A British Achilles: The Story of George, 2nd Earl Jellicoe KBE DSO MC FRS
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A British Achilles: The Story of George, 2nd Earl Jellicoe KBE DSO MC FRS
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Overview
Son of the victor of Jutland, George Jellicoe has enjoyed power and privilege but never shirked his duty. His war exploits are legendary and, as a founder member of Stirling’s SAS and first commander of the Special Boat Service, he saw action a-plenty. A brigadier at twenty-six with a DSO and MC, he liberated Athens as the Germans withdrew and saved Greece from a Communist revolution.
After the war, Jellicoe joined the Foreign Office and worked with spies Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and Donald Maclean in Washington and on the Soviet Desk. His political life saw him in the Cabinet of the Heath Government and he is frank with his biographer over the issues and characters of his fellow ministers.
Jellicoe’s Achilles heel is his weakness for, and attraction to, women. His resignation over an involvement with a prostitute was a national scandal, but he is refreshingly honest and devoid of self-justification. He remained an active member of the Lords pursuing a top-level business career.
A British Achilles is a superb biography of a major public figure and exemplary wartime soldier.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781781597255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Young Man's Fancy
The Western desert, 21 January 1942. Cool damp night air, smelling faintly of the sea, wafted inland from the Mediterranean. Rommel's second offensive was imminent. Where the coast road to Tripoli runs very close to the sea, a powerfully-built young Guards officer with crisply curling hair and a confident walk was leading a small patrol westwards out through sand dunes between the sea and the road. He wanted to see what the Germans were up to. He was George Jellicoe – son of the First World War Admiral and, since his father's death, the Second Earl Jellicoe. He had a genial, usually smiling, face and a Churchillian approach to alcohol. He was with the 3rd Battalion 22 Guards Brigade, on the right (sea) flank of the Eighth Army.
When the patrol could go no further toward the Germans by truck because of the dunes, they left the vehicle and continued on foot. Floating over the moist, clumpy sand came the distant sound of labouring engines and heavy rumbling. Jellicoe went to the top of a dune to see where it was coming from. Men and vehicles were advancing about half a mile away. The German attack had started. The patrol hastily retraced their steps to the vehicle, to find it gone. They moved rapidly east, walking all day and night. Next morning, they found a well. Jellicoe went forward with one man but as they got close to the well, they came under heavy fire. Jellicoe was shot, the bullet passing down through his right shoulder and emerging half way down the side of his chest. He was rather concerned about other matters and carried on. Twenty-four hours later, they met a section of an armoured car regiment who ran them back to Benghazi. By then, 22 Guards Brigade had withdrawn back to just west of Tobruk.
Jellicoe was bandaged up and rejoined his company a few days later. Unsurprisingly given the desert conditions, his wound went bad. The medics sorted it out at No. 8 General British Military Hospital in Alexandria with the help of a pretty nurse called Dollar Bugle, whose patients called her 'Penny Whistle'. Jellicoe went on sick leave to Beirut. There he caught malaria and was soon back in hospital. Lying beneath the slowly turning fans, he contemplated his war.
In spring 1936, as a young man of eighteen, he had skied at St Moritz with his sister Prudy and spent the evenings improving his French. Even then he had been up for the dangerous, taking part in the terrifying Cresta Run, where his key competitor was another novice, Joe Kennedy, son of the American Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy and elder brother of Jack, the future President of the United States. In early April, Jellicoe skipped his last term at Winchester and accompanied by his mother and Prudy, spent an extended gap year in Germany. He aspired to a career in the diplomatic service and wanted to learn German.
While they were staying in a hotel in Berlin, his friend, the young Prince Friedrich of Prussia, 'Fritzi', the youngest son of the Crown Prince and grandson of the Kaiser, came to see them. They knew each other from the Kaiser's sailing days at Cowes. Fritzi's family lived at the Cecilienhof in Potsdam (where the Potsdam Conference was later held), described by Chips Channon as 'a dreadful Lutyens sort of house, ugly and bogus Tudor, built just before the war, only redeemed by the fact that it overlooked a lake'. There, on 10 August, Channon found the young Lord Jellicoe swimming with Princess Cécile, Fritzi's younger sister.
Fritzi was eager to do all he could to help further Jellicoe's German. He said it was too silly for Jellicoe to lodge in Berlin and invited him to stay at Cecilienhof. That summer, they returned briefly to St Lawrence, the Jellicoes' home on the Isle of Wight, for Cowes week (Fritzi was also keen on Prudy) before sailing back from Southampton to Bremerhaven. With two young American women they met on the boat, they lunched in Bremen with some friends of Fritzi's family before returning to Berlin and the second week of the Olympic Games. One black American athlete, Jesse Owens, annoyed Hitler by beating all the blond Aryan competitors and winning four gold medals. But the man who really infuriated the Führer was the German long jumper, Luz Long, who befriended Owens and was the real hero of those games.
At a ball at the Cecilienhof, Jellicoe danced with Mussolini's daughter, Countess Edda Ciano. Her husband was Mussolini's Foreign Secretary even as the axis between Germany and Italy was being forged. The Countess was very attractive and Jellicoe was enjoying himself. Eventually she said,
'I think you like burning your fingers, George.'
'Yes,' he replied.
When the band struck up again, he grabbed her by her slim waist and, despite some resistance, propelled her onto the floor. Then he noticed that no one else was dancing – the band was playing the Italian national anthem. Later that summer he lost his heart to Christa von Tippelskirche, a friend of Princess Cécile. Christa was pretty, with lovely long legs, and very intelligent.
With a friend of the Hohenzollern family, Goffie von Furstenberg, Jellicoe travelled to the Dutch border, then south to the Rhineland and on to the Black Forest. In southern Germany, they joined the party of the Crown Princess of Prussia, visiting Munich, Nuremberg and Bamberg, with its beautiful cathedral. There he began to worry about the possibility of war. Goffie tried to allay his fears.
'George,' he said reassuringly, 'I don't think you need worry. The senior officers of the Wehrmacht will not allow anything stupid to happen.'
October 1936. Jellicoe went up to Trinity College Cambridge. On 12 May 1937, aged nineteen and wearing picture-book knee breeches, a frothy cravat and a long, frogged jacket with lanyards on his right shoulder, he was page to King George VI at his coronation. It was an amazing sight, being the only occasion on which coronets are worn. That night, in contrast to the august proceedings of the day, he discovered the delights of night-clubs. Women did not yet feature much in his life. Apart from a passing, innocent relationship with Pixie Pease, the sister of his friend Peter Pease, his life at Cambridge was romantically uncomplicated. But his mother had matrimonial aspirations for him and kept photographs of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret strategically positioned around the house.
Not having brothers, Jellicoe's male friends meant a lot to him. Tim Marten, an old school friend, had gone to Oxford after leaving Winchester College in 1934. Other friends included Billy Cavendish (Lord Hartington), the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire and future son-in-law of the American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and his brother Andrew. His closest friends were Mark Howard and his two younger brothers, whose family owned Castle Howard in Yorkshire; David Jacobson, who had been top scholar at Eton; and Pease. Reserved and self-effacing, Pease was a committed Christian. Over six feet tall, his biographer later described him as 'the best looking man I have ever seen'.
Having been so well taught at Winchester by Harold Walker, Jellicoe's first two years at Cambridge were easy. He was chairman of the main lunch club, the Pitt Club, and joined the more select Athenaeum. In 1938 Carol Mather looked out from his lodgings at 27 Trinity Street and saw Jellicoe dropping champagne bottles out of the window of the Athenaeum after a rowdy late-night party. There was sport too. He enjoyed golf on the nine-hole course out towards Newmarket, playing with Archie Wavell at Stoneham, and sometimes on the East Anglian golf courses with Willie Whitelaw, David Jacobson and Mark Howard, achieving a low handicap. He also played tennis and real tennis.
Cambridge saw a great flowering of Jellicoe's wider intellectual and artistic interests. He became lifelong friends with his tutor, Steven Runciman. Communist idealism was flourishing at Trinity, from which the Cambridge spies had fledged a few years earlier, but Jellicoe was too rigorous a thinker to be seduced by it. In 1938, he spent two months in Paris chez Monsieur Martin who was recommended by the Foreign Office to aspirants wanting to improve their French. Jellicoe was well read, devouring works in English, French and German, and maintaining a detailed reading list in his diary. During his final year at Cambridge, he took Florentine history as a special subject, went to Florence in the Easter holidays and enjoyed the city but did no work. At the last moment, he switched his special subject to the origins of the Great War but did not attend a single lecture. He continued ski racing and the Cresta Run, where Joe Kennedy remained his principal rival. They were fairly equally matched – in both skill and nerve. Jellicoe suffered no injuries but his mother, watching as he hurtled over Battledoor and Shuttlecock, slipped and had a terrible fall.
On his birthday, 4 April 1939, Jellicoe wrote in his diary, '21 for my sins'. At the height of the debutante era and as a highly eligible bachelor he was invited to all the coming out dances, including those at the US Embassy and Court Balls at Buckingham Palace. It meant little to him, being typified by diary entries such as 'Kemsley's bloody dance' and 'Somebody's dance – quite fearful – at Claridges'. However, he developed a real but critical taste for music, noting on 1 May, 'First night of the opera. Bartered Bride. Very badly done'.
On 29 May, he took the first part of the Tripos in modern European history, noting that he had written a 'tolerable answer'. Next day, he sat the examination on political thought, which he thought a 'fearful bungle'. The special subject followed (the Great War) which was 'messy'. By Thursday it was all over and he was free for a weekend of golf at Walton, Figaro at Glyndebourne and Don Giovanni at Covent Garden. He got a First in Part I of the History Tripos for Modern European history and an Upper Second in the Florentine history, but still gained a BA First Class Honours in the Historical Tripos overall. On 25 July, he took his seat in the House of Lords. After taking the oath, he sat on the cross-benches. The Hansard entry says simply 'The Earl Jellicoe – Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father'. He had never been in the House with his father, who had attended rarely.
The rest of that leisurely summer was overshadowed by impending war. In mid August Jellicoe went to Gartmore in Scotland to stay with one of his uncles on his mother's side and spent a pleasant and energetic '12th' bagging thirty brace of grouse. On 21 August, he arrived at Castle Howard with his mother. His diary records 'Mark was amusing in his possessive casualness' as he showed Lady Jellicoe around. Mark's sister, Christian, joined them with Debo Mitford and Billy and Andrew Cavendish. Jellicoe was accompanied by an impressive reading list.
He was first down to breakfast next morning. The Russo-German Pact had exploded like a thunderbolt in the headlines of the Yorkshire Post.
'This means war,' pronounced a fellow houseguest and everyone was alarmed. Jellicoe was loath to believe it.
'Perhaps,' he wrote on 31 August, 'the news of the appointment of a sort of Military Cabinet in Germany forebodes ill. Joe is being called up.' There was worse to come. Jellicoe heard a wireless announcement: 'There have been some developments during the night in the international situation.' This was the prelude to the invasion of Poland. 'It's obviously the end of the tether – the curtain raiser to the last trump,' he noted.
Back in London, he set off for the House of Lords but went instead to the Commons, which promised more immediate drama. The Kennedy brothers, Joe and Jack, were in the Strangers' Gallery. They all looked down on the muted gathering below. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was grave, slightly broken and rather pathetic but delivered a calm, determined speech.
3 September 1939. Jellicoe arrived early at the Lords to dump his luggage. On going to the tape-machine, the first thing he saw was the eleven o'clock statement. From the Peers' Gallery in the House of Commons, he heard war declared, then returned to the Lords sports room and listened to the Prime Minister's broadcast. There was a general air of stiff upper lip. He sauntered out into the warm September sun for a walk before the House met at noon.
Strolling up and down in front of the Palace of Westminster, he heard the sinister wailing of an air-raid siren. He told a perplexed girl what it was and lent his gas mask to an elderly woman. Everyone crowded into the ARP shelter under Parliament Square where Jellicoe helped put two sandbags in place. An amusing American correspondent said they were closeted with the Polish Ambassador. Some people heard guns. Jellicoe thought the air raid was probably a rude German answer to the polite British declaration of war. In the House, after prayers, came more warnings and more confusion.
In the Commons, he saw Joe and Jack Kennedy again. Chamberlain was as pathetic as ever but Churchill had a great phrase, 'our hearts are at peace', up his sleeve.
Jellicoe stayed at Claridges, where he talked to Wavell and Jacobson about the situation. Their mood was sombre. Yet they could not help admiring the beauty of the barrage balloons. At 3 am, Jellicoe was awoken by the tinkle of Claridges' telephone. Gradually the awful warning impinged itself onto his sleepy consciousness. Another air raid. They were invited down to the cellars. Panicking slightly, Jellicoe dressed and hurried downstairs, but forgot his gas mask. To his great shame, one of the staff went back to fetch it for him. This bothered him because he thought this time they were in for it. But an American suggestion that they should play a round game and the obvious care the women had taken over their makeup soon restored his morale. This time, he too thought he heard guns, but it was only doors slamming. After breakfast, he dispatched some facetious letters to the War Office and Cambridge, filled some sandbags for Claridges and enjoyed the sun in Green Park. Girls with gas masks slung round their shoulders interrupted his contemplation of the ducks. Later that night, he went back to St Lawrence to find a vast mob of aunts and went to bed depressed.
He read Rauschwig's Revolution of Destruction, on modern Germany. One sentence caught his attention: 'The creative will now emerging is of a harshness ... that Europe has not seen for centuries.' It seemed to Jellicoe that harshness was the kernel of the Nazi system. Even more so, it was the basis of its technique, combined with elastic opportunism. Hitler was not only a supreme tactician. He was also a crazy mystic. He and Germany therefore probably had a strength that many underestimated.
People continued to talk of a short war. Jellicoe thought this could only be blind, wishful, optimism. 'I anticipate a five-year plus war,' he wrote. He could not foresee British strategy when Poland was lost, thinking that this would force Britain onto the offensive, whereas a defensive stance was much more to the country's advantage. The West looked impregnable, yet ultimately, the struggle would descend into one of national will. He noted Churchill on war: 'If on land hopes had been dupes, fears at sea had also been liars.'
As he lay on the beach at St Lawrence, waiting for call-up, losing consciousness in the sun, the war faded away and became even more unreal. It made him keener to read, to listen to music, to coordinate what intellect he had and be more introspective. Yet so far, the war was absurdly vague. He confided to his diary: 'Blackout claptrap; innocuous newspapers; doctored wireless; war talks; women war fuss; Red Cross turmoil; and all the rest of it. I'm bored of this war already.'
Fortunately, there were other diverting attractions. He dined with friends at L'Escargot and, after an extremely tipsy evening, the finishing touch being a magnum of claret and vermouth, found himself for no apparent reason on the bonnet of his Packard in the middle of Regent Street. The next morning he had trouble locating the car, which was just behind Claridges. After a hair-raising drive back from London to the Isle of Wight, he missed the ferry, which was tiresome, as he had never driven faster or more dangerously.
18 September. He drove over to Cambridge where, after some embarrassment, he was passed medically fit to get killed. He recorded in his diary the names of nine young men, two of whom later married his sisters, Norah and Prudy, and underneath, 'I would be very sad if any of the above got himself killed.' Sunny September days at St Lawrence were filled with beach walks, tennis, golf and trips up to London to dine or go to the opera with friends. He read avidly. And he wrote, pouring out to the diary his philosophy of life:
I love tolerance ... [but] there has never seemed to me much point in getting in a state (religious, political, or personal) about anything. That limits the depth of one's feelings. One may not be able to plumb life this way – but scratching at its surface can be great fun. Should one aim higher than that?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A British Achilles"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Lorna Almonds Windmill.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO, CB,
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Maps,
Part One: Soldier (September 1939 – December 1944),
Chapter One Young Man's Fancy,
Chapter Two The Admiral's Son,
Chapter Three The SAS Submarine,
Chapter Four Commander of the SBS,
Chapter Five Two Lords A-Leaping,
Chapter Six The Last Seadogs,
Chapter Seven Liberating Athens on a Bicycle,
Part Two: A Different War (January 1945 – December 2004),
Chapter Eight Washington and the Cambridge Spies,
Chapter Nine Cold War Warrior,
Chapter Ten Whitehall Warrior,
Chapter Eleven Opposition and House of Lords Reform,
Chapter Twelve Sons of Heroes,
Chapter Thirteen The Call Girl's Diary,
Chapter Fourteen Trade, Aids and Anti-Terrorism,
Notes on Sources,
Bibliography,