On 4 November 1939, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, known as Quex, died in office of cancer. He was the second Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ((SIS) and referred to unofficially since WW2 as MI6) and the last naval officer to hold the post. His predecessor, Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, was a naval officer, too, and by coincidence, both officers were the only two ‘Chiefs’ to die in office. In one of the books of my series about the Royal Navy during WW1, Now the Darkness Gathers, I outline the RN’s involvement in setting up the Secret Service.
It was Sinclair who not only transformed the former Secret Service into today’s SIS, but he established the Government Code and Cypher School, now known as GCHQ. Indeed, in 1938, he used his own money to purchase Bletchley Park for use as a wartime intelligence station in the event of war since the government stated it didn’t have the funds to do so! The station’s operational head until 1942 was Commander Alexander Denniston. In 1914 on the outbreak of WW1, Denniston had helped found Room 40 of the Admiralty, the nation’s first signal interception and codebreaking organisation. Denniston’s successor in command of Bletchley Park was Paymaster Commander Edward Travis, thus continuing the Royal Navy’s long involvement in running the nation’s intelligence services. In my latest novel, The Suicide Club, I explain how the work of Captain ‘Blinker’ Hall, Sinclair’s predecessor as Director of Naval Intelligence, helped bring the USA into WW1.
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