In the course of researching his new biography of the yachtsman George Millar, the journalist Ben Lowings discovered the former war hero agreed to run guns into the Mediterranean.

George Millar (1910-2005) was a soldier who escaped from a Nazi prison camp and became an undercover agent working with the French Resistance in 1944. After the war he cruised extensively around Europe in a series of yachts, accompanied by his Spanish wife. ‘Isabel and the Sea’ (first published in 1948 and reissued in 2006 by Dovecote Press) remains the best-known of his sailing books. It tells the tale of the Millars taking their 49-foot ketch Truant from the Hamble River and down to the Greek sun via the French canals. Reading it is like going on holiday. We join the first British yacht sailing to the region after the closing of war, when in George’s words, the Mediterranean opened ‘like a flower’ at the ‘first touch of peace’.

Imagine this reader’s surprise then, to find in the National Archives, evidence that the Millars’ project began life as a gun-running expedition. Was it not a honeymoon, but another war mission? Truant was searched several times on her journey and no stash of guns turned up. On the face of it, there wasn’t anywhere to keep them anyway. But Truant still sails, and her accommodation is little changed from the Millars’ ownership… An examination of the cabin layout today does offer some clues…

The documents from the Special Operations Executive show Millar was considered a ‘swashbuckler’ with a ‘good irregular background’ and he did accept the invitation to help with trafficking small arms between France and Spain. George agreed to meet an agent in Marseilles, presumably to organise a transfer of the weapons, or to take more on board. So much for the official record. But there are no receipts for any secret cargo. Perhaps suspiciously, only hours before the yacht left Hamble in the summer of ’46, George remembers that he has forgotten to collect ‘two spare propellers’. It could be argued these were in reality the clandestine weapons.

Close readings of ‘Isabel and the Sea’ offer some intrigue. The Millars are panicked at the prospect of customs searches. Britain was indeed engaged in an effort to arm right-wing forces in Greece against popular Communist militias. Millar did meet British intelligence agents in Greece. He could have been inveigled into something by the British Consul in Piraeus, who wanted to stop yachts being used to smuggle Jews into Palestine. The British general who ended up buying Truant in Athens may have had ideas of putting the yacht into some kind of clandestine military use.

Conclusive answers lie in more files from British intelligence – specifically those of MI9. These are not yet open to the public.

  • ‘The Chancellor: George Millar, a Life’ by Ben Lowings, with a Foreword by Paul Atterbury will be published by Taniwha Press UK in August 2021. Ben’s first book was a biography of the yachtsman David Lewis (‘The Dolphin’ Lodestar Books, 2020.)

Photo: Millars on Truant © ‘Courtesy Estate of George Reid Millar’