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Part Seven

"Jasper Maskelyne's escape and evasion lectures became famous throughout the Middle East and later the Far East...Before the war was over he had given variations of the basic lecture to more than two hundred thousand officers and men in twelve countries, travelling 135,000 miles to do so.."

"Eventually, Maskelyne became an important member of MI-9 ... From a badly scratched desk at the headquarters beneath the brothel , Maskelyne produced some of the most ingenious spy devices ever used in warfare."

The War Magician p. 139.

In this article, we will examine Jasper Maskelyne's unusual involvement with MI-9, a clandestine unit within A-Force which specialised in escape and evasion. According to the account in "The War Magician", Dudley Clarke, commander of A-Force, impressed by Maskelyne's inventive camouflage work, invited him to deliver lectures on escape and evasion methods. Maskelyne reportedly came into his element. His assured presentation skills and his natural conjuring gifts enabled him to present lectures that were serious, informative yet highly entertaining. Over the remainder of the war, these successful lectures helped gain Maskelyne promotion to the rank of major.

Maskelyne also began producing distinctive escape tools for MI-9.

Magic technicians in the past had developed clever ways of concealing objects. Maskelyne, inheriting his famous grandfather's knack for devising novel mechanical items, made use of this magical heritage by inventing camouflaged tools which could be passed off as innocent objects. Several of the diagrams in "The War Magician", taken from Maskelyne's ' diaries', are intriguing. For example, the escape boot for commandos which secretly carried a hidden compass, a silk map, and special cutting instruments. Maskelyne also designed an ordinary looking shoe-polish brush which contained a hidden escape kit.

These original illustrations have been enlarged on the next page for greater clarity.

This phase of Maskelyne's wartime career reminded me of the fictional character, Q, the eccentric master of compact gimmickry who appears in the James Bond novels and movies.

Aware that Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence during the war, I even wondered if Fleming had based the character on Maskelyne himself ?

However, further research uncovered two other candidates who might equally have inspired the character. Indeed, a major weakness of Fisher's book is that he fails to mention these two important figures who rival if not surpass Maskelyne as contributors to the secret war, namely Clayton Hutton and Charles Fraser-Smith. Fleming's character 'Q' is perhaps a fictional composite, based on the combined achievements of Hutton , Fraser-Smith and Maskelyne.

"Q (in the novels and first couple of films he is called Major Boothroyd) is the head of the weapons branch and is always turning up in the films with some new gimmick for Bond to use. In the first film, Dr No ... all he presents to Bond is a new pistol. Desmond Llewelyn took the role in From Russia With Love and issues Bond an attaché case with all kinds of clever devices. In Goldfinger, Bond acquires the famous Aston Martin equipped with a veritable arsenal. From then on, each successive film features a more impressive type of weapon than the last. Llewelyn's Q shares the cinematic M's disgust at the way Bond treats his equipment, women, etc. As the films progress, Q becomes more and more sarcastic, and the Q/Bond scenes function as comic relief."

from "The James Bond Bedside Companion" by R. Benson (1988)

In 1979 , authors M.R.D. Foot and J. M. Langley gave the first detailed account of MI-9's secret wartime work in their book MI-9 : Escape and Evasion .

This valuable book is not simply the product of armchair research .

Langley , wounded and taken prisoner at Dunkirk, made a daring escape from hospital in late 1940 while recovering from the amputation of his left arm. He managed to travel south to Marseilles. After successfully returning to England in early 1941, Langley was recruited for MI-9 and helped develop escape routes over north-west Europe.

Foot, now a war historian of some repute, worked as an intelligence officer, participated in deception operations during D-Day , and also experienced captivity at first hand near the end of the war in late 1944.

Given that these authors had carefully sifted through the MI-9 archives and had interviewed various survivors, I originally hoped they could provide solid independent confirmation of Maskelyne's secret wartime work for MI-9.

Unfortunately, Foot and Langley's references to Maskelyne appear to be mainly based on the tainted material presented in "Magic-Top Secret" and as a consequence the Maskleyne passages need to be treated with scepticism.

It again shows that well-meaning historians, even those who lived through the period, who were trained as intelligence agents, and who participated in the action, can sometimes be led astray by an overconfidence in their source material.

Much of the information presented in Foot and Langley's book is valid and instructive. However, certain parts are based on the assumption that personal recollections are essentially reliable and trustworthy.

It is not clear to me what protective criteria they used to distinguish the genuine memoirs from the semi-fictional or ghost-written accounts.

For example, in both "The War Magician" and "Magic-Top Secret", Maskelyne visits Malta.

Alistair Maskelyne cannot absolutely vouch that his father was sent there , but he believes that such a posting was plausible: "Malta, I just don't know: it is quite likely that he did make that visit, it certainly is right in the area where he spent so much of the war."

Given the urgent need on Malta for camouflage and decoy work in the face of intense enemy bombing, such a visit by camouflage experts is highly credible.

However, one aspect of the story does sound far fetched.

In "Magic-Top Secret" , Maskelyne supposedly witnesses the surprise landing of an Italian bomber commandeered by two daring British escapees. This anecdote is uncritically recycled by Foot and Langley , who mistakenly judged that "Magic- Top Secret" was a reliable source:

"Maskelyne recounts another escape attempt by air which actually succeeded, in circumstances as uncannily odd as that author's name would suggest. In the late summer of 1942 an RAF pilot and his observer crash-landed in a Sicilian lake, swam ashore and were taken prisoner. They were promptly put into a Savoia bomber and flown off towards the mainland for interrogation. One of them spoke Italian and fell into a technical argument with the Savoia's crew. To settle a detail in dispute, he stepped up to the pilot's seat, and then suddenly seized the pilot by the throat with the threat he would crash the aircraft and kill them all unless the pilot flew to Malta. The pilot complied, the other British airman found a course and hung his vest out of the window as an extempore white flag, the intercepting fighters and AA gunners held their fire, and the ruse succeeded."

This sounds like an urban combat myth or a creative episode worthy of an Alistair Maclean novel or a Boy's Own adventure. There is no hard evidence that this daring escape ever took place. Alistair Maskelyne tends to agree: "An urban combat myth very aptly describes the bomber story."

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On a more promising note, Foot & Langley's book on MI-9 first introduced me to the name of Clayton Hutton. Details of Hutton's unusual wartime service can be found in his autobiography Official Secret (1961). This book is long out of print. Fortunately, I located a copy courtesy of a computerised library search. Interestingly, Hutton makes no mention of Maskelyne. The record is not clear how Maskelyne's work fitted in with Hutton's. Hutton appears in some ways to be a precursor to Maskelyne. And this does not suit the narrative momentum of "The War Magician" which portrays Maskelyne as the unique inventor of original devices. An admission that someone else in MI-9 was immersed in the production of special escape devices well before Maskelyne entered the scene tends to undermine the story of "The War Magician".

In the spring of 1940 , Clayton Hutton, nicknamed 'Clutty', began researching the methods used for escape attempts in the previous war. An escapee or evader firstly needed an accurate map. Hutton quickly bought up all available maps of Germany on the open market.

After several trials and errors Hutton developed a method of transferring the images on the maps to actual silk sheets, and setting the ink with pectin. The aim was to create easily concealed silk maps that would elude the standard body search.

Eventually, bomber crews over Germany would carry Hutton's silk maps hidden within their protective clothing.

According to this alternative account, it was Hutton, not Maskelyne, who helped develop not only silk maps, but button compasses, miniature hacksaws and special paper maps (which would not rustle), and was gradually bringing these items into production by c. mid-1940, though too late for the soldiers captured by the Germans at Dunkirk .

Hutton also developed the special flying boot which had special laces that concealed 'Gigli' saws ; magnetised tags that could be used as bar compasses , and a hidden compartment in the heel to hold other escape equipment.

However, as we have seen, "The War Magician" provides diagrams (signed by Maskelyne in November 1942) of several of Maskelyne's concealed escape devices.

Ideally, I would like to have disentangled the discrepancies over who originated what...

Alistair Maskelyne in his first letter responded to my queries regarding the origin of the escape and evasion tools :

"Most of the gadgets described such as the camouflaged tools, maps, compasses were produced by the workshops run by my father. Whether he invented them or not, he certainly had quite a supply with him when he left the British Army , and somewhere I think I can still lay my hands on one of the ingenious little brass uniform buttons that is actually a compass. The button ring is the handle to unscrew the back ; you must turn it CLOCKWISE to unscrew it. Then there is displayed a tiny glass fronted magnetic compass bowl in the back of the button."

"Maybe Hutton was the inventor. It certainly would not be unusual for my father to give the impression he was the person responsible for the ideas."

Alistair's mention of this reverse thread button compass is interesting. As the war progressed, MI-9 had to come up with more cunning schemes to outwit the enemy security forces. Hutton's account candidly acknowledges that the Germans eventually uncovered most of these ruses : "in time they intercepted nearly all of my gadgets ."

Hutton claims it was he who introduced the left-handed thread later in the war to fool the German searchers. "Any attempt to unscrew it, therefore, only tightened the thing."

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As previously mentioned, another obscure but important figure in this secret war was Charles Fraser-Smith who died recently at the age of eighty-eight. In his obituary in the British Telegraph he was hailed as the original 'Q'.

Charles Fraser-Smith

"A man I did know, though only slightly, was Ian Fleming, creator of ...James Bond. The reason I well remember him is that he used - or misused, rather - one of my most imaginative little gadgets, a golf-ball which contained a compass... The whole point about the secret ball, usually sent out to our P.O.W. officers in a box of six, all sparkling new... was that they had to perform as golf balls. In other words, they had to bounce with the same vitality and elasticity as any topflight ball ever made. Fleming's contraptions described so fascinatingly in his novel Diamonds Are Forever, wouldn't have fooled an Irish farmhand let alone the Lynx-eyed prison officers and S.S. of the Oflags."

"The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith" (p. 128 ).

His son-in-law persuaded him to write his memoirs: "The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith" (1983). Unfortunately, in my opinion, Fraser-Smith may have left it too late in his life to complete a satisfactory autobiography. The narrative is highly anecdotal and vague on dates. There are intriguing references to Maskelyne, but for the most part these are of questionable accuracy.

Nevertheless, Fraser-Smith's book is worth reading despite these problems. Fraser-Smith knew Clayton Hutton and appears to have supplied Maskelyne.

Fraser-Smith's follow-up book, "Secret Warriors", is disappointingly superficial. I regard it unfavourably as an inadequate ghost-written compilation, frequently recycling the errors of secondary sources.

I should add that Fraser-Smith's first book was also partly 'ghosted'. And Hutton's "Official Secret" might well have been jazzed up by an in-house ghostwriter.

Obviously, these two characters were deeply involved in the secret war, but it is difficult to judge how accurate and objective their memoirs are.

Where did Maskelyne's work for MI-9 fit into all of this?

It is not clear. He may have come up with variations on the original designs, e.g. modifying Hutton's flying boot into a commando escape boot. After reading and comparing the competing accounts , I found it quite hard to unravel each person's contribution to the war effort. For example, Fraser-Smith takes credit for procuring 'Gigli' saws (used by neurosurgeons to cut through skulls) and for developing them into escape tools. Hutton in his own (much earlier) account claims he was the chap who procured the 'Gigli' saws. And Maskelyne , in "The War Magician" and "Magic-Top Secret" , is credited with devising a similar hacksaw blade.

Whatever the final truth, by ignoring or being unaware of Hutton and Fraser-Smith's contribution, Fisher's claim that Maskelyne "produced some of the most ingenious spy devices ever used in warfare" is, in my opinion, a misleading exaggeration.

In the next article, Jasper Maskelyne's début spy mission for Dudley Clarke — searching King Farouk's Palace for an enemy radio transmitter — will be critically re-assessed.

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