The five members of MI(R)c were hard at work on the afternoon of 10 November when Jefferis’s telephone rang unexpectedly. The caller did not identify himself and nor did he give any indication as to why he was phoning. He simply ordered Jefferis to attend an important meeting in Whitehall. When Jefferis pressed for further information, he was told

Senior figures in the War Office and Admiralty decided that sinking German ships would be more cost-effective than building British ones.

Colin Gubbins had been in his new job less than four weeks when the threatened invasion became a dramatic reality. On 16 July 1940 Adolf Hitler issued Directive No. 16, the Nazi invasion of Great Britain. Even Churchill felt that the final showdown was now just days away. ‘The scene has darkened swiftly,’ he wrote in a letter to President

News of the invasion reached Whitehall within hours, causing outright panic. Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition, immediately called up the War Office file on Norway, only to find that it was completely empty. On the cover were the cryptic letters SFA. ‘I suppose it means Sweet Fanny Adams,’ he said to Winston Churchill when the two of them

It was also extremely versatile. Its magnetic surface meant that it could be used to blow up turbines, generators, trains – anything, indeed, that was made of metal. It was the perfect weapon for sabotage, small, silent, deadly, and with a touch of dark mischief that particularly appealed to Jefferis.

Winston Churchill kept a close eye on Gubbins’s work and praised him for organizing the Auxiliary Units ‘with thoroughness and imagination’. He also expressed his hope that the guerrillas would fight to the death inside the German beachhead and ‘perish in the common ruin rather than to fail or falter in their duty’.41

Colin Gubbins’s office-based work came to an end shortly after five o’clock each Friday afternoon when he and Peter Wilkinson clambered into their Humber and drove down to Kent. Here, they spent the weekend helping to train Peter Fleming’s guerrilla unit. The work was exhausting and physically demanding. ‘Into this short time,’ wrote Gubbins, ‘we

He decided to make use of the old public school network, turning to rugby-hardened alumni from schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In particular, he was keen to enlist school-leavers who had gone on to become polar explorers, mountaineers and oil prospectors, men who knew how to survive in a tough environment.

the British alone played by the rules. They formed orderly queues at the bus stop, they said sorry when there was no need to apologize. In her view, decency and fair play were integral parts of being British.