The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [11]
Sorting out practicalities
The selection of Mansfield Cumming (he tended not to use the ‘Smith’) as the Admiralty’s nominee for the new Bureau was a classic and pioneering example of the informal way in which for a long time the Secret Intelligence Service treated the important subject of recruitment. The fifty-year-old Cumming (born on 1 April 1859) had no apparent intelligence experience. Unlike the War Office’s nominee, Vernon Kell (who, in fact, was to take over the domestic side of things), he was not a linguist, and it is not at all clear what ‘special qualifications’ Cumming actually possessed for the work, nor do we know if he was the only candidate considered.
Cumming, whose original name was Mansfield George Smith, came from a moderately prosperous landed and professional family (his father was a distinguished engineer) and entered the navy after going to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, at the age of twelve in 1872. He enjoyed an apparently successful, but not especially outstanding, career at sea and in various shore appointments (including a spell at the Royal Naval College Greenwich at the same time as the future King George V), before retiring in December 1885 ‘on Active Half Pay’ due to unspecified ill-health. Over the next decade or so he worked as private secretary to the Earl of Meath, serving for a time as his agent in Ireland. During these years he married twice: first in 1885 to a South African, Dora Cloete, who died in 1887, and secondly to May Cumming (when he adopted her family name), an independently wealthy woman whose family had estates in Morayshire, Scotland. In April 1898 he returned to the navy to ‘superintend the working of the Boom defence at Southampton’. Cumming was a practical man, much enthused by the latest mechanical devices. A keen pioneer motorist, and a hair-raisingly fast driver, he joined the Royal Automobile Club in 1902, and three years later was a founder member (and first Rear Commodore) of its offshoot the Motor Yacht Club (also ‘Royal’ from 1910). In 1906 he was a founder member of the Royal Aero Club, acquiring a pilot’s licence at the age of fifty-four in November 1913.7
There are some hints that Cumming’s involvement with motor-yachting (which he shared with many other naval officers) may have helped put him in the frame for the new venture. In the early years of the century the Admiralty, intensely interested in the potential of new types of marine engines, was kept fully informed about the activities of the Motor Yacht Club, which ran international racing competitions and encouraged the development of high-performance motor boats. Its concern was by no means confined to British developments. According to the memoirs of another motor-yachting pioneer, Montague Grahame-White, in the spring of 1905 Cumming was sent ‘on a tour to study the development of motor propulsion in fishing fleets in Sweden and Holland’, in order to ascertain ‘the reliability of internal combustion engines running on paraffin’. 8 Perhaps referring to this mission, Cumming wrote in his diary in late October 1909 that he would ‘like to get in touch with certain Danes and Swedes - with some of whom I made acquaintance when sent abroad recently by the F.O. [Foreign Office] in connection with Marine Motors’.
With his infectious enthusiasm for high-powered cars and motor boats, Mansfield Cumming was celebrated as a pioneer in ‘motorism’.
So it was that by the time he was selected for his new job, he appears to have had some experience of information-gathering abroad. All we know for certain, however, is that a month after the Committee of Imperial Defence sub-committee agreed on the formation