English contacts of GC&CS’s cryptographic abilities, disclosed that the English could understand most secret Bolshevist signals.22
Further political indiscretions jeopardized GC&CS’s good work in decoding intercepted signals traffic: in 1922 more Soviet decrypts were published by the London government; on 2 May 1923 Curzon sent a formal protest about Bolshevik subversion in Britain to the Soviets. This so-called Curzon Note was the first protest by one government to another that acknowledged that it was based on the intercepted radio traffic of the recipient nation. There were further calamitous revelations about signals interception at the time of the police raid in 1927 on the London offices of the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) searching for purloined secret official documents. Cabinet ministers quoted from Soviet diplomatic dispatches that had been sent from London to Moscow in code. The Soviet Union dropped its encryption procedure and introduced the more secure one-time pad method.
The Foreign Office replaced the Admiralty in 1922 in its supervision of GC&CS. There was no one of sufficient seniority there to halt the misjudged disclosures of 1922–3 and 1927. The three old-guard diplomatists who served as PUS at the apex of the Office hierarchy during the 1920s, Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir William Tyrrell and Sir Ronald Lindsay, regarded intelligence as a subordinate aspect of diplomacy. They doubtless agreed with the Berlin Ambassador, Lord D’Abernon, that ‘the Secret Service’ product was ‘in a large majority of instances of no political value, based mainly upon scandal and tittle-tattle, and prepared apparently with no discrimination as to what is really important’. By contrast, the rising younger men of the 1920s understood the value and necessity of secret intelligence. Vansittart, who replaced Lindsay in 1930, and Cadogan, who succeeded him, were the first PUS to value this new ingredient in statecraft. This was held against them by officials and politicians who preferred to work by their own settled assumptions and hunches. ‘No one questions Van’s patriotism,’ wrote the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, in explanation of his enforced retirement in 1938, ‘but he is apt to get rather jumpy. He pays too much attention to the press of all countries and to S.I.S. information – useful pointers in both cases, but bad guides.’23
One momentous fact is always overlooked: for MI5’s first two decades Britain was not yet a full parliamentary democracy. Property-owning qualifications restricted the franchise, and all women were excluded from parliamentary elections. In 1910, at the first general election after the formation of the security services, the electorate numbered 5.8 million for England, 357,566 for Wales, 785,208 for Scotland, 698,787 for Ireland, making a total of 7.6 million. The combined population of England, Scotland and Wales was about 40 million (this includes children). During the war of 1914–18, Britain was depicted as the world’s leading parliamentary democracy, although only about 40 per cent of its troops had the vote, whereas universal male suffrage had prevailed in Germany since 1871. In Britain in 1918 the franchise was extended to all men over the age of twenty-one and to women aged over thirty. The English electorate accordingly rose to just over 16 million, the Welsh to 1.2 million, the Scottish to 2.2 million and the Irish to 1.9 million – a total of 21.3 million. There was subsequent discussion of equalizing the franchise for both sexes at twenty-five, but in 1927 ‘the Cabinet went mad’, as one of its members, Lord Birkenhead, explained, and authorized the extension of the vote to women above the age of twenty-one – ‘a change so dangerous and so revolutionary’ that Churchill fought it. This was called the Flapper Vote.24
The general election of 1929 was the first in which the British parliamentary franchise was extended to all men and women aged over twenty-one, except for prisoners, peers and lunatics. For the first time women comprised the majority of the electorate: 52.7 per cent were female and 47.3 per cent were male (15.2 million women and 13.7 million men). There had been an almost threefold increase in the electorate in under twenty years. Conservative activists believed that the Baldwin government’s defeat by Labour was made inevitable by the extended franchise. Other conservative thinkers saw this as part of a wider dégringolade. ‘The two most important happenings in my lifetime’, said Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, ‘are the revolt of women against their natural and traditional subordination, and the repudiation of Christianity lock, stock and barrel in Soviet Russia. The one destroys the family, and the other banishes God.’25
‘The Flapper Vote … had to come, but came too soon,’ Vansittart judged. After the election of 1929, ‘electoral power passed from the thoughtful – pessimists said the educated – in a crucial decade, which first popularized the impracticable’. His deputy Sir Victor Wellesley was likewise convinced that the instability of British foreign policy during the 1930s was ‘largely due’ to the recent expansion of the electorate to include women. ‘The pressure of an uninstructed public opinion’ after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia resulted in policy swerves and a fatal diplomatic crash which forced the resignation of the Foreign Secretary. ‘We like to think of democracy’, wrote Wellesley, ‘as the best guarantee against war. The events of 1935 prove that it can be as dangerous as a war-minded autocracy.’ Wellesley, writing from the perspective of 1944, made a further point: universal adult suffrage was obtained just at the moment when ‘the authority and prestige of parliaments’ were declining in democratic countries; legislatures were ‘steadily losing their sovereign power’. The volume and intricacy of public business required such specialization that parliaments were slackening control of the administrative machinery: real power had shifted to highly capitalized international companies, argued Wellesley, who founded the Foreign Office’s Economic Relations section in 1933. Britain’s epoch of full democracy began just as the deification of the nation state was occurring elsewhere in Europe: Italy had its Duce, Germany its Führer, Spain its Caudillo and Hungary its Serene Regent; but the most enduring absolutism was in Soviet Russia, where the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of Generalissimo Stalin.26
One fact about the departments of state was so enormous, omnipotent and matchless that it is seldom mentioned. Whitehall was overwhelmingly masculine. The departmental culture was a body of assumptions, judgements, tastes and habits that, even when they underwent adaptation and reformulation, remained irrefragably male. No woman exerted any influence within any ministry. The security services were exceptional in employing women – Jane Sissmore, Ann Glass and others – in positions that mattered. Women were required to resign from the civil service if they married: their first thoughts must henceforth be for their husbands and their homes, so the Home Civil Service judged, and they should not be taking a salary into a household which already had a male breadwinner. The first marriage waiver was given to a principal at the Ministry of Labour in 1938. A year or so later Jane Sissmore, afterwards Jane Archer, became an outstanding exception to this rule. The former Oxford communist Jenifer Hart at the Home Office obtained a marriage waiver in 1941 with the support of her boss, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who advised her to announce in The Times that she wished to be regarded as married although she was barred by the civil service from being so. (She also endured sexual advances in the office from Sir Frank Newsam, who succeeded Maxwell as PUS in 1948.) Under wartime conditions most other women were required to resign on marriage, and were then re-employed as temporary civil servants for the duration of the war.
The married-women ban was formally lifted from the Home Civil Service in 1946, although it endured unofficially for many years longer. In the 1960s officials of the Civil Service Commission justified the bar in the Diplomatic Service on married women as necessary to clear the way for men to get promotion. The interdiction on married women continued in the Service until 1973. There were three women Cabinet ministers between 1919 and 1964 with a combined length of service of seven years. The first female PUS was installed at the suitably domestic Ministry of Housing in 1955. Although the bicameral
