This article was written by Jackie Rickenberg for the Parish Magazine
On Christmas Eve 1919, Walter Wright sold Rock Cottage, at the very top of Highfield Lane at the head of the Valley of the Rocks, to the President of the Board of Education (what would now be the Secretary of State) H A L Fisher. In fact, it was not Herbert Fisher who made the decision to buy Rock Cottage – it was his wife Lettice (at the time they had a seven-year-old daughter called Mary). She committed them to the purchase on the basis of one brief visit, being largely persuaded by the fact that Walter Wright’s daughter who was residing in the property during this visit, was called Lettice Mary!
Fisher was born in London in 1865, the eldest son of eleven children. Direct relatives included brother-in-law, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and first cousins Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, and his godfather was the Prince Consort. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford and it was there he took up his first post as a tutor in Modern History. By 1913 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield and by 1916 Fisher was elected Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam. He joined David Lloyd George’s government as President of the Board of Education. And of course, Lloyd George became Churt’s most famous resident a year later. Coincidence, or were they close? He was sworn on the Privy Council, therefore becoming The Right Honourable, and it was in this post that he was instrumental in the formulation of the Education Act 1918, which made school attendance compulsory for children up to the age 14. Fisher was also responsible for the School Teachers (Superannuation) Act 1918, which provided pension provision for all teachers.
So, when Herbert Fisher bought Rock Cottage a year later, in 1919, he was already a committed, hard-working MP and government minister and remained so for a further 7 years. When he retired from politics in 1926, at the age of 61, he took up the post of warden of New College, Oxford which he held until his death. During his long, illustrious career he served on the British Academy, the British Museum, the Rhodes Trustees, the National Trust, The Governing Body of Winchester College, the London Library and the BBC. In 1939, he was appointed the first chairman of the Appellate Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors. Unfortunately, this inadvertently would be responsible for his demise on 18th April 1940.
On this date, whilst in London to sit on a Conscientious Objectors’ Tribunal during a blackout on what was called a London “pea souper”, H A L Fisher was knocked down by a lorry and died in St Thomas’s Hospital. Now, what was it about this honourable man’s life and ultimately, his death, that made it into a best-selling book and film?
Well, bizarrely it was his underpants. You see, Fisher had left a few of his possessions - clothes, his library of books, etc in New College, Oxford and they were still there a couple of years later, when in 1943, Operation Mincemeat was being planned and executed. This is now the name of the best-selling book by Ben Macintyre and a film starring Colin Firth. Operation Mincemeat was a British Intelligence operation to deceive enemy forces, where they undertook the invention of a false Royal Marines officer, whose body was to be dropped at sea in the hope the false intelligence it carried, would be believed. It was, indeed, a success and was responsible for misleading German intelligence and possibly influencing the eventual outcome of the war.
The following excerpt from the book, explains the details that joined the otherwise unlikely chain of events:
“Underwear was a more ticklish problem. Cholmondeley, (intelligence officer) understandably, was unwilling to surrender his own, since good underwear was hard to come by in rationed, wartime Britain. They consulted John Masterman, Oxford academic and chairman of the Twenty Committee, who came up with a scholarly solution that was also personally satisfying. “The difficulty of obtaining underclothes, owing to the system of coupon rationing”, wrote Masterman “was overcome by the acceptance of a gift of thick underwear from the wardrobe of the late Warden of New College, Oxford”. Major Martin (the corpse’s new identity) would be kitted out with the flannel vest and underpants of none other than H A L Fisher, the distinguished Oxford historian and former President of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s Cabinet. John Masterman and H A L Fisher had both taught history at Oxford in the 1920’s, and had long enjoyed a fierce academic rivalry. Fisher was a figure of ponderous grandeur and gravity who ran New College, according to one colleague, as “one enormous mausoleum”. Masterman considered him long-winded and pompous. Fisher had been run over and killed by a lorry while attending a tribunal examining the appeals of conscientious objectors, of which he was chairman. The obituaries paid resounding tribute to his intellectual and academic stature, which nettled Masterman. Putting the great man’s underclothes on a dead body and floating it into German hands was just the sort of joke that appealed to his odd sense of humour. Masterman described the underwear as a “gift”; it seems far more likely that he simply arranged for the dead don’s drawers to be pressed into war service”.
