During the Second World War the British government undertook a unique experiment in the monitoring of public opinion. It was organised in secret by Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information (MOI) that kept a close watch on the home front, observing the behaviour and eavesdropping on the conversations of the general public. Evidence gathered from all parts of the United Kingdom was sifted and compiled into reports that were issued daily between May and September 1940, and then in weekly form until December 1944, when Home Intelligence was closed down. Initially the circulation of the reports was restricted mainly to a handful of officials in the Ministry of Information itself, but over time the circulation list expanded to include Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the leading ministries on the home front, and the three service ministries – the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry.
The Home Intelligence reports, which covered almost every aspect of life on the home front, have become in recent years a major source for social, cultural and political historians. The authors of this article have themselves edited substantial and unabridged extracts from them in two volumes: Listening to Britain (2010) and The Spirit of the Blitz (2020), which cover the period from May 1940 to June 1941. Less well known than the reports themselves is the history of the unique organisation that researched and produced them: Home Intelligence itself. By the time we embarked on The Spirit of the Blitz, we had already researched and written a complete history of Home Intelligence, on which we drew in the introductory section of the book, while cutting the narrative short in June 1941, and leaving the subsequent history of Home Intelligence in obscurity. In the present article we have restored our original comprehensive account, which we hope will be of interest to readers of the reports and indeed to historians of the home front. We are grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce certain passages that have already been published in The Spirit of the Blitz.
Origins
Unlike Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, which was set up in 1933, the MOI only came into existence at the outbreak of war. The first blueprint of its activities, drawn up by a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence in July 1936, envisaged that it would pursue two main objectives on the domestic front: the censorship of news and information, and the dissemination of propaganda intended to sustain popular support for the war. There was no specific mention of the word ‘morale’, but its importance was taken so much for granted that no explicit reference was needed. In practice the planners paid far more attention to the question of censorship than they did to the cloudy topics of morale and propaganda. Nevertheless some preparations were made.[i]
It was recognised that the MOI would need some kind of machinery for gauging the public’s response to publicity campaigns, as well as the assessment of morale in general. The planners proposed to set up a Collecting Division to gather intelligence about public opinion from sources such as the press and government departments. The Secretary of the University Grants Committee, John Beresford, a former Treasury official and well known man of letters,[ii] was appointed as its provisional director in June 1937. As MOI’s historian explains, Beresford planned to expand the range of sources to include ‘Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of British Industry, Workers’ Educational Associations, school inspectors, teachers’ organisations, the Ministry of Information’s Regional Information Offices (RIOs), the Labour movement and even ‘Communist cells’, the latter contact to be explored ‘as discreetly as possible.’[iii]
Beresford also made tentative plans to engage the services of two social-survey organisations: Mass-Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO), the British branch of the American Gallup Poll. ‘I should like to point out’, he wrote to a Treasury official, ‘that the Collecting Division is an entirely new and pioneering experiment. No division with similar duties as far as I am aware existed in the last war. It is impossible to foresee before the event precisely how it will actually develop.’[iv] When the Ministry of Information was established in September 1939, the Collecting Division, now renamed Home Intelligence, was set up as planned with Beresford as Director.
Another essential component of MOI’s operations was its regional machinery. At the outbreak of war eleven regional offices, corresponding to the civil-defence regions of the United Kingdom but excluding London, were established under the direction of Regional Information Officers (RIOs), whose task was to organise publicity and propaganda at the local level. They included offices for Wales in Cardiff and Scotland in Edinburgh. Regional offices for London and Northern Ireland (which was not a civil defence region) were added in 1940.[v] In every region the RIO was to be assisted by Local Information Committees made up of representatives drawn from the three main political parties – a rule inapplicable to Northern Ireland – local government, and voluntary bodies.
Almost before it started, the machinery ground to a halt. The Ministry proved to be an administrative shambles presided over by an ineffectual minister, Lord Macmillan. In October 1939 it was stripped of its censorship functions, which were transferred to a Press and Censorship Bureau. (They were to be restored to the MOI in April 1940). The rest of the Ministry was subjected to draconian economies imposed, at the request of the government, by Lord Camrose, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph. In October 1939 Home Intelligence was shut down and Beresford, its Director, made redundant.[vi] The regional machinery was suspended and a number of Regional Officers resigned.
It soon became evident that domestic publicity would be unworkable without the regional apparatus and it was gradually restored. Meanwhile, due largely to the efforts of John Hilton, the Ministry’s Director of Home Publicity, Home Intelligence was resuscitated. Hilton, the child of working class parents from Bolton, was one of the many temporary civil servants who brought a breath of fresh air to wartime Whitehall. A popular broadcaster of the 1930s, and pre-war Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge, he understood the value of market research and pressed for the revival of Beresford’s unit. Coincidentally, a request arrived from the Ministry of Food for the creation of a market-research agency.[vii] Home Intelligence was reinstated and Hilton secured the appointment of his friend Mary Adams as its Director in December 1939.[viii]
The archetypal civil servant of the administrative class was male, upper middle class, ex-public school, ex-Oxbridge, and a graduate in the humanities. Adams, a scholarship girl from a modest background, was a graduate in botany from the University of Cardiff. After joining the Talks Department of the BBC in 1930, she became the first woman television producer in 1937, broadcasting from Alexandra Palace at a time when the infant service was still confined to the London area. When it closed down at the outbreak of war she was free to take on a new challenge. ‘In appearance’, her daughter recalled, ‘Mary Adams was small, bird-like, always well dressed, with bright blue eyes and, in public, a knowing confidence. She was a socialist, a romantic communist…a fervent atheist and advocate of humanism and common sense.’[ix] In spite of her left-wing convictions she was married to the Conservative MP, Vyvyan Adams, a strong opponent of appeasement.
Adams proposed that the existence of Home Intelligence should be made public and its rationale explained. ‘All super-imposed intelligence services,’ she wrote, ‘run the risk of being represented as part of a disguised espionage system organised by the Government for political purposes and, as such, contraventions of the rules of democratic society.’ Much future embarrassment, she argued, could be avoided by a publicity campaign explaining the necessity of keeping the government in touch with public opinion.[x] She was overruled, but pressed ahead with the building up of her department. She won the approval of the Treasury for the establishment of a headquarters staff which consisted, by July 1940, of nine people assisted by four shorthand typists and two clerks.[xi] One of the first of her recruits was the artist and illustrator Nicholas Bentley, who had appeared on some of the television programmes she produced at Alexandra Palace. Having trained as an auxiliary fireman before the war, he went on to serve, on temporary leave from his office job, as a firefighter during the London Blitz.[xii] Another Adams protégé, the poet and writer Winifred Holmes, belonged to a literary circle that included T.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Edith Sitwell.[xiii] Adams, however, balanced the literary leanings of her staff by the appointment of Stephen Taylor, an ambitious young psychiatrist whom she had invited on to the air during her time as a talks producer at the BBC. ‘Had the war not come,’ she noted in March 1940, ‘he would have been selected for a production post in television.’[xiv] During the phoney war he was working in a naval hospital in Bristol and many months passed before Adams could persuade the Admiralty to release him to take up a post at Home Intelligence. Eventually she prevailed and Taylor joined the department with the rank of ‘Specialist’ in May 1940.
Home Intelligence had the job of collecting data on morale and opinion, but how and where were they to find it? Adams could draw on in-house sources in the shape of reports from MOI’s regional officers, but she was sceptical of their ability to report objectively on the response to campaigns run by their own ministry.[xv] For harder evidence she turned to the Postal and Telegraph Censorship, which agreed to supply Home Intelligence with regular summaries of its findings. Shortly afterwards, in April 1940, responsibility for the Censorship was transferred from the War Office to the MOI.[xvi]
As a general rule, only outgoing mail from the United Kingdom was opened, though censorship of internal mail was applied to areas like the north of Scotland, where key defence facilities were located. The correspondents, Adams noted in 1940, were predominantly lower middle class, and ‘mainly of an unintellectual type’, and their letters were not always a reliable indicator of morale: ‘Experience has shown that some writers feel it their duty to act a propagandist role when painting a picture of war-time England for foreign consumption’. Nevertheless, she concluded that postal censorship was a valuable source.[xvii] By October 1940, when the first of the weekly reports was produced, 120,000 letters a week were being opened and read.[xviii] Postal censorship of internal mail was subsequently extended to cover sensitive coastal towns in England and Wales and, between the summer of 1942 and the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the number of towns involved increased from twenty-three to several hundred.[xix]
Home Intelligence, however, was founded on the assumption that no single source could be relied upon as an accurate measure of opinion. The aim was to create a broad stream of evidence flowing from numerous tributaries. The Home Office supplied fortnightly reports on morale received from Chief Constables. The BBC made available the findings of Robert Silvey’s Listener Research Department. A number of voluntary organisations like the Women’s Institute, the Women’s Voluntary Service, and the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, supplied replies to questionnaires. The managers of the Granada cinema chain sent in reports (presumably on audience reactions to newsreels), but the arrangement was broken off at the request of MI5. Another unusual source was the railway bookstalls of W.H. Smith’s, whose travelling superintendents filled in questionnaires based on discussions with bookstall managers.[xx]
The most important of Adams’s sources was Mass Observation. In the course of her work at the BBC she had encountered Tom Harrisson, a self-taught social anthropologist and brilliant, buccaneering self-publicist. An upper-class misfit, Harrisson had dropped out of university at Cambridge after twelve months and embarked on a life of adventure. At an age when other young men of his background were making a career for themselves in the Army or the City, he was taking part in expeditions to the South Seas and making friends with cannibals. In 1937 he and the poet Charles Madge co-founded Mass Observation (MO) with the aim of creating a social anthropology of the British, observing them as though they were a hitherto unknown tribe. Harrisson set up a branch in Bolton (‘Worktown’ as it was known in MO’s publications) and began to study behaviour in all manner of social contexts from pubs to dance halls and wrestling matches. He was assisted by a small team of about a dozen full-time investigators whose task was to research the multitude of topics inspired by his fertile brain. Madge, who was based in London, was in charge of a nationwide panel of volunteers who responded by post to requests for their observations and opinions. At first Madge and Harrison worked well together but tensions arose and the relationship degenerated to the point at which Madge was forced out. By June 1940 Harrisson was in sole charge of MO.
Harrisson was constantly engaged in scraping together enough money to pay his full-time investigators. With the approach of war he saw the chance of attaching MO to the government payroll, an opportunism allied to the conviction that his organisation alone could bridge the gulf of mutual incomprehension between the rulers and the ruled. The appointment of Adams to Home Intelligence seemed providential and she soon arranged for Harrisson to be employed on the study of opinion at by-elections, the main purpose of which was to gauge the strength of anti-war feeling. In April 1940 she obtained a three-month contract under which MO was employed on a full-time basis. The Ministry, however, decided to keep the employment of MO secret. So great was the fear that the government would be charged with spying on its own people that MO’s full-time investigators were instructed never to mention, even when questioned by the police, that they were working for the MOI.[xxi]
Although she was a great admirer of Harrisson’s work, Adams was well aware that he was a controversial figure. Among the career civil servants in the Ministry there was a ‘lingering suspicion’ that his organisation ‘was heavily inclined towards the left’.[xxii] This was true in the sense that the majority of MO’s voluntary panel were on the left, and several of its full-time investigators pacifists or communists. But Harrisson himself was robustly pro-war, a Liberal in politics, and quite indifferent to Marxist theory or sociological concepts of class.[xxiii] In the academic world his methods were regarded as unscientific and some thought him a charlatan. His methods were indeed impressionistic. MO’s paid observers conducted daily face-to-face interviews with men and women in the street, and attempts were made to quantify the findings, but Harrisson was convinced that opinions expressed in public, in response to questions framed by pollsters, often concealed the opinions they expressed in private. One of the main objectives of MO, therefore, was to document spontaneous opinion by eavesdropping on people whose unguarded remarks were recorded by investigators as ‘overheards.’ The findings, as interpreted by Harrisson, owed more to intuitive genius than scientific method, but most historians view his judgments as potential insights of exceptional interest and value.
Adams recognised that Home Intelligence needed objective statistical data, based on a representative sample of the population, to act as a counterweight to the impressionism of MO. No organisation was fully capable of this at the time but the best-qualified candidate was Henry Durant’s British Institute of Public Opinion. It had, however, already been ruled out as a source for Home Intelligence in September 1939 and Adams made no attempt to reinstate it. This may have been a mistake. The BBC, the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Food were all subsequently to make use of BIPO.[xxiv] Adams preferred to set up a new organisation, the Wartime Social Survey (referred to here as ‘the Social Survey’). Established in April 1940 it was separate from Home Intelligence, but run by the same Director. In contrast with MO, it was an academically respectable body, supervised by a Professor at the London School of Economics and operating under the aegis of the National Institute of Social and Economic Research. The Social Survey employed house-to-house interviews in which respondents replied to a standardised list of questions. Adams hoped that it would provide Home Intelligence with a statistically reliable ‘barometer of public opinion.’[xxv]
In mid-May 1940, with the Germans advancing rapidly towards the Channel, Adams was instructed by her superiors at the MOI to produce a daily report on the state of morale. The RIOs, who were asked to telephone in each day between 12.00pm and 2.30pm, had little evidence to offer beyond impressions gathered from casual conversations or ‘a hurried series of visits to public houses.’[xxvi] Other sources like the Social Survey produced more reliable findings but at longer intervals. Only Harrisson’s full-time observers could provide survey data on a daily basis. The first of the daily reports, on 18 May 1940, was virtually a carbon copy of a report written by Harrisson. So MO became even more indispensable to Home Intelligence – for the time being.
The Downfall of Mary Adams
Adams had constructed an ingenious mechanism in which the swift impressionism of MO was to be counterbalanced by the slower but more scientific methods of the Social Survey. Both halves of the mechanism, however, were to break down. In May 1940 Churchill appointed his friend and political ally Alfred Duff Cooper as Minister of Information. Meanwhile, the Social Survey was venturing, under the direction of Adams, into politically sensitive territory. People were asked not only whether they had heard or read about Churchill’s broadcast speeches, but also whether they approved of them. 50% approved his first broadcast on 19 May, 78.5% his second on 16 June. Early in July, when fears of invasion were widespread, people were asked whether they believed that Britain was adequately prepared for the dangers. 76% were satisfied that the preparations were adequate, but 16% were dissatisfied. ‘The Survey’, wrote Stephen Taylor, who had recently joined the staff of Home Intelligence, ‘can help to reveal unexpected weak spots in morale – grumbles, worries, dangers and the like – which if not righted or explained may lead to more serious troubles.’[xxvii]
The Social Survey got caught up in the ongoing crossfire between the press and the MOI. Inevitably, as its interviewers went from door to door, explaining that they were from the Survey, the press got wind of their activities and launched an attack on ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’. The government was accused of invading privacy, spying on the public, and imitating the methods of totalitarian states. From the point of view of the MOI, the attack on the Survey had the advantage of distracting attention from the activities of Home Intelligence. The Social Survey’s enquiries were defensible on the grounds that they were openly conducted with the knowledge and consent of householders. More positively, they could be justified as a contribution to the workings of a democracy. The case of Home Intelligence was very different. It really was ‘snooping’ – eavesdropping on people who were unaware that their views were being reported, albeit anonymously. Some MPs suspected that something of the kind was going on with the aid of MO. In the feverish political atmosphere of 1940 the revelation of the extent of MO’s involvement would have caused a political storm. Duff Cooper concluded that he would have to be highly economical with the truth. When the topic was debated in the House of Commons on 1 August he mounted a strong defence of the Survey while misleading MPs about the role of MO. ‘Mass Observation’, he declared, ‘is, I understand, privately run and controlled. We have once or twice applied to it for statistical information on certain subjects which it has been able to furnish.’[xxviii]
While the Social Survey took the flak, Home Intelligence remained largely invisible and immune from public scrutiny. ‘The Government and the Civil Service’, wrote Taylor, ‘were provided with a guide to the changing moods of public opinion; yet the Minister of Information was never called upon to justify this activity in public. Had he been asked to do so, pressure from Press and Parliament might have forced him to discontinue the service.’[xxix] Although its activities might have been represented as sinister, Home Intelligence was never likely to engage in the kind of surveillance practiced by police states. As a general rule neither MO nor Home Intelligence reported the names of individuals to the authorities. When Winifred Holmes wrote to the Home Office about communism at an air-raid warden’s post, and mentioned the name of the well-known children’s writer Noel Streetfeild, she was roundly rebuked by Adams: ‘Only under the most exceptional circumstances should it be necessary for any information about individuals to be lodged with another Ministry, especially with the Home Office’.[xxx]
Although Home Intelligence did not ‘snoop’ on individuals, they did supply the Home Office with a series of special reports on the activities of communists, fascists, pacifists and other anti-war groups. They may therefore have been of assistance in providing background information on dissident groups. Most searching of all were their enquiries into anti-semitism, a topic with obvious implications for the identification of fascists and enemy sympathisers.[xxxi] ‘Most RIOs’, noted a circular in January 1941, ‘send to Home Intelligence leaflets and notes of the activities of such groups.’[xxxii]
The Social Survey survived the ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ row, but it was now under scrutiny and vulnerable to criticism. The most damaging implication, perhaps, was that by the very act of enquiring into morale, it had called into question the unity and resolve of the British people. Heedless of the critics, in September 1940 Adams instructed it to go ahead with an even more contentious project. A team of psychiatric social workers was hired to assess the morale of interviewees on a five-point scale. The National Institute of Social and Economic Research, which had been happy to keep a watching brief on social scientific studies of opinion, declared that the subject of morale was beyond its scope, and resigned from its supervisory role.[xxxiii] Fortunately for Adams the scheme quickly proved unworkable and had to be abandoned before news of it leaked out. In the meantime the MOI had acquired a new Director-General, Frank Pick, the former chief executive of London Transport. Sceptical of the value of the Social Survey he cut staff numbers from sixty to twenty and decreed that in future it should no longer undertake work for Home Intelligence, but only ‘purely factual’ investigations for other government departments. This dealt a final blow to Adams’s attempts to employ the Social Survey as a barometer of morale.
With the Social Survey denied to Home Intelligence as a quantitative means of assessing morale, Adams was more dependent than ever on the qualitative evidence supplied by Harrisson and MO. Nor was her faith in him diminished. In October 1940 she extended MO’s contract for a further period of six months.[xxxiv] The Blitz, however, plunged Adams into a fresh crisis. The main problem was the mounting tension between Home Intelligence and the Home Office, one of the oldest and most powerful of Whitehall departments. During the summer of 1940, the two had shared intelligence on the effects of air raids. The Home Office reports, however, were based on information supplied by the civil defence services. As Adams and Harrisson saw it, the primary function of Home Intelligence was to report on public attitudes towards the civil defence services. When victims of the blitz complained that public air-raid shelters were damp, overcrowded and unhygienic, Adams’s department reported their views in the weekly reports. While the organisation of air-raid precautions (ARP) was mainly in the hands of local authorities, overall responsibility lay with the Home Office and its officials were angered by the tone of the Home Intelligence reports. As James Hinton comments: ‘The Home Office was never able to understand that MO was dealing not in authenticated fact about official performance but in popular perceptions.’[xxxv]
Up to this point the daily reports had been circulated to ministers and officials outside the MOI at Adams’s discretion. Under pressure from the Home Office, Pick now decreed that in future they were only to be circulated within the ministry.[xxxvi] He also instructed her to replace daily with weekly reports.[xxxvii] As the new format enabled Home Intelligence to draw more considered conclusions from a larger body of data, this was in a sense a step forward. But the decision to prevent the circulation of the reports outside the MOI threatened to isolate and marginalise Home Intelligence.
Such was the volume of criticism in Parliament and the Press of the inadequacies of ARP that Churchill was obliged, on 3 October 1940, to replace Sir John Anderson as Home Secretary with Herbert Morrison. If Adams cherished hopes that he might be more appreciative of the work of Home Intelligence they were swiftly dashed. Nor did she win the support of Walter Monckton, who succeeded Pick as Director General of the MOI at the end of 1940. R. H. Parker, a former Indian civil-service judge and Home Office official of strongly right-wing views, was drafted into the MOI as Director of the Home Division and placed in authority over her.[xxxviii] In a desperate bid to recover her independence she sent Monckton a memorandum suggesting that Home Intelligence should be transferred to the Cabinet Office,[xxxix] but no response was forthcoming.
Adams’s difficulties were not confined to the turf war with the Home Office. ‘Naturally’, she wrote to R.J. Silvey of BBC Listener Research, ‘everyone is frightened of the work of our department, regard it with suspicion, and many civil servants do their utmost to bring about a standstill. I needn’t tell you that techniques of social research are so little understood, and I might add so little authenticated, that ignorance, misunderstanding and suspicion abound.’[xl] Pouring out her troubles to Harold Nicolson, the junior minister at MOI, she complained bitterly of the obstruction she faced:
My Department has been charged with the task of documenting morale and assessing changes in public opinion, but there has never been any clearly defined policy about the use to which the reports might be put. For example, at the present moment, I’ve got excellent detailed material about the Glasgow and Clydeside situation but no one is really interested in considering it. There’s such departmental jealousy and staggering sensitivity to criticism that this Ministry would never dream of forwarding these reports (containing as they must do indirect criticism of the work of other Government Departments) to the Ministry of Labour, the Regional Commissioner or the Ministry of Health… Naturally if our reports are to be of the slightest use they must be completely frank and not be eternally concerned with conciliating other interests… There is, of course, terrific pressure everywhere to say (especially in cold print) that everything is alright, that morale is splendid, that people are taking it, etc. We are subject to the same pressure. It’s in the air…[xli]
Adams was distraught. ‘Never in my wildest dreams’, she wrote to Julian Huxley, ‘had I believed such inefficiency and inability existed. No one seems ever to make up their minds about anything.’ The situation, she confided to another correspondent, was ‘absolute hell.’[xlii] Her isolation was the consequence of a general loss of confidence in her judgment. Convinced that she was right, she expected the logic of her arguments to prevail, but the only response from Whitehall was an ominous silence. Harrisson, who shared her impatience with officialdom, urged her to quit: ‘Let not our new battle cry be: “Parker must go”. Let it instead be: “WE MUST GO”. Go somewhere with some liebestraum and leave after the end of March, if you cannot take it before!’[xliii] In a last futile attempt to force the issue, Adams tried to persuade her staff to resign with her. They refused to do so and she departed in April 1941, taking up a post in the North American service of the BBC. Stephen Taylor was put in charge but Home Intelligence continued, for the time being, to be a branch of the Home Division under Parker’s direction.[xliv] When Plymouth suffered a devastating series of air raids between 21 and 29 April, Parker instructed Taylor himself to visit the city and report on conditions – thus by-passing Harrisson and asserting his own authority over Home Intelligence.[xlv]
Rescue and Revival
It was Taylor who rescued Home Intelligence from its plight and transformed it into a more respectable component of the Whitehall machine. ‘To look at’, wrote Bentley, ‘he was tall, with good strong features – what Dornford Yates would have called an open countenance, though at times it could close up in an expression of strong disapproval – and large blue-grey eyes, which, besides their traditional association of innocence, could occasionally take on a look of stone-cold cunning.’ He was also, Bentley observed, ‘very tough indeed…he knew as a rule exactly what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it, and how it should be done.’[xlvi]
Like Adams, Taylor was a socialist. He combined his work for Home Intelligence with campaigning discreetly for a National Health Service in the pages of the Lancet and the Spectator.[xlvii] As a Labour MP after the war he was to be one of the strongest supporters of Aneurin Bevan. He was also robustly patriotic with an Orwellian mistrust of the progressive intelligentsia. Of his first meeting with Harrisson in the late 1930s he wrote: ‘I did not take to him if only because he seemed to be a journalist masquerading as a scientist’. He suspected that Mass Observation was riddled with pacifists and communists and its reports infected with defeatism. Arriving at Home Intelligence he found that ‘alarm and despondency were the order of the day. Defeatism was reported to be rife. The war was as good as lost.’[xlviii]
Taylor repeatedly warned Adams not to place too much reliance on reports from MO, but she was not persuaded. In his memoirs he described her as ‘a sweet, energetic, liberal-minded but muddled lady… For a rational scientist (which she was) reason seemed to play little part in her thinking.’[xlix] As he explained in a brief, unpublished history of Home Intelligence, written at the end of the war:
Those in Home Intelligence who were doubtful about the representativeness of Mass Observation reports were anxious to provide some system of studying the feelings of the public more directly and impartially. So it was decided to make contact with a number of people in London, in all strata of society, who would be prepared, in response to a telephone call or a personal visit, to report the feelings of those with whom they came into contact…The types of people approached were doctors, dentists, parsons, publicans, small shopkeepers, news agents, trades union officials, factory welfare officers, shop stewards, Citizens’ Advice Bureau secretaries, hospital almoners, business men, and local authority officials.[l]
When Taylor succeeded Adams he reorganised the machinery in alliance with Bentley, who became in effect his deputy.[li] He adopted and improved the London model, which had been in operation since the summer of 1940, and extended it to all the MOI’s regional offices. In July 1941 he won permission from the Treasury for the appointment in each of the regions of a Regional Intelligence Officer with instructions to establish a panel of contacts chosen, as in the London area, because their occupations brought them into regular contact with members of the public. All were asked to report objectively on the spontaneously expressed opinions of the people they met. The thirteen Intelligence Officers were, in effect, a major addition to the staffing of Home Intelligence and a remarkable tribute to the confidence placed in him by the MOI and the Treasury.
Taylor set the Intelligence Officers the goal of finding one member of the panel for every 10,000 people in the region. By the spring of 1942 each of them had assembled a panel of somewhere between 200 and 400 contacts. All regions submitted a weekly report on which Taylor and his staff drew heavily in compiling the weekly national report. The regional reports, unfortunately, seem to have disappeared except for a tiny sample, consisting of one from May 1944 and three from December, preserved in the National Archives. All were modelled on the national report and ran to several pages.[lii] Perhaps other copies will eventually come to light but it looks as though a primary source for the regional history of the home front has been lost.
When he succeeded Adams as Director, Taylor inherited a six-month contract with Mass Observation that was due to expire in September 1941. ‘Mr Tom Harrisson is full of energy and ability’, he noted, ‘but also of prejudices. If he can be made to control his own feelings, and to allow his observations to speak for themselves, I think Mass Observation should be worth retaining as part of Home Intelligence.’[liii] As Taylor probably expected, Harrisson failed the test and Taylor made no attempt to renew his contract. Harrisson responded with a somewhat barbed expression of his regret ‘that it has been impossible to grant more opportunities to cooperate and co-ordinate with your work as fully as I should have liked. I believe that I could have been a lot more useful given more liaison and directives.’ Perhaps with a view to softening the blow, Taylor arranged to commission occasional reports from MO in future.[liv] While he never claimed scientific validity for the findings generated by the regional machinery he believed that it was more systematic in its methods, and more objective in its judgments than MO. The most convincing evidence of the validity of the weekly report, he claimed, was ‘the high degree of agreement which is usually found between the thirteen different regional reports.’[lv] The imaginative impressionism of the Adams regime had been replaced by methodical impressionism under Taylor.
The arrangement with W.H. Smith had ended, but Taylor continued to place a high value on reports from Chief Constables and the postal censors. It was public knowledge that overseas mail was censored on grounds of national security, but many would have been surprised to learn how far the terms of reference were stretched. In response to requests from Home Intelligence the censors reported on a wide range of topics, like the popular response to the Beveridge Report, that had little or nothing to do with ‘national security.’ For quantitative evidence Taylor could draw on the findings of the British Institute of Public Opinion, which its director Henry Durant made available to him.
At the same time as reorganising the machinery of Home Intelligence, Taylor clarified its objectives. The task of the Ministry of Information was to sustain morale, the task of Home Intelligence to monitor the state of morale. There was, however, some confusion over the meaning of the term. Was it about states of mind, or actions and behaviour, or both? Politicians and the media tended to equate high morale with cheerfulness and patriotic expressions of defiance of the enemy. Taylor applied a more rigorous definition. ‘Morale’, he wrote in October 1941, ‘is the “state of conduct and behaviour of an individual or group.” This distinction is particularly important in dealing with the British public in whom admirable behaviour is often coupled with a veritable wail of grumbles’.
The factors sustaining morale, Taylor argued, fell into two distinct categories: the ‘material’ and the ‘mental’.
He listed them as follows:
Material
1 Food.
2 Warmth
3 Work
4 Leisure, rest and sleep
5 A secure base
6 Safety and security for dependants
Moral
1 Belief that victory is possible
2 Belief in equality of sacrifices
3 Belief in the efficiency and integrity of leadership
4 Belief that the war is a necessity and our cause just.’[lvi]
This common-sense analysis, which grew out of Home Intelligence’s observations of behaviour during the Blitz, defined the assumptions on which the reports were based for the rest of the war. Attitudes and beliefs were important as indicators of the state of morale but Taylor was surely right in contending that the ultimate test of morale was not what people said or thought, but what they did and how they did it: the readiness of workers to work longer shifts, for example, or of householders to comply with the blackout regulations. Although his professional experience no doubt had a bearing on his conclusions, Taylor was writing first and foremost as a civil servant in step with the priorities of Whitehall. What civil servants needed was the active co-operation of the public in the mobilisation of manpower and resources, and it is easy to see how Taylor’s list of the factors determining morale lent themselves to administrative or political action, broached perhaps through lunches with officials in London clubs.
Unlike Adams, who had lost her way in the politics of Whitehall, Taylor was thoroughly at home in the almost exclusively male preserve of the higher civil service. No doubt the prestige attached to his professional status as a psychiatrist, and his ability to translate psychological insights into common sense terms, helped to inspire confidence in his judgment. He also networked and intrigued with the same skill as old Whitehall hands. One of his quirks, frequently deployed in meetings with obstructive officials, was the disarming habit of ‘chewing his handkerchief as though it were a lettuce.’[lvii] The fact that he was also a socialist seems never to have coloured his assessments of public opinion, or given rise to controversy. Adams’ championship of MO had inspired mistrust, but Taylor’s regional machinery, based as it was on men and women in positions of authority in their communities, was a far more reassuring proposition. Home Intelligence was still engaged in eavesdropping, but no more was heard in the Parliament or the press of complaints about ‘snooping’.
Taylor purged Adams’ recruits and replaced them with his own nominees. Staff numbers held steady at fifteen, where they had been in the summer of 1940, but of Adams’ appointments only two survived to become pillars of the new regime: Taylor himself, and Bentley.[lviii]
At the start of his tenure he still held the rank of ‘Specialist’ under the direction of R. H. Parker, the ex-Home Office enforcer. ‘So we waged a secret war’, he wrote, ‘and within six months, Home Intelligence was removed from Judge Parker’s purview, and I became a full director alongside the Judge.’[lix] Parker had enforced the rule that Home Intelligence reports were not be circulated outside the MOI unless requested. Taylor exploited the loophole to the full. ‘It became necessary’, he wrote, ‘judiciously to stimulate those to whom it might benefit to ask for the report.’[lx] So successful was this manoeuvre that the circulation list soon began to expand. The Treasury, which joined the list in November 1941, was kept abreast of popular attitudes towards pay, tax, pensions and allowances.[lxi] As confidence in Home Intelligence grew, departments also began to commission special reports on topics in which they were interested. The Air Ministry asked for a report on public reaction to German proposals for a bombing truce, the Ministry of Health for a report on public knowledge about health, and the Board of Education for a report on public feeling about educational reform.[lxii] In June 1942 Lord Jowitt, the minister responsible for social reconstruction, commissioned a report on public feelings on the subject. Completed in November 1942, it articulated progressive ideas across a wide range of social, economic and industrial policy.[lxiii] Hugh Dalton, the Labour politician and President of the Board of Trade, seized upon it as a means of strengthening the hands of the Labour Party in pressing for the social reforms outlined in the Beveridge Report, which had been published to widespread acclaim on 1 December. As he wrote to Jowitt a few days later:
‘This is a most interesting and encouraging document, which should stimulate us all, Ministers and officials alike, to quicken our steps and to leap over obstacles placed in our path by timid, short-sighted, or sinister persons. I would like to suggest that copies should be circulated to all our colleagues with Reconstruction problems, and to their principal official advisers. This document is too good to keep within a narrow circle.’
Jowitt agreed to do this.[lxiv]
Taylor’s campaign to expand the circulation of the reports ran into temporary difficulties in March 1942, when he received a request from Leslie Rowan, one of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries, to add Number Ten to the circulation list. This was at once arranged, but Churchill’s attention was now drawn to the activities of Home Intelligence. He fired off a minute to Brendan Bracken, his most trusted ally and confidant, whom he had appointed Minister of Information in succession to Duff Cooper. ‘There is hardly anything in this,’ he wrote, ‘which could not have been written by a man sitting in a London office and imagining the echoes in the country to the London Press. I doubt very much whether this survey is worth the trouble. How many people are engaged upon it, and how much does it cost?’[lxv]
Churchill’s intervention seemed ominous, but Taylor had powerful allies. He had already enlisted the support of Major Desmond Morton, the Prime Minister’s personal assistant responsible for liaison with the intelligence services, and Sir Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s doctor.[lxvi] He could also depend on the backing of Cyril Radcliffe, Monckton’s successor as Director-General of the Ministry, while Radcliffe himself could rely on the support of Bracken. When Taylor produced a memorandum explaining how the weekly report was compiled, and its value as a guide to public opinion, Radcliffe forwarded a summary to Bracken, and Bracken forwarded it to Churchill with a strong recommendation in favour of Home Intelligence. Churchill signified his agreement and the crisis passed.
So highly did Bracken think of the reports that he offered to circulate a monthly summary to the War Cabinet, which readily agreed to the proposal. This new arrangement ran from May to November 1942, after which, perhaps, the ‘turn of the tide’ at El Alamein served to reduce anxieties about the state of morale.[lxvii] The War Cabinet Offices and Churchill’s secretariat remained, however, on the circulation list. The prime minister himself did not receive a copy of the weekly report, but his private secretaries occasionally drew his attention to passages they thought might interest him. In August 1943 he was so pleased by a passage reporting popular enthusiasm for the bombing of Rome that he circulated it as a paper to the War Cabinet.[lxviii]
By February 1943 there were 148 external addresses on the circulation list.[lxix] Copies of the weekly report went to Buckingham Palace, the BBC, the Cabinet Office, Chiefs of Staff Committee, the Admiralty, Air Ministry and War Office, MI5, numerous officials in home front ministries, the US ambassador, John Winant, and the Dominion High Commissioners. They were sent by cable to the Minister of State in Cairo, R. G. Casey, and extracts telegraphed to warships at sea. Harold Macmillan read them in Algiers, where he was minister in residence.[lxx] As a general rule, however, diplomatic staff serving overseas were excluded from the circulation list. The only British ambassadors to receive a copy were the ambassador in Moscow, and, later on, the ambassadors in Paris and Rome.
When the United States entered the war, American requests for the report, which revealed strong currents of anti-American feeling, gave rise to fears that it would damage Anglo-American relations. The Director of British Information Services in New York, and a senior member of the British military mission in Washington, were on the circulation list, but the British Embassy was not, and the American Office of War Information was denied access. (The fact that the reports were still sent to Winant, the US ambassador in London, suggests that he was trusted to behave like a co-opted member of the British Establishment). A select group of British and American officials were allowed to read ‘a discreetly edited summary’ of the report, but alarm bells rang in May 1943 when copies of the full report were leaked.[lxxi] The following month, Bracken was horrified when he realised that copies of a special report on ‘British public feeling about America’ had been sent to Washington. ‘I am much concerned’, he wrote in a draft telegram to Harold Butler, the head of British Information Services, ‘about the harm that might be done if it fell into the wrong hands.’ He urged Butler to recover all the copies, including his own, and destroy them.[lxxii]
When the Director General of the MOI reviewed the work of Home Intelligence in the summer of 1943, he wrote to all recipients of the weekly report seeking their ‘candid opinion’ of its utility, and ‘whether you feel that its withdrawal would deprive you of a useful service.’ He received replies from 114 civil servants and ministers of whom 102 wished to continue receiving the reports while eight did not and four gave no clear answer. All three Home Office officials contacted wished to continue receiving the report – a far cry from the tensions of 1940-1941.[lxxiii]
Several of the 102 recipients replied that the weekly reports were of practical use in their work. The Leather Controller at the Ministry of Supply found it ‘of real value’ to learn that footwear was a major source of complaint. An official at the Ministry of War Transport observed that the reports were ‘constantly referred to and used in the planning of our publicity.’ Hugh Gaitskell, a temporary civil servant at the Board of Trade and future leader of the Labour Party, judged them to be ‘of considerable value, particularly those sections which deal with Home Front questions with which the Board of Trade is concerned.’ Francis Meynell, also at work at the Board of Trade as an adviser on consumer needs, described the weekly report as ‘a valuable addition to our knowledge of consumer complaints. It flies danger signals which I find very salutary to take notice of.’ At the Air Ministry, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Richard Peck commented that the reports ‘have been of great value to the Air Staff in assessing the reactions of the general public to the Air Offensive. I would be very sorry to see them stopped or even curtailed to any degree.’ Winant expressed his appreciation of the attention they devoted to ‘public reactions with regard to our military forces here, as this has been of great usefulness to us in correcting certain situations.’ The Chief Medical Officer, Wilson Jamieson, deemed the reports informative on health issues. ‘For example’, he wrote, ‘the comments on the venereal diseases advertising campaign have indeed been of great help in the development of our general publicity on this delicate subject – they have influenced the substance and emphasis of the publicity.’ At the War Office G.R. Hargreaves judged the weekly report to be ‘of great value to the Director General of Army Medical Services, the Director of Army Psychiatry, and the Consulting Psychiatrist, all of whom are involved in morale problems…’ Harold Macmillan wrote from Algiers: ‘I like these reports and find them very useful’, Brigadier O.A.Harker of MI5 thought the report ‘constitutes a valuable index to public opinion and to the spread of rumour that cannot be found elsewhere’, and his colleague Richard Butler, having discussed it with other MI5 officers, agreed: ‘the report fulfils a most useful function and we would be sorry to be deprived of it.’[lxxiv]
Other examples could be given but it would be easy to overstate the impact of Home Intelligence on policy-making. The majority of replies spoke more broadly of the general interest of the reports and their value in keeping the recipients in touch with public opinion. It seems to have been especially valuable to the many public relations officers attached to government departments. Allegations of political bias were conspicuous by their absence and it was notable how many Conservative ministers – Lord Cranborne, Richard Law, Ralph Assheton, Oliver Lyttelton, Harold Macmillan – expressed their approval. One of the few negative comments came from the former Labour Cabinet minister William Wedgwood Benn, now Viscount Stansgate, at the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Public Relations. In stark contrast to the views of Air Vice-Marshal Peck, he completely missed the point: ‘We have on occasions made enquiries about reported criticisms of the R.A.F. but have always found that the grounds on which they were based were so unsubstantial as to make them not worth pursuing.’ At the opposite pole of opinion was Attlee’s Personal Assistant, the Labour politician Evan Durbin. ‘I should like to say’, he replied, ‘that I have found the Home Intelligence Report of the greatest possible value in my work as Personal Assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister – and that he has found the various sections to which I have called his particular attention of very great interest to him.’ It was left to a civil servant in the Stationery Office, N. G. Scorgie, to comment on the potential historical value of the reports: ‘For the political and social history of the war and any future study of the limiting possibilities of combining democracy with efficiency you have got a valuable record of “public opinion” and its effect on the executive, good or bad, from the dark days until now, and it might be just worth going on to the end to make the record complete.’[lxxv]
In the event it was decided to wind up Home Intelligence at the end of 1944, just at the point where it could have been most helpful in facilitating the process of demobilisation. No explanation of the decision is on record, but given the fact that victory was now assured, and the Treasury exerting pressure to reduce bloated wartime expenditure, it was probably inevitable. Taylor had hoped that it would be retained in a modified form after the war. In peacetime, he wrote, ‘the justification for carrying on a secret public opinion assessment survey would be gone; but to carry on such a service openly under the aegis of a national social research council would, in my view, be a very great advance in the machinery of democracy’.[lxxvi] Disappointed on this score, he lobbied successfully for the retention of the Social Survey by the incoming Labour government. Its rigorously statistical investigations of household economics and consumer preferences made it an indispensable tool for administrators, and at the time of writing it continues to flourish as the Social Survey Division of the Office of National Statistics.
……………………………………………………………………
[i] On pre-war preparations see Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (1979)
[ii] Beresford was the editor of the diaries of Parson Woodforde. The Diary of a Country Parson (Oxford University Press, 5 volumes, 1924-1931), was a minor literary classic of the inter-war years.
[iii] McLaine, Ministry of Morale pps 22-3
[iv] McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p 24
[v] TNA INF 1/296, note from unidentified official to Balfour, 11 June 1940
[vi] A list of headquarters staff circulated by the Ministry on 9 October shows that Beresford was still in post as ‘Director’ at that date: see The Times, 10 October 1939, p4. When he was killed in the blitz in October 1940 the New York Times reported that he had resigned as ‘Director of Intelligence’ at the MOI ‘about a year ago’. See New York Times, 22 October 1940, p4. The Times obituary made no mention of his work for the MOI.
[vii] TNA INF 1/290, ‘The Work of Home Intelligence Division 1939-1944’ p 1. This short history of Home Intelligence was unsigned but almost certainly the work of Stephen Taylor, the Director of Home Intelligence from 1941 to 1945.
[viii] James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History 1937-1949 (2013), p 144
[ix] Sally Adams, ‘Mary Adams’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[x] TNA INF 1/472, undated, untitled memorandum
[xi] TNA INF 1/101, ‘Home Intelligence: Organisation and Staffing’, memorandum by Mary Adams, 17 July 1940.
[xii] Nicholas Bentley, A Version of the Truth (1960), pps 173-180, 197.
[xiii] The Times, 20 September 1995
[xiv] Adams to A.P. Waterfield 9 March 1940, Adams Papers
[xv] TNA INF 1/290 ‘The Work of Home Intelligence Division’ p 2
[xvi] Philip M Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (1999), p160. The Press and Censorship Bureau was also restored to MOI control in April 1940.
[xvii] TNA INF 1/472, ‘Assessment of Home Intelligence Sources,’ undated memorandum of which a first draft is to be found in the Adams Papers at the University of Sussex.
[xviii] TNA INF 1/292, Weekly report for Monday 30 September to Monday 7 October. See note above the source list on the final page. 7 October is given as 9 October in the heading of the report but this appears to be an error.
[xix] TNA INF 1/282, History of the Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department 1938-1946 Vol I, pps 272-275
[xx] TNA INF 1/47, ‘Home Intelligence Machinery, memo by Home Intelligence of 16 July 1940; ‘Weekly Report by Home Intelligence. Special Report on methods of compilation’, typescript memo by Mary Adams, no date, Adams Papers; ‘The Work of Home Intelligence Division’ p4;
[xxi] Hinton, The Mass Observers, pps 152-159
[xxii] McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p 52
[xxiii] For Harrisson’s personality and ideas see Hinton, The Mass Observers, and Judith M Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (Honolulu, 1997)
[xxiv] Mark Roodhouse, ‘Fish and Chip Intelligence’: Henry Durant and the British Institute of Public Opinion, 1936-63’, 20th Century History vol 24 no 2 (2013), p244.
[xxv] Hinton, The Mass Observers, p 179
[xxvi] TNA INF 1/290 ‘The Work of the Home Intelligence Division’, p3
[xxvii] Stephen Taylor, ‘Results of the War-Time Social Survey’, The Lancet, 7 September 1940, p 305.
[xxviii] House of Commons Debates Vol 763, 1 August 1940, col 1555
[xxix] TNA INF 1/290‘The Work of Home Intelligence Division 1939-1944’, p 2
[xxx] Adams to Holmes, 2 November 1940. Adams Papers. Noel Streetfeild was an air raid warden but the context in which Holmes was referring to her is not clear from Adams’s letter.
[xxxi] See for example TNA HO 262/1, HO 262/2 and other files in this series. HO 262/13, on Jehovah’s Witnesses, is closed until 2028.
[xxxii] TNA HO 262/1, Home Intelligence to all RIOs, 6 January 1941.
[xxxiii] TNA INF 1/273 ‘Suggested Press Handout. Wartime Social Survey.’ 5 September 1941.
[xxxiv] Hinton, The Mass Observers, p30
[xxxv] Hinton, The Mass Observers, pps 200-201
[xxxvi] James Hinton, The Mass Observers, pps 188-90, 201; McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p 87
[xxxvii] Adams to ‘Julian’, 3 October 1940. Mary Adams Papers, University of Sussex. Huxley was the head of an advisory committee on Home Intelligence which Adams had set up in April 1940 and there is little doubt that the ‘Julian’ in question was Julian Huxley. Adams had already planned to introduce a weekly report as a supplement to the daily report.
[xxxviii] Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, p 261; Hinton, The Mass Observers, p 212; McLaine, Ministry of Morale, p 199. Adams was presumably demoted at this point from Director of a Division to the head of a branch within the Home Division. That, at any rate, was the position inherited by her successor, Stephen Taylor.
[xxxix] TNA INF 1/101 Mary Adams, ‘Memorandum on the present position of Home Intelligence with recommendations for its reorganisation’ 11 March 1941
[xl] MOA, 1/C, Adams to R. J. Silvey, 28 February 1941
[xli] MOA, 1/C, Adams to ‘Harold’, 15 March 1941. It is unlikely that her correspondent can have been anyone else but Harold Nicolson, who was Parliamentary Secretary at the MOI.
[xlii] Adams to ‘Julian,’ 15 March 1941; Adams to an unidentified correspondent, 15 March 1941, Adams Papers.
[xliii] Harrisson to Adams, 15 March 1941, Adams Papers.
[xliv] Adams returned to television after the war and was responsible for putting Muffin the Mule as well as David Attenborough on the screen.
[xlv] TNA INF 1/292 Home Intelligence Weekly Report No 32, Appendix 1.
[xlvi] Bentley, A Version of the Truth, 197-8
[xlvii] Stephen Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life: A Biographical Guide for would-be Doctors of Society (1988), p 216
[xlviii] Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, p 261
[xlix] Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, p 260
[l] TNA INF 1/290, ‘The Work of Home Intelligence Division’, p 13
[li] Bentley, A Version of the Truth, p 199; for the scope of Bentley’s role see TNA INF 1/101, Memo by Taylor on Staff Organisation, 29 December 1941.
[lii] TNA INF 1/291, ‘Public opinion in UK. Appendices to Comprehensive Report’, Appendix G
[liii] TNA INF 1/101, Memo by Taylor on the reorganization of Home Intelligence, 15 April 1941.
[liv] TNA INF 1/262, Harrisson to Taylor 3 October 1941, Taylor to Harrisson 7 October 1941.
[lv] TNA INF 1/282, ‘How the Weekly Report is made’, 6 April 1942
[lvi] TNA INF 1/292, ‘Home Morale and Public Opinion: A review of some conclusions arising out of a year of Home Intelligence Weekly Reports’, Stephen Taylor, 1 October 1941.
[lvii] Bentley, A Version of the Truth, p 198.
[lviii] TNA INF 1/101, ‘Intelligence Division, Staff Organisation’, L.C. Nash to Woodburn, 29 December 1941
[lix] Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, p 261
[lx] TNA INF 1/290, ‘The Work of Home Intelligence’, p 9
[lxi] TNA T 162/1024.
[lxii] TNA INF 1/290, ‘The Work of Home Intelligence’, p 19
[lxiii] TNA CAB 117/204, ‘Public Feeling on Post-War Reconstruction’, a Report by Home Intelligence Division.
[lxiv] TNA CAB 117/209 Dalton to Jowitt 6 December 1942; Jowitt to Dalton 16 December 1942.
[lxv] TNA INF 1/282, Churchill to Bracken 4 April 1942.
[lxvi] Taylor, A Natural History of Everyday Life, p 275
[lxvii] TNA INF 1/282, Pearsall to Taylor, 24 March 1942; Prime Minister’s Minute of 4 April 1942; ‘Home Intelligence Division: How the report is made’, 6 April 1942; Bracken to Churchill 13 April 1942; TNA CAB 65/26/10, 15 April 1942.
[lxviii] TNA CAB 66/40/14, circulated 10 August 1942.
[lxix] TNA INF 1/282, Note by Taylor, 24 February 1943.
[lxx] TNA INF 1/285, ‘Home Intelligence, Special Enquiries into use of Home Intelligence Reports’ , nd (October 1943)
[lxxi] TNA INF 1/290 ‘The Work of Home Intelligence’, p 9; TNA INF 1/282, Note by Taylor, 15 May 1943; Halifax to MOI, 19 May 1943.
[lxxii] TNA INF 1/282. Bracken to Butler (draft) 29 June 1943. We cannot confirm that the telegram was sent.
[lxxiii] TNA INF 1/185, Director General circular letter of 10 September 1943; ‘Report on Director General’s Enquiry into value of Home Intelligence Weekly Report’, 12 October 1943
[lxxiv] TNA INF 1/285, ‘Home Intelligence, Special Enquiries into use of Home Intelligence Reports’, Leather Controller to Radcliffe, 11 September 1943. (The signature is illegible); Fleetwood C. Pritchard to Radcliffe, 11 September 1943;
Gaitskell to Radcliffe, 13 September 1943; Meynell to Radcliffe, 15 September 1943; Peck to Radcliffe, 11 September 1943; Jameson to Radcliffe, 14 September 1943; Hargreaves to Radcliffe, 18 September 1943; Macmillan to Radcliffe, 24 September 1943; the letters from Harker and Butler are not in the file of correspondence, but are quoted in ‘Report of Director General’s enquiry into value of Home Intelligence weekly report.’
[lxxv] TNA INF 1/185, ‘Home Intelligence, Special Enquiries into use of Home Intelligence Reports’, Stansgate to Radcliffe, 20 September 1943; Durbin to Radcliffe, 24 September 1943; Scorgie to Radcliffe, 11 September 1943.
[lxxvi] TNA INF 1/944 Memo by Taylor, 7 September 1942.
