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On Friday 5 September 1941, 'L' Detachment started training for operations to be carried out in enemy territory, for which they would be dropped by parachute. The prisoner had divulged only his number rank and name: 2655648 Sergeant John Edward Almonds – known in ‘L’ Detachment, 1st SAS as ‘Gentleman Jim’. Boats fascinated him and, aged 10, he built his first craft, a punt made out of a bacon box with toffee tins as outriggers. The son of a smallholder, John Edward Almonds was born in Stixwould, Lincolnshire, on August 6, 1914. Never one to employ or permit unnecessary violence, he rescued a captured German motorcycle dispatch rider from the French Maquis (resistance).
The short barrels and small calibre might support such a notion but success depended on an accurate hit – and Almonds was a marksman. At a personal level, it reveals more of the enigma of this quiet-spoken Special Forces hero and the kind of family life experienced my brother, my sister and me, as we grew up in an SAS family. After thirty-two days on the run in enemy territory, he reached US forces at the Benevento front line.On December 14, 1941, Almonds and Jock Lewes, another of the SAS originals, carried out a successful attack on the main Tripoli coastal road.
While the team concept remained important, each one of them had to develop a sense of their own independence and personal effectiveness.In the new series due next year, actor Corin Silva, perfect in looks and mannerisms, according to Almonds’ family, will once again play Gentleman Jim. Dave would never do down a friend but he had no compunction about ripping off the system when it came to commodities which were in short supply. Led by another founding SAS legend Jock Lewes – played by Alfie Allen in Rogue Heroes – the unit based around the besieged port of Toburk pioneered the stealthy tactic of sneaking through enemy lines to pinpoint positions or launch deadly surprise attacks.
With the mules, who also carried their own fodder, it was slow going back to Keren, the headquarters of Almonds’s command, the Western Province of Eritrea. He retired from the Army in 1961 as a major and went back to the house in Stixwould where he was born. Beside them, Sergeants Bob Tait and Geoff DuVivier, of the Gordon Highlanders waited patiently with Privates Jock Byrne and Jimmie Storie. Near the river, in a small settlement, the shifta had commandeered a couple of thatched huts and lain up for the night.The others were Jim Blakeney, a big raw-boned trawler-man from Grimsby; Pat Riley, a six footer with a round, jovial face; and Bob Lilley, slim built, with a thin, dark moustache and high cheekbones. Quite apart from the training dangers and the times when he came under “normal” enemy fire, he narrowly escaped death no less than nine times. At the time of the Armistice, Almonds was in Campo 70 (Monturano) and was sent out by the SBO [Senior British Officer] to watch the coast road. Whacker' Evans, Scots Guards, and Tubby Trenfield, Warwickshire Light Infantry, two large burly men with bluff, matter-of-fact faces surveyed the scene impassively. Almonds had twice gone to sea without knowing where he was going: first from Britain with 8 Guards Commando to the Middle East in early 1941, then on an Italian warship through the Corinth Canal to Taranto.
If by some miracle he got out of this spot, and if money were no object, one day he would build his own ocean-going yacht and sail it where he wanted to go. However, Justin Saddington, a curator at the museum, told The Telegraph that Mayne ripping out the compass was the "kind of Herculean act which amazed his comrades". A few days later, twenty shifta fired on five unarmed American soldiers at Donnollo Basso on the Asmara to Massawa road.
The son of a Lincolnshire smallholder, my father had left school at fourteen without any educational qualifications. On another raid in the Agheila area, he led a party which destroyed five heavy enemy MT and he participated in shooting up an enemy post in this locality.
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