After all, he had accomplished his mission. He wrote, ‘I knew that if anyone would succeed, Mackrell would, and my relief at his presence there that night cannot be adequately expressed.’ Who was this man who had inspired such hope? You might say that, as a grown man, Gyles Mackrell lived a Boy’s Own fantasy – compensation, perhaps, for an actual boyhood played out in a very minor key. He was born on 9 October 1888 in Marylebone, London, second son of Doctor Alfred Sextus Mackrell and his wife, Mary. From 1898 to 1905, he boarded at the school commonly known as Epsom College, which had been opened in 1855 as the Royal Medical Benevolent College. As such it had been in effect an orphanage for the sons of dead doctors, a profession with a lower status then than now. By the time Mackrell went there, Epsom College was an English public school of the heartier sort, catering especially to the sons of medical men, although it continued to take in orphaned or disadvantaged sons of doctors as well.
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