The Defence of the Realm (14 page)

The Central Registry quickly developed standardized classifications for its suspects. First on each card in its index came the ‘civil classification': BS, AS, NS or ES (British, Allied, Neutral or Enemy Subject). Then followed the ‘general military (special intelligence) classification' along a mildly comic, but easily memorized, six-point scale:

 

 

Finally came an alphabetical series of ‘Special Intelligence Black List (SI/ BL) subclassifications', also designed to be committed to memory:

 

 

On the foundation of the Bureau Central Interallié in Paris in September 1915 to act as an intelligence clearing house for Allied services, Categories A to I were adopted by the Bureau.
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The officer in charge of the Registry and of administration as a whole was Lieutenant Colonel Maldwyn Makgill Haldane, variously nicknamed ‘Muldoon' and ‘Marmaduke', nephew of the former Secretary for War, Viscount Haldane, who in April 1914 became MO5(g)'s first graduate recruit. Before being commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Scots in 1899, Haldane had studied at University College London, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of Göttingen. Like many of Kell's officers, he was a good linguist, competent in French, German and Hindustani, and listed an impressive range of outdoor and sporting pursuits: trout fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry farming and gardening. Less typically, he also declared an interest in ‘ethnology, history, palaeontology and biology'.
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A satirical wartime cartoon shows him, dressed in Royal Scots tunic with tartan trews, towering over an appreciative group of Registry staff.

Because of the expansion of the Registry and its clerical staff, by the end of 1914 a majority of MO5(g) staff were female. According to a post-war ‘Report on Women's Work':

The qualifications which M.I.5 required in its women clerks and secretaries were intelligence, diligence and, above all, reticence. From the earliest days therefore, M.I.5 sought its clerks in the ranks of educated women, who should naturally be supposed to have inherited a code of honour, that is to say the women staff of M.I.5 consisted of gentlewomen who had enjoyed a good school, and in some cases a University education.
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Though MI5 did not recruit men direct from university until well after the Second World War, it sought female recruits from Oxford and London Universities in the First World War. Initially most women recruits were personally recommended by existing members of staff. When, because of the rapid wartime expansion, this method was unable to generate enough recruits, the Service approached the heads of Cheltenham Ladies College and other leading girls' public schools, of St Hugh's and Somerville Colleges at Oxford University, and of Royal Holloway at London.
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MO5(g) thus had a higher proportion of upper-class female recruits than any other wartime British government department or agency. Its women staff also came, on average, from higher up the social scale than the men. Women played a more important role in the Security Service than in any other wartime government department.

A probably satirical cartoon by the wartime MI5 officer Joseph Sassoon depicts Lieutenant Colonel Maldwyn Haldane, head of Registry and administration, dressed in Royal Scots tunic with tartan trews, towering over an apparently adoring group of Registry minions.

From November 1914 the Registry was staffed solely by women and a new ‘lady superintendent', Lily Steuart, placed at its head.
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During the early months of the war, as a post-war report acknowledged, the Registry was ‘almost overwhelmed' by ‘the tidal wave of documents' which
descended on it.
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When Hilda Cribb (who in 1920 was to become controller of women staff) began work in the Registry on 2 February 1915 she found unfiled papers stacked on top of the filing cabinets.
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The pressures of wartime work, exacerbated by MO5(g)'s seriously inadequate resources, probably explain why fifteen of the female clerical staff who joined between October 1914 and February 1915 left after periods ranging from a few days to two months. Among them was Miss Steuart.
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Steuart's successor as lady superintendent on 20 February, Edith Annie Lomax, proved to be one of the ablest administrators in Service history, later becoming the first female member of staff to be honoured with an MBE (subsequently upgraded to OBE).
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Miss Lomax brought with her as her assistant the also formidable Elsie Lydia Harrison (subsequently Mrs Akehurst), who later succeeded her as controller, and was also awarded an MBE. Hilda Cribb noticed an immediate difference. As well as securing more recruits and accommodation, Lomax made a series of simple improvements to work practices. When she arrived, for example, card cabinets were so close together that only two staff could use them simultaneously. By spacing them out, she enabled more people to work on them. ‘The hubbub', Cribb recalled, ‘was incessant . . .'
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In 1915 it was decided not to recruit women aged over forty; within a year the limit was lowered to thirty ‘on account of the very considerable strain that was thrown on the brains of the workers'. Some exceptions, however, were made, such as the recruitment of two women with PhDs to write reports (and later in-house histories).
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A sense of humour in Registry recruits was considered ‘essential to enable some of the impossible things demanded to be accepted with equanimity'.
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The anonymous post-war report on ‘Women's Work', almost certainly by a female author, concluded that though most women demonstrated the stereotypically female virtues of intuition and attention to detail, a minority ‘displayed the more masculine qualities of power of organization and decision and broad methods of work, and . . . did invaluable service for the Department'.
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The author probably had Miss Lomax chiefly in mind. In 1917, Miss Lomax was promoted to the new post of controller of women's staff; her former deputy, Miss Harrison, succeeded her as superintendent of the Registry.
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Secretaries, like Registry staff, were female. The privileged education and upbringing of many of the secretaries made them more likely to stand up for their own points of view than most of those from humbler backgrounds. Among those who took wry amusement in observing some of the bright young secretaries politely outsmart older MO5(g) officers was probably its best-educated male recruit, Percy Marsh, a former scholar of Wadham College, Oxford with first-class honours in classics, who had spent his pre-war career in the Indian Civil Service.
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Marsh also had some talent as an artist. Among his drawings of wartime life in the Service was one entitled ‘Miss Thinks She is Right', which shows a youthful secretary querying a point with a middle-aged officer of somewhat befuddled appearance.
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There were numerous cases of such secretaries taking over, usually temporarily, the jobs of officers. Miss A. W. Masterton, secretary to the head of C (later H) Branch, Haldane, took over from him, at first temporarily, then permanently, the running of MO5(g)'s accounts, including much financial planning. The ‘Report on Women's Work' concluded that this was ‘the only example at this date of a woman managing the finances of a Government office'.
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By the standards of the time, gender relations were sometimes slightly flirtatious. A wartime cartoon by the Old Etonian Cambridge graduate Captain Hugh Gladstone, entitled ‘The Lost File', shows an attractive young member of the Registry telling a male officer, ‘We've looked everywhere, but we can't find any BAULZ in the Registry.'
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Harmless (not to say feeble) though the joke now appears, at the time it could not have appeared in print or been repeated in polite mixed company.

(i) ‘Miss Thinks She is Right' Percy Marsh's drawing shows a youthful secretary querying a point with a somewhat bemused middle-aged officer. The privileged education and upbringing of many MI5 secretaries made them more likely to stand up for their own points of view than most of those from humbler backgrounds.

(ii) A cartoon of December 1915 by H. S. Gladstone, illustrating the sometimes flirtatious wartime MI5 gender relations.

The main basis for MO5(g)'s counter-espionage operations, apart from its much expanded Registry, was greatly extended interception of letters and cables. MO5 had drawn up detailed pre-war plans for cable censorship, earmarking officers and clerks for war service under the chief cable censor, Colonel A. G. Churchill. No such preparations, however, had been made for postal censorship.
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In September 1914 MO5 began to realize the importance of intercepting correspondence to neutral countries as a way of preventing information reaching the enemy. But the handful of MO5 staff sent to the Mount Pleasant sorting offices in Clerkenwell found the sheer volume of mail too much for them. When Colonel G. K. Cockerill visited the sorting offices shortly after taking over as head of MO5 in October, he discovered piles of opened letters awaiting examination and heaps of mailbags which had still to be opened. In November the newly appointed Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain (later Admiral Sir) Reginald ‘Blinker' Hall, received alarmist reports that, due to problems at Mount Pleasant, messages to the enemy were getting through the censorship ‘in some abundance'. Hall took the reports at face value, hurried round to MO5 and insisted ‘that
all
foreign mails are opened and that no secret message gets through'. Cockerill replied that the cabinet was unhappy even with the existing level of censorship but agreed to allow censors chosen by Hall to make their own inspection of the mails for a two-month trial period. Hall persuaded the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill,
to provide £1,600 to fund his new ‘show' but was ‘purposely vague' about what the money was for. His friend Lieutenant Colonel Freddie Browning (later Cumming's deputy) agreed to run Hall's ‘little private censorship' and found him volunteers from the National Service League to act as censors.