Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  The War Office was an austere, Edwardian baroque structure of imposing grandeur with a thousand rooms and two miles of corridors. Built at the height of empire, it gave the impression of solidity and permanence, flanking the east side of Whitehall like some vast baronial pile. It looked out on to a bronze equestrian statue of George, Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the Victorian army for almost four decades. Erect and proud – and decked in greatcoat and plumed helmet – he seemed to epitomize the old school of military thinking. He would have been appalled at the thought that two of the upstairs rooms of the War Office were being given over to a ‘left-wing’ band whose aims were to subvert the conventions of war.

  Colin Gubbins was given an office on the third floor, while Millis Jefferis was allotted a first-floor office in Room 173. As Joan shuttled between the two, she couldn’t help musing on the twist of fate that had landed her in a man’s world of sweat, dirt and yet more nicotine. The War Office was a run-down labyrinth of a building, filthier than any boarding school, with ‘the uneven watermarks revealing the length of the office-cleaner’s arm’.6 Gubbins’s office looked like an abandoned prison cell: ‘two chairs, a table, a very dirty inkwell and an ashtray made out of the lid of a cigarette tin’.7

  As the first air-raid sirens wailed across Whitehall, Joan reconciled herself to long evenings in musty rooms that ‘held the stale smell of scores of smokes and dozens of thick-cupped, thick-made teas’. The filth seemed indicative of a chronic lack of funding. If cleaners couldn’t be afforded to wipe the floors, what hope was there of defeating the Nazis?

  There was just one advantage to inhabiting a world of men. Each time Joan made her way to the lavatories, junior staff officers vied for her attention, cracking jokes about the clanking old tea trolley. One wag told her it was ‘the only serviceable tank in the British Army’.8 Everyone laughed nervously, aware that it wasn’t far from the truth.

  Colin Gubbins had been in his new office for just a couple of weeks when he informed Joan that he had to travel to Paris on urgent business. He was ostensibly being sent as the head of a War Office military mission, but the manner in which he spoke made her suspect that he was using this as a cover for something altogether more underhand. It would be some weeks before she would find out exactly what he was up to. In Gubbins’s absence, the office baton passed temporarily to Millis Jefferis.

  Jefferis’s priority in Caxton Street had been to produce his pamphlet on high explosives. Now, his task was to put together a basic toolkit for any would-be saboteur. It needed to be an easily transportable case of explosives, detonators and limpet mines that could be used to blow up anything from bridges to transformers.

  Jefferis knew from his experiences on the North-West Frontier that the most important item for any saboteur was the detonator and its accompanying fuse, the latter being used to trigger the explosive. He also knew that the army’s Bickford fuse was hopelessly inadequate for targeted destruction. Specialist saboteurs required specialist detonators.

  He had already begun this work in Caxton Street, where he had developed his miniature time vibration switch. Now, a new little beauty emerged from his design sheet. The pressure switch was a piece of consummate craftsmanship, combining the precision of a Swiss watch with the mischievous humour of a devious brain. As its name implied, it used the pressure of the train on the track to trigger the explosive. The humour was Jefferis’s own: he relished the idea of the train itself setting off the charge.

  Stuart Macrae had been working alongside Jefferis on an ad hoc basis and never ceased to be amazed at the way in which such a coarse-fingered individual could produce such finicky products. He tested the unfused prototypes on suburban railway lines and found them extraordinarily precise. The pressure switch worked by means of a spring-loaded striker, a steel rod hardened to brittleness and a sealed compression chamber: it took accuracy to new levels. ‘When a train came along, the rail had to be deflected only a few thousandths of an inch to cause it to fire the mine.’

  Jefferis was using advanced mathematical formulae to conjure up a whole new generation of weaponry. To Macrae’s eyes, the algebraic logarithms scratched on to the office blackboard were ‘an excellent example of how Millis had a gift for tackling a problem from a new angle’. An unfortunate by-product of his hyperactive imagination was his ‘moody and irritable’ temper, especially when confronted with a weapon that didn’t work. ‘When he had a problem on his mind, he did not wait to think about anything else.’ But when he ‘came up for air’, as Macrae put it, the clouds passed and he was restored to good humour.

  Other items in Jefferis’s toolkit included his Castrator, his Camoflet mine and various specialist charges. Some were scarcely bigger than a matchbox, yet they allowed the operator to destroy anything from a sentry-post to a large railway junction. With the addition of a few of Cecil Clarke’s limpet mines, ‘the irregular soldier or saboteur was fully equipped to blow up absolutely anything in any way he chose’.

  It was strictly forbidden to bring explosives into the War Office, but Jefferis couldn’t develop sabotage weapons without the tools of the trade. Arriving each morning for work, he would park his Humber Snipe in the quadrangle and unload the wrapped packages on the back seat. The elderly lieutenant colonel guarding the main entrance would salute him, glance at the brown paper parcels tucked under Jefferis’s arm and say: ‘Ha! And what have you got there? Explosive, I suppose.’

  Jefferis would let out a hearty guffaw. ‘That’s it, sir,’ he would say. ‘Very high explosive, this. We’re trying to collect enough to blow this place up.’9 He would then head straight to Room 173 and lock the blasting gelatine in the filing cabinet. At times he had as much as twenty pounds of the stuff stowed in the office cupboard, enough to bring down a sizeable chunk of the War Office.

  There was the occasional mishap. Macrae was helping out one morning when he answered the telephone to an apoplectic admiral whose office was in a distant part of the building. He told Macrae that he had been seated at his desk when an explosive device had shattered through the floor and detonated under his chair. It had almost blown off his buttocks.

  Macrae soon discovered what had happened. An officer, known personally to him, ‘had been fooling about with some lethal weapon with which I had provided him’10 when it had accidentally fired.

  * * *

  Just a few minutes’ walk from the War Office, in the gleaming Shell Mex building on the Strand, sat a man who appreciated Millis Jefferis’s talents even less than the irate admiral. Leslie Burgin, the recently appointed head of the Ministry of Supply, was a gaunt-faced bureaucrat (and Liberal MP) whose final Commons speech as a backbencher concerned mind-numbing details about the Selby bypass and toll bridge. His appointment as head of one of the key government ministries was memorably described as ‘another horse from Caligula’s well-stocked stable’.11 The inference was clear: Burgin was not up to the job.

  This would have had no bearing on Jefferis, had it not been for the fact that all new armaments had to be commissioned through Burgin’s ministry. Burgin also held the keys to the Royal Ordnance Supply Factories, which had made a speciality out of bureaucracy and red tape. It could take months to complete the necessary ministerial paperwork and even longer for trials to be satisfactorily completed. Jefferis’s saboteur toolkit, if approved, would not be ready for more than a year.

  A few of Burgin’s senior officers had come to hear about Jefferis’s work and ‘strongly disapproved of this pirate design section which had sprung up from nowhere’. So did Burgin himself. No sooner had war been declared than he implemented a vicelike control over the commissioning process for new weapons. Every large engineering company in the country was legally tied to his ministry ‘and could accept orders only with its approval’.12

  This was potentially disastrous for both Jefferis and Gubbins, for whom speed was the very essence of guerrilla warfare. To avoid such delays, Jefferis took the unprecedented decision to bypass Leslie Burgin and his Mi
nistry of Supply. Instead of red tape, there would be no tape at all: henceforth, he would answer to one person alone and that would be himself. Every weapon he designed was to be built on the quiet – clandestinely and illegally – by small family-run companies whose owners were known to him personally.

  One of these was Bob Porter of Boon and Porter, a Barnes-based engineering firm that specialized in upgrading Riley motor cars. Bob had always promised his local customers a service that was ‘liberal in conception and speedy in execution’.13 Now, anxious to help out his old friend, he got his entire team at the Castelnau workshop assembling Jefferis’s detonators.

  Next to be approached was Franco Signs in west London, whose owner was a friend of Stuart Macrae. Franco’s was an electrical engineering company that made illuminated shopfronts for London stores. Macrae reasoned that they would soon be short of work, since ‘illuminated signs were obviously not going to be much in demand’ during the blackout. He tipped the wink to Franco’s manager, who was delighted to keep his men busy making weapons. He put his main factory at Hendon at the disposal of MI(R)c ‘and rapidly reopened one at Bristol which had been closed down’.

  Jefferis’s time vibration switch was a particularly complex piece of equipment, one that he contracted out to the Clerkenwell-based Kinematograph Engineering Company. This was run by a brilliant self-taught engineer named Mr Thomassen, whose eccentricities were such that even Macrae was left rubbing his eyes in disbelief. ‘How Millis had run into him I never knew,’ he said. ‘His workshop was a decrepit old place equipped with very ancient machinery.’ There were no safety procedures whatsoever. ‘It looked as if it might fall down if a bomb exploded within a mile of it.’14 Yet Mr Thomassen accepted the commission with enthusiasm and set to work immediately.

  There was a faintly comic element to many of the workmen hired by Jefferis, one not lost on Macrae. While Hitler was using the industrial powerhouses of Germany – Siemens, Thyssen and I.B. Farben – Jefferis was forced to rely on men like Mr Thomassen of Clerkenwell. But ultimately, Jefferis was to have the last laugh. For those he hired were craftsmen of the highest order and were able to turn out complex weaponry with a speed and dexterity that not even Siemens could have matched. Mr Thomassen was to prove the most diligent of all, working throughout the night, even during the worst of the Blitz.

  From the outset, Jefferis had recognized Cecil Clarke’s limpet mine as a key weapon for any would-be saboteur. Now, he asked Clarke if he could build 250 limpets, using the workshop and facilities of LoLode. Cecil was more than happy to oblige, although he confessed to Macrae that he was unsure how much to charge for the mines. The basic materials were cheap enough: a Woolworths’ bowl, an aniseed ball and a condom (plus the explosive charge). Since Clarke’s Bedford overheads were also minimal, Macrae suggested that he ask £6 for each mine. Macrae (who was to help build the mines) added a whopping £2 commission that was to go to himself. He justified this on the grounds that he had found Clarke in the first place.

  The first order yielded £500 for Macrae and a little less for Clarke. A second, much larger order earned them a further £2,000. Clarke was by now using aniseed balls at such a rate that it was no longer practical to buy them from the local sweet shops. Henceforth, he ordered them directly from Bassett’s, the sweet manufacturers.

  He had also amended the original design, considerably reducing the size of the striking mechanism. This meant that standard condoms were far too large. He therefore commissioned a rubber manufacturer to make special mini-condoms: ‘So small,’ noted Macrae, ‘that they were useless for any other kind of protection.’15

  Jefferis was never one to dawdle. As soon as the first toolkits were produced, they were boxed up in readiness for dispatch to the underground contacts that Gubbins had been establishing in the Balkans.

  Gubbins himself was still in Paris and unable to oversee this, so Jefferis stepped in to help. His explosives were sent in style, rushed to Belgrade aboard the Simplon-Orient Express and accompanied by two members of the MI(R)c team. The only hitch came when they reached Milan, where the train unexpectedly terminated. The two couriers ‘had to sit on Milan station watching thirty-five parcels full of dangerous explosives and time fuses, and hoping the Italians would not declare war against us till they were inside Yugoslav territory’.16

  The men eventually made it to Belgrade, along with the explosive packages; it was the first of many such deliveries sent to anti-Nazi resisters planning operations in southern Europe. A further three tons was sent to Egypt, a precaution against any military adventures that Hitler might be planning in the desert.

  * * *

  One Sunday afternoon, Stuart Macrae’s phone rang and he found himself talking to a highly stressed Millis Jefferis, whose fourteen-hour days were clearly taking their toll. ‘I just can’t go on like this,’ he barked down the phone. ‘I must have your full time help.’ Never one to stand on ceremony, he insisted that Macrae should hand in his notice at Armchair Science and join MI(R)c. ‘Be up here tomorrow at ten o’clock,’ he said. And then he hung up the phone.

  Macrae had been keen to work alongside Jefferis from the very first moment they met, for he considered him ‘an out and out genius’. But employment by MI(R)c meant he would no longer be able to claim his freelance commission on the limpet mines. This was indeed a blow. For months he had been promising Mrs Macrae that they were going to get rich. Now, he would be on the meagre pay of an army colonel. He drove back to London and reflected on his changing fortunes by downing half a bottle of Scotch. Then he took the half-finished bottle home to his wife and, ‘tipping it into her’ (as he put it), told her what had happened.

  To his surprise, she declared herself proud to have a husband working on secret projects, even if it meant forgoing the Bentley that he had been promising. Macrae, his mind befuddled with whisky, could only conclude ‘that women are far more patriotic than men’.17

  He joined Millis Jefferis in Room 173 on the morning after the phone call, and his arrival was to transform the fortunes of MI(R)c. Every genius needs a sidekick, and Macrae was the perfect prop to the ramshackle Jefferis. A jack of all trades, Macrae also happened to be master of one: cajoling unwilling partners into doing whatever was necessary to turn MI(R)c into a smooth-running machine that could properly exploit Jefferis’s brain.

  Macrae was tall and wiry, with a complicit smile and a twinkle in his eye. He wore his peaked service cap at the angle of a listing ship, as if the rakish tilt were a nod and a wink to his employment with ‘the pirates’, as he liked to call MI(R). His moustache was as fair as his hair, clipped in the fashion of a young Terry-Thomas. Disarmingly honest and witty to boot, he had the air of a benevolent racketeer. He kept the office well stocked with whisky and gin, and even better stocked with hangover cures.

  He was the first to admit that he had been singularly ill-qualified for all his previous jobs. Just a few months earlier, he had accepted the editorship of Gardening Magazine. ‘Nobody could know less about gardening than me,’ he said. But it didn't stop him dispensing advice for his readers. ‘I would solemnly give them my views on whether it were better to plant globe artichokes in September or March.’18 Now, at last, he had fallen into a job for which he was extremely well qualified, one in which the only seeds to be planted were those of wholescale destruction.

  He had been working just a few days at MI(R)c when he discovered that he and Jefferis shared a common interest in caravans, one fuelled by their discussions with Cecil Clarke. Shortly after the declaration of war, Jefferis had taken the decidedly eccentric step of cancelling the tenancy on his rented home in Farnham and moving his family into a luxury caravan parked in a field near Elstree, to the north of Edgware.

  Now, Macrae joined him, manoeuvring his new caravan alongside that of his boss. Each evening the two of them would drive home together from work and park Jefferis’s Humber between the two caravans, in order to afford them a little more privacy. It was an unusual arrangement but it had an impo
rtant benefit. The two of them could talk until late into the night about hitherto undreamed-of weapons.

  The MI(R)c team expanded within days of Macrae’s arrival, for he hired a ‘likeable, red-hearted fellow’ called Gordon Norwood and a gruff sergeant by the name of Bidgood. With Gubbins still away, he saw much more of Joan Bright, who was spending a great deal of her working day in Room 173.

  ‘God bless her,’ said Macrae. ‘She more or less ran the show.’ She controlled the office purse, kept the four men equipped with supplies and even took the trouble of having the room carpeted. Macrae was so smitten that he decided to invite her out on a date. The others warned him that ‘Joan was not that kind of girl’ – and that he was married – but Macrae was undaunted. He proved so persistent that Joan eventually consented to be taken to lunch at Taglionis. But he also discovered that his colleagues were right: Joan was not that sort of girl. ‘The whole thing was extremely platonic,’19 he admitted with a tinge of regret.

  * * *

  The five members of MI(R)c were hard at work on the afternoon of 10 November when Jefferis’s telephone rang unexpectedly. The caller did not identify himself and nor did he give any indication as to why he was phoning. He simply ordered Jefferis to attend an important meeting in Whitehall. When Jefferis pressed for further information, he was told that the meeting was ‘with some naval officer’.20 Perplexed, and not a little bemused, he duly attended the meeting and got the surprise of his life when he discovered that the naval officer in question was Winston Churchill.

  Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on the day that war was declared. It was a return to the post he had last held a quarter of a century earlier, a tenure that had ended with the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Now, in very different circumstances, he was back in his former study. ‘A few feet behind me,’ he wrote, ‘as I sat in my old chair, was the wooden map-case I had fixed in 1911, and inside it still remained the chart of the North Sea.’21