Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  New staff arrived each week, many of them specialist mechanics and engineers who were hired by Macrae in order to fine-tune Jefferis’s more exuberant weapons of war. Some of these recruits were decidedly odd. One, known only as Mr Wilson, had previously worked at Portland Place, where he had chosen to live ‘in a cell about six feet square’. To Macrae’s eyes, he resembled a fish in an aquarium. ‘In this cell, he just had room for a drawing board, on which he produced really beautiful work remarkably quickly.’

  Macrae also set up a small factory in the extensive grounds, in order that the Firs could start building weapons as well as inventing them. This required manual labour, which he sought in the surrounding villages. The elderly and unemployed were delighted by the prospect of paid work and Macrae soon found himself in the position of employing so many locals that he had to rent a fleet of buses to shuttle them back to their homes at the end of each shift.

  Millis Jefferis strode around the sparsely furnished rooms of the Firs like some ill-kempt pasha, while Macrae played the role of ever faithful vizier. He had become the self-styled manager of a station whose production line was already working with remarkable efficiency. ‘The experimental workshop was running full blast, we had compiled temporary stores and trucks were whistling in and out with our products.’

  The most tangible sign of their importance was the splendidly polished limousine that Macrae had managed to scam from the War Office. Parked up front for everyone to see, it was the ultimate symbol of success. ‘The kind of vehicle reserved for the use of generals, and was complete with glass partition, speaking tube and all mod cons.’

  As the output of sabotage weaponry increased, Macrae began to assemble a small fleet of trucks and drivers to enable the explosives to be transported more efficiently to Gubbins’s operatives. He also established a building team, in order to construct more labs in the extensive grounds. And he opened a ‘special Number 2 account’ at the Midland Bank in Aylesbury, into which development money gushed like a waterfall. ‘Nearly one million pounds,’ he noted with a mixture of surprise and satisfaction. There were distinct advantages to having Winston Churchill as benefactor.

  As the conflict spread across Europe, saboteurs were dispatched to Gubbins’s furthest-flung outposts – Cairo, Belgrade, Albania and Greece – and began ordering large supplies of explosives in preparation for the fight ahead. Even Macrae expressed surprise when he saw the destinations of their wares. One night, a consignment was sent to Bombay. The next, his team were loading trucks ‘to take our stores to the docks to catch a ship for Australia’. Just a few days later, ‘there was a top priority shipment to the Middle East’.

  The only person who seemed unhappy with the progress was Jefferis himself. One day he summoned Macrae to his office and issued a blunt warning. ‘He solemnly told me that he was now working a minimum of sixteen hours a day and that he thought I and everybody else in the establishment should do the same.’2 Macrae tried to talk him out of such a punishing regime: men like Mr Wilson were already working so late into the night that their complexions were ashen grey. But Jefferis wouldn’t budge. His only concession, he told Macrae, ‘was to allow entertainment on the last Saturday of every month’. Macrae vowed to make that entertainment worth the wait.3

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins was a regular visitor to the Firs, noting each meeting (though never its contents) in the office diary in his scratchy little handwriting. Professor Lindemann was also a frequent guest and he often arrived with inventors and scientists. One of these scientists was Charles Goodeve, a lecturer in thermodynamics at University College and author of publications with titles like Cataphoretic Measurements on Visual Purple and Indicator Yellow. They were not for the casual reader.

  Goodeve was an inventive genius with a lofty forehead and an oversize brain. ‘In my time I have met many cranks,’ said one who met him at the beginning of the war, ‘and this man bore all the external hallmarks.’4 Yet he was a crank with a mind so sharp that he had been placed in charge of an experimental naval outfit known as the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons’ Development. It was in this role that he was brought to the Firs in order to meet Millis Jefferis.

  The two men shared much in common. Both were workaholics. Both had what Goodeve liked to describe as ‘a novelty of outlook’.5 And both knew that the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine depth charge, whose technology had remained unchanged for years, was hopelessly out of date.

  Goodeve had been toying with the possibility of devising a weapon that could somehow fire depth charges into the water. But now, as the two men sparred ideas, Jefferis suggested an altogether more radical approach. He proposed transforming his spigot mortar into an underwater missile.

  Goodeve was at his best when given the crumbs of an idea. Quick as lightning, he envisaged an even more devastating weapon. ‘Do you think we could use this spigot mortar of yours to fire a whole ring of bombs?’ His idea was to create a multi-firing launch-pad that would send several dozen spigots into the sea, all entering the water simultaneously. If these could be propelled downwards and inwards, the spigot could be transformed into a truly lethal weapon against Hitler’s U-boats.

  The viability of such a weapon was contingent on the mathematical configuration of the mortars. Jefferis took his spigot ‘back to the drawing board’ and made a series of calculations. Within a few days, he showed Goodeve ‘a design which seemed distinctly promising’.6 On paper it looked unlike any weapon ever invented: two dozen spigots with state-of-the-art fuses, thirty pounds of explosive packed into each nose and tubular tail-fins to guarantee stability in both air and water. Jefferis intended his mortars to fire upwards to the sky, where they would form themselves into a perfect ellipse before plunging into the sea in an ever decreasing diameter. If the maths was correct, they would strike their target when it was deep underwater.

  Goodeve was as impressed with Jefferis’s maths as he was with the Firs. He had been granted ‘indifferent research and development facilities’, quite inadequate for developing new weaponry. Jefferis, by contrast, had everything: ‘facilities for filling projectiles, detonators and fuses, a special electronic apparatus was available for measuring velocity and there were large water tanks’.7 Goodeve tentatively asked Macrae if he might ‘attach some of his people’8 to the Firs. Macrae immediately agreed, hoping that an influx of yet more staff would bring about the cross-fertilization of more clever ideas.

  These new recruits found that life at the Firs was never dull. Bombs exploded unexpectedly, sheds caught fire and, on one memorable occasion, an entire corner of the building ‘containing some lethal liquid’ blew up in a spectacular explosion. It was hastily repaired, before the owner of the property, Major Abrahams, got to hear about it.

  One of Goodeve’s underlings noted that ‘the least concerned observer present when things went wrong was the impresario of this unusual establishment, Jefferis.’ He impressed everyone with ‘his habit of walking around with his pockets crammed full of detonators, small batteries and pieces of wire’.9 It was a miracle he never blew himself up.

  The anti-U-boat mortar was the first in a new generation of sophisticated weaponry and both men knew it would take a great deal of time to perfect. When it came to building a prototype, Jefferis turned to the trusted craftsmen who had hitherto served him so well. The weapon’s complex mounting was made by a firm of specialist boilermakers in Bristol, while the spigots were built by a gifted artisan who worked for Boosey and Hawkes, the musical instrument makers.

  There was one issue yet to be settled. Goodeve offered a bottle of sherry to the person who came up with the best name for the weapon. The prize went to Ian Hassel, one of his team, who said it should be called a Hedgehog. It was a name that gave ‘a splendid suggestion of prickly hostility’. It was also an accurate description, since the rows of spigot mortars ‘bore a striking resemblance to the quills on a hedgehog’s defiant back’.10

  The prototype reached completion in the late spring of 1941,
just when Jefferis was due to stage a demonstration of his latest weapons for the Prime Minister. The demonstration took place in a chalk pit near Chequers and proved to be ‘a spectacular show’ that brought such delight to the Prime Minister that he asked if he could fire some weaponry himself. ‘Taking a tommy-gun, he fired a long burst at the tyres of a derelict Army lorry.’ He showed such cavalier regard for safety that the spectators took shelter behind the Prime Minister’s substantial girth. Churchill was enjoying himself so much that he ‘turned his attention to the lorry’s Triplex screen on which he cut his initials with bullets’. When all the ammunition was finished he called for more and then gave the tommy gun to his young daughter, Mary, ‘who blazed away enthusiastically at the battered lorry’.

  Seeing the Prime Minister in such high spirits, Goodeve approached him and suggested that he spare a few minutes to visit the Firs, in order to inspect the Hedgehog. Churchill was interested in this new project but he was also hungry. He said he would see the Hedgehog another day. But young Mary had been listening to one of the team, Jock Davies, telling her amazing tales about this strange wonder weapon with its amusing name and devastating power. She grabbed her father’s arm as he was getting into his car. ‘We must see Captain Davies’s bomb-thrower,’ she pleaded, ‘of course there’s time.’11

  Churchill was putty in his daughter’s hands. He ordered his fleet of cars to head to the Firs, where the prototype Hedgehog was primed and made ready for action. Aware of Churchill’s enthusiasm for dramatic displays, Jefferis and Goodeve pre-programmed it to fire twenty-four rounds in quick succession. The result was spectacular. The villagers of Whitchurch were accustomed to fireworks’ displays on Guy Fawkes Night, but they had never seen anything quite like this. ‘Climbing the blue sky, they formed a strangely graceful pattern, and as they reached their zenith they turned lazily over, like well-drilled marionettes, before starting their swift dive to earth.’ The mortars landed in perfect order around the shape of a submarine that had been pegged out on the lawn.

  Churchill was enthralled by this experimental weapon. He asked for a second salvo to be fired and then a third. Everyone watching shared the same opinion, that ‘here at last, it seemed, was the instrument which could turn the tide of the U-boat war.’12

  * * *

  While Millis Jefferis was concentrating his efforts on sending large numbers of Germans to a watery grave, Colin Gubbins was focused on a more clinical approach to death. His experiences in Norway had taught him that men don’t find it easy to kill in cold blood. Many soldiers hesitated before pulling the trigger, even when they couldn’t see the face of their target. Many more found it difficult to shoot at close range. Yet Gubbins would soon be asking his men to undertake operations that would possibly require them to kill with their bare hands.

  Such work could only be undertaken by men trained in what he called ‘the stalkers’ instinct’. They needed to be as skilled as snipers, with ‘absolute confidence in their weapon’, and they also needed to learn how to operate as a band of brothers. Gubbins wanted nothing short of ‘complete reliance on one’s comrades to stand and fight’.13 Training men in the art of killing had been one of the biggest problems he faced at the outbreak of the war, but by the spring of 1941 he thought he had found the solution. And on Easter Sunday, 13 April, he boarded the express train to Scotland in order to see that solution with his own eyes.

  He was glad to escape the office, for the previous few days had brought a flood of relentlessly depressing news. Belgrade had surrendered to the invading Nazis less than twelve hours earlier. Salonika had also fallen to Hitler’s storm-troopers. Gubbins’s hope of a sustained guerrilla campaign inside Yugoslavia and Greece was looking increasingly unlikely.

  More encouraging was the news that three Polish agents had been successfully parachuted into Poland. The flight had been a triumph of logistics, for few planes were equipped to fly such long distances. The Whitley aircraft had to be extensively remodelled with an auxiliary fuel tank in the fuselage in order to make the fourteen-hour return flight. Dropped alongside the men was a cylindrical metal container filled with sabotage equipment and explosives. Both it, and the saboteurs, made it successfully to Warsaw.

  A second piece of good news came from Tom Masterman in Belgrade. When he had left London, his parting shot to Bickham Sweet-Escott had been a promise to bring down the pro-Hitler government of Dragisa Cvetkovic. Now, he had spectacularly succeeded – not on his own, as Sweet-Escott was quick to point out, but he had played an important behind-the-scenes role in helping General Simovic to power. His work raised spirits in Baker Street, for it was ‘the first reverse of this kind which Hitler had so far received’.14

  The news about Masterman came just two weeks before Gubbins’s trip to Scotland, where he hoped to be greeted with more encouraging news. He made a brief stop at Inverness, where he had a meeting, and then continued his journey to the town of Fort William. Here, he changed trains and boarded ‘the puffer’, as it was affectionately known – the quaint little steam locomotive that chugged along the empty shores of Loch nan Uamh before swinging north towards the fishing port of Mallaig.

  Gubbins relished the opportunity to return to the Highland wilderness of his childhood. This was where he felt truly at home: a land where the lead-grey lochs carved gashes into the fractured coast, where the offshore isles of Eigg and Muck showed up as lilac smudges in the mist. But Gubbins had not come for the scenery. He was here to meet two idiosyncratic individuals, neither of whom was a soldier, nor even in the military. Both were portly gentlemen of a certain age who shared lodgings in an austere Victorian hunting lodge on the edge of Loch nan Ceall.

  Eric Sykes and William Fairbairn had first come to the attentions of the War Office a year earlier when they pitched up unannounced in Whitehall, having just arrived from the Far East. Both were close to retirement age and had come to offer their services in the fight against Nazi Germany. At first glance they were an unlikely couple of recruits, best suited, perhaps, to patrol duty in the Home Guard. Dressed in khaki, and striding suburbia with pitchfork and spade, they would have at least been made to feel they were playing a part in the war against Hitler.

  But they arrived in London with such an incredible story (and curriculum vitae to match) that they could not be easily ignored. The first of the men, Eric Sykes, was known to his friends as Bill, a reference to Dickens’s famously shady character. He was stocky, with pebble-glass spectacles and a dimpled smile: he looked as if he couldn’t hurt a fly. One acquaintance said he had the ‘manner and appearance of an elderly, amiable clergyman’. Others were ‘lulled by his soft tones and charmed by his benevolent smile’.15 But Sykes was neither benevolent nor a clergyman. He was an expert in silent killing – chilling, ruthless and clinical – and a man whose every sentence was said to end in the words, ‘and then kick him in the testicles’.16

  His previous employment had been in Shanghai, where he had worked as the representative of two American firearms companies, Colt and Remington. He was a crack shot, arguably the finest in the world, and his speciality was shooting from the hip. One who watched him in action was astonished to see him spin round, gun in hand, ‘with his back facing the target and hit the bull’s eye from between his legs’.17

  Sykes’s comrade-in-arms was William ‘Shanghai Buster’ Fairbairn. Similarly portly, and myopic to boot, he gave the impression of being ‘smaller than he really was, with his long arms and the slight stoop that gave him the aspect of a monkey having learned to walk like a man’.18 Like Sykes, he had the air of a Church of England chaplain. ‘His horn-rimmed spectacles and benevolent expression earned him the nickname “The Deacon”.’19 Yet he was a deacon whose sermons had a nasty sting in the tail: ‘Kill or be killed,’ was his catchphrase.

  Fairbairn’s conversation was generally limited to two words, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and he didn’t allow his discussions on human anatomy to stretch his vocabulary unduly. ‘He had never attempted to find out the names of
the various bones or muscles, and throughout his short, jerky explanations he would merely refer to “this bone” or “that muscle” and point it out or touch it with his finger.’20

  His friends knew him as Delicate Dan, but he referred to himself as Mister Murder-Made-Easy. He would smile benevolently as he taught his pupils ‘how to break a man’s neck or smash his spine across your knee’.21

  Fairbairn was the elder of the duo, a fifty-eight-year-old miscreant who had run away from the family home at the age of fifteen and lied his way into the Royal Marines. Initially posted to the British Legation in Seoul, he won himself a place on the bayonet fighting team and then honed his skills in contests against Japanese experts in martial arts. The Japanese taught him that the butt of a rifle was every bit as effective as a bayonet. Smashed hard into an opponent’s face, it caused such severe internal bleeding that death would rapidly follow.

  Fairbairn had been headhunted for employment by the Shanghai Municipal Police in 1907, a position he was to hold for the next thirty-three years. The city was infamous for its armed gangsters, drug runners and violent criminals. Not for nothing was it known as the toughest city in the world. Fairbairn’s job was to quell gang warfare, a task he set to with such relish that there were some who wondered if he wasn’t a gangster himself. He rapidly established his Riot Squad, a team of 120 hand-picked men who were trained in what he called ‘Gutter Fighting’.

  All his men were crack shots, but Fairbairn himself favoured close-range physical combat over the bullet. ‘His system is a combination of ferocious blows, holds and throws, adapted from Japanese bayonet tactics, ju-jitsu, Chinese boxing, Sikh wrestling, French wrestling and Cornish collar-and-elbow wrestling, plus expert knowledge of hip-shooting, knife fighting and use of the Tommy gun and hand grenade.’22