Some war heroes have films made about them. Others languish in obscurity. Then
there’s a third class of heroes who have films made about them even as they
remain hidden from history.
Which is where the homeless people’s theatre company Cardboard Citizens come
in. “It seems a pity,” their director, Adrian Jackson, says, “that a man who
helped us to win the Second World War hasn’t been acknowledged at all.”
That man is now the hero of Mincemeat, which Jackson’s cast of
professional and formerly homeless actors perform in an East London
warehouse later this month. He was also the hero, after a fashion, of the
Bafta-winning 1956 film The Man Who Never Was and of the postwar
pot-boiler Operation Heartbreak, a novel by a former First Lord of
the Admiralty, Duff Cooper.
Both were based on a real-life wartime disinformation plot, codenamed
Mincemeat, that led Germany to believe that the Allies would invade Sardinia
rather than their actual objective, Sicily, in 1943. This was achieved by
casting ashore on the coast of Spain the drowned corpse of a Royal Marine
carrying a briefcase full of secret Allied war plans.
The operation was a glorious success. The con was meticulous: a complete
identity was established for the body, that of “Major William Martin”, whose
case carried love-letters from a fictional girlfriend and ticket stubs from
the music hall dated several evenings before his supposed drowning.
The Times even included his name in the “roll of honour” for war
casualties. “I think they knew they were involved,” Jackson says. “I’m
pretty sure that the War Office in those days thought you simply couldn’t
lie to The Times.”
So celebrated was the operation that after the war, Cooper and the
intelligence officer responsible, Ewen Montagu, both rushed versions of the
story into print. But, in the fanfare surrounding Mincemeat’s success, few
thought to ask: who supplied the corpse?
In Montagu’s account, Jackson says, he claimed “to have sworn to the
[deceased’s] relatives never to reveal the body’s identity. But it’s pretty
clear from all of the theories that abound now that no relatives were ever
told.” The closer you look at Mincemeat, the more suspicious its stink. “You
have to wonder,” Jackson says, “why the body’s identity was kept secret for
so long. Was there some dirty dealing which led to the need for concealment?”
Jackson first encountered the story in the late 1990s. Papers had just been
released by the Public Records Office, and an amateur historian, Roger
Morgan, claimed the body to be that of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welsh
alcoholic who died (presumably by his own hand) of ingesting rat poison.
“The symptoms had to mirror drowning,” Jackson says. “It had to involve the
lungs being filled with fluid.”
According to Morgan’s theory (and — as the play makes clear — it isn’t the
only one), the “man who never was” was in fact a vagrant, whose body was
assumed by the War Office to be there for the taking.
To Jackson, this was theatrical gold dust, a rip-roaring story about
homelessness that lent itself perfectly to theatre. What attracted him was
“the rich idea of a nobody becoming a somebody. And the theatricality of the
deception. These intelligence officers had to invent a person, and their job
— like in the theatre — was to make that invention credible.”
The play, scripted by Jackson and Farhana Sheikh, pays homage to the Second
World War movie A Matter of Life and Death, as “Major Martin’s”
identity is pieced together before he can enter Heaven. Much of it remains
speculative, Jackson admits, but that’s partly the point. The play asks who
we are, he says. “What gives us value? How do you make someone valuable? You
give them stuff. You give them a partner. You give them a uniform.” Without
those things, people such as Michael too easily seem “disposable”, Jackson
says: like, well, mincemeat.
“The rule with codenames was that you took one that had just become available.
The codename is not supposed to have anything to do with the operation. So
you can’t help wondering why they chose Mincemeat. The tongue must have been
somewhere near the cheek. And vicariously, one can’t help feeling a bit
angry for the man. Because, actually, he wasn’t mincemeat, mate, he was a
person.”
Cardboard Citizens challenge those prejudices. “I’m on a minor crusade against
the way people pathologise homelessness,” Jackson says, “as if it’s always
about drink or drugs or some kind of inadequacy. Most people don’t really
think it could happen to them. They think that the homeless are some kind of
subspecies.”
Mincemeat also features, in cameo roles, Adolf Hitler and Charlie
Chaplin, both of whom experienced homelessness. Which is “a scalding
experience for people”, Jackson says. “You can’t help thinking that the
young Hitler must have thought: “I’m never going to be like this again. And
I will get revenge.’ ” Who knows what might have become of Hitler, Jackson
wonders — with tongue somewhere near cheek — “if homelessness hadn’t been
such a humiliating and horrible experience? Which it isn’t nowadays,” he
admits.
So could the events of Mincemeat come to pass today? Jackson doesn’t
miss a beat. “A homeless man called Ian Tomlinson died in the G20
demonstrations,” he says. “The first autopsy conveniently signed him off as
a heart attack. I’m afraid the cavalier way in which those lives are treated
seems to continue.” Jackson could cite other examples: he has shows in the
pipeline on the plight of the Chagos islanders, whose homeland was forcibly
depopulated in the 1960s; and on the Westminster Council gerrymandering
scandal of 1987.
Next to those tales, Operation Mincemeat clearly isn’t the crime of the
century, Jackson admits. “It’s just a pity that this man was never
acknowledged, was never granted any dignity. We just wanted, finally, to
tell his story. It’s been told from one point of view. But the protagonist
of the story — a dead protagonist, but still the protagonist — has never had
his voice heard.”
Mincemeat is at Cordy House, Shoreditch, London EC2 (Soho Theatre box
office: 020-7478 0100), to July 12
