The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [428]
A large part of Cumming’s success stemmed from his cheerful and equable personality. Whatever professional disagreements he may have had with fellow officers, he always seems to have been able to maintain good relationships on a personal level, regularly socialising, for example, with both Macdonogh and Kirke, despite their repeated attempts to get the army to take control of his organisation. Cumming was very warmly regarded within the Bureau itself, as memoir recollections of him consistently testify. ‘We all loved him to a man,’ wrote Edward Knoblock, a playwright who had worked under Compton Mackenzie in Greece and later served at Head Office in London. ‘He did us all most endless kindnesses, as not only the men but the girls who worked for him will remember to this day.’5 The writer Valentine Williams identified Cumming’s ‘salient characteristic’ as ‘gentleness’, and recalled ‘he had nerves of steel . . . his phlegm was unshatterable. In the darkest moments, it was a tonic to his staff to see him at his desk, calm, affable, humorous, unafraid.’6 At first encounter, Sir Paul Dukes reported that Cumming ‘appeared very severe’; his speech was abrupt, and ‘woe betide the unfortunate individual who ever incurred his ire!’. But ‘the stern countenance could melt into the kindliest of smiles, and the softened eyes and lips revealed a heart that was big and generous’.7 Cumming’s boyish enthusiasm for gadgets and the latest technical inventions struck many a chord, and one (male) colleague indulgently noted his ‘naughty side’: a penchant for Edwardian pornography. ‘With great mystery he would invite one to his office and take out of a secret drawer in his desk an illustrated portfolio of Le Nu au Salon’ containing various ‘tempting’ reproductions. It was considered ‘a great privilege to be shown these pictures while the old man enlarged on the beauty of the “female form divine”’.8
The love - it does not seem too strong a word in the circumstances - and affection which his staff felt for Cumming surely enhanced his reputation in the wider Whitehall world. Since he ran a happy - and tight - ship, his Foreign Office masters could be confident that he was a reliable and competent holder of a nationally important job which, if badly handled, could have disastrous consequences. Had the Foreign Office mandarins Nicolson, Hardinge and Crowe not been convinced that Cumming was a safe pair of hands, they would not, in their turn, have willingly backed him up when the independent survival of the nascent SIS was at stake. This was as true in the immediate postwar years as it had been during the war, when Cumming’s preparedness to step down if his work was found to be unsatisfactory reflected the strength of his situation, as well as a winning (if perhaps slightly disingenuous) modesty about his own indispensability. But the evident confidence that he had been doing a good job was confirmed by Hardinge in February 1919 when he assured Lord Curzon not only that it was essential ‘that the control of secret service operations in foreign countries should be in the hands of the Foreign Office’, but that the government had also had ‘been extremely fortunate in securing the services of the present Chief ’. The conferring of a knighthood on Cumming in July 1919 - a KCMG, in the prestigious Order of St Michael and St George, normally reserved for ambassadors, colonial governors and the like - was a very clear public recognition of the high esteem in which he was held.
A further important factor working to Cumming’s benefit was the restricted view he took of what the Secret Service Bureau should actually do. There is no suggestion in the surviving documentation that he ever saw the function of his organisation as being more than the collection and distribution