Ian Gilmore

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Ian Gilmore was a Royal Air Force officer, climbing up the ranks from officer cadet to Air Vice-Marshal. He was the original leader of the Intrusion Countermeasures Group.

Pure Establishment, he was known for being well trimmed and having no button out of place. His men nicknamed him "Chunky", of which he was aware (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks; AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel, Signs and Wonders) but didn't know why. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)

Biography

He had an aunt named Mrs Connell. (AUDIO: Manhunt)

Sir Charles Waverly, later Commodore, was his commanding officer in Gilmore's cadet days. Gilmore considered them friends and he was "Uncle Ian" to Waverly's daughter, Emma. (AUDIO: Manhunt)

He was once posted in Calcutta, India. (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel) He picked up a taste for the food. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

Official records say Gilmore spent World War II flying missions over enemy territory (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy), though Gilmore claimed in 1965 that he was only in ground operations. In the UK, he was caught in an air raid. (AUDIO: The Concrete Cage) In the Battle of Arnhem, his group were stranded on a bridge and only Gilmore and his friend Tom Carver survived. (AUDIO: Threshold) In 1945 he witnessing the bombing of Dresden by the Allies on one occasion and he would later have to push that to the back of his mind. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) In the early 1960s, he could be driven to anger when people made light of the war. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

Following the war, Squadron Leader Gilmore was part of the Berlin Airlift and remained in the city for a time afterwards: he believed it was his duty to help rebuild the city and help the civilian population. In 1950, he befriended a Czech medic named Nadia Červenka, who helped some of his men in an unspecified way. They shared several drinks as well as rations, and Gilmore fell in love and made romantic overtures. Due to the increasingly contentious Cold War, the relationship was stillborn. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

During his career, Gilmore once told an Air Vice-Marshal he keep a medal “and I’ll tell you where you can pin it”. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

As a result of his time in Berlin, he had what he described as a "smattering" of German. (AUDIO: Unto the Breach)

In 1961, Group-Captain Gilmore was seconded from the RAF Regiment to head up the new Intrusion Countermeasures Group (ICMG) (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy), a counter-insurgency group that he had proposed. (AUDIO: Threshold)

In November 1963, he was in charge of a company of infantrymen drafted from the RAF Regiment and the drafted scientists Professor Rachel Jensen and Allison Williams. As ICMG leader, he was the nominal commander during the Shoreditch Incident of the same year, but was out of his depth and ended up subordinate to the Seventh Doctor. Initially, he didn't believe he was fighting aliens. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)

Despite their success in the Shoreditch Incident, Counter-Measures still had funding issues and its men were often 'loaned' to other departments; Gilmore complained about this to Sir Toby Kinsella, Counter-Measures' benefactor. At the end of the month, he was asked to attend a briefing on the Starfire missile project by John Rutherford MP and witnessed the assassination of the Defence Secretary, leading to Sir Toby ordering Counter-Measures to find out who did it. An alien infiltration was uncovered and stopped before it could carry out the nuclear genocide of the US and USSR. Rutherford turned out to the Doctor, moonlighting as an MP after finding information in Gilmore's future memoirs; Gilmore was baffled by all the time-travel talk but the end result was "Rutherford" proposed a funding bill for Counter-Measures. During the operation, Gilmore expressed concern for Alison Williams being sent undercover. (AUDIO: 1963: The Assassination Games (audio story))

After Rachel worked with Counter-Measures once again as a consultant, she accepted the offer of Sir Toby to join the organisation permanently on the condition that she was supplied with the facilities to continue her research into artificial intelligence on site and that she would replace Gilmore as its leader. However, she assured him that she would defer to his judgement in all matters of security. (AUDIO: Threshold) While Gilmore was initially bitter that Rachel had replaced him, he eventually came to respect her not only as a scientist but as his superior officer as well. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

Gilmore was not fond of Allison's psychologist boyfriend and eventual fiancé Julian St. Stephen on either a personal or a professional level. To that end, he was contemptuous of the science of psychology, claiming that it involved nothing more than getting people to talk about their feelings and their mothers at length. He told Julian that he had several elderly aunts that spent most of their time doing the same thing. Due in part to his anti-military views, Julian did not have a particularly high opinion of Gilmore either, remarking to Allison that the Group Captain was so buttoned up that he was surprised that he could fit his head through his collar. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

Červenka had come from Czechoslovakia to the United Kingdom in 1958, and Gilmore was reunited with her at the Sen-Gen Facility in 1964. She was being driven mad by the Sen-Gen computer and Gilmore, realising something was wrong, tried to convince her that she could come to him; the two still had feelings for each other. Unfortunately, she was killed after Sen-Gen drove project leader Jeffrey Broderick into a paranoid frenzy. (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)

During General Peters' coup against the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Gilmore and his old RAF Regiment unit were moved to other duties: the first sign for him that something bad was expected in London. Sir Toby convinced Peters that Gilmore would be sympathetic to the coup, ensuring that he and his men were securing 10 Downing Street. Instead, as Sir Toby planned, Gilmore was shocked to learn about the coup and helped stop it, saving Wilson in the process. (AUDIO: State of Emergency)

To his surprise and outrage, in 1965 he found Waverly was briefing against him (and secretly altering Gilmore's records) in order to take over Countermeasures. The two had public arguments and when Waverly was found dead, Gilmore was suspected. Sir Toby helped him remain on the run for the week to gather evidence. To Gilmore's horror, it turned out that Emma Waverly had been genetically engineered (and able to swap gender) as a super-soldier by her father - Catherine Waverly was the killer, after learning this. Gilmore was further distraught when Catherine allegedly committed suicide. (AUDIO: Manhunt)

In 1965, Gilmore and Rachel had dinner together but she claimed that it was "perfectly professional." (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel) Later that year, Gilmore invited Rachel to have dinner with him at an Indian restaurant and told her that he wanted to start a romantic relationship with her. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

His ICMG codename was "Raven". (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

In 1965, Allison described Gilmore as "solid as a rock, very capable". (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)

Following the disbanding of Counter-Measures in the late 1960s, Gilmore campaigned for a replacement group with greater facilities and a permanent rapid-reaction capability. His efforts proved unsuccessful. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) This led him into contact with Major General Oliver Hamilton, who was of a like-mind. They began making plans to resurrect the Home-Army Operational Corps. But they needed to bide their time, until the right leader presented himself. (PROSE: The Dogs of War)

By 1969 he was an Air Vice-Marshal and member of the Alexander Club. Following the London Incident, he met with Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, at the behest of General Hamilton, at the club and informed him of the Shoreditch Incident. Lethbridge-Stewart was the man they wanted to head the new Home-Army Operational Corps, but first the colonel needed to read several top secret files. (PROSE: Downtime, PROSE: The Dogs of War) He later suggested the Colonel for the head of the British branch of UNIT. (PROSE: The Scales of Injustice) He told Mike Yates' captain in the 1970s that the Brigadier was a good man. (AUDIO: Foreshadowing)

He eventually published his memoirs. A copy of them was found by the Seventh Doctor and Ace in a bookshop in London in 2013. Ace looked herself up in the index and discovered references to two encounters with her. The first alluded to the Shoreditch Incident while the second took place at the time of the Starfire Incident in November 1963. Gilmore was very vague about the circumstances of the latter, though he did mention that the Doctor saved on his life on that occasion. (AUDIO: 1963: The Assassination Games)

Ranks

There's a minor continuity error in that Left-Handed Hummingbird has him as Air Commodore after UNIT is formed and Downtime has him as Air Vice-Marshal before.

Behind the scenes

  • The nickname of "Chunky" started as a cast in-joke: the script had talked about "his chunky service revolver", causing the cast to say to Simon Williams "to get out my chunky, show them my chunky.... I became known as Chunky in rehearsals". This leaked into the finished episode with no explanation of where the nickname came from. "Viewers must have imagined that Gilmore used to be a very fat man or rather well endowed." (Doctor Who Magazine #299)
  • Gilmore's exact role in World War 2 is unstated. Flying across enemy territory and witnessing Dresden (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) would imply Bomber Command. The Counter-Measures audios instead have Gilmore say he only handled ground operations (AUDIO: The Concrete Cage), while AUDIO: Threshold implies he was fighting on the ground at Arnhem (this may be an error).
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