大象传媒

(Told by his son, Mr John Vandepeer Clarke)
My father had been four or five years in the First World War as an Infantry Officer and something of an expert in explosives. Being an officer of a Pioneer Batallion doing a great deal of tunnelling and general explosives work and who temperamentally seemed to love making loud bangs, 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. He became an officer whose speciality was training saboteurs in the use of exlosive devices and with Stuart Macrae he designed the limpet mine.
Within a few months of starting work advising saboteurs my father was made Commanding Officer of the secret station, Station 17 in Brickendonbury Manor, 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 operations in factories, blowing things up, etc. These saboteurs were then dispatched by Lysander aircraft or dropped by parachute into occupied Europe to carry out their work.
He felt it very important that these foreign enthusiastic volunteers should get some 'hands on' experience of trying to carry out an attack. So my father made out a pass on War Office paper saying 'The holder of this pass Major C.V. Clarke has authority to inspect Luton Power Station'. So armed with this pass which I'm sure judging from the signature looked remarkably like my father's, he took his team from Hertford to Luton one dark night.
The used scaling ladders to get over the walls of Luton Power Station, which of course was guarded like all big installations. They successfully got inside, they planted dummy charges on all the transformers, they then got back over the wall successfully without anyone noticing. Then, having cleared off to a nearby street waited for my father, who then walked up to the front door of the power station and asked for the Officer of the Guard and produced his Pass and he said,
"I want to do a routine inspection". So he went round with a very big torch and we came up to the first transformer and he flashed his torch and he said, "What's that?" And this young subaltern who was in charge of the Guard said, "I'm not quite sure what this is, sir." "It looks to me like an explosive charge. Let's have a look around."
And in the end the poor subaltern in charge of the Guard was knock-kneed with what he'd let happen. So my father, who was a kindly man, said,"Alright old man, you say nothing about this and I'll say nothing about it. But you've learned your lesson." With that he had his team back to retrieve the appliances and off they went. But this was very valuable training, slightly unorthodox but it's one of those things that happened in wartime. One of the wilder outfits in the Army during the war!

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