78 1GM Saturday September 5 2020 | the times
Register
Gus Fletcher on the day he was
awarded his George Medal in 1957It took Gus Fletcher two hours to crawl
the last 80 yards through the Malayan
jungle to get his man. Just ahead of him
lay Ah Ho, a communist terrorist
leader, sleeping and guarded by a sen-
try. Fletcher, who was a police assistant
superintendent and special branch offi-
cer, crawled on. So too did the two Chi-
nese inspectors with him. All were dis-
guised in terrorist uniform. Then they
pounced. One of the inspectors seized
Ah Ho’s Bren gun. Fletcher sprang for-
ward, his revolver drawn. Bullets
cracked and screamed. Ah Ho and two
of his men were killed; seven others
were captured.
This action, which took place in Oc-
tober 1956, was part of a mission code-
named Operation Googly in which an
elite group of British forces made con-
tact with Malayans as part of a secret
infiltration exercise. Fletcher, a brilliant
Chinese linguist, had devised a series of
operations that involved taking a hand-
picked team of Chinese detectives and
a squad of Gurkhas for security, and
holding night-time conversations with
the communist leaders in which he per-
suaded them to surrender and secretly
take him to capture or kill their leaders.
In Jungle Warfare: Experiences and
Encounters (2008), John Cross de-
scribes Operation Googly as “a spec-
tacular escapade”. At first the details of
the successful mission were shrouded
in secrecy, to avoid compromising
related operations. However, in 1957
the announcement came that Fletcher
and his colleague Inspector Goh Chin
Hee, one of the Chinese inspectors who
had accompanied him into the jungle,
were to be awarded the George Medal.
The citation, which was originally
written in dialect to avoid it being
leaked, described how the two men had
displayed “outstanding coolness, relia-
bility and gallantry in the face of grave
personal danger”.
Augustus James Voisey Fletcher was
born in Gurney Slade, Somerset, in
1928, the son of James Fletcher, a farm
labourer, and his wife, Naomi (née
Dudden), who before her marriage had
been in domestic service. He had an
older brother and younger sister, both
of whom predeceased him. He was edu-
cated at Weston-Super-Mare Gram-
mar School, where he was in the Air
Training Corps and hoped to join the
RAF. However, by his own account he
missed the war “by a whisker” and in-
stead in 1946 joined the Great Western
Railway police as a junior cadet.
While he was on duty at Temple
Meads station in Bristol he spotted a
glamorous poster depicting smart offi-
cers on horses and motorcycles. It invit-
ed applications to join the Palestine
police. He promptly applied and was
deployed. However, the Middle East
provided him with few opportunities
for adventure and when the British
mandate ended in 1948 the force was
disbanded. Fletcher returned home in
search of new opportunities.
He did not have to wait long, as he
later recalled: “I saw in a Sunday news-
paper that Malaya needed 500 ex-Pal-
estine policemen to deal with a ‘Com-
munist uprising’. I was not entirely sure
where Malaya was, nor what constitut-
ed a Communist uprising, but wrote to
the Crown Agents for the Colonies for
further information. In short order I
found myself in Hounslow Barracks.
There were about 40 of us, all ex-Pales-
tine police, our ages ranging from old
men of 40 to young squirts like me, 19
years old.”
He described vividly their 50-hour
journey to Malaya on a military air-
craft, which involved several layovers.
A few rows in front of him was one Col-
onel WN Gray, who was dressed in
black jacket, pinstripe trousers, waist-
coat and bowler hat. “As our aluminium
tube lumbered eastwards to ever hotter
regions, and as we climbed back after
each landing into an increasingly oven-
like atmosphere, our commissioner di-
vested himself of his outer garments
one by one,” Fletcher wrote in a chapter
for Brian Stewart’s book Operation
Sharp End: Smashing Terrorism in Ma-
laya, 1948-58 (2003). “For reasons un-
known, however (and it was the subject
of much speculation), he kept his bowl-er on in the aircraft.”
Signed up to the Federation of Ma-
laya Police, Fletcher became interested
in all things Chinese, rapidly picking up
Cantonese at a Malayan government
language school and astonishing his ex-
aminers with his ability. “I was posted to
the rubber estates in Mentakab and or-
ganised defences among other things,”
he told the New Straits Times in 2015,
adding that he had passed the time by
learning Malay pantuns, or poems. He
continued studying and memorising
his pantuns behind sandbags in the
quiet of the jungle evenings, while wait-
ing for communist insurgents.
While home on leave in 1956 he mar-
ried Enyd Harries, a Welsh school
teacher, later declaring himself to be an
honorary Welshman. Immediately
after a short honeymoon in London the
couple sailed for Malaya. Enyd survives
him with a son, Michael, who is a solici-
tor, and a daughter, Jane, a copywriter.
Fletcher, a genial, gregarious and
hospitable man, left Malaya in 1958 andHe liked showing visitors
a side of Hong Kong not
usually seen by outsiders
Obituaries
Gus Fletcher
Former railway policeman awarded the George Medal in Malaya
for the next six years was employed as
a specialist officer by MI5. He trans-
ferred to MI6, the Secret Intelligence
Service, in 1964 and two years later was
posted with the diplomatic service to
Hong Kong, where he was to serve for
two separate tours: a total of some
seven years. He took boisterous pleas-
ure in astonishing his Chinese interloc-
utors with his mastery of Cantonese
and Mandarin.
He liked showing to visitors aspects
of Hong Kong life not normally seen by
outsiders. On one occasion he met a
couple of newlyweds on their first day
in Hong Kong and invited them for
lunch. They recalled: “He introduced us
to the delights of chicken’s feet, duck’s
feet, pig entrails and 100-day-old eggs.
At the end of this astonishing meal he
proclaimed that ‘you can now eat any-
thing in Hong Kong — nothing will be
worse than that’.”
There were also two tours of duty in
London, dealing with Chinese matters.
The first 15 years of his service in MI6
afforded him no break in this speciali-
sation and, although he sometimes
longed for a change, his energy was un-
diminished. The change finally came in
1979, when he was posted to Delhi for
three years, a period that was rather
spoilt for him by serious back trouble.
After retiring in 1983 from the main
stream of the service, Fletcher spent ten
years with the section of MI6 responsi-
ble for the “positive vetting” of new re-
cruits. He enjoyed his work; he had al-
ways liked travel and individuals; and
he was good at it. But his colleagues
sometimes wondered whether the
people whom he was interviewing were
ever able to get a word in.
Although Fletcher’s career was large-
ly concentrated in one area, his inter-
ests and activities were wide. He was a
glider pilot, owned a narrowboat and
was keen on the opera, with a particular
leaning towards English National Op-
era and a weakness for Gilbert and Sul-
livan. In retirement he became interest-
ed in Turkey and, characteristically,
learnt Turkish to add a further dimen-
sion to his visits to the country. He en-
joyed serving on the committee of the
Travellers’ Club.
As a child he had been brought up in
the Church of England, and in later
years he began attending once more.
He served as a sidesman at his local par-
ish church, although he probably en-
joyed the church gardening group at
least as much as the Sunday services.
He enjoyed fine wine and was a vora-
cious reader, working his way through
countless biographies, novels and trav-
el books. Anthony Trollope and the
poetry of AE Housman were his fa-
vourites.
Fletcher loved languages and dia-
lects, considering it to be good manners
to address people in their own tongue.
He also enjoyed puns and poems, cross-
words “and not-so-cross words”. He
was delighted to discover that an ana-
gram of the word “funeral” is “real fun”,
and asked that this fact be pointed out
at his service — with instructions that
those who were celebrating his life
should do just that.Gus Fletcher, GM, OBE, intelligence
officer, was born on December 23, 1928.
He died on August 9, 2020, aged 91Linda Manz
Actress whose hauntingly brilliant performance
in Days of Heaven made it a film like no other
When the director Terrence Malick
was looking for someone to play Rich-
ard Gere’s untamed kid sister in the
1978 film Days Of Heaven, he instructed
his casting director to find a feral child
from the wrong side of the tracks who
had “actually lived this life”.
The 15-year-old Linda Manz, hailing
from the New York tenements, was the
answer. Her life until that point had
been brutal. Her father had walked out
when she was two and she was brought
up by Sophie Manz, her troubled and vi-
olent mother, who worked as a cleaner
in the Twin Towers and with whom she
had “an adversary relationship”. Fre-quent evictions meant they lived out of
a suitcase. Shuffling around run-down
apartments, Manz went through half a
dozen schools. There were social work-
ers on her case and she “ran away a lot”,
hoping someone would adopt her. She
witnessed fights on the streets and had
several scars on her face. She claimed to
have got them “falling down”, but what-
ever their origin, they went well with
her confrontational stare.
Playing alongside Gere’s character,
who had killed a foreman and fled to
Texas with his girlfriend and younger
sibling in tow, Manz did not need to act;
she knew about life on the run and only