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Hillgarth, Alan Hugh (1899–1978), intelligence officer and author

by Denis Smyth, rev.

References

Other online resources

Churchill Archive

Who Was Who

DNB archive

© Oxford University Press 2004–14

Hillgarth, Alan Hugh (1899–1978), intelligence officer and author, was born on 7 June 1899 at 121 Harley Street, London, the second son and third of five children of Willmott Henderson Hillgarth Evans, a general surgeon with a special interest in dermatology, and his wife, Ann Frances, also a doctor, the daughter of the Revd George Piercy, of Canton (Guangzhou), China. Alan assumed the surname of Hillgarth by deed poll in 1928. Alan Hillgarth's father imbued his children with a respect for tradition, as was evident in his second son's choice of career. When Alan entered the navy he was the representative of the eighth generation of his family to become naval officers. However, his own tastes for travel and adventure were expressed in a preference for the career of ordinary naval officer over that of naval surgeon, which had been the customary familial role in the senior service. Having entered the Royal Naval College, Osborne, in 1911, at the age of twelve, he proceeded to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1913, but his education was interrupted the following year with the outbreak of the First World War. He soon saw active service as a midshipman, particularly in the Dardanelles, where he was seriously wounded when still only sixteen years old. However, he recovered and was sent to King's College, Cambridge, at the end of the war to make good his formal education. There he consolidated his interest in international affairs, cultivated his love for English literature, and developed his mastery of foreign languages, including German. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in 1919, returned to active service and pursued his naval career with distinction until his retirement on 15 December 1927, with the rank of lieutenant-commander.

By then Hillgarth had already embarked upon a second career as a writer of adventure novels. He was an author who understood that the best research for his literary genre was personal experience. Thus, a prospecting trip to Bolivia in 1928 yielded not gold but literary treasure—The Black Mountain (1933), his fifth and penultimate novel, which was favourably reviewed by Graham Greene and translated into Spanish. In 1929 Hillgarth married Mary Sidney Katharine Almina (b. 1896), third daughter of Herbert Coulstoun Gardner, Baron Burghclere, and former wife of Geoffrey Hope Hope-Morley, later Baron Hollenden. They had two daughters, and a son who became professor of history at the University of Toronto. They lived on the island of Majorca where Hillgarth was appointed British vice-consul at Palma in 1932. He was therefore strategically located at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Throughout that conflict Hillgarth was busily engaged in humanitarian work, a disinterested labour which culminated in February 1939 in his arranging the peaceful surrender of republican-held Minorca. Hillgarth's civil wartime role in Majorca not only earned him promotion to consul and appointment as OBE in 1937, but also won the admiration of Captain J. H. Godfrey, whose ship, the Repulse, was able to visit Barcelona in 1938, free from fear of fascist air attack, thanks to Hillgarth's influence with the Francoist camp. When Franco won the civil war in 1939 Godfrey, then director of naval intelligence, secured the appointment of Hillgarth, who was fluent in Spanish, as naval attaché in Madrid (with promotion to the rank of commander, and in 1940, captain) where his many contacts with the new regime could be exploited in the British interest.

Godfrey never regretted his choice, coming to regard Hillgarth as a ‘super-attaché’ (Beesly, 143) in view of the latter's varied and valuable services to the British cause in Spain during the Second World War. These included the deterrence of the Francoist authorities from all but desultory collaboration in the Nazi logistical effort to refuel and resupply their U-boats in Spanish ports. The vigilant team of agents which Hillgarth organized throughout the Spanish ports limited incidents of submarine reprovisioning to about twenty-six and also cut short a campaign conducted by Italian human torpedoes against royal naval ships in Gibraltar harbour. However, the naval attaché also moderated British policy towards Spain. Hillgarth, and under his influence Britain's wartime ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, succeeded in dissuading London from applying so rigorous an economic blockade of Franco's Spain as to push that country into the war, at the very time, 1940–41, that the odds were already so heavily stacked against British survival. Again, Hillgarth's role in alerting the British government to the dangers of precipitate, preventive military action against Iberian territory was crucial in averting an unnecessary provocation of hostilities with Franco, at this most delicate juncture in the war. Winston Churchill was ready to listen to Hillgarth's counsels of prudence on Spain because he knew the attaché personally, had real affection for him, and regarded him as a ‘very good’ man, ‘equipped with a profound knowledge of Spanish affairs’ (Churchill's handwritten comment on A. H. Hillgarth to W. S. Churchill, 27 July 1940, TNA: PRO, PREM 4/21/2A).

With such powerful support it was no wonder that Hillgarth was afforded an unusual authority over, and autonomy within, the sphere of British intelligence operations in Spain. Much to the professional envy of MI6's Kim Philby, Hillgarth was granted substantial funds to maintain his own network of information and influence in Franco's Spain. However, his clandestine activities were not confined to espionage. He won London's approval for a large-scale effort to bribe leading Spanish generals (half in cash down and half in a blocked account in Argentina) to exert themselves in favour of upholding their country's non-belligerency. Using the good offices of the financier Juan March, Hillgarth was able to disburse large sums among members of the Spanish military to secure Spain's neutrality. The scale and significance of this affair may be deduced from the fact that the British were trying in the autumn of 1941 to free from US government control 10 million dollars which had been paid to Spaniards ‘for a consideration’, an effort being made at Churchill's prompting: ‘We must not lose them now after all we have spent—and gained. Vital strategic issues depend on Spain keeping out or resisting [German invasion]’ (A. H. Hillgarth's ‘most secret’ note, not dated, for W. S. Churchill, and Churchill's comment dated 25 Sept 1941 on Sir Kingsley Wood's minute of 23 Sept 1941, TNA: PRO, PREM 4/32/7).

By 1943 the battle for Spanish neutrality was won. In 1943 Hillgarth was transferred to Asia to become chief of intelligence, Eastern Fleet. The following year he was appointed chief of British naval intelligence, eastern theatre. In these positions he developed an intelligence organization whose high-grade product, particularly that emanating from the cryptanalytical establishment, HMS Anderson, materially aided the allied war effort at sea against Japan and eased US naval resentment at the belated participation of a British Pacific Fleet in that struggle. Ian Fleming, a future spy novelist, but then a colleague of Hillgarth in naval intelligence, was sufficiently impressed by his performance in the Pacific theatre of the war, to describe him to a friend as ‘a useful petard and a good war-winner’ (Lycett, 158).

In 1943 Hillgarth was appointed CMG. His first marriage having been dissolved in 1946, in 1947 he married Jean Mary (d. 1975), daughter of Frank Cobb, who owned and ran a silverware manufacturing firm in Sheffield; they had two sons and a daughter. He retired to an estate in co. Tipperary, Ireland, where he devoted much time to his passion for forestry. He walked several miles a day, inspecting his trees. He also joined the Rio Tinto Company and acted as Juan March's representative in the UK. Of medium height, he had dark brown hair and eyes, with pronouncedly bushy eyebrows. He had a slight figure, which gave the impression of immense energy, and he was always well dressed. Later in life, he became a Roman Catholic. Despite his literary inclinations, he refrained from writing memoirs, believing that an intelligence operative has a lifelong responsibility under the Official Secrets Act. However, an internal history of the Far East and Pacific War, which he wrote with R. T. Barrett, can now be freely consulted in the Public Record Office. Nevertheless, much remained secret. He died on 28 February 1978 at his home, Illannanagh House, Ballinderry, co. Tipperary, Ireland.

Denis Smyth, rev.

Sources

W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, 2–3 (1949–50) · P. Elphick, Far Eastern file: the intelligence war in the Far East, 1930–1945 (1997) · P. Beesly, Very special admiral: the life of Admiral J. H. Godfrey (1980) · M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 6: Finest hour, 1939–1941 (1983) · D. McLachlan, Room 39: naval intelligence in action, 1939–1945 (1968) · K. Philby, My secret war (1968) · N. West, MI6: British secret intelligence operations, 1909–45 (1983) · private information (1986) · CUL, Templewood MSS · WWW · D. Smyth, Diplomacy and strategy of survival: British policy and Franco's Spain, 1940–41 (1986) · A. H. Hillgarth to W. S. Churchill, 27 July 1940, TNA: PRO, PREM 4/21/2A · Sir Kingsley Wood, minute, 23 Sept 1941, TNA: PRO, PREM 4/32/7 · A. Lycett, Ian Fleming (1995), 158 · b. cert. · Burke, Peerage (1921) · CGPLA Éire (1978)

Archives

CUL, Templewood MSS

Wealth at death

£18,395: probate, 31 Aug 1978, CGPLA Éire

© Oxford University Press 2004–14

All rights reserved: see legal notice

Denis Smyth, ‘Hillgarth, Alan Hugh (1899–1978)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.rp.nla.gov.au/view/article/31233, accessed 17 Nov 2014]

Alan Hugh Hillgarth (1899–1978):

doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31233

[Previous version of this biography available here: September 2004]

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