MENZIES, SIR STEWART• 353same evening atCamp 020. In his confession, Menezes named all
his contacts inPortugal, leading to 17 arrests by PIDE, the Portu-
guese secret police. He was convicted under the Treachery Act in
April 1943, sentenced to death, but reprieved the following month
when the Portuguese ambassador demonstrated the enthusiasm with
which PIDE had pursued the leads supplied by MI5.MENZIES, SIR STEWART.Chief of theSecret Intelligence Service
(SIS) from 1939 to 1953, Stewart Menzies was the son of Lady Hol-
ford and was brought up by the man who became her second hus-
band, Colonel Sir George Holford. Menzies’s friends sometimes
thought that he promoted the idea that he was Edward VII’s illegiti-
mate son, a rumor often in circulation in polite society, fueled by his
refusal ever to mention his father, Jack Menzies, in hisWho’s Who
entry. A regular officer in the Grenadiers, Menzies subsequently
transferred to his stepfather’s regiment, the Life Guards. During
World War I, Menzies fought in France at Ypres and won the DSO
and the Military Cross, but he was not to return to regimental duties
for the remainder of the conflict, during which he was engaged on
‘‘secret service and security’’ under Colonel (Sir) Walter Kirke. His
first experience of what had been termed MI1(c) was when he was
posted to Sir John Haig’s headquarters staff at Montreuil in Decem-
ber 1915.
In November 1918 Menzies married Lady Alice Sackville, the
daughter of the 8th Earl de la Warr but 13 years later they were di-
vorced so she could wed Colonel Fitzroy Spicer of the 16th Lancers.
The following year Menzies married Pamela Beckett, one of the four
daughters of the Honourable Rupert Beckett, an immensely wealthy
Old Etonian who was chairman of the Westminster Bank and proprie-
tor of theYorkshire Post. Later Menzies was to have a string of mis-
tresses, including Freda Portarlington, wife of the 6th Earl of
Portarlington; the wife of a near neighbor at his country home in
Wiltshire at Bridges Court, Luckington; and, it was rumored, his sec-
retary Evelyn Jones.
When Menzies effectively accepted the mantle of SIS chief from
the ailing AdmiralHugh Sinclairin November 1938, he was head of
Section II, SIS’s army section, although in reality he had always
acted as C’s deputy. Menzies spoke good French and German; was