Twenty-one year old Graham Hayes talked his way into a job with Robert Thompson at the famous Mouseman workshop at Kilburn in North Yorkshire, in the mid-1930s.
His ambition was to gain experience with the Mouseman and then start his own business but that dream went up in smoke with the outbreak of the Second World War.
He went on to become one of the founding members of the Small Scale Raiding Force, the commando team brought together by the Special Operations Executive to carry out Winston Churchill’s instruction to create ‘a reign of terror down the enemy coast’.
The force carried out ‘Operation Postmaster’, the daring 1942 raid, recently depicted in Guy Ritchie’s film ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ starring Henry Cavill, in which commandos boarded and captured three enemy vessels moored in the ‘neutral’ port of Santa Isabel on the Spanish Island of Fernando Po off the West African Coast.
The now Captain Graham Hayes led one of the assault teams and was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the exploit and in the film he's portrayed by Hero Fiennes Tiffin - nephew of actor Ralph Fiennes.
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