The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [30]
In the autumn of 1914 his son, a subaltern in the Seaforths, had been driving him in a fast car on some urgent Intelligence mission in the area of operations. The car going at full speed had crashed into a tree and overturned, pinning Captain Cumming by the leg and flinging his son out on his head. The boy was fatally injured, and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might he could not free his smashed leg. Thereupon he had taken out a penknife and hacked away at his smashed leg until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to his son and spread a coat over him, being found later lying unconscious by the dead body.
‘That’s the sort of old chap C is,’ said Sells.
However it happened, Cumming certainly lost part of his leg as a result of the accident, as confirmed by the rather less dramatic summary in his service record: ‘3.10.14: injured in motor accident in France; both legs broken - left foot amputated’.3
Subsequent telegrams charted his recovery. On 7 October his condition was ‘serious’, but the following day it was ‘satisfactory’, confirmed by ‘report progress satisfactory’ on 2 November. On 12 October Kirke went to visit him and noted that Cumming was ‘out of danger now, I am glad to say, though minus a foot, but the life and soul of the hospital - wonderful fellow!’ For six weeks from the beginning of October there are only very sporadic entries in Cumming’s diary, among other things listing fellow patients in the hospital as well as nursing staff ‘to remember’. But suddenly, on 11 November, Cumming resumed writing up the journal: ‘Arrived at home about 3 & commenced work at once.’ He had a ‘long interview’ with Captain Thomas Laycock, his second-in-command who had held the fort in his absence. Being temporarily immobile, for a time people came to him: on 11 November, ‘Cockerill came over & stayed an hour’; next day the new Director of Intelligence in the Admiralty, Blinker Hall, came ‘& stayed over an hour discussing various matters’. His first venture out (to the War Office) was not until 8 December. On 10 December Callwell reported that Cumming ‘had just been in to see me, wheeling himself in an invalid chair. He is wonderful all things considered and as keen as ever.’4 Cumming’s enforced immobility may have done some good for the organisation at a time when it was expanding rapidly. Obliged to delegate duties which hitherto he had carried out himself - Laycock, for example, was ‘constantly backwards & forwards to Admty & WO’ - Cumming had a chance to get to grips with Service administration. On 23 November he recorded in his diary that the monthly expenditure was £4,310, already four and a half times greater than the prewar figure of some £950. Over three-quarters of this was spent on intelligence-gathering networks in Continental Europe and the remainder on the thirteen-strong Head Office staff, which, he reported to Cockerill on 6 December, comprised himself and three officers, four clerks, two female typists, a messenger and ‘2 outside men’ (one of whom was Ernest Bailey, Cumming’s chauffeur and servant).
According to an in-house history of British Military Intelligence drawn up after the war, Cumming’s accident (which, it asserted, ‘incapacitated him for some months’, an allegation which Cumming would have challenged) had two main consequences. In the first place it meant that the Secret Service organisation was brought more closely under War Office control; and, second, it led to GHQ in France instituting ‘its own independent service’. While this second development reflected the immediate needs of an army in the field for operational intelligence, later in the war it was to provoke disputes about how intelligence-gathering in the battle-zone should be organised and controlled. The intensification of War Office control in London was combined with the incorporation of Kell’s security