In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we return to Keith Jeffery's official history of MI6 to examine a question that gets to the heart of how the secret state was built: who became a spy, and why?
When the First World War broke out, Mansfield Cumming – the first "C" of the Secret Intelligence Service – faced a peculiar problem. At a moment when all the young men wanted to do their bit at the battlefront, the notion of working in a secret service was as likely to put potential recruits off as encourage them to join. Many of those who most wanted to be involved were, from Cumming's perspective, the least attractive prospects.
This episode explores the social world of early British intelligence. Cumming's wartime recruits were typically not career soldiers or sailors. They were independently wealthy men who did not need to be paid. Frank Stagg, who joined Cumming's staff, found that three of his five main colleagues were Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve officers – one was an engineer from the Columbia Emerald mines, another had been an actor in America before the war, and a third worked for the *Tatler* magazine.
This is the myth of the English gentleman amateur – the chap who does his bit, whose private means free him from the need for a salary, and who puts his intellect to wartime service. The reality was more complex: everyone was on a steep learning curve, and people dropped in and out of the service, alternating between intelligence work and active military duty.
We also trace the organizational growth of Cumming's bureau – from a handful of staff to over thirty by the summer of 1915 – and the bureaucratic turf wars with the War Office that threatened its very existence. The army would have been quite happy to fold MI6 into its own military intelligence. Cumming had to fight continuously to retain his service's independence.
We examine the role of women in the service – as typists, clerks, and even drivers sent abroad – at a time when the Foreign Office obliged women to resign on marrying. And we meet some of the remarkable characters Cumming recruited: Freddie Browning, the celebrated cricketer and Savoy Hotel director; Thomas Merton, the physicist rejected for active service who became the service's first scientist; and Major Claude Dansey, whose career spanned colonial policing in Borneo, Somaliland, and a country club in upstate New York.
**Topics covered:**
- The recruitment problems facing Mansfield Cumming
- The "gentleman amateur" ideal in British intelligence
- Social class and the early Secret Service
- Organizational growth and geographical divisions
- Bureaucratic turf wars with the War Office
- The role of women in the service
- Key figures: Freddie Browning, Thomas Merton, Claude Dansey
- The slow professionalization of intelligence
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