Portrait.

'Blinker' Hall was a naval gunnery specialist who was captain of the battlecruiser 'Queen Mary' at the Battle of the Heligoland Bight in 1915, but was recalled shortly afterwards to become head of naval intelligence at the Admiralty: the move probably saved his life since the ship blew up at Jutland. Hall became one of the founders of modern intelligence gathering, 'Room 40' at the Admiralty pioneering early codebreaking. His greatest coup was managing the release of the contents of the Zimmerman telegram in January 1917, 'a decrypted communication sent from Berlin to the German embassy in Washington, DC, for onward transmission to the German ambassador to Mexico. This disclosed Germany's intention to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, and her plan to secure Mexican co-operation in the war through promising the restoration of territories ceded to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century' (ODNB). By a series of ruses Hall engineered this without revealing the source of the decrypt, or that the British were also cracking American codes, and the effect materially contributed to widening American support in the war. Hall left the Navy as a rear-admiral at the end of the war but rose to admiral in a long retirement, which saw him serve as a Conservative MP on two separate occasions. That said his very right-wing position and use of old intelligence connections to discredit the Labour party and socialism in general during the 1920s earned him some disrepute at the time and in historical retrospect. His war work was nonetheless an inspiration to those who followed him in developing intelligence in the next generation. [PvdM 4/12]