Unlike Dudley, Tom Clarke was a born civilian who dropped his rifle on parade in the OTC and slipped off from school to go racing at Sandown Park; his favourite uncle was a chairman of the Magic Circle who could conjure half-crowns from ears. After a varied career, Dudley’s brother T. E. B. Clarke took up screen-writing for Michael Balcon at Ealing Films and ended up as the Academy Award-winning writer of such great British films as The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport to Pimlico, The Blue Lamp and The Titfield Thunderbolt.
Young Dudley shared his brother’s creative imagination, which fuelled the inner man as he stamped about on parade grounds, curried in stables, box-wallahed in barracks. In February 1916, Dudley joined the Royal Horse Artillery and a month after his seventeenth birthday he was in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, being taught to ride by tough sergeants. Commissioned second lieutenant in November 1916, he was too young to go to France with the British Expeditionary Force and applied to join the Royal Flying Corps.
On Monday, 5 November 1917, Dudley Clarke arrived at the School of Military Aeronautics in Reading with a huge valise with no handles that he called ‘the green elephant’. He was 18 years old, lively and full of himself, and keeping a diary. This shows that Dudley Clarke was already a precise man, exact about train times. But there is nothing about the war in the diary; instead he likes the glamour of showbiz. He is becoming a ‘stage-door Johnny’, waiting outside for the Gaiety chorus and blown away by a Theatre Royal revival of a famous melodrama called The Whip which simulated the Derby with a real horse race on a revolving travelator. The first thing he noticed in Reading, apart from his thrilling first encounter with girls in uniforms astride motorcycles, ‘very dashing numbers’, is the Hippodrome. That night he headed straight for the Reading Palace where he spent two shillings on the last seat in the house and watched Sharp’s Tromboneers bring the house down with ‘Yaka Hula Hickey Dula’ and Perry and his Pert Pianiste attempting to twinkle, though her front teeth were missing.
One night, unable to sample the joys of Reading for lack of cash, Dudley (who once edited a home newspaper called Knutty Knews and enjoyed his ‘brain waves’), amused himself in his room by ‘raising an apparatus composed of a bootlace, a lanyard and some straps off my valise, by which I am enabled to turn out the light without getting out of bed’. He showed the same ingenuity when he was posted to Egypt for seven months in 1918, setting up ‘The Problem Club’, a series of enjoyable challenges for other young airmen in Egypt who, like him, were saving money of an evening by not going out.
The first problem was to produce the most original article obtained in the most original manner. Horne took a hair from each member without their knowing. Clarke produced a piece of the mess chimney after climbing a roof.
Clarke first flew solo in Egypt, in early July 1918. The flying hours of the training squadron at Suez were 4.30 a.m. to 10.30 a.m., and thereafter Clarke acquired his lifelong taste for swimming and sunbathing. He chewed Chiclet gum and read seven-penny novels in his tent, wearing a white cricket shirt and Charterhouse football shorts with no stockings, his chair a Nestlé’s Milk crate and his desk made of Haig & Haig whisky boxes. He was still an aesthete, though; his tablecloth of pale blue silk matched his muslin curtains and bedspread, and he enjoyed others admiring his room and the hookah he had haggled for. After Clarke got his wings at No. 5 Fighting School, Heliopolis, he thought it ‘great fun’ to go out and strafe Egyptian camels in the desert – much later he regretted such arrogance – and at the Armistice he watched the Cairo celebrations turn into a drunken riot of arson and looting.
There were two strands to Dudley Clarke’s military career between the wars. One was active. In the absence of major conflict, ambitious soldiers like Clarke or the young Churchill who wanted to shine had to find interesting scrapes to get into. In 1920 Dudley Clarke was stationed in Mesopotamia, learning polo and pigsticking, when the four-month Iraqi uprising occurred. Clarke evacuated Europeans and cash boxes down the Tigris on a steamer, repelling potential boarders with small arms. In September 1922, he found himself on leave in Turkey, caught up in the Chanak crisis which ended Lloyd George’s political career. As British occupying troops resisted the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal’s threat to take back Constantinople and the Dardanelles by force, Clarke’s job was to feed scraps of false information into the ear of his landlord, a Kemalist spy. In late 1925, again on leave, Clarke went to Morocco to cover the French and Spanish suppression of Abdel Krim’s Riff rebellion for the Morning Post. (He found a publisher and joined the Society of Authors intending to write a book but, unlike Churchill, did not complete it.) In 1930 he joined the Transjordan Frontier Force and swaggered about black-booted in kalpak, kurtah and cummerbund; he learned to ride a camel, chased Ikhwan marauders, and sat with the founder of the Arab Legion in Jordan, John Bagot Glubb, over coffee in the desert. However, Glubb Pasha, in his dark, four-button suit, stiff collar, tie and fedora, seemed to Clarke disappointingly like a character from H. G. Wells, with ‘none of the flamboyant fancy-dress favoured by Lawrence’.
The second strand of his early career was recreational. While stationed at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, in 1923, Dudley revived the pre-war Royal Artillery Officers’ Dramatic Club. When General White asked him to take charge of the Royal Artillery display for the 1925 Royal Tournament at Olympia, Dudley came up with a grand pageant demonstrating 200 years of firepower and its transport, from Minden to the Marne. He talked to the circus proprietor Bertram Mills and costumier Willie Clarkson and set about hiring two elephants, two camels, sixteen oxen, eight Sikhs and fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find from the hundreds of black men who came to the audition. Dudley had a twelve-foot stock whip with a thirty-foot thong made at Swaine and Adeney, and used it to create a noisy and colourful half-hour show that ran twice daily for thirty performances, employing 37 guns, 300 animals and 680 men.
At the Staff College in Camberley in 1933–4, Dudley Clarke wrote and directed two Christmas pantomimes, Alice in Blunderland and Al Din and a Wonderful Ramp, which played to appreciative full houses. In 1935, however, Clarke (by then Captain D. W. Clarke) put on another spectacle whose climax was so realistic that much of the audience fled. The Aden Silver Jubilee Display was performed to honour King George V at Holkat Bay in Aden, capital city of Yemen, on 6 May 1935. This was a time of growing tension in the region, because Mussolini was marshalling his Italian fascist forces to attack Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia on the other side of the Red Sea. As a finale, the combined services presented ‘Invasion!’ Dudley had roped in all the armed forces to simulate an attack. It started in darkness after the sounding of the Last Post. HMS Penzance and No. 8 Bomber Squadron RAF appeared as a hostile warship and aircraft, suddenly lit up by the searchlights of the Aden anti-aircraft section, shelling and strafing to cover enemy troops landing on the beach. The point of the show was meant to be that the valiant Aden Armoured Car section, the Aden Protectorate Levies and the Aden Armed Police would drive the invaders back into the sea. But when the ship and the planes first appeared out of the darkness, someone yelled in Arabic ‘The Italians are here!’ and the spectators took to their heels.
In February 1936, Clarke got the job he wanted: brigade major in Palestine. He bought a white two-seater 1929 Delage and shipped it to Port Said. In the Directorate of Military Operations he read a secret aide-memoire about Britain’s military weaknesses. The tide was turning, though. On 3 March 1936 Stanley Baldwin’s government issued a White Paper on Re-Armament, and the Army Estimates, published two days later, showed the fourth successive annual rise in defence spending, to £49 million from the low-point of £36 million in 1932.
In Gibraltar, Dudley Clarke visited his friend from the Staff College, fluent German-speaker Kenneth Strong (later Eisenhower’s intelligence officer). After ‘interesting and revealing meetings at GHQ’ in Cairo, Clarke drove his car from Egypt through the Mitla Pass to Jerusalem. In the twenty years since Allenby had walked through the Jaffa Gate, te
nsions in the Holy Land had been increasing. Britain now ruled the country under a Mandate from the League of Nations, but increased Jewish immigration, as advocated by the Balfour Declaration, was making the Arab inhabitants feel threatened, even though their own birth rates were high and they were in the majority. Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany augmented Jewish immigration to Palestine.
In April 1936, the month the lid blew, Tony Simonds arrived in Jerusalem from Egypt with the simple order to ‘institute Military Intelligence’. In his autobiography, Pieces of War, Simonds says that intelligence was then abysmally low on the list of military priorities. Nor were the British in Palestine equipped for the outbreak of strikes, sabotage and Arab guerrilla warfare that ensued. The British armed forces consisted of two infantry brigades at Jerusalem and Haifa, commanded by Colonel Jack Evetts with only two staff officers, one of whom was Dudley Clarke. There was just one squadron of RAF planes and two troops of RAF armoured cars at Ramleh, as well as 500 British, 300 Jewish and 1,000 Arab Palestine police (who could not be trusted). They had to deal with a new kind of uprising in which hundreds got killed and over a thousand were wounded.
As senior operations staff officer, Clarke got the RAF and army staffs working closely together, as they would do much later in Combined Operations. He sent an RAF wireless tender out with army convoys, so if they were attacked they could flash a signal and call in close air support to bomb or machine-gun the assailants. Clarke also saw that the regular army was too blunt an instrument to deal with the guerrillas, who had local support and could only be fought locally, by small units who would need good clear intelligence, which Simonds got from both Jewish sources and loyal Arabs.
In September 1936, Lieutenant General John Dill, former director of Military Operations and Intelligence, was appointed to supreme command in Palestine. An additional division of British troops – 17,000 men – was sent out to help quell what the Colonial Office called a ‘campaign of violence’ with which ‘the Arab leaders are attempting to influence the policy of His Majesty’s Government’. Dudley Clarke became Dill’s chief of staff at his HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and began working late through the night, with his back to the wall and a gun to hand. Guerrilla war sharpened his wits; he fitted a clip for an automatic pistol to the steering column of his Delage and always reversed the car into parking bays to get away quickly.
In September 1937, Clarke got a new master. John Dill was replaced as military commander of British troops by a man who knew Palestine well, Major General Archibald Wavell, the biographer of Allenby and friend of T. E. Lawrence, a craggy taciturn figure who never talked when he had nothing to say. Some found Wavell’s silences excruciating, but Clarke coped. Their first dialogue was on a drive from Jerusalem to Haifa:
‘When did you join?’
‘1916, sir.’
(An hour later) ‘I meant when did you join this Headquarters?’
Clarke wrote,
I soon learned to respect these silences, and even to understand them, while I somehow came to realise that the General understood me. From this strange relationship I gradually became imbued with an abiding affection for the man himself.
Unconventional soldiering ran in Wavell’s family. His grandfather was a mercenary who fought with the Spanish in the Peninsular War and then against them in Chile and Mexico. Having seen the stupidity of many of the tactics in WW1, Wavell liked the unorthodox thinking of people like J. F. C. Fuller, T. E. Lawrence and B. H. Liddell Hart, and wanted infantry who were ‘quick-footed’ and ‘quick-minded’. For fourteen seasons, from 1926–39, with only a brief gap for his time in Palestine, Wavell trained British soldiers for war in annual field manoeuvres far from the barrack-room square, trying to simulate some of the real conditions of battle, including muddle, chaos and surprise. Bernard Fergusson, Wavell’s first ADC, tells how ‘the Chief’ encouraged daring guerrilla tactics in his exercises and used two different versions of the ‘haversack ruse’. In the first, he fooled a fellow brigade commander by planting a marked map covered with bogus dispositions. In the second, some years later, the same officer was commanding a rival division in manoeuvres. This time Wavell had a map made that showed his dispositions completely correctly, and gave it to a cavalryman with instructions to blunder into captivity and then pretend to destroy the map. Wavell was hoping that the officer would say to himself: ‘Old Archie’s … forgotten that he played this one on me once before. The one thing that we can be sure of is that not one single disposition shown on this map is genuine.’ Everything went according to plan; the officer lapped it up and took a horrible beating.
Soon after Wavell arrived in Palestine, the District Commissioner for Galilee was murdered by ‘Arab terrorists’ in Nazareth. Wavell cracked down hard on the Arab Higher Committee, and several Arab leaders were deported to the Seychelles. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haji Amin el Husseini, chief of the extremists as well as the leader of the religious community, hid inside the temple area in the centre of the Old City, finally escaping to join the Nazis in Berlin on the ancient principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The anti-imperial struggle always had international dimensions: the Mufti left behind on his desk the Arabic translation of an IRA handbook about fighting the British.
One day, Wavell was en route to visit a military post when his car was flagged down by a British officer from his Intelligence staff. A ‘dark, fiery and eager’ captain called Orde Wingate, having ambushed the commander on the highway, abruptly laid out his plan for dealing with the armed Arab gangs: armed Jewish gangs or Special Night Squads, trained, organised and led by British officers. Wavell gave Wingate the go-ahead to fight fire with fire. Dudley Clarke, meanwhile, wrote a long, thoughtful appreciation, ‘Military Lessons Learned from the Arab Rebellion’, which was circulated in the War Office.
In his introduction to Dudley Clarke’s first book, Seven Assignments, Wavell wrote:
When I commanded in Palestine in 1937–8, I had on my staff two officers in whom I recognised an original, unorthodox outlook on soldiering … One was Orde Wingate, the second was Dudley Clarke.
When WW2 got under way, and Wavell became commander-in-chief, Middle East, he encouraged the development of special forces and secret fraud by picking Orde Wingate for guerrilla war in Ethiopia and Dudley Clarke for strategic deception.
Sefton Delmer was the physical opposite of Dudley Clarke, a ‘huge, breezy and bearded’ rogue well known to most of the secret circles of wartime London as Mr ‘Seldom Defter’. Denis Sefton Delmer, always ‘Tom’ to his family and friends, was born to Australian parents on 24 May 1904, in Berlin, where his father Frederick Sefton Delmer was a ‘Herr Professor’ of English at Berlin University. Although his Australian parentage gave him British nationality, the boy grew up speaking German at home and as a young man retained a slight German accent. ‘Tom’ did not start speaking English until he was five, when his mother Mabel Hook took him on an eighteen-month trip to Australia while Frederick Delmer completed English Literature: from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw (1911), which became the standard textbook for students in Germany.
From 1914–16, as the only English boy in a German school, the Friedrichs Werdersche Gymnasium, during ‘an orgy of war-hysteria’, young Tom Delmer sometimes had to defend himself with his fists. But many Germans were kind when his father was interned for refusing to become a naturalised German. The landlord lowered the rent, former students repaid old loans, the dentist would not charge, and the school did not expel him as an enemy alien. Half a lifetime later, Tom paid back one kindness. Revisiting his old neighbourhood in the wrecked and ravaged Berlin of summer 1945, Delmer found himself back in his old schoolyard, now a hospital for lung patients, crunching over the gravel in his large British Army uniform and calling out the name of ‘Herr Harry Deglau’. When a frightened man in a bath chair responded, Delmer was able to hand over a carton of Players’ cigarettes and a block of precious chocolate to Harry Deglau, the boy who had saved hi
m from a beating-up thirty years before when young Tom cheered the news of the Australian battleship Sydney sinking the German cruiser Emden.
Delmer’s father was found not guilty of spying and let out of gaol in the spring of 1915. The family endured the starvation winter of 1916–17 and were finally allowed to leave Germany for Holland on 23 May 1917. Tom ate five rich ice creams in the refreshment room at Oldenzaal station and was promptly sick. Soon after his thirteenth birthday he redeemed himself by telling an intelligence officer at the British Consulate in Amsterdam just how many empty trains he had counted travelling east and how many full ones travelling west, confirming that Imperial Germany was switching forces to the Western Front – his first but not his last contact with the British secret services.
The refugee boy with odd clothes adjusted to new life (rowing, not cricket) at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith in a London being bombed by Gotha aircraft from his old home in Germany. His father survived a quizzing about his loyalty by Admiral Reginald Hall of Naval Intelligence himself and went on to write articles for Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail and The Times. Delmer did not see Germany again until after WW1, when he was nearly 17. He stepped off the Warsaw Express in Cologne to meet his father who was by then working in the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, monitoring Germany’s compliance with the Versailles Treaty’s demands for disarmament.
Young Tom was charmed by the Weimar Republic in the spring of 1921. Drinking wine in the sunshine beside the Rhine, watching wandering Hansels and Gretels, healthy youths with knapsacks on their backs and bosomy girls in flowered dirndl dresses, singing the songs that he knew from school in the warm, blossom-scented air, he knew that the Germans would never ever want to make war again. ‘All was peace, all was beauty.’ Nie wieder Krieg. No more war. He would describe the decay of this hope in his 1972 book Weimar Germany, a survey of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933.
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