Alan Hillgarth

Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth CMG OBE (1899–1978) was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. Hillgarth appears as one of the actual historical figures in C. J. Sansom's 2006 novel, Winter in Madrid, and also in María Dueñas's 2009 novel, El tiempo entre costuras (English translation 2011, The Time in Between (US), The Seamstress (UK)), as well its Spanish-language 2013 television adaptation.

Early years

Hillgarth was born George Hugh Jocelyn Hillgarth Evans (called "Hugh" by his family) at 121, Harley Street, Marylebone, London, second of three boys and two girls of Willmott Henderson Hillgarth Evans, a leading London surgeon specialising in skin diseases, and his wife Ann Frances, daughter of Rev. George Piercy, a pioneer Methodist minister in China. Hugh changed his name to "Alan Hugh Hillgarth Evans" in 1926, and in 1928 discontinued use of the surname "Hillgarth Evans" in favour of "Hillgarth".

Hillgarth was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and during World War I he saw active service as a midshipman before being seriously wounded during a skirmish in the Dardanelles. After the war, he studied at King's College, Cambridge.

Career

In the book Roosevelt & Churchill: Men of Secrets, the historian David Stafford gives an account of Hillgarth's links with Winston Churchill in prewar Majorca, where Hillgarth was the British consul. By the outbreak of World War II, Hillgarth was Naval Attaché in Madrid, where he handled a huge number of clandestine intelligence operations on behalf of the British government. He had a prominent role in Operation Mincemeat in which faked documents were used to fool the Germans about Allied plans for the invasion of Sicily. He was successful at simultaneously appearing to try to retrieve the documents before the Germans saw them but making sure that they did, all without arousing suspicion. His work here led Ian Fleming to refer to Hillgarth as a 'war-winner'.

In his book Men of War, Hillgarth wrote that "adventure was once a noble appellation borne proudly by men such as Raleigh and Drake... [but is now] reserved for the better-dressed members of the criminal classes."

Hillgarth was also a member of the strange and extravagant 'Sacambaya Exploration Company,' which, in 1928, went in search of Bolivian gold. A number of British adventurers set forth on a romantic enterprise with modern machinery to excavate a treasure believed to amount to more than 12 million pounds. It turned out to be a scam, as the maps and documents turned out to have been fakes.

Family

A son was the historian Jocelyn Nigel Hillgarth FBA FSA.

Further reading

• Hart-Davis, Duff (2012). Man of War: The Secret Life of Captain Alan Hillgarth, Officer, Adventurer, Agent. London: Century. ISBN 978-1-846-05971-1.