War hero Graham Hayes’ Mouseman chair at auction in York

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.

The chair up for sale (Image: Supplied) 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.

Director Guy Ritchie (Image: Julia’s House) 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.

Film star Henry Cavill However, disaster followed on a mission just a few months later when a commando team carrying out a night-time reconnaissance of the Normandy beaches was ambushed by a German patrol. Hayes escaped and with the help of the French Resistance made it down the escape route to the Spanish border but he was betrayed and handed over to the Germans.

After being held in solitary confinement at the notorious Fresnes Prison near Paris for nine months he was executed by firing squad on July 13 1943 – four days after his 29th birthday.

Tom Howard of auctioneers Duggleby Stephenson, said: “It was a shocking end to the life of an extraordinary young man, a life that today reads like something out of the Boys’ Own magazine.

“Graham came from an affluent Yorkshire family. His father was the Managing Director of a heating engineering company and wanted his son to go into that business but Graham disliked the work and at the age of twenty literally escaped to sea . . . he signed on to join the crew of a four-masted Finnish sailing barque that had berthed in Hull  . . . spent the next year on its round the world voyage to Australia . . . and then turned up at Kilburn looking for a job.”

Auctioneer Tom Howard tries out the chair made by Graham Hayes (Image: Supplied) “Robert Thompson rarely employed anyone other than trained craftsmen or local boys but he liked Hayes, was impressed by the evidence of his woodworking skills, and took him on.

“The chair in Friday’s auction, made whilst Graham was at the Thompson workshop, is a quite unusual tub-shaped adzed oak armchair. The carved mouse, the firm’s famous emblem, is a prominent feature, running up the right hand upright.  It has come via family descent, so it has never previously been seen on the market.

“Even without the backstory of Captain Graham Hayes MC, it is a very nice piece of Mouseman furniture that we’d expect to make £1,200 – £1,800. However it has aroused enormous levels of interest – easily the most watched item in a country house auction packed with impressive antiquities – and advance bidding hit double that valuation more than a week ago.”

Viewing of the Country House Sale is taking place at Duggleby Stephenson’s York Auction Centre at Murton throughout this week and on Friday (December 6) from 9am until the start of the auction at 11am. The catalogue is available on the firm’s website (www.davidduggleby.com).

York Auction Centre