(Lieutenant Colonel J. C. Pegram, Chief of the Geographic Section of the US War Department, in a letter dated 18 October 1927)
The story of the mapping programme has to be set in the climate of the times. The young men of the inter-war period, and especially the officers, most of whom had been educated in the British public school system, had been raised on a culture of escape stories from the Great War. They had read many of the books which had been written by the great escapers from World War I, people like Durnford, Evans and others. They had also been made more aware of the relevance of geography in their curriculum, of map reading and navigational skills. Their education had also sought to instil the standard British public school behaviour of team, country and King before self. They were avid readers of Boy’s Own Paper and many had belonged to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement. Recognizing this, Christopher Clayton Hutton identified all the available literature, a total of fifty books (through a visit to the British Museum Reading Room) and purchased second-hand copies. He enlisted the support of the Headmaster at Rugby School, his alma mater, who allowed the sixth form to carry out a review of the books. The review was completed in four days, and led directly to Hutton’s decision to make maps a priority, for it would appear difficult, if not impossible, to escape from enemy-occupied territory without a map. It was this simple fact which appeared to be the catalyst for Hutton’s visit to the War Office Map Room. The staff there could not apparently help in meeting his initial request for a small-scale map of Germany.
The section responsible for operational maps and geographic matters, MI4, was by that time located in Cheltenham. It had moved from London in September 1939, apparently to make space to accommodate those branches whose presence in Whitehall was deemed to be essential and also to afford protection from possible air attacks to the sizable map collection which was also relocated to Cheltenham. Brigadier A. B. Clough, in his history of the military survey organizations during World War II, Maps and Survey, published in 1952, made it clear that the absence of MI4 from London ‘had the serious effect of putting it out of daily touch with the General Staff at a critical period’. MI4 remained physically distanced from all War Office operations, intelligence and planning staff and also from the Air Ministry Map Section, which had been moved to Harrow. It is, therefore, likely that the War Office Map Room visited by Hutton was simply a small reference collection and not the main operational map collection of MI4 which would certainly have held the maps he sought. Hutton’s lack of contact with the military map-makers is likely to have been to the longer term detriment of the escape and evasion mapping programme.
During a visit to the commercial mapping company, Geographia Limited, on London’s Fleet Street, he discovered the existence of ‘a famous Scottish firm’ which proved to be John Bartholomew & Son Ltd of Edinburgh. This renowned cartographic company was established in 1826 by John Bartholomew, built on his and his father’s experiences as apprentices to the Edinburgh engravers, Lizars, from the last years of the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century it had acquired a world-wide reputation for its maps. Hutton was also fortunate that the firm was headed at the time by John (known as Ian) Bartholomew who had had a distinguished military career in World War I, serving as an officer in the First Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, experiencing the worst of trench warfare and winning the Military Cross at Ypres in 1915.
Ian Bartholomew was only too ready to hand over copies of his company’s maps, waiving all copyright and insisting ‘it was a privilege to contribute to the war effort’. This was to prove the critical ingredient to MI9’s wartime escape and evasion mapping programme. It was this collection of small-scale maps of Europe, the Middle East and Africa which provided the backbone of the escape and evasion mapping which MI9 subsequently produced. At the time, the company was not aware of its wartime involvement with MI9, a secret which Ian Bartholomew, the Managing Director, apparently never even mentioned to his sons.
MI9’s War Diary entry for 31 March 1940 reflects just how quickly Hutton got to grips with the task he faced: the entry indicates that even by then, just three months into MI9’s operations, available escape devices already included ‘maps on fabrics and silk, maps concealed in games, pencils, articles of clothing’. Hutton had tried to find a paper which was thin, resistant to the elements and soundless when hidden inside Service uniforms, which was what he was planning to do. After talking to contacts in the trade, he became convinced that such a paper did not exist and so turned his attention to fabric, and to silk in particular.
John (known as Ian) Bartholomew, of the Edinburgh cartographic company John Bartholomew & Son Ltd, in the trenches near Ypres in 1915.
A printed Bartholomew map of France at 1:2M, used by MI9 as its ‘Zones of France’ map, but with southern England removed.
Detail from the same map.
THE HISTORY OF MILITARY MAPS ON SILK
Hutton was almost certainly unaware that the efficacy of silk as a suitable medium for military maps had long been recognized. Indeed, the oldest surviving silk map in the world is a military map, known more commonly as the Garrison Map, excavated in 1973 from the Han Dynasty Tomb No. 3 in Mawangdui, Changsha, in Hunan Province, China. It was one of three silk maps found on the site, the others being a topographical map of the region and a city map. The Garrison Map has been dated to the middle of the second century BC. It was unearthed in twenty-eight fragments, moisture and pressure having taken their toll during 2,000 years of burial in a small box. The fragments were restored and then a reconstruction of the map was undertaken by Chinese scholars.
The Garrison Map covers the region between Mount Jiuyi and the Southern Ridges in Ningyuan in southern Hunan province, China. The map shows mountains, rivers and residential settlements, and in particular it indicates the locations of the garrisons, defence regions, military facilities and routes of nine army units. It is the oldest known map on silk, dating from the second century BC
A reconstruction of the Garrison Map.
The map carries no indication of scale but, by comparing it with modern mapping, it is estimated to be in the range 1:80,000 to 1:100,000. It has been drawn on a rectangular piece of silk which measured 98 cm by 78 cm. The map was originally drawn in three colours, black, red and blue/green, using vegetable-based tints and is orientated and marked with south at the top and the left side marked east. Water features are shown in blue/green, with some background features and place names in black but the military content of the map is emphasized in red, showing the size and disposition of army units, command posts, city walls and watchtowers. Settlements are shown, together with the numbers of inhabitants. The boundary of the garrisoned area is marked and frontier beacons (observation outposts) are shown. Topographic detail is stylized, so that mountains are shown as wavy lines rather than by any attempt to represent their real form and shape. Roads are shown with distances between some settlements clearly marked, as are river crossing points: in modern military parlance, this is referred to as ‘goings’ or terrain analysis information and was a technique also utilized by MI9 in the production of some of their special area escape and evasion maps.
While the Chinese are understandably keen to stress the relevance of the three maps in terms of how they reflect their nation’s