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in an air crash flying to the Yalta conference in February 1945.4 Like previous private secretaries to the Permanent Under-Secretary, he provided one of the main links between the Foreign Office and SIS, so much so that the Service was occasionally described in official minutes as ‘Mr. Loxley’s friends’. On 2 April 1943 Loxley wrote to Menzies that postwar planning was ‘in the air’ and it struck him ‘that the time has come when you ought to be doing some serious future planning for S.I.S.’. He thought that a number of matters needed particular attention, including recruitment, which appeared to him to be haphazard, and conditions of employment, which under existing conditions offered neither security of tenure nor pensions. He also felt that the Chief should have a designated deputy. At the moment Menzies was carrying far too great a personal burden, and on the rare occasions when he was absent, there was ‘no one man in charge of S.I.S. as a whole’; instead, ‘four deputy directors, plus Vivian and probably one or two others, each continue to run his own sectional affairs but without anyone of them really overseeing the whole organisation’. Loxley finally raised the question of the relations to be established in the post-war world between British diplomatic missions and SIS representatives abroad.

Perhaps prompted by Loxley, during April 1943 the SIS Board of Deputy Directors were urged to begin thinking about forward and post-war planning. At the end of the month, the chief of staff, Commander Howard, circulated a paper on the ‘Re-establishment of S.I.S. posts in Europe’, which raised questions both of the scale of the planned postwar organisation and of the cover under which representatives would operate. Another quite urgent problem was that of recruitment. The Deputy Director/Army had reported ‘that we have now reached the limit of candidates from the War Office’. The other services, moreover, ‘have been practically barren for some time’. It was suggested that more use might be made of women, ‘at any rate under present war conditions’. This raised an important question. The number of women employed by SIS increased enormously over the war, though almost invariably they were used only in subordinate clerical and office support roles. Even when they were employed, entrenched male attitudes caused problems. Reporting ‘difficulties’ among the secretaries in his station at Bari in southern Italy, John Bruce Lockhart observed that ‘most of the male officers are fairly pudding-like and are either misogynists or else consider that a woman’s place is the bed and the kitchen, certainly not the mess’.

Inside the Foreign Office, Loxley argued that it was a particularly opportune moment to consider the future of intelligence organisation generally. Reflecting the fact that the Office was less pressed by work at this stage of the war than was anticipated would be the case after it had ended, and because he and his colleagues had ‘a very real interest in the matter’, Loxley argued that ‘there is every advantage in our trying to clear our own minds on the subject while there is still time to do so at leisure’. He ‘diffidently’ put forward the case for a ‘single Government intelligence body devoted to the study of military intelligence in the widest sense of the term’. This would be like the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (JIC), but ‘more unified’. He was not sure which government department should take responsibility for this organisation, but thought perhaps it would be the Ministry of Defence, although he observed that the Foreign Office had a major interest in ‘what may loosely be called civilian, as opposed to service, intelligence’.5

This matter essentially concerned the organisation of intelligence-assessment, but, as Loxley observed at the end of August 1943, ‘intertwined’ with the role of the JIC after the war was ‘the future organisation of intelligence relating to foreign countries’.6 SIS was central to this discussion and early in October Cadogan appointed a three-man committee under Sir Nevile Bland to report on ‘the