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Patrick Howarth
Special Operations Executive officer who after the war turned prolific author and broadcast his own poetry on the BBC
ONE of the earliest members of the wartime Special Operations Executive, Patrick Howarth, did valuable work on its staff in London, and in training agents at various secret locations around Britain. Turning man of letters after the war, he published books on a wide variety of subjects as well as writing poetry. Notable among his prose works were two on the SOE, one of which, a collection of essays by SOE agents, he edited and the other he wrote.
Patrick John Fielding Howarth learnt at Rugby, like his friend Peter Wilkinson, the elements of resistance to authority, and he went on to St John’s College, Oxford, from which he graduated just before the Second World War began. With a character at once genial and combative, stoutly patriotic, and good at keeping his mouth shut when he had to, he was an ideal recruit to the SOE.
The symbol MX1, allotted to him, meant and was meant to mean nothing to the outside world. To an initiate, it meant that he worked under the immediate eye of (Major-General Sir) Colin Gubbins, variously described as SOE’s mainspring and its linchpin.
Gubbins originally ran the operations and training departments; by late 1943 he was executive head of the whole show under Lord Selborne. SOE’s operations had to start slowly. There were no agents on the spot at first. They had to be found, trained and inserted — usually by parachute.
Howarth was never one to “speed glum heroes up the line to death” without taking his share of risk. He did parachute training as a matter of course, when it was far more dangerous than it is today. He also took part in SOE’s main training courses, in paramilitary techniques on the Inverness-shire coast and in secret tradecraft at Beaulieu in the New Forest.
He never himself went on operations, for he commanded no foreign language well enough to pass for a native, but he made himself thoroughly useful on the Baker Street staff. He did spend several weeks in Italy in 1944, with a party of Polish friends, waiting to go on a sabotage mission into the Balkans, but after many postponements it was cancelled.
His tact and sympathy were invaluable when dealing with the governments-in-exile in wartime London, whose consent had usually to be sought before SOE could dispatch agents into their countries. How thoroughly he became imbued with SOE’s spirit became clear after the war, in two of his books. One, Special Operations which he edited in 1955, was a collection of essays (already in print) by former members of SOE, recounting their authors’ various astonishing adventures, from which the proceeds went to the Special Forces Club, of which Howarth was an original and lifelong member.
The other, Undercover, he wrote himself, and it came out in 1980. He was dissatisfied with the treatment that some of SOE’s heroes and heroines had received from the popular press, and felt the official histories that had come out were too dry. So he gave his own recollections of such outstanding characters as Forrest Yeo-Thomas, GC, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard and Christine Granville, and sketched the critical role SOE had played in keeping civilisation alive against Nazi barbarism.
After the war he had a brief spell in the foreign service, serving in the mission in Warsaw. This he had to leave because he married a Polish wife — it turned out a disastrous marriage, and was soon dissolved.
He then turned full-time author. He wrote several books about the lifeboat service, of which he was a leading supporter. His two novels, The Dying Ukrainian and A Matter of Minutes, both appeared in 1951 and reflected corners of his wartime life. In the same year he published a retrospective of England in the year of the Great Exhibition of 100 years before. He wrote also on parliamentary questions, on the French Riviera, and on schoolboy stories, as well as a life of Sir John Squire, Squire: Most Generous of Men, which appeared in 1963.
His range of interests is shown by his life of Attila, king of the Huns, and the range of his intellect by his excellent Intelligence Chief Extraordinary (1986), a life of Sir William Cavendish-Bentinck, 9th, and last Duke of Portland. It was Cavendish-Bentinck who turned the Joint Intelligence Committee into a worthwhile body, which performed major tasks of strategic analysis during the Second World War. It did wonders for the chiefs of staff committee, under which it worked, and in Howarth it found a worthy analyst of its sucesses.
Like Squire, Howarth wrote verse, and in his seventies he gave up metropolitan life for the sake of country peace and quiet in Dorset, where he settled down to what Edward Grey once called the proper occupations of a gentleman, drinking wine and writing poetry. Play Back a Lifetime and The Four Seasons collected some of his poetical broadcasts.
A second marriage was short-lived. The death of Eva, his third wife, three years ago, of course distressed, but did not quite silence, him: he was broadcasting poetry this autumn.
Patrick Howarth, wartime SOE officer and author, was born on April 25, 1916. He died on November 12, 2004, aged 88.
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Originally Posted by CAG 147
BTW before SOE Brits have Section D, GS/R-MI/R and EH(Electra House) organisations 
(we got one at Eastern front but their never did combat jump.
