Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Local villagers began to wonder what on earth was going on in Sir Arthur’s old house. Lorries arrived from London with heavy machinery, lathes and workbenches. The house was converted into offices, the lawn resembled a firing range and two vast swimming pools were rumoured to be under construction, an unusual luxury in wartime. And then one day the villagers awoke to discover that the house had sprouted antennae, pipes and wires. ‘The electricity people supplied a whacking great transformer to give us power,’ wrote Macrae, ‘and the telephone people ran in new lines.’

  Whenever anyone made enquiries as to the new owners of the Firs, they were met by a wall of silence. In common with the government code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, just twelve miles to the north-east, the Firs was surrounded by a cordon of secrecy.

  With MD1’s move to the countryside, Jefferis’s enemies finally conceded defeat, although they continued to smart over their wounds. Macrae overheard a number of them referring disparagingly to the Firs as ‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’. He had a quick rejoinder for anyone who cared to listen. ‘The toys we produced,’ he said, ‘were rather dangerous ones.’14

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins returned to London from Coleshill House to discover that he had just missed the best job in town. On the very day that Hitler had announced his intention of invading Great Britain, Winston Churchill had called one of his midnight meetings at Downing Street. On this occasion there was only one person invited and only one item on the agenda. Hugh Dalton, the Minister for Economic Warfare, was being placed in overall charge of guerrilla warfare.

  Churchill was characteristically blunt when speaking with Dalton, informing him that there was no hope of conventional military action against the Nazis for the foreseeable future. Hitler’s war machine had kicked its iron boot through the Low Countries and France and was now so powerful, in terms of both men and weapons, that Britain’s Dunkirk-shattered forces could not hope to compete. Sabotage and subversion represented the only possible way of striking back and Churchill instructed Dalton to establish – as he called it – a Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

  If its name was amusing, its role was anything but. It was to subvert the conventions of war – punch below the belt – and it was to work in tandem with Jefferis’s team at the Firs. Any German target, however soft, was to be considered fair game, and no weapon was to be considered off limits. ‘This form of activity was of the very highest importance,’ said Churchill.

  The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was to be ‘a special organisation’,15 as well as a clandestine one. The remnants of MI(R) and Section D were to be amalgamated into this new body whose purpose ‘was to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas’. Its official name was the Special Operations Executive, but that was to remain secret and was never to be used, not even on internal memos. In Whitehall it was to be known by its cover name, the Inter-Services Research Bureau. To its employees it would be known simply as Baker Street, after the location of its headquarters.

  Churchill stressed that knowledge of its work was to be kept ‘within a very restricted circle’. Even members of the Cabinet were not to be informed of its day-to-day activities, partly because most of them disapproved of the envisaged ungentlemanly antics. One minister quipped to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax: ‘You should never be consulted because you would never consent to anything. You will never make a gangster.’16

  Hugh Dalton was a strange choice to be the ministerial head of an organization in which personal loyalty was to count for so much. His nickname was Dr Dynamo, a moniker that suggested unceasing energy and dependability. Yet his benign façade masked an altogether more devious interior. His staff thought him an abrasive bully with a penetrating voice and weird eyes that, as one of them put it, ‘used to roll around in a rather terrifying way’.17

  ‘The biggest bloodiest shit I’ve ever met,’ was how one ministerial rival described him. Churchill agreed. ‘Keep that man away from me,’ he once said. ‘I can’t stand his booming voice and shifty eyes.’18 But the Prime Minister and Dalton shared one thing in common: both believed that the Nazis would only be defeated by playing an even dirtier game of war than them. Dalton accepted the job with alacrity, privately exhilarated by the thought that he now had a ‘black life’ so secret that not even his family knew what he was doing.

  As he turned to leave the Prime Minister’s study, Churchill issued him with one final, famous instruction: ‘And now set Europe ablaze.’19 Those who knew Dalton’s lack of personal skills said that he was more likely to set Whitehall ablaze.

  Colin Gubbins was the most obvious candidate to direct the operational wing of the new organization. But Gubbins was preoccupied with the Auxiliary Units in the summer of 1940. Dalton turned instead to Frank Nelson, a former Conservative backbencher who had resigned from Parliament some years earlier in order to devote his working life to pneumatic tube delivery systems. These were used by department stores for transporting money from cash registry to accounting office.

  It was not an exciting job, but then Nelson was not an exciting person. A fastidious workaholic with a gaunt forehead and lavishly oiled hair, he struck Joan Bright (who met him that summer) as ‘an austere and somewhat remote figure’20 who lacked Gubbins’s panache, vision and bonhomie. Even his friends admitted that he was ‘a man of grim but unshakeable determination’.21 One of his early recruits to Baker Street was alarmed to learn that he had moved into a government service flat so as to be closer to his office. ‘He seemed to have no family life and was in the office seven days a week from about a quarter to nine until very nearly midnight.’22

  What few knew about Nelson was that he had been living a secret double life. Alongside his business interests, he had been working as an intelligence agent in Basel, an important listening post in the late 1930s. It was this intelligence work – and not his interest in pneumatic tube delivery systems – that had led to his employment by Hugh Dalton.

  That summer, Dalton hired scores of men he knew through personal contacts: bankers, accountants and international lawyers. ‘Before long,’ said one recruit, ‘we were employing one or more representatives of most of the merchant banking houses in the City.’ Dalton also hired most of the partners working for the legal firm Slaughter and May. As summer drifted into autumn and the tally of attempted guerrilla operations remained stubbornly at zero, one office wag joshed that ‘we seemed to be all “may” and no “slaughter”.’23

  Dalton’s appointments puzzled many, yet they were not without logic. He believed that resistance to the Nazis would come from civilians not soldiers. If so, his high-flying team would be well placed to foster that resistance. But after a year working for Gubbins’s inner circle, Joan Bright felt that Dalton was living in fantasyland. ‘In these early days, most people in Occupied Europe were still stunned by defeat and, except for a few ardent patriots, asked for nothing except to be left in peace.’24 If there were to be resistance to the Nazis, it would have to be spearheaded by British-trained guerrillas.

  Dalton realized his mistake within two months of starting his new job and immediately turned to Gubbins, newly returned from Kent, offering him the post of Baker Street’s Director of Operations and Training.

  Gubbins might have been expected to jump at such a job, but he hesitated as he eyed up the well-heeled bankers employed by Dalton. They were hardly the sorts of people he would have recruited for a dirty war against the Nazis. His hesitation led to the offer of sweeteners. He was to be promoted to brigadier and given a salary considerably higher than his contemporaries in the regular army. He was also allowed to rehire everyone who had worked for him in Caxton Street. These sweeteners may have enticed him, but he eventually accepted because of his unswerving belief that ‘guerrilla warfare on the mainland of Europe might prove decisive in what might otherwise be a single-handed struggle against Hitler.’25

  The office to which he arrived for work on Monday, 18 November was very dif
ferent to the grimy MI(R) rooms at the War Office. Number 64 Baker Street was a gigantic stack of a building that sprawled over six floors. He was accompanied by Peter Wilkinson, who had served him so well in the Auxiliary Units. The two men found the atmosphere decidedly frosty when they were introduced to Dalton’s bankers. Wilkinson immediately realized why: the two of them had come to work in military uniforms, whereas everyone else in the office was wearing open-necked shirts. The unsmiling faces said it all: they viewed Gubbins’s arrival ‘with considerable suspicion’, said Wilkinson, and feared that ‘it heralded a military take-over’.26

  Gubbins had been expecting to be housed in the main building, but he was told this was not possible. His fledgling department, codenamed SO2, was to be relegated to two dingy flats in Berkeley Court, opposite Baker Street Tube station. Neither he nor Wilkinson was impressed when they were escorted to this backstreet building. The office was in ‘one of the rather glum warrens of Edwardian flats which cluster around the northern end of Baker Street’.27 Even the furniture looked like cast-offs. To Wilkinson’s discerning eye, the rooms looked as if they’d been fitted with ‘pretty nasty furniture from the cheaper end of the Tottenham Court Road’. Far worse, from his point of view, was the fact that Berkeley Court was situated on the outer fringes of the civilized world. ‘Too far to go and lunch at one’s club,’ he noted sadly.28

  Gubbins relished the position of the underdog: it was precisely what guerrilla warfare was all about. When he learned that Dalton had already hired several members of his former team from MI(R), he had them immediately transferred on to his own roster. They included his Polish expert, H.B. ‘Perks’ Perkins, the ‘larger than life’29 colonel who had proved so gifted at organizing post-work parties. Perks had developed a new party trick over the long summer months: ‘The only man I had ever actually seen bend a poker in his hands,’ remarked one of his astonished colleagues.30

  Gubbins also retained the services of Colonel Chidson, the terrifying recruitment officer who had originally warned Joan about the Nazis sticking pins in her toes. The intervening months had done little to soften his interviewing technique. When a young banker named Bickham Sweet-Escott arrived for an interview, Chidson set out ‘with steely precision the blood-curdling aims of the organisation’. He also warned of the need for secrecy. ‘For security reasons, I can’t tell you what sort of a job it would be. All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.’31 Sweet-Escott was taken aback. He thought he was going for a regular day job at the War Office.

  Once new recruits had signed on Chidson’s dotted line, there was no turning back. They were given codenames, fake identities and fictitious jobs, for everyone ‘who worked here had cover stories to fit the work they were doing’.32

  Gubbins’s first task was to find a secretary to replace the redoubtable Joan Bright, whose services had been retained by the War Office. He was sorry to part company with her, for she had done sterling work. He vowed to remain in touch and proved true to his word. He continued to see her several times a week and she was one of the few people with whom he trusted the secrets of his work.

  Joan’s replacement was Margaret Jackson, a bewitchingly glamorous thirty-three-year-old who had first worked alongside Gubbins in Paris. She had fled her post in the wake of the Nazi invasion, making a dash to the coast alongside ‘cars with mattresses on their roofs and machine-gunned windscreens’. Gubbins had immediately rehired her to work at Coleshill House, where her cool pragmatism left him deeply impressed. In a crisp assessment of her qualities, he noted that she had ‘a strong sense of responsibility, plenty of initiative and competent’.33 Margaret was Scottish, like him. She was also a first-class organizer who spoke both French and Spanish and prided herself on her loyalty. On occasions she could be frivolous: she later confessed that she had focused her life on four objectives: ‘ambition, being admired, captivating people and doing my best to attract glamorous young men’.34 One of those young men, Leo Marks, told Gubbins that Margaret ‘had everything we sought for in a woman except availability’.35

  Margaret was the first to admit that she was fascinated by her boss. Indeed, she found it hard to take her eyes off him as he paced restlessly around the office in a trail of pale blue cigarette smoke. ‘He was always quick in all his movements and he had this quality of dynamism.’36 Everyone worked hard in Berkeley Court, but Gubbins seemed to be on triple-speed. He was, she said, ‘like an electric current’.

  His fastidious attention to detail could be tiresome, especially at the end of a long working day. He insisted that she fold the office maps in the correct fashion, with ‘the annexes neatly flagged’, and he dictated his memos in precise staccato (telling her where to place each comma and colon). It was some months before it dawned on Margaret that Gubbins’s precision was not gratuitous. It was the very essence of guerrilla warfare.

  Just occasionally she would find the pressures of work too much. In these moments, he would encourage her to have a tea break. ‘Festina lente,’ he would say. ‘Hasten slowly.’ It was an expression he had learned during his childhood in the Scottish Highlands when out stalking deer. ‘Pursuits,’ mused Margaret, ‘in which it is necessary to pause and think of the quarry’s next move.’37

  Security was a prime concern, even in these early days. Gubbins constantly reminded Margaret that they would soon be sending saboteurs into Nazi-occupied territories. These would be dangerous undercover missions with no room for mistakes. ‘Symbols and code-names were always used [and] telephone numbers and extensions memorised,’ she said. ‘Ours was an operational service headquarters where security was crucial.’

  Some rules were never broken. The office had to be cleared of paperwork each evening and documents locked into the steel safe. Margaret even had to empty the wastepaper baskets, a tiresome task. Once she had gathered all the disposed papers, ‘the contents were shredded so that there was nothing left by the time the cleaners came round.’38

  The last job before heading home was to remove blotting paper from the various blotters, lest the imprint on their surfaces betray the identity and whereabouts of an undercover agent.

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins took two key decisions at an early date. The first was to divide the entire Baker Street organization into country sections, with each occupied territory having its own department and staff. Every department was to be entirely independent, to the point of having its own training schools for sabotage, explosives and endurance. The security was not gratuitous. It was vital that a saboteur being sent into Norway should know nothing about the work of a fellow saboteur being sent to Greece or the Balkans, lest he be induced to reveal details of their mission under torture.

  The second decision was taken by Gubbins alone. He decided to employ women – lots of them – and not just as secretaries. They were to be given key positions of responsibility. Margaret had been the first to note that Gubbins ‘didn’t have any discrimination against women’, yet even she was only dimly aware of the growing number of young ladies working in Baker Street until one day she looked up from her desk and realized that she was surrounded by dozens of female faces.

  The most important of the administrative jobs was that of country registrar. The registrars controlled all the secret files, including what Margaret called ‘the nerve centre’ of the country sections. This ‘centre’ contained highly sensitive information about all the saboteurs, along with plans of factories and installations targeted for destruction. As such, it contained many of the secrets of Baker Street.

  Gubbins insisted that the registrars were women, for he found them more trustworthy than men. He also insisted on a strictly hierarchical structure, with a formidable operator on the registrars’ throne. ‘Lesley Wauchope was queen of the registry,’ said Margaret. One of Joan Bright’s closest friends, she was proud, sharp and blessed with ‘the face of an untroubled Madonna’. She certainly knew how to knock men into shape. Margaret said she
had ‘a wicked wit’ and was ‘no respecter of others’ pretensions’.

  Equally formidable was Joan Armstrong, the owner of an interior decorating business, whom Gubbins had promoted to head of the Scandinavian Section. It was not just the men who admired her model-like allure. ‘Very attractive,’39 confessed Margaret as she watched young Joan filing the paperwork of her Scandinavian empire.

  Entering this brave new world, where women were on equal terms to the men, was a bewildering experience for gentlemen of the old school. Even the younger chaps found themselves thrown into turmoil. One uniformed recruit, Jack Robertson, confessed to being totally intimidated when introduced to one of Gubbins’s senior managers named Annabel, a feisty young sophisticate. She looked him up and down and admonished him in a fashion he hadn’t experienced since prep school. ‘Larks, young man!’ she said, ‘what on earth induced you to come here in uniform? Can’t have chaps like you mucking around here in uniform.’

  Robertson confessed that ‘she frightened the life out of me’, but he soon discovered that Baker Street contained scores of Annabels, ‘refined, chatty, intelligent gentlewomen’ of impeccable pedigree, who hailed from large mansions in the Home Counties. ‘They all had names like Claudia and Bettina and Georgina, they all called their bosses by their Christian names, and were crisply efficient and nineteen-twentyish, enervated by turns.’40

  Gubbins also hired the services of the all-female First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, employing its members as drivers, telegraph operators and signals experts. One of those who worked for him, Sue Ryder, got to know Gubbins well: she said his conviction that ‘women were better at doing this work than men’ won him few friends in the Whitehall establishment. He was ‘highly disliked by people in the War Cabinet and Foreign Office. They couldn’t stick his guts.’41