Douglas Berneville-Claye

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (November 2007)

Douglas Webster St Aubyn Berneville-Claye was a British traitor during World War II.

He was a member of the British Free Corps (BFC) and had a penchant for fraud, theft, embellishment and the ability to pass himself off as something he wasn't. Having been booted out of the RAF, he was commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment in 1941. He ended up as a Lieutenant with the SAS in the Middle East where he was branded as "useless" and "dangerous" by his comrades, (hearsay comment made many years after the event by one person: see Ronald Seths book Jackals of the Reich) and eventually refused to conduct operations with him. He was captured in 1942 by units of the Afrika Korps and taken to an Italian POW camp, which he claimed to have broken out of four times.

He was sent to Oflag 79 in Brunswick until removed for his own safety since the POWs had correctly identified him as a German informer. From that point until his appearance in Templin in March 1945, his record is a blank. Standing before the BFC, Berneville-Claye launched into a speech saying he was an earl's son, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, and would collect two armoured cars to take the BFC into battle — even making the claim that the BFC would have no problems with the British authorities and that Great Britain was going to declare war on the Soviet Union in a few days. Cooper called Berneville-Claye's bluff; the officer took one of the BFC men with him as a driver and drove away. Berneville-Claye eventually changed into an SAS uniform while the driver took up farmers clothing, and they surrendered to the Allies.Strangely, Berneville-Claye was not demobilised immediately and continued to be an British army officer. Because he spoke good German, he seems to have been involved in the German War Crimes commission. But his old character traits resurfaced fairly quickly and he was court-martialled twice, in 1945 and 46, and the army eventually got rid of him.but as his daughter said in march 2002, "Everyone always described him as having film star looks and said he was able to charm the birds out of the trees. I always thought he was an SAS war hero and never believed he might have become a traitor," she told BBC Radio 4's It's My Story.

Margaret Metcalfe Margaret Metcalfe: "I always thought he was a war hero" Margaret, a former midwife, was 65 when she learned that her father was a traitor. The truth only unravelled when she decided to write her family tree.

She knew from her mother's letters that her father was the son of a pub landlord and had joined the West Yorkshire Regiment, with which he was posted to north Africa.

There, he signed up with the newly formed Special Air Service and took part in daring raids on German airfields and supply bases, deep behind enemy lines.

Missing in action

Keen to find out more, Margaret went to the Public Record Office in London to examine the regimental war diary.

We don't know why he wasn't prosecuted - there was plenty of evidence

Margaret Metcalfe "The entry for 13th January 1942 shows that he was reported missing on operations," she says. "But I [also] noticed that he had given himself a double-barrelled name of Berneville-Claye and had also awarded himself an aristocratic title of Lord Charlesworth.

"This seemed strange because they seem to be pure inventions on his part to make himself blend in better with other members of his SAS unit.

"But I was even more surprised by the MI5 secret intelligence reports in which several eyewitnesses describe him wearing the distinctive black uniform of a captain in the Waffen SS," she says.

Secret meeting

It materialised that Margaret's father had actually been a member of what became known as the British Free Corps (BFC) or Britisches Freikorps - a unit of the German military made up of British volunteers.

Margaret could not understand why the British never prosecuted her father after the war, even though he was investigated by MI5.

"We don't know why he wasn't prosecuted. There was plenty of evidence from what MI5 regarded as tainted witnesses but there was virtually no independent documentary evidence of what he had been doing from the Germans."

Unknown family

During the course of her two-year investigation, Margaret discovered more secrets about her father. She had a half-brother and an extended family scattered across Britain, America and Australia that had hitherto been unaware of each other's existence.

Berneville-Claye in London, 1974 Probably the last picture of Berneville-Claye, taken in London in 1974 Berneville-Claye married again after the war, but was briefly imprisoned for bigamy. Eventually he emigrated with his new family to Australia where he re-invented his life, establishing himself as a pillar of his local community.

He taught English in a boy's school, converted to Catholicism and was much mourned when he died in 1975.

Initially Margaret Metcalfe was welcomed into the new family fold. But her revelations about Berneville-Claye began to cause schisms and the family she had found eventually disowned her. Margaret has now ceased contact with them.

He was cashiered by General Court Martial in 1946.