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members. Subsidised luncheon facilities were provided in the basement of Broadway Buildings. Though inexpensive, these ‘were somewhat frugal, and less than pleasantly housed’. This was clearly not enough for some, as in September 1946 it was reported that Menzies had noticed that ‘a small number of officers . . . seemed to be extending their luncheon hours beyond the allotted 1½ hours’ (which was already felt to be generous). Officers were reminded that ‘this period should never be exceeded for other than Service reasons’. Reflecting a continuing distinction between ‘officers’ and ‘other ranks’, from 1948 senior members of the Service could use ‘the slightly more salubrious, waitress-served (and more expensive) facilities of the Broadway Club’, which operated as a kind of senior common room within the headquarters building where colleagues could discuss Service business with comparative freedom. For younger officers a mark of favour was to be invited in the first instance to be an ‘evening member’ of the club, allowing them to meet their seniors informally over drinks. But even in Broadway security had to be observed and Sinclair reminded officers in November 1947 ‘that there should be no secret talk in front of messengers, etc., in lifts and corridors and at the time of the emptying of waste-paper baskets, etc.’.

On a number of scores postwar reforms were held up pending the anticipated move into a new headquarters building. Broadway, where the headquarters had been situated since 1926, was grossly overcrowded, and sections of the Service were spread across a range of buildings in both central London and the home counties. There were also security concerns that, especially among liaison services, ‘Broadway’ had come to be used as a synonym for SIS. In May 1944, for example, after it was reported that both OSS and SOE officers in Cairo had been ‘referring to S.I.S. as “Broadway”’, instructions were issued that officers should ‘refer to this organisation as “C”, never as Broadway, S.I.S. or any other symbol’. In October 1945 the Director of Production said he was ‘somewhat alarmed by the extent to which the term “Broadway” was used in telephone conversations from the Field to Head Office’, a practice he described as ‘thoroughly insecure’.

The CSS Committee, noting that the present premises were ‘most unsatisfactory’, looked into the question of a new headquarters building which might have to accommodate both SIS and the Government Code and Cypher School. It rejected a suggestion that SIS ‘should be placed in the country’, for example at Eastcote in north London, where GC&CS had moved from Bletchley Park in 1946, as being ‘quite impracticable’. Having ascertained from the Ministry of Works that any new building in Whitehall would take at least five years before it was available, the committee told Menzies that ‘immediate and most active steps are required on the highest level’. Menzies, who, like many others, felt a strong sentimental attachment to the old place, was not so keen on moving out of Broadway. In 1949, however, the Ministry of Works found a site in Marsham Street, Westminster, for a purpose-built headquarters to be shared by SIS and MI5, with the latter being the avowed occupant. Work actually started on the project, but was suspended following a freeze on government building, and separate arrangements were subsequently made for the two agencies. SIS did not get a new headquarters building until it moved into Century House in Lambeth in 1964.

Technical developments

SIS’s scientific research and development organisation after the war was concentrated in two main branches. The SOE development team joined SIS in a new Directorate of Training and Development, and SOE’s Station XII at Stevenage, with its wealth of wartime experience, became responsible principally for clandestine equipment of all sorts and special operations matters, such as sabotage, explosives, fuses, drugs and other chemical tasks. SIS’s wartime technical establishments were amalgamated into the Government Communications Centre, which dealt