by Mary Horlock
The presence of film men in the North African desert undoubtedly tightened the focus on deception. Barkas considered it a ‘film production on a grand scale’10, which made it sound almost glamorous.
‘Very good work going on in Libya in the news,’ Joe told Mary in November. ‘We are greatly tickled by the references made to the value of concealment and camouflage. We have a good lot of chaps out there now. Can’t say how it delights me to hear how the story unfolds.’
And what a story it was. The desert offered every possibility – a place where monotony might easily give way to mirage. General Archibald Wavell understood such tricks, and in April of 1941 came up with his own bit of wizardry. Attempting a quick sketch, he asked: ‘Is it a wild idea that a tank could be camouflaged to look like a lorry from air by light canvas screens over top?’11 It wasn’t wild, it was brilliant. The note was handed to Jasper Maskelyne at the camouflage workshops and he set about making a collapsible tented structure from wood and canvas that could be used to disguise tanks. They became known as ‘Sunshields’ and would be one of the most useful deceptive devices of the desert war.
But Wavell’s part in it was over. Churchill dismissed him in June and passed the initiative to Claude Auchinleck, a one-time painting companion of Edward Seago at Southern Command. The ‘Auk’ began planning Operation Crusader, an assault designed to relieve the siege of Tobruk. Yet even with this change of command the role of deception remained.
Crusader was scheduled for November 1941 but there were many months of build-up ahead of that, and Steven Sykes was selected by Barkas to camouflage a new railway line ending at Misheifa in Egypt that would be used to bring military supplies for the offensive. Sykes saw immediately that such a massive construction could never be hidden. Instead, he proposed to build a fake nine-mile extension to the existing track, ending in a dummy terminus that he hoped would sufficiently mislead enemy bombers. The decoy railhead had a double objective: it would provide a fresh target for enemy bombers, and the ongoing work would fool them into thinking that the British were planning to attack much later.
It was a clever scheme although as usual lacking resources, which meant it was built on a gradually shrinking scale. Sykes eventually found himself crafting rail track out of flattened petrol tins, bashed into shape and blackened – but aerial reconnaissance showed the effect was still convincing. The train itself was made out of various locomotive and car parts, and an army cookhouse stove was converted to burn ‘black’ to make smoke. To complement the picture Sykes also pitched tents, mocked up mess huts and used straw figures to man them, deploying old trucks and cars to add to the impression of activity. Then, as a finishing touch, he positioned cans containing waste petrol along the track that could be detonated electronically after a raid.
The fake railhead was bombed on 28 November and received hits in the following weeks, whilst in December a captured German map showed Sykes’s extension to be real. This was ‘campaign swaying’12 publicity for camouflage. Back in England Colonel Buckley, a ‘Concealment’ man, felt the reverberations. He dispatched Julian Trevelyan to investigate. Trevelyan, when he eventually found Sykes’s creation, reported: ‘The dummy railhead looks very spectacular in the evening light. No living man is there; but dummy men are grubbing in dummy swill-troughs, and dummy lorries are unloading dummy tanks, while a dummy engine puffs dummy smoke in the eyes of a possible enemy.’13
The deception was so good – but how good? Sykes suspected Barkas exaggerated the number of bombs dropped on the railhead to further his cause,14 and, according to Trevelyan, ‘the planes have been over and shot at everything except the dummy railhead’. He also heard that ‘they later paid it the compliment . . . of dropping a wooden bomb on it’.15
When everything had to be secret, there could be many versions of the truth. Jasper Maskelyne, the camoufleur who brought Wavell’s ‘Sunshields’ to life, couldn’t resist taking some liberties with reality. His ghostwritten memoir, Magic – Top Secret, and a later book, The War Magician, puts him centre stage in every conjuring act of camouflage in the desert, from creating an entire decoy port to divert bombers from Alexandria, and even making the Suez Canal disappear by means of dazzling searchlights. Such fictions were the perfect bait for Hollywood filmmakers and persist despite having been methodically debunked and disproved.16
Even now, when I mention Joe and his work in camouflage, people will ask: ‘Oh, did he know that magician who made a whole city disappear?’
Camouflage layered fiction over fact, and told a good story at the expense of the truth. That is what made it so appealing. But there was always the danger that deception could turn into deceit, that the lies would take over. Joe thought he could play the game if he set the rules, but the fact remains that the greatest deception wasn’t really his. It was Nancy’s.
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 Gray, Camouflage and Air Defence, p. 77
2 Ibid., p. 42
3 Colin Dobinson, Fields of Deception – Britain’s Bombing Decoys of World War II, Methuen, London, 2000, p. 26
4 Ibid., p. 28
5 Gray, Camouflage and Air Defence, p. 43
6 Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards – The British Genius for Deception 1914–1945, Faber & Faber, 2008, p. 277
7 Gray, Camouflage and Air Defence, p. 77
8 Sayer, Camouflage Game, p. 43
9 War Office letter, 9 December 1941, Appendix C, TNA WO199/1629
10 Barkas, The Camouflage Story, p. 96
11 A. Wavell, handwritten note dated 23 April 1941 with original sketch of the idea of the ‘Sunshield’ cover.
12 Steven Sykes (quoting a letter from Barkas), Deceivers Ever: Memoirs of a Camouflage Officer, Spellmount, Tunbridge Wells, 1990, p. 95
13 Ibid.
14 Sykes, Deceivers Ever, p. 54
15 Trevelyan, Indigo Days, p. 159
16 See www.maskelynemagic.com. Richard Stokes’s excellent website cuts the Maskelyne myth down to size, comparing and contrasting the material in Maskelyne’s 1949 memoir Magic – Top Secret and David Fisher’s The War Magician and including interviews with desert camoufleur John Codner and Maskelyne’s son, Alistair.
is for Regularity, huts in a row, Or guns equidistant are certain to show
By November 1941 Nancy Gray was harder to find than her husband.
She still is, in fact, all these years later. It is a frosty autumn morning and I am with my aunt Victoria in Bedfordshire, essentially going round in circles. We have driven past our destination several times, so poorly is it signposted. Eventually we stop and ask passers-by, who furrow their brows and claim to know vaguely but not exactly where it is we must go. I feel embarrassed to have dragged my aunt along with me.
We fall into uneasy silence that doesn’t break even after we locate the nondescript layby where we’d been instructed to park. My relief now is laced with despair.
The sky is clear but a brisk wind makes me button up my coat. I try not to look across at Victoria as we walk for several minutes down a narrow footpath between flat and empty fields. I’m not even sure what we are walking towards. There is this single building in the distance, open at the sides. It is really just a barn.
At this point my aunt stops abruptly.
‘Is that it?’ She looks at me, eyebrows arched.
I stare back at the barn
and shrug, and she turns away to answer her mobile phone, which has now started bleeping its own little distress signal.
Of course I’m disappointed, but as I approach this very ordinary structure I have what is now a familiar sinking feeling. I have written scores of letters that have remained unanswered, I have visited libraries and scoured public record offices and often come back empty-handed. I have spent months trying to find people who invariably tell me little, and so many characters in this story are now long dead. It’s rare that I find what I am looking for. So, what am I looking for? I want to pin down my family members precisely, to know exactly what they were thinking and doing. I want to know the truth. It may seem impossible but still I must try.
It brings me here, to Gibraltar Barn Farm, and a clutch of laminated information sheets flapping in the breeze. I consider the now ageing poppy wreaths scattered about and look out across the fields. There is nobody else around, but I know Nancy was once here, blending into her own little background.
As we retrace our steps to the car I’m relieved that Maureen chose not to join us. I only realise later that she’d known all along.
‘Not much to look at, is it?’ she says, when I tell her what I found. ‘But of course, that was the point.’
At first I do not understand.
‘You knew?’ I ask.
She nods. ‘I was allowed there once, and I remember feeling distinctly underwhelmed. You would never guess they were dropping agents into France.’
No, you really wouldn’t. But it feels somehow appropriate that Nancy Gray, a woman so fiercely private, would end up working at Britain’s most secret air base. RAF Tempsford was operational from October 1941, and in 1942 became the base for two Special Duties Squadrons, No. 138 and No. 161, which dropped agents, arms and supplies into occupied Europe – under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Since its activities were always secret, Tempsford had to look unexceptional. Gibraltar Barn was just that, with surrounding buildings made to look like animal houses. Such was the extent of the camouflage, a new pilot to the base thought it ‘some elaborate leg-pull’. The whole place looked derelict.
There was a huddle of buildings roughly the shape and size of Nissen huts but they looked like cowsheds. In fact, they were Nissen huts built within the walls of cowsheds, but I didn’t know that until much later. They were grouped around a farm. That’s another thing I didn’t find out until later, that its name was Gibraltar Farm. Even if I had known, it wouldn’t have meant anything. There were some hangars, so superbly camouflaged that it took me quite a while to realise that they were hangars. The whole place was odd, very odd.1
From this strange ‘non-place’ over a thousand agents were dropped, with 10,000 packages and 20,000 containers. The SOE had an entire unit dedicated to camouflaging anything in everything – microfilms and weapons in bicycle pumps and toothpaste tins.
Nancy was the manageress of a small canteen on the outskirts of the airfield. She had her own room to sleep in, though time to herself was rare. Most days she was up early, organising the kitchen and its rotas, and preparing food for the air crews. She was part of the ‘official’ side of things, fully aware there was a ‘covert’ side, with the cars coming in at the dead of night, and curtains always drawn. It rather suited Nancy. She had learned to compartmentalise her life and keep control. Putting out the flying rations each night, she didn’t expect every plane to return. There were times when as many as twelve planes went out, and only two came back. That was hard, but everyone had to keep a brave face.
Nancy liked the military obsession with stiff upper lips and living by numbers, everything tidy and accounted for. She thought the war had brought out the best in her. At Tempsford she was proving to be an excellent manager, if rather strict, but this was in fact useful since it meant the men respected her. It also helped that she was still very striking, with piercing eyes and a haughty look. She made men work hard for a smile, but she also made that smile very dazzling.
Although addressed as ‘Mrs Gray’, Nancy never talked about her husband, nor did she feel the need to. The war saw so many couples separated – if it was liberating for Joe, it could be the same for his wife. Nancy was starting over. She had brushed aside unhappy memories of the Sutherland, and didn’t think once about returning to Scotland. Her parents, after all, had excelled at disapproving and not allowing – so she would never have admitted the truth to them.
Nancy now refused to have regrets, just as she refused to acknowledge her husband’s infidelity. Yes, she knew about Joe and Mary, but knowing and admitting were two quite different things. Nancy never confronted Joe – what would be the point? She found it simpler to ignore troubling facts or events, or even people. Wasn’t this just what Joe was doing? Well, Nancy did it better. All three of her sisters had emigrated in their twenties and she had cut them off completely. Once they were gone, that was that. The fact was, if it looked likely anyone would leave Nancy Gray, she did her damnedest to leave them first.
Joe still paid money into her account but they had little other contact. Nancy had declared herself ‘a most unsentimental type of person’ – so even if Joe wrote to her, she would not keep his letters. She destroyed all of her personal correspondence, ripping it into microscopic shreds. That she’d had to sign the Official Secrets Act now served her very well.
Joe knew exactly what Nancy was like, which is why he never pushed her. ‘Timing is of the essence,’ he told Mary. ‘Any man – especially a soldier – doesn’t dare advance until he is sure of the ground.’ It was a tactic from one war now applied to another. Joe had always been patient, and now he was waiting, biding his time for the right moment.
Perhaps it might come soon: one letter reached Nancy that she decided to keep. It was from Dick Orr-Ewing, writing from Scotland, and it had chased her down to Bedford. Dick, like Joe, had found himself eminently more employable once war broke out. By the end of 1939 he had been taken on by a reputable firm of civil engineers and had moved to Edinburgh to survey the proposed Forth Road Bridge. When this was delayed he joined the Home Guard and was appointed temporary civil engineer at a naval base in Orkney.
Joe and Dick had been good friends. They had lived under the same roof for years, even worked together. Joe liked Dick. Dick liked Joe. Dick loved Nancy. He had loved her from the start, and now he wrote and told her so.
Joe had constantly put Mary off, he had delayed and procrastinated, promising things would come right. He wasn’t wrong. One letter to Nancy could change everything. Dick knew she had separated from Joe and that it wasn’t just the war that kept them apart. He had a very practical proposal. He suggested she get a divorce and marry him instead. He told her that he loved her and promised he could take care of her, and he offered the simplest reason why: ‘Because if I am killed before the war is over, you will have my pension. You won’t have to worry again.’
It wasn’t romantic – it was really quite brutal – but Joe had already accepted he might die in an air raid and Dick shared that same fatalism. Here were two men who had already survived one war, and, perhaps more importantly, they had lived to see the misery and poverty of its aftermath. They were both thinking about what and who might survive them.
As long as Joe stayed married to Nancy, she would get his pension. It was the only thing he could offer. Mary had her own money. Nancy didn’t. When Joe talked of his duty to Nancy, that’s what he meant. He would not divorce her and leave her stranded in some desolate limbo. He had to see her taken care of. Dick’s offer did that. It would relieve Joe of his responsibility. How handy that Nancy might actually love Dick, too.
Dick’s proposal, as sincere as it was sensible, was a solution to a problem. He would take Joe’s place, if Nancy wanted him.
Did she want him?
Only Nancy could say. She liked everything neat and tidy and under her control, and she did have control. She’d never deny that. From the moment she had moved with Joe to London she had fe
lt disappointed and betrayed, and this was the role she’d play well – perhaps not so much the victim, but most certainly someone wronged. Joe was typecast as the errant husband – unreliable and chaotic – the counter to her steadfast resilience. Joe didn’t fight it, because by then he was fighting other things. He left plenty of space for Dick to become the hero, Nancy’s rescuer. It was all terribly convenient. As if it had been planned.
Joe had grown used to the idea of dying, but it was only when his plane crashed that he realised how much he wanted to live. He had been flying in one of the old Stinsons out of York, having just visited Tom Van Oss, when the plane suddenly lost power – one minute they were soaring over fields, the next they were hurtling back down to earth. They crash-landed, skidding through mud and grass, and Joe jumped out just before the whole thing burst into flames. Fortunately, everybody escaped unharmed, but the flames and the smoke left him very shaken.
‘It was a good little plane.’ He told Mary. ‘It will always be a mystery what happened.’
How easy it was to die, and yet how hard it was to live. He returned to London in another man’s uniform and found a letter waiting for him at the Board. Kitty Meade had decided to issue Joe with an ultimatum and, like James, she chose to put it all in writing. She said she would no longer tolerate his ‘chaotic descents’ into Bath and it was time for him to ‘put his affairs in order’. Kitty didn’t agree with divorce, but she saw no alternative. Like everyone in the family, she couldn’t fathom why Joe insisted on staying married to a woman he barely saw and claimed to no longer love. It seemed bizarre to the point of suspicious. Kitty wasn’t that much older than Joe, so she understood his talk of duty and tradition. But she felt it was time he acknowledged his duty to Mary.
