The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [29]
The wartime situation of Cumming’s organisation involved not just the allocation of duties between the War Office and the Admiralty (not to mention the Foreign Office), but also the question of how it would relate to George Macdonogh’s new intelligence branch at GHQ in France, as well as any future liaison with Britain’s French, Belgian and Russian allies. During the first two months of the war Cumming made three trips to the Continent, each time taking his own car, which had to be hoisted on and off the cross-Channel ferry. He went to Brussels on 15 August following an angry complaint from Colonel Fairholme, the British military attaché, to the Foreign Office about Cumming’s man Henry Dale Long, who had ‘made a fool of himself over a “suspect” cyclist’. Here was another potential problem of line-crossing, between the more overt intelligence duties of a military attaché (enhanced by the fact that Britain and Belgium were now wartime allies) and those of the Secret Service. While in Belgium, Cumming and a colleague drove south-east from Brussels towards Wavre where they found the Belgians ‘throwing up entrenchments against expected attack’, and German Uhlans (cavalry) were reported to be in woods close by. Driving on towards Namur, they were turned back by French troops who ‘thought we were TR [German] spies’. At the end of August Cumming motored to Paris for talks with Colonel Wallner and other French Deuxième Bureau officers. At lunch in the Hôtel Grande Bretagne Cumming met an American journalist. Never one to miss an intelligence-gathering opportunity, he offered him $6 a week for German news, but made ‘no arrangement for transmission’.
At the end of September Cumming travelled over to France to consult with Macdonogh. At about nine o’clock in the evening on Friday 2 October, motoring east of Paris in country through which the British Expeditionary Force had passed at the beginning of September on the ‘retreat from Mons’ (before subsequently fighting its way back north), Cumming suffered a serious accident in which his twenty-four-year-old only son, Alistair, was killed and Cumming badly hurt. A telegram from France conveyed the news to May Cumming: ‘Deeply regret to inform you that Lieut. A. Smith-Cumming, Seaforth Highlanders, died the result of motor accident on 3rd October, his father Commander Cumming was severely injured and is in French Hospl at Meaux. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy.’ The laconic entry in Cumming’s diary for 3 October reads: ‘Poor old Ally died.’ The drivers in the Intelligence Corps, which had been formed only with the outbreak of hostilities mainly to provide auxiliary assistance for unit intelligence officers, had gained a reputation for risky, high-speed driving. Macdonogh’s deputy at GHQ, Major Walter Kirke, wrote to his wife that ‘last night young Cumming went off to Paris with Commander Cumming in the 60 h.p. Fiat of which I told you before as having given me some hairy rides, & piled it up against a tree. Young Cumming was killed, & the old man has had one foot amputated . . . & he is in a [ghastly?] bad way, so we are all rather sick.’2
The army telegram sent to May Cumming bearing the grim news of her son’s death.
The story of Cumming’s misfortune inevitably grew with the telling and it became part of Service mythology, as demonstrated by the vivid version given by the novelist Compton Mackenzie in his 1932 book Greek Memories. During the First World War Mackenzie worked for Cumming in Greece, where he was told the story by Commander William Sells, the British naval attaché in Athens, who had heard it at