The rescue team was making its way towards Russia, but progress was painfully slow. By five a.m. on Sunday, 25 May 1919, the Fennia was still just dropping her pilot near the mouth of the Tyne and preparing for her crossing of the North Sea. The weather was atrocious, the winds were against her and the old Swedish cargo ship pitched and rolled like a fairground ride. Gus had secured his precious afternoon tea from the Swedish captain (in return for a few of Cumming’s one thousand guineas), but that home comfort hardly mattered to some of the crew. The captain and chief engineer of the Fennia had been paid to give up their cabin to their suspicious new ‘deckhands’ but, as that was the only available cabin on the ship Beeley, the only NCO, and Marshall, the junior ‘snottie’, were forced to sleep on benches in the ship’s saloon where they were thrown about with every drunken lurch of the old tub. Beeley was battered and dreadfully seasick and with every retch must have wished that he was back in the warmth of the sheds at Osea among his beloved engines. Separated from the boats there was nothing for him to do and as the only NCO billeted with three senior officers there was no one for him to talk to, either. To make matters worse, halfway through that first day untethered mines were spotted floating in the water and the Fennia’s captain reduced their speed still further. Gus could barely contain his frustration and that night wrote irritably in his diary about how the captain had ‘… got the wind up’.
The weather on Monday was just as bad and the four Englishmen stayed in the saloon, trying to keep their playing cards on the table for games of piquet, interrupted only by Beeley’s occasional dashes outside to throw up over the handrail. But at six p.m. a cry from the watch announced the coast of Sweden in sight through the murk and by the end of the evening the captain was able to inform them that the barometer was rising and there would be better sailing ahead.
He was right. The following morning the sea was calm and the sun broke through the clouds. Beeley turned a paler shade of green and the Fennia began her steady passage through the spectacular mountains and forests of the Scandinavian islands. For the next four days the journey felt more like a pleasure cruise than a desperate rescue mission, but even though the crews knew that time was ticking away for ST-25 there was nothing they could do to make the ship go any faster (although Beeley did spend a lot of time investigating the engine room) and the weather was so glorious that there was nothing to do but make the best of it. The crew played deck quoits (Gus and Beeley thrashing the snotties Hampsheir and Marshall) and more games of piquet. They read books. They snoozed in the sunshine. Gus spent a lot of time in the chart room on the bridge with the captain, learning as much as he could about sailing conditions in the Gulf – although the captain mainly wanted to tell him about his female conquests in Hull. Gus noted in his diary that the captain was: ‘… a bit of a gay dog when away from home’. Gus gave up the precious bunk in the cabin to Beeley on the slightly less than noble grounds that he was too tall to sleep comfortably on it anyway. For the first time on the trip the team’s chief motor mechanic actually got some rest.
The Fennia plodded slowly on. Finally, at two a.m., on Friday, 30 May, the lights of the Finnish port of Abo appeared on the horizon. As experienced seamen Gus and his crew simply went back to sleep – they suspected that it would take quite a while for this civilian ship to negotiate its way slowly through the shoals and into the safety of the harbour. They were right. The Fennia crept forwards, had a long wait for a pilot to become available and were then held in a long queue of other vessels seeking docking permission. Despite Gus’s polite suggestions that they should get a move on the captain seemed unruffled, more interested in sharing a carefully hoarded bottle of Scotch whisky with his highly profitable new deckhands than hurrying his own crew.
It was 7.30 p.m. before the Fennia finally docked. It had taken them seventeen agonisingly long hours to cover the last mile of the voyage. As soon as the gangplank was lowered the team grabbed their bags and, pausing only to show their Finnish visas at the Immigration Office, they dashed for the railway station. They had to reach Helsinki as quickly as possible to make contact with the MI6 station there. But more bad news awaited them: they had missed the last train of the day by just a few minutes. The old stationmaster took some small pleasure in informing them that there would not be another train until 7.10 the following morning.
There was nothing for it but to head for the misleadingly named Hotel Grand and book rooms for the night. Gus arranged at the desk for an early wake-up call and they headed for dinner. This was Gus’s first introduction to the economic realities of newly independent Finland where all commodities were in short supply. Having just emerged from a civil war in which the Bolshevik sympathisers had only been narrowly defeated much of the country was still in chaos and prices were astronomic. One thousand guineas had seemed like a lot of money when they left England, but having already spent over a hundred pounds on the journey Gus began to worry about how long the money would last. ‘Everything ruinously expensive,’ he noted gloomily in his diary that night.
Experienced officers know that on an espionage mission anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It was a lesson Gus began to learn the next morning. The hotel desk had forgotten the alarm call and the crew had to frantically grab their belongings and race on foot across town to the station. Unwashed, dishevelled and with their new suits stained with sweat, Gus and his crew arrived just in time to catch the 7.10 to Helsinki. Except that there wasn’t a 7.10 to Helsinki. There was a 6.45 to Helsinki, but it had already gone. The stationmaster who had given them the wrong information yesterday was nowhere to be seen and Gus angrily demanded to know when the next train was: not until 4.30 p.m. and it wouldn’t reach Helsinki until at least midnight. Dispirited, Gus sent the crew to the hotel while he took a cab to the harbour master’s office to get news of the Pallux which was due to arrive with the CMBs the following morning. There he discovered that bad weather in the North Sea had delayed the ship’s already slow crossing and the Pallux was not expected now until Wednesday.
Gus stepped outside the office feeling about as low as it was possible to feel. To make his day complete, it began to rain.
He hailed a cab back to the hotel, but even then his troubles were not over. On arrival at the hotel the cabbie demanded an outrageous price for the trip. After the numerous disappointments of the morning Gus was in no mood to be taken for just another gullible foreigner and he stood his ground. As the argument with the cabbie developed into a full-blown row, first the other cab drivers joined in and then a local police officer arrived. To Gus’s astonishment he backed the Finnish cab driver against the foreigner and demanded that Gus pay up or be placed under arrest. Gus refused to back down and demanded that the British Consul be sent for. There was a long delay while telephone calls were made. Eventually the news arrived that the consul was out of town and couldn’t be contacted. Gus had no choice but to pay up.
He trudged into the Hotel Grand where he and the crew spent the rest of the day having breakfast and lunch (‘at ruinous prices’) and playing cards. Tomorrow would be 1 June – just two weeks until the ‘White Nights’. Then there would be no proper night-time, just a sort of hazy twilight, and it would be impossible to penetrate the line of Russian forts without being seen and shot at. Even if they made contact with ST-25 before that date, every day wasted meant fewer minutes of darkness each night and their chances of survival would be a little less.
However, the next day things did improve. The team had caught their train from Abo in the evening and arrived in Helsinki in the early hours of Sunday morning. They checked into the Grand Hotel Fennia in the city centre which had been booked for them by the local MI6 station They had several rooms together with a private sitting room, although Gus noted that all meals were served ‘… in the café downstairs at ruinous prices’. The next day Gus left his men to go for a walk around the city whilst he went to the British Consulate. There he met the British Consul Henry Bell and the Vice-Consul Raleigh Le May who was also, apparently, head of the MI6 station. Major John Scale, the head of the MI6 station at Stockholm and also in overall charge of all MI6 operations in northern Russia, had also travelled to Helsinki for the meeting. The poor weather in the North Sea had meant that the Fennia had cancelled her call at Stockholm during the trip over and Scale wanted to see what sort of man London had sent him.
This first meeting was essentially a briefing on the political situation in the area and Gus immediately learned that Cumming’s idea of this being a top-secret mission had gone out of the window. The hotel had been insistently asking for their British passports, but Gus had been holding out because he had been told in London that they would be issued with passports in false names. Gus found that this plan had been dropped. The Foreign Office was insistent that the Finnish authorities must be apprised of the fact that the CMBs were operating in the area even if they were not told the exact details of the mission. The situation in Finland was extremely delicate. Officially Finland was neither pro-British nor pro-Bolshevik, and during the war had even been pro-German at one point. The British Consul, Henry Bell, was working hard to cultivate good relations with the new Finnish administration, but Finland could not afford any action which might antagonise her powerful neighbour and jeopardise their hard-won independence, least of all British sailors dashing around on secret missions sinking Russian ships. Democratic elections were due in a few weeks’ time.
Le May was equally adamant that there was no way he could get the necessary stores of petrol and oil without official Finnish assistance. It was essential that Admiral Walter Cowan, commanding British naval forces in the Baltic, should be briefed on the mission. The Admiral was currently in Reval, the capital of Estonia, but he was sending a destroyer and Gus would be taken to meet him on the following day. Two Finnish ministers would also be travelling on the destroyer, heading for talks in Estonia. Gus’s presence would be explained by saying that he was a diplomatic courier working for the Foreign Office.
Also at the meeting was an enormous Russian who was introduced to Gus as Pyotr Sokolov, although he very quickly became known to everyone simply as Peter. Gus was told that Peter was ST-25’s chief courier, but that he was currently being held back in Helsinki by MI6 because the border crossing had become too dangerous. Gus formed the distinct impression that this was MI6’s view, not Peter’s.
Peter was twenty-eight years old. He had been a law student in St Petersburg when war had broken out in 1914 and had then served as an NCO in the Russian army. Like Melnikov, he was working against the Bolsheviks because of the way his family had suffered at their hands. He was blond, tall, powerfully built and Gus later learned that he was something of an athlete: both a boxer and footballer. Football in Russia was a fairly new sport, introduced by the English community, but it had caught on tremendously just before the war. Peter had played for St Petersburg Unitas, the national champions, and he had won four caps playing for Russia at the 1912 Olympics. Gus was not surprised that this huge Russian, who was about six foot four inches tall, played as a central defender. Le May told Gus that his first task would be to get Peter into Petrograd.
Although Peter spoke very little English, Gus could speak some Russian and soon warmed to him. Unlike Scale and Le May who seemed more worried about political complications, Peter was desperate to get back to ST-25. Gus told the others that he had to have a base nearer to Petrograd. Peter suggested the tiny harbour of Terrioki. It had previously been the home of the St Petersburg Yacht Club, but was now deserted except for a Finnish border garrison in a fort about a mile away. Terrioki was 30 miles from the British fleet’s forward base at Biorko and just 25 miles from Petrograd, well within the CMBs’ range of operations. It sounded ideal.
Peter had more good news when Gus asked him about the breakwater. Like Melnikov, Peter worked as a smuggler to raise money for his anti-Bolshevik activities and he knew from local sailors that there were several passages through the breakwater. This was fantastic news. It meant that the seemingly impregnable defences could be breached. It would still mean running in under the Russian guns, but with the combination of surprise and the speed of the CMBs, it just might work. Gus asked Peter if he could find a smuggler who would act as pilot for the team. Peter agreed to travel to Terrioki and hire one while Gus and the others had their meeting with Admiral Cowan.
Although it might have been politically necessary, it was a foolish move to take a long-serving naval officer such as Gus aboard a Royal Navy vessel and the next day his cover was completely blown. The destroyer HMS Vanessa docked in Reval at 11.30 a.m. and the party crossed to Cowan’s flagship, the cruiser HMS Cleopatra, only to find that the Admiral had left for an official lunch. Diplomacy with the newly independent states was as important as military matters in this command. But as Gus was going aboard the Cleopatra he was recognised by a junior officer, Lieutenant James Rivett-Carnac:
‘But surely you are Agar, are you not?’ he challenged.
Gus knew James Rivett-Carnac so well that for a moment he was lost for an answer. Then he proved once and for all that he was not a natural spy by eventually blustering that he was actually a cousin of Lieutenant Agar, working for the Foreign Office, and that the two of them were often mistaken for one another. Rivett-Carnac didn’t fall for this story for a second and continued to watch Gus curiously as he hung around the ship waiting for the return of the Admiral.
It was 7.30 p.m. before the Admiral finally returned. Admiral Cowan saw Gus and his colleagues in private with only his Flag Captain, Charles Little, present. Cowan was one of the most decorated sailors in the British Navy and Gus described his jacket as ‘… a blaze of colour from the many decorations he had received for war services …’ (Indeed, Cowan was known to arrange his numerous campaign medals in an order which showed off their colours most pleasingly rather than in the official order.) Standing only five foot six inches tall, he was known throughout the Royal Navy as ‘The Little Man’ or simply ‘Titch’. At 48 years of age, he had a record as a brilliant seaman, but also a reputation as a martinet, a trait which would eventually cost him promotion to the very highest offices within the Admiralty. By 1919 he had already suffered one mutiny under his command and was soon to suffer another in the Baltic. He was known both for his demand for the very highest levels of performance and for a tendency to inflict severe punishments for the slightest of offences. It was a tendency he was aware of himself and when he was in his seventies he wrote: ‘When I commanded a squadron [i.e. in the Baltic] I made the mistake of expecting too high a standard of discipline.’
And yet this little man with the violent temper inspired tremendous loyalty and admiration amongst those officers who knew him well. Admiral Keyes described him as ‘The gallantest little sportsman I ever met.’ Charles Little was in many ways the perfect flag captain for him. When Cowan lost his temper over a misdemeanour and demanded a draconian punishment for the sailor responsible, Little would simply say, ‘Aye, sir’ and then do nothing, knowing that by the following day Cowan would have forgotten or thought better of it.
Cowan opened the meeting by explaining the difficulty of his position. Officially Britain and the new Soviet government were not at war. When challenged about what the Royal Navy were doing there, the British government had simply said that British forces were on ‘a summer cruise’. And yet Cowan’s light-cruiser squadron had been sent to the area to safeguard the independence of the Baltic States and Finland. His only guidance from the British government was to treat any Bolshevik warship found outside Russian territorial waters as hostile. The problem with this was that he did not have sufficient naval power to protect the Baltic States. It was all a gigantic bluff! Cowan explained that the Bolshevik Baltic fleet included three great warships: the battle cruisers Petropavlovsk and Andrei Pevozvanni and the armoured cruiser Oleg. At present they were lurking in their well-defended harbour at Kronstadt, but if they ever ventured forth and were well handled they could blow his force out of the water.
Knowing of Cowan’s reputation, Gus, still dressed in his ill-fitting brown Moss Bros suit, had approached the meeting with some nervousness. But he also knew that he would need Cowan’s help and wanted to prove to the Admiral that he could be an asset to the British naval force. He explained his purpose for being in the area and how he planned to penetrate the line of forts from a base at Terrioki. He joked that once his secret duties were complete it might be possible to reconnoitre and possibly raid Kronstadt harbour. Cowan laughed and said that if Gus managed to attack Kronstadt then he would recommend him for the Victoria Cross – a remark which turned out to be prophetic.
Captain Little was against the whole enterprise, feeling that if this sort of work needed to be done then it should be done by naval personnel in uniform, not by young officers masquerading as civilians. Together the naval officers studied confidential Admiralty charts which showed the disposition of the Russian defences and the lines of the breakwaters. Little listed all the hazards which Gus faced and then said that in his opinion the plan was outlandish if not impossible. But Cowan was of a different mind. He admired daring above all other qualities in a junior officer. He listened to Gus’s account of how Sokolov had told him about the gaps in the breakwaters and the idea of using smugglers to find them. He was particularly interested to hear how CMBs could skim over the broad Russian minefields. Mines represented the greatest daily threat to Cowan’s squadron throughout the mission and were to account for the loss of several British ships. It does not appear to have occurred to him before this meeting to use CMBs to counter that threat.
Cowan had a liking for unusual ideas (he had once captured an enemy submarine during a naval exercise by having his men lasso its periscope from the deck of his destroyer – and was reprimanded for the damage he caused!) and by the end of the meeting he had decided to overrule Little’s concerns. To the end of his life Gus remained grateful to Admiral Cowan for his backing at this vital moment and he always remembered Cowan’s words of support: ‘Nothing is worthwhile doing unless there’s a risk in it. Always choose the boldest course if you have any choice at all; it is always the boldest course that stands the best chance of success.’
Gus boldly asked for a destroyer to tow the CMBs as near to Terrioki as possible. Cowan agreed, announcing that only the day before the Finnish government had agreed that Cowan should be allowed to base his cruiser force at an advanced base at Biorko Sound. Gus also asked for a couple of ratings to be attached to his command to deal with routine matters such as cooking and guard duty. He would need his crews to be as fresh as possible for their courier work. Cowan agreed readily.
Then, as the meeting was breaking up, Gus raised a rather more tricky subject. Because the CMBs were being transported to Finland on a civilian freighter they had been unable to bring with them anything more powerful than small arms. They might be able to put up a fight against Russian patrol boats, but against larger craft they would be effectively defenceless. Gus wondered if Cowan would issue them with torpedoes?
Admiral Cowan was highly doubtful. This was a secret-service mission and he did not like the idea of people dressed as civilians racing around firing Royal Navy torpedoes: ‘… that would never do.’ But then Gus told him how Cumming had given the team permission to keep uniforms and a small white ensign hidden aboard each of the boats. If Cowan issued the torpedoes, Gus promised that they would only attack the Russians under a British flag and wearing British uniforms. Cowan pondered this and then asked who would be responsible for the maintenance and priming of the torpedoes? Even in 1919 torpedo design was still at an early stage and they could be unstable and dangerous. Gus explained that he was a fully trained mines and torpedoes officer. Still not entirely convinced, Cowan said that he would give the matter further thought.
After three hours the meeting broke up at 11 p.m. HMS Vanessa took Gus and Scale back to Helsinki. It was three o’clock on Tuesday morning before Gus fell into his bed back at the Hotel Fennia, but he was up early the next morning to take the train to Abo and make preparations for the arrival of the CMBs on Thursday. Gus was determined to move things along as quickly as possible. First he saw the harbour master and arranged that the Pallux should be able to dock right under the big crane that served the harbour. The CMBs might have been the last thing onto the Pallux, but they were damn well going to be the first thing off. Next he visited the Customs office. He had asked Le May to get hold of a letter from the Finnish Ministry of the Interior exempting the boats from Customs searches – since the mission was no longer secret from the Finns he might as well make use of any official help he could get. He had also hired a tug and a barge to transport the 2,000 gallons of high-octane petrol and other equipment off the Pallux and then take it to sheds where it could be stored before being sent on to Terrioki. Meanwhile Consul Bell and Vice-Consul Le May were negotiating with the Finns for permission to use the boats in Finnish waters.
The SS Pallux duly arrived shortly after midnight early on the morning of Thursday, 5 June, bearing CMBs 4 and 7 together with Sindall and the two mechanics, Piper and Pegler. True to Cowan’s word, HMS Voyager had arrived promptly at 9 a.m. ready to tow them on the next stage of their journey. By 10.30 a.m. the two 40-foot CMBs, still in their fresh coats of gleaming white paint, were winched off the deck and lowered gently into the water. They were easily the most striking objects in the busy commercial harbour, their sleek lines attracting many admiring glances – and some suspicious ones: MI6 was not the only intelligence service operating in the country. Clearly Cumming’s plan to pretend that these vessels were for commercial sale in a country as poor as Finland was never going to wash – there was already gossip all over the port. Gus ordered the mechanics to repaint the boats in their light grey camouflage colour immediately. Meanwhile he was forced to continue the round of unofficial diplomacy, this time leaving for a meeting with General Hubert Gough, head of the British Military Mission to Finland (as distinct from Cowan’s naval mission), who was naturally curious to find that there was going to be a secret-service team operating in his area. The secret mission was definitely a secret no longer.
Their planned departure after dark that evening was delayed. Peter Sokolov had missed his train on the way back from Terrioki. There was no way the team could go without him. And then matters became worse. The Chief of the Finnish Naval Staff, whose name was Schultz, asked to be transported on the Voyager as he was travelling down the coast. Gus and the captain of the Voyager spent an agonising few hours working out where they would stash Peter so that he and Schultz did not meet. But eventually Schultz decided he would rather go by train so the problem was solved by the time Sokolov finally rolled up, profusely apologetic, late on Friday afternoon.
At 10 p.m., when it was finally dark enough, HMS Voyager set off with the two CMBs in tow. Hugh Beeley paced the aft rail ceaselessly during the night, nervously watching his beloved boats. Exposure to sea water was the greatest problem with running the CMBs’ high-performance engines and he did not like the way the tow had been set up. He understood the fragile nature of the CMBs’ hulls. They were loaded with stores and could easily split a seam under the pressure of a fast tow. Commander C. G. Stuart, captain of the Voyager, was doing his best, but the problem was that the streamlining of the CMBs had been designed for when they were driven by their powerful engines from the rear. Towed from the front, the balance was all wrong and as the speed rose above twenty knots they kept bucking and dipping their prows like nervous horses lowering their heads as they were dragged forward. Several times the tarpaulin covers that Beeley and his team had hastily made up at Osea were completely awash. He was convinced that the engine compartments must be getting drenched. The problem was that the Voyager had to travel quickly if she was to reach Biorko before dawn so Captain Stuart kept straining for more speed. Two hours or so into the journey Beeley thought that the CMBs looked heavier in the water, a sure sign that either a seam or the canvas cover was leaking. Gus agreed and just at that moment the hawser towing CMB7 snapped under the strain.
There was no time to check the seals on the tarpaulin or the engines. The destroyer halted briefly and a boat was sent out with a new line. For the rest of the journey, HMS Voyager reduced speed to try and protect the little boats, but nothing seemed to make any difference and at 5 a.m., with the race to beat the dawn already lost, CMB4 sank lower and lower in the water and finally her hawser parted as well. Beeley went out with the Voyager’s boats to attach a new line and announced through a loud hailer that she would have to be pumped out before she could be towed any further. He dreaded to think about the damage that must have been done to the delicate engines. More time was lost as they had to use the hand-operated pumps and it was noon on Saturday, 7 June, before Voyager crawled into Biorko Sound where Cowan and the rest of the light-cruiser squadron was already waiting.
For the next 24 hours Beeley and Piper worked hard. (As planned, Pegler had remained in Helsinki with the reserve stores.) They stripped the engines as far as possible and tried to repair the damage that the sea water had caused. On Sunday afternoon Gus ran the first trials of the boats across Biorko Sound. Sailors of the squadron with nothing better to do lined up on the decks to cheer on the little boats as the roar of their powerful engines resounded across the bay. CMB7, the ‘lucky boat’, had been lucky again and passed her test with flying colours. But, just as Beeley had feared, for CMB4 it was a different story. On her first run across the bay the engine would not make more than about 20 knots. She simply bounced across the choppy water like a car with a faulty clutch, never quite making the speed necessary for her aerodynamics to lift her out of the water. Beeley disappeared below to make some adjustments and then Gus took CMB4 on a second run. As she sped across the bay, the engine roared and speed increased until she was racing flat out. She rose out of the water and two great wings of spray, the trade mark of a fast-moving CMB at full power, flew high to either side in her wake. A great cheer rose up from the watching sailors. Drenched in the spray, Hampsheir, Beeley and Gus looked at each other across the cramped open cabin. The roar of the engines made speech impossible, but the grins and raised thumbs made their exhilaration clear as CMB4 pulled away from CMB7.
Then, just as they came to the end of their run and were about to throttle down, there was an explosion from the front of the boat and the scream of grinding metal. Beeley frantically made the sign to cut power as smoke began to billow around them. Gus slammed the throttle shut and CMB4 dropped back into the water, quickly gliding to a dead stop. Beeley disappeared into the engine compartment, holding an oily rag over his face against the fumes. He was gone for some time. Sindall and Marshall in CMB7 pulled alongside, looking concerned. Gus and John Hampsheir spent the time while Beeley made his checks finding a rope and organising a tow from CMB7, but they knew they were in trouble.
When Beeley clambered back into the cabin, his face and overalls were coated with oil and with smoke residue and he looked despondent. It was all bad news. CMB4 had run the big ends clean off two connecting rods and completely seized her engine. It was about as bad an accident as could have happened and with the tools that Beeley had available there was nothing he could do. The engine was a complete write-off.
As the two boats limped back towards HMS Voyager Gus was at his lowest point yet. With less than ten days to go before the onset of the White Nights one of his boats was already out of action. There was a spare engine with the stores at Helsinki, but he knew from experience that to install a complete new engine would usually take a team of mechanics several days even with the first-class workshop facilities at Osea Island. Out here, miles from anywhere and with only limited equipment, it would be impossible to get CMB4 ready in time. Gus looked towards the distant Russian coast. Either he would have to risk a run through the forts with just one boat or Beeley was going to have to produce a minor miracle.