by R. V. Jones
Not long after the war I happened to meet Jimmy by accident and asked him if he had any news of ‘Inspector Thompson’. Jimmy had just heard that he had been shot dead by the Paris police. It was only later that the full truth emerged. His real name was Harold Cole, and he was born in 1903. He had stayed in France after Dunkirk, and had become involved with the famous escape line which was run by a Belgian officer, Albert Marie Guerisse, also known as Lieutenant Commander Patrick Albert O’Leary. Guerisse himself was finally trapped by the Germans in March 1943 after helping many of our men to escape, but he survived the concentration camp at Dachau and after the war became head of the Belgian Medical Corps. His many decorations included the George Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.
In the early days of Guerisse’s organization, Cole had at first seemed genuine enough, but he must at some time have been caught by the Germans and offered his freedom if he would pretend to go on working for us. Against the numbers that he undoubtedly helped to escape, his treachery led to at least fifty French and Belgian helpers being murdered by the Gestapo. A few days before the liberation of Paris, he left it in the uniform of a German officer and some months after V-E Day he was arrested in the American Zone of Germany posing as a Captain in the British Intelligence Corps. Brought back to Paris under escort and put in an American prison, he stole an American sergeant’s uniform and escaped. By sheer bad luck, for him, the landlady of the lodging house in which he took refuge reported him as a possible deserter, and he died in a shoot-out with the French police who tried to arrest him. Our romantic illusions about the villain who turned out to be a hero in the end had been finally shattered.
Besides Jimmy Langley there was another Coldstream officer with us, a Lieutenant Colonel who belonged to a famous Coldstream family. Desk work did not appeal to him, and he thought that there were better ways of helping to win the war. To prove his contention, he used to come into the office in uniform, and change into civilian clothes, leaving almost immediately to do his day’s work as second drayman on a dray from Watney’s Westminister Brewery. He had simply walked into the brewery and offered his services; having been taken on, he found himself part of a team with another drayman and two dray women, ferrying barrels around to the London pubs and sharing their lunch of beer and bread and cheese. At the end of the day he would return to the office, put on his uniform and go to his elegant house in South Kensington, satisfied that he had done more to help in the war than anything he could have done in 54 Broadway.
Amongst others with whom it was a pleasure to work were the Archibald brothers, Henry and Roy, Canadian lawyers practising before the war in Paris. Henry had been amateur golf champion of France, and one day he introduced me to a very gallant Frenchman whom I knew only by his code name ‘Fitzroy’. He and his wife both worked for us, being frequently brought over by Lysander and parachuted back into France. I believe that Fitzroy himself made at least eleven trips. He and I cooked up a scheme for causing trouble to the Germans and benefiting ourselves, by tapping German telephone wires in open country and then putting the conversations back on the wire again after amplification in a radio transmitter. The messages would now be broadcast and we could pick them up in England while the Germans would have great difficulty in finding where they came from because they would have been radiated from a wire many miles long.
We never actually tried the scheme, but it led to Fitzroy telling us of one of his own escapades when, as a head agent, he had been parachuted back into France with six radio transmitter-receiver sets for distribution to his sub-agents. He got them safely to his first port of call, and was then faced with the problem of distributing the other five sets. Instead of trying to do this furtively he went into the local town and in the course of a few days made friends with the German garrison commander. As their acquaintance grew he let the German know that he was in the Black Market, and that there was a deal which he could bring off to their mutual benefit if the commander would co-operate. All that was needed was a German Army lorry and a driver, because the deal involved selling a load of carrots on the Black Market, transporting them from the original farm to another some twenty or so miles away. Fitzroy himself had no transport, but if the German could arrange the lorry, Fitzroy would split the prospective profit with him. The deal was arranged and a German Army lorry driven by a German soldier appeared at the farm and the carrots were duly loaded. However, in addition to the carrots a large package went on board, and was about to be covered by the carrots when the soldier asked what it was, because there was no mention of a package in his orders. Fitzroy put his finger to his lips and said ‘Zigaretten!’ and tore open a corner of the package and pulled out a box of 100 cigarettes. He told the soldier that this was what the deal was really about, but that his commanding officer did not know, and that if the carrots and the package were safely delivered the soldier would receive a further 100 cigarettes. The driver was now happy, because he knew, or rather thought he did, how his commanding officer was being hoodwinked, and there were no further problems.
But this was not enough for Fitzroy. When he met the garrison commander to share the proceeds with him (the money of course being provided by us) they had a celebratory drink and then Fitzroy told the German that he had been thinking about the deal and that it had been Black Market. The German said that he realized that. ‘But,’ said Fitzroy, ‘if you can pretend to find out that it was Black Market it is in your power as garrison commander to confiscate the carrots. If you will, we can sell them again—I know where I can find another customer!’ And so the carrots were duly confiscated and sold again, and this time a rather smaller package went under them, one radio set having been left with the first ‘buyer’. I do not know how many sets were distributed before the carrots went rotten.
Later in the war Fitzroy was caught by the Germans, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp. He survived and was, I believe, awarded a D.S.O. Tragically, as with others I knew, he found life in peace-time too dull, and sought excitement in high speed driving: he and his wife were killed when their car failed to take a bend.
Many of the aids associated with the dropping and picking up operations with agents were devised by ‘Jane’ Shaw, who delighted in making neat gadgets for such purposes; these included the magnetic trouser button which could be used as a compass, and which became a standard issue to air crew to help them in escaping. Another service was lessons in make-up, so that agents could disguise themselves. The officer in charge was Leon Thompson, who ran the photographic section and provided me personally with much help. We used to travel home together on the underground to Richmond, and on one of our journeys he told me that he had been surprised by a trainee who had corrected him on the appropriate make-up pencil to use; he had been an actor, and his name was Lindemann.
This Lindemann joined the French section, where he began to bring me agents’ reports on German installations which were described as ‘Radio Gonio’. With a chuckle, he told me that he had decided to bring these reports to me personally because they seemed to embarrass his secretaries who thought they dealt with some sort of venereal disease that would act at a distance. In further conversation, I remarked to him that he had the same name as my professor. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’m his brother. I’m the one he doesn’t own!’ It turned out that the Prof had two brothers: one was Charles, who had been partly a physicist and who had won the D.S.O. as a Colonel in the First War, and who was now a brigadier and an Attaché in our Embassy in Washington; the other was James, known as ‘Seppi’ who described himself to me as ‘the black sheep of the family’. He had taken his share of his father’s wealth and had proceeded to enjoy himself. At one stage on the Riviera, he owned two Rolls-Royces, one white and driven by a negro, and the other black, driven by an albino.
One evening in the Cabinet Offices, I told the Prof that I had met his brother. This was a shock to him because he never mentioned Seppi to anybody; but when I told him that Seppi was working near me he said that I had be
tter get Seppi to telephone him so that they could meet for lunch. After the lunch Seppi appeared in my office, much amused: the Prof did not want his disreputable brother to know exactly where he worked, so he had offered to drop Seppi at Seppi’s office. Seppi, on the other hand, thought that the location of M.I.6 headquarters was too secret even for the Prof to know, so he had insisted that the Prof should be dropped first. They drove round and round St. James’s Park, neither prepared to give way to the other. In the end, Seppi persuaded the Prof to drop him at some quite irrelevant place, from which he made his way back on foot.
The Prof’s secretiveness also amused his brother Charles, who told me that one of his tasks as Attaché in Washington was to arrange the transport of all nuclear physicists and others from Britain who were visiting or working at such stations as Los Alamos in connection with the atomic bomb project. Among these visitors was the Prof, who used to spin Charles the most fantastic yarns regarding the purpose of his visits, not knowing that his brother was already in the atomic picture and had in fact made all the travel arrangements for him.
I myself knew how the Prof felt about not disclosing where his headquarters were, since one of my pre-war colleagues in Oxford, Richard Hull, who was now a Fellow of Lincoln, posed me the same problem. We had had lunch together, and he was curious to know where I worked and so he proposed to walk back with me to my office. He had already asked me where it was, and I had told him that it was built underground on an island in the lake of St. James’s Park. I explained that the entrance was also hidden from public view, and when he insisted on accompanying me there was nothing for it but to bluff it out. Fortunately I remembered that there was a gardener’s hut hidden in the bushes by the side of the lake with an entrance marked ‘Private’ and when we came to it I shook hands with him and disappeared into the bushes while he went on his way. I had forgotten the matter when a week or so later the Chief of Air Staff called me over to his office to discuss something or other, and as I entered his anteroom his personal assistant, Cox, slowly smiled and said ‘I was back in Lincoln last weekend’ (he was also a Fellow) ‘and I heard from Richard Hull where your office really is’. I was never quite sure whether Cox knew the truth or not.
We enjoyed another diversion when an Air Commodore was drafted into Broadway, along with a Colonel from the Royal Marines and a Lieutenant General, to improve the Service representation in the direction of M.I.6. As with other buildings in Westminster, our window-sills were infested with pigeons—and we persuaded the Air Commodore that our pigeons were our main means of communication with the French Resistance. For days, at our instigation, he solicitously provided them with saucers of water!
Thanks to Hugh Smith, the strain of the war was relieved by some hilarious weekends in Gloucestershire, where I became involved in a masquerade as the ‘Bishop of Wigan’. This was nearly exploded when the victim of the masquerade discovered that the ‘Bishop’ was not listed in Crockford’s Directory, but the situation was saved by telling him that it was a new diocese which had been created as a result of the increased population brought to Wigan by the ‘shadow’ aircraft factories, and that the Church had been forbidden to announce the increased ecclesiastical status because this could provide the Germans with a clue to the new centre of the aircraft industry. The ‘Bishop’ was therefore on the Secret List: he emerged, though, after the war, in Volume 39 of the English Place-Name Society, which deals with the North and West Cotswolds, under the entry for Little Washbourne, and alongside the description of The Hobnails as ‘An ancient Inn’, there appears among the field-names, ‘“Bishop’s Piece” (named from an incident when Dr. R. V. Jones, Professor of Natural Philosophy in Aberdeen, appeared there as a Bishop of Wigan cf. Early English and Norse Studies presented to Hugh Smith, ed. A. Brown and P. Foote (London, 1963), 224)’. The name is attached to the piece of land not far from The Hobnails, and so I have taken my place with my old colleague Yves Rocard, who has had a submarine volcano near Tahiti named in his honour. Others may care to debate whether an acre in Gloucestershire is worth a volcano in the South Seas.
The title of this chapter was inspired by another weekend episode, this time in Broadway itself. Charles Frank was going away for the weekend, and in preparation had brought his suitcase to the office. It was a walking exhibition of Continental hotel labels, which Charles had accumulated in the course of his pre-war journeys. During the course of the afternoon I happened to spot that someone else in the office was reading a book with a lurid dustcover entitled Revelations from the Secret Service. I could not resist pasting the dustcover centrally among the hotel labels on one side of the suitcase while Charles was out of the room, and so it transpired that he left 54 Broadway, the headquarters of the Secret Service, carrying a Revelation suitcase with ‘Revelations from the Secret Service’ ostentatiously displayed on its side. But even that indiscretion did nothing to disillusion a girl in a nearby office across Broadway whose room looked out on the entrance of No. 54. From her observations she had decided that we were some sort of Government office where retired Serving Officers came to collect their pensions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Full Stretch
BY THE end of 1942 the resources of my small Section were stretched to the limit. Besides our main duties there were many facets of the war which called for our intervention. There was, for example, the imminent introduction of a new aid to our bombers which came into use under the code name H2S. This was a centimetric radar device which scanned the terrain for several miles around the aircraft and which presented the navigator with what was virtually a map of the ground, showing towns (which gave rise to large radar echoes), rivers, lakes, and coastlines. In fact it did exactly what I had at one time thought that the German X-Gerät might do. At that time, in 1940, our technical experts considered the idea impracticable, because they thought ordinary radio waves would be too coarse to give a sharp picture, while centimetric waves would be reflected strongly from many kinds of objects, even the furrows in a ploughed field. However, when—thanks to a brilliant invention by J. T. Randall and H. A. H. Boot—we were able to generate centimetric waves on a large scale and try the idea out, we found that it was easy to differentiate between towns and fields, and so the device appeared highly practicable. This would mean that any bomber equipped with the device would in effect be able to ‘see’ the ground below, in the dark and through cloud. The idea was taken up enthusiastically and developed by our Telecommunications Research Establishment, and notably by Philip Dee and Bernard Lovell, under the code name ‘T.F.’.
Where I came back into this story was when I heard the initials ‘T.F.’ which I promptly guessed stood for ‘Town Finding’. I thereupon warned Lindemann that once again our radar people had disclosed their intentions by the choice of a too-obvious code name, and he told me that he would see what could be done to change it. The following week, after visiting a ‘Sunday Soviet’, as A. P. Rowe’s get-togethers were called, Lindemann told me that he had succeeded in getting the name changed, and that in future it was to be known as ‘H2S’. He asked me if I could see the connection between the new name and the device. When I failed, he said ‘Ah, you see, it’s very clever—H-S-H: Home Sweet Home!’
A few weeks later I was myself at T.R.E., and I told them that I was amused by the reasoning behind the new code name. They immediately volunteered that I did not know the true story. What had happened, they said, was that the Prof had told them that they must change the name, and had given them the lunch interval to think of a new one. When they were discussing it among themselves, someone suggested H2S because of the Prof’s own part in the story. When they had originally shown him the possibility on an early visit to Swanage, he had not seemed very impressed, so they had not pushed ahead with the development. On a subsequent visit, after he had toured the Establishment, he told them that the last time he had been there they had shown him a very interesting device for mapping terrain from the air and wanted to know what they had done about it. Th
ey hardly liked to tell him that they had not done as much as they might because he had not given them any encouragement, and he became indignant at the various tactful excuses they offered. Finally he said of their tardiness ‘It stinks! It stinks!’ so when they were challenged for a new code name, H2S (the chemical formula for the gas associated with rotten eggs) happily suggested itself. But they had not forseen his obvious question: ‘Now why did you call it that?’ There was an awkward silence until someone who deserved to go far came up with ‘Please Sir, Home Sweet Home!’
The one factor in the story that I found hard to believe was that Lindemann could ever have failed to encourage the development of a device which would aid our bombers. Certainly, once he realized its potential, he was very keen to have it, being almost emotional about the theme of a scientific instrument in every bomber. It seemed to me that this was dangerously obsessive, because the same device had a quite different and possibly much more important use as a U-boat detector. Our original A.S.V. (Anti Surface Vessel) radar had worked on a wavelength of 1.5 metres and it was now becoming useless because the Germans had equipped their U-boats with receivers to detect it, and thus the approach of our aircraft long before they themselves could detect the U-boat. By the time the aircraft had reached the correct position the U-boat had dived and escaped. H2S offered much hope because it showed up the U-boats very clearly and worked on a wavelength of 10 centimetres for which, as yet, the U-boats had no detectors.
The question therefore arose whether Bomber Command or Coastal Command should have priority in its equipment and use. When I heard that the priority was to be given to Bomber Command, I was so concerned that I wrote a note to Charles Medhurst, now Vice Chief of Air Staff, entitled ‘Repercussions of H2S on Air-Sea Warfare’ and dated 23rd January 1943. This concluded:
