ABSTRACT
If, despite his best efforts, Desmond Morton is remembered by historians and others intrigued by the labyrinthine workings of government, it is principally for his role in the half a dozen years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Where his name is mentioned in accounts of the period, it is usually in one of two contexts: as Director of the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC), a shadowy but energetic figure with sinister connections, striving to present the hard facts of German rearmament to military and political authorities who paid too little attention, too late; or, still more intriguingly, as a man driven by impatience or conscience (or both) to pass secret information clandestinely to Winston Churchill, then ‘in the wilderness’, fuelling the latter’s vigorous and heroic campaign to get a short-sighted government to wake up to incipient danger and rearm. Indeed, the dramatisation of Morton’s character, in the BBC’s successful 2002 drama The Gathering Storm, saw him immortalised by the distinguished actor Jim Broadbent as a trilby-hatted and trench-coated conspirator, a bluff spy facilitating the passing of surreptitious brown paper envelopes containing top secret assessments of German air power.
