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all his hopes were centred’, a blow which, Macdonogh’s intelligence colleague Walter Kirke observed, ‘he bore with admirable stoicism characteristic of the man’.2 Stoicism, the default British reaction to such dreadful circumstances, was Cumming’s response, too, as encapsulated by the terse entry, ‘Poor old Ally died,’ in his diary the day after the accident. It is difficult to estimate what the emotional impact of blows like this might have been, especially (as in Cumming’s case) when combined with the draining physical toll of losing part of a limb, but the fact that, aged fifty-five, he was back to work at his office in London within about six weeks testifies to very considerable powers of resilience and fortitude.

It was clear from the start that Cumming was his own man, as demonstrated by his insistence in 1909 on continuing with the Southampton boom-defence work alongside running the new Secret Service Bureau. While Admiral Bethell wanted him to assume the Bureau responsibilities on a full-time basis, Cumming, although evidently attracted by the new commission and ultimately prepared to accede to Bethell’s requirements, held out until he got permission to carry on in Southampton. This represented quite a commitment, as the records of the Boom Defence Experiments Committee confirm, and Cumming remained involved with the work from 1909 at least until the spring of 1914.3 Although he was a naval officer and his appointment had originally come from the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), Cumming strikingly demonstrated his continuing independent-mindedness in May 1913 when he publicly disagreed with Bethell’s successor as DNI, Captain Jackson, over the appointment of Captain Roy Regnart to be his ‘branch agent’ in Brussels. During the First World War, he was able to balance his obligations to the Admiralty and War Office, and ensure the support of the Foreign Office, sufficiently deftly to maintain his own (and his Bureau’s) independence.

His wartime colleague Frank Stagg recalled long afterwards that ‘“C” always used to boast that, as he had three masters, he had not got one at all as he could always set the other two against any objector.’ But this was not just a matter of playing one master off against another for short-term administrative convenience. Cumming had a clear strategic vision for his Secret Service Bureau, and his determination to secure the organisation permanently on an interdepartmental and autonomous basis was embodied in the vitally important ‘charter’ he secured from Sir Arthur Nicolson on 17 November 1915, establishing that Cumming, as the ‘Chief of the Secret Service’, would have ‘sole control’, not only of ‘all espionage and counter-espionage agents abroad’ but also, crucially (subject to Foreign Office supervision), of ‘all matters connected with the expenditure of Secret Service funds’. So important and fundamental was this document that, when the situation of SIS was being discussed in 1940, Stewart Menzies carefully copied it to the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, Sir Horace Wilson.4

While the sailor Cumming’s fending-off of military attentions during the First World War is understandable enough, his handling of the strong-willed, interventionist and unbiddable wartime DNI, Blinker Hall, is surely more remarkable. Despite his naval background, once he had taken on the secret service work Cumming clearly conceived his Bureau to be an interdepartmental organisation, which, while substantially (and at times primarily) serving naval and military needs, also had a distinctly civilian, ‘political’ role to play. Cumming clearly resented Hall’s evident belief that he and his outfit were more or less an integral part of the Naval Intelligence empire, simply being at the DNI’s beck and call (as illustrated, for example, with deployments in Spain). So difficult at one stage did relations between Hall and Cumming become that in September 1917 George Macdonogh (by then Director of Military Intelligence) ‘hinted definitely [to Cumming] that if sacked by Navy he would take me on with pleasure’.