At the time of Stand Down, volunteers were told that ‘no public recognition would be possible due to the secret nature of their duties’ and that, since no written records of service had been kept, they were not eligible for the Defence Medal.1
John Warwicker
Two young men, Bob and Tony, piled into the back of a fifteen-hundredweight truck and were driven out of the back gates of Coleshill House into the Wiltshire countryside. It was midnight and pitch black; the moon and stars obscured by clouds. They drove for about fifteen minutes and then the truck stopped and they were ordered to jump out. The truck sped off into the night leaving them on the side of the road with the roar of the engine ringing in their ears. Bob felt for a packet of cigarettes but Tony signalled to him to put them back in his pocket. He cocked his finger, indicating that Bob should follow him into the wood where they could whisper. Their task was to find their way back to the house undetected. ‘We were given a general map of the area and left to find our own way in pairs,’ Bob Millard explained. ‘We had to make a mark in chalk on one of the vehicles abandoned in the grounds to prove we had got back unseen and unchallenged.’
They set off in the direction they had worked out from the plan and made their way back towards Coleshill. They knew there were at least two patrols out and they had to sneak past them to reach the woods on the outskirts of the estate where the cover was better and they could hide. Every leaf seemed to crackle beneath their feet and even their breathing sounded loud in the windless, silent night. Key to being undiscovered was learning how to stand still if they heard a sound close by and melt into the background as close to a tree as possible. ‘If you stay dead still they [the enemy] can pass right close to you and not see you. They might know you are there but they cannot see you,’ Bob explained. Crawling through the undergrowth close to the wall they managed to avoid being spotted and within two hours they had made it back into the grounds and reached the vehicles. Bob took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and marked his sign on the side of the lorry. He grinned at Tony who looked dishevelled, his blackened face smeared with sweat and his knife still between his teeth. He took his cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one and drew on it with satisfaction. They had done it. ‘It was all good boy scout stuff,’ he recalled sixty years later.
Bob Millard was just nineteen years old when he went to Coleshill House for the first time in 1941 – not that he ever set foot in the mansion. He and his fellow trainees slept and ate in the stables and used the grounds for night training in order to learn techniques of sabotage, unarmed combat and night patrols. Bob had volunteered to become part of a secret organisation of stay-behind parties sited all over Britain who would aim to slow the progress of a German invasion by targeting their fuel dumps, ammunition stores and basic infrastructure, such as bridges and railway lines. These ‘Auxiliary Units’ were called into being in the summer of 1940 when the threat of invasion was at its most intense. They were so secret that many of the men who volunteered only found out fifty years later that someone they had known well was in a neighbouring patrol. ‘Our sergeant, Jack Wyld, had a contact outside of the patrol because he came along with things we had to do. But we knew nobody else. In fact, with patrol members, there were two or three one only knew by Christian name or nickname.’2
The men who volunteered to be involved in the stay-behind sabotage parties represented a cross-section of the Britons that would never willingly submit to being ruled by an invader. They formed a slice of village life from earls, vicars and doctors to gamekeepers, boy scouts, poachers, and farm labourers. They were people who knew the land around their village like the back of their hand and who would quickly learn how to live off it when called to. Their training, like everything else about their patrols, had to be secret and the location of Coleshill House as their base was ideally located close to Swindon with its excellent railway network, but so well hidden within its grounds that its true nature was never uncovered. Without signposts the recruits did not know where they were, so circuitous were the routes taken by the drivers when picking up men to drive them to the house.
The last invasion of Britain had been by revolutionary France in February 1797 during the War of the First Coalition when the French landed at Carregwastad Head in Pembrokeshire. The Battle of Fishguard lasted for three days from 22 to 24 February when the French were beaten back and forced to surrender by a hastily assembled mixture of British Forces and the civilian population. It was short-lived but a painful memory nevertheless. The threat between June and September 1940 was of far greater moment and on 4 June the prime minister made his rousing speech in the House of Commons promising that Britons would fight on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets. He is purported to have sat down after the speech and muttered to a colleague ‘and we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!’3
Is that really all Britain had? No, of course not, but the retreat from Dunkirk had seen the British Expeditionary Force obliged to abandon the majority of its kit and equipment (from vehicles to weaponry large and small) while 60,000 men were taken prisoner, including whole battalions at St Valery. And yet, despite the initial disarray, Britain had not only the remains of the British Expeditionary Force but, over the next few weeks, it acquired a large number of foreign servicemen who would stand by Britain and fight on behalf of the Allies for the rest of the war. These were men from Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Holland and other countries, numbering in the tens of thousands, and their contribution was essential.
Churchill’s oration motivated the British public and engendered a spirit of singular focus so that when volunteers were called for to create an ad hoc stay-behind-the-lines fighting force to hold up the Germans should they invade, there was no shortage of applicants.
War is about killing. Kill or be killed. And the Second World War was a period of almost limitless development in the art of killing human beings, following just two decades after the First World War in which mechanised warfare made unprecedented advances. Increased variety and methods of extermination led to atrocities against civilian populations as well as the military, escalating from the aerial bombardment of cities and devastating U-boat attacks in the Atlantic to the ultimate horror of the atomic bomb. The annihilation of millions of men, women and children in concentration camps lent a new dreadfulness to the word holocaust.
The British sought to exploit brilliant minds to come up with inventive ways of sabotaging the enemy’s powerful war machine. The development of technology was critical and the race was on to keep ahead of the enemy. Radar, code-breaking and intelligence were some of the methods developed and used. Guerrilla combat, or as Churchill called it, the art of ‘ungentlemanly warfare’, was just another arrow in the government’s quiver and it was not new. In the early nineteenth century, the first irregulars to tackle an army were Spanish guerrilleros ‘who fought their “little war” against Napoleon’. Later, the French had their own irregulars known as francs-tireurs (free shooters) ‘who took on the might of the Prussian army during the war of 1870–71 and had a lasting effect on the psyche of the German soldiers in both the First and Second World Wars.’ 4 The term ‘guerrilla’ was widely used for the first time in the Second World War.
Within the British Army’s experience there was a tradition of subversive tactics developed by T. E. Lawrence during the First World War and the IRA during the Troubles in the 1920s. These methods were expanded during the Second World War by the British to equip amongst others the Commandos, the agents of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Auxiliary Units. Guerrilla combat was ideally suited to a mobile war and its strategy of subversive disruption, distraction and sabotage made it a useful tool for the Allies.
At the same time that Lawrence Grand, head of Section D of MI6, was studying guerrilla subterfuge, a separate committee was formed to examine and analyse campaigns in Spain and China where such tactics had been used. It had a secret brief as well, which was ‘to consider how British support might be provided to resistance efforts in Europe should the German Army march and conquer east.’5 This was called GS(R) – General Staff (Research) – and was run by Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. C. ‘Jo’ Holland. Older than Lawrence Grand by a few months, Holland had seen service in the First World War and in Dublin during the Troubles, where he was badly wounded. He had admired the technical skills of his Irish guerrilla opponents even if they had been used against him. By 1938, declared unfit for war service, he joined the War Office and chose to research irregular warfare. Initially he was the only officer in GS(R). Historian M. R. D. Foot wrote: ‘Holland’s Irish experiences led his lively imagination well outside the normal range of military thinking at the time.’6 In early 1939 Holland’s section was renamed MI(R), standing for Military Intelligence (Research), and a quote from a minute from the section’s war diary introduction reads: ‘I have introduced a research section directly under me. This section must be small, almost anonymous, go where they like, talk to whom they like but be kept from files, correspondence and telephone calls.’7
The need to keep a lid on the secret nature of his work meant that Holland felt safest recruiting men who were, if not personally known to him, at least known to be like-minded. Each new recruit was given a specific task, such as securing intelligence from prisoners of war, developing code names or inventing secret gadgets. Holland’s section worked alongside Section D, and agreed ‘on a rough division of labour: MI(R) would cover tasks that could be tackled by troops in uniform, while Section D would look into undercover, unavowable work.’8 Eventually these two groups, along with the propaganda arm of the Foreign Office, amalgamated to become Special Operations Executive, or SOE. This highly secret organisation, so secret in fact that it was never referred to by its name during the war, but by its cover name, the Interservices Research Bureau, helped to bring down Hitler and Mussolini, as well as fighting against the Japanese in the Far East before it was quietly wound up in early 1946.
One of Holland’s recruits was his friend of twenty years Colonel Colin McVean Gubbins, an army officer with a distinguished First World War record and a holder of the Military Cross. It is this man who arguably had the greatest direct impact on the development of underground warfare both in Britain and in occupied Europe. Gubbins was born in Japan in 1896 and from the age of seven lived with his maternal grandparents and maiden aunts on the Isle of Mull, the beautiful Scottish island due west of Oban. One of the aunts, Elsie, believed in toughening up young boys. He was told that ‘Scottish boys were harder than English and should never admit to being hungry or cold: “Run around the house twice if you are cold” was the cure for that,’9 he said, years later. He did not see his own parents for five years but he described his childhood as blissfully happy. These early years gave him a love of all things Scottish and particularly of the Highlanders whom he trusted implicitly. Although he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he was always considered by the military as something of an outsider. He was particularly impressed by men he encountered in the Territorial Army and he appreciated their constructive criticism of military procedures and practices. ‘While many soldiers, sceptical of civilians, might have discouraged such comments, Gubbins encouraged them.’10 He disliked bureaucracy and hide-bound ways of thinking, so he was in most ways the ideal fit for the role of a training instructor in subversive techniques. The only outward expression of his willingness to ignore the rules was the fact that he usually wore a kilt, which was now against army regulations.
Just before the outbreak of the Great War, Gubbins was in Heidelberg learning German and had to make a frantic dash back to Britain to avoid arrest. He succeeded by disguising himself as a child and later wrote: ‘My escape from being imprisoned in Germany was entirely due to the kindness of the Englishman, a complete stranger, who lent me £1 on Cologne platform.’11 Gubbins was at Ypres for the first and second battles, then on the Somme where he won his Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry, organising a rescue party for wounded men who had suffered when one of his guns had been blown up. He was shot in the neck on the Somme in October and was in hospital for eleven days; he was gassed in 1917 and suffered from trench fever in April 1918, but was fit enough to join General Ironside, later commander-in-chief of the Home Forces, as ADC (aide-de-camp) on the autumn mission to Archangel in Russia to prepare a winter campaign.
After the war, aged twenty-three, Gubbins was sent to Ireland where he was given a three-day course in guerrilla warfare and, like Holland, observed the methods used by the nationalists at first hand. In 1923 he learned Russian and then went to India to learn Urdu. Promoted to major in February 1934, Gubbins was posted to the War Office and appointed general staff officer grade 2 in a new section of MTI (Military Training Instruction), which was the policy-making arm of the Military Training Directorate. In this role he was sent in 1938 to Czechoslovakia to oversee the withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland. It was something that he found exceptionally repugnant and it remained a matter of lasting shame to him for the rest of his life. It also gave him a first-hand view of the brutal force of Nazi expansion.
It was these experiences and his ability to command loyalty and affection, while communicating energy that reminded Holland that he would be ideal to explore the possibility of the British giving support for insurgents working against the Germans in any Nazi-occupied country. He chose Gubbins to be responsible for organisation, recruitment and training, and recruited an expert in explosives and demolitions for sabotage. Gubbins described his first meeting with Holland in his new role:
. . . a cold hand took me literally by the back of the neck and a voice I knew said ‘what are you doing for lunch today?’ I whipped round – it was Jo Holland – and I replied that I was going to my regimental races at Sandown; there, beside me, were my field-glasses. ‘No you are not,’ he replied. ‘You are to lunch with me; the CIGS says so.’ We knew each other very well and I naturally agreed. In a private room at St Ermin’s Hotel I found the real host, who was waiting for us there.12
The expert in explosives who joined them at the lunch was a ‘somewhat eccentric and extremely able Sapper major’ called Millis Jefferis, who Gubbins also knew from earlier days. Jefferis was to perform with distinction in Commando raids in Norway in the spring of 1940 and later would go on to run ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’. In that role he developed twenty-six different devices to assist with regular and irregular warfare.
Holland, who was both far seeing and imaginative with a first-class brain, was also a severely practical and down-to-earth man. He asked Gubbins to write two pamphlets: The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, and The Partisan Leader’s Handbook. Jefferis wrote a third pamphlet, How to Use High Explosives. Gubbins said later: ‘My difficulty was that, strangely enough, there was not a single book to be found in any library in any language which dealt with this subject.’13 Those three pamphlets became compulsory reading for every would-be agent and trainee guerrilla over the years of the Second World War. He wrote them in 2 Caxton Street and was amused by the eccentricities of Lawrence Grand and his obsession with secrecy but he found the revolutionary nature of the work exhilarating. The Art of Guerrilla Warfare begins with a statement outlining the general principles: ‘The object of guerrilla warfare is to harass the enemy in every way possible within all the territory he holds to such an extent that he is eventually incapable either of embarking on a war or of continuing one that may already have commenced.’14
The military elite found the idea of this type of activity distasteful and Gubbins’ popularity did not improve as a result. There was a residual dislike of the idea of guerrilla tactics which were seen among some of the older officers as unfair or unsporting. Some of the methods Gubbins was to go on to recommend were nothing short of murderous but he was unapologetic: the foe was pitiless. Gubbins was under no illusion that guerrilla warfare would win the war, but he understood that it could prove to be a useful additional weapon in Britain’s armoury. He also recognised that expertise in this kind of attack could greatly boost the morale of underground resistance networks in occupied countries. This expertise could be passed onto men and women on the ground and SOE could further back them up with supplies of weapons and communication equipment which would make a significant difference in the long run.
Gubbins was described by his biographer and the woman in charge of the Secret Intelligence Centre in the Cabinet War Rooms, Joan Bright Astley as:
. . . quiet-mannered, quiet-spoken, energetic, efficient and charming. A ‘still-waters-running-deep’ sort of man, he had just enough of the buccaneer in him to make lesser men underrate his gifts of leadership, courage and integrity. He was a man-at-arms campaigner, the fires banked up inside him were as glowing as those round which his Celtic ancestors had gathered. He was dark and short, his fingers square, his clothes immaculate and in peacetime he wore a carnation in his buttonhole.
Holland’s department expanded over the summer of 1939 and Gubbins was given a free hand to pick whoever he thought fit to work in clandestine work: Polar explorers, oil executives, British expat businessmen and regular army officers with specialist experience or expertise.
In early August 1939, Gubbins was sent to Warsaw to make contact with the Polish intelligence where he met Stanislav Gano, head of the Deuxième Bureau, who was described as ‘a brilliant agent’.
The Poles had the best intelligence services in Europe, not least because they had spent so much of their time squeezed between enemy neighbours. Douglas Dodds-Parker wrote of them: ‘with generations of clandestine action behind them, they had educated the rest of us.’15
The Polish Cipher Bureau had already cracked the code of the German Enigma machine in December 1932 with the help of French intelligence and had been reading much of Germany’s military and political communications for more than six years. The British were incredulous. Just before the war broke out the Poles, fearing an invasion and the loss of this priceless intelligence asset, sent replicas of Enigma to Britain and France with detailed instructions on how to use it.16
Gubbins had the great skill of making good and trusting friends quickly. ‘My appointment to Warsaw in the event of war had been arranged in July with the DMI, so that I had two roles, the official one as Chief Staff Officer, and the unofficial “to stimulate and assist the Poles and Czechs in Guerrilla warfare.” ’17 He returned to Britain on 19 August with the intelligence that in all likelihood Germany would invade Poland before the end of the month. Four days later, Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the German—Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow. The fate of Poland was sealed as far as Holland, Gubbins and everyone in MI(R) was concerned. Gubbins’s role was now to get the MI(R) element to Warsaw before the German invasion took place. He realised he needed to return immediately and set out overland for Poland, via France, Egypt and Romania as the direct route led through hostile countries and was far too dangerous. Arriving in Bucharest on 1 September he heard that the Germans had bombed the airfields around Warsaw, so he and his delegation took taxis to the border and travelled by train to the capital. He spent ten days in Warsaw talking to contacts in the security services but the mood in the country was gloomy. The army was at a loss in the face of overwhelming aggression from the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht. Gubbins was forced to withdraw, heartbroken. He described their retreat:
Lunch had been arranged for us at a hotel in Lyublin and we sat inside, still wearing our civilian clothes as our country was not at war. While having our meal we heard on the radio that Britain had declared war on Germany. I immediately ordered my officers and men to put on their uniforms and we went out into the town square to rejoin our buses. The square was completely filled by a huge crowd, cheering and shouting ‘England is beside us. Long live England.’ We were each of us lifted bodily into the air and carried into our buses already loaded with flowers. My heart was filled with sadness and foreboding.18
The mission arrived back in Bucharest on 14 September only to be forced to leave a week later when Romanian prime minister Armand Călinescu was murdered. Gubbins finally returned to London on 4 October, having spent a week helping General Carton de Wiart VC, one of the most striking figures in the British Army, write up a report on the Polish campaign. Two vital items came back from Poland. Gubbins brought a time-pencil – a fuse designed to be connected to a detonator – which would be so useful for SOE, and the Enigma machine, which the Poles had been working on had been sent to Bletchley Park and would prove vital in helping finally to break the naval Enigma code.
Back in London, Holland gave Gubbins the task of trying to establish contact with the Polish and Czech underground forces. For the next few months he worked on this project, spending time in Paris with the Polish and Czech general staffs who were established there at the invitation of the French government. The contacts he made would prove useful in the medium term but events began to change rapidly as the German advance of spring 1940 transformed the face of Europe in a matter of weeks.
By March, Gubbins was back in Britain on Holland’s orders. He was put in charge of preparing and training selected assault troops who would make amphibious raids on Norway’s western seaboard, an initiative keenly advocated by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Gubbins realised that battalions would be too large and unwieldy and he recommended small raiding parties which Holland proposed to name Independent Companies, forerunners of the Commandos. These companies would be armed and equipped to operate independently for up to a month. Crucially the men were volunteers from the regular army, as Gubbins and Holland recognised their roles would put them in great personal danger. Ten Independent Companies, each comprising twenty-one officers and 268 men, were formed in mid-April and moved to Scotland to train. The soldiers were drawn from the Signals, the Royal Engineers and the Infantry. Gubbins joined the trainees in Scotland and on 2 May was given command of SCISSORFORCE, comprising four Independent Companies. His brief was to prevent the Germans from occupying three Norwegian towns: Bodø, Mo and Mosjøen. These missions in Norway ultimately failed, but Gubbins gained first-hand experience of fighting the Wehrmacht and he was deemed to be the man of the moment. He showed himself to be a bold and resourceful commander of these small groups and was awarded a DSO for his leadership. Crucially his experiences had taught him the importance of thorough training and preparation for guerrilla warfare. He had also learned how single-mindedly ruthless the Nazis were prepared to be. He wrote: ‘This was total war, and total war is a very cruel business indeed.’19
The Blitzkrieg, launched on 10 May, the day that Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, followed three weeks later by the evacuation from Dunkirk, shook Gubbins as it did everyone. He said that the sight of Germans on the French coast caused him the first real shock of the war. Everyone from Churchill down feared an imminent invasion, probably within six weeks. The focus for those involved in secret training was to put the methods learned to good use in defence of the country. ‘By mid-June the numbing incredulity produced by the Dunkirk evacuation and the arrival of German forces on the Channel coast had given place to a sense of frantic urgency to prepare a virtually defenceless Britain for an invasion which at the time appeared inevitable.’20
On his return from Norway, Gubbins was put in charge of preparing home-grown guerrilla units which would have one mission: to attack, sabotage and disrupt the invaders in any possible way. The idea now was to train small groups of civilians as stay-behind resistance fighters. Gubbins wrote:
The immediate circumstances necessitated the highest degree of decentralization from the start . . . they must be very small units, locally raised, and able to melt away after action. So there was no need for transport, and wireless too was out of the question. The highest possible degree of secrecy must be maintained.21
Some stashes of arms and explosives had already been left by Lawrence Grand’s D Section officers in various dumps around the country in anticipation of invasion. On his instructions, drawn up in a briefing document on 31 May 1940, before the evacuation from Dunkirk was complete, thirty regional officers distributed incendiary weapons for stay-behind parties to use in the event of invasion. It was ad hoc and not carefully planned. M. R. D. Foot wrote: ‘Combining haste with secrecy led too often to muddle. D Section’s attempts in midsummer 1940 to arrange stay-behind parties, to disrupt the communications of a German invasion that was expected shortly, caused such confusion that the whole project was handed over to Holland.’22 Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary effort, as a more recent historian, Malcolm Atkins, has pointed out. It took Lawrence Grand just a matter of days to lay the basis for an entire network of civilians prepared to undertake guerrilla activities.
Holland told Gubbins that his task was to create order out of chaos and to organise small bands of men to work in patrols against the invaders. Groups were overseen on a county or area basis by regular army officers given the cover title of intelligence officers, even though they were not part of the Intelligence Corps. These officers worked round the clock to find the men and women who would be trusted to work in the new companies. Some of the youngest were under military age while others were considerably beyond. Only men were to be trained in guerrilla tactics to work in the Auxiliary Units. The women, some of the boys and the older men were recruited to work as observers. These recruits belonged to the Special Duties Section (SDS) and their job was to learn how to recognise high-ranking German officers, to memorise number plates and to count passersby inconspicuously. There were over four thousand civilians involved in this type of intelligence work.
Civilians would be expected not to flee in the face of invasion but remain in their ordinary jobs having been trained to collect and communicate intelligence. Within the SDS there were agents, coast watchers and runners. These last, often boy scouts, were tasked with passing information from agent to radio operator via secret or dead-letter drops. They were taught how to use hollowed-out and sleeved door-knocker studs or the hinges of otherwise derelict five-bar gates. These were installed on the direction of a man called Douglas Ingram, an SDS intelligence officer in Norfolk, whose brother was in MI6. His favourite DLD (dead-letter drop) ‘was the identifying number plate pinned into a telegraph pole. Once the plate was first removed it was straightforward to hollow out the core of the pole and fit a sleeve to take the rolled-up message. Once the DLD had been set up, the runner knew it held a message from the agent if the number plate was upside down.’23 It didn’t stop there. The runner had to take the precious hidden message to a local garden refuse dump and find a tennis ball with a cut in the cover. The message was slipped inside the ball and taken to the stump of a beech tree. ‘This had been carefully sawn horizontally and fitted with an off-centre pivot. When rotated by someone in the know, a hollow section was disclosed and this married with a terracotta water pipe passing downward into the ground.’24 At the other end of the pipe was a radio operator in a hidden bunker. She would take the message from the tennis ball and pass on its contents via her radio transmitter. ‘The coded messages were received directly, or through relay stations, at in-stations situated at local army HQ, assessed by an intelligence officer and passed upward to the CO if necessary.’25 Runners had to learn to be inconspicuous; radio operators inscrutable when going about their work and the letter drops had to be checked regularly to make sure they remained fully functional but undiscovered. In all there were some 200 secret radio transmitters operated by trained civilian signals staff working for the SDS.
The men who were chosen to carry out sabotage were the type who would not stand out in their community. They had to be able to fade into the surroundings once they had carried out an attack so no one questioned by the Germans would be able to point at an individual and name him. The majority of them, like Bob Millard, had served in the Home Guard. His friend, Anthony Bentley-Hunt, ‘Tony’, asked him one evening if he wanted to join something that was a bit more exciting than the Home Guard. Bob replied immediately ‘ “Yes, I’m willing to try anything”. So we went to a house in Bathwick Street where we met a chap called Jack Wyld. He asked us all about our families, about our knowledge of the neighbourhood, our knowledge of weapons. He produced a 9mm Barretta, I remember, which he field-stripped in front of us and said, “Can you put that back together again?” Fortunately, being of a practical nature and watching what he was doing, I could. “Right-ho,” he said, “come back in a week”.’26
Jack Wyld checked out the two boys and when they returned the following week he asked them whether they would like to join the Auxiliary Units.
‘Our job will be to go underground if there is an invasion, bob up behind the Germans, and act as saboteurs.’ Well, to a teenager, it sounded very interesting, so we said ‘Yes, we would’. Before that though, before he mentioned it to us, he said, ‘If you are going to join, I’m going to have to swear you to secrecy.’ So we were sworn to secrecy and had to sign the Official Secrets Act before we were told any details.27
All the men who joined were warned that if they were caught by the invading Germans they would be treated as agents: tortured then executed. They were also told that the life expectancy of a stay-behind fighter would be about fifteen days if the Germans invaded. Although they were told the job would be a dangerous one they probably had no idea just how vulnerable they would become if the invasion occurred. ‘To be fair to the powers-that-be, nor did anyone else,’28 concluded John Warwicker.
On 16 July Hitler showed his hand. In his Führer Directive No. 16 he set out his plans to his senior Nazi colleagues and the military planners:
As England, in spite of the hopelessness of its military position, has so far shown itself unwilling to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England.
This operation is dictated by the necessity of eliminating Great Britain as a base from which the war against Germany can be fought, and if necessary the island will be occupied.29
Herman Kindred was a farmer in Suffolk when he was recruited that month. He was conducting routine duties with the Home Guard when he was taken to a local village hall and asked if he would be prepared to ‘join something special’. Like Bob Millard, he was warned it might be dangerous and he would have to keep it absolutely secret. Kindred considered the offer and, like Millard, thought it sounded more interesting than standing around with the Home Guard so he accepted, albeit cautiously. The man interviewing him, Captain Andrew Croft, told him:
You may be the man we are looking for. We have already started work along the south coast and are now in a hurry to sort out East Anglia. You will be checked out. Could you get another five or six men you can absolutely trust? They have got to be patriotic and determined and, above all, must know the land like the back of their hands. You see, the Germans are coming and they are a ruthless lot. We have to make special preparations because they could invade at any moment.30
Croft, who was the intelligence officer in charge of Essex and South Suffolk, was a distinguished member of Gubbins’ team. He had been the deputy leader on an Arctic expedition to Nordaustland for which he had been awarded the Polar Medal. He was said to be able to make himself understood in ten languages, but, most significantly, he had witnessed the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1933 when he was there studying German. He had no illusions about the Nazis’ methods and knew that an invasion would be brutal.
When the Germans invaded Norway, Croft was in Bergen. He succeeded in evading them by walking over the mountains and reaching the evacuating British Forces. It was there that he met Gubbins. By the end of the war Croft had been involved in many missions with SOE and had himself led over twenty sorties into enemy territory. For now, he was busy recruiting suitable men for the Auxiliary Units. It is a mark of how serious the situation was in the country that people of such calibre as Andrew Croft were involved in screening would-be stay-behind saboteurs.
Recruiting was undertaken by the intelligence officers in the first instance but the vetting was done internally within the patrols. If a new member was judged not to be pulling his weight or refused to turn up for training in bad weather, for example, he would find himself rejected by the core members with the threat ringing in his ears that if he ever spoke about their work he would face a grim and swift reckoning. In this way the patrol could get rid of leaders as well as rank and file men. Men of one patrol would not know the identities of men from adjacent groups. Nor would they know where the neighbouring operational bases were. This was designed to lead to foolproof secrecy in the event of capture.
However secret the operating units had to be, they needed to be trained to a certain standard and in clandestine activities that could not easily be taught in the local drill hall. Colonel Gubbins needed to find a suitable property for training exercises. As men and women would be travelling from all over Britain, it was crucial to have a secret base in a central part of the country that was sparsely inhabited but within reach of public transport.
As well as being close to the rail hub of Swindon, Coleshill House, near Highworth in Wiltshire, was entirely surrounded by its own parkland and had extensive woods, fields and streams, with a quarry located on the edge of the wood for explosives training. In and around the quarry a few old army trucks and armoured vehicles were used as targets. The great advantage was that the house and grounds were not overlooked by any other property other than Coleshill’s own lodge so it was truly a secret location. In addition, there were extensive outbuildings which could be put to good use as accommodation for the trainees, lecture rooms, offices and the obligatory NAAFI. The kitchen for feeding the Auxiliary Units was set up in the old brewery. In the early days some of the officers’ wives were obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act in order to have access to the site to help out with the cooking.
Coleshill House was purportedly the first house in England to be built for a ‘minor’ gentleman in the classical manner. It was the work of the architect Sir Roger Pratt to a design influenced by Inigo Jones, for his cousin, Sir George Pratt, and was completed in 1662. The house remained in the family throughout the next 275 years and had the unusual fate of remaining virtually unaltered. Also, some aspects of the original design meant that the house was already fairly suited to the style of living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, the house had central corridors running through all three floors which meant that the main rooms were private rather than having to act as passageways as was the norm in older large houses. The other novelty was a servants’ staircase, which became very useful during the war when the house was occupied by the officers of the Auxiliary Units. One of Pratt’s other architectural innovations was the matching storeys. Many larger houses built in the period were in the Palladian manner with a piano nobile as the first floor, with grand state rooms, and smaller rooms with lower ceilings above.
While the exterior of Coleshill was handsome, symmetrical and all of one style, it was the interiors that were most noteworthy. The handsome central staircase sprang out of the hall for two storeys and was lit by a beautiful cupola. The hall and staircase were further lit by huge windows, so that the sense was of a brightly lit space with carefully placed detail. Nine niches in the wall in the entrance hall were filled with portrait busts. These niches, it was said, would be filled by nine spectral cats if the family were ever threatened with evil. No one who occupied Coleshill during the war ever mentioned the cats so it is safe to assume the family was not threatened by the guests from Gubbins’ Auxiliary Units.
The interior decoration in the main rooms was lavish: great carved wreaths of flowers and fruit adorned the staircase and some of the walls, while the ceilings in most of the ground-floor rooms were deeply coffered with fine classical motifs carved into the recesses. Each room had a different style of carving, some Dutch, others Italianate or French. The main drawing room was filled with family portraits and had the most elaborate coffered ceiling of all. A magnificent chandelier hung from the richly decorated oval above the centre of the room. The first floor had suites for the family and above them, on the second floor, there were thirteen bedrooms, designed for use by the servants.
When Sir George Pratt died his sister inherited Coleshill. She was married to Thomas Pleydell and their only daughter, Harriet, married the Hon. William Bouverie, Viscount Folkestone and Baron Longford. He was later created Baron Pleydell Bouverie and 2nd Earl of Radnor in 1765 and the conjoined name stuck. The principle Radnor seat is Longford Castle near Salisbury and by the early twentieth century Coleshill House, with some forty rooms, was occupied by the Earl of Radnor’s sisters – the renowned English potter Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, and Mary, or ‘Mollie’ – and their dogs.
Katharine, known always as Bina, had trained as a potter with Bernard Leach at his pottery in St Ives, but in 1925, at the age of thirty, she set up a studio at Coleshill where there was an abundance of clay, water and trees to provide the large quantities of wood to fire the double-chamber kiln that she had built in the grounds. She used ash glazes prepared from wood and vegetation from the trees and plants growing at Coleshill. This gave her work a particular look which had a similar style to Bronze Age English pottery. Cole Pottery, as the style was called, remained active until the outbreak of the Second World War when it had to close in order to comply with blackout restriction. As the firings took thirty-six hours it was not possible to confine them to daylight hours.
Bina and Mollie remained in residence throughout the war. Their first visitors were forty evacuees from the Isle of Dogs and although they did not stay for long, the boys remember being taught sword fighting by Bina. She had an infectious laugh and was very self-deprecating, sympathising always with the underdog but she was great fun and the boys enjoyed sparring with their eccentric host. From the beginning of the war she agreed to become the local Red Cross commandant and would go to Shrivenham regularly to help give the wounded hot drinks when they were brought in on their way to hospitals. When the estate was taken over in the summer of 1940 the sisters were told it was to be used for Home Guard training and they asked no questions. It is said that their dogs were so distressed by the explosions and goings on in the grounds while the Auxiliary Units were training that they had to be fed on aspirin and brandy by their mistresses. For the Radnor estate it must have been something of a relief to have had the house requisitioned as the War Office’s contribution towards the upkeep of Coleshill would have been a considerable help.
Once Coleshill had been requisitioned the next task was to develop the house, outbuildings and particularly the grounds. The officers lived and messed in the house itself while the soldiers initially slept in the stable block. This was unheated and full of rats so eventually two Nissen huts were erected with heaters and the men found that much more comfortable. The house, while large and opulent, was not as luxurious as it might at first have seemed. There was no central heating, no electricity and a very poor water supply. Water was pumped from a main reservoir well below ground level and ran through a series of cellars and tunnels. ‘This, and the ancient appliance – man-handled and pumped by half a dozen men either side of a master lever – was the only protection against fire hazards.’31 Eventually the army installed a generator so they could at least have light. The temporary cables hung well below the ceilings so as not to damage the ornate plasterwork, with light shining into corners that had remained in the shadows for over two hundred years. Soon after the Royal Signals provided the house with a switchboard. Prior to that there had been only one telephone – Highworth 85. Corporal Eric Grey of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) was at Coleshill for two years and was one of the regular drivers. He remembered having to enter via the servants’ staircase into the house if he needed to speak to one of the staff officers as the front entrance was still the preserve of Bina, Mollie and the dogs.
The routine for training Auxiliary Units at Coleshill was fixed from the word go. Recruits would arrive on Friday nights, usually by train. They were given very few instructions but one of them was to report to the post office in Highworth, the closest village to the house. In a gloriously understated and very British manner, they would have to ask for Mabel Stranks, the post-mistress, who would check their identity and then phone to the house for a car to collect them. Soon a car or an army vehicle would arrive to take them up to the house by a winding route so that they would not be able to pinpoint Coleshill’s location were they ever caught. Mrs Stranks always refused to answer any questions posed by the recruits and she was regarded as a local character. ‘Even when obviously genuine military convoys arrived at the Highworth post office the post-mistress always refused to direct them to Coleshill House, instead telephoning ahead to announce: “Some of your lot are down here.” ’32 She had worked at the post office for twenty-five years and was nearly sixty when the war came to her village. She refused to be fazed by anything. To Bob Millard she looked immeasurably old.
The Auxiliers spent the weekend at Coleshill living in the stables on bunks made of chicken wire with straw palliasses and army-issue blankets. Bob Millard described the set-up:
Behind the clock house was the stable yard, which was quite a large cobbled yard with big buildings and stables around three sides of it. People who came there for training would work in this area. As I recall we did that on the first floor of the building, which was a large room that had bunks down either side and tables down the middle and we would sleep, you would eat and work in that room, get our lectures and talks in that room. I think too that in the stable yard in those days there was a wooden building, a wooden kitchen, and we used to go down and collect our meals and take them back up into this upstairs room and to eat. But, as you can imagine, the training was very, very intensive and you didn’t get much sleep.33
At night they would do exercises in the grounds, such as stealing up on sentries, guarding dummy aircraft or practising unarmed combat. Gubbins called it ‘scallywagging’ but it was deadly serious and the intense training was intended to turn men with little or no previous military experience into highly efficient saboteurs in a very short space of time. It is greatly to Gubbins’ credit and vision that he was as successful in accomplishing this as he was, even though the Auxiliers were thankfully never put to the test. On Sunday evenings they dispersed, either by train or car. Those going back to Scotland were driven to Leighton Buzzard so as to avoid having to go via London to return home. Bob Millard remembered going home buzzing with excitement about everything he had learned and keen to pass it on to the other members of his patrol who had not been on the course. ‘But the biggest thing about Coleshill was the comradeship it gave you, knowing you could rely on the man next to you. And the self-confidence.’34
Gubbins had a very clear idea of how he wanted the Auxiliary Units to work. The units should be small: just six to eight men. They would be trained in guerrilla tactics and to use explosives. They were also encouraged to make sure they knew their patch like the back of their hands: ‘We walked miles, both through the open countryside and also through the urban areas. We wanted to establish quick routes, possible places where one could lay up in the town, where each alleyway went to, possible doors into gardens and houses, short cuts and things like that so that if we had to move about the town we knew it backwards.’35
Gubbins had as his second-in-command at Coleshill a larger than life figure, Major (later Brigadier) Geoffrey Beyts, known as Bill or Billy, who was in charge of drawing up the guidelines for the country-wide intelligence officers and designing ‘lecture notes and training schedules and facilities for Coleshill’.36 While he was preparing the courses his wife, Ruby, was in charge of cooking. She and Oonagh Henderson, the wife of one of Gubbins’ senior aides, Major the Honourable Michael Henderson, the Auxiliary Unit’s quartermaster, manned the kitchens. Later the Army Catering Corps arrived and Mrs Beyts and Henderson were relieved of their onerous duties, cooking for upwards of seventy people each weekend.
Major Beyts had been born and brought up in India and was the third generation of his family, who were originally of Dutch extraction, to lead the Third Battalion, Sixth Rajputana Rifles. At the age of just twenty-two he was allotted an area of Burmese teak forest and a list of 100 rebels to seek out and capture or kill. After nine months he and his company had accounted for every man on the list and for this he was awarded the Military Cross. He subsequently saw action against Waziri tribesmen and the Japanese army. By the time he arrived in London in September 1939 he was just thirty-one. His biographer, Ian Trenowden, wrote of him: ‘He was no stranger to the truism that if you want to establish something where nothing has previously existed: you will have to do most of the work yourself.’ Gubbins, who knew of Beyts’ reputation, asked Beyts to visit him on his return from a quickly aborted visit to France on 9 May 1940. He offered Beyts the rank of major and asked him to become his second-in-command, with responsibility for training at Coleshill. Within a short time, Beyts had worked out the forty-eight-hour crash course in unarmed combat, night stalking, the use of petrol bombs, hand grenades and high explosives that served as a template for the weekend courses for the Auxiliary Units and which needed very little alteration over the next four years. The main emphasis was on the use of explosives in order to attack the enemy’s supplies, transport and communications rather than their ground troops.
Any weapons the Auxiliers were issued with were intended for defence rather than attack. The British stay-behind forces were the first to be equipped with the Thompson sub-machine gun, phosphorous grenades, the PIAT (projector infantry anti-tank), plastic explosive and time-pencil delay devices based on the one that Gubbins had brought back from Poland in 1939. In some cases these new weapons were still at the experimental stage and the men in the weapons research and development section of the Ministry of Defence, known as MD1, run by Lieutenant-Colonel Millis Jefferis, and nicknamed Churchill’s Toyshop, used the Auxiliers to test new devices. Special stores for the Auxiliary Units personnel included 0.22 inch rifles with telescopic sights and silencer – easily capable of killing a man 100 yards away. These were primarily intended for picking off German officers and tracker dogs. They also had rum rations which were only to be used in the final emergency. However, intelligence officer Captain Ian Benson, who worked at Coleshill in 1944, handed back several gallon jars of rum only to be told they contained cold tea. He was completely perplexed and only found out after the war how the sergeant had managed to get at the rum while leaving the jars sealed. ‘He explained how he got a red hot razor blade, ran it around the seal, banged the bottom of the jar with the manual of military law, out popped the cork and they resealed it after the tea went in by rubbing oil round it.’37
Auxiliers tried out booby-trap lines, detonators, hand grenades, smoke bombs, time-pencils and a plastic explosive called Nobel 808, which was green and smelled of almonds. Eric Grey remembered the weekends as being exceptionally noisy with the firing ranges in full operation and ‘bangs’ being set off both in the grounds and in a nearby quarry where recruits were taught how to set explosives.
Beyts’ speciality, learned in the forests of Burma and in Waziristan, was teaching men to move absolutely silently and unnoticed through the night. Under his direction, they learned to accept darkness not as a hostile element but as their best friend: ‘anyone who remains still is invisible’ was his mantra.
It may properly be claimed that, in his teaching, Beyts formalised irregular, even illegal warfare, for what was seen then as a totally worthy and justified cause – the national interest. At the same time, he created an example of terrorism as it has since developed worldwide – sometimes justified by the perpetrators from the very highest moral standpoint and, at others, with no justification at all. It all depends on whose side you are on.38
After Beyts left Coleshill in 1942 to become chief of staff to Colin McKenzie in India, his training role was taken over by a former prep school headmaster, Major Bill Harston. ‘He made his new pupils pretend to be German sentries, and he then demonstrated how they could be approached silently and stabbed before they had time to cry out.’39 One Auxilier, speaking in 2012, told an interviewer that he had been taught to kill sentries, cut open their stomachs and spill their intestines next to the body in order to demoralise the Germans.
At Coleshill, Auxiliers trained in demonstration Operational Bases – underground bunkers built in secret locations and carefully disguised where the units could hide in preparation for attacks following the invasion. Peter Fleming, writing under his pseudonym Strix, described them in The Spectator in 1966:
In order to stay behind, we needed somewhere to stay: and by sucking up to the Sappers we had already brought into being what might very loosely be called a network of subterranean hide-outs in which not only the striking force – Strix and about fifteen other idiots – but our far-flung, hand-picked collaborators in the Home Guard, would bide their time before emerging to wreak, in a variety of ill-defined ways, havoc among the invaders.40
The one still remaining in the woods at Coleshill is typical of the design used throughout the country. It is some twenty feet long and over eight feet in diameter (6.4 × 2.45m), lined with curved corrugated iron sheets and known as an elephant shelter. Each tunnel-shaped bunker had benches on which the men could sit and sleep, housing three to six men. Over time they developed a design that meant the shelters would be watertight and yet have some form of ventilation. When Captain Ian Benson dug his first OB on the Suffolk coast he did not think of how the water table might rise. As a result the base flooded and he had to find another more suitable site. Sometimes existing structures, such as caves in Scotland and coal mines in Northumberland, could be adapted, but more often than not they were dug by Royal Engineers who helped to fit them out. The entrance hatch was a trap door which had six inches of earth on the lid so weeds could grow to help with the camouflage. It was closed by a carefully constructed balance mechanism. The main chamber had either a concrete or railway sleeper floor, and the sheets of rust-proof iron created a rounded, hut shaped roof that was very strong. At one end was a wall with the entrance hatch and rungs to climb down from the outside. At the other end was an opening that led to an escape tunnel, usually less than one square metre in diameter and several metres long. By the time the units were disbanded there were thought to be some 600 OBs throughout the length and breadth of Britain. The bases, like the Auxiliary Units, were set in rural locations because it was believed that the Germans would invade by sea and thus into the countryside rather than towns. Also, it was likely that the patrols would be fighting not the Wehrmacht but small groups of enemy forces sent ahead to set up bridgeheads en route to the bigger towns and cities.
There were strict rules: for example, only ten to fifteen minutes of smoking per hour was to be permitted, partially to protect the air in the OBs but also because the smoke or fumes might give their position away. Some tips were practical – it was suggested that lights were turned out ten minutes before Auxiliers emerged into the darkness so their eyes would adjust quickly. They also recommended keeping the OB ship-shape as much for morale and psychological well-being as for practical reasons. The twenty-four-hour routine of an OB started at 14:30 with reveille followed by a meal, planning for night patrol and then eight hours out of doors between 20:45 and 5:45 and back to bed after a hot meal by 7:00.
Gubbins realised that certain men could not attend the weekend courses at Coleshill, some being prevented by travel and others by the fact that their cover such as air-raid wardens or Royal Observer corps duties would not permit them to get away for a whole weekend and keep down their regular jobs. This problem was solved by the appointment of Captain Benson as training officer for the Auxiliary Units in their entirety. Born in 1920 he was usually the same age and often younger than the men he was training. It was a job for a young man, however, as there was such a lot to be done. ‘From the Outer Hebrides to the Dorset coast I travelled all round the bloody place,’ he said. For eighteen months he toured the country working mainly at night time.
One or two wives felt suspicious of their husbands going away at the weekends or training on week nights. If it was out of character with their usual habits some came to suspect the involvement of another woman. The authorities became aware of this and gave the men Home Guard uniforms to wear when required to be out on patrol. They concluded that no one would consider it strange to see a man cycling in uniform with a Lee Enfield rifle. He was clearly doing his bit and it would seem unlikely that in such unglamorous gear that he was off to see a lady friend either.
By the end of August 1940 there were a total of 371 cells comprising more than 2,000 men with access to over four hundred arms dumps and explosives. The emphasis was on stealth and surprise. Had the Germans invaded, the Auxiliary Units would have gathered in their OBs and put their plan into action. They would have the upper hand initially which would, they hoped, allow them to set explosives on enemy supplies, tanks and aircraft, thus disrupting the enemy’s advance, and then melt away in the darkness and make their way back to the OBs. That was the theory. John Warwicker concluded: ‘They would have performed well in the short term but all the long-term evidence is that they didn’t have sufficient back-up or resources or reinforcements to enable them to take part in a long-term campaign as was conducted on the continent.’41 When Ian Benson was asked how he felt about his role as an intelligence officer who would have stayed with his patrols he said: ‘I never thought it had a great future attached to it! It was just part of the role.’42
Over the course of the four years it was used as the Auxiliary Unit’s training HQ, Coleshill had several commanders. Gubbins left in November 1940, recalled by the War Office to lead another new organisation, the Special Operations Executive. He was succeeded by an officer with a confusing name. He was Colonel C. R. ‘Bill’ Major and must, at various periods, have been Lieutenant Major and later Major Major. He was in charge from the autumn of 1940 until February 1942 when he was replaced by Lord Glanusk, a Territorial Army colonel, who arrived at Coleshill in a Rolls-Royce with a complete entourage that included a young wife, a staff of Guards’ officers ‘with public school accents and double-barrelled names’ and a string of thoroughbred race horses. His complete wine cellar was available for sale in the officers’ mess. It was a far cry from the early days when Ruby Beyts prepared meals for seventy guests and the Coleshill staff from scratch.
In addition to the officers in charge, the instructors, drivers and other male support staff, about eight members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) worked in the office at Coleshill. Corporal Joan Welborn was fifteen when the war broke out and by 1943 she was in the ATS working as a secretary to the former training officer Captain Benson. She remembered above all the cold: ‘Although we had electricity the office was very cold and I use to type wearing woollen mitts.’ During the week, when there were no courses, she and her fellow ATS members would be allowed some free time and she remembered lovely walks through the woods picking primroses in the spring. Joan’s experience of life at Coleshill was on the whole a positive one. As a young woman in her first job she was as keen on her leisure time as she was on the work:
Our working day was 8.30 to 17.00, so at 5pm we climbed into the back of a 15 cwt truck to take us back to our billet which was Hannington Hall in the village of Hannington north of Swindon, a journey of about 5 miles. It was home to the Fry Family of Fry’s Chocolate. We slept on the second floor. At weekends we would cycle, or go to the cinema or to a dance. I met my future husband who worked at Highworth Station at a dance in the school at Highworth. It was October 1943 and we married on the 9th August 1947.
Hannington Hall was in the charge of Beatrice Temple, who was the senior commander of all ATS personnel in GHQ Auxiliary Units, Coleshill and Special Duties Branch. She earned the nickname ‘the Queen-Bee of the hush-hush party’ and was an impressively energetic woman who was described as having ‘a natural friendliness and a pretty wit’. She had a staff of four officers, a driver, three corporals and eleven privates, including the cook and orderlies. The latter remained at the hall to keep the billets up to scratch while the other women were working at Coleshill.
Senior Commander Temple was thirty-four when she arrived at Coleshill in November 1941. Two and a half years earlier she had been touring Europe and was in Vienna when the Germans invaded Austria. A few days later she was on her way to Italy passing through a small Austrian town when she heard that Hitler was due to visit. She was invited to watch from an upstairs hotel balcony as the Führer passed slowly by on the street below. At the outbreak of the war she joined the ATS because she wanted to drive lorries but that never happened. She was snapped up and in only five days became an officer, learning to drill with sergeants in the Guards and studying military law. She was made a captain and given the job of ATS company commander attached to the Seaforth Highlanders.
In November 1941 she was interviewed by Colonel Major and asked to take command of the ATS element at Coleshill House. She joined Major Petherick and his small team of officers who ran the Special Duties (SDS) Branch at Hannington Hall. John Warwicker described Petherick as ‘a shadowy figure if ever there was one’. However, Beatrice Temple wrote in her diary in January 1942 that he was very amusing, friendly and helpful: ‘Really improves on acquaintance.’ Petherick’s service in the First World War with the War Office at the age of just twenty-two and his subsequent career as an MP from 1931 to 1945 might well have been a cover for a full or part time association with MI6. He was certainly an excellent choice as leader of the SDS. Beatrice Temple wrote of her arrival at Coleshill: ‘Arrived Highworth. DR led to HQ Coleshill House – met by charming Colonel Beyts. Tea with Colonel Major who then led the way to Hannington Hall which turns out to belong to friends of a fellow officer. Butler opened door and maid asked if she could unpack any cases. The Fry family still had fourteen servants. All but a few left eventually to engage in war services.’43
Her role, apart from commanding the ATS girls who worked at Coleshill, was to interview prospective candidates for secret signals work. These interviews took place in Harrods’ tea rooms and were followed by a voice test. It was only when the girls had passed the test, proving that they could speak clearly and be audible over radios, and signed the Official Secrets Act that they were told to report to Coleshill. Beatrice wrote of one group who came for a training session: ‘much slower lot than last – not such good manners + how did Clifford pass voice test, can’t think!’44 Their job was to run the clandestine radio network and remain behind the enemy lines once the Germans invaded. They would be just as vulnerable as the male Auxiliers and experience showed later that the Germans took a harsh approach to radio officers, often shooting them on the spot if they were caught. A historian of Coleshill House wrote: ‘As most of the candidates were well educated, spoke well and [were] generally attractive, they eventually became known as the “Secret Sweeties” but they were to undertake a highly dangerous task – relay messages from our spy network.’45
Unlike the Auxiliary Units who were to practise in the field with no support at all, the signal control stations around the country were set up and maintained by Royal Signals personnel. ‘Each station consisted of a “hut” and a secret underground bunker each with a radio. Each would be linked to a series of “outstations” sending them reports.’46 The idea was that the radio operators, usually two or three ATS subalterns, would work in the huts, but once the invasion came they would go to the underground bunkers to avoid detection. Their main task was to link up with the out stations but they were also encouraged to listen out for broadcasts by suspect agents. They were so secret that when an RAF officer came across a member of Special Duties transmitting from a wireless hidden in a wood he called in back-up from soldiers who were intent on killing the operator as an enemy agent. They were dissuaded at the last minute.
Temple was exceptionally thorough. She would inspect stations once a month and she was constantly on the move around the country. Her responsibility was not just to keep an eye on the radio operators’ skills but she was also in charge of their welfare. She checked that they were properly billeted, paid and in touch with the right military commanders. Her diary is an extraordinary log of life on the road and brushes with various members of the secret service, some of whom she liked more than others. She travelled by train and car, sometimes having to be rescued when her own car broke down. In early 1942 she was, ‘ “Run in” by stern + stupid young Policeman in Basingstoke who thought GPO address bogus & took me to Police Stn for “further enquiries”. Returned to HH.’47
If all else failed she was happy to hitch a lift with lorry drivers to get to where she needed to be. On Monday 23 February 1942 she had a staff car and was to drive welfare items to Canterbury. She wrote at the bottom of the entry: ‘other news: Uncle William got Canterbury’. She was now the niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two months later to the day she wrote: ‘Installation of Uncle at Cathedral’. Eight weeks after that she was back in Canterbury helping out with rations and bedding as the ATS billets there had been bombed and they were now homeless.
Beatrice Temple had boundless energy and a great deal of compassionate common sense but she was also somewhat clumsy and accident prone. In March 1942 she went for a stroll with her junior commander, Barbara Culleton, and fell into the ice-covered fish pond, injuring her wrist. That summer she went to a Home Guard sports day outside Winchester where two of the Coleshill officers tried to get her to throw a Mills bomb. ‘Knowing her throwing she declined!’ her younger sister wrote later.
As secrecy was everything for the Auxiliers and members of the Special Duties Section under Gubbins’ tenure no paper records were kept. It seemed there was simply not the time or the inclination for any unnecessary formal administration. The quantity of ordnance and the size of ammunition dumps in the countryside was all unrecorded and, ‘any attempt to catalogue the first issue of firearms to the Auxiliary Units is just a minefield of confusion. The intelligence officer simply gave them whatever he could get his hands on.’48
This has been frustrating for historians of the Auxiliary Units who found, at best, notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes by the intelligence officers and others involved in recruiting and shaping the early units.49 Colonel Major took a different view and ensured that records were kept and that the Auxiliary Units had some affiliation with the Home Guard, something that had been considered troublesome at the outset owing to the pressing need for confidentiality in the face of the threat of invasion. ‘With these changes, much of the absolute secrecy previously demanded from every participant in these highly secret units was thrown away and replaced by War Office standardisation.’50
Some people’s lives were cover enough but others needed a more elaborate story in order to carry out their work. One observer was the secretary of the local beekeepers association. He was given extra petrol coupons and special rations of sugar – that all-important ingredient for a successful apiary and so short during the war – and with that he was free to visit anywhere he desired. He could scout around and not attract attention to himself. Another who was involved with secret activity was Ted Jefferies. He was a boy scout and carried messages for the Auxiliary Units at Coleshill House to the Highworth post office and back. Too young to sign the Official Secrets Act, he had to give the scout’s oath as he was sworn not to breathe a word about what he was asked to do. As a boy scout, he was unlikely to attract suspicion or attention from the invading Nazis. Ted used his roller skates to race up and down the hill between Coleshill and Highworth and the only thing that singled him out from the other keen roller skaters was that the rubber on his wheels was replaced when it wore out. That was something other boys could only have dreamed of after the fall of Singapore when Japan gained control of the majority of the world’s rubber.
The Auxiliary Units were stood down at the same time as the Home Guard on 30 November 1944. ‘A skeleton staff of physically low-grade officers and men were sent out to seal or destroy the Aux units Operational Bases and recover all the explosives. This process was hurried and piecemeal. The men were expected to continue with their ordinary lives and to keep secret, forever, their wartime activities.’51 The courage of the men and women who were prepared to stay behind enemy lines in the event of an invasion is an extraordinary testament to the spirit of wartime Britons. Although the existence of the Auxiliary Units was not made public until the 1990s and the men and women who had been involved remained secretive about their wartime activities, there was a letter published in The Times on 14 April 1945 quoting the farewell message of General Sir Harold Franklyn, commander-in-chief, Home Forces:
I realise that each member of the organisation from the first invasion days beginning in 1940 voluntarily undertook a hazardous role which required both skill and courage well knowing that the very nature of their work would allow no public recognition. This organisation, founded on the keenness and patriotism of selected civilians of all grades, has been in a position through its constant and thorough training, to furnish accurate information of raids or invasion instantly to military headquarters throughout the country.52
Would the Operational Bases and their keen personnel have made an impact on the advancing Germans had Operation Sea Lion succeeded? Peter Wilkinson, a close colleague, friend and later biographer of Gubbins, thought they would have been nothing more than a ‘flea-bite behind the enemy lines.’53 The Auxiliers were never intended to be compared with the resistance movements in occupied Europe. They were a short-term harassing force. ‘As the men in the Operational Bases were isolated from the outside world, including the military one, it meant that the only order they could follow was the last one given by their intelligence officer – something like: ‘Mount an operation against the enemy every night until you are killed, captured or relieved by counterattack.’54 As each of the OBs had just a fortnight’s rations, it is not difficult to conclude from this their likelihood of survival and their life expectancy.
Had the Germans invaded and had the units carried out sabotage there would have been reprisals and they would have been appalling. Captain Peter Fleming, who was a pioneer of the XII Corps Observation Unit, wrote that ‘reprisals against the civilian population would have put us out of business before long. In any case, we would have been hunted down as soon as the leaf was off the trees.’55 There are many examples of Nazi brutality when their forces came under partisan or guerrilla attack. In the village of Tulle in France the villagers still remember the day when storm troopers hanged ninety-nine local men from lampposts in a reprisal for the killing of forty Germans by members of the Resistance. Two days before, the Germans had shot eighteen men. A further 101 local citizens never returned from Dachau concentration camp where they had been sent after the hangings. In any tit-for-tat battles the Germans exercised extreme violence and it would have been no different in Britain.
Each Auxilier was given a pistol and a letter which he was instructed to open only in the event of his being trapped behind enemy lines. The letter contained instructions to ‘eliminate’ certain people on their patch, such as the chief constable, who might know more than he ought to and who would be a danger if caught and tortured by the enemy. They were told to keep the final bullet for themselves. On no account were they to be taken alive. ‘Would you have done that, killed people you knew?’ Geoffrey Devereux was asked in 2012. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘we had to be extremely hard in our outlook.’ Geoffrey Devereux was just seventeen when he was recruited by an intelligence officer.
Indeed, every man who was interviewed about his role in later life claimed that he would have undertaken the sabotage willingly and with fervour. In 1957 Peter Fleming sounded a note of caution:
Yet legend plays a large part in their memories of that tense and strangely exhilarating summer, and their experiences, like those of early childhood, are sharply rather than accurately etched upon their minds. The stories they tell of the period have become better, but not more veracious, with the passage of time. Rumours are remembered as facts, and – particularly since anti-invasion precautions continued in force for several years after the Germans had renounced their project – the sequence of events is blurred.56
The story of the Auxiliary Units remains one of the Second World War’s lesser known stories of bravery and patriotism. Coleshill House, the backdrop for top-secret training, was stood down in late 1944. As the dust settled and grass grew over the tyre marks in the lawns, the Pleydell-Bouverie sisters resumed a quieter life. Katharine remained at the house until a year after the war when she moved to Kilmington Manor. In 1946 the house and estate at Coleshill was sold to Ernest Cook, one of the founders of the travel agents Thomas Cook & Son, to be handed on to the National Trust on his death.
