The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [102]
In addition to the cadre of long-serving Head Office staff, recruited during the war or shortly afterwards, a significant number of overseas representatives, who joined at much the same time, also had lengthy careers in the Service. One such was Major (later Colonel) Valentine Vivian - widely known in SIS by his initials, ‘V.V.’, and sometimes as ‘Val’. Vivian, born in 1886, son of the successful portrait painter Comley Vivian, was educated at St Paul’s School, where he was a classical scholar. Although he apparently had ambitions to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1906 he joined the Indian Police, rising by 1914 to be assistant director of the criminal intelligence department. After war service with the Indian Army in the Middle East he became Indian Political Intelligence’s representative in (and later headed) the jointly funded MI1(c)/IPI Constantinople operation. By the spring of 1922, when the Indian government wanted to recall Vivian to India, Eyre Crowe of the Foreign Office declared that ‘the utility of the existing organisation in Constantinople depended very much on its chief’.28 Vivian came to Head Office in London for the first six months of 1923 before going abroad again, to the British army of occupation in Germany. He spent the rest of his working life in SIS, rising to be Deputy Chief and not retiring until well after the Second World War. Knowledgeable, thoughtful and personally kind, towards the end of his career he acquired a reputation for ineffectual fastidiousness.
The importance of individuals, and their personalities, was accentuated by the smallness of the Service. In the autumn of 1919, Head Office had fewer than fifty staff, while overseas there were seventy-two officers and an indeterminate number of support staff. By 1923, successive budget cuts had had their effect. At home there were sixteen officers, thirty secretaries (all female) and twenty weekly paid staff, including drivers, ‘chars’ (charwomen – that is, cleaners), messengers and (a typical Cumming requirement) one ‘car washer’. No provision is made for technical and scientific staff in the surviving account books for 1921-3, although in July 1919 Cumming took on a Dr S. Dawson ‘as chemist’, and renewed his contract (at a slightly reduced level) in July 1921. It seems that, at this stage, scientific assistance was provided on a consultancy basis. In any case, SIS could also call for assistance from the technical branches of the armed services. Abroad, there were forty-eight officers and clerks (distributed among thirty-three stations) and approximately seventy-seven ancillary staff. These figures, of course, did not include agents. In the 1920s the British Secret Service, with a worldwide remit, had a total complement of fewer than two hundred people, sixty-odd at home and approximately twice that number abroad.
From Cumming to Sinclair
The travails of the immediate postwar years (not to mention those of the war itself) seem to have taken a considerable physical toll on Cumming. According to Frank Stagg, he became a ‘martyr to angina’, and, fifty-nine years old at the end of the war, clearly could not go on for ever. In the autumn of 1919, though he had ‘no intention of retiring’ unless he was ‘asked to do so’, he raised the question of his pension with Lord Hardinge at the Foreign Office. Although he had the substantive rank of a naval captain, neither his time on boom defence nor his years as Chief of the Secret Service counted towards his pension, and so the Foreign Secretary approved the purchase out of public funds of an annuity to make up his prospective pension to that of a captain. Prepared to retire or not, there is some evidence that Cumming had thought about the future. Compton Mackenzie claimed that when he returned to London in 1917 Cumming had proposed that Mackenzie come to Head Office as his number two. ‘I’ll go through the war,’ he allegedly told Mackenzie, ‘and I’ll stick on for a couple of years after it’s over, and when I go you’ll step into