Intelligence recruitment in 1945 and ‘Peculiar Personal Characteristics’

In the last months of 1945, two senior British civil servants corresponded about the size, structure and pay of the postwar signals intelligence (Sigint) organization that was to become GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters), the continuation to the prewar Government Code and Cypher School (GC and CS) and its greatly expanded wartime version at Bletchley Park. One of the two officials, J.I.C. Crombie, was the Foreign Office’s Principal Establishment and Finance Officer with the grade of Assistant Under-Secretary of State, the antique title of Chief Clerk, and an annual salary of £1,700. In considering Bletchley’s postwar resources, he was continuing the Foreign Office’s prewar sponsorship of GC and CS, though unusually for its Chief Clerk, he was a home civil servant with a Treasury background and not from the diplomatic service. ¹ The other civil servant, A.J.D. Winnifrith, was younger though still quite senior: an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury, on a scale of £1,150–£1,500, who exercised the Treasury’s responsibility for controlling civil service costs and numbers. ² They had been to Cambridge and Oxford and had joined the civil service through what was then its academic competition, and were fliers rising to the top. Sir James Crombie retired in 1962 after eight years as the Chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise: Sir John Winnifrith was the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1959 to 1967 before taking a clutch of post-retirement appointments.