For British homing pigeons, the war brought a complete change of life. When hostilities broke out, racing stopped, and 1400 fanciers seconded their birds to the National Pigeon Service, a newly formed voluntary organization which took them over as couriers for military use. Skilled fanciers who had joined the army or the RAF needed only a few days to train a pigeon to recognize a new base, from which it could be sent on missions; but did the birds notice any difference in the landscape over which they travelled? Like humans, they can see in colour; and even if they navigate by sensing the earth’s magnetic field (as is generally believed), and even if they have a sense of smell, as well as an ability to detect low-frequency sounds at huge distances, these stalwart fliers are thought also to use roads and other landmarks for direction finding. As they sped on their journeys in the autumn of 1939, more and more of the familiar smooth green spaces below them were turning brown and furrowed as ploughs cut through the turf, and then gradually going green again as the new-sown corn germinated and began to sprout.
Over the next five years the military birds carried out an astonishing number of missions, sometimes as passengers in outgoing aircraft, sometimes on their own, each carrying a small pouch slung over its back, or in a tiny canister tied to a leg, in which a message could be stowed. During the war nearly 250,000 birds were used by the army, the RAF, MI5 and civilian defence services, including the police, the fire service and Bletchley Park. A great many died on duty, and no doubt quite a few were eaten: it is thought that at least 20,000 lost their lives, and that a bird’s chances of survival were less than one in eight. But their skills were highly valued, not least because they travelled fast and were extremely difficult to intercept. In the words of the Home Guard’s official training manual, ‘Pigeons cannot talk, and, if captured, will not give away their origin or destination.’ Along the south coast predators such as sparrowhawks and peregrines were culled to give carriers free passage on their way back across the Channel – but the Germans were also using falcons in attempts to capture British pigeons and gain access to their messages.
In Germany strict rules governed the Fancy – officially the German Pigeon Federation – which was enormous, with 57,000 members. The organization came under the control of the SS, whose head, Heinrich Himmler, was himself a lifelong fancier – so, of course, Jews were banned. In 1937 the Federation had arranged a race in which 1400 German birds were brought to England and released over Lympne, in Kent, to fly home. MI5 suspected that the event had been organized as a covert training exercise, to familiarize the pigeons with routes back to their bases, and that this was only the precursor of a systematic attempt to infiltrate British lofts.
In MI5, in the Pigeon Service Special Section, B3C, the Pigeon King was Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker, a fanatical fancier, devoted to the birds, who at the start of the war convinced himself that the Germans were trying to flood Britain with pigeons, bringing them by parachute and sea, to provide Nazi agents with an undetectable method of sending messages to Europe. His theory seemed more plausible when, early in 1940, a small metal container was picked up in north London containing a message in German giving accurate information about British warships; and he became still more suspicious when a storm blew two German birds across the Channel, even though it turned out that they were carrying nothing but training messages. ‘Both birds are now prisoners of war,’ he reported, ‘working hard breeding British pigeons.’ Later in the war he arranged for a falconry unit to be set up on the Isles of Scilly, tasked with the interception of enemy messengers. Under his auspices, a young man was sent to Wales, where he took half a dozen young peregrines from their eyries, brought them to England, reared them and hacked (trained) them. Three of them did in the end account for a dozen pigeons in the Scillies and along the south coast, but all were British – blue-on-blue casualties.
From 1940 large numbers of British pigeons were dropped into occupied Europe in the hope that Allied sympathizers would send information about enemy troop dispositions back to the United Kingdom. An agent parachuting in could carry six birds in a container strapped to his chest. Otherwise, they made solo descents. Loaded into a single-bird box, with food for ten days, each messenger was lowered through a hatch in the belly of an aircraft, protected from the slipstream by a canvas sack, which was then opened by a jerk on a long string, so that the bird was released and parachuted into enemy territory. The hope was that Resistance workers would continue to send messages if their radio was captured or went down, or their situation became too dangerous for them to transmit.
‘Vive la patrie!’ began a sheet of instructions for French recipients. ‘A bas les Boches! … Help us chase the enemy out of your country … Send us information about the Germans. You can collect important information. This pigeon will transmit it to us.’ During the invasion scare of 1940 the message asked specific questions: ‘What preparations are in train? Are there important concentrations of troops or ships in your area?’ There followed instructions for dealing with the bird:
As soon as you arrive home, give the pigeon some water and food. Give it enough space to relax until its departure. Look after it well, if necessary for several days … Don’t sign any message with your own name … To despatch the pigeon, launch it gently in a safe place. If at night, put it on a roof, at an open window, on a wall or in a tree. It will take off at day-break.
Most of these birds were lost: of 16,544 parachuted in, only 1,842 returned. A special effort was made in August 1943, when, at the instigation of the ever-optimistic Flight Lieutenant Walker, 1000 pigeons were dropped over Calais and the west coast of Brittany. Every bird carried a questionnaire about local beaches, defences and so on, suggesting that the Allies were eager to acquire information which would help them plan an invasion of that area, and so decoy German forces away from Normandy, which had already been chosen as the real point of attack. The huge release of feathered spies produced no discernible result, but Walker was not dismayed.
In due course all RAF bombers and reconnaissance aircraft carried pigeons housed in watertight baskets and containers, so that if the aircraft went down on land or in the sea, a bird could be released and sent back to its loft in England with a message bearing the coordinates of the site or the last-known grid reference, and a rescue could be mounted. One of the most celebrated recoveries took place in October 1943, when a Catalina flying boat stricken by engine failure ditched in a rough sea in the Hebrides at 08.20 one morning. Foul weather frustrated attempts at rescue by sea, and an air search was rendered impossible by mist so thick that no aircraft could take off; but at 17.00 that afternoon a pigeon called White Vision arrived at its loft bearing a message which gave the position of the downed aircraft. The sea search was resumed, and although the aircraft sank, the crew were rescued. The pigeon had flown sixty miles over a heavy sea, against a twenty-five-mile-an-hour headwind, in visibility of only 100 yards at the crash site and 300 yards when it came home. For this feat of endurance and navigation it was awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross.
Another hero and medallist was Royal Blue, who, a fortnight earlier, flew 120 miles in four hours ten minutes to report a ditching in Holland; and a third was Paddy, the Irish pigeon which outpaced all rivals when bringing news of the successful D-Day landings in June 1944. Hundreds of birds were dispatched, but Paddy beat them all home, flying 230 miles in four hours and fifty minutes. Another star was William of Orange, who flew the 250 miles from the battle of Arnhem in only five hours.
Messages could go astray even in England. One fancier lived in Barrow-on-Furness with his Italian mother, and when his brother visited he persuaded him to take home a promising young pigeon and release it, to see how it performed before he handed it over to the National Pigeon Service. This the brother did – but the bird never returned to base. Three months later two men in suits appeared at the fancier’s house – and only after they had asked many awkward questions was the matter cleared up.
&nbs
p; It turned out that the brother, before setting the pigeon off on its return flight to Barrow, had attached to it a message for his mother, written in Italian because her English was poor: ‘The weather here today is sunny. Hope you’re feeling better and the wireless is repaired.’ A farmer had shot the pigeon, and, as he was about to pluck it, had found the message, which he handed in to the police. For weeks members of the family had been followed by agents of MI5: their letters had been opened, their telephone tapped. Eventually it became evident that the message was entirely innocent, and that they were not Fifth Columnists – but they were severely reprimanded.
One ornithological activity which continued throughout the war, improbably enough, was the ancient practice of swan-upping – a ritual carried out on the Thames and other rivers for at least 900 years, in which mute swans are herded together, caught, marked and released. In earlier days roast swan was a delicacy and frequently appeared at banquets, royal or otherwise – and no doubt during the war many birds found their way onto the tables of hungry citizens along the river. The House of Commons did not set a good example. When cygnet à l’orange appeared on the menu, one member pronounced it ‘delicious’, another ‘awful’.
Traditionally the ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water resides with the Monarch, but in practice the Queen claims ownership only of those on some stretches of the Thames and its tributaries. In an archaic form of census, held over five days in the third week of July, the Queen’s swan-uppers (in scarlet shirts), led by the Queen’s Swan Marker, and their opposite numbers from the Worshipful Company of Vintners (in white) and the Worshipful Company of Dyers (in blue), row up the river in six wooden skiffs from Sunbury to Abingdon. When a family is sighted, the uppers give the cry ‘All Up!’ and converge on the swans until they can corral them with the boats. They then lift each one out of the water to weigh, measure and ring it before returning it to the river.
During the Blitz of 1940 some seventy swans were killed by enemy action on the Thames in London, either burnt by incendiary bombs or so badly contaminated with oil that they had to be destroyed. By the end of the conflict there were few left in the capital, partly because of disturbance, partly because so many stretches of the river banks had been concreted over, leaving the birds nowhere to graze. But they were flourishing further upstream. In the annual census of 1941 559 swans were upped on the Thames, compared with annual totals of about 450 half a century earlier.
Seventeen
Fun and Games
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
Henry Newbolt, Vitaï Lampada
With the outbreak of war the Government imposed an immediate ban on the assembly of crowds at sports events, for fear that a single German bomb might cause unprecedented slaughter in a crowded stadium, and within three days the Football League cancelled its League competition. Soon, however, the rules were relaxed, and it was announced that friendly games would be allowed, provided police approval had been obtained – but in the interests of public safety the numbers of spectators were limited. The blackout naturally put paid to any matches that depended on artificial lighting.
The first-class cricket season stuttered to a close. On 26 August 1939 the West Indies touring team cancelled the remaining games of their tour and set off for home, sailing out of Glasgow aboard the Montreal. The Marylebone Cricket Club called off its projected tour of India. After 1 September no further first-class fixtures took place until 1946 – the longest gap since such matches had started a hundred years earlier. The shutdown brought a premature end to the careers of many celebrated players, not least Hedley Verity, Yorkshire’s classic slow left-arm spinner, who, in the county’s last game against Sussex, took seven wickets for nine runs. During that season he took 191 wickets at an average of just over thirteen runs each; he was only thirty-four, and had already played for England forty times. Always an optimist, while training Green Howards recruits at Richmond, in Yorkshire, he told readers of The Cricketer that Hitler’s invasion of Holland was merely an early season setback. But he never played first-class cricket again, for he died of wounds as a prisoner of war in Italy in 1943.
Another outstanding player whose career was interrupted – but by no means concluded – by the war was the Middlesex batsman Denis Compton. In 1938, aged nineteen, he had made his first Test century against Don Bradman’s Australian team, and in the 1939 season he scored 2468 runs. Then, however, he was posted to India in the army for the whole of the war, before returning to the English team for the 1946–7 Ashes series in Australia, where he scored a century in each innings of the Adelaide Test. His flamboyant batting delighted fans, who speculated endlessly about how many more runs he might have scored had Hitler not denied him five seasons at the height of his youthful exuberance.
In the autumn of 1939 at Lord’s – headquarters of the game – members of the staff removed the famous little urn containing the 1883 Ashes and hid it in some secret redoubt. The bust of W. G. Grace was also taken from the Long Room for safekeeping.
Lord’s, in the heart of London, was obviously vulnerable to air attack. Already in October 1938 the Practice Ground, behind the stands at the eastern end of the main field, had been occupied by an anti-aircraft detachment; from April 1939 a barrage balloon was anchored on the field, and in August a searchlight detachment joined the other military installations. Members of the armed forces quartered in various parts of the site were given facilities for cricket and football, which, MCC’s annual report recorded, were ‘greatly appreciated by all ranks’. Windows in the pavilion were blacked out, seats were removed from the stands, and air-raid shelters built.
Throughout the glorious summer of 1940 the game went on all over the country. On 1 June, in the words of the social historian Eric Midwinter, trains crammed with exhausted survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation ‘wound their way past cricket match after cricket match on rural meadows, and people remarked on that strange contradiction’. On the same day, before a crowd of 42,000, West Ham beat Blackburn Rovers 1–0 in the Wartime Cup Final at Wembley.
On 9 July German radio reported that ‘a revolt against plutocratic cricketers’ had swept through the country, and that ‘the people tried to destroy the playing grounds at night’ – an attempt which ‘led to a state of war between the population and the English sports clubs’. Ignoring this phantom insurrection, the Government decreed that all cricket fields must be rendered useless for enemy aircraft landings, and Lord’s, like many other grounds, was obstructed by obstacles set out whenever no game was in progress. Yet matches continued, not only at cricket’s headquarters, but all over the kingdom.
On 7 September, the day the Blitz on London began, a match was in progress between a Middlesex XI and a Lord’s XI when the sirens sounded: the players ran for shelter and a long delay ensued. But a recent edict from Lord’s had laid down that games must be finished, if at all possible, and this one eventually ended in victory for Middlesex as dusk was settling on the ground. Twenty-six matches, including several between schools, were played at Lord’s that summer, and most of them drew large crowds.
During the Blitz between thirty and forty incendiary bombs fell on the Match and Practice Grounds, and one 1000-lb high-explosive bomb left a large crater, blowing out the windows of the Committee Room. The resident barrage balloon proved frisky, twice breaking loose: once it merely damaged some roofs, but the second time its dangling cable wrapped itself round the iconic figure of Old Father Time, with his long, pointed beard and his scythe over his shoulder, and dragged the weather vane down from the roof of the Grand Stand – after which mishap it was consigned to the Committee Room for the time being. A famous hit was made on 29 July 1944 when the Army were batting against the RAF and a doodlebug was heard approaching. As the engine cut out, the players flung themselves face-down on the turf, certain that the V-1 was about to crash on the Nursery Ground: in fact it fell in Albert Road, and when the game resume
d, the batsman, J. D. Robertson, hooked the first ball derisively for six.
The Oval, in south London, fared worse than Lord’s, being taken over by the Government and converted into a cage for a prisoner-of-war holding point. In the event no prisoners ever went there, but the field was much damaged by having lines of twelve-foot wooden posts, set in lumps of concrete, erected to support walls of rolled barbed wire. The ground also housed an anti-aircraft site, a searchlight battery and an assault course. To restore the playing area after the war, Bert Lock, the groundsman, had to import 45,000 rolls of turf from Hoo marshes in Kent, and he himself spent innumerable hours repairing the practice nets, which had been put into storage and chewed by rats.
Another casualty was the Lancashire county ground Old Trafford, in Manchester, which was first taken over by the military and then heavily bombed, with the result that the Lancashire Cricket Club closed for business and diverted members’ subscriptions into a war fund. Grounds in Kent, Sussex and Essex which lay within ‘defence areas’ could not be used for the duration, but at others the game carried on, even after the field had been pock-marked with craters. ‘Local cricketers are as pleased as you,’ said a sign outside one club on the south coast. ‘Each peardrop which falls on this ground saves life and property. We shall carry on. Nothing which falls from the skies will deter us, except RAIN!’ In many people’s minds the continuation of cricket became an emblem of the nation’s defiance.
Our Land at War Page 27
