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had sufficient access to contemplate recruiting a German officer, naval or not. Danish businessmen with reasons to travel to Germany tended to be understandably unwilling to jeopardise their interests by taking more than minimal risks. The traditional Danish neutrality was widely felt to be good for Denmark and vulnerable to German displeasure. Under these circumstances, it was quite creditable that in 1934-7 the station delivered between four and five hundred reports a year, even if most of them were rather run of the mill. But London inevitably wanted more and better information, especially on economic and political matters. In late 1938 Broadway sent Copenhagen the Circulating sections’ collective comments on the station’s recent reporting: no political information of value; ‘slight improvement’ in air reporting; military reporting ‘disappointing’; the ‘location of the German fleet in German harbours efficiently carried out’. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the station’s efforts.

During most of the interwar years, SIS had only a minimal operation in Norway. Between October 1924 and September 1938 there was no full-time representative. For much of this time, indeed, Biffy Dunderdale, while based in Paris, was also nominally head of the Oslo station, though the SIS representative in Stockholm, John Martin, also had a watching brief. In fact, for much of this period quite a lot of local work was handled, and a very productive liaison maintained with the Norwegian authorities, by one of the unsung heroes of the Service, an extremely capable multilingual female secretary. In the late 1930s the likely importance of Norway (especially on the naval side) brought a reinforcement of the station, though this was not initially without difficulties. Late in 1938 Sinclair decided to appoint a permanent representative to Oslo ‘to obtain information on all types of German activities, particularly naval movements, and the reactions of his neighbouring Scandinavian countries thereto’. The individual selected, Lieutenant Commander Joseph Newill, a retired sailor and fluent Norwegian-speaker, was appointed from 1 January 1939. Although he seemed ideally suited for the job, on 8 May he told Rex Howard at Head Office that he was ‘in a constant state of perplexity’, had made no progress since his arrival and wondered ‘whether I shall ever do so. I doubt’, he added, ‘whether I have the natural guile so essential for this work!’ Later the same month John Martin from Stockholm delivered a savagely damning judgment on Newill, whom he rated ‘a complete flop’, ‘never likely to do any good or be of any use’ and ‘should be got rid of ’. Newill had told him that the job was not what he had thought it would be and was ‘far more hard work’ than he was prepared to do. ‘I am 52,’ he had told Martin, ‘and I am not going to work myself to death at my time of life.’ He had, in any case, no need to work, since he had a private income far in excess of his salary (at the time, of course, normally a positive attribute for work in SIS). Being plunged in on his own had clearly unsettled Newill, but he slowly got to grips with the work. When Sinclair sent Frank Foley to Oslo in August 1939 to review the situation there he reported that Newill was ‘a good man in the right place’. And after Foley had been installed at Oslo to oversee all the Scandinavian stations, he was able to manage Newill closely and professionally, so that by October 1939 he was functioning satisfactorily and confidently, especially on the naval reporting and maritime front.

In the 1930s independent Ireland became an intelligence target for SIS. After the separatist nationalist, Eamon de Valera, came to power at the head of a Fianna Fáil government in March 1932, he set about dismantling the remaining links with the British empire, and in the new 1937 constitution abolished the role of the British monarch as head of state. Hesitating to declare Eire a republic, however, he devised the concept of Ireland’s ‘external association’ with the British Commonwealth. The government in London was