On the outbreak of the First World War, a subsection of the Directorate of Military Operations, MO5(h), was established with responsibility for press and cable censorship and the issuing of War Office communiques through the Press Bureau. Initially just two General Staff Officers (GSO2) were allocated to the subsection. It became immediately apparent that two men were insufficient for the task and within a fortnight the subsection was expanded to a senior General Staff Officer (GSO1) with eight assistant "censors" working under him. In February 1915, the Directorate of Special Intelligence was formed, and consequently MO5(h) was upgraded and designated as the MO7 section. It was nominally under the command of Colonel Coleridge, the Military Assistant Director of the Press Bureau. As part of the War Office, MO7 was concerned with press publicity. It gave the first war correspondents permission to visit the
Western Front in May 1915. Its duty was to ensure that the military authorities maintained control over the Press and correspondents' work. In January 1916, as part of a reorganisation of the
Imperial General Staff, a new Directorate of Military Intelligence was created and MO7 became Military Intelligence Section 7. MI7 was organised in a series of sub-sections distinguished by lower-case letters in brackets. The precise duties of these sub-sections varied with time, but may be roughly summarised as follows. • MI7 (a) – censorship, • MI7 (b) – foreign and domestic propaganda, including press releases concerning army matters, • MI7 (c) – translation and (from 1917) regulation of foreign visitors, • MI7 (d) – foreign press propaganda and review (part of subsection (b) until subsection (d) was formed in late 1916).
Patrick MacGill served in MI7(b) after his recovery from wounds he received in the
Battle of Loos in 1915. Later
A. A. Milne, the author of
Winnie the Pooh, served in MI7(b) after recovering from wounds sustained at the
Battle of the Somme. The Anglo-Irish fantasy writer
Lord Dunsany also served with Milne after being wounded in the Easter Rising of 1916; his books
Tales of War and
Unhappy Far-off Things collect some of the material he wrote during this time.
Location From April 1916, when it was first established under the direction of
Captain Peter Chalmers Mitchell, until early October 1917, most of MI7(b)'s staff worked from Adelphi Court, on the
Strand, London, whereupon the whole section moved into Adastral House on the
Victoria Embankment. Not to be confused with the later
Air Ministry headquarters on
Kingsway, the first Adastral House was the former
De Keyser's Royal Hotel, located by
Blackfriars Bridge. The bankrupt hotel was requisitioned in May 1916 for use as Government offices and was utilised by both the
Royal Flying Corps and MI7.
Surviving source documents As a branch of military intelligence, paperwork was routinely destroyed to maintain strict security. A further large-scale destruction of papers was organised when MI7 was closed down at the end of WWI. A few important files are scattered amongst War Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Information records at the British
National Archives. Also, some documents from MI7(b) have survived because they were retained by one of its operatives, Lieutenant James Price Lloyd. In 2012, relatives discovered after his death, when his property in
Builth Wells, Wales was being sorted and cleared, that he had kept up to 150 files from his time at MI7(b). The archive consisted of two broad categories of articles written between 1917 and 1918 the "Tales of the VC". More than 90 stories of individual heroism by men from all over the Empire can be viewed on the
National Library of Wales website and on the Europeana 1914–1918 website. Samples of the remaining 60 articles can be found in archives such as "MI7b-the discovery of a lost propaganda archive from the Great War". ==Second World War==