The Times - UK (2022-04-04)

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Dancer in Frederick Ashton’s

Symphonic Variations

Henry Danton

Page 44

Lady Clark, then Marjorie Lewis, joined the war not knowing her mission before

being sent to Italy, where she met her future husband, Sir Robert Clark, below

harbour. Failing that she had the duty-

free cigarettes her father sent her, but

she duly exchanged these with a local

Italian for underwear. “The officer in

charge would wonder how all these

Italians were getting cigarettes,” she

said. “Well, I couldn’t smoke them all.”

She had also met her future husband

Robert (Bob) Clark, an SOE agent who

sabotaged railway lines and rowed

agents ashore under the cloak of night.

They entered a courtship of drinking gin

on the harbour wall, singing round the

piano in the mess and stealing off to the

cinema. A sensitive and thoughtful man,

he kept his childhood teddy bear, Falla,

tucked inside his battledress.

“By now you must know how much I

have enjoyed the last months in your

company,” Bob wrote to her in one of

hundreds of letters during those years.

The correspondence accompanied her

through unbearable bouts of radio

silence, when Bob was sent on covert

missions in the wild foothills of the Ital-

ian countryside. He was sworn to secre-

cy and she never knew of what his mis-

sions consisted. “There is a kind of war-

time Romeo and Juliet aspect to Bob

and Marjorie’s romance,” wrote Willi-

am Boyd in The New Statesman. “Their

blossoming love was plagued by a con-

tinuous sense of danger.”

She was herself plagued by a tide of

adversities; Bob’s absences, a bout of ma-

laria, the mental exhaustion of listening

to the incessant hum of transmissions in

a dark room. She suffered a nervous

breakdown and was sent to a “rest camp”

in Ravello alongside injured soldiers.

that the requisitioned convoy would

ferry 43,000 troops and supplies to Al-

giers, Alexandria and Bombay via the

Suez Canal. Days into the voyage they

were attacked by German U-boats.

Coastal batteries, meanwhile, shot

down nine enemy aircraft. As the night

sky turned to amber, a ship yards away

exploded from a torpedo.

It was winter when they arrived in Al-

giers and FANY’s quarters were un-

comfortable. There was no heating and

no furniture except for a camp bed with

scratchy blankets and tables cobbled

from orange boxes and parachute silk.

When Lewis was relocated to Monop-

oli in the heel of Italy after the Italian

surrender (the Germans fighting even

more intensely after losing their allies),

her purpose was, for the

first time, disclosed. She

was to be part of a six-

person secret unit

known as No 1 Special

Force. So began gruel-

ling 12-hour shifts

under the austere

eye of a man they

called “Oddjob”.

She found the

responsibility de-

bilitating: a momen-

tary lapse would re-

sult in the capture

or death of an

agent. To decom-

press, she mean-

dered through the

cobbled streets to-

wards the medieval

Then in December 1944, Bob was cap-

tured behind enemy lines. He served out

the rest of the war in a German camp

and she had no idea whether he was alive

until she received a telegram at the end

of the war: “Arriving London from Ger-

many. Meet me London.”

She was born Andolyn Marjorie

Beynon Lewis in 1924 in Ystalyfera, a

village in south Wales. Her mother, An-

dolyn, after whom she was named, died

giving birth to her and she was chris-

tened over the coffin in the Welsh tradi-

tion. Her father, Howell, was a mine

owner who played rugby for Wales. His

rugby career ended after he had been

injured three times during the war and

Marjorie (she went by her middle

name) and her sister Gwenda were kept

up by his nightmare-induced screams

in the night. Growing up she also had a

penchant for sports, and remembered

playing hockey on Swansea beach after

moving to a convent school aged ten,

with the team waiting until the tide re-

treated to mark the pitch.

A vexatious child, she once threw rice

pudding out of the school bus at a group

of pedestrians, and her father packed her

off to Cheltenham a few years later to

hammer in some “discipline”. With her

broad Welsh accent, she felt out of place.

“I was in a different category from all

these posh young English girls,” she told

the Times journalist and broadcaster Lu-

cy Fisher when interviewed for Fisher’s

book Women in the War (2021). “It was

very, very tough.” She had elocution les-

sons and was forced to speak with a pen-

cil clamped between her teeth.

Upon her return by train to London

at the end of the war, Bob borrowed his

father’s Land Rover and greeted her at

Paddington. He was posted to the Far

East with the Special Forces Club and

the army paid for her to do a secretarial

course, after which she worked in PR

for Rolls-Royce.

Three years after his return they

were married in Hampstead and went

on to have three children: Tim, a City

lawyer; Will, a partner in an investment

management firm; and Catherine, a TV

agent.

Her husband predeceased her (obitu-

ary, January 24, 2013). He had enjoyed

a successful career as director of the

Bank of England and chairman of the

Mirror Group after Robert Maxwell’s

death, and was knighted in 1976. Clark

duly assumed the title of “Lady”, and

made headlines when she told a nosy

journalist that, being staunchly right-

wing, she would not touch The Mirror

with a bargepole. The following day’s

headline read: “Chairman’s Wife Says

Mirror is Trash”. She was delighted and

handed the papers out like free candy.

Clark had come a long way from the

timid girl sitting in front of the mysteri-

ous man from the ministry. Or as she

put it, “I grew up, didn’t I?... I became

someone to stand on my own two feet.”

Lady Clark, SOE wireless operator, was

born on July 14, 1924. She died on March

9, 2022, aged 97

After Bob’s capture she

heard nothing from him

for the rest of the war

Obituaries

Lady Clark

Steely wireless operator for Churchill’s ‘secret army’ who fell in love with an SOE agent in occupied Italy

The “man from the ministry”, as the 17-
year-old Marjorie Lewis called him,
opened the interview with a strange
question: “Can you keep a secret?”
It was 1943 and an anonymous gov-
ernment official had travelled to the
grounds of Cheltenham Ladies’ College
to recruit girls to work with the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), part of
Winston Churchill’s “secret army” de-
signed to conduct subversion and espi-
onage in occupied Europe.
Lewis, later known by her married
name Clark, was one of two girls select-
ed by their headmistress, Miss Popham,
to interview for the FANY (First Aid
Nursing Yeomanry). FANY had ceased
being an auxiliary nursing organisation
in the 1930s, and had instead trained
voluntary female drivers and radio op-
erators. In 1939 FANY became an obvi-
ous source of volunteers and a conve-
nient “holding unit” for several clan-
destine organisations, including SOE,
whose mandate from Churchill was to
“set Europe alight”.
The recruitment process was shroud-
ed in secrecy and she did not know what
the job was, or why she had been chosen.
As a discreet girl who had been bullied
by her home counties classmates for her
Welsh accent, she was an interesting
candidate for a wireless operator. She
later learnt that her interviewer thought
that as the Welsh were known for their
love of music, she must have a good ear.
“Churchill wanted women who were
intelligent and could hold a secret,” she
said. “I don’t know about being intelli-
gent, but I could hold a secret.”
After a second interview, this time
with the commander of FANY, she was
offered the chance to join the SOE and
promptly turned down a place she had
been offered to study history at Oxford.
She was, typical for her generation, sto-
ic and morally attuned. “I wasn’t brave,
I was just doing my bit. How could I
have possibly gone to Oxford when
London was being bombed?”
After rigorous and selective training,
she was sent to Fawley Court near Hen-
ley to learn about codes and ciphers. To
decrease the risk to agents on the
ground they had to master high-speed
Morse transmissions of at least 20
words per minute. There was a high
fallout rate for wireless operators and
most became coders or registry clerks.
After learning to transmit and re-
ceive signals under wartime conditions
at a specialised school in Scotland, she
wrote with excitement to her family
that she was being posted abroad. “I
want you to be very cheerful about this
decision of mine, because I feel I am do-
ing the right thing. Just you be happy
too — that’s all I want in the world
and I too will be all right.”
Armed with a “tropical kit” of
mugs, camouflage nets and bed-
ding, she and 12 others boarded a
slate-grey troopship in Liver-
pool, her short brown hair
tucked neatly into a cap
and her uniform
pressed. She still
knew nothing of the
work and had no
idea where the
ship, the Mon-
arch of Bermuda,
was bound, until
the captain declared

Field Marshal

Sir John Chapple

Professor Robert

Lethbridge, master

(2005-13), Fitzwilliam

College, Cambridge,

writes: To the excep-

tional range of

“extra-curricular”

activities listed in

your obituary of

Field Marshal Sir John Chapple (March

26) could be added his 1973 appointment

as services fellow at Fitzwilliam College,

Cambridge. It was the first such appoint-

ment made by the college.

Over the following decades, we were

reminded of his loyalty to the college by

his regular appearance at the London

dinner of the Fitzwilliam Society. On

one such occasion, when post-prandial

smoking was still allowed, and notwith-

standing remaining “defiant about

some aspects of modernisation”, he

asked the guest next to him whether

she would mind if he lit up one of his no-

torious Philippine leaf cigars. That he

graciously demurred when she voiced

her objections was characteristic of his

courtesy. But that did not prevent him

from often recounting the episode with

a chuckle.

Shane Warne

Anthony Dixon

writes: My eight-

year-old son had

the privilege of

meeting Shane

Warne (obituary,

March 4) the day

before the classic

second Test match

at Edgbaston in 2005. After thanking

the great man for his autograph, Warne

uttered, “Haven’t you forgotten some-

thing, sonny?” To my son’s delight, he

was required to go through the complete

repertoire of high fives with the world’s

greatest spin bowler. My son then

proudly revealed the secret behind War-

ne’s prodigious ability to spin the ball —

“Dad, his fingers are huge. They resem-

ble the finest sausages I’ve ever seen.”

Madeleine Albright

Vivian Wineman,

trustee of the

Council of Chris-

tians and Jews,

writes: In your obit-

uary for Madeleine

Albright (March 23)

you mentioned her

Jewish origins of

which she only became aware late in

her life. After becoming aware, how-

ever, she was active in fostering links

between the religion of her Catholic up-

bringing and that of her Jewish ances-

tors. In recognition of her work she be-

came the latest recipient of the prestig-

ious Bridge award from the Council of

Christians and Jews. Previous recipi-

ents have included the Prince of Wales,

Lord Rothschild and Lord Sacks. The

award was presented to her in a virtual

ceremony by the chief rabbi and by the

ambassador of the Czech Republic.

Lives remembered

If you would like to add a personal view or

recollection to a published obituary, you

can email it to [email protected]

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