Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Two weeks after returning to Britain Gavin joined a weekend party at Carlton Towers, the great house of Lord Howard of Glossop, at Goole in Yorkshire. Among the other guests invited by Miles Howard (Lord Howard’s son, and the future Duke of Norfolk) was Gavin’s favourite modern writer, Evelyn Waugh. In his diary entry for Saturday, 29 July 1939, Waugh recorded the encounter:

  The whole Howard family are together. I never discovered exactly how many, seven or eight of them, each with a Christian name beginning with M. A nice chap called Gavin Maxwell and Maureen Noel [the daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough] were the rest of the party … We played ‘the game’ after dinner. Maxwell, to be civil to me, chose clues from my books which no one recognised.

  All talk now was of impending war with Germany. With armed conflict seemingly so certain Gavin was anxious to volunteer for the regiment in which his family had traditionally served, and which his elder brother, Aymer, had already joined – the Scots Guards. As early as September of the previous year Gavin had asked to join the regiment’s officer reserve, but had been told there were no vacancies. A few days after the Carlton Towers weekend he was informed that a vacancy had been created by the resignation of a distant relative, Lord Lovat, Chief of Clan Fraser of Lovat, who had left to join the Lovat Scouts and (later) the Commandos. On 21 August the War Office wrote to Gavin at Elrig to confirm that he had been selected and to advise him that he would be required to do thirteen weeks’ preliminary training on joining the regiment.

  SIX

  A call to small arms

  Who is the happy warrior? Who is he

  That every man in arms should wish to be?

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘The Character of the Happy Warrior’

  On 2 September 1939, the day after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Gavin Maxwell joined the Training Battalion of the Scots Guards at the Guards Depot in Pirbright, Surrey, for the start of a thirteen-week course of basic infantry training. Three days later he was gazetted Second-Lieutenant.

  Gavin viewed the prospect of active service with both enthusiasm and trepidation. He was determined to do what was required of him, and hoped to find some kind of personal fulfilment – adventure, old-fashioned honour, perhaps – in one of the British Army’s élite fighting regiments. But he was well aware that regimental life, with its emphasis on authority and discipline, communal living and physical slog, was something to which he might not be ideally suited, either psychologically or physically.

  Basic army training is a shock to the system for anyone joining from civilian life, and for Gavin it was doubly so, for he was not physically robust and he did not take kindly to orders from anybody, least of all the martinets of the military machine. Less than three weeks after joining the army he fell seriously ill with the first of his many duodenal ulcer attacks and was sent home on sick leave. He returned on 9 October, and though he was able to complete his initial training his service with the Scots Guards was to be dogged by recurring bouts of acute stomach pains.

  In February 1940, Gavin was posted as a platoon commander to Ground Defences at RAF Kenley, and during the spring and early summer, as the Germans launched their lightning offensive in Europe, he attended a series of specialist courses at the School of Tactics back at Pirbright, including a course in sniping, at which he showed such aptitude that Evelyn Waugh, now a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, invited him over to Bisley to lecture about it to the troops under his command.

  By the time Gavin had completed his courses the war had finally come to Britain. On 10 July the German air force launched its air campaign against the British mainland – the Battle of Britain. Nipe days later Gavin was posted to the Scots Guards Holding Battalion in the Tower of London, from which he sallied forth each day (and very often each night) as a member of a detachment of three officers and two hundred men forming a mobile anti-parachute column intended to intercept any German airborne landings in south-east London and its environs. On 7 September, anxious to join one of the Scots Guards fighting battalions, Gavin approached his commanding officer with a request that he be borne in mind for the post of Intelligence Officer in the 1st or 3rd Battalion. ‘He is, of course, an expert sniper and camouflageur,’ the C.O. noted in an informal memo to his Regimental Adjutant, ‘and they could easily send him on a short I.O. course. On the other hand I’m not sure that all the Maxwells have not got an exaggerated idea of their value!’

  Gavin had chosen an unfortunate moment to request a transfer, for late in the afternoon of that same day the Germans switched their target from RAF airfields to London itself and sent nearly four hundred bombers and more than six hundred fighters in two waves to attack London’s East End, followed by another two hundred bombers after dark. This was the beginning of the London Blitz. Gavin’s column became entangled in the air raids on the capital, and all question of a posting was, for the moment, forgotten. By this time the column was stationed in the South Metropolitan Gas Works on the riverside just below the Blackwall Tunnel and opposite East India Dock – within the bullseye, in other words, of the German bombers. During one of the heavy air raids on the London docks that September an incident occurred which was to bring about an unforeseen and radical change in the direction of the whole of Gavin’s subsequent life.

  It was the third week of the Battle of Britain. An air raid had been in progress all night and Gavin was doing a round of his column’s extensive perimeter when he heard a bomb falling almost directly overhead, and dived for the nearest cover. The bomb fell with a gobbling roar but did not explode, and when the All-Clear sounded about an hour later Gavin went out into the deserted, dawn-lit streets to look for the bomb-hole. He found it amongst the gravestones of a churchyard and remembered ‘with a sickening lurch’ that the crypt underneath was in use as an air-raid shelter.

  I ran down the long winding steps and struggled with the door. As it burst open under my weight I was hit by a stifling wave of air so noisome that I retched even at its first impact. The temperature was that of a Kew hot-house, the stench indescribable. As I became accustomed to the dim light I saw that the stone floor was swimming in urine, and between the packed human forms were piles of excrement and of vomit. One hundred and twelve people had been in that airless crypt for seven hours. They were not anxious to be disturbed; abusive voices, thick with sleep, told me to close the doors. I had just time to open both wide before I was myself sick, helplessly and endlessly.

  He returned to his unit’s HQ in the Gas Works so thickly coated with bomb-blast that he looked like the corpse of the man he had seen removed from the ruins of the pub on the corner the previous day. There were two Guardsmen in the shower when he got there – one of them from a small island in the Outer Hebrides. ‘I did not know it, but I had seen it from the sea, and the name and his soft speech brought a momentary vision of its low hulk dark against a harsh Atlantic sunset.’

  The image of the Hebrides set Gavin’s mind racing, and he told a fellow officer in the windowless, gaslit mess room: ‘I’ve made a resolution. If I’m alive when the war’s over I’m going to buy an island in the Hebrides and retire there for life; no aeroplanes, no bombs, no commanding officer, no rusty dannert wire.’

  They spread a map of Scotland on the floor, and in a spirit of childlike make-believe lay full-length on the floor and worked their way down through the islands from north to south.

  We spoke of Hyskeir, Rona, Canna, Staffa; in my mind were high-pluming seas bursting upon Atlantic cliffs and booming thunderously into tunnelled caverns; eider-ducks among the surf; gannets fishing in deep blue water; and, landward, the scent of turf smoke.

  After an hour there were rings drawn around several islands. I had drawn an extra red ring round the Island of Soay, an island unknown to either of us, below the Cuillin of Skye. We were still playing at make-believe; Soay was my Island Valley of Avalon, and Avalon was all the world away. Presently the sirens sounded, and down the river the guns began again.

  On 16 October, Gavin was finally posted to a fi
ghting battalion – the 1st Battalion Scots Guards – first as Weapon Training Officer and then as Liaison Officer with Brigade. At the beginning of 1941 he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, but towards the end of the winter his old ailment returned and on 9 March he was admitted to the Royal Masonic Hospital in London with a serious ulcer condition. He remained there for six weeks, and a month’s sick leave at Monreith followed, during which he was downgraded to Category C by a Medical Board at Dumfries. Such a low medical grading, meaning home service only, put an end to any hopes he might have had for an illustrious wartime career with the Guards. He returned to London on 21 May, and from the Guards Club in Brook Street, where he had a day or two to spend before learning his new posting, he scribbled a note to the Regimental Adjutant in which he aired his concern about his future:

  I have hardly been off training work since the war started, and I am most anxious that my re-grading and removal from a service battalion should not result in my returning to training work. There are a great many Intelligence and Liaison jobs for which I should be perfectly fit physically (and I hope mentally) – the only way of life I am supposed to follow being a pretty simple sort of diet and an outdoor life … I feel so strongly about it that I think I should really rather become a private in a Labour Battalion than remain for a long time in general training work again!

  This heartfelt plea received short shrift from the Regimental Adjutant: ‘If you write any more stupid letters,’ he replied with typically military bluntness, ‘the Lieutenant-Colonel will take you at your word and you will find yourself as a private in a Labour Battalion!’

  When the Scots Guards service battalions were mobilised for the front, Gavin was not with them. After a month with the Training Battalion back at Pirbright Camp he was posted yet again to the Tower, and in October he returned for a third time to the Training Battalion. The truth was, the Scots Guards did not really know what else to do with him. His physical disability clearly ruled him out of active service, and though he was keen and willing, and came from the right background, he was a prickly character and did not conform to the stereotype of a typical Guards Officers’ Mess. Yet his prowess as a marksman and sniper, his expertise in fieldcraft and camouflage, and his excellence as an instructor, ensured that he did not count among the waifs and strays of the Regiment.

  The sole surviving photo of him at this low period – an identity card ‘mug shot’ – reveals a Gavin Maxwell virtually unrecognisable to anyone who knew him in later years. Tightly buttoned up in his army greatcoat, and with his officer’s hat jammed firmly down over his head, he stares at the camera with the fiercely fixed glare of the martinet subaltern, his de rigueur moustache bristling, but his eyes wary, fugitive and vulnerable-looking. This, one cannot help feeling, is Gavin camouflaged in the guise of the British military establishment. The moustache alone could serve as a metaphor for the singularity of his situation. Many years later he was to recall the bizarre ceremonial this moustache engendered: ‘Every morning when you got up, your servant had a pair of tongs warming on a little methylated-spirit stove. Every so often he tested the tongs on a piece of toilet paper, and when the tongs no longer singed the paper he handed them to you and you started to roll up your moustache with the help of the tongs and a comb. You did this regularly every morning, and if you were going on parade in the afternoon you did it in the afternoon as well. Looking back on it, this strikes me as incredible.’

  But Gavin did not look back on his days in the Guards as altogether a waste of time. ‘In the Brigade of Guards no moment is lost, everything is just right and in its place,’ he once told me. ‘Now I think this did me a tremendous amount of good. It gave me a tremendous feeling of responsibility. The years I spent in the Scots Guards taught me, I suppose, how to be a freelance – how to manage one’s day, how not to waste time, how to plan.’

  * * *

  There seemed little future for Gavin in the Guards. By the summer of 1941 he was determined to leave the regiment, and at the end of August, after a Medical Board had extended his low medical category for a further twelve months, he made contact with an old friend from Stowe, Captain Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard, the head of the Czech Section of the Special Operations Executive, better known by its initials SOE.

  SOE was an independent secret service, set up on Churchill’s instructions in July 1940, shortly after the retreat from Dunkirk and the surrender of France. Its aim was to conduct subversive warfare and (in Churchill’s phrase) ‘set Europe ablaze’, by co-ordinating (and if necessary initiating) subversion and sabotage activities by resistance organisations throughout the occupied nations of Europe (and eventually of the Far East as well). As an unorthodox organisation created to wage war by unorthodox means in unorthodox places, SOE resorted to the services of unorthodox people, many of whom, as agents in the field, faced terrible dangers – a quarter of the SOE agents sent to France never returned.

  There was no formal selection process for SOE in those days, and recruitment was usually by invitation rather than application – often as the result of chance encounter or personal introduction. SOE needed men and women with an extraordinary range of special skills – safe-breakers and demolition experts, linguists and undercover operators with high motivation and ice-cold courage. At a searching interview at SOE’s London headquarters in Baker Street it was noted that Gavin was an outstanding small-arms and fieldcraft expert who had spent over a year as an instructor in sniping and camouflage. There was never any question that he could work as a secret agent himself – his medical condition saw to that – but he might prove invaluable in training SOE agents for their secret work in the field. On 10 September 1941 Hesketh-Pritchard recommended Gavin to SOE, noting that though he had a low medical category he was ‘actually perfectly fit if he can stay in the open and does not eat certain foods’. On 5 November Gavin was formally engaged as a Lieutenant Instructor in the SOE training branch; he ceased to be paid from Army funds, receiving quarterly payments from clandestine Foreign Office funds instead.

  Training was crucial in the preparation of an agent. At that time trainee agents (who were grouped according to their nationality – British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Yugoslav, Spanish Republican and even German) first had to pass a stiff preliminary course of basic military and physical training lasting two to four weeks. The successful ones were then put through an even stiffer three-to-five-week para-military course at the Group A Special Training Schools located in various country houses in the Arisaig area on the West Highland coast of Scotland, before going back to England for parachute training at Ringway and a finishing course in clandestine techniques at Beaulieu.

  Gavin himself was put through the first two stages of the training course. First he underwent a brief spell of preliminary training at the SOE Special Training School (STS) No 4 at Winterfold, Cranleigh, Surrey, during which it was reported that though he had difficulty keeping up with the other students and had collapsed after twenty minutes’ strenuous PT he was ‘very keen and interested … knows his subjects and lectures well’. This was followed by the tough para-military course at Arisaig (STS 21), at the end of which a medical report recommended that ‘he should be fit for an Instructor’s post in a few weeks, provided he remains free from abdominal symptoms … in his own words he has not felt so well for many months’. His STS 21 report was glowing:

  This officer is a very good lecturer with an easy manner and has obviously had experience of lecturing. He is very good at fieldcraft and quite at home in this type of country … He is a good organiser and has a strong personality. The only doubt is regarding his health, but if this is not likely to break down we should like to have him in the area and he is himself keen to be posted here.

  At the end of November 1941, Gavin returned to London and for the remainder of the year worked as Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard’s assistant in the Czech Section of SOE, where his main task was to handle the paperwork. Sometimes, however, he would escort Czech agents to
Tangmere airfield, near Chichester, where they boarded the aircraft from which they would be parachuted into their Nazi-occupied homeland. Major (later Sir) Peter Wilkinson, the overall chief of the Czech and Polish Sections of SOE, recalled of Gavin’s time at the Baker Street headquarters: ‘I saw Gavin in London every day while he was there, and I would have lunch with him now and then, though not very often – we were tremendously busy. Alfgar treated Gavin shockingly – he viewed him as a sidekick and bossed him about all over the place. Gavin took it meekly. He was then a very nice, perfectly normal person – not as odd as he later became. He was always a pleasure to be with, always pointing things out, it was impossible not to like him.’

  At the end of December Gavin travelled to Monreith to spend Christmas with his mother and his brother Aymer – his last full leave for several years. Despite his intensive military involvement with small arms, he had not lost his love of shooting. ‘I had ten days’ leave at Christmas and some quite good shooting,’ he wrote to Peter Scott. ‘My brother and I killed 1,200 head of game at the time shooting alone, and had 246 in one day, which is reasonable enough for two guns anyway.’

  Early in January 1942 Gavin took the train north to begin work as an instructor at the para-military training schools in the Arisaig area. With him travelled two tyro instructors who were to become good friends – Matthew Hodgart (later Professor of English at Cambridge) and Edward Renton (a musician and conductor). The para-military schools were centred on eight large houses in and around Arisaig, Morar and Knoydart. The area had been chosen by the operational chief of SOE, General Sir Charles Gubbins, himself a Highlander, who knew this rugged country well. Its advantages were many: the terrain was suitable for the training involved, it was remote and sparsely populated, and it already had a high-security status due to the naval bases and commando training centre in the vicinity. It was also one of the wildest, grandest and most beautiful parts of Britain, with mountains, deer forests and sea lochs inland, and a magnificent coastline that looked across shell-sand beaches and rocks to the rearing cliffs and peaks of the Small Isles of Eigg and Rhum to the west. Gavin was back in the West Highlands – for him it was like coming home.