Review of The Moleskins: The Story of SOE Agent and British War Artist Cecil Michaelis by Anne Graaff (2022)

The Moleskins is a biography of Cecil Michaelis (1913-1997), son of the Randlord Sir Max Michaelis, and in his own right an artist, philanthropist and founder of the Montebello Design Centre in Cape Town. Cecil Michaelis lived a life of great privilege; thanks to his father’s immense wealth he was the owner of the sixteenth-century mansion Rycote Park in Oxfordshire by his early twenties, owner of a second house in the south of France and, like his parents, of a fabulous art collection too(1). But he was also, similarly to his parents, public-spirited and eager to help improve the lives of others; this was evident from the support and funding he offered for worthy causes during the war, but also, before and after the war, in the important initiatives he established in the areas of creative art and design(2). His private life, too, was eventful, with three marriages, difficult relationships with his children, and a rich assortment of extra-marital liaisons. 

Given this, there would be plenty of material for a whole-life biography of Michaelis, but this excellently-researched and detailed study eschews this in favour of a focus on just one intriguing period of his life, his activities during World War Two and its immediate aftermath. A final brief chapter touches on his work as a draughtsman; it is followed by a broad selection of the sketches he produced during the 1940s, and some family photographs. Chronologically, then, this is a study largely of the period 1939-1947. 

The preface to the book, by the author’s sister and Director of Montebello Design Centre, Tessa Graaff, explains this focus: some time after Michaelis’s death, she received word from his daughter-in-law in Germany that there was a treasure-trove of sketches stored in boxes in a property once owned by Cecil’s third wife, Amata Mettenheimer, and that these might be of use to Montebello. Tessa travelled over to Germany to see these sketches and found them jotted down in small, soft ‘moleskin’-covered books. But although the sketchbooks were small they were collectively bulky, so she decided to bring back to South Africa a limited but coherent selection of them, those that documented Cecil’s war years. The fact that he had been appointed an official war artist, and that many of the sketches related to this work, offered an additional rationale for this choice.

More wartime notebooks were then discovered in France. So too were further surviving acquaintances of Michaelis. Anne Graaff conducted extensive interviews with these acquaintances and what was revealed was very surprising: namely, that quite apart from his war-artist activities, Cecil Michaelis had had a highly eventful wartime life as part of the Allies’ Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Allies’ espionage and sabotage operation that was established in 1940. There was now material for a very focused biography of Cecil Michaelis’s war and Anne Graaff’s study of this period of his life takes us from one action-packed adventure to the next, from his training in Scotland, to Gibraltar, and then to Tangier in late 1942, where Michaelis was involved in Operation Torch, the Allied landings on the North African coast.

Just over a year later, Michaelis returned from Tangier to London where he was now prepared for service as an SOE trainer rather than operator. Back in Britain, he reconnected ambivalently with his family at Rycote which, through his French wife Marie Alix Dard, had become a centre for the Free French. He helped establish the monthly newsletter France Libre here, but found life at home difficult and spent most of his time in London before being posted to Algiers in spring 1943. Here he taught signals and coding, as well as sabotage operations. In his words, he was “training baddies” for the French Resistance. (page 76) 

Other work followed later that year, in Sardinia, and in Corsica, but Michaelis soon contrived to get himself returned to London where he was recruited to the far more exciting, newly-formed Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) whose mission was the liberation of occupied France. 

Michaelis arrived in Cherbourg in northern France shortly after D-Day and his fluency in French and familiarity with French life soon made him an invaluable member of the SHAEF team under Eisenhower, who was tasked with liberating Paris and thereafter the whole of France. Michaelis was in Paris in August 1944 during those momentous days. It was chaotic and exhilarating, and for Michaelis a personal exhilaration because it was here, quite by chance, that he met the woman who was to become his second wife, fellow artist Lil Laubeuf. The story of Michaelis’s war ends in a jubilant liberated city, among artists and writers and with a new love. 

The war over, Graaff offers a brief resumé of its aftermath for Michaelis. Married in 1947 to Lil, he  settled with her in l’Harmas in the south of France and here the couple created an artists’ retreat, while also maintaining an apartment in Paris. And then there were visits to Cape Town, the place where Cecil had spent most of his early childhood. It was here, in 1993, that he established Montebello, the design centre in which his name lives on today. 

These final references to Cecil’s creative initiatives might have taken us away from the war action and into a broader discussion of Cecil Michaelis the artist. And yet even here, the war frames the narrative and the selection of works that illustrate it; Michaelis was a gifted painter, ceramicist, and designer of glassware throughout his life but it is the little sketches he produced during the war years – in pencil, or pen and ink – that appear in this biography. Michaelis had received an art training as a young man and applied to be a war artist specifically so that he might be allowed to carry art materials into the field of battle. He took his small moleskin notebooks with him there. 

Fitted into his pockets, these notebooks could be taken out quickly to sketch passing scenes and Graaff makes a lovely selection of these to end her study: arranged chronologically, they track the people and places he saw in the 1940s and include some illustrated letters and Christmas cards sent to his children. They document some of Cecil’s experiences during these years, but also the breadth of visual styles he experimented with, from the loose painterly sketches of nameless soldiers and women to the sharper linear drawings of his children, from the fluid penwork of the Corsican sketches to the tighter topographical studies of Paris. They end with some tender portrait sketches of Lil and a few delicate postwar nature studies.    

The images are a reminder of the chief love and interest of Cecil’s life, his own artmaking and the promotion of artistic creativity in others. Despite the war-artist activity, this creative work had been sidelined during the war years, and this biography makes clear how many other bizarre and improbable adventures absorbed the time of Michaelis the SOE operative. But in its opening and closing pages it also reminds us, tantalisingly, of how rich was Cecil Michaelis’s life before and after the 1940s. Graaff has written an absorbing study of his war years. Hopefully, in time, with yet more of the Michaelis archival material to hand, she will offer an even broader biographical study of this multi-faceted man.    

Footnotes:

(1) For studies of art collector Sir Max Michaelis, see Hans Fransen, editor, Michaelis Collection: The Old Town House, Cape Town (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1997), Michael Stevenson, Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and their Collections (Vlaeberg: Fernwood Press, 2002), and Anna Tietze, “Controversial Collections: the Michaelis Gifts to South Africa”, Journal of the History of Collections, 34, 3 (October 2022): 255-268.

(2) This included, in the 1930s, the establishment near Rycote Park of Rycote School (later Rycotewood College).  This was a school for training in crafts and agricultural skills, designed for underprivileged young male students.