A MASTER OF DECEPTION IN THE BATTLEFIELDS OF LOVE AND WAR
Joseph Gray’s Camouflage Mary Horlock Unbound €23.99 ★★★★★
Joseph Gray was an Englishborn artist who found himself working in Scotland at the start of the First World War and enlisted in the Black Watch regiment. His first-hand experience of trench warfare informed his haunting portraits of fallen comrades and for a time he was held in high esteem as a war artist, but his traditional style of painting fell out of fashion in the Modernist 1920s and today he’s all but forgotten. He doesn’t deserve to be, because his contribution to Allied victory in the Second World War was even more striking than his record in the First.
Gray is the subject of this unusual and surprisingly poignant biography by his great-granddaughter, who never knew him but found herself increasingly baffled by a family history full of mysterious gaps. For Joe, as she refers to him throughout the story, became a master of deception during the Second World War, and the secrecy that was necessary for his army work spilled over into his private life as well.
Camouflage was Joe’s field of expertise, and the contribution he made to bamboozling German intelligence was as remarkable as it was ingenious. His interest in camouflage had been stirred in the Flanders trenches, where his artist’s eye had immediately discerned that the neatness and uniformity so prized by senior officers were worse than useless in combat. Nature is irregular, and the only way to fool the enemy was to break up the contours of artificial constructions such as tanks and buildings. Joe’s discovery that steel wool was much more flexible than traditional painted nets was a game-changer and undoubtedly saved many lives. Joe was equally adept at camouflaging the love affair that led to the break-up of his marriage, and Mary Horlock’s painstaking unmasking of his double life is as expertly drawn as any of his portraits. She doesn’t judge, she simply reveals, and in so doing she brings a remarkable time, and a remarkable man, vividly to life.