Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Castration was to be an important element in Gubbins’s game of psychological warfare against captured Nazis. His men were ‘to cut off their “knackers” to demoralise the rest’.37 If all went to plan, Kent’s trees were to be festooned with German testicles.

  Security at Coleshill House was tight and all new recruits reported for duty at the country post office in the nearby village of Highworth. Here, they were given instructions by the white-haired postmistress, Mabel Stranks, who would demand to see their identity papers, ask for a predetermined password and then disappear while she made a phone call. ‘Somebody’s coming to fetch you,’38 she would tell them if everything was in order. Soon after, a civilian car would sweep up outside and take the new recruits through the parkland to the mansion itself. Mabel Stranks prided herself on security. On one notable occasion, she kept General Montgomery waiting in his car while she undertook a thorough identity check on him.

  By late summer, Gubbins had established the rudiments of the first guerrilla army in British history. The 3,000 recruits being trained at Coleshill were a quixotic mix of men, most of whom had been hired because they had a particular skill. Not all were gentlemen: the War Office referred to them as ‘scallywags’ and many were indeed men of dubious repute. A criminal past was no hindrance; in fact it often provided a fast track to employment. Peter Wilkinson cast his eye over one batch of new arrivals and couldn’t help but smile at the social mix in the dormitories, with ‘peers of the realm owning broad acres kipped down happily with poachers and convicted burglars, the latter criminals recruited for the dexterity in handling explosives or in picking locks’.39

  Gubbins faced frequent complaints from the regular army, whose commanding officers abhorred the very idea of guerrilla warfare. Their fears were rarely allayed by the behaviour of Gubbins’s more exuberant leaders. One of them, John Gwyn, decided to test the defences of General Montgomery’s headquarters, which the general had declared to be impregnable. He was soon proved wrong. Gwyn crept through the perimeter fence and buried a number of Jefferis’s explosive charges in the lawn, with the fuses set to detonate just as Montgomery was giving his morning lecture. The resulting explosion was the Full Monty, with Peter Wilkinson there to witness the fall-out. Montgomery ‘was never one to forgive these sorts of pranks,’ he said, ‘and he never reconciled himself with irregular operations for the rest of the war.’40

  Winston Churchill kept a close eye on Gubbins’s work and praised him for organizing the Auxiliary Units ‘with thoroughness and imagination’. He also expressed his hope that the guerrillas would fight to the death inside the German beachhead and ‘perish in the common ruin rather than to fail or falter in their duty’.41

  But that fight to the death was unexpectedly put on hold. Hitler’s invasion had always been predicated on two factors: air supremacy and naval superiority. As the summer wore on, it became apparent that Germany had neither. Luftwaffe pilots had failed to wipe out the Royal Air Force and the Kriegsmarine was hindered by the loss of ten destroyers in the invasion of Norway. The Kriegsmarine commander, Erich Raeder, insisted that German naval strength was insufficient for an invasion to be undertaken that summer. ‘A German invasion of England would be a matter of life and death for the British,’ he warned, adding that it was certain to be ‘an all-out fight for survival’.42

  On 17 September a reluctant Hitler ordered the indefinite postponement of the invasion, having been convinced by his senior generals that it was not viable in the foreseeable future. Although Gubbins’s guerrilla units had not been put to the test, they had been ‘a triumph of improvisation’. Gubbins had said from the outset that ‘their usefulness would have been short-lived, at the longest until their stocks were exhausted, at the shortest when they were caught or wiped out.’ But this was their raison d’être. ‘They were designed, trained and prepared for a particular and imminent crisis: that was their specialist role.’43

  They had also given Gubbins a taste of things to come. He knew that it was now only a matter of time before full-scale guerrilla operations would commence against the enemy. By the autumn of 1940, his work with the Auxiliary Units was at an end. But his association with Winston Churchill was only just beginning.

  6

  The Enemy Within

  MILLIS JEFFERIS INCREASINGLY came to resemble one of his own weapons in the summer of 1940, or that’s how it appeared to Stuart Macrae. Just as butchers develop sausage-shaped fingers and wine merchants get port-stained cheeks, so Jefferis had acquired a short fuse and an explosive temper. Too much pressure and he was in danger of detonating.

  Macrae was increasingly concerned by the way in which his boss was rubbing people up the wrong way. Jefferis’s cavalier approach to the rule book was not passing unnoticed in Whitehall. Macrae repeatedly warned him that the Ministry of Supply ‘resented our not coming under their jurisdiction’ and that Leslie Burgin was furious at their illicit trade in weaponry. A showdown was not just likely, but inevitable. Amazingly, Jefferis didn’t care one jot.

  The troubles began with a telephone conversation. A certain Brigadier Wyndham called the Portland Place workshop to express his disapproval about the uncivilized weapons they were producing. Macrae retorted that no one else was in a position to design sabotage weapons. Nor, for that matter, could anyone else have supplied Gubbins’s Auxiliary Units with such a supply of explosives. He said that ‘the vitally important work we were doing at 35 Portland Place could not readily be taken over by anyone else’. If it had been left to Leslie Burgin to equip Gubbins’s men, he would still be doing the paperwork.

  Wyndham was unmoved. ‘With a slight snort, the brigadier announced his intention of paying a state visit to our establishment to see for himself if there was any truth in my suggestion.’

  Macrae was the first to realize that ‘the situation was serious’.1 Brigadier Wyndham was a senior figure in military intelligence and had a wealth of connections. The Ministry of Supply, the Director of Military Administration and the Armaments Design Department were all backing his move to hurl a bureaucratic sticky bomb into the workings of Portland Place.

  Jefferis rarely concerned himself with office matters, for experience had taught him that such things were best left to Macrae. But on this occasion, his anger got the better of him. The stress of a fourteen-hour day coupled with a production line close to breaking point led to an unprecedented outburst. ‘I refuse to waste my time trying to argue or excuse myself with any of these bodies,’ he fumed. ‘My contention is that I have a better brain for the purposes of producing warlike weapons.’ He lambasted Burgin’s halfwits at the Ministry of Supply, who were absolutely devoid of creative talent. ‘What it boils down to is that if I am left alone, I might produce something.’2

  And produce something he did. At the very moment of Brigadier Wyndham’s Portland Place inspection, Jefferis plucked a rabbit from his magician’s hat. It was a rabbit with very sharp teeth.

  His conjuring trick had only been possible because of a surprise encounter that took place some weeks earlier. A self-styled Irish inventor named Stewart Blacker had pitched up at Portland Place with a strange-shaped package and an even stranger story. He introduced himself to Jefferis as the country’s only freelance inventor of experimental weapons, one who had begun work at an early age, drawing inspiration from the revolutionary mortars used in the Sino-Japanese War. ‘Procuring some black powder, a stock of cigarette papers and a croquet ball as a projectile, he built his first mortar,’ while still a schoolboy in the Lower Fifth. It proved a triumph. ‘He carried out a spectacular bombardment of the headmaster’s greenhouse at a range of 300 yards!’3

  Blacker conformed to all the stereotypes of a madcap inventor. He kept a monocle clamped to his right eye and had a bulging, size eighteen neck on account of breaking his vertebrae when shot from his plane by a German fighter ace during the Great War. He shared many things in common with Jefferis: he had served on the North-West Frontier, spoke Pashto with the same degree of fluency
and had a ‘pathological hatred of officialdom’. He particularly despised civil servants, referring to them as the ‘abominable no-men of Whitehall’.4 There was good reason for his antipathy. When he had presented his new wonder weapon to the War Office, they had politely shown him the door.

  For two years, Blacker had persisted in petitioning to get his weapon adopted; for two years, the War Office had shown no interest. ‘In Millis’s eyes,’ said Macrae, ‘this was certain proof that it must be a good idea.’ Jefferis’s opinion of the War Office remained unchanged: ‘he had never known them to be right yet.’5

  Jefferis watched with interest as Blacker proceeded to unwrap a bizarre, tubelike barrel that he called his Bombard. He had co-built it with the local clockmaker in Petworth, the village in which he lived, and described it as an anti-tank gun. Jefferis immediately recognized it as a work of consummate creativity. Instead of firing a shell from a gun barrel, the barrel itself was fired at the tank, with the explosive charge at the front and stabilizing tail fins at the rear. It was like a primitive missile.

  There were problems with the Bombard, just as there were problems with Blacker himself. ‘He had no mathematics,’ said Jefferis bluntly, a failing he took very seriously indeed.6 Yet Blacker’s homespun weapon – a spigot mortar – was a masterpiece of explosive malice and Jefferis devoted many weeks to correcting its deficiencies. By late summer, he had perfected it to such an extent that it could blow a hole in any advancing German tank.

  With Blacker’s agreement, he now took it back to the Ordnance Board in order to show them how wrong they’d been in rejecting it. His words fell on deaf ears. ‘If God Almighty had sponsored the spigot mortar,’ he was told, ‘I tell you it would still be turned down by the Ordnance Board.’7

  When this news reached Professor Lindemann, he called for a demonstration at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence. Macrae thought this a high-risk strategy. ‘We were still in the experimental stage with this weapon,’ he said, ‘and the workshops at 35 Portland Place had to work 24 hour shifts before we got everything sorted out and could take to Chequers a weapon which we felt might work without blowing up and injuring the PM and his retinue.’

  When Jefferis’s team arrived at Chequers, they were alarmed to see that Churchill had invited along General de Gaulle and General Smuts. No one seemed terribly impressed with the weapon, with its stubby tube and splayed metal legs. Even Macrae thought it ‘looked nothing at all like a gun, but rather like something thought up by Heath Robinson’. Yet that tubelike exterior concealed a conical-shaped missile with a massive explosive charge.

  Jefferis chose the two most competent members of his team to fire the weapon. Ralph Farrant was a gunner with a rare genius for hitting distant targets, while Norman Angier had played a key role in constructing the mortar. There was a great deal at stake. Although the Sticky Bomb had already been issued to the Auxiliary Units, the country stood in urgent need of more powerful anti-tank weapons.

  Farrant elected to fire the mortar at one of the trees in the garden of Chequers, selecting one that, to Macrae’s eyes, ‘seemed an awful way off’. Norman Angier was in the process of adjusting the alignment of the weapon when disaster struck. It accidentally fired. There was a piercing screech as the explosive charge spun through the air, almost whipping off the heads of the attending dignitaries.

  ‘The missile very nearly wiped out General de Gaulle,’ said an alarmed Macrae. He knew of Churchill’s antipathy towards the leader of the Free French and added that ‘unkind people afterwards suggested that the Prime Minister had in some way bribed Norman to have a go at this.’ Miraculously, having narrowly missed de Gaulle, the missile struck the tree right on target, shattering its branches and incinerating it. ‘A roaring success,’8 was the conclusion of everyone in attendance.

  Churchill was deeply impressed that Jefferis had produced yet another winner. He turned to him and said, somewhat formally, ‘as Prime Minister, I instruct you to proceed with all speed with the development of this excellent weapon.’ He offered an initial sum of £5,000, and promised a great deal more once ‘proper financial arrangements’ had been made.

  When he learned of the problems being caused by the Ministry of Supply, he took an important decision. Alongside his many official titles and duties, Churchill had named himself Minister of Defence, even though there was no Ministry of Defence. Now, he decided to turn Jefferis’s team into a Ministry of Defence department to be known as MD1. ‘In order to secure quick action,’ he wrote, ‘free from departmental processes, upon any bright idea or gadget, I decided to keep under my own hand, as Minister of Defence, the experimental establishment formed by Major Jefferis.’

  Professor Lindemann was to be the go-between between Jefferis and Churchill, while the Prime Minister’s personal military adviser, General ‘Pug’ Ismay, was to shield Jefferis from any further interference. MD1 was to be answerable solely to Churchill. ‘I used their brains,’ he later wrote, ‘and my power.’9

  Macrae was delighted by the outcome and soon received even better news. The Prime Minister told the Ministry of Supply ‘that they must give us everything we wanted and look after our well-being, without having any say at all in what we did’. Brigadier Wyndham had been silenced for ever. He ‘retired hurt’10 and was never heard from again.

  * * *

  Millis Jefferis faced other troubles in that long summer of 1940, ones rather closer to home. Ruth Jefferis’s enthusiasm for caravans never quite matched that of her husband and it took a decisive knock when her portable stove spectacularly malfunctioned and she came home to find ‘everything covered with a thick film of black soot’. Stuart Macrae’s wife, Mary, was also tiring of life in a caravan and so the two wives hatched a plot to settle into a more routine existence, taking themselves house hunting in north London. They soon found a comfortable little place for rent in Mill Hill, one that was affordable, cosy and relatively safe from the Luftwaffe.

  The new surroundings made the routines of life easier for the two couples, but did little to calm the simmering discontent between the respective husbands and wives. Macrae was the first to admit that ‘the ladies had a poor time’, but even he underestimated the resentment caused by them coming home at midnight each night reeking of whisky.

  Jefferis’s approach to marital discord was the same as his approach to the Nazis: it was to be confronted with every heavy weapon available. When Ruth and Mary complained about never receiving any flowers, Jefferis launched a floral blitzkrieg. He and Macrae drove to a flower shop in Hendon Central and bought the ladies a bouquet they would never forget. ‘We want to buy the contents of the shop, please,’ said Jefferis to the astonished florist as he pulled out his chequebook, ‘and will you have them delivered to this address.’ At first the lady thought he was joking – it was wartime, after all – but Jefferis was most insistent. ‘When we got home that night, we had great difficulty getting into the little house,’ said Macrae. ‘There were flowers, flowers everywhere, including a palm tree in the lavatory, which made it impossible to sit down.’ Jefferis’s solution seemed to work, for both Ruth and Mary were completely silenced. ‘Flowers,’ said Macrae, ‘were never mentioned again.’11

  Problems came in twos and threes as summer drifted into autumn in that first full year of war. First, the MD1 storehouse at Hendon was burned to the ground by German incendiary bombs, destroying Jefferis’s entire stockpile of sabotage weaponry. Next, the main office at Portland Place received a direct hit and was ‘put completely out of action’. It was a miracle that no one was hurt. Jefferis himself seemed to relish the bombing raids, viewing them as only marginally more inconvenient than an unexpected rain shower. ‘Nothing pleased him more than to strut down the middle of some London street when alarming whistling noises and bangs were going on all around.’

  Professor Lindemann had promised to be a ‘very powerful string-puller’ and so he proved to be. Jefferis’s team was assigned a civil servant named Mr Rose, who arrived at th
e bombed-out offices with a blank requisition warrant. He told Macrae he was permitted to acquire any building that might be of use to the new MD1.

  Macrae took Mr Rose off to Buckinghamshire in order to search for a safe house in the countryside that could become their new headquarters. He soon found the perfect place. The Firs was a half-timbered, mock-Elizabethan manor that stood in secluded grounds on the outskirts of Whitchurch village. It was the country residence of a gentleman squire by the name of Sir Arthur Abrahams, who spent his leisure hours touring the Buckinghamshire countryside in his magnificent Rolls-Royce. The Firs had brick outbuildings, extensive stabling and several little cottages in the grounds. Macrae noted that the secluded garden at the rear would be perfect for experimental demolition work.

  Sir Arthur had only recently put the mansion on the market and was delighted to learn that he had viewers from London. ‘The impeccable butler who had first shown us round the place had been under the impression that we were potential purchasers,’ said Macrae. It was therefore ‘a bit of a shock to him when Mr Rose whipped out his requisitioning form and informed him that the place was ours’.12 Macrae added that Sir Arthur was ‘not very happy’13 – something of an understatement, as it transpired – but there was nothing he could do. It was wartime and everyone had a role to play in defeating the Nazis.

  The Firs now became the country headquarters of Jefferis’s team and Macrae was put in charge of giving the place a make-over, a task made easier by the fact that Churchill proved extremely generous with funds. Macrae found himself custodian of ‘a bottomless bank account’ and this enabled him to hire many more staff – not just inventors and engineers, but also carpenters, builders and roofers, who were tasked with converting outbuildings into lodgings. Macrae already had his eye on turning the place into a major weapons-building establishment and was privately delighted to learn that Jefferis fully supported this idea, telling him that ‘it was vital for The Firs quickly to be converted into a sizeable research organization so that he could run a number of projects at once.’