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By Root 2494 0

(Director of the Intelligence Division), the notoriously tetchy Hall queried an arrangement Cumming had for Captain Norman Thwaites (who worked for him in New York) and asked whether Cumming was ‘serving the Bureau or the Nation’. Clearly taken aback, Cumming wrote in his diary: ‘I should have replied “the nation through the Bureau - my only means of serving it”’. Hall then introduced Cumming to the new naval attaché for Copenhagen, Captain Dix, but refused to allow Cumming ‘to speak to him about my [Cumming’s] people & work’. Cumming appears to have told Macdonogh about his difficulties with Hall, for the following day he noted that the Director of Military Intelligence had been ‘very heartening about my position & hinted definitely that if sacked by Navy he would take me on with pleasure’. Underpinning the improvement in relations with the War Office (and, in the end, also with the Admiralty) was an internal reorganisation of Cumming’s Head Office, which had been first mooted in August 1917 and came into effect at the end of the year.

Staffing and organisation

Securing staff posed some problems for Cumming at a time when all young men (or nearly all) wanted to do their bit at the battle front. The notion of working in secret service was as likely to put potential recruits off as encourage them to join up. From the start, indeed, Cumming had been faced with the problem that many of the people who most wanted to be involved were among the least attractive prospects from his point of view. In a memoir written in the 1950s, Frank Stagg, a naval lieutenant who transferred from Blinker Hall’s staff in the Admiralty to Cumming in September 1915, recalled that it was ‘difficult to get officers released unless they had been gassed or wounded’. Other individuals, such as Thomas Merton, the celebrated physicist, had been rejected for active service on grounds of health, but he was engaged by Cumming in June 1916 as the Service’s first-ever scientist. He was granted a commission in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and, being independently wealthy, was taken on ‘without pay’.9

Cumming’s early wartime recruits were typically not career soldiers or sailors. When Frank Stagg joined, three of Cumming’s five main staff were Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officers. One, Lieutenant F. C. Newnum, was an engineer ‘from the Colombia emerald mines’; another, Guy Standing, had been an actor in America before the war; the third, Sub-Lieutenant Jolly, worked for the Tatler, the society magazine. There was a high turnover of personnel. Apart from Cumming himself, Newnum, who had been taken on in November 1914, was the only senior person to remain continuously in Head Office from 1914 to the end of the war. Stagg, for example, returned to naval duties in June 1917 and Standing left for the Ministry of Information in December 1917. Some people, however, stayed on. Paymaster Percy Sykes, who took charge of the Service accounts in November 1915, continued to do essentially the same job for over a quarter of a century.

From the autumn of 1914 Cumming’s expanding Head Office was organised broadly on a geographical basis, reflecting that of the Military Operations directorate. In September 1915, for example, Stagg handled information coming in from Scandinavia, the Baltic and Russia; Newnum took Greece and the Mediterranean; Standing the Americas; and Captain L. N. Cockerell (another mining engineer) was responsible for Belgium and Holland. Later sections were formed for Italy and Switzerland, and South America. A specific Code Section was created in April 1915. In April 1917, Lieutenant H. Brickwood, a volunteer naval officer whose family brewing business was based in Portsmouth and who had been working on coding, was put in charge of a new section formed ‘to assist British Prisoners of War to escape from Germany by sending maps, compasses etc., to them by secret means’. Head Office also began to spread beyond 2 Whitehall Court. An office where prospective officers and agents could be interviewed was established at Central House, Kingsway. It had