Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Solomon was shown round GHQ at St Omer and taken to dine at the château of the commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir John French. However, French was away in Paris, and his temporary house-guest, Winston Churchill, was dining out that night, so Solomon met neither.

  By December 1915, the tectonic plates of British command on the Western Front were shifting. Solomon arrived in French’s very last days; he had stayed on after the disastrous Battle of Loos in late September only to be outmanoeuvred in October and November by General Sir Douglas Haig (who was now telling influential people, including King George V, that Sir John had muffed things at Loos). The two soldiers were opposites. Philip Chetwode said: ‘French was a man who loved life, laughter and women, whereas Haig was a dour Scotsman and the dullest dog I ever had the happiness to meet.’ Haig and French came to loathe and despise each other with all the ardour of former friends.

  Churchill, however, was still close to French. Fresh from his resignation, the former government minister, now Major W. L. S. Churchill, arrived at Boulogne on 18 November, and the military landing officer told him that the commander-in-chief had sent a staff car. Churchill used the vehicle to touch base with his Yeomanry regiment, the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, near Boulogne, before going on to the hospitality of French’s château. When asked by French what he wanted to do, Churchill told him that he would like to spend some time in the front line with the elite Guards Division. The prodigal son was back in the army again, but he knew he had to master the special conditions of trench warfare as a regimental officer before other possibilities of command could arise. Two days later, Churchill was driven to the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards near Merville. They had not been consulted and were none too happy about having a politician foisted on them, even though his bellicose ancestor the Duke of Marlborough had once commanded the regiment.

  It took three wet hours to get into the front line. The officers started out on horses, riding through the icy drizzle of a late November afternoon. Occasional red gun-flashes stabbed the darkening plain. Habitation gave way to ruins; shell holes and rubbish increased; leafless trees stood scarred and split among fields rank with weeds. At a halt in the darkness, orderlies took away the horses, and they walked the final two miles over sopping fields to the battalion HQ, Ebenezer Farm, a thousand yards behind the front line, an edifice of shattered brick propped up inside with sandbags. Churchill’s education in trench warfare began here. He wrote to his wife:

  Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet and clothing breaking through the soil, water & muck on all sides; & about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous rats creep and glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifles and machine-guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.

  Around the same time Solomon J. Solomon met the Second Army commander, General Herbert Plumer, who had brought him out to France, and went on to Canadian HQ where the bluff and genial General H. E. Burstall, in charge of Canadian artillery, asked Solomon to make forward Observation Posts or ‘OPs’, also known as ‘Oh Pips’, disguised as trees, like the French did.

  Near Hill 63, between Ploegsteert Wood and Messines, south of Ypres, Solomon sketched a tree on a hill in the rain. The next day, with borrowed sleeping bag and gas mask, Solomon found himself at 39th Division HQ at Brielen, north-west of Ypres, where General Percival said he needed ‘Oh Pips’ for artillery spotters so he could more accurately shell the German lines. His gunners had found some willows which, if replaced by imitation trees with steel cores, would serve their purpose. Would Solomon go and look?

  Sunshine gleamed on the yellow water of the Yser canal, which was bridged by a dozen military pontoons. The opposite bank, nearer the German lines, was piled up twelve feet high with sticky yellow clay thrown up by excavating two tiers of dugouts. Tall poplar and birch grew up beyond that, some broken and splintered by artillery fire. As Solomon watched, a German shell hit a local landmark known as ‘the White Château’ in a cloud of black smoke. He sketched the scene on brown paper, thinking white paper was too conspicuous.

  They crossed one of the bridges over the canal; the odd bullet from a German sniper whacked into the wood or went whanging off the iron. Solomon noticed that a narrow length of hessian cloth ran along one of the iron rails of the bridge. Like a skimpy towel, the space below it revealed your lower legs, while above it failed to cover your head and shoulders. This screen was intended to give people confidence, but Solomon sensibly thought a solid pile of sandbags on the enemy sides of bridges would give real rather than imaginary protection.

  They scrambled up the canal’s slippery bank and peered over discreetly. Solomon studied how the tree trunks grew out of the steep slope on the other side, facing the Germans. He was wearing a thick mackintosh and as they moved along the old towpath, keeping low and moving from tree to tree, he found it hot work and hard going. The thick yellow mud sucked at his feet. Panting in a culvert dugout, Solomon peered through a slot at an enemy machine-gun post in a concrete pillbox known as ‘the mushroom’. The existing willow trees in their clumps and copses were too small for his purposes, but Solomon proposed to General Percival that he make two steel-jacketed trees on his return to the UK.

  Back in London, Solomon saw General Scott Moncrieff at the War Office. Scott Moncrieff recommended a firm in Holborn, Messrs Roneo, who worked with hardened steel. Solomon gave them scaled drawings and asked them to make two plywood models. What he wanted was an oval-shaped hollow steel conning tower, bolted together in two-foot sections, just wide enough for a man to climb up in order to see out. To make this OP pass as a convincing tree he needed real bark for the outside. Solomon decided to go right to the top. He would ask King George V’s permission to get a decayed willow from Windsor.

  On Saturday, 18 December, from his home at 18, Hyde Park Gate, Solomon hand-wrote a letter to the Keeper of the Privy Purse:

  Sir,

  I have just returned from G. H. Q. where I was invited to report on some matters connected with ‘Invisibility in Warfare’.

  The French are making what they call ‘camouflage’ objects to serve as artillery observation outposts and have offered to make these for the British Army, but much time will have elapsed before such things can be produced for our use by them.

  The General Officers of the Second Army have impressed upon me the urgency of their need of armoured outposts – mainly imitations of existing trees – and they sent me to the front that I might study their requirements. They gladly agreed with my proposal to experiment and endeavour to provide them (with the assistance of engineers and others) with the much needed posts of vantage before the development of the spring and summer vegetation might render them ineffective.

  In discussing this matter with General Sir George Scott Moncrieff at the War Office, we came to the conclusion that as trees (pollard willows in this instance) are needed, and that as secrecy in the affair is of the highest importance, that it would not be prudent to approach any private owner of such trees and that the safer course would be to ask His Majesty’s permission to allow me in the first instance to study pollard willows that are on the Royal Estates and to collect bark and branches wherewith the imitations of such trees might be made to serve for the use of artillery observers in the Ypres district …

  Believe me Sir

  Yours obediently

  Solomon J Solomon

  Sir Frederick Ponsonby (older brother of Arthur Ponsonby, the author of Falsehood in War-Time) replied from the Privy Purse office at Buckingham Palace on Monday, 20 December:

  His Majesty was much interested to hear that you had taken up the question of making the Artillery Observation Posts invisible. The King will be glad to give you every facility you require either at Windsor or at Sandringham.

  Solomon arranged to go to Buckingham Palace the following afternoon. Ponsonby then wrote a ‘Private and Confidential’ letter to W. Archibald Mackellar, Head Gardene
r at Windsor:

  Dear Mr Mackellar,

  Mr Solomon J. Solomon of the Royal Academy is anxious to carry out some experiments with regard to trees. He has been commissioned by the War Office to make Observation Posts in the shape of pollarded willows and as this must be kept secret, he is anxious to have some place where he may try his experiments. The King wishes him given every facility and, if necessary, foresters or workmen placed at his disposal.

  On 23 December 1915, the head gardener himself met the 10.42 train from Paddington in a dog cart and trotted Solomon along the winter riverbank. They selected an old willow which was later cut down and brought entire to the fruit conservatories at Frogmore. Working in the warm royal greenhouse with two scene painters and a theatrical prop maker, Solomon constructed a realistic tree cover for a steel core. Sections and strips of bark were sewn and glued to canvas which could be wrapped around the metal.

  Meanwhile, the adjutant general at GHQ in France sent a letter on Christmas Eve requesting that Mr S. J. Solomon ‘be despatched to this country at the earliest possible date, accompanied by sufficient personnel of his own selection to enable him to start work as soon as possible upon the construction of some urgently required special observation stations’.

  Solomon started picking a team. They included the black-and-white draughtsman Harry Paget, an older man who had served in the Artists’ Rifles and had some useful military knowledge, shy Walter W. Russell, ARA, the ingenious and inventive Lyndsay D. Symington and young Roland Harker, who was by trade a scenery painter.

  There was also ‘a small man, very deaf, who staged the operas at Covent Garden’, known to be ‘a good organiser’. It was, in fact, Oliver Bernard, who experienced the sinking of the Lusitania. Bernard brought along F. W. Holmes of Leeds, who was head property man at the Drury Lane theatre and a master carpenter when ‘Bunny’ Bernard first met him in Manchester twenty years earlier. Solomon, Paget, Russell, Harker, Symington and Bernard all became officers on the low-status General List.

  Winston Churchill gained experience both in and out of the trenches with the Grenadier Guards, sporting his newest headgear, a blue steel helmet given him by a French general on 5 December, in order to safeguard his ‘valuable cranium’. In 1915 the French had not only pioneered camouflage but also protective helmets for infantry. This started because General Adrian met a poilu or ordinary French soldier who had survived a potentially fatal head wound because he happened to keep his metal food bowl under his forage cap. The first attempt, steel skullcaps, did not give quite enough cover from shrapnel, so more depth and narrow brims were added. French helmets (which required seventy operations to manufacture) had a central ridge because they were adapted from the existing dies to make helmets for pompiers (firemen) and cuirassiers (cavalrymen). G. M. Trevelyan, serving with the Red Cross in Italy, noticed how the ‘shrapnel helmet’ was gradually adopted there in the spring and summer of 1916. The first models were French, stamped ‘R.F.’ for République Française.

  The British-made, green-painted ‘Helmet, steel, Mark 1’, known as a ‘tin hat’ by soldiers or a ‘battle bowler’ by officers, was copied in mid-1915 by its designer John L. Brodie from the ‘chapel’ helmet once worn by pikemen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. George Coppard of the Machine Gun Corps tested the resistance of the steel helmets that littered the battlefield later in the war by hitting them with a pickaxe as hard as he could:

  A good British helmet yielded only a moderate dent, but a dud would burst open down to the shaft of the pick handle … Clearly, some cunning war contractor had been cheating and a War Office check hadn’t been properly carried out. The duds were obviously of little use against shrapnel, and it is reasonable to assume that men had lost their lives wearing them.

  Churchill’s battalion at the front received its first 500 ‘Brodie’ steel helmets on 24 January 1916. The Brodie was adopted by the US Army when it came into the war in 1917, and continued in American service until after Pearl Harbor.

  The distinctive ‘coal scuttle’ German Stahlhelm weighed 2½ pounds and was probably the best-designed helmet, with two integral lugs for protective visors. German machine-gunners wore specially padded, thickly armoured versions that weighed 13¼ pounds and could resist all service ammunition. (However, George Coppard claimed German helmets were easier to hole with a pickaxe. Perhaps he hit them harder.) German helmets were also in 1917 the first to be painted in disruptive camouflage patterns of brown, green and black.

  When Sir John French was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig as commander-in-chief on 19 December 1915, Churchill had to accept that the brigade of 5,000 men that French had promised would be reduced to a battalion of 1,000. Field Marshal Haig signed another letter from GHQ dated 31 December 1915:

  I request that the necessary military status may be given to Mr S. J. Solomon RA to enable him to carry out his duties in connection with the camouflage work. I recommend that he be granted a temporary commission of the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. I consider that this rank is commensurate with the responsibilities and importance of his duties …

  Solomon’s unique promotion was probably unmatched in WW1. Going, overnight, from a private in the United Arts Rifles to lieutenant colonel in the Royal Engineers meant hurried visits to military tailors and bootmakers. On 15 January 1916 Solomon wrote to Privy Purse Ponsonby:

  The King’s own trees will now I hope help and protect the men who will erect and make use of the armoured outposts, and I am indeed grateful for all the facilities that have been so graciously afforded me.

  Ponsonby replied from York Cottage, Sandringham:

  The King was interested to hear that you had finished the trees which you have been constructing at Windsor and feels sure that they will be a great success. His Majesty saw a confidential account of similar trees and disguises for the men which were being constructed in the French Army. It seems a very practical idea and His Majesty is glad to know you are taking the matter up.

  On 18 January 1916, the historic first party of British camoufleurs crossed the English Channel to Boulogne. Oliver Bernard gloomily remembered the torpedoing of the Lusitania, but Solomon was excited. It was ten years and a week since he had become a Royal Academician, and now, in another year with a lucky six, he was a lieutenant colonel leaving ‘good old England’ on his way to war. Ominously, the army-commandeered London bus that met them on the quay broke down halfway to St Omer. It was a chilly night, and when they met Major General George Fowke they did not look very soldierly in their new and ill-fitting uniforms. Solomon pushed forward Paget to do the military blarney. Fowke did not know much about art or opera but he used to go to fancy dress balls at Covent Garden. ‘Is Willie Clarkson still alive?’ he asked Oliver Bernard. ‘I used to get my fancy costumes from him.’ ‘Bunny’ Bernard, grateful to be in the forces at all and therefore more ready to adapt to his new hosts, realised quite soon that there was a great gap between Solomon and the military.

  Solomon had the artistic vision to point the way to the use of military camouflage, but he had no understanding of the human and material organisation required to achieve it. There was already a class divide among the group: Solomon tended to huddle with the artists Paget, Russell and Symington and leave out the craftsmen Bernard, Harker and Holmes. His recent dealings with upper echelons – kings, generals and so on – had exacerbated a tendency towards grandiosity. Oliver Bernard disliked ‘this royal academy of camouflage, all talk of what soldiers can do, damn all to show what artists can do’. He thought Solomon was making enemies by being a know-all of theory, without the humility to find out what the military actually did and how they went about getting what they needed. Solomon dismissed all official channels of supply as ‘red tape’. Trouble started when he began blithely shopping in Boulogne instead of going via Ordnance or Royal Engineer (RE) stores. Oliver Bernard’s mundane skills made Solomon call him ‘my business man’.

  The first week they spent at Amiens, studying the camouflage and paintwork tha
t the French had been doing for a year, combined with their use of blindages, or hardened steel plates, to protect observation posts. The leader of the French camoufleurs, Guirand de Scévola, was an impressive figure, always smartly dressed, with white kid gloves. He lent nine of his camoufleurs to the British, who now aimed to set up their own industry and start producing materials. The first temporary workshop was a barn found by the mayor of Poperinghe; Oliver Bernard went to Paris to get special supplies of paint and cloth. (The Director of Works, J. E. Edmonds, the future official historian, refused to pay the 468 francs Bernard spent on taxis, saying he was not authorised to use such a conveyance.)

  General Fowke, meanwhile, took Solomon to Wimereux near Boulogne and showed him an abandoned feldspar factory near the golf-links, 200 yards from the cliff-edge. It stood in six acres surrounded by a ten-foot wall, on a railway branch line, with an old locomotive parked by the atelier. The sounds of hammering came from fifteen workmen levelling the concrete floors inside. This building would become the centre of the Special Works Park, RE, Wimereux, but it would not be ready for six weeks.