Following up on my comments after Steve’s review of Manning Coles’ No Entry:

   In Drink to Yesterday, as Hambledon and Saunders/Kingston are escaping toward Ostend, they stop to requisition gas and oil from a German depot of some sort. There are some British POWs at the depot making pointed remarks, and one of them refers to Hambledon as a “wee fat man.” Now, he’s dressed as a German major and is probably wearing a greatcoat, so he may not be all that portly, but still…

   Earlier, Saunders describes a non-existent bad guy as someone taller than himself, and says the man was five-eight or five-ten, which would imply that Saunders was of average height; that might make Hambledon sound shorter in the scene described above. But Saunders was impersonating the major’s driver, so he may have been seated the entire time, in which case the POW would not have used him as a reference for Hambledon’s height. Who knows? My guess would be Tommy was about five-seven or five-eight and well-fed; the POWs were pretty skinny, I’d imagine, so anyone who wasn’t in their condition would probably appear heavier than he really was.

   On page 1 of A Toast to Tomorrow Hambledon as Lehman is described as “short and cheerful.” Several pages later, after he’s surfaced to British Intelligence (without identifying his job in Germany) he’s described by the agent he’s put across the Belgian border as “a nondescript little man, grey eyes, rather ginger hair going grey, short but not fat, thin face with duelling scars across his right cheek, quick, energetic walk, rather a pleasant voice, cheerful-looking fellow, looked as though he could see a joke. Short nose, wide mouth, rather thin-lipped, square jaw.” Both those descriptions are in 1933.

   When he is recovering from the near-drowning in hospital in 1918 the doctor thought he was in his late twenties.

   I think that’s as much as we’re gonna get.