Joseph Gray's Camouflage
Page 9
TNA = The National Archives
WO = War Office
Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.
To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.
6 F is for False Work . . .
1 Brig. J. S. Wilkinson in an undated letter, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
2 J. Gray, ‘Further Notes,’ February 1948, Barclay Archive, p. 1
3 Ibid., p. 5
4 Gray, Camouflage and Air Defence, p. 1
5 Ibid., p. 1
6 Ibid., p. 5
7 Ibid., p. 5
8 Ibid., p. 6
9 Ibid., p. 8
10 Ibid., p. 10
11 Ibid., p. 9
12 Ibid., p. 16
13 Ibid., p. 17
14 Ibid., p. 77
15 Ibid., p. 19
16 Ibid., p. 48
17 Ibid., pp. 76–7
18 Brig. A. P. Sayer in a statement connected to Steel Wool Claim, Barclay Archive
19 STEEL WOOL CAMOUFLAGE MATERIAL, ‘Gray’s First Claim 8 Jan ’46 and Comments’, IWM Archive Gray Documents.4273
20 CID Report 130-B, 3/2/37, p. 3, TNA HO186/14
21 TNA HO186/390
22 F. J. C. Wyatt, The Principles and Organisation of Static Camouflage, London, 1944, pp. 27–8
23 John Spencer Churchill, Crowded Canvas, Odhams Press Ltd, London, 1961, p. 148
is for Garnishing, this should be wound To copy the texture and tone of the ground
‘There are not many materials suitable for constructional camouflage purposes, light enough in weight to be portable, close enough in texture to conceal . . .’
Maureen had stared at the torn scrap of paper, the muddle of words. It made no sense. Then her father had lifted it from her hands and turned it over.
‘Look here.’
There was a name and address.
‘Miss Mary Meade,
The Needlewoman,
18 Henrietta Street.’
‘Go and talk to this Miss Meade,’ he had said. ‘She needs an office girl. She is expecting you.’
Maureen had memorised the address, folding the scrap of paper into her coat pocket, and presented herself for interview. How quickly she’d grown up. Now seventeen, she was old enough to earn her keep, a terrifying but liberating prospect. Nancy had found her a room in a house in Raynes Park, and Joe had found her this job. They wanted her to be independent, but Maureen was still cripplingly shy. It was difficult to imagine how she might negotiate her way in any London office.
How lucky then that Joe knew somebody. Joe always seemed to know somebody. Maureen supposed her father had contacts in every office in the country. She didn’t think to ask quite how he knew anyone at a woman’s magazine, but her father was full of surprises.
‘Are you interested in art? Do you visit exhibitions?’
The question came out of nowhere. Miss Meade (‘Oh please, do call me Mary’) was leaning over a large table, wielding a large pair of scissors and examining a new dress pattern. She peered across the office at Maureen, fine eyebrows arched.
‘I just saw a most interesting exhibition at Shell Mex House. You should see it. Do you like art?’
Maureen sat rigid before her typewriter. She had been there a matter of weeks and this Miss Meade, Mary, was always asking questions. It was a little off-putting, but Mary was rather a bohemian sort, and Maureen knew it was rude not to answer. Did she like art? She thought of her various attempts at drawing at the Sutherland, of her father always scraping around for money, the years of frustration and uncertainty.
‘It is a simple question.’
Mary straightened up, cradling the scissors in her long and elegant hands. She was tall and thin, with roughened brown hair framing a pale face more handsome than beautiful.
‘I was thinking, because of your family. Your father is an artist, after all. That must be interesting.’
Maureen pressed her fingers on the edge of the desk. It seemed important that she summon a decent response.
She took a breath.
‘I don’t think artists should have families.’
It was a shocking comment now that she heard it out loud. She had surprised herself, and apparently everyone else. The whole office had fallen silent.
Mary released the scissors.
‘My dear. What do you mean?’
Maureen could feel herself blushing, but she had to carry on.
‘I mean, artists should not marry and have families . . . since they simply never have the means to support them.’
‘Ah!’ Mary nodded lightly. ‘I see.’ She sucked in her lips. ‘It isn’t an easy life, I agree.’
Maureen noticed a strange look pass between her colleagues. She felt so very mortified. What a thing to blurt out. With burning cheeks she ducked her head and carried on typing, reminding herself to hold her tongue in future.
Yet the evidence lay just a few yards away, recorded in a slim appointments diary, a dark ox-blood leather, now tattered and bruised and resting in my palm. Joe had taken Mary to that exhibition she’d just mentioned.
Mary Meade, or rather Katherine Mary Meade, was a careful keeper of diaries. She had made detailed entries of all her goings-on ever since she was a girl. Since working at The Needlewoman she had favoured preferred smaller journals adorned with pithy proverbs:
‘Let the shipwrecks of others be your sea marks.’
‘Get a move on, procrastination causes loss.’
She never did heed them. From January 1937 the word ‘Gray’ hovers on every other page, swiftly reduced to a ‘G’. He is marked at least once during the week and always at the weekends. There is often an ‘X’ beside it, but nothing more, which is unusual since Mary generally wrote detailed entries for everything and everyone. And so already it’s a secret, recorded by the most minimal of means. ‘X’ marks the spot, where the treasure was buried. Joe and Mary. They were always together; they couldn’t bear to be apart.
Neither would ever reveal where or when they first met – most likely it was in Chelsea through artist friends. Joe hadn’t been looking to fall in love, but he fell heavily and quickly, and it overlapped conveniently with his new area of research, his new preoccupation.
One form of camouflage had inspired another, or did both arise from a single impulse?
Joe was, at least, consistent.
Mary Meade, Miss Mary Meade. It’s entirely understandable why she caught his artist’s eye. She had the sort of face he liked to draw: a broad forehead and good cheekbones, a bold nose. All good angles. Everything about Mary felt original. She didn’t follow fashion but made her own. Clever and cultured, she thought hard about things and formed her own opinions. She asked questions when other people stayed silent, and she wasn’t afraid to show her feelings. She also loved art with a passion. Perhaps it was inevitable she would fall in love with an artist.
That she loved Joe is clear. She loved how he looked at the world; she loved his disarming sense of humour and his singularity, how he had survived so much without losing his head or his hope. They quickly developed their own little rhythm, meeting at private views in Chelsea galleries or the pubs on the Fulham Road – anywhere with a distinct or offbeat flavour – and established a network of mutual friends: open-minded, creative types such as the artists Charles McCall and James Proudfoot, the novelist Harold Freeman and his costume-designer wife Elisabeth Bödecker. They’d gather for dinner or have drinks at Mary’s flat in Vale Court, which became their secluded haven.
Mary could be completely herself with Joe, and Joe, for his part, felt ten years younger. That there existed a fifteen-year age gap didn’t seem to matter. In fact, it matched that between Mary’s own parents. She was the eldest daughter of Charles Hippsley Meade, a d
eeply religious man with a lively intellect but no fixed occupation, and his beloved Kitty. They were a devoted couple, producing three children: first Mary, then James (already a respected economist), and finally Diana. The Meades lived in somewhat dilapidated grandeur at Lansdown Crescent, one of Bath’s glorious stretches of Georgiana. This highly conservative and rather stifling atmosphere, overflowing with retired colonels, was something Mary and her brother James had been all too eager to escape.
Mary was her father’s favourite; she could do no wrong in his eyes, and when he died in 1938 Joe was already there to comfort her. Was Joe a father figure? A little, perhaps. Mary was very distinctly a different generation to Joe. She’d been a child when the First World War broke out and she’d grown up in a nation mutilated by loss – but that loss was all she knew. There was no before and after; there was only now. Those poor dead young men had left a space in which she was free to move. The 1921 census put it into cold figures: there were nearly 2 million more women than men in Britain. Mary wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted, but she had accepted that a husband and children were not guaranteed. For Joe, that must have been a relief.
Mary was a free spirit. As soon as she was old enough she had taken off to Paris to study dressmaking, and then returned to London to attend the Royal College of Needlework. After qualifying as a teacher she had worked for a time at The Embroideress magazine, before travelling to America to take up a post at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, where she taught needlecraft as part of the programme to foster the ‘educational, industrial, and social advancement’ of women.
Mary was deadly serious about her craft. At The Embroideress she’d implore her readers to educate themselves with visits to the National Gallery. (‘Luini paints a scalloped edge to a chemise, Moretto da Brescia a smocked one, and Raphael one in outline stitch. All embroiderers would do well to look at paintings as often as possible, since good technique is nothing without understanding the importance of colour and design.’1) Fresh back from America she had taken up her post at the The Needlewoman, where she involved herself in all aspects of the magazine production: from writing comment pieces to devising patterns for both high-fashion clothing and home decorations – everything from monogrammed bathing suits to cushion covers based on Persian tapestries. Mary liked to challenge her readers. With Maureen’s help, she also replied to their enquiries. Letters poured in each week: questions about knitting patterns or where to get the best corsets or how to clean aluminium saucepans. You could ask ‘Miss Meade’ anything and be sure of a reply. To her readers she must have seemed the epitome of the thirties woman: resourceful and practical, rising above the economic crises of the time and urging her readers to do the same. (‘Depressions sociological or meteorological cannot depress the woman who has just discovered an extremely daring combination of colours’!2)
Everyone was impressed by her. If Joe had grown used to seeing a world in black and white, then Mary was glorious technicolour. She was a terrific idealist with huge reserves of passion, and she was also in possession of the most jaw-dropping temper. He would draw cartoons of a tall, thin woman with fists clenched, smoke coming out of her ears, sending everyone running for cover.
But Mary had every right to blow off steam now and then. After all when she first met Joe she didn’t know he was married.
‘At the beginning I thought you knew all about me,’ he wrote. ‘All our mutual friends did. I was horrified when I found out you didn’t. Of course I would have left you immediately then – but did you want me to? – or would you have let me? You know perfectly well you did not – and would not.’
Joe would argue that he never lied to Mary, he just didn’t tell her the whole truth. If Mary was shocked by the discovery, she accepted it quickly, just as she accepted his daughter as her office girl. That was a daring move on Joe’s part, to get Maureen a job working for the woman who was his mistress, but there was a logic to it. His camouflage commitments were keeping him very busy, and increasingly he was being called out of London. Mary could keep an eye on Maureen on his behalf, and Joe was comforted by the thought of these two women together. He hoped they’d find a bit of common ground without him.
Spectacularly naive or an ingenious double bluff? It was a bit of both. Joe was more than aware of the need for secrecy, and he certainly never gave Maureen any reason to suspect. And Nancy was also watching. She remained at the Sutherland but saw Maureen every week. More than that, she had arranged for her daughter to lodge at a doctor’s residence where Susan Henry, their former maid from Broughty Ferry, was now housekeeper. Susan had Nancy’s confidence, always.
Joe had to be very careful. He wrote to Mary constantly – rushed notes full of abbreviations and code words wherever possible. He called Mary ‘P.F.’, he called himself ‘P.C.’. (I still don’t know what ‘P.F.’ means: Perfect Fool? Pie Face?) ‘P.C.’ meant ‘Popcorn’ (I have no idea why). Later, Gray becomes ‘Grumble’; pennies become ‘pumbles’, drinking is ‘drumbling’ and the war a ‘wumble’. It made things sound amusing and rather silly when they weren’t, and this Joe admitted: ‘I am afraid I have an unfortunate gift of appearing unsympathetic . . . I just simply can’t say things, and I think use understatement as a sort of camouflage.’
He often uses that word, declaring, ‘I cannot camouflage what I feel,’ and yet he does. He is always now in camouflage and he begs Mary to keep their secrets.
‘You had better be careful with these letters. Do you lock them up? Nobody must read our letters but us!’ For the longest time nobody did.
By 1938 Joe had his own keys to Vale Court and could come and go as he pleased, athough he scrupulously avoided the cleaning lady and never stayed all night. He’d linger with Mary as long as he could, then wander back to Paddington in the early hours of the morning, pausing for a hot Oxo drink at the stall outside the station. He was still returning to Nancy at the Sutherland, even if his heart was now elsewhere.
Maureen had no inkling, and apparently neither did Nancy. They assumed Joe was always working, and a moving target is harder to track. Every day he was either inspecting sites or devising plans or testing new materials. No one ever seemed to know where he was, and by the time they found him, he had moved on again.
Mary coped with Joe and his chaos well, since she herself was always busy. Maureen, meanwhile, was enjoying working life and the freedom it brought. But commuting each day to Charing Cross, she wondered how much longer this unsteady peace would last. It had been a long and anxious summer. Mr Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, promising ‘Peace for our Time’, but all this really did was give Britain more time to prepare. That’s what Joe was doing, after all.
Even the air felt heavy with threat, and the changing weather set everyone’s nerves on edge. Joe would go wherever he was needed, but what about the women? Mary had started considering jobs outside of the capital – Joe’s persistent talk of bombing raids was making her very edgy. But Maureen had decided she wouldn’t go anywhere. For the first time in a long time she felt settled, and she had other reasons for staying that she wasn’t yet ready to admit.
It was the end of another long week. Everyone seemed so eager to race to their homes, but Maureen couldn’t face the stuffy train yet. Instead, she walked across town to the Sutherland, peoplewatching and window-shopping as she went. She hadn’t heard from her father in a while and although this wasn’t unusual, she was worried it might become too much the pattern. Maureen still needed Joe and if war was declared then she’d need him even more.
For once she found him sitting still. Her parents now occupied a large room on the ground floor of what was called ‘the annexe’. Maureen assumed her father needed more space for his work, and he seemed to be working now. The door was ajar but through the crack she saw him sitting, hunched at his desk, cigarette smoke drifting upwards. The curtains were half drawn; there were papers scattered all over the floor – writings and crossings out and strange little diagrams.
Maureen pushed the door further open and stepped inside.
Joe didn’t look up or turn around. As usual, he hadn’t heard.
She tiptoed around the clutter of papers, and craned her neck to see what it was he was doing. Then she stopped. Joe appeared to be engaged in some kind of tug-of-war. He was methodically pulling at and teasing out a bundle of metal fibres. Stray narrow tentacles had already sprung free and crept like ivy across the desk surface. Maureen’s first thought was that her father had broken something. He stopped and flicked his cigarette onto the small ashtray.
She took another step towards him, but still he didn’t look up. He carried on unravelling the fibres.
After a minute she went to stand right beside him.
‘Dad.’ She touched his shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’
Joe looked up finally and his eyes refocused.
‘Oh, hello!’ He was surprised, then he grinned. ‘Look at this, isn’t it marvellous?’ He held up the bundle of twinkling fibres to give her a better view. ‘I jolly well think this is it. This time . . . I really think this is it!’
Maureen pushed her lips into a smile but felt utterly bemused and a little concerned. After all, her father was holding up what was nothing more than a loose pad of domestic steel wool, the kind of thing used for scouring pots and pans.
Her wide eyes held his.
‘Sorry, Dad, you’ve lost me.’
‘It’s what I’ve been looking for!’ Joe beamed.
Maureen looked at it again. Steel wool. Really? How could that possibly be anything other than what it was?
Notes
CAB = Cabinet Papers
CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre
HO= Home Office
IWM = Imperial War Museum
PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records
TNA = The National Archives
WO = War Office
Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.