The agency that would become MI5, originally known as the Secret Service Bureau, employed just 17 staff in 1914; by the end of the first world war, the number working for Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency had swelled to 850, including a number of female administrators.While valuable for managing the card index records, noted Edith Lomax, the controller of women staff in 1918, only women under the age of 30 should be recruited “on account of the very considerable strain that was thrown on [their] brains”.The merits of female intelligence staff remained a topic of debate within the agency. In 1945, Maxwell Knight, MI5’s leading agent-runner between the wars and reputedly the model for James Bond’s M, said while some believed women could not make suitable agents due to being “ruled by their emotions, and not by their brains”, “the emotional makeup of a properly balanced woman can very often be utilised in investigation … given the right guiding hand”.He might have looked to t...
