Colin Hercules Mackenzie,
CMG (1898-1986), scholar, soldier, industrialist and aesthete, was a
Special Operations Executive spymaster who led
Force 136 throughout the period of its existence during the
Second World War.
Origins
Mackenzie was the son of Major-General Sir
Colin John Mackenzie and Ethel, the daughter of Hercules Grey Ross
ICS and granddaughter of the sportsman and photographer,
Horatio Ross. Of Scottish ancestry on both sides of his family, he had the peripatetic childhood typical of many children of British Army officers.
Education
Having attended first
Summer Fields and then
Eton (as a
King's Scholar), Mackenzie was commissioned into the
Scots Guards and was badly wounded at the very end of the First World War, undergoing a series of amputations of his leg in an ultimately successful battle against gangrene. Following the war, Mackenzie went up to
King's College, Cambridge. On informing the Provost that he had forgotten his Latin and proposed to read English, Mackenzie was told that "English is a grubby subject" and elected instead to read Economics. His tutor was
John Maynard Keynes and he graduated with a first class degree, having also won the
Chancellor's Medal for English Verse. He later maintained that Keynes's most useful advice to him had been: "If a book is worth buying at all, it is worth buying in
red Morocco."
Between the wars
After Cambridge, Mackenzie worked for
J. and P. Coats in
Glasgow. He became a director and...
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