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 Counter-Measures 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[]
Early life[]
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)
As a lieutenant in 1940, he was terrified during a massive German bombing raid. After the base landline was cut, he spent the night with WAAF Operator Rachel Jensen. The next morning, he was transferred to Scotland for training command. Since then, he would have recurring bouts of fear that he covered up with his uniform and bearing. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks)
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 unit was 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)
Gilmore was wounded in his last raid, after his plane was shot down. He would later marry his nurse, Edith. He would have recurring nightmares and flashbacks to his last mission. (PROSE: Birds of Passage)
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)
His marriage to Edith broke down, in part due to his war trauma and in larger part because he still had lingering feelings for Rachel Jensen. Years later, Rachel would assume Gilmore's night terrors were because Edith hadn't done enough to help him. (PROSE: Birds of Passage)
Counter-Measures[]
According to one account, in 1961, Group-Captain Gilmore was seconded from the RAF Regiment to head up the new Intrusion Counter-Measures Group (ICMG) (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy), a counter-insurgency group that he had proposed. (AUDIO: Threshold) According to another, the ICMG was set up by High Command in 1963 following a series of strange events (such as the disappearance of two teachers from Coal Hill School), and immediately tasked with monitoring Shoreditch. (PROSE: The Shoreditch Incident)
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. It wasn't until he was shown conclusive proof he began to accept the reality of the situation, though he knew very little about the Doctor's plans or what the Daleks were fighting over. (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 be 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)
He was sent to Bermondsey to find out what had happened to Heinrich Schumann. 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)
He posed as Alison and Rachel's driver when they went undercover to Pelage. He almost ran over Billy McGuinness outside. He noticed that Pelage had quadrupled in size since his aerial photographs where taken. He helped Alison to sneak about the complex. He had to defend the team when Ken Temple ordered his workforce to attack them. (AUDIO: The Pelage Project)
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 Counter-Measures. 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)
Kinsella sent him and Alison to a graveyard at night. After exploring the crypt they realised there was a radiation leak. After being taken to a military hospital, he was dealing with radiation sickness. He thought that there was a nuclear reactor under London. Alison and him escaped the hospital to try to find Kinsella and Jenson. They got to the tube station they were found by a set of troops. (AUDIO: The Fifth Citadel)
He was interested when they came to Amsterdam to collect a psychic defector. He started to argue with Kinsella about minute things. On their way back the psychic aura caused the plane to crash, luckily Gilmore and his colleagues survived, because of his attempts to land the plane. He was given orders to shoot Anya Barkov. (AUDIO: Peshka)
Rachel convinced Gilmore to join her on a private investigation into Emma Waverly's death. He later staked out Father Ellard's church for information. He spotted Ray Cleaver leaving the church and Kinsella entering the vicarage. He went into the vicarage to warn Cleaver and Kinsella about the troops which are coming. He followed Kinsella into a medical facility to try and deal with Cleaver. (AUDIO: Sins of the Fathers)
He drove Kinsella to his hearing about the his involving the Wilcock affair. He wasn't called to give his testimony of the events which occurred. He was dismissed for insubordination by Templeton. He told Rachel about some of Templeton's orders and Rachel ordered him to find Alison. He convinced all of the soldiers to help him to do this regardless of the consequences. (AUDIO: Changing of the Guard)
He went through the official documents of a new social housing estate to find out why weird things were happening at. He realised that there was some correlation between the full moon and the accidents. Staying with Rachel, he hallucinated with her about the blitz bombing of the area. He realised that Jefferies was murdered and not killed in the fire. When Rachel ran into the building Guilmore went after her and experienced the air raid again. He worked out that there was a bomb there which could go of at any moment. (AUDIO: The Concrete Cage)
His dinner was interrupted with Rachel by one of his men telling her that Alison needed her at her parents. Kinsella told him to quarantine Alison's home village of Lower Burford because of what he had heard in a ministerial briefing. His ICMG codename was "Raven". He was on the outskirts of the village maintaining the perimeter when Curtis. He managed to break into a foreign signal which was talking in code. He rescued Alison and Rachel from being hostages of a Soviet spy. (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)
In 1965, Allison described Gilmore as "solid as a rock, very capable". (AUDIO: The Forgotten Village)
Kinsella told him to go with Rachel to East Berlin to capture an alien. He posed as a married couple with Rachel as his cover story. Passing through checkpoint charlie he was captured, but this was a ruse by Klaus Werner. Later after walking around with Rachel his papers were searched. Kinsella told him that they were being played by Maria Jager and that Rachel was being controlled. He was arrested on the boarder. (AUDIO: Unto the Breach)
He was placed in a military prison with Kinsella (AUDIO: New Horizons) He planned a way to escape from his prison. He attacked Jeffrey Broderick in the showers as part of the plan. (AUDIO: The Keep)
He went to Battersea Power Station to investigate what the Light Sleepers were planning there, but were stopped by some military personnel. He travelled with the rest of the team to the British Rocket Group in order to stop Keith Kordel from launching some rockets that would release some pathogens. (AUDIO: Rise and Shine)
He helped Rachel and Alison escape the Counter-Measures base. He then had to serve as their Valet at an Oxford College. Kinsella asked him to keep tabs on Heaton. After Rachel's cover was blown she was relocated. He later saved Hilary was being killed by Parks. Parks later nearly dragged Gilmore with him when he fell out of a window. He was apparently involved in a car accident. (AUDIO: Clean Sweep)
In 1965, to escape retribution from the Light, Gilmore's death was faked and he went undercover as an airline pilot called Captain Philip Benson. (AUDIO: Who Killed Toby Kinsella?)
In 1967, Gilmore reunited with the Seventh Doctor and Ace to help thwart a Markarian plot in Australia. When storming the compound with which the criminal Markarians intended to nuke Earth with, Gilmore was trapped aboard a spacecraft. Put in suspended animation by his Markarian ally, Gilmore remained in orbit until 2029 where he was recovered by astronauts before the Doctor arrived to take him back home. (COMIC: Operation Volcano)
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) He considered Counter-Measures to have not been the right model: he felt it had been "corrupted" by government influences and had never really believed the military should take a back seat to science when facing aliens. 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, member of the Alexander Club, and had married Rachel Jensen. 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. As with Hamilton, he felt Britain should have its own defence first rather than make a global group (a view Lethbridge-Stewart disagreed with) and he was concerned that the Vault and similar groups were stockpiling alien technology outside of the government. He used the files and Lethbridge-Stewart as bait to draw out the Vault's agents and locate one of its Citadel bunkers. This led to Gilmore joining Lethbridge-Stewart in a flight through the London Underground, pursued by a Robot Yeti under Vault control, before capturing the base. (PROSE: Downtime, PROSE: The Dogs of War)
When UNIT was eventually formed, Gilmore suggested Lethbridge-Stewart for the head of the British branch. (PROSE: The Scales of Injustice) He told Mike Yates' captain in the 1970s that the Brigadier was a good man. (AUDIO: Foreshadowing)
New Counter-Measures[]
On Christmas 1973, the Light was exterminated but this apparently resulted in Kinsella's death. Upon hearing the death of Kinsella he got back into contact with Jenson. Before Kinsella's final attempt on the Light, he told Gilmore of his plans. After the funeral, Routledge told him more about Kinsella's connections with Hassan Al-Nadyr. (AUDIO: Who Killed Toby Kinsella?)
He went to the prince's hotel to warn him about an assassination attempt. He then planned a way to get Mikhail out in the open to arrested him. As he was working for the prince he was afford diplomatic immunity. Kinsella told him that he was resurrecting Counter-Measures. (AUDIO: The Dead Don't Rise)
He was sent on a mission to smoke out Edwige Ponzi by joining Balthazar Schrek's team as a hire goon. He started to worry that Schrek might start to explode. He shot an innocent guard which was against his normal ideals. He wanted to shoot Rachel in his dazed fate before he snapped out of it. He then raced after Schrek and arrested him. (AUDIO: Nothing to See Here)
He didn't trust Machado. He found it disheartening when Rachel and Alison joked about his apparent lack of knowledge. He told his crew to expect corpses. Upon exploring the submarine, he started to be glad that he was part of the RAF and not the Navy. He started to hear voices. Alex told him to learn how to launch the nuclear weapons. He didn't launch the nuclear weapons but instead launched the torpedoes and aimed them on the sub. (AUDIO: Troubled Waters)
He liked the new offices they had at the Post Office Tower. He informed the team about the call Abrams gave to them about the flocks of birds that were attacking people. He helped to distract a guard so that Rachel could meet Starling. They were attacked by pigeons in the Counter-Measures office. He had to help Allison rescue twelve tourists from a flock of peregrine falcons. Using riot police he managed to get them out. (AUDIO: The Phoenix Strain)
On a mission to Monte Carlo he posed as Rachel's chauffeur. He was tasked with spying on Gus Kalwarowsky and Suzanne Clare's meeting at a warehouse. On his stakeout he witnessed the event which sent Gus back in time. Clare gave him an ultimatum to save his colleagues. He used Jenson's adaptation of Ponzi's technology to capture Clare. (AUDIO: A Gamble With Time)
Whilst questioning Henry Cording, he had to stop him from being attacked by an unknown assailant and had to keep guard over him. He wanted to know what Henry meant to Rachel. He realised that the attacker was Javier Santos. He stayed with Cording at the safe house until he was murdered. Following the solving of the case he wanted to bring back a straw donkey for his niece. (AUDIO: The Splintered Man)
He worked out that they had for some reason that he and Kinsella were on a boat. He thought something was odd and try to stop a women be arrested. He was placed in the brig. After being released he helped Allison to break into the crews quarters to get information on what was happening. He was arrested and Dimitri Papkin tried to use him as an experimental subject. (AUDIO: The Ship of the Sleepwalkers)
He was sent on a mission to a Punk rock nightclub but this was halted due to an intervention of Suzanne Clare. He was concerned when he couldn't get any of the systems to work. He made friends with Bernard at the nightclub and made a deal with him. Back at the Post Office Tower he revealed that Bernard's people would take both Clare and August Frazer and place them in one of there studying machines. (AUDIO: My Enemy's Enemy)
He investigate a break in to a electronics firm. Later, Gilmore and Rachel found some strange footprints in Hyde Park. Later he went Yeti hunting in the park. He went with Gilmore to investigate a potential construction site for the Yeti. At this site he saw Yeti constructing more Yeti and wanted to get more troops to shut it down. Rachel and Gilmore were persued. Gilmore started an electrical fire at the construction site. (AUDIO: Time of the Intelligence)
He thought that Cavall might be conning the gentry out of money. He managed to talk to Cavall with his knowledge of aircraft but he saw right through this. With this he and Toby went to investigate the helicopter. Investigating he found a strange mushroom creature. Cook told him and Kinsella of the truth that everyone was controlled by the mushroom. (AUDIO: The Hollow King)
Toby brought his team together to investigate the Robo-Helper 2000 learning it was developed by an escaped Lady Clare. He was very cautious that the Robo-helper was a weapon. He helped Rachel to stake out Clare Industries factory. He kidnapped Clare thinking she was doing something wrong. He though that Clare was hiding something. He called in the troops to deal with the Movellan invasion. He went with Clare to find a way to rescue Rachel. (AUDIO: The Movellan Manoeuvre)
Rachel and Gilmore went to talk to those who had helped Clare create the robots but found him dead. They later found a Dalek was doing all the killings. Trying to learn more about the Movellans, Gilmore and Allison became caught in the fire between a Dalek Squad and the Movellans. They were both abducted in the skirmish, waking up in a Dalek ship. The Daleks interrogated Ian and Rachel about what the Movellans and learnt that they planned to destroy the Earth. After getting a message out to his colleagues, a Dalek suffocated him but didn't kill him. He used his coat to impair the Daleks sight. He was distraught after Rachel being caught in the explosion of the Dalek bomb. (AUDIO: The Dalek Gambit)
The late 70s[]
From some accounts, Counter-Measures had been closed down in the 1960s and Vice Marshall Gilmore had settled into middle aged retirement, married Rachel, and had a son named Dillon. After the Auderly House Accords let to defence cuts, Gilmore lost his position with the RAF and took a consultancy job with Woden Armaments. He had tired of the job by 1975, viewing his young co-workers as callow, bored of pushing paper, and unhappy that Woden was both selling to Saudi Arabia and appointing the reactionary MP Harry Whateley to the board. Gilmore was unsure how he felt about the Hong Konger immigration to the UK after the Accords.
After the Saudi deal, Defence Secretary Kofi Bambera recruited Gilmore to be a spy within Woden and investigate it for corruption. Later, Bambera would say Gilmore had been extremely glad to be given the mission and get out from a desk. After two months, Gilmore was brought in by Bambera and MI6 aagent Alex Stanhope and informed that Woden-built Cerberus laser satellites had been hijacked and a Soviet defector, Yuri Gorkovich, had proof his wife's research had reached Moscow. He was drafted back into the RAF by Bambera under the Defence of the Realm Act, assigned to BRIXMIS check in East Berlin to extradite Gorkovich. Stanhope assigned agent Hannah Gordon as Gilmore's minder. While in West Berlin, Gilmore and Gordon found proof Whateley was an agent for the Soviet's GRU.
Gilmore, Stanhope, and Gordon were able to extradite Gorkovich under fire from East German soldiers and the GRU, and Gilmore piloted an old RAF Chipmunk plane out of East Germany and back into British airspace. However, Stanhope was part of Whateley's plot and killed Gorkovich and Gordon to cover the MP's involvement up; Gilmore had to flee for his life and was framed for the murders. He took refuge with his ex-wife Edith before making contact with Bambera. The Defence Secretary revealed Woden had been dirtier for longer than he'd told Gilmore and likely part of an association before he was wounded by an assassin. Gilmore and Bambera were saved by Rachel Jensen and Major William Bishop, who were trying to oppose Woden's hijacking of the Cerberus system.
Gilmore and his wife led a team of former Home-Army Fifth Operational Corps men that Bishop had organised, and led them against a Soviet force that were trying to abduct Allison Williams and Judith Winters from Scapa Flow. Gilmore shot Woden's man Hemmings. Having neutralised the control of Cerberus, Gilmore went on to pass the proof of Whateley's treason to the journalist Jack Bannerton. (PROSE: Birds of Passage)
Later life[]
Gilmore would lecture a class at Sandhurst that Winifred Bambera was in, telling the officer cadets to keep an open mind. (PROSE: Battlefield)
Gilmore 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 his life on that occasion. (AUDIO: 1963: The Assassination Games)
Ranks[]
During his career, Gilmore was an officer cadet, (AUDIO: Manhunt) Squadron Leader, (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence) Group Captain, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) Air Commodore, (PROSE: The Left-Handed Hummingbird) and Air Vice-Marshal. (PROSE: Downtime, PROSE: The Dogs of War)
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)
- There is 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.
- Gilmore's exact role in World War II differs in stories. The Remembrance novelisation has him working as ground crew in an RAF base under attack. Flying across enemy territory and witnessing Dresden in PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy implies he was in Bomber Command, which was picked up in PROSE: Birds of Passage. 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.
- Tom Adams, Nicholas Ball, Tom Chadbon, Michael Cochrane, Lewis Collins, Del Henney, Ian Ogilvy, Tim Pigott-Smith, Neil Stacy, Simon Ward and James Warwick were considered for the role before Simon Williams was cast.
