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Intelligence under the chief of a combined secret service, and what becomes of the authority of the Government of India?’). ‘With all the divers aspects of our present day secret service’, moreover (and using a Gilbert and Sullivan analogy), ‘the head of a combined organisation would have to be more than a Pooh Bah - he would have to be the Lord High Executioner as well.’ While this was a defeat for Sinclair and the Foreign Office, which had championed the single-agency option, the committee commended Sinclair as ‘a zealous, intelligent and exceptionally competent officer’. It recommended ‘that someone, preferably “C”, who has a peculiar flair for such things, should be made responsible for keeping a look-out for a suitable building, or buildings, in the neighbourhood of Whitehall, to which the outlying branches could be transferred’. This, it was believed, would facilitate the closer liaison between SIS, its fellow agencies and customers which everyone thought was desirable. The committee also thought that the ‘relations between what are probably the two most important sections, namely the Secret Intelligence Service and Scotland Yard’, could be improved, and that SS1, the liaison department between Scotland Yard and SIS, should either (like the service ministries) second a representative to work ‘on “C”’s staff’, or ‘transfer itself bodily’ to SIS.31

Sinclair acted swiftly to find a new combined headquarters closer to Whitehall. In the spring of 1926 he moved both SIS and GC&CS into offices in Broadway Buildings, a two-year-old nine-storey office block opposite St James’s Park Underground station, conveniently located between the headquarters of the London Missionary Society and the Old Star and Crown pub. At the end of September 1926, the Passport Control head office moved into 21 Queen Anne’s Gate, adjoining Broadway Buildings, and an internal passageway was constructed linking the two buildings. Since it was ‘essential that the connection between the P.C. Office and the S.I.S. Office be kept secret’, Sinclair instructed that SIS staff should ‘in no circumstances use the Queen Anne’s Gate entrance’. Initially SIS and GC&CS occupied only the third, fourth and fifth floors, though they steadily expanded until, shortly before the Second World War, they took over the whole building.

Sinclair, too, had a flat in Queen Anne’s Gate with a link to SIS so that he could move unobserved between his residence and his office on the fourth floor of Broadway Buildings. Here visitors were required to knock on a hatch, after which they might be admitted to the Chief ’s outer office by one of his secretaries. A green light over the door of the inner office indicated whether Sinclair was engaged or not. For the ordinary visitor, the experience had an ineffable air of mystery. The interwar Chairman of the Conservative Party, J. C. C. Davidson, long afterwards recalled (and perhaps embellished) one such occasion. Sinclair’s secretary, the formidable Miss Pettigrew, had asked him to come to see the Chief. ‘When I enquired how I should come, she told me through the office of the sanitary engineer. I went to that entrance and passed through the rooms with lavatory pans and baths etc., and through a double door.’ Met by Miss Pettigrew, Davidson was ushered ‘into a room that was quite out of this world . . . There was a mother-of-pearl handled pistol on a round table in the middle, a cigar box, a Turkish carpet with so deep a pile that you nearly got lost in it, and a handsome desk behind which sat “C”.’32

Relations with other agencies

One issue which surfaced during the 1925 Secret Service Committee proceedings was that of SIS’s domestic activities. Reinforcing his argument for the creation of a unified secret service, Sinclair told the committee that it was ‘impossible to draw the line between espionage and contre-espionage, for both were concerned solely with foreign activities’. MI5, for example, ‘looked to him to obtain abroad information relating to spies working in the United Kingdom and were then supposed to follow it up in this