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Billy McLean 1938.
Neil Loudon Desmond McLean was born in Scotland on 28th November 1918. Educated at Eton College and known as ‘Billy’, he was commissioned from Sandhurst into the Royal Scots Greys in August 1938. Posted to Palestine, he spent the first two years of the war there before applying to join the newly formed SOE.
Having completed his training, McLean
joined Colonel Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force in Ethiopia, where he commanded a group of irregular troops (unofficially known as ‘McLean’s Foot’) fighting the Italians. After a spell as an SOE staff officer in Egypt, Syria, Istanbul and back in Palestine, he was promoted to major and selected to lead a mission to occupied Albania. After parachuting behind enemy lines (where his pack contained the complete works of Shakespeare), he succeeded in joining disparate groups of partisans together, forming them into a highly effective 1st Partisan Brigade, for which he was awarded the DSO. McLean kept a detailed diary, and four boxes of his papers are held by the Imperial War Museum. He did not mince his words when describing some of the partisans: ‘He acts as a stage Communist, always sinister and secretive. Accepts a cup of tea ungraciously as if offended by such a bourgeois concept’. He was, however, equally scathing about some of the other SOE officers: ‘A young and pig-fat man with a Yorkshire accent. The idea suddenly struck me that to keep him so well fed – over 50 peasant children were being starved’.
In 1945, McLean volunteered to work for SOE against the Japanese in China. He ended the war with another two bars to his DSO. He then returned to Albania to work undercover against the communist dictator Enver Hoxha. Back in the UK, McLean stood for parliament in 1950 as a Conservative in Preston South, being defeated by 149 votes, and again the following year, where he lost by 16 votes. Finally, in 1954, he was elected Unionist MP for Inverness.
In ten years as an MP, McLean specialised in foreign policy and acted as a roving ambassador for parliament on various fact-finding missions. He flew to many trouble
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