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By Root 2569 0

Broadway was overcrowded and scruffy. A secretary who joined in September 1943 thought that, whenever it was that the office had been built (actually in 1924), she did ‘not think it had ever been refurbished, or redecorated’. The floors were ‘covered in worn lino, quite dangerous in places, walls were a mucky grey/ white/cream, and the rooms were lit with bare light bulbs: only senior personnel were allowed to have desk lamps’. The offices were so dark that at the back of the building, which looked into a courtyard, there were what she remembered as ‘long panels of silver painted wood’ placed outside the windows and slanted in order to reflect light in. She herself worked with three other people in a ‘large gloomy room in the front of the building, grottily furnished’. When she first started, her hours were 9.30 to 6.30 six days a week, ‘but we could choose which day of the week we wanted off’, and she was allowed one week’s holiday for every three months worked. A great many of the staff were ‘serving officers who wore uniform (except on a Saturday, when they all wore tweeds)’.

This secretary worked in the Finance Section under Paymaster Sykes, ‘a fearsome gentleman in naval uniform, very deaf ’, and some of her early duties concerned staff salaries, another area where the pressures of war forced rationalisation and change. Before the war the practice in both SIS and MI5 had been for salaries to be paid free of income tax. In his second report on the Secret Service (which focused primarily on MI5) Lord Hankey raised the matter and suggested that, while it was probably unwise to alter the basis of existing salaries, the situation might be regularised for future appointments, with salaries subject to tax. In August 1940 Sir Horace Wilson, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, told Menzies that there was really ‘no option’ but to adopt this proposal. Menzies was appalled, describing it as a ‘drastic change’. Members of SIS, he told Wilson, were ‘just as anxious as anybody else to make their proper contribution to the war expenditure’, but SIS salaries were so comparatively low that in order to make up for the deduction of income tax ‘a very considerable additional payment would be necessary’. It was still the case, moreover, that there was no pension provision for SIS officers. Security was also a consideration. Menzies was concerned that if tax deductions were made from Service salaries, and even if the information was restricted to only a few tax officials, the potential leakage of information about SIS personnel would be ‘deplorable and fraught with the utmost danger’. But the huge expansion of wartime staff, with many individuals being seconded from the armed services, made it difficult to sustain the traditional, idiosyncratic system. The Treasury had their way and from April 1942 all new appointees paid tax. But everyone, even the Chief, was still paid in cash, and the paybooks were all written in pencil, ‘ready to be rubbed out if anyone tried to prove there was an SIS’.

Training and communications

Commander Cohen’s appointment as Chief Staff Officer, Training, in the spring of 1943 marked another move towards professionalisation. The war years saw the beginnings of a more coherent and co-ordinated, if rather modest, training regime. Up to this time, with the exception of codes and signals, training had been decentralised and varied considerably from section to section. The sort of thing that might be done is illustrated by the bespoke training programme Rex Howard devised in summer 1941 for the novelist Graham Greene, due to go to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in November. Greene was detailed to visit Sections I-IV (Political, Air, Naval and Army respectively), V (Counter-espionage) and VI (Economic), who would be asked to describe their work to him, and also their requirements from the West Africa area. Section V would instruct him in the ‘general question of C.E., enemy methods, hints on security and telephones’. Greene would be instructed in codes and wireless procedure. Howard noted that, ‘if possible’, Greene should