At 22:10 on 12th September 1940, the night before the City of Benares set sail from Liverpool, Gilbert Roberts was dozing in the basement of his rented home in West London when he felt a dull thud somewhere high above his bed.1
The Blitz, the Luftwaffe’s persistent bombing campaign on Britain’s major cities, was only five days old, but those who had picked their way through London’s streets, newly seasoned with shards of shopfront glass, glinting shrapnel and lunar hollows, knew that the routine of city life had instantaneously changed. For Roberts, this had meant sleeping below ground.
Roberts had taken the mattresses from the upstairs bedrooms in the white-fronted town house in Courtfield Gardens, near London’s museums in South Kensington, where he and eleven other tenants had lived on the top floor since April, and shunted them together to make a sea of the basement floor. At night he instructed the two children among the group to lie down in the broom cupboard, so that if the house collapsed they might have a rubble den in which to await rescue. Finally, with the assistance of the house’s other tenants, Roberts built a heavy wooden hatch, adding another line of defence against the choking dust and sleep-skewering noises of siege outside.
Now, listening out for the sound of falling debris, Roberts eyed the hatch. It was not the first bomb he had felt land that night, but it was the closest.2 Three years earlier, Roberts had been forced out of the navy–‘invalided’, as per the term of the time, with all its cruel connotations–following a bout of tuberculosis that had brought him close to death, then left him gaunt and breathless. Still, having reached the rank of commander, he had spent more than two decades in active service and could instinctively estimate his distance from a falling explosive, and what, if anything, he needed to do about it. While the adults crowded in the basement whispered assurances to the children, Roberts opened the hatch with a creak and a clack, then climbed the stairs into the hallway.
Considering the hour, the hallway was oddly bright. Over the past week residents had been instructed to extinguish every light source in order to make it harder for the German pilots to place their bombs. There were severe penalties for anyone who breached the rules. That night, however, brilliant flares dropped from the German planes had, like lilting stars, exposed London’s harried streets. Roberts looked through the sitting room window. There, outside and half-buried in the pavement, sat a bent bomb, a 250-pounder, dripping with oil. Roberts went outside and saw that the oil had covered most of the front of the houses on his side of the street. Mercifully, there were no fires.
He took a closer look at the bent device on the pavement. There, on top of the bomb, sticking out of the casing at a cartoonish angle, quivered a smouldering fuse.3
Twenty-seven years earlier, and a few miles away, the twelve-year-old Roberts, wearing his school uniform and with a puffy black eye, sat at a polished mahogany table in a high-ceilinged room in the Admiralty, and stared into the severe faces of six men. Outside it was a summer’s day, but the meeting room was dark and oppressive. A series of papers, written tests that Roberts had been asked to take as part of his application for entrance to the Royal Naval College, were laid out on the table.
The men stared at the boy. The boy stared at the men. Finally, a bewhiskered admiral, the most senior member of the group, leaned forward.
‘Roberts,’ he said. ‘How the devil did you get that black eye?’
An explanation spilled forth, of how during a recent cricket match Roberts had dived to stump one of the batsmen, only to receive a club to the face.
‘And I didn’t even stump him,’ he added, with a sorrowful flourish.
It was 1913 and applying to naval college was Roberts’ rebellion: his father was an honorary colonel of the London Irish Rifles and his elder brother a horse-gunner in the army. Securing a place at naval college was going to be a challenge, however. At school, Roberts had opted to study German instead of Latin, and Latin was still a prerequisite of the navy at the time.
Next the interviewers asked the boy to locate the town of Dingle on a map of Ireland. Roberts confidently placed his finger on the chart, only to be told that he was mistaken. Not so, said Roberts, whose father had mentioned visiting Dingle during a recent fishing trip to the area at which he was pointing. Holding his nerve, the boy requested a more detailed chart be brought to the table. After a moment’s scrunch-nosed searching, he triumphantly stabbed his finger at a label that read ‘Dingle’, a diminutive namesake to the better-known town on the south-west coast of Ireland. Roberts’ pluck and determination made its mark on the panel. Alongside a clutch of other promising pubescent boys, he was accepted into the college two months shy of his thirteenth birthday.
At naval college, as well as distinguishing himself academically, Roberts proved to be a championship swimmer–a talent he was called upon to use during the summer of 1924. After serving at sea as a midshipman, he had returned to Portsmouth to train as a sub lieutenant. During a short leave break Roberts, who was by now in his early twenties, travelled with friends to Polzeath, Cornwall, a town that at the time was no more than a single row of houses sitting in front of a YMCA hut.4 In the gaps between ‘loafing, swimming, rock-climbing, surfing and loafing’, as Roberts later described the group’s summer preoccupations, he took himself off to study the Magazine Handbook of Regulations, a ‘boring book’ that he nevertheless had to learn in order to pass his final exams.
On a rounded hill above hundred-foot cliffs between Pentire Point and The Rumps, close to where the poet Laurence Binyon wrote ‘For the Fallen’ with its famed stanza about those who will not grow old as we grow old, he would sit in the buzzing grass, back pressed against a rock, reading and rereading the handbook. On 5th August 1924, from over the top of his book Roberts spied a group of five young holidaymakers making their way down the ‘rough and imperfect’ rock stairs on the east side of the bay.5 He assumed they wanted to peer into the mouth of a cave where seals were known to often swim.
‘They seemed, wisely, to be roped together,’ Roberts recalled. ‘But it also seemed to me a very unwise thing to do.’6 The end of a strong westerly gale was blowing. The sea was ‘only now a little ruffled’, Roberts wrote, ‘but it still had a high swell which was springing up the west-side cliffs and falling back in a great smother of spray’.
Twenty minutes later he heard chatter and saw four people traipsing back up the hill. Roberts called over to ask what had happened to the fifth person. The answer came back that he wasn’t a member of their party and they weren’t sure where he had got to. Roberts descended the hill and clambered down the cliff face toward the frothing sea. On a low-hanging ledge, he removed all his clothes except his underwear and a pair of gym shoes.7 Fearing that he might be swept off and ‘smeared down the cliff in the backwash’, Roberts picked his moment and leaped into the broiling water, swimming under the surface a few yards to clear the rocks.
The currents were stronger than he had expected, but now Roberts had a clear view of Seal Cave, which, he reasoned, the man must have climbed into for a better look. Roberts swam towards the cave, diving to avoid its craggy roof, just as a wave lifted him into its mouth. Roberts grasped a rock and, in the seconds before the next swell hit, looked around for the man. He lingered a moment too long, and the next wave clattered him around the rock walls like a shoe in a washing machine. Wincing under the water, Roberts spied a body. When he reached the man ‘there was no mistake at all; it was unnecessary to try to tow him out’.
Tiring fast, Roberts realised that he was now fighting for his own life. On the clifftop, a group of bystanders peered down. Roberts had lost track of time, and the light was beginning to fail. He began to swim out of the cave into clear water, leaving the body behind. He could see Pentire Head, around which he believed the water would be calmer, and set off at a steady pace.
‘But after some time, I saw I wasn’t moving at all,’ Roberts wrote. ‘What an ass: I had forgotten the tide.’
As the sky turned to dusk, Roberts realised that he was ‘waterlogged and very tired’. As he trod water, bleeding and exhausted, he heard voices then felt himself being wrenched from the sea. A group of French fishermen had seen him and hauled him aboard. Within moments they had given him a revitalising swig from a bottle. The Frenchmen were headed to Penzance so, when he had regained his strength, Roberts requested that they first deposit him back into the water, half a mile along the coast, within swimming distance of the broad sands of Polzeath Beach.
Roberts had lost his canvas shoes in the sea, and he climbed the cliffs on numb, lacerated feet, worried that he might strike his head on a rock in the dark or lose his footing.
‘Anxiety took me clear of trouble,’ he wrote.
He made it to the top of the cliffs and found his way to his abandoned handbook and sweater.
‘There was nobody around,’ he wrote. ‘They’d all gone home.’
Roberts made his way back to the house. The next morning, he awoke to find his sheets soaked with blood and, in the local newspaper, a report that he was missing, presumed drowned. A few days later, Roberts and one of his friends, Sandy McKillop, were towed by the coastguard in a rowing boat to the cave. They retrieved the man’s body, which was taken to St Ives for an inquest, which Roberts attended.
Roberts was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s bronze medal by the Prince of Wales for his efforts to save the man, later identified as James L. Wainwright of Henley.8 Roberts wrote of the incident in the plain, pragmatic prose of the wizened sailor, who sees in the sparkling ocean not serenity, but a sleeping monster.
Roberts’ naval career continued on a promising, if unorthodox trajectory when, following sorties to fit out Australia’s first aircraft carrier and a trip down the Danube, he was made a game designer for the Royal Navy. In July 1935, a few days after he was promoted to the rank of commander, Roberts joined the tactical school at Portsmouth. Here naval captains and their senior staff played wargames, hyper-evolved military-themed board games staged on floors painted to look like giant chessboards. Distant cousins to commercial board games such as Battleship and Risk, these wargames were intended to explore and rehearse lifelike combat situations, a crucible in which tactics could be tested, analysed, and refined. It was work to which Roberts took an immediate liking.
The use of games to represent the manoeuvres of warriors on stylised boards can be found throughout the historical record; archaeologists have unearthed sets of miniature soldiers that represent Sumerian and Egyptian armies. Many of the earliest board games that, like chess and go, are still played today are either military-themed, or explore military concepts of strategy and tactics. Games establish consequence-free realities in which we can explore and experience situations that in actuality are too dangerous, rarefied or consequential. This makes them the ideal sphere in which to experience war.
In his 1913 book Little Wars, H. G. Wells captured the allure of the wargame that captivated his interest as a boy, and held his attention into adulthood:
Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster–and no smashed or sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings, nor devastated countrysides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage of embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.9
For similar reasons wargames have proved themselves of supreme value to professional militaries, who are able to use the board as a kind of divination pool in which they test tactics and strategies in fictional fronts. H. G. Wells perceived this usefulness, arguing in Little Wars that ‘the British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors’.* One of the earliest known games, wei hei (meaning ‘encirclement’), was designed by the Chinese general Sun Tzu for this purpose.
In the seventeenth century, recognising the limitations of abstract wargames like chess in preparing to lead an actual army into battle, more complex variants such as Koenigsspiel, or king’s game, emerged. Invented in Germany in 1644 by Christopher Weikhmann, Koenigsspiel added units such as colonels, captains, couriers, bodyguards and private soldiers to chess’s traditional roster of kings and knights. Weikhmann claimed the game was a ‘compendium of the most useful military and political principles’. Wargames continued to evolve in complexity, size and realism till, by the 1850s, ‘Kriegsspiel’ were widely used by the German military.
Around this time, John Clerk, a Scotsman who had never been to sea, designed a game to represent combat between warships with the aim of devising more efficient tactics.10 Clerk wrote up his findings and suggestions in a book titled An Essay on Naval Tactics. In the preface he explained how he, a man with experience of neither combat nor sea, might presume to correct those naval officers and commanders who had spent their life fighting on the ocean.
As I never was at sea myself, I have been asked, how should I have been able to acquire any knowledge in naval tactics, or should have presumed to suggest my opinion upon that subject… I had recourse not only to every species of demonstration, by plans and drawings, but also to the use of a small number of models of ships which, when disposed in proper arrangement, gave most correct representations of hostile fleets… and being easily moved and put into any relative position required, and thus permanently seen and well considered, every possible idea of a naval system could be discussed without the possibility of any dispute.11
Clerk’s assertion that it was possible for admirals to become experts from the comfort of armchairs was contentious but, eventually, accepted. The Germans were first to accept and embrace wargaming as an imperfect yet instructive mirror of reality. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing size of armies made it impractical and often foolishly provocative to practise full-scale mobilisation. Other nations began to adopt wargames to simulate deploying to a range of potential locations.12
Tactical schools, such as the one that Roberts joined in Portsmouth in 1935, became an essential component of every force. In doing so, officers could evaluate their previous decision-making, and perceive potential pitfalls in future encounters. Games, which employ logic and rules to create scenarios in which a player can evolve strategies, simulate perfectly the perspective and problems that naval captains face in combat. The board is indistinguishable, in functional terms, from the commanding officer’s map. Game-player and officer tactician alike have a bird’s-eye view of the theatre of war, pushing a unit forward here, making a retreat there.
Wargames also proved their worth to the military in the civilian sphere. Not only did they allow amateurs such as H. G. Wells to experience, vicariously, the scale of challenge that faced commanders in a real battle, they also attracted young men to join the services. In his 1930 autobiography, Winston Churchill admitted that his decision to enter Sandhurst, and thereby pursue his chosen career, was influenced by his childhood passion for staging imaginary battles with toy soldiers, a hobby that ‘turned the current’ of his life.13
The best-known sea game is undoubtedly Battleship, variants of which were published by various companies under various names, initially as a pad-and-pencil game in the 1930s. The board-game manufacturer Milton Bradley published its first Battleship-style game in 1943, under the title Broadsides: The Game of Naval Strategy, a title that was distilled to Battleship in 1967. MB Games claims it has no record of who designed or named the game,14 but there were clear commercial precedents.
L’Attaque was a French board game designed by Mademoiselle Hermance Edan, who filed a patent for a ‘jeu de bataille avec pièces mobiles sur damier’ (‘a battle game with mobile pieces on a game board’) on 26th November 1908. Produced in Great Britain from the 1920s by H. P. Gibson & Sons, players moved pieces that represented different classes of soldier around a board measuring nine inches by ten. Each piece has a numeric value, hidden from the opponent and only revealed when an attacking piece moves onto a square occupied by an opponent’s piece. In most cases, the piece with the highest value wins and the losing piece is removed from the board. Play continues until one player finds and takes the opponent’s flag piece.
H. P. Gibson & Sons designed a number of follow-ups to L’Attaque, including a naval-themed variant called Dover Patrol (‘Easy to learn,’ states the blurb in the September 1932 Games and Toys Journal, ‘but reaches the skill of chess’) and Aviation, an air-force-themed version. In 1932 they ran an advertisement with the slogan: ‘War Without Tears!!’15
The company also published a game titled Jutland, similar in rules to the modern game of Battleship. Two players each mark out the position of their warships on a ten-by-ten grid, hidden to their opponent. Once their ships are positioned, each player takes turns to fire a salvo of six missiles at their opponent’s grid, hoping to strike a ship rather than the sea.
‘A lot of skill can be exercised in finding the position of one’s opponent’s ships,’ states the game’s manual, reassuring the reader that this is no game of mere chance. The progenitor of the wargame on which Roberts based his games in Portsmouth was Fred Jane, a failed novelist who, in 1898, published the rules of a boardgame-style naval wargame in the Engineering Journal.16 Later that year, his books, Jane Naval Wargame and Fighting Ships, provided a formal set of rules, scorecards and ship diagrams, which were subsequently adapted by the navy. The game, which used scale ship models, a squared board and even some ping-pong-like bats to fire projectiles, was notable for its flexibility and realism. Jane tested the game aboard warships docked in Portsmouth Harbour and, four years later, a modified version was issued to HM Ships for training. It was a version of the Jane Naval Wargame that Roberts adapted at his posting in Portsmouth, more than three decades later.
Chance played its role in Roberts’ games at Portsmouth, which, on a board painted across the entire floor of a room, on which ships of various sizes were manoeuvred, bore a passing resemblance to Battleship, but the aim was to reduce serendipity’s role in sea battle by incrementally refining naval tactics.
The technique may have been sound, but the focus of Roberts’ wargames was misplaced. Despite the fact that during the First World War the Germans had used submarines to great effect to disrupt the convoys bringing food and supplies to Great Britain, neither U-boats nor convoys featured in the wargames of 1935.
‘All the information about the lessons from the First World War was available for anyone who wanted to read it,’ said Peter Gretton, a commander who repelled numerous U-boats while escorting convoys in the war. ‘But I’m afraid no one bothered.’17 The vital lessons of the Great War, when Britain had faced starvation by German sea blockade, had been forgotten.
‘Submarines were not mentioned,’ Roberts wrote of the games he was tasked with designing. ‘Nor were convoys and attacks on them. Nobody connected Hitler’s rise… to the possibility of another Battle of the Atlantic. Nor did I, to be absolutely fair.’18*
(In fact, a wargame to test convoy protection was designed and played at the naval college in Greenwich in January 1938. This game, of which Roberts was seemingly unaware, correctly estimated the time of war’s outbreak but assumed that the threat to convoy ships would come not from U-boats, but from German raiders disguised as merchant vessels.19)
Despite this consequential oversight, Roberts worked with his colleagues for two years to develop new naval tactics via these wargames. Roberts’ keen interest in the push and pull of tactical manoeuvring, and his bright imagination, which enabled him to add an engaging layer of fiction to the wargaming, made him the perfect leader for such a course.
‘What an astonishing two years,’ he wrote. ‘I loved it, absolutely.’20
Eventually, however, Roberts’ talent on the tactical table earned him a role on an active ship. In the autumn of 1937, he was appointed captain of the lithe destroyer Fearless, and dispatched to the seas of Gibraltar. Here began one of the happiest times of Roberts’ life, patrolling the seas around the Spanish coast as commander of his own destroyer, a ‘lovely little ship’.
During downtime, Roberts and his crew partook in athletic competitions held on the rock, including the Windsor Baton, an exhilaratingly complicated relay race unique to the island. This started with a sack race at the Spanish border, running and walking sections, a bicycle leg raced by each ship’s postman carrying a full sack of letters on their back, a climb up the harbour crane and scrambles over docked ships, followed by a swim across the harbour and, finally, a hundred-metre sprint to the finish line.
During these halcyon days, Roberts developed a wheezing, whistling cough that turned him into a sweating insomniac. A prescription of linctus, a thick, syrupy medicine designed to coat the throat, alleviated the cough but none of the other symptoms. Roberts endured the rest of the sortie, which included training exercises off Portland, and a visit to Scotland. There the commander-in-chief Sir Charles Forbes showed Roberts, who was bravely trying to conceal his sickness, around the battlecruiser Prince of Wales, which was still under construction.
As the pair surveyed the new ship, Forbes turned to Roberts and said: ‘That would do just for you, wouldn’t it?’
It was not to be. Roberts’ ship Fearless departed Glasgow and made for Devonport on the south coast of England. He arrived into port in abject pain and, on disembarkation, was escorted to the battleship Resolution to see the surgeon commander. The doctor delivered his diagnosis on the spot: tuberculosis.
‘That was the end,’ Roberts wrote in his diary.
Roberts was summarily relieved of his command and, with the bruising efficiency of an organisation that requires its members to be fighting fit, discharged from the Royal Navy before the day was out.
After two nights in Stonehouse Hospital, Roberts was provided with a chit that admitted him to a private nursing home in Camberley, Surrey. The fees would be covered by the navy for just ninety days. Roberts would also receive ninety days’ pay. Thereafter, if he survived his illness, he would be on his own. Equally troubling was the news that Roberts would not receive a pension. His heiress wife was profoundly rich, but he felt the natural obligation to provide for his two young children. Where would he go? What would he do?
At thirty-eight years old Roberts had spent his entire adolescence and adulthood in the navy. ‘The navy was his life,’ said one officer who served under Roberts. Beyond the distant, misty plains of young childhood, it was the only thing he had known. Of the 180-page unpublished memoir that Roberts wrote later in life, just a single handwritten page relates to his pre-naval childhood. Moreover, the war that he had spent so many months preparing for via tactical wargames was unquestionably on its way.
Anxiety is malleable; it contorts to fit the shifting shapes of our lives. A few weeks earlier Roberts’ preoccupations were the common worries of the professional approaching middle age: of being passed over for promotion, of spending too much time away from his family. Now, like black treacle, his fears adapted to fill the new circumstances of his world. To be removed from this moment of great and deep history delivered an existential blow. What man was left, when the uniform was taken away?
Without a travel warrant, Roberts made his own way to the convalescence home. There, in a sunless bungalow wing, a doctor X-rayed Roberts’ chest. The infection was extensive in his left lung and spreading to the right. The prognosis, the doctor said, was poor. Tuberculosis, he explained, was ‘a curse’, one that usually led to death. Reeling from the double blow, Roberts asked the doctor for a radio, a cricket scorebook and a pen. A Test match was due to start the next day. If Roberts was to die, he would go out keeping score.
He did not die. While the war raged in his lungs, Roberts, forced into a blanketed wheelchair, spent the next year fighting on a second inner front: a battle to hold onto his identity and purpose. Those memories associated with his physical virtues–the cricket match, the cave rescue attempt, the heroic running races–became keepsakes, a reminder for the life vanished and hope for the life to come.
During those months of tristesse, Roberts was not entirely abandoned. A visit from Surgeon Captain Ingleby Mackenzie reassured him that there were those in the navy who still cared for him. Then, following a visit from a concerned rear admiral, Roberts received the news that he was to receive a pension; the Treasury had conceded that his illness had been contracted as a result of his service. The financial news was as nothing to the warm sense that Roberts had not been disowned by his naval family, in whom he had invested his best years. After a stint at the King Edward VII sanatorium in Midhurst, Sussex, in July 1939 a brighter, fitter Roberts was moved to Yelverton, Devon, where the clean air of the moors would, everyone hoped, salve his deeper wounds.
Eager to offer himself, once again, to service of his country, Roberts answered a newspaper advertisement asking for men with experience of guns, searchlights and ammunition. His application was rejected. Hoping to leverage his connections, Roberts wrote to the Second Sea Lord in search of a role. A dispiriting response followed: write again in a year’s time. When Roberts successfully wheedled his way into the labour battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, he immediately found himself standing in front of the colonel, Willie Buckley, who also happened to be his cousin. Buckley, knowing all about the health difficulties Roberts was facing, ordered him to stand down.
The illness that knocked him from his career trajectory was, for Roberts, a source of if not private shame then at least profound self-consciousness. Later in the war he lied to a newspaper journalist from the Liverpool Daily Post, claiming that he was invalided not through illness but ‘as a result of an accident’ in 1938.
Chronic illness, like war, arrives uninvited and inexorable. And, like war, it too disrupts and transforms the lives of those it touches. Bewildered by the sudden, dizzying change in circumstance, Roberts came loose from the other anchor points in his life. Cracks and valleys appeared in his marriage to Alice Brooks, known to all as Margot, heiress to a family fortune made manufacturing bicycle saddles, who, with an absent husband, spent more and more time with her horses. For now, his marriage endured, even if the relationship around which it was built began to collapse.
In November 1939, Roberts received a letter from the Admiralty. Any hope he felt was soon extinguished when he read its contents: ‘I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to inform you that you will not be accepted again for general service in the Royal Navy. In view of the nature of your illness… it is very unlikely that any suitable service could be found for you.’21
With the matter closed, Roberts, who was bright but not an intellectual, and whose educational efforts had been focused entirely on preparing for a naval career, finally found somewhere that would take him. He joined the local police force as a special constable, serving the local farming community in the early months of war, before becoming a local defence volunteer, a member of the so-called Home Guard, the anti-invasion force that would later gain–not unfairly–a reputation for being a rather hapless organisation of ragtag individuals and hangers-on, via the sitcom Dad’s Army.
In March 1940, a few months before the fall of France, Roberts’ telephone rang. The call came from the Admiralty. After a slew of firm rebuttals, Roberts was asked to return to duty as a retired commander, on full pay and in uniform. He was ordered to leave Devon and find a place to live in London, before reporting to the duty captain at the Admiralty, close to where Vera Laughton Mathews was busily assembling and organising her Wrens.
The newspaper classifieds were full of vacated houses and apartments available to rent. Roberts picked Courtfield Gardens due to its useful proximity to Gloucester Road Tube station. He reported for duty at Admiralty House wearing his old uniform, now at least one size too large for his devastated body, a civilian gas mask in hand and, over his shoulder, a tin helmet with the word ‘Police’ daubed in white paint. His job was dull but vital: ensuring the resupply of ammunition to the escort ships fighting the U-boats in the Atlantic. Estimating how many shells each ship might need on return to port may have been a desk job, but it nevertheless allowed Roberts to live vicariously through his calculations.
Then, five months after arriving in London with his family, Roberts found himself face to fuse with a real German bomb.