J OAN BRIGHT HAD lived in Argentina, Spain and Mexico City and the experience of life abroad had taught her an important fact: the British alone played by the rules. They formed orderly queues at the bus stop, they said sorry when there was no need to apologize. In her view, decency and fair play were integral parts of being British.
It was much the same with sport. In villages across the realm, well-spoken youths in whites and flannels spent their Sundays playing cricket, a game with so many rules that only the British were equipped to master it. Even more violent sports like boxing came with a book of regulations. In 1867 the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (though hardly a gentleman) had put his name to a set of rules that ensured boxing was fought in a spirit of decency. No longer could you hit a man when he was down: that was deemed to be underhand.
As international relations grew increasingly strained in the late 1930s, the question of what constituted gentlemanly combat became a subject of heated debate on the letters page of The Times . A certain Dr L.P. Jacks of Oxfordshire fired the opening salvo when he wrote to the editor expressing his belief that the sword alone was ‘a gentleman’s weapon’. His reasoning was quintessentially British. Attacking someone with a sword ‘was more likely to give the other fellow a chance, and so make it more of a sporting affair between him and me’ 1 .
Not everyone agreed. Writing from his club in St James’s, Mr Edward Abraham wanted to know how it could be considered gentlemanly ‘to slash at a human being’s jugular vein with a sword’, 2 yet ungentlemanly to kill him with a bayonet. Where did Dr Jacks stand on less conventional weapons? Mustard gas, for example? Gentlemanly? Or ungentlemanly?
There followed a furious spat in which other readers entered the fray. Leslie Douglas-Mann confessed to not giving two hoots about the rules of the game. If you wanted to win – and win at all costs – there was no place for gentlemanly behaviour. Guns, gas or grenades; you should be prepared to get your hands dirty. ‘A spiked mace smashed in the face,’ he reasoned, ‘is probably quite as unpleasant as poison gas.’ 3
The issue rumbled on for weeks until an exasperated Dr Jacks (who had started the fight in the first place) begged for a gentleman’s truce. ‘May I withdraw my rash description of the sword as a gentleman’s weapon,’ he wrote, ‘and describe it, with greater caution, as less ungentlemanly than poison gas?’ 4
The epistolary spat would have been of little long-term consequence, were it not for the fact that it raised an important point. Was there any place for rules in the modern game of war?
The issue would eventually be debated on the floor of the House of Commons. Most members were rigidly conservative in outlook and spoke vigorously in defence of the rules. But one of them begged to differ. Robert Bower was the Conservative MP for Cleveland, a member whose ungentlemanly behaviour had already gained him notoriety in Westminster. Two years previously he had shocked his Tory colleagues by his use of unparliamentary language, insulting a Jewish backbencher with a nasty racist jibe. The backbencher in question, Emanuel Shinwell, was so incensed that he crossed the floor of the house and punched Bower in the face.
Now, once again, Bower was prepared to nail his ungentlemanly colours to the mast. He expressed shock at the manner in which his Tory colleagues continued to treat Hitler with kid gloves, even though he was breaking every international law in the book. He contended that there was no place for the rule book when dealing with the Nazis. ‘When you are fighting for your life against a ruthless opponent,’ he said, ‘you cannot be governed by the Queensberry rules.’
He poured scorn on his frontbench colleagues for their outdated notions of fair play, claiming that most of them would rather lose a war ‘than do anything unbecoming to an absolutely perfect gentleman’.
Bower’s parliamentary colleagues were appalled by what they were hearing, but the honourable member for Cleveland was not yet finished. He warned them that Britain was doomed to destruction if it clung to the old ways. ‘We must have a government which will be ruthless, relentless, remorseless,’ he said. ‘In short, we want a few more cads in this government.’ 5
Colin Gubbins’s strict Scottish upbringing had instilled a powerful sense of morality in him, yet he was content to let others trouble themselves with the rights and wrongs of ungentlemanly warfare. He was more concerned with the practicalities of an effective guerrilla campaign against Nazi Germany.
It was clear that he could not do it alone. He would need an inner circle of experts who could help him plan how best to strike at Hitler’s Nazi war machine. Such experts were unlikely to be found in the regular army. Gubbins needed rule-breakers: mavericks and eccentrics with a talent for lateral thinking and a fondness for making mischief.
He had been in Caxton Street for little more than a week when he was joined by Millis Jefferis, the gorilla-like officer who had first conceived the idea of a magnetic mine.
‘Red of face, kind of heart’, at least that’s what Joan Bright thought when first introduced to the chain-smoking Jefferis. 6 He arrived in a cloud of tobacco, bringing yet more nicotine into her life. She was in awe of him during his first days in Caxton Street. He was gruff, impatient and rougher around the edges than the ever courteous Gubbins. His jacket was crumpled, his trousers creased: the overall impression was of someone with a complete disdain for military etiquette. His brother-in-law thought he looked ‘more like a race-course bookie’ than a soldier. 7 Joan wasn’t so sure. She took one look at his ruddy cheeks and declared that ‘he could never have belonged to any other branch of the Army but the Royal Engineers’.
Although he continued to intimidate her for weeks to come, she soon came to appreciate that he had a great deal more to offer than the typical British bulldog. He was inquisitive, wildly creative and, most impressive of all, entirely self-taught, ‘an inventive genius, his dreams and thoughts linked with all forms of infernal machine – and the bigger the bang, the louder his ready laugh’. 8
Jefferis’s grizzled face was a result of too much exposure to the high-altitude sunshine of the Indian Himalayas. An engineer by training, he had started his career on the troubled North-West Frontier in the employment of the Madras Sappers and Miners. It quickly became apparent that he had a magician’s hands when it came to designing bridges and viaducts. The Royal Engineers Journal described him as ‘an outstanding man of rare inventive genius’, 9 someone who was able to span impenetrable Himalayan ravines with his unique blend of algebra and imagination. His subaltern confessed to having never met anyone so driven by the will to succeed. ‘Difficulties existed only to be surmounted, and there was no setback that a little thought and determination could not overcome.’
Jefferis had spent the bloody Waziristan campaign of 1922 hacking his way through impassable mountains until he had created a road of sorts that linked the strategic settlements of Isha and Razmak. It was a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that he and his Afghan contractors were under constant gunfire from hidden snipers. ‘Bet you never have another up to this level,’ wrote his company major. 10 His bravado in the face of adversity was to earn him a Military Cross. More importantly, it earned him first-hand experience of guerrilla warfare.
Colin Gubbins was quick to see that Jefferis’s craggy exterior masked a unique skill, one that had stood him in good stead during the Waziristan campaign. His floating bridges and concrete piles were merely the outward expressions of a passion for applied mathematics. For Jefferis believed that every problem could be solved by algebra – not the simple algebraic equations taught at school, but equations of staggering complexity. This, indeed, was his great discovery in life: everything conformed to an equation, if only you looked hard enough.
He had worked out the algebraic formula to explain how an albatross stayed aloft without flapping its wings. He had even found an equation that could predict the point at which a greyhound would capture a hare on any given racetrack, assuming that the hound was travelling at a slightly faster speed than its quarry. When Joan was first introduced to him in the spring of 1939, such matters seemed of trifling consequence. But Jefferis knew differently. For if you could predict when a greyhound would capture a hare, then you could also predict when a rocket would hit a plane. And that made both algebra, and Jefferis, very important indeed.
It was while serving on the North-West Frontier that Jefferis underwent a bizarre Damascene conversion. Hitherto, he had lived, breathed and dreamed of bridges. But as he trudged his way back to the town of Isha, depleted of men after a bruising campaign, he developed an overwhelming desire to blow them up.
Close friends had noticed the sudden change. ‘Millis Jefferis had taken a dislike to bridges,’ wrote one bemused observer, ‘and was anxious to do them an injury.’ There was logic to his antipathy. His Waziristan adventure had given him first-hand experience of the strategic importance of both railways and bridges. If you could cripple a bridge, you could stop an entire army in its tracks.
Jefferis’s induction into Caxton Street was to mark a turning point in his life. He was given command of his own little unit called MI(R)c, an adjunct to Gubbins’s team, with the task of ‘designing and producing special weapons for irregular warfare’. These were the weapons on which Gubbins’s guerrilla operations would succeed or fail.
Now, seated impatiently at his desk, his dark thoughts could be turned into an even darker reality. Others watched in awe as he scribbled numbers, letters and equations on to loose sheets of graph paper, systematically turning complex mathematics into diagrams of destruction. When the maths was done, he ‘acquired some large drawing pads marked off in one sixteenth inch squares’ 11 and began making detailed plans of viaducts in order to work out how best to reduce them to rubble. His finished work was to be published as a companion volume to Gubbins’s edible pamphlets.
The title left little room for the imagination. How to Use High Explosives contained highly accurate advice for anyone who wanted to blow up a bridge, building, railway or road. It was illustrated with line drawings that showed ‘how to fit a stick of gelignite under a railway sleeper or where to pack a lethal brown paper parcel under a bridge’. 12
There were also handy tips on how to wreck train pistons, how to cripple points, how to blow up pylons (plant gelignite under three legs, not four, or it won’t fall over) and how best to sabotage a factory. This little pamphlet, scarcely longer than a copy of Science Illustrated , was a historical first, the first manual in the history of the British Army to teach men how to wreak havoc on civilian targets with a small bag of explosives.
Not content with offering advice about weaponry, Jefferis began to design and build his own. Each chuckle from the far side of the office would announce the conception of some lethal new weapon. ‘Blowing up railways appealed to him most,’ wrote one colleague, ‘but as a close second came the burning of pontoon bridges.’ He took particular pleasure in designing a mine in which the train itself acted as the detonator. He also devised an ingenious floating fire-mine which would detonate itself when it hit a pontoon.
In his spare time, he invented booby traps intended to give a nasty surprise to any Nazi unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end. One of the most devious was the innocuously named Release Switch, ‘which could be concealed under a book or a lavatory seat or something of that sort and cause a bang when it was lifted’. Men not in the habit of lifting the toilet seat at last had their excuse.
Most devilish of all was the aptly named Castrator, a concealed, spring-loaded striker that did exactly what it claimed. ‘They were certainly a cheap and effective way of keeping down the birth rate of the Germans,’ noted Stuart Macrae wryly, ‘as they only cost 2/- each.’ 13
All these prototype bombs had to be tested. It was fortunate that the Caxton Street office had a secret stash of plastic explosive that was kept in a locked stationery cupboard. Only one man had the key, a roguish Cockney who ‘habitually and quite naturally talked in rhyming slang’. 14 He had previously earned his living as a gun-runner and boxing promoter, thereby adding a further whiff of illegality to the activities of Caxton Street.
Some of Millis Jefferis’s larger weapons were trialled at the Bedfordshire farm belonging to Cecil Clarke’s brother. It was the ideal place for detonating his powerful incendiary bombs. But the working day was too short for constant trips to the countryside, so Jefferis began to use Richmond Park instead.
Keeping one eye on ramblers, dog-walkers and deer, he detonated increasingly large amounts of explosives. One mine, tightly packed with ammonal powder, caused such a massive explosion that it flung bags of earth into the Richmond skyline and created ‘a most impressive crater’. 15
It was one thing to build weapons for use in guerrilla warfare, quite another to find guerrillas who would be prepared to be dropped behind enemy lines. Gubbins was not immediately clear as to what sort of person would be willing to risk their skin on missions that would lead (as Colonel Chidson was always quick to point out) to certain torture if caught.
The British Army in 1939 was a volunteer force boosted by conscription; its men were poorly trained and not suitable for guerrilla fighting. The British Expeditionary Force offered more fertile recruiting. It had been established in the previous year, in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, and some of the initiates had shown a reasonable degree of competence. But Gubbins knew that it could not spare any manpower in that fraught and uncertain summer.
He therefore elected for a rather more eccentric approach when seeking men for his guerrilla army. He decided to make use of the old public school network, turning to rugby-hardened alumni from schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In particular, he was keen to enlist school-leavers who had gone on to become polar explorers, mountaineers and oil prospectors, men who knew how to survive in a tough environment.
He had few contacts among the old school brigade: it stood at a far remove from the world of his Highland childhood. But he found himself receiving help from an unexpected quarter. Brigadier Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt was an Old Etonian with an impeccable pedigree, ‘tall and polite, an erect, good-looking man, his crisp moustache brushed up’. A well-connected Guards officer, the brigadier had been appointed head of the army’s Intelligence Directorate. He had only recently drawn up a list of fearless, enterprising young men, anticipating their recruitment into his directorate. Now, with characteristic generosity, he handed the list to Gubbins and told him to take his pick.
The names on the list meant little to Gubbins and so he asked Joan Bright for help, since she knew this world far better than him. ‘I was sent over to the War Office to make a preliminary sorting,’ she later recalled, ‘and then to pick out those whose qualifications seemed most suited to training in irregular warfare.’ 16 There were some first-class candidates on Beaumont-Nesbitt’s list. Peter Fleming (Eton and Oxford), Douglas Dodds-Parker (Winchester and Oxford) and Geoffrey Household (Clifton College and Oxford) were three of the six that Joan selected for her initial shortlist. They were soon followed by many more. All shared one thing in common: they had been given an education that, while expensive, had toughened them up and made them immune to hardship.
Once Joan had made her pick, she handed the list to Gubbins. He then embarked on a tour of London’s various gentlemen’s clubs, having learned that many of these men were members of either Boodle’s, Brooks’s or White’s. One of his earliest potential recruits was Peter Wilkinson (Rugby and Cambridge), a young gentleman officer who had only recently joined the Royal Fusiliers. Wilkinson was lunching in the Army and Navy Club one day in the late spring of 1939 when he found himself engaged in conversation by an immaculately dressed, middle-aged stranger with a clipped moustache and a Scottish brogue.
Wilkinson found Gubbins most diverting company. The two of them chatted for a while about the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland and then Gubbins spoke of his desire to learn German. Wilkinson recommended a newly published primer, The Basis and Essentials of German , which he had used to obtain proficiency in the language. Gubbins thanked him, drained his coffee and went on his way.
Wilkinson thought nothing more about the encounter until two days later, when he received an invitation to lunch at a private address in a mews off Marylebone Road. It came from the same Gubbins fellow and it piqued his curiosity. The invitation led him to the back entrance of a vast Regency mansion that faced on to Regent’s Park.
Matters only got stranger when he was invited inside by a servant and led up the back stairs. He found himself ‘faced with what looked like, and proved to be, Epstein’s head of Paul Robeson’. Hanging above it was ‘a magnificent explosion de couleur which on closer examination, proved to be a painting by Kokoschka’. Only later would he discover that the mansion belonged to the wealthy, art-collecting family of Edward Beddington Behrens.
There was no time to admire the art. Wilkinson was led into a vast drawing room where he found Gubbins chatting with two men, a subaltern in the Hussars and a captain in the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, neither of whom he recognized. He still had no idea as to why he had been invited and Gubbins did nothing to enlighten him. The four of them ate a delicious cold luncheon washed down with Chevalier Montrachet, and then finished the meal with wild strawberries. It was not until the coffee arrived, and cognac was being sluiced into crystal balloons, that Gubbins finally explained why the three men had been invited. He told them that if war broke out, as seemed likely, ‘large areas of Europe would be overrun by the Germans and that, in that event, there would be scope for guerrilla activity behind German lines’.
He confessed that ‘he was a member of the secret branch of the War Office’ and that he was looking to build an elite team ‘for training in guerrilla warfare’. They would not have to plan their missions: that would be done by Gubbins and his inner circle. Nor would they have to concern themselves with weaponry. Such things would be dealt with by Millis Jefferis. Their training, too, would be undertaken by a special instructor who would teach them the dark arts of guerrilla warfare. Their task was to be at the sharp end: they were to be dropped behind enemy lines.
Peter Wilkinson listened to what Gubbins had to say, drained his cognac and signed up immediately, though not because he had any particular desire to be a guerrilla. ‘It seemed to me that any job which involved cold luncheons washed down with Chevalier Montrachet and finishing up with fraises des bois merited careful consideration.’ 17
The other two men were also seduced by the lunch. They allowed themselves to be whisked back to the offices in Caxton Street in order to meet the fledgling team that was slowly being assembled. It marked the beginning of a whole new life, one that promised excitement, comradeship and danger. And it was to begin right away.
Joan Bright never ceased to be amazed by Colin Gubbins’s energy and enthusiasm. He was driven by his work and would often remain in the office until long after midnight. But the day’s work was merely the prelude to long hours of after-dark partying, for there was one rule to which Gubbins always adhered: if you worked hard, then you had earned the right to play hard. He put one of his staff, H.B. ‘Perks’ Perkins, in charge of after-hours entertainment. It was a job that Perks took very seriously.
One Caxton Street newcomer was surprised at how Gubbins ‘would come and totally let his hair down’. 18 ‘Great party-goer, great womanizer,’ recalled another. 19 He would party long and hard, consuming impressive quantities of alcohol before ‘going to bed at three or four in the morning’. 20 Then, somewhat sore of head, it was back to the office again at the crack of dawn.
Joan couldn’t help but wonder if poor Mrs Gubbins had ever seen her husband at play. She doubted it, especially after being introduced to the shy, introverted Nonie. ‘She was above all a home-maker,’ she wrote, adding that homemaking ‘was a quality which was stretched to its limit when she met Colin’. 21
International tensions were on the rise throughout the long summer of 1939, leading to a frenzy of activity in Caxton Street. Gubbins made two hastily arranged trips to Warsaw, in order to build contacts with Polish intelligence. There were strong fears that Poland would be Hitler’s first target if and when war broke out.
While Gubbins was away, Joan did her best to make space for all the new recruits. She found it a giddying experience to be surrounded by so many well-groomed young men. ‘Our offices near St James’s Underground became crammed with men and ideas.’ She helped to set up basic courses in guerrilla warfare, with informal lectures by Joe Holland on subversion, wireless communication and local resistance. The venue for these talks was Caxton Hall, a building that was no stranger to subversion, having once been used by the suffragette movement for its ‘Women’s Parliament’. Joan had good reason for choosing it, aware that ‘the constant comings and goings gave good cover to the small and highly secret groups of young men in plain clothes.’ 22 She kept an eye on the new recruits as they were put through their classes and felt certain that, given time, they would prove a highly effective force.
But time was not on their side. On Saturday, 19 August, Gubbins received alarming news from the War Office. British intelligence had been tipped off about Hitler’s intention to invade Poland before the end of the month. Three days later, the entire world was stunned to learn that Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov had signed a German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The fate of Poland now seemed sealed. It was surely only a matter of time before Hitler would send his troops over the frontier.
Gubbins knew that he had to act – and fast. He needed to get his ‘left wing’ into Poland in order that they might help to organize resistance to any invading German Army. He also wanted to renew the links he had made with senior Polish intelligence officials. It was unfortunate that his fledgling guerrillas had only undergone the most rudimentary training and had precious little idea about how to fight an underground war, let alone coach others in such warfare. But another trip to Poland would, at the very least, give them a better sense of the Polish will to resist.
Speed was essential. Gubbins had just three days to assemble his team and head for Warsaw. The men were to travel incognito and in the greatest possible secrecy. It was imperative that the Germans knew nothing of what was taking place.
Among those chosen to join the mission was Peter Wilkinson, who realized that his days of quaffing chilled Chevalier Montrachet were probably at an end. Not entirely sure as to what he should pack for guerrilla warfare against the Nazis, he sought the counsel of his ageing stepfather, a veteran of the First World War.
The old man had ready advice. Hunting wire-cutters and a liquid prismatic compass, those were the two essentials. He told Peter to take himself off to the Army and Navy Stores on Victoria Street and buy the best he could get. Peter did as instructed, somewhat puzzled as to how a liquid prismatic compass would help him defeat the Nazis.
The day for departure came soon enough. Joan made her way to Victoria Station to wave them off. ‘Twenty men in civilian clothes, their passports identifying them as insurance agents, commercial travellers, entertainers, agricultural experts.’ She was swept up by the excitement of it all: ‘A deadly secret cell in a big body of naval ratings, soldiers and airmen.’
Yet as she handed the men their passports, she was shocked to learn that Caxton Street had made its first fundamental blunder. ‘It was a sign of our immaturity in such matters that the numbers on the brand-new passports were consecutive.’ 23 It was as if a school group were heading to the battlefront. In wartime, such a slip could cost them their lives.
If the mission began as farce, it rapidly turned into comedy. Peter Wilkinson had been warned of the importance of travelling inconspicuously. He was therefore a little dismayed when he met his fellow guerrillas at Victoria Station. Far from looking inconspicuous, they could have been heading to a fancy dress party.
Gubbins himself was wearing a bright green pork pie hat and clutching a diplomatic bag; Hugh Curteis was in tartan trews; ‘Boy’ Lloyd-Jones had chosen to disguise himself in a grey pin-stripe suit and seedy bowler hat. Wilkinson took one glance at him and decided that ‘he looked like an absconding banker’. 24 Another member of the party, Tommy Davis, had made the effort to come in civilian clothes, but somewhat spoiled the effect by wearing a Brigade of Guards tie.
It was too late to change clothes: the train was ready to depart for Dover. As Joan wished them good luck, she happened to glance at the sky and noticed the first barrage balloons being installed, ‘mute white forerunners of London’s ordeal by raid’. 25 She felt suddenly depressed. Although she had spent the last four months helping to prepare for war, only now did the reality strike home. The barrage balloons reminded her of her frightening childhood during the First World War.
Gubbins and his team took an extraordinarily circuitous route to Poland so as not to arouse German suspicions. They travelled by train to Marseille, by boat to Alexandria and then by plane to Warsaw. By the time they arrived in Poland, it was all too late. German troops had stormed across the Polish frontier on the first day of September and the first bombs were already raining down on the suburbs of Warsaw.
Gubbins managed to renew contact with the brilliant Polish intelligence agent Stanislav Gano, head of Poland’s Deuxième Bureau. He also snatched meetings with members of the fledgling Polish resistance. ‘This tragic fortnight has been an unceasing rush, tearing round night and day in fast cars over primitive roads, trying to find out what is happening and why; rushing back to send wires to London and then dashing off to some new area of activity.’ 26
There was no time for guerrilla warfare: as the Germans pushed deeper into Poland, Gubbins realized that the game was up. He told his team to scatter and flee from the country in whatever way they could. Gubbins himself headed southwards in the company of Peter Wilkinson, who was somewhat disappointed by his first guerrilla mission. He had not even used his wire-cutters.
The two of them made it safely to Bucharest, where they got royally drunk at the infamous Colorado Club and flirted with a dancing bar-girl-cum-spy called Mickey Mouse. Wilkinson recognized her from a nightclub that he had once frequented in Prague. When he reintroduced himself, she seemed delighted to meet him again and reminded him of his ‘nightly rendering of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”’.
He and Gubbins finished their drinks and staggered off to the Nippon Club, where they got completely ‘bottled’. They ended the evening ‘with two very amusing girls and two bottles of fizz’ – and all for less than a pound. It was a strange sort of guerrilla warfare.
Wilkinson kept a diary for his mother, who was longing to know if being a guerrilla was as romantic as it sounded. But he omitted the drinking, the womanizing and even the secret meetings with Polish intelligence officers. His mother was most disappointed and complained that his diary ‘might have been written by a curate accompanying a party of Victorian spinsters’. 27 The truth was very different. Gubbins and Wilkinson had used their trip to create vital links with Polish intelligence.
Gubbins returned to London in October and found he had acquired a new nickname. Everyone in the office was now calling him Gubbski, on account of the friendships he had forged. Joan quizzed him about his Polish jaunt – not just the most recent one, but his previous two trips as well – but Gubbins proved reluctant to give anything away.
In the absence of hard news, wild rumours began to circulate throughout the office. There were stories that Gubbins had led secret discussions between Polish and British agents; that there had been a clandestine meeting in Poland’s Pyry Forest; and most bizarre of all, that a heavily disguised British man (with the moniker of Professor Sandwich) had brought together a team of British and Polish cryptanalysts.
Joan would never get to the bottom of Gubbins’s work in Poland; it was just one more mystery in an office whose raison d’être was subterfuge and deception. But others who scratched at the surface of the story began to suspect that the curious Professor Sandwich – facilitator of everything – had been Gubbins in disguise.
There are few certainties about Gubbins’s three trips to Poland and the Professor Sandwich files – if they still exist – remain behind lock and key to this day. But one thing is clear: the rumoured meeting in Pyry Forest did indeed take place, and it ended with a British agent named Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale being handed a bulky leather holdall. He was instructed to deliver it to London as a matter of urgency.
When Biffy peered inside the bag, he found that it contained a strange-looking machine built of rotors, cogs and an illuminated keyboard. Resembling some sort of futuristic typewriter, it was so valuable that the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, turned up in person at Victoria Station to collect it.
Menzies had been making his way to a formal dinner when he was brought news of the machine’s imminent arrival. He caused something of a stir on the station concourse by pitching up in full dress uniform, ‘with the rosette of the Legion d’honneur in his button hole’. 28
It was a suitably flamboyant welcome for a parcel that was to prove of supreme value to the British war effort. For the machine – filched from the Nazis and transferred to Britain with the aid of Gubbins’s Polish contacts – was called Enigma.
Its destination was Bletchley Park.