The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [426]
By August 1914 the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau which Mansfield Cumming had created was already recognisably the forebear of the Secret Intelligence Service it was to become. The basic shape of the organisation, its priorities and working practices, the fastidious concern for security and the ethos of professionalism imbued by Cumming were all to survive throughout the Service’s first forty years. Cumming also put his stamp on the organisation in other ways. He was the original ‘C’, signing himself thus from almost the very beginning. The earliest document with a ‘C’ signature in the archives is a memorandum to Admiral Bethell of 10 January 1910, and since Cumming’s time all subsequent Chiefs have used the designation. From Cumming, too, came the practice whereby the Chief of the Service writes in green ink, the earliest use of which occurs in handwritten notes on a paper of 9 May 1910. The practice of writing in green was a naval tradition, by which officers in charge of branches or sections used it to indicate their superior status. John Fisher, First Sea Lord 1904-10 and 1914-15, for example, wrote with a characteristic green pencil.1 Cumming, therefore, may have adopted it as much to confirm his autonomy vis-à-vis other naval officers as for any other purpose. That it might have been for external status reasons is rather confirmed by the fact that he did not consistently use green ink for his diary until January 1916. Whatever the rationale, his successors as Chief continue the practice to the present day.
Cumming habitually worked long hours. In August 1910 the Director of Military Operations, George Macdonogh (himself a notoriously hard worker), told him he was ‘going on leave next week for a week or two. I said I did not see my way to get away at all, and he remarked that the work must be rather a tie. I wonder’, confided Cumming to his diary, ‘if any of them suspect how many hours a day I have to work? I reckon it 9.30 am to 11.30 pm, with 2 hours off, say 12 hours, but I get a very short Saturday afternoon and no Sunday. It is bound to continue for a year or two, but after that should settle down.’ This was an optimistic prediction indeed, though in 1910 Cumming could hardly have anticipated the unrelenting responsibilities he would have to carry during the First World War. Sampling his diary entries for holiday periods gives a flavour of the extent to which he could not (or, of course, would not) let go of his duties. He worked all day in London on Good Friday 1915, travelled to France on the following day, and over the Easter weekend had meetings in Amiens and Paris. He ‘worked late’ on Christmas Eve 1916 (a Sunday), and on 25 December noted in his diary ‘all day in office’. ‘Rather quiet,’ he added, ‘not many staff about,’ though ‘Colonel Kell called & had a long yarn with me.’ On August Bank Holiday 1917 (6 August) he was again in France, at a conference with Sir Douglas Haig’s intelligence chief, General Charteris, following which he went on a tour along the British front line.
Cumming’s achievements during the First World War are all the more remarkable considering the physical and personal loss from his devastating car accident of October 1914. He was by no means the only person to suffer thus during the war. The Prime Minister himself, Herbert Asquith, lost his eldest son Raymond in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. In a curious parallel to Cumming, George Macdonogh, while head of Army Intelligence at the British headquarters in France, was briefly incapacitated by a broken collarbone sustained in a car accident in September 1914, and during the following June lost to illness his seven-year-old only son, ‘in whom