Stewart Menzies

Stewart Graham Menzies was born in England in 1890 into a wealthy family as the second son of John Graham Menzies and Susannah West Wilson, daughter of ship-owner Arthur Wilson of Tranby Croft.[2] His grandfather, Graham Menzies, was a whisky distiller who helped establish a cartel and made huge profits. His parents became friends of King Edward VII[3] who at the time was rumoured to be Menzies' father, though this was probably not the case. Menzies was a nephew of Robert Stewart Menzies. But Menzies' father was dissolute, never established a worthwhile career, and wasted his share of the family fortune; he died of tuberculosis in 1911 in his early 50s, leaving only a minimal estate.[4]

Menzies was educated at Eton College, becoming president of the student society Pop, and left in 1909. He excelled in sports, hunting and cross-country running. He won prizes for his studies of languages, and was considered an all-around excellent student.[5]

Following the end of the war, Menzies entered MI6 (also known as SIS). He was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Soon after the war, Menzies was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the Imperial General Staff, General Staff Officer, first grade. Within MI6, he became assistant director for special intelligence. Admiral Hugh Sinclair became director-general of MI6 in 1924, and he made Menzies his deputy by 1929, with Menzies being promoted to full colonel soon afterwards.[10]

In 1924, Menzies was allegedly involved—alongside Sidney Reilly[11] and Desmond Morton[12]—in the forging of The Zinoviev Letter.[11] This forgery is considered to have been instrumental in the Conservative Party's victory in the United Kingdom general election of 1924, which ended the country's first Labour government.[13]

In 1939, when Admiral Sinclair died, Menzies was appointed Chief of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He expanded wartime intelligence and counterintelligence departments and supervised codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, overseeing the work of cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing. Before the Second World War, the SIS had been a relatively minor and uninfluential branch of the British government; budgetary pressures after the First World War and during the 1930s of the Great Depression were the main reasons for this.

After the war, Menzies reorganised the SIS for the Cold War. He absorbed most of SOE. He was sometimes at odds with the Labour governments. He also had to weather a scandal inside SIS after revelations that SIS officer Kim Philby was actually a Soviet spy, although this came after Menzies had retired.

Nonetheless, Menzies deserved some of the blame for Soviet agents having penetrated MI6, according to Anthony Cave Brown in his book C: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill. Menzies was already the head of the service when Kim Philby joined in 1941. Cave Brown insists that Menzies's primary criteria were whether the applicants were upper-class former officers and recommended by another government department, or else were known to him personally. In his New York Times review of Brown's book, novelist Ken Follett makes this conclusion: "Mr Philby outwitted Menzies because Mr Philby was intelligent and professional and cool, where Menzies was an amiable upper-class sportsman who was out of his depth. And British intelligence, except for the code breakers, was like Menzies—amateur, anti-intellectual and wholly outclassed."[16]

After 43 continuous years of service in the British Army, Menzies retired to Bridges Court in Luckington in rural Wiltshire at 62 in mid-1952. Menzies was certainly adept at bureaucratic intrigue, a virtual necessity in his position, but his efforts as Chief had a major role in winning the Second World War, as evidenced by his nearly 1,500 meetings with Churchill during the war.[17]

His first marriage was in 1918 to Lady Avice Ela Muriel Sackville, younger daughter of Gilbert Sackville, 8th Earl De La Warr and Lady Muriel Agnes Brassey, daughter of Thomas Brassey, 1st Earl Brassey. They were divorced in 1931, when she left him for another man.

His second wife Pamela Thetis Garton (née Beckett) (d. 13 March 1951) was the fourth daughter of the Honourable Rupert Evelyn Beckett by his wife Muriel Helen Florence Paget, daughter of Lord Berkeley Charles Sydney Paget, himself a younger son of the 2nd Marquess of Anglesey. Menzies and Garton married on 13 December 1932. Garton was an invalid for many years, suffering from clinical depression and anorexia nervosa. She had Menzies' only child, a daughter, Fiona, in 1934.[18]

His third marriage was in 1952 (as her fourth husband) to Audrey Clara Lilian Latham (b. 1899), formerly wife of Sir Henry Birkin, 2nd Bt., Lord Edward Hay, and Niall Chaplin, and daughter of Sir Thomas Paul Latham, 1st Bt.[19] Stewart and Audrey were both over age 50 at the time of their marriage, each had separate estates (his in Wiltshire, west of London, hers in Essex, east of London), and they for the most part lived separately, but they met in London for dinner each Wednesday.[20] By his third marriage, he had two stepdaughters Pamela Buxton (wife of Lord Buxton of Alsa) and Sara Hanbury.

Anthony Cave Brown also reported that Menzies had a long-standing affair with one of his secretaries, which he ended upon retirement (and presumably remarriage) in 1952; the secretary apparently tried to kill herself at that time.[20]

Menzies died 29 May 1968.

Stewart Menzies is a character in the 2014 film The Imitation Game and is portrayed by Mark Strong. He is also a principal character in 'The Speedicut Memoirs', Books 2-6, edited by Christopher Joll.

• Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, 1975.
• Anthony Cave Brown, "C": The Secret Servant: The Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987) ISBN 0-02-517390-1
• Ken Follett, "The Oldest Boy of British Intelligence", The New York Times, 27 December 1987. Three page review of Brown's biography and Mahl's book.
• Hastings, Max (2015). The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939 -1945 (Paperback) |format= requires |url= (help). London: William Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-750374-2.
• Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939–44, (Brassey's Inc., 1999) ISBN 1574882236.