Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth, CMG, OBE was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. Hillgarth appears as one of the actual historical figures in C. J. Sansom's 2006 novel, Winter in Madrid, and also in María Dueñas's 2009 novel, Eltiempo entre costuras, The Seamstress ).
Early years
Hillgarth was born George Hugh Jocelyn Evans at 121, Harley Street, Marylebone, London, second of three sons of Willmott Henderson Evans, a leading London surgeon specialising in skin diseases, and his wife Ann Frances, daughter of Rev. George Piercy, a pioneer Methodist minister in China. Hugh changed his name to "Alan Hugh Hillgarth Evans" in 1926, and in 1928 discontinued use of the surname "Evans" in favour of "Hillgarth". The name derived from the family legend of a rich widow Hillgarth from the north of England who married into the Evans family, who were naval surgeons for several generations.
Career
In the book Roosevelt & Churchill: Men of Secrets, the historian David Stafford gives an account of Hillgarth's links with Winston Churchill in prewar Majorca, where Hillgarth was the British consul. By the outbreak of World War II, Hillgarth was Naval Attaché in Madrid, where he handled a huge number of clandestine intelligence operations on behalf of the British government. He had a prominent role in Operation Mincemeat in which faked documents were used to fool the Germans about Allied plans for the invasion of Sicily. He was successful at simultaneously appearing to try to retrieve the documents before the Germans saw them but making sure that they did, all without arousing suspicion. His work here led Ian Fleming to refer to Hillgarth as a 'war-winner'. In his book Men of War, Hillgarth wrote that "adventure was once a noble appellation borne proudly by men such as Raleigh and Drake... reserved for the better-dressed members of the criminal classes." Hillgarth was also a member of the strange and extravagant 'Sacambaya Exploration Company,' which, in 1928, went in search of Bolivian gold. A number of British adventurers set forth on a romantic enterprise with modern machinery to excavate a treasure believed to amount to more than 12 million pounds. It turned out to be a scam, as the maps and documents turned out to have been fakes.
