Harris Lebus

By Rob Crane

In the summer of 1940, Britain was reeling from the Dunkirk evacuation. The Army had escaped but its equipment lay abandoned on French beaches. Into this vacuum stepped Winston Churchill’s new Commandos – small bands of volunteers tasked with striking back at the enemy in daring, unconventional ways.

Among their most audacious ideas was the use of collapsible canoes: flimsy holiday craft reinvented as stealthy weapons of war. And Harris Lebus played a key role in developing one of the most successful military canoes of the war.

The Commandos attracted highly motivated volunteers with a tendency for alternative thinking. It wasn’t long before pioneering Commando officers were advocating the use of canoes in operations. Their low profile and capability to slip quietly through the water was ideal for small-scale operations that needed a stealthy approach.

The interwar period saw a rapid boom in the popularity of ‘collapsible’ canoes. Ironically it was led by a German company, Klepper, although UK-based manufacturers soon entered the market, too.

‘Collapsible’ canoes had a canvas skin that stretched over a wooden frame. The frame could be broken down into its component parts and the whole affair packed into a relatively small carrying bag. This made them ideal for adventurous leisure seekers who could easily take their canoe with them on holiday.

But now pioneers realised these canoes could have military applications, too – they would be ideal for coastal operations such as planting explosives on enemy shipping in harbour, carrying out coastal reconnaissance, or landing to blow up targets such as coastal railway bridges.

Convincing more senior officers of the potential wasn’t always easy, but eventually a number of ‘small boat’ units came into existence under the umbrella of Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ).

These units included the Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment or RMBPD (better known as ‘The cockleshell heroes’, made famous in a 1955 film of the same name for their raid on shipping in Bordeaux harbour), Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (who did covert reconnaissance of enemy-held beaches ahead of larger amphibious landings) and the Special Boat Section (SBS), which was trained to carry out a range of operations.

But the first canoes used by these units were of disappointingly poor quality. The Admiralty, which fiercely staked responsibility for overseeing pretty much anything that floated, took responsibility for their procurement. It turned to manufacturers that had produced collapsible civilian canoes before the war, such as Folbot (based in London) and Cavender & Clark (based in Cottenham in Cambridgeshire).

But the various canoe units condemned the boats delivered by these companies as well below the quality they’d been achieving when making civilian canoes before the war. Poor-quality wood was being used for the frames, but other issues – too numerous to list – were also pinpointed.

Their frustration was fuelled by the aloof attitude of the Admiralty. Excessively bureaucratic and intransigent, the Admiralty refused to incorporate feedback from users as it updated the canoes’ specification to produce the Mark I* canoe design. Its attitude seemed to be: “You can take the canoe we’ve designed or no canoe at all.” Yet the Mark I* achieved no advance in quality or performance compared with those that had come before.

COHQ’s frustration with the Admiralty reached breaking point in early 1943. It turned to the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), asking whether MAP could help with canoe production. Perhaps partly motivated by inter-service rivalry, MAP jumped at the opportunity. And it found a willing partner in Harris Lebus.

The first canoes produced by Harris Lebus from early 1943 were built to the same Admiralty specification as the Mark I* canoes produced by other manufacturers. But according to the book The Cockleshell Canoes, the Harris Lebus canoes were from the start produced “to a far better quality” than those of the other manufacturers.

Aside from the good standard of workmanship achieved by Harris Lebus, the company showed it was willing to listen to feedback from the user units. Requested changes were soon incorporated into the production line. With COHQ’s Squadron Leader Peter Levy acting as liaison, the Mark I* canoes being produced by Harris Lebus evolved to such an extent that they gained their own separate designation as the Mark I**.

The Mark I** was arguably the most successful canoe type of the war. It certainly remained popular with the canoe units right until its end. Its popularity persisted even when MAP continued to develop more sophisticated canoes: ones with room for four men, ones made with plywood or ‘rigid’ hulls, even ones powered by small electric or diesel motors to help the crews cover further distances.

According to The Cockleshell Canoes, it’s possible that as many as 850 Mark I** canoes were produced by Harris Lebus up to January 1944. They saw service with units throughout the world – in Europe, the Mediterranean, and in south-east Asia and the Pacific.

Although canoe types proliferated under MAP’s guidance, the only other one that Harris Lebus built was the Mark II**. This was a three-man version of the ‘semi rigid’ Mark II canoe that had been used by RMBPD during the ‘cockleshell heroes’ raid.

This canoe had a flat wooden bottom and deck that could concertina down to make the canoe exceptionally flat. An additional cockpit increased their versatility, making it easier to carry a ‘passenger’, such as when carrying a non-paddler specialist on an operation or when dropping off or picking up an agent from the enemy coast. The additional cockpit could be covered if not needed.

At the end of the war, Harris Lebus returned to producing furniture. The various units that had used the company’s canoes were all disbanded. But it wasn’t long before Cold War tensions led to the establishment of a unit that today is known as the Special Boat Service (SBS).

Since the war, the materials used to make them has changed, but the basic design of the SBS’s Klepper canoes remains virtually unchanged from the Mark I** canoes that Harris Lebus helped develop.

See the book ‘The Cockleshell Canoes’, by Quentin Rees, for full details of the military canoes used during the Second World War.

Photos captions:

COHQ’s Squadron Leader Peter Levy (front), Commander Garforth Mowll (middle) and SBS Captain Mike Kealy in a three‑man adaptation of the Mark I* canoe.

RMBPD’s Captain William Pritchard‑Gordon transports a collapsed ‘semi‑rigid’ Mark II* – a three-man canoe that Harris Lebus helped build.

A Mark I* in Chichester Harbour near COPP headquarters, showing the canoe in action. (Rob Crane)

COPP men train in Scotland, carefully loading a Mark I* through a submarine’s forward torpedo hatch.

The frame of a collapsible canoe at COHQ in London.

Rob Crane started researching Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP) when he found himself with spare time during the first UK Covid lockdown. His interest was sparked by his grandfather Jack, a Royal Engineer officer who served with COPP in south-east Asia. Rob’s research is available on the COPP Survey website.