They look like ordinary pencils. And they write like ordinary pencils. It鈥檚 the green paint that鈥檚 the giveaway. Pencils, on display at the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, were made during the Second World War, when paint was in short supply and pencils left the factory with a natural wood finish. The paint marks them out as a special line. Snap one open and all is revealed. Hidden inside is a map and a tiny compass. The pencils, issued to British airmen flying over enemy territory, were one of the secret gadgets thought up by Charles Fraser-Smith, the shadowy civil servant who became the model for Ian Fleming鈥檚 鈥淨鈥� in the James Bond stories. Like most of Fraser-Smith鈥檚 ingenious devices, the pencils were made by a well-known manufacturer-the Cumberland Pencil Company in this case. By using established firms, the man from the ministry was able to tap the ingenuity of a whole band of engineers and designers, and he ended up with a product bearing a well-known name that wouldn鈥檛 arouse suspicion if it fell into the wrong hands.
AT 5.30 pm, Fred Tee picked up the folder with his papers in, put on his trilby and headed for home. Like most of the 100-strong workforce at the Cumberland Pencil Company, he was a local man and lived just a few minutes鈥� walk from the factory in Keswick. As soon as it grew dark, Tee, the factory鈥檚 youthful technical manager, set off back to the works and quietly let himself into his laboratory through the back door. This was the fifth night in a row that he and his fellow managers had met after work to do a spot of moonlighting.
This was 1942, and Britain was at war. Tee and his colleagues had been asked to produce a special type of pencil: it must have a secret compartment just large enough to hold a tightly rolled map and a tiny compass. In the interests of security, only the managers were in on the secret, sworn to silence by the Official Secrets Act.
Advertisement
Tee and the Cumberland Pencil Company had been commissioned by a mysterious man from London who claimed to be a civil servant from the Ministry of Supply鈥檚 Clothing and Textile Department. He was Charles Fraser-Smith, a fixer whose real job was to supply equipment and gadgets for MI6, MI9 and the Special Operations Executive-everything from miniature cameras to surgical saws, edible notepaper and forged foreign currency. He was always on the lookout for novel ways to hide equipment that would help downed airmen avoid capture, prisoners of war escape, and secret agents get their information safely back to Britain. He was the original 鈥淨鈥� immortalised in the James Bond movies.
Fraser-Smith was bombarded with requests for devices with secret compartments, and conjured up shaving brushes, pipes and pens, golf balls and even shoelaces that concealed escape equipment. His strategy was to approach a well-known firm that made a suitable object and ask if they could make a version with some unusual features. Across Britain, designers and engineers took up the challenge.
So when Fraser-Smith needed a pencil with a secret compartment he visited the oldest manufacturer in the country, the Cumberland Pencil Company. Was it possible, he asked, to make a pencil that would hold a tightly rolled map, about 12 centimetres long, plus a compass-without anyone noticing? A pencil was a standard piece of navigation equipment, making it an ideal place to hide escape gear.
As technical manager, Tee worked out how to make the pencils without the rest of the tight-knit community finding out about them. There were six separate operations in producing a pencil-first making the leads, then gluing them into grooved cedar-wood slats, shaping the pencils and embossing them with the company name, before packing them into boxes. Although it would have been easier to create the hiding place early in the process, Tee decided that the extra step should be done right at the end to ensure that none of the workforce realised what was going on.
After hours and at weekends, Tee and his fellow managers crept into the factory, took a box of finished pencils off the shelf and carefully drilled out the insides, leaving a short stretch of lead-filled pencil at the working end. Holes drilled, the next job was to slide in the map, fix the metal ferrule to the end, slip in a tiny brass compass and glue the rubber back on top. At the end of the job, the pencil looked just as it had at the start.
The maps and compasses arrived secretly at the factory, ready to be inserted into the pencils. The compass was one of Fraser-Smith鈥檚 early successes. Almost his first job had been to supply a fountain pen with a miniature compass inside. He tackled the problem of the pen first, and once he had established that Platignum could make one with a suitable hiding place, he set about finding a compass to fit it. 鈥淣o compass as yet existed that was small enough to fit into the tiny aperture,鈥� he wrote in his autobiography. But in London he discovered 鈥渁 couple of back-alley brothers鈥�, the Barkers of Clerkenwell, who were making large compasses for the Navy. He asked them to make something 鈥渟maller than they had ever seen or heard of鈥�. They did, and over the next few years the miniature compasses turned up inside pens and pencils, in battledress buttons, hairbrushes and even in place of fillings in airmen鈥檚 teeth.
The next component was the map. Fraser-Smith toyed with handkerchiefs printed with invisible ink that would emerge when soaked with urine. These were too bulky to hide inside gadgets, so he had to think of something else. The maps in the Cumberland pencils were printed on a fine, non-rustling tissue paper made specially for the job, then rolled around a soft wire which was folded over at the tip to secure the paper. Three cotton ties ensured the map stayed tightly rolled and no more than 3 millimetres in diameter. There were four maps-which were fitted into a series of pencils numbered 101 to 104. Pencils labelled 101 held a general map of Germany. The other three concealed larger-scale maps of different sectors of the country.
So did any downed airmen or prisoners find their way home with the help of a Cumberland pencil? Fraser-Smith was certain his gadgets saved lives and helped people get home, but there were no official records. Officially, he didn鈥檛 exist. In their remote and tranquil setting in the Lake District, Tee and his colleagues would never find out. Their pencils didn鈥檛 exist either.