ABSTRACT
Gerry Holdsworth, whom Section D had sent to Newlyn on 1 August 1940 to take charge of the attempt to land their first three agents from the lumbering and unsuitable Belgian yacht, had been a cadet on a rubber plantation in Borneo, but the Depression that afflicted the world economy in 1929 brought him back to England, where he found work making films for an advertising agency.1 He became part owner of a Bristol Channel pilot-cutter yacht named Mischief and, when Section D was set up in 1938, was one of a very select group of members of the Royal Cruising Club who were recruited to survey, and familiarise themselves with, parts of the continental coastline that might be of strategic significance in wartime. They were a distinguished company of amateur sailors including Frank Carr, Assistant Librarian of the House of Lords, who sailed another Bristol Channel pilot-cutter; Roger Pinckney, architect of Melbourne Cathedral who, with his mother, owned and sailed the Laurent Giles-designed Dyarchy, and Augustine Courtauld, the Arctic explorer, who sailed a handsome Fife yawl named Duet. Holdsworth’s allotted task covered part of the Norwegian coast but, in the autumn of 1939, when war had begun, he was given a short course in demolition techniques by a sapper major in the St Ermin’s Hotel, and sent to Norway under commercial cover to see how and where the flow of Swedish iron ore from Narvik to the Ruhr might best be disrupted; and how explosives for the purpose might be infiltrated by fishing vessels either via the Shetlands or direct from Aberdeen. This was viewed in Whitehall and in Paris as an operation of high strategic importance and when Menzies, the new Chief of the Secret Service, first called on Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, on 11 December 1939, it was to discuss this very subject.
