LCDR Walter Brooksbank MM RANVR at the Admiralty

Author

A.N. Other

Subjects

Biographies and personal histories, Naval Intelligence, History - WW2

Tags

London

RAN Ships

None noted.

Publication

June 2024 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)

The December 2023 issue of this magazine introduced LCDR Walter Brooksbank RANVR and the start of his involvement with Naval Intelligence. His grandson Tim Proust provided this article which continues the story from his secondment to Admiralty in 1945, where we briefly meet Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

The Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiralty, shook hands with me and asked me to be seated, ‘Well, Brooksbank, how are you getting on with your itinerary?’ ‘Its comprehensiveness has quite astonished me, sir, and I am most grateful to find that I shall be given a thorough insight into the workings of the Naval Intelligence Division, Admiralty, and its associated organisations.’

The Admiral nodded his appreciation and then took a look at his copy of my itinerary laid out on the desk before him. ‘You’ve been here nearly a week now, I see. How are you getting on?’ ‘I’m afraid, sir, that I haven’t yet made a start on my itinerary.’ The Admiral recoiled in surprise. Sharpening his tone, he now asked ‘And how does that come about?’ ‘Well, sir,’ in the politest of tones, I answered him. ‘I thought that, as a representative of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Melbourne, it was my first duty to report to you.’

I had given the Admiral a jolt, it was plain to see. Stroking his chin impatiently and taking several quick glances at me, finally be said; ‘Well, Brooksbank, I’m afraid you have got off to a bad start.’

I had now half risen from my chair. ‘Yes, that will be all,’ the Admiral now said to me. ‘You may leave the room.’ And this I quickly did – and certainly with no hard feelings against the Admiral for having castigated me, for it was through no fault of his, I felt, that so long a delay had taken place before I had presented myself to him.

No, if the conclusion I had come to was correct, the fault was with his Personal Assistant, Lt. Cdr. Ian Fleming, RNVR – later to become widely known as the author of the James Bond super-spy stories. For on several occasions my presence had been reported to him, and, on the face of things, he had taken no steps to arrange for my interview with the Admiral. It was through no sense of self-importance that I had taken my stand; it had been my belief that if it became known to the various Section Heads who would be taking part in my instruction that I had not been presented to the Admiral, it might well place me at a disadvantage with them.

On two occasions only was I to meet Ian Fleming, and his somewhat supercilious manner had scarcely commended itself to me; the buffer-like job of Personal Assistant to a Director is an unenviable one, and this may well serve to explain that he was unpopular with quite a few of his colleagues. In his biography of Fleming, Robert Pearson tells how a number of ideas his highly inventive mind prompted him to put forward for the betterment of naval intelligence had to be dismissed as being impracticable. Nevertheless, great credit is due to him for conceiving the idea for the formation of a self-contained unit, which came to be known as No. 30 Assault Unit, whose function during a landing and the immediate period following it was to seize as many secret documents as the members could lay their hands on.

The base arranged for me was a room overlooking the Horse Guards Parade and presided over by Mr. Edward Smith, MBE who was to act as my mentor for the period of my attachment to the NID. I had long been aware of his existence through his microscopic signature on many memoranda we in NID, Melbourne, had received from our Admiralty counterpart. From time to time and I felt that I was putting him in rather an uncomfortable situation through the attitude I had taken, but he bore the situation nobly, despite the strain of seeing me sitting cross-legged in his office and with my nose buried in The Times for as long as I found its contents interesting.

Big of stature, Edward Smith also possessed a big heart as I was not long in discovering, and soon there were laid the seeds of a friendship to be sustained in later years by a regular interchange of correspondence and renewed in person during an overseas tour I undertook with my wife in recent times. ‘Edward Smith is every bit what you have told me— and more.’ was my wife’s summation of him. To overcome my boredom during my self-imposed period of waiting, he began to acquaint me with the problems currently engaging his attention, and so diverse were they that I began to think that here in Edward Smith was probably the ‘king-pin’ of the Naval Intelligence Division, Admiralty, and later this was to become a conviction. Nor was his work confined to naval intelligence only, for he was very closely concerned with matters relating to the Naval Control of Shipping Organisation.

On looking back at it all, I shall never forget the thrill of expectation I experienced when after emerging from the subway of the Trafalgar Square tube station, the imposing, beautifully-sculptured Admiralty Arch loomed up before me. For it told me that I was to enter the Admiralty itself, a building so steeped in tradition and, which was of particular concern to me, the fountain-head of British Naval Intelligence.

‘You have got away to a bad start,’ the Admiral had said to me. I had the weekend to chew over this, and I confess that it was not altogether without some trepidation that on the Monday morning I reported to the Far Eastern Section (Section 4) of NID, the head of which at the time was Colonel Sillitoe, Royal Marines. There certainly was no suggestion in his manner that I was unwelcome, I was relieved to find. My itinerary had shown me that I would be attached to Section 4 for four days, and I was glad of this, for it would help me to find my legs.

So, at last there had begun to take place the main purpose of my overseas visit, and from my experience of Section 4 the amount of time absorbing it that would be necessary for me to undergo promised to be most demanding. And indeed, was this the case. Not that I had expected contrariwise, but even the most hush-hush sections of the NID were being laid open to me, and sometimes I would experience a feeling of regret that I had not been afforded all this experience in pre-war times. Then there would arise in my mind the sobering thought that, although Germany had now capitulated, the Naval Intelligence Division was continuing to operate on a full war-time basis, and our own wartime expansion in NID Melbourne had been impressive enough.

Moving around from one section to another extended my familiarity with the Admiralty building as a whole and it was not long before I got caught up in the atmosphere of the place, which contained so many contrasts between the old and the new. Until the institution of the fluorescent lighting system some of the rooms must have been impressively dingy. The building contained a cafeteria; but more often than not I spent my lunch-time in the Press Room, where there was a bar and sandwiches were obtainable. Here among its patrons, there would be present journalists who had

called for ‘hand-outs’ and a few writers seeking material from the Admiralty Information Section and archives. A visit to the Admiralty’s modern showpiece, ‘The Citadel,’ was included in my programme, and this I would visit at a later date.

The accommodation Australia House had secured for me at Knightsbridge struck me as being quite an unusual choice, even if I had no valid reason to quarrel with it. The hotel possessed neither public bar nor saloon bar, and objets d’art, obviously the selection of a connoisseur of no mean standing, figured very largely in its adornments. Sometimes I would think it was a pity they were not edible for the meals, subjected as elsewhere to rationing, were on a meagre scale. Some of the guests at the hotel, mostly widows, a few of them bearing titles, were there on a permanent basis, and the whole atmosphere of the place was such that one would need to mind his manners. Not long after my arrival, a table a deux right up against the rear wall became available, and I eagerly seized upon it as a means of refuge; it did, however, become rather tiresome, and from this situation, mercifully I was shortly to be rescued.

‘Good morning, Australia.’ Looking up, I saw that the greeting had come from a new arrival at the hotel, an Englishwoman in her early thirties who was now about to occupy the table in front of me. ‘How did you know that I was an Australian?’ I asked as I rose from my chair and returned her greeting. ‘Oh, that was quite simple,’ she smiled, ‘I heard you giving your order to the waitress. Nobody-or, rather, anyone who has visited your country could have possibly mistake your accent.’ A touch of alarm sprang into her eyes. ‘Oh, I do hope that I’ve not offended you.’ ‘No, danger of that,’ I reassured her. We were both glancing down at the empty seat opposite me on my table-­ and soon, at my invitation, she occupied it.

Although our ways are now wide apart and there was quite a margin between our ages, that was the beginning of a friendship with ‘Young Un’, as I came to call her, which was to endure. A much-travelled author and a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot, she proved to be an excellent conversationalist, and, although a woman of substantial social standing, snobbery was foreign to her and she took quite a delight in accompanying me on an occasional ‘pub crawl’. Theseexcursions gave me an insight into the intrinsic character of the average Londoner who had so stoically endured the nightmarish bombing and the many hardships they had to endure on the ‘home front’.

My stay at the hotel also enabled me to study the characteristics of the English ‘upperstocracy’. A strict regard for privacy did not appear to be one of them. My window overlooked a courtyard, and it surprised me to find that the occupants of some of the rooms on the other side of it neglected to draw down their blinds when undergoing their various ablutions. Fortunately for them, I was no ‘Peeping Tom’, but there was one scene of which I was a spectator which I shall always cherish and which I watched until its strenuously fought-for, but happy conclusion.

The personae in the scene were a florid-faced retired English Colonel and his buxom lady, who in the dining-room occupied a table not far from me. The former I had much admired because of his dignified bearing. This was an occasion, however, where he was finding it impossible to maintain it. He had now completed the task of dressing for dinner; not so his adipose life-partner, who apparently had been experiencing difficulty in lacing her corsets and had sent out an ‘SOS’ signal, to which the Colonel was gallantly responding. With his back wedged up against the dressing-table and with one leg levered against the end of the bedstead, the while firmly grasping the corset-cords in his hands, perspiration streaming from his face, determinedly was he striving to bring the two wings of the corset together. The odds seemed heavily loaded against him; time and again he was compelled to desist for a ‘breather’, but at last sheer pertinacity triumphed and when finally, he had attained his objective it was with the greatest difficulty that I refrained from uttering three hearty British cheers. The Colonel and his wife entered the dining-room later than was their usual custom. I observed that

his good lady had not yet recovered from the ordeal. The Colonel? He was every bit as dignified as ever.

Not long after my arrival in London there took place the British General Elections. According to the Press, the return of the Conservative Government seemed assured; this also was the emphatic opinion of a stockbroker in the City upon whom I called with a letter of introduction. I had some reason for thinking otherwise, for it so happened that a day or two before polling I visited Buckhurst Hill, in Essex, which was part of Winston Churchill’s electorate, and when he drove past the house of my host in his car, he looked very crestfallen. We learnt that he was just returning from addressing a crowd of people in an open-air gathering close by the railway station and there he’d met with a very mixed reception. His Labour opponent in the electorate was apparently rather an unknown quantity; nevertheless, he polled quite well even if he of course failed to unseat Winston. The overall result, however, was, as history has shown, a landslide victory for the Labour Party. This was so unexpected that London seemed stunned; that at least was the impression I formed when walking around London streets just after the result was known. For remarkably few people were in evidence, and those I saw seemed to have a guilty conscience, akin somewhat to the expression on a small boy’s face on running away after throwing a stone at a plate-glass window.

It is, of course, the custom not only for the Leader of the victorious party to broadcast an address as soon as the result of an election is known; but from a very well-informed source I learnt at the time that the BBC had been striving in vain to bring Winston Churchill to the microphone. Who could blame him for that? was my view. An act of base ingratitude to the war leader who had led the nation to victory, it seemed to me.

Nature fights back

Although tied down at the Admiralty during the day-time, I took advantage of the long twilights to wander around and form some idea of the damage caused to London as a result of the air raids. While it was true, for example, that incendiaries had set on fire part of the roof of the Admiralty and there had been other damage inflicted there, it had come as a surprise to me to find how lightly Whitehall and buildings fronting Trafalgar Square and the Strand had fared. But it was altogether a different story in that part of London lying in the vicinity of St. Paul’s, where the destruction had been on an appalling scale. Well could this be said, too, of parts of the East End and of the docks; but in general, the results of the bombings were very uneven and a large gap would appear in the most unexpected of places. A truly prodigious amount of labour must have been expended in clearing away the rubble and to clothe the nakedness of these hideous gaps. Nature had already started to manifest herself, for in some of them I was astonished to find that, battling their way up through brick-dust, meadowsweet and field daisies were displaying symbolically their purple and white blooms.

Except for the very important qualification that no bombs were now falling, soon I had come to the conclusion that I could not have been in London at a worse time. For war-weariness was becoming evident on every side; and, despite the surrender of Germany, food-rationing was still in force and seemed likely to remain so for quite some time. In the eyes of the Londoners, the war against Japan was remote, but there had been no lifting of wartime restrictions. Frustration remained the order of the day; tempers, particularly those of the bus conductresses, were becoming frayed– so much so that now I nearly always travelled on the Underground. One was fortunate to get one’s laundry back in a fortnight’s time, and, while Service personnel fared better, for the general public cigarettes and tobacco were in markedly short supply. True to traditional Government policy in England, the price of beer remained reasonable; but when and where obtainable spirits were at an astronomical figure and a glass of sherry cost 4/6d. The short rations on which I was subsisting suggested to me that it was about time that I checked my weight. So, on a weighing-machine at the Piccadilly Circus Tube, I proceeded to do so. My eyes fixed upon it, the arrow commenced its circuit–and imagine my dismay when it stopped at a mark registering 2 stone 7 lbs! (15 kgs). It was a ridiculous result of course, but typical of a London now run down.

Included in my programme were brief visits to various organisations in the city with whom NID had liaison. The most enjoyable of them all had been my visit to Lloyd’s, London, whose Chairman, Sir Eustace Pullbrook quickly convinced me that the reputation he held as a lover of all things Australian was well founded. It had been fascinating to watch the underwriters at work, and there in a prominent position was mounted the famous Lutine Bell– originally mournfully tolled on receipt of news of the loss of a vessel but now clanged ecstatically every time a missing ship turns up. Surprisingly, at Lloyd’s I saw more relics of Lord Nelson than had been on exhibit at the Admiralty.

Early in my attachment to NID, I had spent several days at HMS Flowerdown, an Admiralty Communications Centre near Winchester. Shortly I would be paying a visit to Oxford, where I was to be shown over the Inter-Services Topographical Department, the Admiralty Photographic Library, and a unit occupying part of Mansfield College, whose function I do not feel at liberty to disclose. Back in Navy Office, Melbourne, we had greatly admired the comprehensive handbooks on foreign countries which, with the best brains in the land, ISTD was producing. It was at this establishment that I came across for the first time a Varityper typewriter and I lost no time in setting arrangements in train for the supply of one to NID, Melbourne.

At the Admiralty Photographic Library, located in the Sheldonian Theatre, I was shown about 40 photographs of Australian subjects made available by well-meaning contributors but which they had to label. Rather to the astonishment of the librarian, I was able to identify more than half of them. It amused me to find that one of the photographs was of a small settlement, Ferny Creek, which lies in the Dandenong Ranges, some thirty miles inland from Melbourne. Doubtless, many of the photographs forwarded by members of the public were found to be of little practical value.

‘Knife Fork and Spoon Course’

All the time during my stay at Oxford I had been itching to see again Magdalen College, where so many years ago now I had undergone an Army Officer Training Course when serving with the First AIF. At last, the opportunity presented itself to me, and as on my way I wandered along that famous street, ‘The High’ I thought how strange it was that Dame Fortune had decreed that I should now be doing so in naval uniform! Magdalen College… Back in my hotel it was a long time before I fell asleep, so crowded was my mind with revived recollections of the four months I had spent there when it was in use as an OTC. It had been a gruelling course packed with so much close-ordered drill and over all of us there hung like the Sword of Damocles the threat of RTU (Returned to Unit) if we failed to make the grade. Even when we were off duty outside the college grounds, we had the feeling that our behaviour was under close scrutiny, and on such occasions, we were required to wear gloves and carry a cane. it was labelled a ‘Knife Fork and Spoon Course’ by the disgruntled, of whom there were more than a few; and through his gentlemanly bearing and dignified mien our Commanding Officer, a Colonel of the Argylls, certainly imparted to the Course a high tone.

The room I had occupied with three of my fellow-cadets overlooked ‘The High’ itself, and our Common Room, we learnt, had been the room of none other than Oscar Wilde! Proudly displayed for our inspection by an old retainer was a pair of football boots which he averred had belonged to the Prince of Wales! The President of the College, a literary giant in his own right who bore the distinguished name of Sir Walter Raleigh, sometimes sat the high table of the great banquet hall. The glorious singing in the Chapel (and on May Day at that ceremony on the Tower) of the permanently-established, heavily endowed choir, and that descendant of none other than Mendelssohn, the aged Don, whose shuffling feet as he walked along the cloisters had earned for him the sobriquet, ‘The Creeping Barrage’.

Those field exercises at the latter end of the course where we were set tactical problems–I had quite enjoyed them. And there had been many other compensations. The novelty for me of rowing in outriggers between the snow-clad banks of the Thames. When summer had come in all its burgeoning glory, never had I played cricket under such delightful conditions as those offered by the College grounds. It had been competitive cricket, and canoe excursions had been more relaxing on the little River Cherwell which disappeared under Magdalen Bridge in its hurry to join up with Father Thames.

So much for this somewhat lengthy digression …. shortly after my return from Oxford I was informed that the Admiral wished to see me. What was all this about, I wondered? Had I, in some way or other, ‘blotted my copybook’ again? A thought flashed through my mind in view of my inauspicious start at the Admiralty; had he called for reports on my behaviour from the Section Heads? If he had done so, l felt that I had no qualms on that score. Any other doubts clouding my mind were soon dispelled, for a friendly smile greeted me when I entered his room.

This is the burden– well, I could hardly call it a burden! …of what the Admiral had to say, after inviting me to sit down ”Well, Brooksbank, I suspect, from what I know of our American friends, that the three weeks you spent in the United States must have been-shall we say? -­ strenuous. Am I right?’ ‘Strenuous is the word for it, sir!’ I replied. ‘And in a way, in altogether a different sense, it has been quite strenuous here!’ ‘Exactly! And I feel that you must be due for, say, a week’s leave.’ I had half-jumped out of my chair, in my surprise.

Changed Itinerary

Affecting not to notice this, The Admiral now went on; ‘Your itinerary provided that you should visit one of our Sub-Centres, and Liverpool had been in view. I understand, however, that for private reasons you wish to visit Ireland, and, that being so, I could substitute our Belfast Sub­Centre for Liverpool.’ ‘If I may say so, that’s extremely kind and thoughtful of you, sir!’ ‘Well, the amended plan is that you spend three days at Belfast and then you could spend your leave in Ireland.’ ‘In Eire, actually, sir. My wife comes from Galway.’ At this, the Admiral evinced no surprise. It was pretty clear to me now that Edward Smith had a hand in all this!

And so we leave Walter Brooksbank to explore the delights of Ireland, a tale we might return to on another day.