The following day we drove down to London in a steady drizzle and parked the car close to Brundrett's office in Storey's Gate. Whitehall looked gray and tired; the colonnades and statues seemed ill suited to a rapidly changing world. Clement Attlee was still promising "teeth and spectacles," but the winter had been hard and people grew restless under rationing. The euphoria of victory in 1945 had long since given way to sullen resentment.
We introduced ourselves to the neat secretary in Brundrett's outer office. The annex hummed in that subdued Whitehall way. We were not the first to arrive. I greeted a few familiar faces, scientists from the various Services' laboratories. It seemed a large turnout for a routine meeting, I thought. Two men I had never met detached themselves from the huddle.
"You must be the Wrights," said the shorter of the two abruptly. He spoke with a clipped military accent. "My name is Colonel Malcolm Cumming from the War Office, and this is my colleague Hugh Winterborn." Another stranger came over. "And this is John Henry, one of our friends from the Foreign Office." Cumming employed the curious code Whitehall uses to distinguish its secret servants. Whatever the meeting was about, I thought, it was unlikely to concern antisubmarine warfare, not with a contingent from MI5 and MI6 present. Brundrett appeared at the door of his office and invited us in.
His office, like his reputation, was vast. Giant sash windows and high ceilings completely dwarfed his desk. He showed us to the conference table, which had been carefully lined with ink blotters and decanters. Brundrett was a small, energetic man, one of that select band, along with Lindemann, Tizard, and Cockcroft, responsible for gearing Britain for the technical and scientific demands of fighting World War II. As Assistant Director of Scientific Research for the Admiralty, and later Deputy Director of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, he had been largely responsible for recruiting scientists into government service during the war. He was not especially gifted as a scientist, but he understood the vital role scientists could play. His policy was to promote youth wherever possible and because the Service chiefs trusted him he was able to get the resources necessary to enable them to perform at their best.
As a weary and diminished Britain girded herself to fight a new war in the late 1940s - the Cold War - Brundrett was the obvious choice to advise on how best to galvanize the scientific community once again. He was appointed Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Minister of Defense and succeeded Sir John Cockcroft as Scientific Adviser and Chairman of the Defense Research Policy Committee in 1954.
"Gentlemen," began Brundrett when we were seated. "It is quite clear to all of us, I think, that we are now in the midst of war and have been since events in Berlin last year."
Brundrett made it clear that the Russian blockade of Berlin and the Western airlift which followed had made a profound impact on defense thinking.
"This war is going to be fought with spies, not soldiers, at least in the short term," he went on, "and I have been discussing where we stand with Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Director-General of the Security Service. To be frank," he concluded, "the situation is not good."
Brundrett crisply described the problem. It had become virtually impossible to run agents successfully behind the Iron Curtain, and there was a serious lack of intelligence about the intentions of the Soviet Union and her allies. Technical and scientific initiatives were needed to fill the gap.
"I have discussed the matter in outline with some of you here, Colonel Cumming from the Security Service and Peter Dixon representing MI6, and I have formed this committee to assess the options and initiate work at once. I have also suggested to Sir Percy that he obtain the services of a young scientist to help on the research side. I intend to submit the name of Peter Wright, whom some of you may know. He is currently attached to the Services Electronics Research Laboratory and he will go over on a part-time basis until we find out how much work needs doing."
Brundrett looked across at me. "You'll do that for us, won't you, Peter?"
Before I could reply he turned to my father. "We'll obviously need help from Marconi, G. M., so I have co-opted you onto this committee as well." (Father was always known in the Navy by the name that Marconi was known by in the old days. )
It was typical Brundrett, issuing invitations as if they were orders and bending the Whitehall machine thoroughly out of shape to get his way.
For the rest of the afternoon we discussed ideas. The MI5 and MI6 contingents were conspicuously silent and I assumed it was the natural reticence of the secret servant in the presence of outsiders. Each scientist gave an extempore synopsis of any research in his laboratory which might possibly have an intelligence application. Obviously a full-scale technical review of intelligence services requirements would take time, but it was clear that they urgently needed new techniques of eavesdropping which did not require entry to premises. Soviet security was so tight that the possibility of gaining entry, other than through party walls or when an embassy was being rebuilt, was remote. By teatime we had twenty suggestions of possible areas of fruitful research.
Brundrett instructed me to draw up a paper assessing them, and the meeting broke up.
As I was leaving, a man from the Post Office Technical Department, John Taylor, who had talked at some length during the meeting about post office work on listening devices, introduced himself. "We'll be working together on this," he said, as we exchanged telephone numbers. "I'll be in touch next week."
On the drive back to Great Baddow, Father and I discussed the meeting excitedly. It had been so gloriously unpredictable, in the way that Whitehall often was during the war and had so seldom been since. I was thrilled at the opportunity to escape from antisubmarine work; he because it continued the thread of secret intelligence which had run through the family for four and a half decades.
My father joined the Marconi Company from university in 1912, and began work as an engineer on an improved method of detecting radio signals. Together with Captain H. J. Round, he succeeded in developing a vacuum receiver which made the interception of long-range communications possible for the first time.
Two days before World War I began, he was working with these receivers in the old Marconi Laboratory at Hall Street, Chelmsford, when he realized he was picking up German naval signals. He took the first batch to the Marconi works manager, Andrew Gray, who was a personal friend of Captain Reggie Hall, the head of the Naval Intelligence Department.
Hall was the dominant figure in British Intelligence during World War I and was responsible for attacking German ciphers from the famous Admiralty Room 40. He arranged for my father to travel up to Liverpool Street Station on the footplate of a specially chartered locomotive. After studying the material he insisted Marconi release my father to build intercept and direction-finding stations for the Navy.
The central problem facing Naval Intelligence at the outbreak of World War I was how to detect the German High Seas Fleet putting to sea in time to enable the British Fleet, based at Scapa Flow, to intercept them. Naval Intelligence knew that when the German Fleet was quiescent she lay at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal. Hall believed it might be possible to detect the German Commander-in-Chief's wireless communications on board his flagship as they passed through the Kiel Canal into the North Sea.