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my place.’29 There was never any likelihood of this happening, not least because Mackenzie was appalled at the prospect. At the beginning of 1921 Cumming, evidently with retirement in the not-too-distant future in mind, was worried about the possibility of Kell replacing him, but there appears to have been no serious discussion about the subject until February 1922 when he had a conversation with Nevile Bland about ‘a successor for me’. Bland said that ‘neither D.M. [Desmond Morton] nor S.M. [Stewart Menzies] would be acceptable & thinks a naval man would be preferred anyway’. ‘R.’ (probably Commander E. H. Russell, who worked in the Naval Section in SIS Head Office) was ‘a bit young’ and ‘R.R.S.’ (unidentified) was ‘too old’.

In the end it was to be ‘a naval man’, and some time in late 1922 or early 1923 Rear Admiral Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair was selected to be the second Chief. Writing in January 1923, Cumming told Sir Samuel Hoare that he was pleased Sinclair had been chosen and that he thought him ‘in every way qualified & suitable’ to take over the Service. ‘I feel sure’, he wrote, ‘that in his capable hands this org[anisatio]n will grow to be v. useful – it is not too much to say – essential – to the Govt. Departments we serve.’30 The forty-nine-year-old Sinclair was a career sailor who had been educated at the Britannia Naval College at Dartmouth and entered the navy as a midshipman in 1888. From his service record it is clear that he was an exceptional officer. From the start his ability and professional knowledge were described as ‘very good’. The record is characterised by positive comments: ‘steady and trustworthy’; ‘zealous & capable’; ‘Excellent tact & temper. Very discreet & loyal’; ‘exceptional powers of administration’.31 During the First World War he had served in the Mobilisation Division of the Admiralty and finished up as chief of staff of the battle-cruiser force. In January 1919 he succeeded Blinker Hall as Director of Naval Intelligence, a move which the notoriously hard-to-please Hall warmly welcomed. Hall was ‘delighted’, and told Sinclair that it was ‘not often given to men that they see their job filled by the only man who can do it’.32 He stayed in Naval Intelligence for only eighteen months and in August 1921 was appointed to a three-year stint as ‘Rear Admiral “S”’ (commander of the Submarine Service). This would have taken him to August 1924, but by the late spring of 1923, with Cumming’s health failing, it had evidently been decided that he would take over as Chief of SIS in September that year.33

There is some suggestion that even this timetable might have been accelerated as Frank Stagg recorded a ‘farewell’ dinner for Cumming at about this time. ‘“Blinker”’, he recalled, ‘eulogised him [Cumming] magnificently for his wonderful work. In his reply “C” said “. . . you’ve come to bury ‘C’ Sir – not to praise him”’. Cumming died – ‘suddenly’, according to the death notice in The Times – on 14 June 1923 at 1 Melbury Road, which was both the Service headquarters and his London home. In his autobiography, the journalist and thriller – writer Valentine Williams, whom Cumming had befriended during the war, claimed to have been the last person to see him alive. Hearing that he was retiring and about to leave London, Williams called to return some books he had borrowed and ‘spent the afternoon with him, chatting about old times’. When Williams left at about six o’clock, Cumming was ‘comfortably installed in a corner of the sofa. When his secretary went in to see him soon after she found him dead.’34

The appointment of Hugh Sinclair to head the Secret Service – he actually commenced work on 3 September 1923 – illustrates the extent to which the status of the Service had risen during Cumming’s time as Chief. Far from the Director of Naval Intelligence appointing some evidently junior officer to the post, a former DNI himself took it over. There were other differences, too. Sinclair was socially very well connected (he had been appointed a naval aide-de-camp to the King in February 1920) and, along with