大象传媒

Wartime memories of my childhood in Bedford Part Three 鈥� My father鈥檚 (Major Clarke) invention of a trench digging machine and then becoming a SOE Training Officer in sabotage. He was made Commanding Officer at Station 17, Brickendonbury Manor near Hertford. Later he was posted to MD1, Whitchurch.

Part three of an oral history interview with Mr. John Vandepeer Clarke conducted by Ann Hagen on behalf of Bedford Museum.

鈥淲hen the war started my father was, within a few months engaged in helping with the war effort. He was first of all being taken on at the behest of Winston Churchill; we鈥檝e still got a letter from Churchill, because my father had an idea for a high speed trench forming machine which could be used to attack the German positions in France and in Germany. This is in the 鈥楶honey鈥� war period before the great German Blitzkrieg of 1940. He had produced quite detailed drawings showing a machine, an extraordinary machine, which was about 60 feet long which propelled itself along by firing rockets. Effectively it was forming a trench about 8 or 9 feet wide, perhaps 10 feet wide by about 8 feet deep. It could overnight travel about three or four miles and the idea was to effect surprise by no doubt having a barrage going on overhead to create a great deal of noise. Because this machine itself would have created a great deal of noise, but to camouflage that you would set up an artillery barrage. Then by using this machine you could advance your troops and following tanks in the shelter of this deep trench across several miles and perhaps achieve a great surprise. This was an idea that Churchill thought was very interesting. And my father became a Civil Servant at the princely salary of 拢1000 a year at that time for a matter of about two months. He was attached to what was called the Naval Land Section of the Admiralty because Churchill at that time was the First Lord of the Admiralty. There was already another person who was involved in designing something along parallel lines. Ironically within about a fortnight of my father taking up his post as Civil Servant he decided that he would cease to be a Civil Servant pronto. Because what had happened was that the Germans had in May 1940, which was the time we are talking about, had suddenly launched the attack on the Low Countries and France and where sweeping through all these countries. The idea of a high speed trench forming machine was plainly not worth pursuing any longer.

My father who had been for four or five years in the First World War as an Infantry Officer and as something of an expert in explosives, being an Officer of a Pioneer Battalion doing a great deal of tunnelling and general explosives work and who temperamentally seemed to love making loud bangs - a feature of his character which I personally don鈥檛 share - he went to the War Office and was taken on immediately because of his previous experience and became one of the early members of the SOE.

My father developed his Spigot mortar that he invented in 1940 that was capable of being used by small groups of people. For example for the Local Defence Force which became the Home Guard to attack enemy vehicles and which threw a plastic explosive projectile which could be used against enemy vehicles. It was propelled by a spring device behind an armoured plate where the firer would lie concealed and this spring had a spike on it which then went into the base of the propelled charge and caused it to fly across and when it hit the target, the plastic explosive which was in a great sort of pudding shaped lump on the front of the projectile would explode with rather nasty results. The Tree Spigot was exactly the same principle but it was rather safer for the people who were firing the thing against perhaps an enemy convoy in that the person who was going to operate the firing of the Spigot mortar could use a trip wire to set the charge off because the Spigot was attached firmly to a tree and therefore the operator could be 20 or 30 yards away in deep foliage and could make an escape after firing this weapon.

My father was a member of the Special Operations Executive and he became an Officer whose specialty was training saboteurs in the use of explosive devices. He was also designing explosive devices and weapons himself. You will remember that he had, with Macrae, designed the limpet mine in the preceding year. I鈥檝e got in front of me a book, and a list of things that my father did during the war. And I shall just explain that I was the eldest boy of the three boys in the family, and I think to me alone my father confided. He realised that I was reasonably responsible and that if I was told by him that this was confidential and that nobody else was to be told. I would absolutely not say anything to anybody outside the family or indeed to any other member of the family except in talking with my father or mother about what my father was up to - which was highly secret. Within a few months of starting work advising saboteurs my father was made Officer Commanding the secret station, Station 17 in Brickendonbury Manor near Hertford, just south of Hertford. There he would run courses for Poles, French, Dutch, various nationalities in the use of explosive devices. How to blow up railway lines, how to effect various sabotage activities in factories, blowing things up, etc. etc. These saboteurs were then despatched by Lysander aircraft or dropped by parachute into occupied Europe to carry out their work.

I remember as an example of my father鈥檚 trust in me because I had an uncle who had a farm out at Pulloxhill in Bedfordshire. My father, shortly before an operation was due to take place and before a group of saboteurs were sent off, they having been trained up to the limit and needing a couple of days鈥� break, were sent by my father across to Pulloxhill to help bring in the harvest or do some other job on the farm and it happened that I was there at the same time. My father told me that these foreign people who were on the farm helping my uncle, that they were saboteurs, that they were going
to be dropped over Europe but they were not to know under any circumstances that I was Major Clarke鈥檚 son. So we kept absolutely quiet about that and worked with them in the field as they were having their break before going on their dangerous missions.

After about a year at this Station 17 my father then transferred to a Special Weapon Developments Station set up by Professor Lindemann who became Lord Cherwell, who was Churchill鈥檚 chief scientific advisor. By this time of course Churchill was Prime Minister and also Churchill had made himself Minister of Defence. The one establishment under the Ministry of Defence that he set up was this research and development weapon station situated just north of Aylesbury in the village of Whitchurch which was code named MD1 Whitchurch, Ministry of Defence 1. My father became Deputy Assistant Director of this secret station where his former colleague Stuart Macrae was already installed and was in fact Second in Command of the outfit there. It became a very, very big and important enterprise because the great thing about MD1 Whitchurch, which was Commanded by Colonel Jeffries, a Regular Royal Engineer Officer of great distinction, the thing that made their work different from that of the Regular Army and Ministry of Defence weapon procurement sections was that they had no time whatsoever for red tape. They got things done at twice or thrice perhaps the speed at which the normal procurement method of designing and getting things into production would take. They weren鈥檛 always terribly popular with some of the Regular Army people who had been doing the job all their Army careers, but they did achieve some very great results.

When my father was in MD1 Whitchurch he was of course carrying on with his weapon development and he devised a system for attacking U boats by air using Liberator aircraft which were used in the later part of the war. It was one of many different types of approach to destroying the German submarines which sailed out of the west coast of France into the Atlantic. His particular contribution was a 35 lb. armour piercing bomb which is quite a small bomb but the thing was that rather than dropping one or two large bombs from an aircraft at a very small target of a submarine which is rapidly trying to disappear below the waves, it consisted of 20 or 30 smaller charges which were dropped in a scatter device so that they covered a much larger area. Therefore they were more likely to get one of these bombs attacking and actually hitting the target. My father was attached to Coastal Command for several months flying up and down from St.Eval aerodrome in Cornwall down to Gibraltar and back again in the Liberators and they achieved one or two sinkings as a result of their activities.

One of the chief benefits as far as we children were concerned was we found that my father coming home at weekends from Aylesbury - he occasionally managed to get back to Bedford for a night or two, bearing gifts of bananas and oranges which were totally unknown at that time of the war.

Other things that my father produced included an altimeter switch which was an ingenious device. It was a tube of explosives which had a device actuating it which caused the charge to go off at a given height, so it was known as an altimeter switch. For attack on enemy aircraft, stationed on airfields, and it was a saboteur鈥檚 device and it was capable of being put in by saboteurs into say the tail plane under the tail plane and inspection port, concealed in there so that when the Heinkel or Messerschmitt aircraft took off. All was well until the plane reached a height of either 5,000 or 10,000 feet, this height could be varied. Suddenly there would be a loud bang and the tail of the plane would be blown off which was rather an unfortunate experience for the pilot. These were used extensively by SOE during the war in France and the other occupied countries.鈥�

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