The Unsung Genius of Millis Jefferis and the Firs Team

In the final months of World War II, as Allied forces pushed through Europe after D-Day, one eccentric British inventor and his team continued working grueling 16-hour days. Millis Jefferis, the mastermind behind some of the war’s most ingenious weapons, led a small but brilliant team at The Firs, a clandestine research facility in Whitchurch. Their work—designing mortars, detonators, and booby traps—remained critical until Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945.

When news of the armistice finally arrived, the exhausted team erupted into a celebration as chaotic as their wartime efforts. Stuart Macrae, Jefferis’ deputy, watched in disbelief as all 250 employees abandoned their tools and stormed the local pub. Even the usually reserved Jefferis joined in, commandeering a Sherman tank from the testing range and spinning it wildly outside the bar, sending debris flying and rupturing a water main. The revelry escalated when two colleagues—Macrae’s wife Mary and a veteran staffer—took the tank for a joyride toward a village church, only to be thwarted by a low archway. Undeterred, another team member fired a rocket into the church basement. The night ended with mortar shells lighting up the sky, leaving villagers with a spectacle they’d never forget.

Yet the next morning, Jefferis promptly reinstated the 16-hour workday. The war in the Pacific still raged, and American orders poured in. The Firs had one last astonishing contribution to make—refining hollow-charge explosives for the Manhattan Project. Jefferis’ young protégé, James Tuck, adapted their designs to solve a critical problem in triggering the plutonium-based atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The Sudden End of a Wartime Miracle

By August 1945, with Japan’s surrender, the adrenaline that had sustained The Firs’ team vanished. Macrae described the abrupt emptiness: “The drive simply left our bodies.” Rumors swirled that the facility—despite its staggering output of 3.5 million anti-personnel mines, 1.5 million sticky bombs, and countless other devices—would be shuttered. Bureaucrats who had long resented Jefferis’ unorthodox methods seized their chance. By October, orders came to dismantle everything.

Macrae, the first to arrive at The Firs in 1940, became the last to leave in 1946. Winston Churchill, hoping to preserve their legacy, tasked him with collecting weapon samples for the Imperial War Museum. Yet none were ever displayed. “We created an institution that contributed more to the war than any other weapons department,” Macrae lamented. “But it was so disreputable, it was erased from history.”

The Parallel Fate of Baker Street’s Saboteurs

The same postwar oblivion befell Colin Gubbins’ Special Operations Executive (SOE), headquartered at 64 Baker Street. Despite orchestrating sabotage missions that crippled 90 Nazi factories with minimal resources—outperforming Bomber Command—the SOE was deemed unnecessary in peacetime. Churchill privately admitted that “mischievous exploits” had no place in postwar planning. In January 1946, the SOE dissolved without fanfare.

Gubbins’ elite trainers met similarly anticlimactic fates. Eric Sykes, the silent killing expert, died of a heart attack days after VE Day, exhausted by years of covert work. William Fairbairn, the knife-fighting instructor, found postwar work training U.S. forces. The SOE’s Scottish training estate, Arisaig, reverted to a private home, its bullet-riddled walls repainted and its secrets buried.

The Quiet Aftermath of Extraordinary Lives

Jefferis, awarded a knighthood he never sought, became Chief Engineer in India but chafed at military bureaucracy. He refused a £100,000 royalty for his inventions, declaring it unethical to profit from war. He died in 1963, his obituary barely mentioning his wartime role.

Gubbins, divorced and adrift, founded the Special Forces Club to preserve camaraderie among veterans. He lived long enough to see his methods shape the CIA—whose origins traced back to SOE-trained OSS operatives—but died in 1976 on Scotland’s Harris Island, far from the thrill of sabotage.

Why Their Legacy Matters

The Firs and Baker Street embodied Britain’s wartime ingenuity: small, agile teams outperforming vast bureaucracies. Yet their informal brilliance clashed with postwar order. Jefferis’ toys and Gubbins’ “ungentlemanly” warfare were quietly shelved, their pioneers forgotten.

Today, as asymmetric warfare dominates global conflicts, their lessons resonate anew. The tank-spinning, church-rocketing chaos of May 1945 wasn’t just a celebration—it was the defiant last laugh of men and women who rewrote the rules of war, then vanished into history’s shadows.