Dummy and Biffy

Noël Annan

• Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community by Christopher Andrew
  Heinemann, 616 pp, £12.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 434 02110 5
• The Secret Generation by John Gardner
  Heinemann, 453 pp, £9.95, August 1985, ISBN 0 434 28250 2
• Two Thyrds by Bertie Denham
  Ross Anderson Publications, 292 pp, £7.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 86360 006 9
• The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939 by Wesley Wark
  Tauris, 304 pp, £19.50, October 1985, ISBN 1 85043 014 4

No wonder people think of the secret services as farce or fiction. What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, to the present time, when not to know the first name of a casual acquaintance makes it almost impossible to address him without appearing pompous or supercilious, nicknames like Stubby, Toby or Tubby came to be used as a gesture to informality, particularly in the Army and Navy. The reader is likely to think that such men are preposterous and what they do ludicrous. Even in fiction, the secret services are no longer heroic. Gone are the days when Sapper’s Jim Maitland would sun-bathe himself to a frazzle in order to pass in a burnous as an Arab in Tripoli or thwart the machinations of Baron Stockmar in the Sudan (‘It’s the game, Dick: The Great Game. The only game in the world worth playing’).