Killers, saboteurs and a glass of fine whisky
Giles Milton heads for the Highlands on the trail of the WWII heroes who joined the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’
THERE’S almost no trace left of what once took place at Arisaig House. No hint of the extraordinary events that occurred here. It’s as if the stories of the past have been airbrushed from history. There is a good reason for this. Arisaig, now a comfortable country house hotel, was once the setting for some of the greatest secrets of the Second World War. Here, on the remote shores of Loch Nan Uamh in the Western Highlands, Winston Churchill created a clandestine and controversial guerrilla army. It was so pivotal to the Allied war effort that the entire area was sealed off and made a forbidden zone.
In this stunning Victorian manor – where guests nowadays enjoy the bracing sea air and dine on locally caught lobster – an army of saboteurs and assassins were once trained to undertake missions of vital importance. Their task was to smuggle themselves into Nazi-occupied Europe and cripple Hitler’s war machine.
Seven decades after the last of the saboteurs set off on their missions, I’m following their trail up to the Highlands, catching the night train from London to Fort William. The only difference is that today’s Caledonian Sleeper, with its convivial restaurant car and well-appointed cabins, is a great deal more luxurious than the unheated carriages used during the war years.
I wake at dawn, open the blind and am greeted by a sight so spectacular that I immediately reach for my camera. We are crossing the austere expanse of Rannoch Moor, whose surrounding mountains are topped with an unusually late powdering of snow.
A change of trains at Fort William sees me travelling on the branch line to Mallaig, a ride of jaw-dropping beauty. Churchill’s guerrillas and saboteurs got their first taste of what was to come while taking this train. It was invariably ambushed by men already undergoing training at Arisaig: it was good practice for the operations they would be undertaking.
Arisaig House (not to be confused with nearby Arisaig Hotel) gives the impression of having been specially designed to keep its secrets from the world.
Set in sprawling private grounds and reached via a twisting gravel drive, it is shielded from prying eyes by gigantic rhododendrons and rambling magnolias planted more than a century ago. You turn a final corner and there is the house itself, its grey granite walls buttressed against the stiff sea breeze.
The house is currently owned and run by two sisters – Emma Weir (the proprietor) and Sarah Winnington-Ingram (the manager). They have turned the place into a laid-back country-house hotel in which guests are greeted like friends of the family. In the hours after dinner, everyone sits around the fire and chats over glasses of fine malt whisky.
It was very different 70 years ago. Arisaig House was then under the control of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and had been made the fiefdom of two extraordinary gentlemen whose role was to train Churchill’s guerrillas.
Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes and William ‘Shanghai-Buster’ Fairbairn were the world’s leading experts in silent killing. They had previously led the anti-gangster squad in Shanghai, where their uncompromisingly violent methods virtually destroyed the city’s underworld. In 1941, they were poached by the SOE and sent to Scotland to teach recruits their dirty tricks.
The excellent little Land, Sea and Islands Visitor Centre in Arisaig village has a permanent exhibition that describes some of the audacious missions planned from here. Churchill referred to his guerrilla unit as his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Back at the hotel, Sarah points to a squat, brick building in the field below the house.
‘That,’ she says, ‘was the solitary confinement cell, in which men were locked up for days on end before being put through mock interrogations.’
Many of the men trained here were British, but many, too, were foreign allies, including members of the French Resistance, and Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, who in 1942 assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s ‘Butcher of Prague’.
Arisaig was just one of a number of country houses in Scotland used to train Britain’s secret guerrilla army – the countryside was an ideal place to do it. The surrounding mountains are as challenging as they are dramatic, while the nearby islands of Skye and Eigg are equally impressive.
The west coast of Scotland is a wild and blustery version of paradise, with its empty, silver-sand beaches, emerald-green headlands and tumbledown crofters’ cottages that are exposed to the elements.
You’ll need a hire car to explore fully the coastline and islands. I picked up a diminutive Fiat 500 and took the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry from Mallaig to Armadale on Skye, driving along a spectacular single-track road that hugged the contours of the snow-capped Cuillin Mountains.
Although the SOE requisitioned a number of country houses across the British Isles, Arisaig House is the only one that is easily accessible – and certainly the only one in which you can spend the night.
As I settle into a leather armchair for a final whisky before bed, I toast the brave men who trained here for their missions.
What they learned inside these walls was to prove instrumental in defeating Hitler’s war machine. But as the wind-swept memorial in Arisaig village makes clear, many of them would never come back.
Giles Milton’s book The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is published by John Murray at £20.
M