Ian Gilmore was a Royal Air Force officer.
Biography
During World War II, Ian flew missions over enemy territory, witnessing the bombing of Dresden by the Allies on one occasion. He would later have to push that to the back of his mind. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) In the Battle of Arnhem, his unit were stranded on a bridge and only Gilmore and his friend Tom Carver survived. (AUDIO: Threshold) 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)
In 1961, he was chosen to head up the new Intrusion Countermeasures Group (ICMG), (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) a counter-insurgency group he'd proposed. (AUDIO: Threshold)
In November 1963, he was Group Captain for a company of infantrymen drafted from the RAF Regiment. As Group Captain and 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. He was assisted by Professor Rachel Jensen and Allison Williams. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
After Rachel worked with Counter-Measures once again as a consultant, she accepted the offer of Sir Toby Kinsella 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)
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)
Following the London Incident, he met with Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and informed him of the Shoreditch Incident. (PROSE: Downtime) He later suggested the Colonel for the head of the British branch of UNIT. (PROSE: The Scales of Injustice)
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
- Squadron Leader (AUDIO: Artificial Intelligence)
- Group Captain (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
- Air Commodore (PROSE: The Left-Handed Hummingbird)
- Air Vice-Marshall (PROSE: Downtime)
