Glyndwr’s early life was marked by loss. His father died in 1924, when Glyndwr was fifteen. His mother, Sarah Ann Michael, died in 1940. By the early 1940s, Glyndwr was living in London, part of the large Welsh community that had come to the city in search of work, and he was doing very badly.
The records available about Michael’s later life are sparse, which is not surprising for someone in his circumstances. He was a laborer without steady employment, and the fragmentary documentary record of such a life is not the kind of history that generates extensive paperwork. What is known is that by January 1943 he was homeless or nearly so, surviving on the margins of London during a period when the city was still living with the consequences of the Blitz and facing wartime shortages of food and housing.
He died on January 28, 1943, at St. Pancras Hospital. He was thirty-four years old.
The cause of death is the most uncertain and sensitive aspect of Michael’s story, and it deserves careful handling. The available record indicates that he had consumed phosphorus-based rat poison. Whether this was a deliberate act of self-destruction, an accident related to the desperate circumstances of extreme poverty and hunger, or some combination of circumstances that cannot be reconstructed from this distance, cannot be definitively established.
The guardrails applied to the Operation Mincemeat project explicitly caution against inferring “suicide, accident, private despair, or consent from uncertain circumstances.” This is the right approach. The historical record does not permit a confident reconstruction of what Michael was thinking or what led him to ingest poison. He was in desperate circumstances. Phosphorus rat poison was sometimes consumed by people in extremis, in situations where food was not available and poison might be mixed with something that could be eaten. That is what the available evidence suggests, without pretending to explain the interiority of a man’s last hours.