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Part Fifteen
"Aboard the strange landing craft and other vessels were numbers of new war-magic inventions and illusions. There were dummies and camouflage apparatus, materials for sham attacks, items to draw enemy shore batteries' fire harmlessly, and all sorts of other devices. I had submitted plans for every kind of trickery ; but, by good fortune, many were never necessary, for the landings — on Sicily and then on the Italian mainland — went forward with a comparative ease and swiftness that surprised all Allied authorities." Magic-Top Secret (p.127)
Any attempt to document Jasper Maskelyne's war career after El Alamein soon melts into a sludge of confusion and speculation. Spurred by the desert victory , camouflage and deception experts were given greater recognition and better resources. Yet Maskelyne's precise contribution remains a mystery. At first, I hoped the best way to unravel Maskelyne's role was to focus on the main deception plan in the Mediterranean for 1943, codenamed 'Barclay' and see how Maskelyne might have fitted in. Michael Howard describes Barclay in the following way : "The main Allied operation approved at the Casablanca conference...was the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky. The object of Barclay therefore was to secure the greatest possible surprise for Husky by posing credible threats which would pin down enemy forces in the south of France and the Balkan peninsula; to weaken the garrison of Sicily and retard its reinforcement, especially by German troops; and to reduce to a minimum air and naval attacks on the shipping being assembled for the assault on Sicily from Britain, north Africa and Egypt." Of course, there were many individual components to the overall deception plan. For example, Operation Mincemeat, the planting of fake documents on a corpse, as popularised in the film "The Man Who Never Was" , really did take place and probably had some effect on the German High Command. The 'you only die twice' human bait was secretly dumped on the Spanish coast by a submarine. A concocted letter on the person of this faked courier indicated that the prime invasion target would be Greece not Sicily. I assumed that Maskelyne would be involved in some component to the Barclay deception plan. Given his expertise, one might expect Maskelyne to have played a prominent part in Operation Waterfall (mid-1943) : "a really massive display of dummies was erected in the Western Desert for the benefit of German aerial reconnaissance." This concentration of equipment was designed to simulate preparations for an invasion force directed at Greece. However, there is no mention of Maskelyne in this operation. Instead, Colonel Victor Jones is given the credit in the official records. Substantial numbers of fake landing craft, nicknamed 'Dry Bobs' were assembled, precursors to the 'Wet Bobs' used in the D-Day landings in 1944. Where then was Maskelyne? What was he doing? The answers are unclear. It seems probable that in 1943 Jasper Maskelyne continued his work for MI-9, giving numerous escape and evasion lectures for Allied aircrews. He may also have developed small-scale camouflage and deception schemes in the Mediterranean theatre, especially for areas such as Italy and the Balkans. Maskelyne appears to have contributed to various minor tactical deceptions, but it is doubtful that he was involved in what would be defined as the broader strategic side of deception. "As we slowly cleared the middle of Italy of the Axis fungus, very big-scale preparations were put in hand to co-operate with partisans in Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Greece. I was kept hard at work briefing and lecturing to key-units of the British 8th Army and U.S. 12th Air Force, as well as devising camouflage for bomb damage caused by German raiders, and planning devices that partisans could use all over that part of Europe." According to "Magic - Top Secret", Maskelyne then flew to Corsica:"My task in Corsica was to brief senior members of the U.S.A.A.F. who were carrying out special missions in Yugoslavia and the vicinity". As previously emphasised, "Magic-Top Secret" can hardly be seen as an accurate account, but some of these passages that have been quoted may well contain kernels of truth. Although it is quite hard to provide exact dates and details, Jasper Maskelyne almost certainly dabbled with MI-9 work during this period. Previous articles have discussed Maskelyne's involvement with MI-9 and his role in designing secret weapons and spy devices for Allied agents and resistance fighters. In trying to get a clearer understanding of the likely chronology of Jasper Maskelyne's career after Rommel had been driven from Africa, I addressed the following question to Alistair Maskelyne: after Alamein, did your father maintain the same level of correspondence ? "The level of correspondence from my father was certainly maintained after the African campaign, but with no letters extant, plus my own involvement at sea, it is not possible for me to give dates or places with any accuracy. I recall Bari as being a location in Italy figuring largely in letters to my mother. " Independent evidence from other sources backs up this recollection. After the successful invasion of Southern Italy, SOE did indeed establish an HQ at Bari. MI-9 , as we have previously noted, provided direct assistance to SOE. I checked a map of Italy and found that Bari was situated on the eastern side of Southern Italy, further up the coastline from Brundisi. Bari faces the Adriatic Sea. Beyond this stretch of water lies Yugoslavia and Albania. This would seem an ideal sight from which to plan and launch operations into the Balkans. Nigel West's recent analysis, "Secret War-The Story of SOE, Britain's Wartime Sabotage Organisation" , (1992), is critical of the effectiveness of the SOE :"On a strategic level it must be open to considerable doubt whether unconventional warfare, of the type practised by SOE, played any part in shortening the war." As for the Balkans, West ruefully concludes: "...far more Yugoslavs were killed with SOE weaponry than German or Italian troops..." Jasper Maskelyne (or should we say the ghost-writer of "Magic- Top Secret") would probably agree with this assessment. "Whether we did any eventual good... is a debatable matter." "Our 'magic' transformation of the Balkan garden may have (and did) inconvenience the Germans, but...the plants have proved to be violent perennials instead of merely hardy annuals as we had innocently hoped..."
INDEPENDENT TESTIMONY Anthony Quayle, the famous British actor , in his autobiography "A Time to Speak", wrote of his experience as a novice working in the Music Halls in the 1930's: "At the time I did not appreciate my luck, but for six months I was in daily contact with a species as rare and fascinating as the ridge-back gorilla, and already on its way to extinction. Now all of them are gone and their like will not be seen again, for the conditions that nourished them have vanished. Harry Champion, Flanagan and Allen, Will Fyffe, Jasper Maskelyne, Nellie Wallace — those are just some of the artists I was on stage with. I put them in alphabetical order because, wherever they are — even in the Kingdom of Persephone —billing is bound to be a sore point with them." Quayle had a distinguished war record. He visited SOE headquarters in Cairo and volunteered for special operations in the Balkans. His first SOE mission was to Albania. "There followed several weeks of courses — in explosives, ciphering, deciphering , and in the rudiments of the Albanian language. We even had a few lessons from Jasper Maskelyne — one of the magicians from my music-hall days ; he instructed us in various idiotic skills, like writing in invisible ink." ___________________________________________________________________________ Jasper Maskelyne's career now shifts to the far eastern theatre. He is posted to India, but the precise date of this transfer is not given. We will return to this disputed chronology in the next article when we investigate Maskleyne's alleged role in the D-Day deception , June 1944.
FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE MASKELYNE DYNASTY My main focus over these articles has been the wartime career of Jasper Maskelyne. However, some of the information gleaned about other members of the Maskelyne family is worth recording, particularly the rivalry between Jasper and his brothers and the recurrent financial problems. Here are some additional comments by Alistair Maskelyne culled from his earlier letters: In the opening articles to this series, we mentioned that Jasper's grandfather, John Nevil Maskelyne, fought and lost a court case over what he regarded as his rightful share to the Maskelyne estate at Basset Down. Alistair Maskelyne wrote :"He succeeded in wasting away most of the profits accumulated during his years as an illusionist, and when he died, his son Nevil was obliged to continue the Maskelyne and Cooke, later Maskelyne and Devant shows, at rented premises : finally the St. George's Hall in Langham Palace. This venue was at last acquired by the BBC before the second world war, and in that ownership was totally destroyed by bombs during the blitz." "This fundamental failure to acquire freehold property seems to have been the eventual fall point for the continually popular magic show. " "As a small boy I well recall the fascination of watching from a privileged stage side box my various aunts and uncles demonstrating impossible feats of levitation, escape or transformation. Behind the scenes it was equally engrossing for a small boy to see how some of the illusions were prepared." "This place, St. George's Hall had become a London institution. Unfortunately there were some jealousies within the family: my father, Jasper was the youngest of four sons, Jack, Clive and Noel. By the time Jasper was born, funds were insufficient to educate him as had the older boys been privileged. He attended only state schools, and was never given the opportunity of tertiary education. He gained a place in the family theatre, but to him not his rightful position, as the most stage presentable and cooly talented illusionist." "It must be emphasised that he never was able to achieve feats of manipulative dexterity, certainly not with cards." "My knowledge of the causes for the final split between my father and his brothers is not good; it had much to do with the permanent chip on my father's shoulder about his comparative lack of education, and the apparently superior voting rights of his brothers in the conduct of the business.."
THE MYSTERY OF CLIVE MASKELYNE'S DEATH In reading Alistair's correspondence, I was intrigued as to the fate of one of Jasper's older brothers, Clive Maskelyne, who died prematurely. In his book "The Great Illusionists", Professor Dawes gives 1928 as the year Clive died but does not specify the cause of his death. Interestingly, in his first letter, Alistair mentioned that "Clive had been killed while taking part in an expedition to climb Mt. Everest in the 1920's ". I scoured a recent reference book, "Everest - A Mountaineering History'"by W. Unsworth, which actually lists the unfortunate climbers that have perished. There was no mention of a Clive Maskelyne. Indeed, there was no reference to an expedition in 1928. The third Everest expedition was in 1924 ; the fourth , because of frontier disputes, was not until 1933. The ghost writer of "White Magic" does not refer to Clive Maskelyne's death, which is strange given that such an event would capture the reader' s attention. I mentioned these anomalies in a follow-up letter to Alistair Maskelyne. Might Clive have died en route to Everest ? Or was the Everest story a family legend concocted to hide a scandal ? In his return letter, Alistair included a photocopy of a rare 1933 program from St. George's Hall which states "In 1926, Clive retired to undertake an extensive tour of India and the Far East; but unfortunately, he was taken ill and died at sea on the outward journey." Alistair adds : "This was later, as I mentioned, commented upon in the family as "on his way to the Everest expedition". It may have been a cover-up, or euphemism for behaviour which might not have been wished to be publicised : the reason for my comment is that his daughter Althea, who is still alive, was born in 1926, and it seems a bit strange for a father with a new born baby to take off on his own around the world." Edwin Dawes , on reading this, kindly forwarded me a copy of Clive Maskelyne's Obituary , printed in the Magic Circular in October 1928, which I have reconstructed below:
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It appears, then, that Clive Maskelyne died after a fatal bout of pneumonia while en route to 'the east' . __________________________________________________________________________
I also found interesting Alistair Maskelyne's memories of his own childhood education: "At all these times my earliest recollections give memories of both financial hardship together with a gift for lavish living : two rather impracticably combined ways of life..." "...both my father and mother, to my juvenile eyes, showed no signs of lessening their convictions that they were to be numbered in the ranks of the well known and fortunate in British society. Certainly not in society itself, but acquainted with many of the more worldly of its members, and familiar in society ways." "This attitude was translated into my own schooling: when finances permitted, I was a pupil at Gibbs School, a popular upper bracket primary school in Sloane Square , where I rubbed shoulders with Peter Ustinov and young Bobby Kennedy. In fact more than rubbed shoulders with Kennedy; we had a mutual dislike and took it out in fisticuffs, where I was the loser." Peter Ustinov's autobiography contains amusing recollections of this élite school run by an eccentric absent-minded headmaster. The standard biographies of Robert Kennedy also confirm that Bobby , as a child, was sent to this exclusive British preparatory school. In a later letter, Alistair gave more details of his clash with Bobby Kennedy: "The Kennedy family, all twelve of them, had arrived in London upon the appointment of Joseph Kennedy as Ambassador in 1937. Young Bobby, although older, and much bigger than me, was installed in my form at Gibbs. We had English class sessions prior to putting on a performance of "As You Like It", and Kennedy had been allocated to read the part of Orlando. His inability to read coherently, coupled with his accent, caused me to laugh at him. During morning tea break he set on me in good Kennedy fashion and was bashing my head on the wooden classroom floor, when the form master , attracted by my howls, appeared to stop the brawl. Being British, he settled matters in typical fashion: he directed us both to the gym, where we donned boxing gloves, and Kennedy proceeded to beat the be-Jesus out of me again."
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