Free Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter

type of cellulose used as a dope, or lacquer, on the wings of airplanes was discussed. He got nine rolls of cellulose film donated from Pathé News. It was a thousand yards long and a yard wide. It came in wooden cases which he loaded aboard three cars and drove to Abbeville and on to London aboard a transport truck.
    The rolls were mounted on trestles in the Great Hall of St James’s Palace. For weeks the place reeked of acetone as women cut the film into sections for helmet windows. A trial lot of a thousand were used in France, and then the team was told to go full speed on the manufacturing. They took over three laundries in London to produce the helmets.
    The mask was such a success that the Allies realized the Germans would have to change the chemicals they used from chlorine and sulphur dioxide to phosgene. So an alteration was made because exhaled breath would spoil one of the protective chemicals: an exhaling apparatus was added. The new German ingredient destroyed wool, so flannelette was substituted for the original Viyella. Hexamine was also added to protect against another gas, and the slightly changed helmet with glass eyepieces instead of film wascalled the PH helmet. This was the one British soldiers used in France.
    The gas team went on to produce the box respirator, which used powdered carbon as a filter. Twenty-two million were made before Macpherson was put on other tasks: how to protect soldiers from flame-throwers; and figuring out a means to transport hot food to men at the front (a box inside a box separated with hay). Then Macpherson was sent to Gallipoli as a medical transport officer in Mudros. He got offers to join the engineers as he was a dab hand at manoeuvring hospital boats and wrecking tugs along the peninsula of Gallipoli. He had to board vessels and decide how many patients they could handle. He would roll out blueprints and do his estimation. Forty thousand wounded poured down the Turkish shores onto the ships for treatment. Siegfried Sassoon’s brother, Hamo, was one of them—he died at Gallipoli. The
Aragon
was nicknamed the “Arrogant” and the “Featherbed” by troops coming down from Gallipoli. Macpherson wrote, “She was reputed to have grounded on a bank formed of empty champagne bottles which had been thrown overboard.” A photograph from the time shows a cat wearing a lifejacket made of champagne corks. Eventually the
Aragon
was torpedoed and sunk off Alexandria. Later Macpherson would say he never worked so hard in his life, and the load was matched only by his time later in St John’s, dealing with the influenza epidemic of 1918.
    Cluny Macpherson also acted as an advisor on poisonous gas in Turkey. He was charged with building and equipping a redipping station for reconditioning gas helmets after they had been worn in the field. He had done this before in Abbeville and Calais. There was scarce fresh water where he was stationed in Mudros, but there was a condensing plant. Macpherson used a heavy boiler and a sheet iron smokestack and had Egyptian craftsmen working for him. When work got slow he learned a few Egyptian shanties and got the men singing, and the rate of work increased.
    In Egypt, the men received letters from home, from family concerned they were so close now to the war.
But we are further away now,
they wrote back,
than we had been in England.
    Macpherson strikes me as an intelligent, warm, fast-thinking, generous person who posed as an innocent from the colonies naive on protocol. He loathed red tape and admired a job done effectively and quickly. He suffered migraines and temporary half blindness. He climbed to the roof of the Grace Hospital in St John’s in the middle of winter and took a series of photos of the city to send to a woman whose uncle used to live nearby. He pricked holes with a pin through the photos and wrote on the reverse the names of all the new buildings.
    He was injured in Egypt. His horse shied from a camel and fell, trapping his