by Mary Horlock
What do you want me to do?
P.C.
Joe didn’t wait for a reply but rushed to see James in Whitehall to plead his cause. James wasn’t sure what to think. ‘The whole position is horribly tangled and involved,’ he reported to Margaret. ‘Gray, as you know, is married. He and Mary are very much in love. They have had a violent quarrel.’8
Mary had presented Joe with an ultimatum: he had to divorce Nancy and so be free to marry her. And Joe had refused, outright. At this moment, at this time, he felt it was impossible. He explained to James it was a matter of honour – he had married Nancy during one war and he would not abandon her in the midst of another. Joe was determined to do things in his own way. It was what he told everyone.
Mary was from a different class and time. She tried to understand but she couldn’t, and Joe didn’t know how to make her. What he felt towards Nancy was very complex. Guilt could be as strong an emotion as love, maybe even stronger. He would not, he could not, blow Nancy’s world apart. His relationship to Mary was something different, already so ‘disrupted’, she could endure it for the moment.
He begged her for more time: ‘How to find our way out I cannot think at the moment. But I am sure – at least I hope – you will understand.’ There was a ‘P.S.: This is what I saw tonight.’ He included a hastily drawn sketch of a gutted church with two large bells strewn on the floor, an interior view of the still smoking ruins of St Clement Danes. Just a few nights earlier had seen one of the worst raids yet. The War Office, Westminster School, the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament – were all badly hit. The blaze at St Clement’s had been really something, a furnace just minutes from Joe’s office. As he’d inspected the charred ruins he knew it would make a beautiful etching.
James Meade almost felt sorry for Joe. He saw his worry and confusion. ‘This doesn’t seem to be a good time to try to seek a final solution of knotty personal problems,’ he reflected. James was right, but it was probably the right time for a new tactic.
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Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.
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.
1 Wilkinson, A Brush with Life, p. 121
2 Ibid., pp. 118–20
3 Sayer, Camouflage Game, pp. 33–4
4 Godfrey Baxter, The Fortnightly D.O., No. 10, January 1942, TNA WO 199/1630
5 Lecture notes of Capt. Hymes, IWM 83.9(41).0/5
6 J. Meade in a letter to his wife Margaret, 3 April 1941, courtesy Charlotte Lewis
7 First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. All female unit founded 1907, called yeomanry because they first rode horseback, employed in various capacities in WW2.
8 J. Meade in a letter to his wife Margaret, 18 May 1941, courtesy Charlotte Lewis
is Opacity over the gun You must garnish opaquely, but think of the sun
The threat of an invasion of Britain seemed to have passed, but by the spring of 1941 the news was never good. General Erwin Rommel was thundering through North Africa, recapturing all Cyrenaica except the vital port of Tobruk.
On the morning of 20 May 1941, German paratroopers of the III Battalion of the 1st Air Landing Assault Regiment were dropped south-east of Maleme airfield in Crete. Joe didn’t hear the news straightaway as he had taken a few hours off to attend Johnny’s wedding to Little Mary. It took place in-between air raids at St Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate, one of the few churches where divorced persons were able to remarry. It was a beautiful setting but the mood was sombre.
Joe had begged Mary to come: ‘I may not have crossed out some of the things which ought never to have been written. If that is the case please forgive me and forget them. But you know you always had a gift – when you got really started – of saying just the sort of taunts and things which you know would hurt me most!’
Mary had not replied. For days she had left him hanging, too angry to make up her mind. Then, at the very last minute she had caught the train to London. Joe felt a huge relief to see her arrive at the church, but the smile soon froze on his face. This wasn’t his Mary, she seemed quite different, cold and imperious and already thinner. As she took her place in the wooden pews, he sensed an invisible wall between them. She wouldn’t look or speak to him.
Joe had made a fatal mistake. By bringing Johnny and Little Mary to Bath he had exposed a weakness – Nancy. He had pushed her to the edge of his mind, an unresolvable problem. For a long time now it had been easier for him to pretend she didn’t exist, and that was what allowed him to carry on as he did. But she was still there, and they were still married. At the beginning Mary had been his secret, but somehow Nancy had taken her place. How complicated it made things.
Joe watched Johnny fidget as he waited for his bride. Only Johnny knew the whole story of Joe’s marital woes, and even he didn’t entirely understand. Joe supposed this was because Johnny was younger, he hadn’t been through the last war or suffered the same hardships. True, Johnny had been divorced, but Johnny’s first wife had left him, so that was entirely different. Joe couldn’t, wouldn’t, do any abandoning. This damnable war had caused so much chaos and he refused to make any more.
But if Joe now felt terribly vulnerable, it was a hundred times worse for Mary. Didn’t he see? Mary Meade, Miss Mary Meade, unmarried and childless, a lowly clerk at the Admiralty, hopelessly embroiled in an affair with a married, much older man.
Joe gazed at her adoringly throughout the service. (‘It was wonderful to see you again – but frightful not to be able to love you and tell you how much I love you.’) Mary kept her eyes straight ahead. Just in front of them sat Peregrine with his aunt Clemmie. On the other side were a few members of Little Mary’s family, though most had chosen not to come. The ceremony in this chilly, half-empty church had an air of unreality about it. Joe hoped it might show Mary how dreary a wartime wedding would be. He wanted so much more for her, couldn’t she see? But it was too late for him to try to explain.
‘I will be leaving directly after lunch,’ she informed him.
So matter of fact. He felt crushed. As they gathered outside the church, Mary fixed a smile for the newlyweds and wished them all the best, but became rigid when Joe drew near. Lunch at the Savoy was brief and sober, and after Mary left for her train Joe couldn’t wait to make his excuses and be away himself. He hurried back to the Board. Camouflage was a world he understood. It was now perhaps the only world in which he was understood. At least he had his brothers. ‘It is quite true that all the camouflage chaps will do anything for me.’ He was trying to reassure himself.
The war, the war, the war – its hard facts made sense to Joe. His job made sense. This was a critical period and camouflage still had much to do. It was more about the men going overseas and the ideas they took with them. He had been back and forth to Farnham these last months and the reports on different terrains showed how methods could change. It was important to adapt, to cope with new demands.
As the day drew to a close, he counted off his colleagues as they made up little groups to wend their way home in the blackout. Peregrine’s words echoed in his ear, whispered over the clinking of glasses: ‘Johnny won’t stand a suburban villa life for more than six months.’ Peregrine, with his dark eyes, a funny chap but a good one. He had a habit of always being right. Joe did so hope otherwise, since he felt his luck was very much tied up with Johnny’s and in fact with every other chap here.
What to do? Nancy was still in Wimbledon and he sense
d he should go and see her. But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t do the one thing Mary wanted. Of course he knew how it looked from the outside: that he was a coward. It wasn’t that simple. He just couldn’t explain it, not yet.
The fall of Crete came as a humiliating defeat. Brooding over Maleme, Winston Churchill wrote to the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces asking: ‘How do we stand on the strategic and tactical camouflaging of defences against enemy attacks on airfields? What body is studying the lessons of Maleme and the batteries thereabouts?’ It was noted that the anti-aircraft guns at Maleme had been laid out so as to give a full 360 degree arc, forfeiting concealment in the process. As a consequence, the guns were entirely exposed and easy to pick out by dive-bombers.
The prime minister suggested that ‘the deceitful presentation of dummy guns’ should surely be a priority. ‘There might well be two or three dummy guns, or even more, for every real gun. The best of all camouflage is a confusing variety of options made in which no-one can tell the real from the sham.’1 The words came back like an echo from Camouflage and Air Defence. In order for it to work effectively, camouflage had to combine concealment with deception.
Tom Van Oss was asked by Fighter Command to draft some ‘Notes on Camouflage of Aerodrome Perimeter Defence’ and consulted with Joe on his next visit. In his draft document he concluded that the concealing of aerodromes was impossible, but they could be made more difficult to find. Defences in Crete had been all too obvious, which meant they were swiftly overpowered. Tom stressed that certain very simple things might have been done to ‘waste the enemy’s time whilst relief is on its way’. Any light surfaces had to be darkened, any smooth surfaces roughened. This was common sense stuff – tracks and freshly dug earth easily draw the eye – a bit of simple maintenance went a long way. Camouflage could create ‘hesitation and doubt, wastage of bombs . . . loss of time’.2
That same month, whether by chance or by design, Peregrine took the opportunity to brief Lord Cherwell, the prime minister’s scientific adviser, on his latest schemes. Peregrine sent him a set of photographs that showed, amongst other items, a camouflaged Radio Direction Finding station and a vast hide concealing up to twenty aircraft, both of which used steel wool and both of which were invisible from the air. In his accompanying note Peregrine listed the current problems with ‘concealment’ and went on to propose a strategy ‘for defence against tank and dive bombing attack’ where he stressed that deception was as important as concealment, and that dummy tanks and other obstacles should be used to deflect an impending attack.
He went as far as to argue that ‘where a permanent building such as a Bomb Store or Wireless Station is to be built, a replica of the existing landscape complete with dummy hedges etc., should be reproduced at a convenient height above the ground BEFORE the building is begun. The building should then be erected underneath.’ Peregrine concluded: ‘Concealment as a Strategic Weapon can only be effective if full use is made of Dummies and Siting.’3
Camouflage wasn’t a sticking plaster to be applied afterwards but a strategy in itself – when would they see its potential?
The answer was soon, but it wouldn’t happen on British soil. It was in the North African desert, where several of Farnham’s ‘babies’ had been posted early in 1941. Geoffrey Barkas, Peter Proud, Steven Sykes, and even a stage magician, Jasper Maskelyne, were confronted with the arid and inhospitable desert landscape, a place where it was surely impossible to hide anything. But, of course, the fact that hiding was so hard meant deception could be everything.
A brilliant chance to prove this came in April of 1941, when 36,000 Australians and other British Commonwealth troops were trapped in the port of Tobruk surrounded by German forces. Tobruk was the best port for hundreds of miles in North Africa. Rommel wouldn’t attack across the Egyptian border as long as the Tobruk garrison threatened the lines of supply to his front-line units, and he retained almost complete air superiority. Everywhere was under constant surveillance and in danger of being attacked.
Before the war the charming and persuasive Peter Proud had become known for his ability to design lavish-looking film sets on deceptively modest budgets; now he breathed fresh life into every bit of desert debris. He used old scaffolding, canvas and battered petrol tins to make dummy soldiers, trucks, gun positions and even a decoy air strip. Every bit of scrap was used to distort the picture on the ground. To protect the vital port, Proud and his men strung a vast canvas depicting wreckage scenes and debris-littered netting between actual wrecked ships, thus creating a canopy under which undamaged ships might pass. They also concealed two Hurricane fighter planes in caves dug into a dry riverbed, and another was literally buried in a hole in the ground, covered with a trapdoor over which sand was spread.
But perhaps the most impressive set piece from the desert camoufleurs was the artful ‘distressing’ of Tobruk’s water distillery plant. The plant was crucial but impossible to hide, and so, after a bombing raid, a paint and cement team went to work and what looked like a black and ragged hole was created in the roof and side of the main building. It was made to appear impressively deep by darkening the shadows with coal dust and waste oil. Rubber tyres were set alight so that by dawn it gave the impression that the building was still smouldering. It had exactly the desired effect. German reconaissance planes noted the distillery as destroyed, and so ‘wasted’ no more bombs on it.
Such ruses were scrupulously documented with a steady flow of reports, drawings and photographs filtering back to Farnham and beyond. The Fortnightly D.O., a newsletter edited by Godfrey Baxter, would celebrate the desert camoufleurs and their ingenious recycling of unlikely materials. It had a brilliantly Heath Robinson appeal. After all, who would have thought that ten tonnes of condemned flour could be mixed with Worcester sauce and sand to make a paste that when applied to army vehicles blended them into the desert landscape? Or that battered petrol cans dusted with cement could be turned into rocks? It proved how the enemy could be defeated not by fire and man power, but guts and imagination.
Baxter concluded: ‘The difference between Tobruk and this country is that out there camouflage is not a subject of after dinner speculation, but a matter of existence.’4
*
Telegram to KITTY MEADE 6/7/41
PLEASE CAN MARY LUNCH SATURDAY CONSTITUTIONAL CLUB. OR DINNER AND PLAYERS THEATRE. JOHNNY AND LITTLE MARY COMING. JAMES CONSULTED AND APPROVES. MARY WILL STAY STANMORE SAT NIGHT. WELL LOOKED AFTER. = GRAY
It was time for Joe to put on his own show. He was playing the part of the ‘Good Victorian’, providing suitable chaperones and married friends to make everything appear respectable. He would direct all his invitations to Kitty Meade first, for her approval. Yes, it was ridiculous. He and Mary were two educated adults ‘with everything in the open’, yet now they had to dance to someone else’s tune. He had no other option. Mary had told Joe that she would not be coming to London as often, and she certainly wouldn’t stay the night. She had made it very clear things could not go on as they had before. There would be no snatched intimacies or ‘pretend hotel honeymoons’. Regardless of the fact that they had been physically intimate for years, Mary now believed that their situation was too exposed. They had to hold back. This was the right thing to do for the sake of her mother and her brother, and perhaps also for herself.
Joe pretended to accept it. ‘I realised we have been asking too much of your mother. She has lived a sheltered and conventional life since she was a girl and can’t understand that there can be any happiness – or safety – outside of those conventions.’ But everybody now had an opinion on their relationship and Joe felt blisteringly uncomfortable. James, Kitty, Peregrine and even the newly respectable Johnny joined the debate. Johnny was fiercely possessive of Joe and said Mary didn’t understand him. Mary, in turn, considered Johnny a thoroughly bad influence. They were both right, but what a tangle it was becoming. Joe wished, not for the first time, that they had kept the whole thing undercover. He wasn’t sure
he could bluff his way out.
Darling, over the past three years you and I, as fairly intelligent people, both with some experience of life, have done what we wanted to do, very frankly and honestly – for better or worse and with complete mutual understanding, knowing that we would never let each other down. Now the position is different, physically because we are parted, because other people have come into the picture. I don’t care if I never sleep with you again so long as I know that you would if you could.
But he did care. He cared terribly. And he refused to accept conventional definitions. ‘You and I cannot commit adultery, morally, even if the law can claim we have. The Dictionary says ADULTERY – “violation of the marriage bed”.’ Now, as no marriage bed was in existence, it could not possibly be violated.
But it wasn’t enough. He could no longer turn up in Bath at a moment’s notice or lure Mary away with a room at a hotel. He had to make everything seem proper.
And it worked. Mary came to London twice and Joe felt he was almost forgiven. He met James for dinner in town and for lunch at Whitehall, persistently reaffirming his sincerity. Camouflage was getting a better reputation, and Joe hoped it might rub off on him. He promised Mary he’d look after her and he genuinely felt he could. The tales of Tobruk delighted and enthralled him. He felt a direct connection. ‘I am to a great extent responsible for the present organisation,’ he wrote.
To a great extent I am still responsible – my ‘babies’ are doing first class work now wherever the army is in action. MI10 recently produced a captured German operations order which said that a recent German counter attack at Tobruk had been heavily defeated owing to the excellent camouflage of our tanks and guns and the Germans had no idea about them being there before they went into action. Please don’t say anything about that because it suggests I am in the habit of disclosing information which I am actually not. Still, it was a bit of a feather in the camouflage cap and I thought you would like to know it, as it shows old Pop Corn looked ahead very well in 1935, now doesn’t it? Everything will come right in the end, you will see.
