Smash hit musical about one of history’s greatest hoaxes

The musical is billed as an ‘unbelievable true story’ about a secret mission that ‘won us WWII’ but Operation Mincemeat was so astonishingly secretive that RAF Wireless Operator Ted Ross didn’t know he was a key player.

When war ended Liverpool-born Ted came to Belfast to live, work, and to marry his wife Ann. And while watching the 1956 movie about Operation Mincemeat called ‘The Man Who Never Was’ Ted realised that he’d been part of the plot!

The historic hoax involved a corpse cast afloat by a submarine in 1943 and found by a sardine fisherman off the Spanish coast. The corpse wore a British officer’s uniform and handcuffed to its wrist was a briefcase containing ‘secret’ documents. There are no secrets about the West End musical!

Among its international accolades to date are 64 five-star reviews and five sell-out runs prior to London where the run is being extended to 24 February 2024.

Sadly, Ted Ross has passed away, but in 2013 the then 91-year-old pensioner told Roamer about his pivotal role in Operation Mincemeat.

“I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday,” he said. At 0218 in the morning on 24 April 1943, in his RAF base in Gibraltar, Ted received a final “continuous distress signal” from an allied plane off Finisterre.

An SOS from a British plane was always replied to with a request for position, course and speed, and Ted had already received several SOS calls from the troubled aircraft.

Each time he asked it to signal its location and progress, which would have been intercepted by the enemy.

No more calls came and Ted assumed the plane had ditched in the sea, which seemed to be confirmed when an RAF rescue launch “roared out of the harbour at 0230 am,” Ted recalled. Strangely, the launch’s radio operator later told him that it wasn’t a rescue mission but “they’d been instructed to do a routine night exercise along the Spanish coast.”

Six days later, on the 30 April, (though Ted didn’t know till he saw the film) a British submarine on a top secret mission surfaced close to Huelva on the Spanish coast and a body was put in the water - the corpse of ‘The Man Who Never Was’.

He was actually a deceased, homeless Welshman who’d been ‘requisitioned’ by the Secret Service. They dressed him in a military uniform, gave him a false name - Major William Martin - and deposited fake personal letters, receipts and bills in his pockets. They even put a photo of his ‘fiancée’ and a note from his ‘father’ into his wallet.

The British Secret Service masterminds behind the plot were Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, who Winston Churchill said had “corkscrew minds”.

Crucially, the corpse’s briefcase contained ‘official military’ documents indicating that the Allied armies in North Africa would progress to Greece, not Sicily. Ted Ross’s final message from the apparently doomed aircraft came at 0218 on the morning of 24 April.

Major Martin’s wristwatch had stopped at 0218, and it would have taken six days for his body to drift to Huelva in Spain! Completely conned by the briefcase’s contents, Nazi generals deployed their troops to the wrong country.

Thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives were saved, Mussolini was deposed, and the course of WWII changed dramatically. “I don’t think my SOS signals came from a crashing plane at all,” Ted Ross admitted. But 21-year-old RAF Radio Operator No. 1144016 received the signals, telling the sender to broadcast his location, speed and direction, and the Germans were listening.

“It was all done very well,” said Ted, who checked his wartime diary after seeing ‘The Man Who Never Was’.

“Then it all clicked!” he told me. Along with several close shaves with death his diary recorded numerous other WWII Undercover operations, including vital work with the GCHQ in the Far East and with Tito and the Partisans in Yugoslavia.

Ted Ross, born on 7 January 1922, died during the first Covid lockdown on 20 March 2020

For information and tickets for Operation Mincemeat visit OperationMincemeat.com