In the early days of MI5, most women recruits were recommended by existing members of staff. When, after 1914, demand outpaced supply, the service turned to Cheltenham Ladies College and other leading girls’ public schools and to St Hugh’s and Somerville Colleges at Oxford. Women played a more important role in the security service than in any other wartime government department, maintaining its registry and letter checks which were kept up to date by 130 women clerks. By early 1917, MI5’s Central Registry contained 250,000 cards and 27,000 files on its chief suspects.
During the early months of the war, the registry was “almost overwhelmed” by “the tidal wave of documents” which descended on it. When Hilda Cribb (who in 1920 was to become controller of women staff) began work in the registry in February 1915 she found unfiled papers stacked on filing cabinets. All this changed with the appointment of Edith Annie Lomax as lady superintendent. She proved to be one of the ablest administrators in service history, later becoming the first female member of staff to be appointed MBE (subsequently upgraded to OBE).
A sense of humour in registry recruits was considered “essential to enable some of the impossible things demanded to be accepted with equanimity”. The anonymous postwar 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 organisation and decision”.
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 drawings of wartime life in the service is one entitled “Miss thinks that she is right”, which shows a youthful secretary querying a point with a middle-aged officer of somewhat befuddled appearance.
Occasionally, women played a more active role in the security service. When, postwar, the British Communist Party was one of MI5’s greatest concerns, its most valuable penetration agent was Olga Gray (“Miss X”), the 25-year-old daughter of a Daily Mail night editor in Manchester. Gray, who was a highly competent secretary, came to London in the autumn of 1931 and made herself available for work in communist organisations without ever applying for jobs in them. Initially she did not even join the CPGB but simply attended meetings of Comintern front organisations. After doing part-time voluntary typing for the Friends of the Soviet Union, she was asked to do secretarial work for the League Against Imperialism and the Anti-War Movement, where she got to know both Harry Pollitt, the CPGB general secretary, and Percy Glading, an officer of the League who was later found guilty of espionage for the Soviet Union. Only then did Gray join the CPGB. It was said of her that “she had attained that very enviable position where an agent becomes a piece of furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not”.
In the first year of the Second World War, MI5 was based in Wormwood Scrubs, a move that was so sudden that some staff found unemptied chamber pots in the cells which became their offices. Prisoners remained in several of the cell blocks and were sometimes seen exercising in the yard. “Don’t go near them”’ one of the warders warned female staff. “Some of them ain’t seen no women for years.” Other prisoners, however, had. The ex-public-school “Mayfair Playboys”, who had been imprisoned for robbing high-class jewellers, had danced with registry staff at debutantes’ balls during the London season. The Playboys’ leader, the 22-year-old Old Etonian Victor Hervey, later sixth Marquess of Bristol, was said to have inspired the Pink Panther.
The prison buildings, complained Milicent Bagot, “appeared never to have been ventilated since their erection and their smell was appalling”. The cell doors had no handles or locks on the inside. So, as one Wormwood Scrubs veteran recalls, staff “stood a good chance of being locked in by unwary visitors turning the outside door handle on leaving. At first there were no telephones in the cells, and with the rooms themselves soundproofed, it was possible for you to be shut in for hours before anyone noticed that you were not around.” In an attempt to maintain morale amid these straitened working conditions, it was arranged for a ladies’ hairdresser to visit the prison. Miss Dicker, the Lady Superintendent, also relaxed the previously inflexible female dress code. Because of the open prison staircases, visible from below, women were for the first time allowed to wear trousers.
The number of officers in the security service grew from 36 in July 1939 to 332 in January 1943. There was no wartime expansion, however, in the number of female MI5 officers. At the outbreak of war, the security service had only one: Jane Archer, its main Soviet expert, who married the service’s RAF liaison officer, Wing Commander John “Joe” Archer, during the lunch-hour on the day before war was declared.
Women continued to be actively employed as agents. Maxwell Knight, who had recruited Olga Gray, succeeded in placing three female agents (among them his secretary, Joan Miller, who lived with him for several years) in the pro-Nazi Right Club. Knight’s section also ran a number of women, employed by London embassies, and diplomats suspected of assisting the Nazi cause. Among them was an agent described as an “exceptionally capable, reliable and discreet woman”, who between 1941 and 1945 worked for, and reported on, employers of six different nationalities.
Knight was the first MI5 officer to put on paper his views “’On the subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents”. Female agents, he argued, should “not be markedly oversexed or undersexed”.
“It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex.
“What is required is a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely. Nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy. This cannot be done by an undersexed woman. However, it is important to stress that I am no believer in what may be described as Mata-Hari methods. I am convinced that more information has been obtained by women agents by keeping out of the arms of the man, than was ever obtained by sinking too willingly into them.”
As soon as the London Blitz began in September 1940, it became clear that Wormwood Scrubs was insecure. In October 1940 the greater part of MI5 moved to the more scenic surroundings of Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, near Oxford, which had just been vacated by the boys of Marlborough College. More than 250 female staff were lodged in rooms at Keble College, Oxford. Since there were no telephones in the rooms, messages had to be left with the college porters who would stand in the quad and bellow the names of the recipients. Coal for the coal fires in rooms was rationed; cold and condensation were constant problems in the winter months. After a usually Spartan breakfast in the College Hall, buses were waiting in a side road to take staff to Blenheim Palace.
In May 1941 Keble’s Bursar complained that service staff were responsible for considerably more breakages than undergraduates. M.B. Heywood replied on behalf of the service: “It is difficult to envisage that, among other things, our staff have broken 28 larger coffee pots, 740 plates of all sorts and 104 dishes of all sorts in the dining room unless there has been a free fight. I feel that the bulk of the breakages must occur between the kitchen and the dining room and be attributable to College staff.”
Though the staff worked long hours, the office circulars at Blenheim provide evidence of a environment unimaginable at the Scrubs. For example: “The practice of leaving bunches of flowers in the fire buckets militates against the efficiency of our fire fighting arrangements, and causes much extra work for the fire fighting staff.”
Postwar MI5 remained heavily male-dominated. In May 1945, though there were no female officers, 59 women were doing officers’ jobs. Of the 164 officers in the service in 1955, 10 were women officers, all of whom had achieved their rank as a result of internal promotion. The most influential of them was Milicent Bagot, the service’s first female Oxford graduate. In 1949 she was promoted from administrative assistant to the rank of officer, in recognition of her extraordinary memory for facts and files on international communism. Bagot was a stickler for meticulously correct office procedure, terrifying some young officers to whom she pointed out their shortcomings. Though a powerful personality within the office, she was a quite different person at home. A male colleague, who for a time lodged at Bagot’s house, later recalled:
“Milicent had the most extraordinary domestic arrangements because she shared a house in Putney with her Nanny, and Nanny was boss . . . She looked after Milicent and was not afraid to correct or criticise her ... Milicent, I think, adored her ... Milicent in fact on her own could hardly boil a kettle of water.”
Officers who joined the service early in the Cold War could expect to spend a quarter to a third of their careers on overseas postings in the Empire and Commonwealth. This, for many recruits, was one of the attractions of a service career in an era before the invention of the package holiday had brought foreign travel within the reach of most of the British population. Most secretaries were equally enthusiastic. One of them recalls that, when offered a two-year posting in Colombo soon after joining, “I could hardly believe my luck”. The cautionary advice given to women posted abroad by the last of the lady superintendents, Catherine Weldsmith, has passed into service folklore. The warning most frequently attributed to her was “Beware of men in hot climates!” She also advised wearing a girdle at all times “just in case”, though its precise function as a defence against hot-bloodied males was never spelt out. At various times during the 30 years after the Second World War, the service had 42 outposts abroad, the great majority in the Empire and Commonwealth.
The largest section of MI5, the registry, remained an exclusively female preserve. The first men did not join until 1976. In the immediate postwar years the daughters of former officers and debutantes were a major source of recruits. The Director of Establishments claimed in 1948 that “the general atmosphere . . . is that in which ex-officers would like to find their daughters working”. According to service folklore, “’a job in the registry was as much a step in a debutante’s progress as Queen Charlotte’s Ball”. Though the folklore exaggerates the proportion of debs, there was no shortage of individuals who fitted the stereotype. One registry deb is said to have arrived each morning accompanied by her boyfriend in the Household Cavalry, with whom she had just been riding in the park.
In 1960 the Director General, Sir Roger Hollis, was asked informally if he would consider the possibility of a building south of the river in the Elephant and Castle area. He replied that it was a rather “slummy” district. Hollis wrote subsequently that “since most of our girls come from the Kensington and Bayswater area”, a move to the Elephant and Castle would have an adverse effect on recruiting.
By the later 1960s the younger generation of women graduates and professionals felt less content with life in the service than most previous female recruits. Their discontents were increased by a senior officer who told one group of new entrants at the end of the 1960s: “Women are happier in subordinate positions.” Women were not included in the agent-running sections of the service for another decade. When Stella Rimington became junior assistant officer in 1969: “The nearest women got to the sharp end of things in those days was as support to the men who were running the agents. They would be asked to go and service the safe-house where the agent was met — making sure there was milk and coffee there and the place was clean and tidy.”
The first area where women played operational roles was in surveillance. At first none was allowed to drive. Their role was essentially to act as camouflage, accompanying male officers when it was necessary to strengthen their cover.
Growing resentment among MI5’s female graduates led to a meeting in November 1972 to discuss a petition (known as the “Women’s Charter”) against career discrimination. One of the signatories later acknowledged: “Our meeting caused some justified ill-feeling among the non-graduate women; they should have been included, as the lack of career prospects affected them as much as us. However, we, being young and thoughtless, had not considered this.”
The biggest obstacle to female promotion was the general conviction throughout the British intelligence community that women were unsuitable for agent-running. The only woman selected for the first agent-running training course in 1973 was Stella Rimington, later the first female DG. Rimington believed that, in the aftermath of “The Women’s Revolt”, management “were genuinely surprised at the strength of feeling and sufficiently concerned that so many of their good female staff, essential to the running of the service, appeared to be disgruntled, that the policy was changed”. A number of female assistant officers, Rimington among them, were promoted to full officer rank and women began, like men, to be recruited at officer level.
Over the next decade in the recruitment of female officers the service moved ahead of much of Whitehall and most employers in the private sector. By the early 1990s some 40 per cent of its officers were women.
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