British Council staff often have a wide range of interests and talents. A case in point is James Maurice Scott (1906-1986): a Cambridge law graduate and Rugby blue, an Arctic explorer and mountaineer, in 1944-45 the colonel commanding the British Army mountain warfare school in the Apennines, then a journalist working for the Daily Telegraph, and by the time of his death the author of twenty-six novels and seventeen other published works. In between he managed to squeeze in two and a half years setting up the BC offices in Milan, and then as Representative (Director) Yugoslavia.
To find out about this phase of his career I have been delving in the British Council files lodged at the National Archive in Kew. He arrived in Milan from London in January 1946 having just been awarded an OBE. Interesting that he should have been given a civilian decoration rather than a military one, which suggests it was as much for his pre-war explorations and his first six books (all concerning travels in the Arctic) as it was for his six years of soldiering. He was immediately immersed in negotiations over a home for the BC’s library, offices and teaching rooms. All suitable premises were either too bomb-damaged, expensive, or illegally occupied by the emergent political parties preparing for elections.
Somehow he managed to find a palazzo and get a lease signed, though with ongoing hassle about whether it was legal to pay in sterling as the landlord demanded. Four staff were recruited, classes begun and a library formed, partly relying initially on donations from Embassy staff. Membership and student numbers rose, in spite of freezing weather, almost constant power cuts and lack of transport. His reports are written in a lively style, with wit and good humour mitigating the frustration. Headquarters memos to the Representative in Rome congratulated Scott on his success, but occasionally noticed that he did not display as much interest in the pedagogic side of the work as in the “club activities”.
Some time in the summer of 1947 the BC must have decided that they needed Scott’s energy in Belgrade, so he was appointed Representative Yugoslavia, taking over from W. G. Tatham some time in August or September. It seems to have been a mistake. There is only one document in the Yugoslavia files with his signature. In that month (November 1947) he reports that the Assistant Representative gave a lecture “On reading Shakespeare”, while the Representative lectured on “Everest”, during which a lady in the audience fainted. There is also a memo to London dated April 1948 in which the Assistant Representative, A. L. P. Himbury, comments that the Representative’s Annual Report may have suggested that there was very little activity in the centre, but that his own report will give “a more optimistic picture”. Other hints in the files suggest that Scott did not get on with or admire the Yugoslavs he met and had to work with. As many of us have experienced, he had probably switched from being the office guru, fluent in the local language and well versed in the local culture, to being the office dunce.
From May 1948 there is no further mention of him, and a different Representative is in post by June 1948. By the end of that year Scott had joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph. Whether he resigned from the British Council or was fired I do not know. What we do know is that in 1950 he published a children’s novel, The Bright Eyes of Danger, in which a bunch of teenagers foil the wicked plans of a communist dictator in the land of Ecalpemos, something which the inept diplomats are unable to accomplish. That is probably his last word on the subject.
He went on to become briefly famous for one book, Sea-Wyf and Biscuit, published in 1955. This arose from a set of small ads which appeared in the Personal Columns of the Daily Telegraph between March and May 1951. They began with BISCUIT appealing to SEA-WYF to get in touch after nine years of silence. After four appeals there was a reply from BULLDOG, telling BISCUIT to give up and respect the “compact”. BISCUIT persists and threatens to publish a story of “three men of authority and one woman adrift 14 weeks on the Indian Ocean”. Now SEA-WYF herself responds and agrees to a rendezvous. Afterwards BISCUIT complains that she failed to come, but she says she was there and saw him, but wants him to “remember me as I was when the smoke appeared on the horizon”.
Personal columns were the social media of the day, and the ads were widely discussed, speculated over and reprinted as a bunch in several other papers, as far afield as France and Australia. Four years later Scott published his book, claiming that he had tracked down Biscuit and Bulldog and heard at first hand the story, the sinking of the ship San Felix, loaded with evacuees escaping from Singapore in February 1942, the ordeal of four survivors on a life raft, their encounter with a Japanese submarine, their wreck on an uninhabited island, the mysterious death of “Number Four”, and the reason why Sea-Wyf does not want to be found. No one can be sure whether Scott was telling the truth but had fictionalised it enough to preserve the anonymity of the participants, or whether he had concocted his own explanation for the small ads, or whether he had created the whole story, inserting the ads himself. Against the third explanation is the four year delay. If he had made the whole thing up, why wait for four years? At any event, the book was a huge success and was filmed as Sea Wife in 1957 with Richard Burton as Biscuit and Joan Collins as Sea Wife. Not a bad film, either.
None of Scott’s books has stayed in print, and his style and much of his subject matter (sea-faring adventure) now seem old-fashioned. Nevertheless, we can be glad that his career took in the British Council, however briefly.
≎̸