Thicker Than Water, Excerpt Three: Family Ties
Rose looked around the table before continuing. ‘Sarclet Castle has a long history. Parts of it were already over three centuries old when it was purchased in the 1890s by an industrialist who had made his money through shipbuilding and arms manufacturing and then went into politics. He was made the 1st Earl of Wick in 1895. He died in 1920 and his son Reginald Gough became the 2nd Earl of Wick. Reginald had two sons and a daughter before his wife left him.
‘Let’s wind the clock forward to September 1942. The 2nd Earl of Wick had become a colonel in the Home Guard and was a man of power and influence in Caithness. At the time there were people in the British establishment who believed that Churchill was the wrong man to lead the country and that it was a mistake to be fighting Hitler as, in their view, Stalin was the real threat. Colonel Reginald Gough, the 2nd Earl of Wick, was one of those people.
‘To find out if he posed a threat to the nation, MI5 dispatched a female agent to stay at Sarclet Castle. She used the name Madame Monique Dubois and as far as the Earl was concerned, she was a French journalist based in London who was researching a series of articles for a US magazine about how Scottish landowners were coping during the war.
‘Monique Dubois was my mother, our mother, and although I always knew she was remarkable it’s only since I’ve read her journal that I’ve been able to tie together all the pieces. If I were to tell her story in detail, I’d keep you here all night and probably tomorrow night too, so I’ll just give you the edited highlights. Besides, our daughter Carol has kindly agreed to use her literary skills to turn Mother’s journal into something that might attract a wider audience, and I don’t want to remove your need to buy the book when it comes out.
‘Let’s start at the beginning. Mother was born in Siberia in 1912 before being adopted by a family who fled the Russian Revolution and moved to Denmark and later to Paris.
‘She became a professional dancer at the age of 16 and, when she was just 18, she married a White Russian count who had her spy on the communists. The British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, recruited her when she was 20 after she’d left her first husband and she spied on both the communists and the White Russians for them. When she was 24, she was recruited by the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, with the enthusiastic agreement of her MI6 handlers. Her first husband was shot as a spy in the Soviet Union at about the same time.
‘A year later she married her second husband, a senior officer in the Abwehr who was nearly 60 at the time. He was killed in a car crash in Berlin in early 1940 and she became a full-time field agent for the Abwehr, again with MI6’s blessing. Having a double agent buried deep within the German intelligence service must have seemed like a godsend to MI6. Mother and two other German agents landed on the coast of Scotland on the 29th of September 1940 and were quickly arrested. She then transferred to MI5 and the German spies who she landed with were executed.’
Rose picked up her glass and took another drink of her wine. The great hall was completely silent and the only movement was by those following Rose’s example and taking a drink.
‘So that’s how our mother, using the name Monique Dubois, came to be at Sarclet Castle on Thursday the 10th of September 1942.’
‘Meanwhile, our father, Bob Sutherland, had also had an eventful war. He was a highly successful fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain but was shot down and injured just after it ended, losing the sight in his left eye. He went on to command various training units and did a worthy if, Mother thought, unsatisfying job as, officially at least, he wasn’t allowed to fly because of his eyesight. Then fate took a hand. On Tuesday the 25th of August 1942, King George VI’s younger brother, the Duke of Kent, was killed when the flying boat supposedly taking him to Iceland crashed about 20 miles south-west of here at a place called Eagle’s Rock, inland from Dunbeath, which most of you will have driven through to get here.
‘Father was asked to investigate the cause of the crash. This was partly because before the war he’d been a detective with the Glasgow police. Combined with his background as a pilot this arguably gave him the right mix of experience to do the job. Mainly, though, he was asked because he was completely independent of the various arms of British military intelligence, who were at one another’s throats at the time.
‘On Thursday the 10th of September 1942 he flew his Hurricane fighter north from Oban, where the aircraft that crashed had been based, to Wick, because he wanted to interview the only survivor and visit the site of the crash. En route, he encountered a lone German bomber over the sea within sight of here and shot it down. That brought him to the attention of the 2nd Earl of Wick, who contacted RAF Wick to invite Father to dinner at Sarclet Castle and spend the night here.
‘It turned out that Mother and Father had met a year earlier, fleetingly, but it was the fact that their paths crossed again here in this castle that led to their marrying in June 1943. That night they dined with the Earl, his family members and other guests in this room just as we are doing and that’s why I wanted to buy the Sarclet estate so badly when the previous owner felt he needed to sell it.
‘I should perhaps briefly tell you the rest of the story of Sarclet Castle. The 2nd Earl of Wick had two sons and a daughter. The older son was an officer in an armoured regiment in North Africa who was killed early in 1943. The younger son was an RAF pilot who died very late in the war when he crashed at an airfield in the Netherlands in April 1945. The daughter, Lady Alice, married a French officer in London in 1943 and, after the war, she moved to Paris with him. Last year one of her grandsons visited Sarclet Castle with his wife and children and talked to the estate manager here, Geoffrey Gunn. That’s how we know the family story.
‘After the war, with his two sons dead and his daughter in Paris, it seems the 2nd Earl of Wick lost interest in his Scottish properties and spent all his time at his house in London. He sold the Sarclet estate in about 1950 and the castle later became a hotel for many years. Then there was a small fire that some at the time said was intended to be a bigger fire and the insurance company refused to pay out. The castle was boarded up and forgotten about for a time.
‘The previous owner bought the castle five years ago and, separately, quite a lot of the rest of the old Sarclet estate. He then spent much more on renovating the castle than he had on buying it. As I said earlier, I only read Mother’s journal and learned of her connection to Sarclet Castle in late 2021, so the chance of buying it when it was semi-derelict and cheap was no longer available. But, as they say, “all things come to those who wait”, and here we are.’
Rose stood still for a moment with her gaze fixed to Jenny’s right. Jenny realised she was looking at David Sutherland and glanced at him just in time to see him smile at Rose and nod.
Rose smiled back, then resumed her story. ‘I should tell you that my brother David and I have had a debate about how much detail I should go into when telling you our parents’ story. I thought for a while I’d need to finish there, but I think we’ve just agreed I can tell you a little more about what happened while they were at Sarclet Castle.’
Rose stopped speaking to empty her wine glass, then thanked Callum as he refilled it for her. ‘I should apologise for leaving you with a slightly misleading impression just now. You probably thought from what I said that Mother and Father became romantically involved, to use a very old-fashioned phrase, after the dinner that was held in this room on the 10th of September 1942. That’s not quite what happened.
‘I talked about finding parts of my mother’s journal shocking. There are graphic accounts in it of appalling acts of violence as both Mother and Father found themselves, more than once, facing a choice between killing and being killed. When I thought about it, I realised that explained a darkness I had sometimes seen in the eyes of both of them when they didn’t know I was looking.
‘But it was something else in Mother’s journal that surprised me most. My impression of our father was of a gentle and kind man with a great sense of humour, but also of a man who always behaved “properly”, perhaps as befitted a senior RAF officer. I was genuinely shocked to read in Mother’s journal that on the night of the 10th of September 1942, our father ended up in bed with Lady Alice, the daughter of the household. It seems he wasn’t quite as strait-laced as I had always thought.’
She paused as a ripple of laughter passed around the table.
‘Before you think that I’ve totally lost the plot by buying the castle where my parents failed to get together I should add that when Mother and Father returned to Sarclet Castle two days later, on Saturday the 12th of September 1942, they did so as a couple.
‘What happened in the meantime is scarcely believable and Carol has found that the official records are still locked away, eighty years later. Yet she has unearthed enough material that bears tangentially on what Mother wrote in her journal to be sure that her account is true.
‘In the middle of that night, with Father and Lady Alice in one bedroom and Mother in another, the castle was raided by German commandos who had come ashore from a U-boat at Sarclet Haven. Everyone present was taken prisoner. Members of the family were locked in the cellars here. Mother and Father were taken away in a truck and locked in the cellar of a hunting lodge in the heart of Caithness.
‘It’s the next part that’s simply incredible. The next day Mother and Father were able to escape while boarding a German flying boat that had landed on a loch near the hunting lodge. They hijacked the aircraft and flew it to Fort George near Inverness and, almost incidentally, prevented King George VI from being taken into German captivity. They spent that night, together, at Dunrobin Castle and then returned here the following day.
‘Those of you who find it hard to swallow what does sound like an exceedingly tall tale might wish to take a look at the medals on show in the display cabinet in the drawing room. Both Mother and Father were made Commanders of the Royal Victorian Order, an unusual award made for, and I quote, “distinguished personal service to the British monarch”.
‘And, having strained your credulity to the limit, I hope you now understand why I believe that Sarclet Castle is the best place to ensure that the memory of our Mother and Father lives on. I should add that although Monique Dubois was coined as Mother’s cover name in Scotland it was only the latest of many names she’d used during her life and from then on it became the name she usually went by. It was also the name she was married under.’
Rose raised her glass. ‘I hope that after listening to me for so long you’ve still got something to drink in your glasses. I’d like to conclude by proposing a toast… to Monique and Bob!’
Everyone around the table stood up. ‘To Monique and Bob!’