Mansfield Smith-Cumming: MI6's First 'C', Green Ink and a Wooden Leg Myth

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Mansfield Smith-Cumming was born in 1859 into a family linked to the banking dynasty that became NatWest, and his father designed coin-minting machines shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He entered Royal Navy training at Dartmouth at 12, chased pirates in Malaya and served in the Anglo-Egyptian War, but chronic seasickness put him on the retired list as medically unfit in 1885. After the death of his first wife, Dora, he married heiress Leslie Valiant Cumming in 1889 and added her name to his own. He was working on river boom defenses at Southampton when the 1909 German spy panic, fed by invasion literature, led the government to create a Secret Service Bureau. Vernon Kell took the home section that became MI5, and Cumming took the foreign section that became MI6.

Cumming signed documents with a single letter C in green ink. A 1914 car crash in France killed his son and led to the amputation of his left foot, and he encouraged the false legend that he had cut off his own leg with a penknife, even stabbing his artificial limb in meetings to test visitors' nerves. During the First World War his service recruited novelists including W. Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie and John Buchan, and agents tested semen as an invisible ink. In Ireland his Dublin network was destroyed on Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920, when Michael Collins's men killed 14 officers. Cumming died in 1923.

• Early in the war, Cumming, Kell and Special Branch identified 22 German spies in England, leading to 11 executions.
• German censors brushed letters with iodine solutions to reveal lemon juice and chemical inks.
• The agents' motto for the semen method was "every man his own stylo."
• Ian Fleming borrowed Cumming's single-letter convention for M, and John le Carré's Control signs in green ink.
• An English Heritage blue plaque marks his former headquarters at 2 Whitehall Court in London.