Hambledon is a teacher in a British boarding school in his first appearance in
Drink to Yesterday (1940) and, during school holidays, a spy in
Germany for the
Foreign Office. At the end of this book, which takes place in
World War I and in which he is known only as Tommy Hambledon, he disappears at sea and is presumed dead. He reappears as the hero of the next book,
Pray Silence (1940) (known in the U.S. by the title
Toast to Tomorrow), which begins in the 1920s. He is an amnesiac in Germany who gradually works his way up in the fledgling
Nazi Party until, in 1933, he becomes
Hitler's Chief of Police. He recovers his memory on the night of the Reichstag fire, and thereafter battles to defeat Hitler and his plans. His full name is revealed to be Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon. At the end of the book he fakes his own death in Danzig (Hitler himself delivers the eulogy at his 'funeral') and stows away with his colleague, Alfred Reck, on a British cargo ship bound for Cardiff. On their return to Britain he and Reck are faced with the problem of a series of unexplained sinkings of ships not long out of harbour in Portsmouth in
They Tell No Tales (1941). In
Green Hazard (1945) the Gestapo mistake him for Professor Ulseth, inventor of a new and extremely powerful high explosive, and kidnap him. He then finds himself once again in Berlin where he has to fool his 'hosts' into believing that he actually knows something about chemistry whilst praying that they will fail to recognise a former colleague. After
World War II, he continues his career in the Foreign Office and helps defeat a number of
Communist plots. In these later adventures, he is frequently aided by Forgan and Campbell, a semi-comic team of
model-makers from the
Clerkenwell Road in
London, who first appear in
A Brother for Hugh (1947). In this and some other of Manning Coles' subsequent novels Hambledon actually occupies quite a minor role — in
The Man in the Green Hat (1955) he hardly appears at all in the first half of the book. Hambledon is thought to have been based by Coles on a former teacher of his. He eventually became the youngest officer in British intelligence, often working behind German lines, due to his extraordinary ability to master languages. Cyril Coles himself was a model maker and was, at the time of his death, building a train set from scratch for his young grandson. ==In popular culture==