In June 1940, then a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders, Blair was taken prisoner when the original 51st (Highland) Division surrendered to Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at St Valery in northern France.
For 14 exhausting days, sleeping in fields and with virtually no food and water, Blair and his fellow Highlanders were forced to march the 220 miles to Hulst in Holland. There he and more than 1,000 Allied officers were packed on to a steamer for a voyage down the Rhine to Wesel in Germany. The final leg was an awful 60-hour train journey in cattle trucks to Laufen in Bavaria, arriving at Oflag VIIC on July 7.
An ex-fighting patrol officer, Blair was anxious to escape, and he eventually got his chance in 1941. Absconding from a party working outside the camp, it took him eight nerve-racking days to walk the 75 miles to neutral Switzerland. With money borrowed from the British military attaché at Berne, he acquired a passport, visas and a train ticket to Madrid, where the embassy arranged for his return to Britain. He arrived in January 1942, the first army officer from a PoW camp to make it. He was decorated with the Military Cross.
John Herivel
Mathematician recruited to Bletchley Park aged 21 who developed the 'Herivel Tip' to decipher Enigma
"When I came to Hut 6, we were doing very badly in breaking into the Red," Herivel later recalled. "Every evening, I would sit down in front of the fire and put my feet up and think of some method of breaking into the Red. I was very young and very confident, and I said I'm going to find some way to break into it. Then, one evening, I remember vividly suddenly finding myself thinking about the other end of the story, the German operators."
The Enigma machine was similar in appearance to a typewriter set in a metal or wooden box. The operator typed his message letter by letter on the machine's keys. This sent an electric impulse through a series of three rotating wheels, lighting up the enciphered letter on a lampboard above the machine.
The operator began each day by putting the correct rotors and ring settings into the machine. He then selected an opening position for the rotors himself, sending it as a three-letter indicator at the start of his first message.
"I thought of this imaginary German fellow with his wheels and his book of keys," Herivel said. "He would open the book and find what wheels and settings he was supposed to use that day. He would set the rings on the wheels, put them into the machine, and the next thing he would have to do would be to choose a three-letter indicator for his first message of the day."
Herivel realised that lazy operators would move the rotors by only a few letters – or not even move them at all – and that the indicators would all cluster around the original settings: "If the intercept sites could send us the indicators of all the first messages of the day for the individual German operators, there was a sporting chance that they would cluster around the ring settings for the day."
That would allow the codebreakers to narrow down the possibilities from 17,576 to a couple of dozen settings, which they could test out individually by hand. "The next day I went back to Hut 6 in a very excited state and told my colleagues of this idea. 'Oh, brilliant,' they all said."
Welchman had it tested out daily, but it did not work until two months later, in May 1940, as the Germans invaded France and the operators came under pressure of combat. Then the Herivel Tip worked – "It was a very exciting moment," Herivel later recalled.
Ian Macpherson: SOE officer
Highly decorated SOE officer who in peacetime negotiated an important accord in Baghdad between Iraq and western oil prospectors
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) achieved significant successes in promoting sabotage and subversion in Axis-occupied countries during the Second World War. It also made more speculative efforts, principally to test the effectiveness and strength of the opposition movements, and Ian Macpherson was one of the few SOE agents to undertake such a mission and survive to tell the tale.
He was commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders in 1940 and made strenuous attempts to join a battalion in the Western Desert. He reached Cairo in 1942, having gained some priority through training in intelligence work and his language ability. He was sent first to Iraq, where the Rashid Ali coup had recently been overturned, and Persia (Iran) to glean intelligence for GHQ Cairo and the War Office.
On his return to Cairo he became a junior staff officer in the SOE office, directing and planning operations in southeastern Europe. Eager for operational experience of some kind, he acquiesced in this, against an undertaking that he would be sent to join one of the SOE missions, “if anything suitable comes up”. This turned out to be in Bulgaria.
Bulgaria had accepted a German move through her territory to attack Greece in March 1941 and later declared war on Britain but not on the nearby Soviet Union. Macpherson spoke Russian and having consulted a primer, assessed Bulgarian as similar but with fewer grammatical complications.
Given two months to acquire a grasp of the language, learn parachuting and assimilate what was known of the opposition in Bulgaria, he was then flown to SOE’s HQ in Bari to await an aircraft.
The Bulgarians had taken advantage of the German invasion of Greece to occupy Thrace and as SOE already had Major John Harington there, leading a mission to the Greek Andartes (guerrillas), it was arranged that Macpherson should join him before they moved north over the frontier together. Accompanied by a corporal radio operator, Macpherson parachuted into Thrace in July 1944, linking up with Harington without difficulty.
Guided by the Andartes, he and Harington crossed the Bulgarian frontier intending to separate later to try to contact the Otechestven (Fatherland Front), a loose affiliation of communists and other groups opposed to fascism. Brushes with the Bulgarian gendarmerie encouraged the two to stick together, and eventually they joined up with an Otechestven brigade near Plovdiv, 70 miles southeast of Sofia.
The partisans were eager to receive arms, and Macpherson arranged with Bari for a substantial air drop to be prepared. Meanwhile events were moving swiftly elsewhere. Russia declared war on Bulgaria at the end of August, and the communist elements of the Otechestven began to flex their muscles for a takeover.
Harington and Macpherson hastened to Plovdiv to make contact with the Russians to be met by polite explanations that their presence was now superfluous. Accepting the inevitable, they returned to Cairo via Turkey. In Macpherson’s own words: “It is unlikely that anything we did altered the course of events in that tip of Europe.” He was awarded the Military Cross for the coolness and skill with which he avoided the capture of his mission by the Bulgarian gendarmerie.
Ian Gibson Macpherson was born in Edinburgh in 1920 and educated at George Herriot School, from where he won a scholarship to L’École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris.
After demobilisation in 1946 he joined the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), which had been created in 1912 by the Armenian entrepreneur Calouste Gulbenkian in partnership with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (a forerunner of BP) and other Western shareholders, to explore for oil in the Ottoman territories that became Iraq. The company’s main find was at Kirkuk in Kurdish northern Iraq, where Macpherson was posted. After serving as a representative for IPC’s interest in Damascus and Beirut he returned to Kirkuk as general manager in 1957 just before Iraq’s Hashemite dynasty was overthrown by the revolution of General Qasim the following year. He managed to steer the company through the difficulties caused by this revolution, notably fending off nationalisation.
But after a period in London he was sent back to Iraq as a new, Baathist, revolution renewed its demands in the 1970s. Macpherson was at the centre of negotiations when countries in the Middle East, led by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, nationalised foreign-owned concessions, and was one of those at IPC responsible for government relations.
But as Opec took control of pricing, Saddam Hussein, then its vice-president, gradually nationalised IPC’s concessions in Iraq, and other host governments, too, sought participation in the group’s operations. Macpherson visited Baghdad in 1970-72 in an attempt to resolve matters with the Iraqi government and attended the last meeting with the government team before the nationalisation of its large operation at Kirkuk.
As oil politics generally became more difficult and IPC continually found itself in collision with the aims of several Middle Eastern governments, it was Macpherson’s role to try to restore working relations. With a combination of charm, humour and firmness, helped by the trouble he had taken to acquire Arabic and Turkish, he succeeded to a degree in establishing relations with ministers.
Appointed managing director of IPC in 1978, he accepted the challenge of returning to Baghdad to seek a final settlement with what was by then Saddam’s determination to force through nationalisation. Though without terms of reference from his shareholders, within 24 hours he reported back to London that he thought a deal could be done, and within 72 hours of negotiating, he had succeeded. Saddam was satisfied and IPC’s shareholders were not totally displeased.
Macpherson went on to establish a new base for IPC’s operations in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. After relinquishing executive duties in 1982 he remained chairman of IPC and its offshoots in the Gulf for some years.
In retirement in Norfolk Macpherson enjoyed gardening, particularly growing rhododendrons and azaleas.
He is survived by his wife, Antonia, a son and daughter.
Ian Macpherson, MC, businessman and former SOE officer in Bulgaria, was born on April 7, 1920. He died on December 1, 2010, aged 90
Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes
Spitfire pilot who parachuted safely into a Sicilian vineyard after baling out of a Messerschmitt 109
As a combat pilot with 72 Squadron in Sicily in 1943, Tom Hughes became probably the only RAF aviator to earn his membership of the “Caterpillar Club” (awarded to those who bale out safely) as a result of jumping from an enemy aircraft. When the squadron had arrived at Comiso airfield in the south of the island in July that year it found a couple of Messerschmitt 109 fighters that had been left there, and Hughes set to work to evaluate these against the RAF’s Spitfires.
These “dogfights” were most instructive, and after being captured by the Germans later in the war, Hughes was able to assure a senior German officer that he considered the Spitfire the better aircraft. But such test flights were not without incident, and on one occasion there was no alternative to “hitting the silk” when the engine of the Me109 that Hughes was flying suffered a major leak in its coolant system. Baling out and parachuting down into a vineyard, Hughes was entertained by the friendly Sicilians on the ground with their produce, a genial hospitality that amply compensated him for his experience.
His squadron continued in the wake of the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula, and he was captured after being hit by flak over Cassino in 1944, spending most of the rest of the war as a PoW.
Thomas Bartley Hughes was born in Rugby in 1921 and was educated as a day boy at Rugby School. In 1940 he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and after training qualified as a flying instructor in June 1941. During his time with No 11 Service Flying Training School one of his more hair-raising feats was to lead a formation of three twin-engined Airspeed Oxford trainers under the two bridges across the Menai Strait.
Converting to Spitfires, in September 1942 he was posted to Gibraltar to flight-test Spitfires that had been sent there by sea in crates and were being rapidly reassembled for the invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, scheduled for November that year. Next posted to 72 (Spitfire) Squadron he took part in air cover for the invasion and the battles that took place in its aftermath.
In March 1943 his engine failed while he was in combat with an Me109 but he was able to bring his aircraft in to a wheels-up landing in the desert. Uncertain as to which side of the battle lines he was on, he waited until dark and made his way back to his airfield, a hike of 20 hours. He was back in action two days later.
During the subsequent invasion of Sicily, No 72 was in the thick of the action, and on one occasion he led a section of seven of its Spitfires which accounted for six Italian fighters in a single sortie. For the Italian campaign the squadron switched to a ground attack role, and it was while returning from one such sortie, flown in support of the fighting for Cassino, that he was hit by flak and crash-landed with severe burns to his legs. He spent much of the rest of the war in captivity, being released on a prisoner of war exchange six months from the end of hostilities.
After being demobbed he read for a degree in mechanical sciences at Cambridge, embarking on a career in electronics with AEI and Ronson. At Cambridge he had taken up gliding and was a keen glider for many years thereafter. He was also a member of the management committee of the Matfen Hall Cheshire Home in Northumberland. Leonard Cheshire himself wrote the foreword to a collection of Hughes’s memoirs that were sold to raise funds for the homes.
Hughes is survived by his wife, Joan, whom he married in 1949. There were no children.
Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes, wartime fighter pilot, was born on November 23, 1921. He died on December 31, 2010, aged 89
