Miles Belfrage Reid
Midshipman Miles Belfrage Reid, M.B.E., M.C., D.L., J.P. (5 May, 1896 – October 6, 1984) served briefly in the Royal Navy. This article is a lightly edited family biography of the man, provided to us by his grandson, Stephen, oldest son of John Willett Reid.[1]
Miles Reid was the youngest child of Russell Belfrage Reid (who made his fortune tea planting in Ceylon) and Margaret Laura Willett (daughter of Henry Willet who presented the Willett Collection of Popular Pottery to the Brighton Museum in 1903). The Reid family are Scottish in origin and many of our ancestors are buried in Milnathort churchyard in what was Kinross (now Tayside), indeed Russell was brought up there, before ending up in the south of England.
After Hazlewood School, Miles went to Osborne for two years and then to Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. In addition to winning the King’s Medal in 1912, he also won the Chief Cadet Captains Award, which came with a very handsome naval dirk, in 1913. The dirk is engraved with the name of the prize, his name, the year and "RN College Dartmouth & HMS Cumberland". Whilst at Dartmouth he was made mentor to the younger and very shy Prince Albert (later George VI) and thus began a friendship that lasted until the King’s death (the family owns a number of letters from the Prince/King to Miles).
Army Service in the Great War
Miles visited Germany in 1912, as his father thought he ought to learn German, and was impressed with the precision of the guard turning out at the Kaiser’s Berlin palace which he was able to watch every day. To the disappointment of his parents, once qualified and awarded two months' seniority, he insisted on leaving the Navy as he suffered from severe sea sickness: he had just passed his Cambridge entrance exams when war was announced. Determined to join the army as soon as possible (and there was a huge queue of volunteers at the time) he wrote to an influential fellow Royal Naval College midshipman for help – Prince Albert - and received an interview with Lord Stamfordham, George V’s Private Secretary. He suggested that, seeing as the Navy was out of the question, and that Miles knew Morse code, perhaps he should join the Royal Engineers who at the time were responsible for army communications.
In 1915, aged 18 and a Second Lieutenant, he landed at Sulva Bay on the Gallipoli Peninsula. “As soon as I got onto dry land I had my first experience of the realities of war. A few yards away a soldier stood on a land mine and was blown, it seemed, thirty feet into the air. All his clothes seemed to be blasted off as his broken body came to rest.” A month of confusing action followed during which little advance at all was made from their landing point until, he writes, “I was talking to the commander of the 30 Brigade outside his headquarters. ‘I wouldn’t stand here,’ said his Brigade-Major, ‘there is a sniper who watches this path.’ How right he was. Suddenly I heard a crack and simultaneously I was floored with a bullet through my right thigh. It was only after a few minutes that it began to hurt but it was lucky that it only chipped the femur without breaking it. At night with the other wounded I was put into a horse-drawn ambulance, bumped and jolted, in some pain in our journey over the cracked surface of a salt lake and deposited on the beach. I had every reason to feel that I was fortunate: among the other wounded was a man shot in the stomach whose agonising cries for water stay in my memory. After some hours lying on the beach we were finally loaded into naval cutters and towed by picket boat to a hospital ship that was at anchor in the bay.”
After being invalided back to England, Miles soon recovered and was allowed to go home for a few days recuperation before joining a Signals Depot. His father took him up to London to lunch in the Carlton Hotel where an “officious woman came over and gave me a white feather, saying I ought to be in uniform. I have never seen my father so angry as he told this silly woman what he thought of her.”
He went on to take part in the battles of Loos, the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. He was awarded an M.C. on the Somme for laying telephone lines under heavy fire from tear gas filled shells on 9th September 1916 and he was also mentioned in despatches by Field Marshall Haig on 7th April 1918 “for gallant and distinguished service in the field”. He was badly gassed at Passchendaele and sent home to recuperate and put in charge of a training centre which meant promotion to acting Lt Colonel, reputedly the youngest Lt Col in the British Army.
In between the wars he worked in industry, starting off with Mather & Platt in Egypt where he sold fire prevention systems for use in cotton warehouses, but in 1925 becoming involved with a fledgling company called Colas (eventually bought out by Shell Oil) that made a bitumen product that was used in, amongst other things, building Germany’s autobahns, involving Miles in visits to Germany. During this period, he became fluent in the German language.
World War II
When war broke out, although he was over age, Miles again pulled strings and became part of the GHQ Liaison Regiment (known as Phantom), a group of multilingual signals officers who acted as liaison between generals of the French and British armies. Miles was a go-between between Lord Gort and the First French Army. He escaped at Dunkirk and was then sent to Greece to do a similar liaison job.
He and his men were captured by German paratroopers, after running out of ammunition while attempting to defend a bridge over the Corinth Canal on 26th April 1941. Reid spent time in various POW camps including Tittmoning and Warburg. He escaped with a colleague (Michael Smiley) from Warburg by hiding in bundles of laundry, but they were both recaptured the same day.
On recapture, it worryingly became apparent that the Nazis had decided that all his work in Germany in the ‘30s was part of a spying mission on behalf of MI5. However he was eventually sent to Spangenberg and after that to Colditz on the grounds that he was “Deutschfeindlich”. He was the oldest British prisoner in Colditz and probably not in the best of health after four years in captivity and he decided use this to good effect by faking the symptoms of heart disease in the hope of being repatriated. He bartered for cigarettes and smoked incessantly (a habit that stayed with him for the rest of his life) and at the same time drank neat black coffee to excess, all of which caused an increase in blood pressure and a shortness of breath.
He was eventually repatriated on health grounds, and finally arrived back in England in early 1945. The family has a letter from the King to Reid dated February 7th 1945, asking him if he would mind awfully popping in to see him at Buckingham Palace if he had time. He was appointed M.B.E. (Military) in 1949 for his service in Greece and in 1956 he was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Sussex. He was also a J.P.. He continued to work in industry after the war and was with Mobil Oil from 1951 to 1960. He had two sons, John Willett Reid (born November 13, 1918) and his younger brother David Benedict Reid who was always known as Steve – both served in WWII in North Africa and Italy. Very sadly, his wife died of cancer in 1953 – he never remarried.
Publications
- Age Cannot Wither (Hutchinson, undated but 1944 or '45) – a novel written whilst a POW in Spanenberg.
- Last on the List (Leo Cooper, 1974) deals with his part in Phantom from early days in France up to his capture in Greece. It was also largely written whilst he was a prisoner.
- Into Colditz (Michael Russell, 1983) Follows the story on from his capture in Greece to his return home from Colditz. It has an excellent introduction by Paddy Leigh Fermor whom Miles knew from his days in Greece.
He also had an essay, An Evacuation Incident – France – May 1940, published in Detour – The Story of Oflag IVC, by J.E.R. Wood, M.C. (Falcon Press, 1946).
Finally, he wrote an unpublished biography, Memories of Five Reigns, which I have in manuscript form and which I hope to publish in the future.
See Also
Bibliography
Footnotes
- ↑ Email from Stephen Reid, 20230221.
