Max Markham is the author of Indigo Bird – An Erotic Novel. For more information on the author and his work, please visit Max Markham’s Section on this website.
Brigadier Mike Calvert
[Read "Mad Mike" Calvert, A Character Assassination - Part I...]
In 1944 Calvert was evacuated to Britain on medical grounds. In March 1945 he was appointed to command the Special Air Service (SAS) Brigade and held this appointment until the Brigade was disbanded in October 1945. Calvert’s appointment as Brigadier was a wartime rank. After the war, he reverted for a while to Major. He had to attend the army’s Staff College at Camberley; a necessary prelude to Regular higher command. After passing the course, he was appointed to a staff post as Lieutenant Colonel in the Allied Military Government in Trieste.
Fortune seemed to smile on Calvert when in 1950 he was selected to command the Malayan Scouts, engaged in operations against Chinese Communist insurgents. During the Malayan Emergency the British Army experienced the rebirth of the SAS. Disbanded shortly after the end of the Second World War, the specialists of the SAS returned in 1950 when General Sir John Harding, Commander-in-Chief Far East, decided that he needed independent advice from an expert in jungle warfare. He called for Calvert, who he knew had had considerable experience of jungle warfare in Burma. Calvert had also been one of the prime movers in ensuring the SAS ethic had not died out at the end of the war. The Malayan Scouts were an early unit of the revived SAS. They never entirely lost an early reputation for poor discipline; said to be the result of highly informal selection procedures. Although he again held the local rank of Brigadier, Calvert led several patrols and operations in person. Calvert was once more invalided home in 1951.
Calvert reverted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel; a possible indication of official displeasure, as it involved a drop of not one, but two, military ranks. He was posted to an obscure staff billet in the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR); a further indication of displeasure. While serving there in 1952 he was accused of an act of indecency, court-martialled and forced to leave the Army in disgrace. It was a sad end to a brilliant career.
The circumstances of Calvert’s court-martial and dismissal are deeply discreditable; not to him but to the army. In Germany, Calvert, very bored, had befriended some local young German men. Some of them were civilian BAOR employees. As far as I can discover, his activities with them were no more reprehensible than drinking beer, playing table tennis and practicing his spoken German. Calvert was studying for an advanced German language qualification. However some of them accused him of making homosexual advances to them. The army machine swung into action and Calvert was soon facing serious disciplinary charges. Many years later the Germans admitted that they had been bullied and pressured into making the accusations, which were entirely false. To their credit the Germans were bitterly ashamed of their part in the drama. The “villains” were the Royal Military Police, but they were clearly acting on orders from much higher-up.
It is not in doubt that some senior British army officers were delighted to get rid of Calvert, whose unconventionality and blunt views had exasperated them. Brigadier Sir Bernard Fergusson (later Lord Ballantrae), a monocled, Etonian establishment figure, ventured a snide joke at Calvert’s expense in a speech at a Chindits reunion dinner and was rebuked by John Masters who, like Ian MacPherson, was a former Gurkha and Chindit officer and author of Bugles and a Tiger. But the main pressure to get rid of him was political.
The “special relationship” between the UK and USA is based less upon shared democratic values than upon close cooperation in intelligence work. Although the USA also maintains close cooperation with a few other countries, notably Canada and Australia, the relationship with the UK is unique. By the 1950s the UK was definitely the junior partner and heavily dependent on American information. As the cold war intensified, the US Government was becoming more and more paranoid about spies in the British Government and armed forces. They were not entirely wrong, given the presence of Kim Philby in a senior position at MI6; of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean at the Foreign Office; and of Anthony Blunt in the Army Intelligence Corps, later MI5 and later still as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. By coincidence three of these spies were homosexual or bisexual, although none was the victim of blackmail; their commitment to Communism was ideological. US disquiet focused particularly on homosexuals, who were seen as a particular security risk, due to their vulnerability to blackmail. If something were not done about them soon, the supply of American information might dry up….At American insistence there ensued a “purge” of existing homosexuals and a tightening-up of selection procedures so as to make it more difficult for gay men to come into Government service as new entrants. Many brilliant men were lost to the UK Government service and armed forces in this way: it has been compared to the flight of the Huguenots from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. High-profile examples were made, to show the Americans that the UK was taking their concerns seriously. Alan Turing was one: Mike Calvert was clearly another. He had anyway come to the Americans’ notice during the War and they did not like him. Calvert maintained his innocence and his defence battled to appeal the guilty verdict with no success, despite important prosecution witnesses being shown to be members of a criminal gang.
After his conviction and dismissal from the army Calvert returned to England and obtained a job with Shell Petroleum in Australia. He left for Australia at the end of 1952, depressed by the miscarriage of justice. Officials of the company met him on his arrival in Australia. They told him they could no longer offer him a job and proposed a posting in Iraq. He turned it down and remained in Australia in a cycle of heavy drinking and hard work, followed by his dismissal for fighting. Calvert returned to England in 1960 and managed to conquer his alcoholism by 1964. He worked for the Greater London Council in charge of recruitment and training of graduate engineers for the Highways and Transport Department, holding this post for five years from 1965. In December 1976 Calvert published an important paper entitled “The Pattern of Guerrilla Warfare”, which laid out the dangers of technological reliance and defence against terrorism. Through the 1970s, Calvert worked on a variety of books and papers, publishing some and never completing others, including military papers, text books and a novel.
In 1996 an inquiry into Calvert’s court-martial was mounted. The surviving prosecution witnesses willingly cooperated, stating that the evidence they had given in 1952 was false or inaccurate. They were horrified to learn that their later statements, with which they had tried to put right the inaccuracies of the court martial, had not been accepted and the appeal dismissed. This seems to have been a political decision. It is difficult to conclude otherwise.
In 1997 the Labour Party returned to office after an absence of eighteen years. Public perceptions of homosexuals in the armed forces having changed and the Party being known to be liberal on sexual matters, it was hoped that the new Government would do something for Calvert. Calvert was by then impoverished, and once more an alcoholic. The restoration of his rank of Brigadier and of his pension rights would have made a great difference to him. In the event nothing was done and, after selling his medals to pay urgent expenses, in 1998 Calvert died.
The Indigo Bird
An Erotic Novel by Max Markham
James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.
James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome. He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder. James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.
The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]
The Indigo Bird is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords.com, Amazon Kindle US, Amazon Kindle UK, and any other good bookstore.
