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Humphrey Max Macar\3512 Humphrey Max Macaré Dutch Agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Humphrey was born in Bandoeng, Java on the 12/10/21. The eldest of 6 children, his father worked for the railways. The family had arrived in the Dutch East Indies in the early 18 th century. Over the course of the next 200 years, there were many relationships and marriages with the indigenous population leading to the family having an obviously Indonesian appearance and build. Humphrey was a very small man who measured only 5 feet 2½ inches tall and weighed 9 stones 2 pounds with a chest size of 31 inches. He was conscripted into the Dutch Navy in July 1941 prior to which he had been training to be a teacher. Once in the Navy, he was trained as a telegrapher which, no doubt, was to prove instrumental in him being recruited as a wireless operator for the S.O.E. Following the Battle of the Java Sea, the Japanese invaded Java on the 1 st March 1942. Two days later, Dutch forces were evacuated and Humphrey was able to escape from the naval base at Soerabaja to Tjilatjap where he boarded a ship of the Royal Parcel Sailing Company and sailed to Colombo. There he boarded the troopship MS Nieuw-Amsterdam that sailed to England on a voyage that lasted from the 17 th March to the 3 rd May 1942. On arriving in England Humphrey appears to have been sent to Wrottesley Park nr Wolverhampton. The camp was the main training establishment for Dutch troops during the war and we can assume that Humphrey spent a short time there in between his naval service and joining the SOE. It was only a matter of four weeks or so because his personnel file with SOE begins on the 6 June 1942. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was set up in 1940 to help the resistance movements in occupied countries by running agents and arranging resistance and sabotage behind enemy lines. Winston Churchill wanted the organization to “ set Europe ablaze”. The organization had many successes in Europe but it also had some failures, of which the Englandspiel episode in the Netherlands was by far the worst. Humphrey was to become one of the casualties of this tragic episode. Many young adults were anxious to volunteer for special service, in spite of being warned of the fate that might await them if they did. Potential agents were first looked over at a preliminary training school at a requisitioned country house – one for each country section of SOE – in southern England. Villagers who lived nearby were led to believe that the men there were training to be commandos. The teaching staff and officers from the country section, in Holland’s case N section, would consult together about whether the students would be suitable for secret work; anyone obviously unfitted for it at this stage could be sent off somewhere else. These Special Training Schools (S.T.S.) were referred to by a number. Humphrey appears to have been sent firstly to STS 6 on the 18 June 1942. STS 6 was West Court a fine 17 th century manor house in Finchampstead, Berkshire which, before improvements made in 1835, still had a moat and a drawbridge! He was there for 3½ weeks. By this time he had been given a training name which was M Mebins. Agents were told to choose a different name beginning with their own initial letters from their surname. The idea was that from the moment their training started their real names were taboo and they were not to mention them to anyone, in case German agents in England should hear of them. He, in common with the other agents, would have also handed in his naval uniform in exchange for British uniforms with sergeant’s stripes. 1 Training was undertaken in small groups of around 4 men. Pieter Dourlein describes the routine thus “Out of bed at half-past six and straight on to half an hour’s physical exercises, either indoors or out in the open air. Then breakfast, theory and practice, lunch and again instruction until dinner-time. After a day or so of this I felt as if all my bones had been broken and my brains were bursting out of my head. For four weeks we were trained in the use of automatic light firearms, in blowing up small objects with explosive charges , in learning radio signals and map-reading, and in sport – a great deal of sport”. A note in Humphrey’s file dated 2 July 1942, two weeks into the training, says “ He is very happy in his new life. He seems to consider it a privilege to have been accepted in this Service and appears very grateful. He is doing his utmost to keep pace with the others as far as military training is concerned even though he gets less of it and had to start from scratch”. It is not clear what the significance of this last sentence is and why he should have received less military training than the others. Presumably he had to start from scratch because his naval experience was not directly relevant to the type of training he was now receiving. A photo which is dated the 5 August 1942 shows Humphrey with three other men in British uniforms with sergeant’s stripes. It seems fairly certain that this is a photograph of Humphrey and his training companions at STS 6. Of the other three in the photograph, I have only identified the man on the far left. He was George Lodewijk Ruseler. At the time that the photograph was taken both he and Humphrey would have been 20 years old. They also had quite a lot in common in that Ruseler had also been born in the Dutch East Indies and had come to SOE after six months as a sailor in the Dutch Navy. He had never been to Holland before. Humphrey had only a little more European experience. The family had lived in Belgium for a year from 1934 to 1935 and Humphrey had returned to Holland to attend a jamboree as a scout representative. The next training report which was written four days after the photograph was taken observes that “ Humphrey is a very subdued sort of chap and very shy. He will probably get good results on the training but his keenness for going on the real job seems, for the moment, to depend on the place where he will eventually be sent. His interests are entirely centred round the colonies”. This seems hardly surprising. It was only 5 months since Humphrey had left Java, the Japanese had invaded and taken control of the country and his thoughts were bound to be with his family there living under occupation. Of the Dutch SOE agents, there were several who were from the Dutch East Indies and who, despite bravely serving their European motherland, would have had precious little real knowledge or experience of the Netherlands. The various books and texts which deal with the training of SOE agents refer to the next stage as being commando style training at Arisaig in the Western Highlands of Scotland. The agents would then go to Ringway, Altrincham for parachute training before going on to Beaulieu to learn the techniques of counter-espionage. This included being sent off on a two or three day exercise to an English provincial town to practice their newly acquire skills. It appears from Humphrey’s file that he was sent at this time to Newcastle. Following on from this some of the agents would go to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for ten weeks of intensive training as a wireless operator whilst others went to Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire to learn about industrial sabotage. However in 2 Humphrey’s case, his records show that he moved on to STS 52 on the 13 July 1942. STS 52 was Thame Park and, apart from four separate days, he was there until the 1 st October which equates to the ten weeks wireless training programme. It would seem then that, for some reason, Humphrey never went to one of the Scottish training schools. Thame Park On the 26 September, one of the days when Humphrey was away from Thame Park, his file records him as being in Dudley in the West Midlands. This fits in with the letter we have which was written by a Margaret Clarke who lived in Dudley to Fred Macaré, one of Humphrey’s brothers, after the war. In the letter, Margaret talks about first meeting Humphrey, who she refers to as “Mac”, when he was stationed at Wrottesley Park. She describes “Mac” as “ only being in England a short time when I met him”. She goes on to say that “ while he was at Wolverhampton I saw Mac many times. My family and myself were all very fond of him. He used to love to sit in front of the fire and talk to us. He would never talk very much about the training he was doing but I did know that he would eventually be dropped into enemy occupied country. In the letter, Margaret Clarke seems to think that Humphrey was training whilst at Wrottesley Park and that he then went to London. She records that; whilst she initially had a lot of letters from him, there was then a period of three months when she did not hear from him. He then turned up to see her and her family, out of the blue, on his 21 st birthday.
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