Early life

Born Walter Fleischl von Marxow, he was the second son of Paul Fleischl von Marxow and his wife Cecile (née Levis)^[4] of Shagbrooke, Reigate, Surrey.^[3][5] His father was an Austrian-born woolbroker, brother of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who became a naturalised British citizen in 1887.^[6]

Following education at Charterhouse School and the University of Lausanne, he began training as a manager in the rubber industry.^[3]

World War I

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he entered the British Army, obtaining a commission in the Army Ordnance Department. He served in East Africa, and by the end of the war in 1918 had reached the rank of major.^[3]

Post-WWI

In September 1919 he changed his name by deed poll to Walter Fletcher.^[7] He returned to Africa, where he managed a large number of rubber plantations. He returned to England, where he subsequently became chairman and managing director of Hecht, Levis and Kahn, a major rubber and commodities company. He held the position for thirty years.^[3] In 1928 he married Esme Boyd.^[3]

World War II

In late 1940, Fletcher approached the Special Operations Executive and offers them his speciality, he eventually assigned to the Force 136 and running an operation called Operation Remorse.^[1] Originally it was hoped Fletcher could use his contacts to smuggle rubber out of Japanese-occupied Malaya and Indo-China through the Chinese black market. The operation was diversified to include the smuggling of foreign currency, diamonds and machinery to fund the SOE's activities.^[8][9]

Colin Mackenzie, the head of Force 136 (SOE in the Far East), said of Fletcher, “He did it very well… even in the early days I had £20,000 of diamonds across my desk in one go. One estimate is that the net profit was worth £77 million.”^[10] Mackenzie also commented:

Walter was gloriously fat. It was rumoured that he won the hundred yards at Charterhouse when he was nineteen stone. I didn’t believe it, but when I saw him running for a bus when he was still nineteen stone I began to believe it might be true.

In 1947 Fletcher was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his war service.^[3]