Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  However reprehensible these arguments may seem today, they were widely held at the time and indeed continued to be the reality throughout the First World War and well after. Even so women themselves, particularly educated middle-class women, seized the opportunity of entering what have been described as ‘white blouse’ jobs. The work was considered to be far preferable to that of a governess and although wages were low and there was little hope of promotion, clerical work offered respectability and financial independence. In 1881 there were about 6,000 women working as clerks in the post office and other offices; by 1901 the figure had risen to nearly 60,000 women in private firms and 25,000 in the post office and other government offices, and by 1911 there were approximately 166,000 women in clerical posts. By 1914, about 58,000 women were working for the post office.

  Working for MI5

  The few women working for the War Office before the war were typists, who were overseen by male clerks. Before 1914 intelligence-gathering offices were small and had few permanent staff. Just over 100 people were employed by the Directorate of Military Operations, which included intelligence. When war began in August 1914 intelligence operations in Britain expanded rapidly and a new organization, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) was created in January 1916, which by 1918 employed some 6,000 people. As casualties mounted on the front line and as increasing numbers of men were called up for service – conscription was introduced in 1916 – growing numbers of women were recruited and were soon working in all parts of the DMI, as well as the intelligence sections of the Admiralty, Army headquarters and Foreign Office. The women were mainly under thirty, single, and from privileged – so-called ‘good’ – family backgrounds. They included university graduates, daughters of naval or military families, and even Girl Guides. None of them had the right to vote – the woman’s vote in Britain was not won until 1918 – nor could they hold political office but evidence indicates that all the women who worked behind the scenes for British intelligence during the First World War did so with dedication and discretion.

  During the First World War the Directorate of Military Intelligence was divided into various sections and sub-sections. Women worked in all of them. Approximately 600 women worked in MI5 carrying out a multitude of duties from clerical and secretarial work through to filing, maintaining and administering MI5’s Registry – a massive card file of suspects and information. Part of MI5’s ‘H’ Branch, from November 1914 the Registry was staffed entirely by women, who kept track of literally thousands of dossiers and cards recording all the spy-tracking activities of MI5.

  One woman who worked in the Registry and wrote an account of her experience was Mrs Dorothy Line (née Dimmock). Like so many of the women who worked with MI5 during the war, she came from a ‘good’ family background and was approached by family friends, rather than responding to any sort of advertisement. Dorothy Line had left school in July 1914, having hoped to try for a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. The university offered her a place but not a scholarship and her father, formerly of the Indian Medical Service, was a small country doctor who could not afford to support her at university. The arrival of war however put thoughts of university out of Dorothy’s mind, and she determined to play her part in the war effort. She joined a team of other ‘girls’ working with The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association in London, visiting families of men who had been called up to establish hardship needs. She became ill, returned home and then worked as an assistant housemistress in her old school, Bridegenorth High School for Girls, and as a temporary teacher at the Boys’ Grammar School. In 1915 however:

  ‘I had a surprise letter from the War Office; the woman head of the clerical department of MI5, Miss Lomax, had put forward my name as a suitable applicant for work in her department. I was needed for an interview. I did not know Miss Lomax and could not think how she knew about me, but a letter from my mother explained matters. Miss Lomax was an old friend of my Aunt Constance Harvey-Kelly and asked her one day if she knew of any girl who would be suitable to work as a clerk in her department. No previous training or secretarial experience was necessary. The important thing was that she should have had some further education and should be a responsible type who could be trusted to hold her tongue. Candidates for these posts were selected by private recommendation and there was never any advertisement.’

  Armed with the ‘princely sum of £20’ for her work at the schools, she set off to London ‘with great joy, and blew the lot on a new outfit; coat and skirt, hat and accessories, and presented myself for interview. I got the job.’ She was found accommodation in Old Bedford College, Baker Street, which had been converted into a hostel for women doing war work and was sent to the MI5 department at 16 Charles Street, Haymarket, to work as a ‘search clerk’:

  ‘There was a very large room known as the Registry in which there was an enormous card index which grew daily. It stretched round the room like a snake. To this index came cards with the names of spies, suspects, accomplices and places often with actual addresses, and all kinds of information – these had to be carefully inserted into the right places. Every day there arrived from the different sub-departments files about people suspected of being in league with the enemy. It was our duty to look these up in the card index and try to connect the information in the files. Sometimes through quite a chance reference to a place or person one would hit on an exciting trail and unravel a piece of useful case history. Many other times nothing of value could be found and it gave one a pang to put N.T. (no trace) and initial it and return the document to the original department wondering “Have I missed something?”’

  Ironically, perhaps, on one occasion Dorothy found an individual in the card index who was described as ‘harbouring the accomplice of a well-known spy’. The individual in question was the very aunt who had recommended her for the job. Dorothy went straight to Miss Lomax and it turned out that Dorothy’s aunt, whose widow’s pension was very small, had taken in paying guests, one of whom was the alleged spy. The woman promptly changed her lodgings, but not before presenting the aunt with a coral necklace for Dorothy and recommending a hairdresser in London that Dorothy might like to visit. Wearing the necklace, Dorothy boldly went to the hairdresser but nothing happened. Subsequently the alleged spy applied to leave the country but was stopped at the port. Dorothy never knew what happened to the woman but her aunt apparently commented: ‘Our counter-espionage department seems to be on the spot after all!’

  In 1917 Dorothy Dimmock as she was then left MI5 to get married to Captain James Line, RFC, but not before introducing various friends to MI5 who carried on her work on the card index. Interestingly, when the future Director General of MI5, Stella Rimington, joined MI5 in 1969, she spent time working in the Registry as part of her early training. At that point it was still staffed exclusively by women.

  Some 3,500 women worked in MI9, the Postal Censorship Branch, which was responsible for censoring and intercepting mail. Within MI9 women worked as clerks and censors, translated letters from abroad, and tested mail for invisible ink. MI9 handled an extraordinary amount of correspondence, including all non-military incoming and outgoing mail, as well as so-called transit mail, which passed through Britain on its way to other countries. Initially only men, those who were too old or unfit to join the armed forces, were employed to do the work but as the quantity of mail that needed to be examined increased, women were recruited. One of the women who worked in the Censorship Branch was Freya Stark, who later went on to become a very well-known writer and traveller. She joined the Censorship Department in 1916:

  ‘In late autumn two householders guaranteed me and I went on trial as a Censor. This consisted of three weeks’ training during which the letters were re-censored by a supervisor. She was an embittered woman who spent her time in a long room full of desks telling us all what fools we were, but at the end of three weeks I was sent on into a building off the Strand, where I worked for thirty-five shillings a week… The l
etters I passed now went on my own responsibility: if I saw anything suspicious I sent it up with a form where the reasons for suspicion were given, and if the higher department thought the matter worth investigating the form was returned with a red star attached. I used to get from one to five stars a day, but a very stupid girl next to me hardly got three a week so I can’t help thinking that a good many undesirable things slipped past her. I could read about 150 letters a day (German, French and Italian mail from or to Switzerland). They were mostly dull; no one would believe how often people say the same thing: we had a cold snap at the time, and 120 out of the 150 letters described bursting pipes. The suspicious letters were, of course, interesting: some one could make sure of – the morse code cut round stamp edges, the lining of envelopes, and the flourishes and underlinings used as guides to key words: but generally it was a sort of instinct which told me to look carefully, and I had some difficulty in finding words for my suspicions that I would write on the form: more often than not this vague feeling was right and a red star showed that the clue was being followed.’

  Women also worked in Naval intelligence, in what was known as Room 40, so named after Room 40 in the Old Building at the Admiralty. Room 40 intercepted and decoded enemy messages and ciphers, much of the work being focused on German naval codebooks and maps. Information received was top secret. The director was William Reginald Hall, known as ‘Blinker’ because of a facial twitch, who was assisted by a brilliant codebreaker, Sir Alfred Ewing. Other men on the team included Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, a classics scholar who went on to work on the Enigma machine during the Second World War. During the First World War, Room 40 decoded around 15,000 German communications, its most significant success occurring in 1917 when Room 40 decoded the so-called ‘Zimmerman Telegram’, a coded message from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman, to his ambassador in Mexico, promising Mexico Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona if Mexico joined the Central Powers. Its ‘interception’ and publication in the United States brought America into the war.

  Given the shortage of manpower, women were employed to do secretarial work, unload the tubes in which messages were received, and help with decoding. Recruitment was strict; only women with naval connections, such as the daughters of admirals or other naval officers, or who were personally recommended by impeccable sources were employed. Elitism played a major part: women had to be of the right social and political background. Many of the women were university graduates – although Oxford University for instance did not actually award degrees until 1920 – and several spoke French and German fluently, a much sought-after skill for the work. Women who worked in Room 40 included Olive Roddam, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, whose fiancé was killed in 1914 and who worked as a secretary to ‘Dilly’ Knox, whom she later married. Some women stayed with the department after the war, and during the Second World War several returned to cryptography at Bletchley Park.

  Women worked in other sections of British Intelligence as well, deciphering enemy wireless messages in MI1B, in passport control, and in MI7, the propaganda section. Women wrote reports, processed, classified and précised the highly secret intelligence that flooded into MI5 at the rate of more than 10,000 documents a month. Women staffed switchboards, frisked incoming foreigners at British ports, and worked as cooks, cleaners and drivers. From 1916 women also ran the printing section of MI5. A number of women, such as Lady Sybil Hambro, held fairly high-level posts, managing female staff and running the secretarial sections. A few women also worked for the British Secret Service abroad in Paris and Holland.

  Wages, conditions and discrimination

  Hours of work were long and conditions often left a great deal to be desired. Some offices operated twenty-four hours a day receiving and processing information so women were employed on a shift basis of around eight hours per shift. In MI9 women were employed to work from 9.00 am – 5.00 pm with one hour off for lunch and a twenty-minute tea break. In practice though, women often worked longer hours. Similarly in MI5, women were supposed to work an eight or nine-hour day with one day off a week; however they often worked seven days a week, having a half-day off only if pressure of work allowed. Most had one Sunday off in two, but as time went on, female members of staff were allowed one week off every three months.

  Offices were cramped and poorly ventilated and, as Freya Stark had implied, women often found themselves working in very close proximity with women they did not get on with particularly well; the work itself, while crucial to British intelligence, could sometimes be very monotonous as women sorted through countless letters and filed numerous documents. Knowing the work was top secret and important to British security did not necessarily lessen the strain and tedium that many women experienced.

  Girl Guides: cheerful and willing

  VERY FEW PEOPLE would associate Girls Guides with the murky world of spying and undercover work. But MI5 documents reveal that during the First World War some ninety teenage Girl Guides worked for MI5 as messengers, carrying top-secret material from office to office and even delivering their messages verbally on occasion. At the start of the war, MI5 used Boy Scouts but it was soon found that the teenage boys were far too boisterous, talkative and prone to get into mischief so MI5 switched to using Girl Guides, who were considered to less talkative, although this was debatable, but certainly less boisterous and mischievous. The girls, who were aged between 14 and 16, worked at Waterloo House and two other offices in central London, where they were divided into groups of five or six Guides, each group being managed by a patrol leader, who was responsible for ‘the work, discipline and good behaviour of her patrol’. Each day the patrol leaders allotted marks and at the end of the month the group that proved most satisfactory was awarded a picture as a prize. Guides who were chosen for the work needed to be ‘of good standing, quick, cheerful and willing’.

  They were employed on a three months’ probation period and paid ten shillings (50p) a week, with dinner and tea provided. The hours of work were 9.00 am – 6.00 pm and 10.00 am – 7.00 pm on alternate weeks. Guides got one half-day off a week and had to be on duty on alternate Sundays. They were allowed one week’s summer holiday and a short break at Christmas and Easter. According to MI5 records, for the first hour of the working day Guides had to dust rooms, fill up inkwells and disinfect telephones. After completing those duties, they collected documents from the post room or took them for posting, ran messages, sorted cards, collected files and gathered waste paper for burning. Some Guides were also taught to clean and repair typewriters.

  At a time when women of whatever age were expected to conduct themselves with decorum, Girl Guides had to observe a strict dress code, with skirts being no more than 8 inches off the ground. They had to wear a belt and their hat at all times. Between 1914 and 1918, the Guides carried out their duties with immense devotion. They pledged on their honour never to read the papers they carried, and they stuck to their pledge. At times perhaps their enthusiasm could be a bit overwhelming. In March 1920 The Nameless Magazine carried ‘An Essay on the Girl Guide’ by M.S. Aslin. Written in a humorous vein, Miss Aslin of MI5 Registry commented that ‘the Girl Guide may be found, in all stages of perfection and imperfection, lurking in dark corners of 16, Charles Street. She has many functions. One of these is to snub you when you seek to penetrate beyond the sacred portals of the Office… She speeds from floor to floor, bearing messages… and no obstacle is too great for her to fall over in her devotion to this happy task. Released for the moment, she retires to her attractive little sitting room, where she reads and writes or converses quietly (?) on high topics with her friends’.

  Despite their skills and the enormous contribution they made to the running and development of the British secret service, women were consistently paid less than men in all departments, as they were of course in all areas of waged work. For instance female clerical workers in MI5 received between £7 and £10 per month, with one of the supervisors, the same Edith Lomax who interviewed Dorot
hy Dimmick, being initially paid £20 per month, rising to £29 per month by 1919. Male officers by contrast were paid £33 per month. The same differences applied throughout British intelligence. Female graduates working in cryptography, who were among the highest paid women workers, earned an annual salary of £200, while their male counterparts earned between £350 and £500 per year. Nor were women entitled to bonuses that were paid to male workers in the censorship department. Unequal wages were not the only examples of sex discrimination; women in MI5 had to fight hard to be regarded as colleagues rather than just drudges or skivvies. After the war an S. Callow wrote a humorous poem entitled Song of the Women Clerks describing the varied types of work that she and other women had done but implied that despite their hard work and the fact that many women had degrees, they were not necessarily seen as equal to the men. There was recognition at the end of the war but change took a long time to arrive. Seventy years later when Stella Rimington first joined MI5 she commented that ‘even in 1969, the ethos had not changed very much from the days when a small group of military officers, all men of course… pitted their wits against the enemy. It soon became clear to me that a strict sex discrimination policy was in place in MI5 and women were treated quite differently from men.’

  Top secret

  The British secret service looked for various qualities in the women they recruited: women were expected to be well educated and to be of good social standing. Many were recruited from Oxford and Cambridge and women’s colleges such as Cheltenham Ladies College. Clerical experience was valuable but not essential and the ability to speak other languages, particularly French and German, was very useful. Women working in naval intelligence had to be the daughters of admirals or other naval officers, and all women recruited had to come with first-class references. Above all, the women who worked in British intelligence needed to be discreet; it was essential that they said nothing about the work they were doing, which was absolutely top secret. As a result women told nobody where they were working or what they were doing. According to Dorothy Line, the roof of the MI5 building, where women sometimes escaped to get a breath of fresh air, overlooked Nelson’s column, which from that angle made ‘the great Admiral’s tri-corn hat look like a pair of horns and his sword like a tail. This was useful because it was impressed on us that it was most important never to say where we worked. So when we were asked by curious relatives and friends “Where is your office?” we could say blithely “Where Nelson looks like Mephistopheles”.’