Colin Hercules Mackenzie Colin Hercules Mackenzie , CMG ( 1898 - 1986 ) , scholar , soldier , industrialist and aesthete , was a Special Operations Executive spymaster who led Force 136 throughout the period of its existence during the Second World War . Origins . Mackenzie was the son of Major - General Sir Colin John Mackenzie and Ethel , the daughter of Hercules Grey Ross ICS and granddaughter of the sportsman and photographer , Horatio Ross . Of Scottish ancestry on both sides of his family , he had the peripatetic childhood typical of many children of British Army officers . Education . Having attended first Summer Fields and then Eton ( as a King ' s Scholar ) , Mackenzie was commissioned into the Scots Guards and was badly wounded at the very end of the First World War , undergoing a series of amputations of his leg in an ultimately successful battle against gangrene . Following the war , Mackenzie went up to King ' s College , Cambridge . On informing the Provost that he had forgotten his Latin and proposed to read English , Mackenzie was told that " English is a grubby subject " and elected instead to read Economics . His tutor was John Maynard Keynes and he graduated with a first - class degree , having also won the Chancellor ' s Medal for English Verse . He later maintained that Keynes ' s most useful advice to him had been : " If a book is worth buying at all , it is worth buying in red Morocco . " Between the wars . After Cambridge , Mackenzie worked for J . and P . Coats in Glasgow . He became a director and played a leading part in the company ' s global expansion , in particular into South America . In the 1920s he had an intense epistolary relationship with the writer Iris Origo Spymaster . During the Second World War , at the suggestion of his friend Lord Linlithgow , Mackenzie was appointed to set up a Far Eastern mission for Special Operations Executive , which became known in due course as Force 136 . Unusually for senior SOE personnel , he remained in his post to the end of the war , despite the numerous political and other challenges that he faced . An official SOE report in 1944 recorded that : " No one can visit India without being impressed by Colin Mackenzie ; by his exceptional grip on the working and personnel of his group ; by his capacity to simplify and without delay go to the root of any problem ; and by his remarkable sense of timing and diplomacy . The high regard in which he is held in SEAC , in GHQ India and in the Viceroy ' s Department is obvious . Not less impressive is the respect which all members of his group , scattered as it is all over India and China , have for his judgement ; the faith they have in his capacity to produce the right solution for all problems ; and the personal affection in which he is held . " By the end of the war , Mackenzie ' s command had expanded to the extent that he was responsible for 33 , 000 agents and auxiliaries in South East Asia Later years . After the war , Mackenzie was appointed to head the Economic Mission to Greece , but was prevented by ill health from taking up his post . He returned to J . and P . Coats , until retiring to the Isle of Skye Mackenzie , a knowledgeable collector of books , also served as Chairman of the Scottish committee of the Arts Council , in which capacity he did much to encourage the creation of the Scottish Ballet . Family . In 1940 , Mackenzie married Evelyn Clodagh Meade ( 1916 - 2001 ) , the daughter of Charles Francis Meade and Aileen Hilda Brodrick . They had one daughter .