LITMIR.BIZ

       Detail from Ordnance Survey one inch map of the Lake District (Keswick), printed on silk and dating from 1891.

      The flexibility and durability of fabric, both silk and linen, as a medium for military maps had clearly long been recognized, a fact that had been reflected in the UK Government’s report of the War Office Committee tasked in the closing decade of the nineteenth century to consider the precise form of the military map of the UK. The Committee made frequent mention in its Report, published in 1892, and throughout the minutes of evidence, to the superior durability of linen over paper as a material on which maps could be printed for use in the field. Almost certainly related to the Committee’s work, although not acknowledged as such, the Ordnance Survey was simultaneously printing some of its one inch series of the Lake District on silk. Copies of two sheets, Ambleside and Keswick, are known to exist in a private collection and they are dated 1891. Ordnance Survey was still, at that time, staffed at senior levels by sapper officers from the Corps of Royal Engineers, so it is more than likely that they would have been called on by the War Office to do prototype printing experiments for military purposes. It is, however, notable that no mention of this work appears in the definitive history of the Ordnance Survey which concentrates rather on the work of the Dorington Committee which was taking place at the same time, charged with looking at the state of Ordnance Survey mapping after considerable public disquiet had been expressed.

      With hindsight, it becomes very clear that the knowledge and capability to print maps on silk existed in the UK at the time of World War II and that the military had for centuries recognized the value of fabric maps, whether silk or linen, in terms of their durability and flexibility. Hutton’s search and ultimate decision to produce maps on silk might have been made more promptly and with far less effort and cost had he spoken to the military map-makers. Certainly both the Directorate of Military Survey (D.Survey), the principal military mapping organization, and the Ordnance Survey doubtless had the expertise but, for unknown reasons, they were apparently never consulted by Hutton, who preferred rather to approach commercial printers, paper manufacturers and silk processors. This is rather surprising, bearing in mind the covert nature of MI9’s activities and the secrecy which surrounded every aspect of their work, not least the mapping programme. It does, however, largely explain why MI9 paid little attention in their map production programme to the finer points of cartography and the standard techniques of identifying the maps they produced, as will be outlined in the next chapter.

3

       THE MAP PRODUCTION PROGRAMME

      ‘Geography is about maps . . .’

      (Edmund Clerihew Bentley, from Biography for Beginners, 1905)

      The detail of MI9’s mapping programme, which became such an important part of their escape programme, has been difficult to piece together. No single, comprehensive record of the production programme has ever been found and only now, in 2015, is a record set of the maps being deposited in The National Archives by the Ministry of Defence. Copies of the maps have been found in many collections, both public and private, throughout the country. There is, however, very little mention of the maps in the published literature and some of the possibly relevant MI9 files in The National Archives are still closed.

      Reconstructing the story has proved to be like the reassembly of a jigsaw puzzle where some pieces are still missing, possibly lost for all time. The records that remain make it difficult to describe and record the extent of the programme and the challenges faced in ensuring the quality and utility of the maps for their intended users. It is likely that MI9 kept a card index of the individual maps in the programme in the same way as they are known to have kept a card index to maintain a record of other aspects of their work. Sadly, none of the card indexes appear to have survived and there is, therefore, no comprehensive record of MI9’s escape and evasion map production programme available.

      The programme has had to be pieced together from, sometimes, fragmentary information. The single most comprehensive record is undoubtedly the D.Survey war-time print record which was created, managed and kept up-to-date by Survey 2, that part of D.Survey responsible for the management of all operational map production programmes. This card index was originally found as an uncatalogued item in the India Office Library and Records, housed in the British Library. How it came to be held there, rather than in The National Archives where one might reasonably anticipate finding it, is an enigma, but it has now been catalogued by the British Library.

      The second source is a typed list held in one of the War Office files. There is also a third source, a list deposited in the British Library by the archivist of John Waddington Ltd, the Leeds company that printed many of the maps, referred to as ‘pictures’ in their list and in their dealings with the Ministry of Supply. Intriguingly, the typed War Office list also refers to the maps as ‘pictures’, and it is, therefore, likely that it had its origins in the Waddington list.