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and £150,000 basis. When quizzed on these, Cumming said that at the £65,000 level ‘two agents paid from Headquarters would have to be dismissed, and the Political section would be abolished’. Cumming was accompanied by Colonel Stewart Menzies, who provided liaison between the Secret Service and the War Office. Employing a careful double negative Menzies conceded that ‘the £85,000 basis would probably be not unsatisfactory’, though it would leave coverage stretched in the Near and Middle East, as well as the USA. Depending on reductions in other parts of the secret service estimate (for example from the Irish and Home Offices, the former as a result of the Anglo-Irish agreement of December 1921 bringing an end to the Irish War of Independence), the committee thought that £5,000 extra could be found for Cumming.19

At the beginning of April 1922, the committee reported to the Cabinet that one of their objects had been ‘to augment so far as might be requisite the sum designated to foreign intelligence’ (emphasis added). This was a remarkable assertion, in sharp contrast to the unvarying demands for reductions which had dominated the debate about finance since the end of the war. Naturally, the reduced overall figure of £200,000 was sacrosanct, but, with savings from other budgets, the committee suggested that Cumming be given £90,000 for the year 1922-3. They were ‘satisfied that for £90,000 a foreign intelligence organisation’ could be provided which, ‘while necessarily of a less elaborate character’, would cover all the essential countries and would ‘involve neither the abandonment, nor unduly drastic curtailment, of any essential services’.20 While financial stringency was to continue to affect the Service and its work in the 1920s and 1930s, the deep spending cuts of 1919-22 were not repeated. Indeed, in the mid-1920s, although overall secret service expenditure declined, the Foreign Office share saw a modest increase.21 The report of Sir Warren Fisher’s committee in the spring of 1922 marked an important moment for the survival of the Secret Intelligence Service, for, underpinning the committee’s reversal – albeit modest – of the budget reductions which had applied unremittingly since the end of the war, there was an acceptance of Cumming’s organisation as an important and autonomous government agency devoted to the clandestine collection of foreign information.

Staffing and structure

The establishment of a more or less settled budget not only confirmed the institutional value of the Secret Service to the government, but also reflected the fact that the immediate threat to its independent existence had passed. The replacement as Prime Minister of Lloyd George by Andrew Bonar Law, who headed a majority Conservative administration after winning a general election in November 1922, also reduced the likelihood (for the meantime) of any major change to the government’s overall security and intelligence organisation. Cumming himself must take much of the credit for successfully steering his organisation through the choppy waters of the Great War and the troubled years that followed. One measure of his achievement is a comprehensive appreciation of the Service, describing its function, its relations with other government departments and its ‘internal organisation’, which would have scarcely been possible to produce while the Bureau had been under continuous pressure, its future and even perhaps its very existence uncertain. The review was apparently prepared some time between the fall of Lloyd George’s government on 23 October 1922 (which is mentioned in the text) and Cumming’s death on 14 June 1923 (for the document has marginal annotations by him). One comment concerned the title of the organisation. The appreciation began with the statement: ‘The S.I.S. (Special Intelligence Service) is the offspring and successor of the pre-war “Secret Service”, developed and altered to suit post-war conditions . . . Both the name S.I.S.’, it stated, ‘and the definition of that Service’s functions, which date from 1919, are self invented.