An earlier chapter in this collection described how careers were determined for the top echelon of GCHQ as the organisation was being created in 1945. Whitehall officials tried hard to get the right recruitment strategy, and historians will judge the results. For them I offer some memories of the GCHQ Directors in the period when I was in relatively junior positions, from my joining the organisation in 1952 to the mid-1970s. The three Directors were Eric Jones (1952–60), Leonard ‘Joe’ Hooper (1965–73) and more briefly Clive Loehnis who held office between them (1960–4). I introduce them with some additional impressions of GCHQ's management in these early Cold War years.

This treatment omits Edward Travis, effectively Bletchley's Director in the second part of the war and with full responsibility during 1945–52. Travis had retired just before I joined, and I subsequently heard little about him. There is an intriguing description of him as ‘gruff, rough and burley’, who ‘won little love but muted respect’; and also that he was a bridge player of international standard, perhaps reflecting a professional flair for codes and ciphers. One would like to know more about him and his influence, but there is still no substantial account of his career, and I do not offer it here.

Post-war Management as a Whole

My recollection is that GCHQ's Directorate up to the mid-1970s usually comprised the Director, a Deputy (not always nominated as such) and two Assistant Directors, plus a Chief Scientist dating from the early 1960s. As might be expected, most of them were recruited in 1945 after wartime experience at Bletchley. Travis as the first post-war Director was also a link with the pre-war codebreaking of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), as was ‘Josh’ Cooper, the Sigint polymath whose career there went back to 1925. When I joined in October 1952 Jones had recently become Director, at what was a time of incipient change. GCHQ's move from Ruislip to its permanent accommodation in Cheltenham was about to take place over the next three years, and its main production areas were reorganised just afterwards into the form they would take for the rest of the Cold War.