Rodney Dennys

Rodney Onslow Dennys ( 1911 - August 13, 1993 ) was a British diplomat, intelligence officer and heraldist .

Life and activity

In 1937 Dennys joined the British Foreign Service. At the same time he was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; MI6), the British foreign intelligence service , which sent him to The Hague as an agent in 1937. There he headed the counterintelligence department.

After the Venlo incident - in which he was not involved himself - he was instructed to move his base of operations to Brussels , which he only partially implemented: after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, he spent a day and a half in The Hague with the Burning of files and papers before escaping to the UK.

At the end of the 1930s, Dennys was classified as an important target by the police in National Socialist Germany due to his involvement in the Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz affair - who defected from the German diplomatic service to the British: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin set him up the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were considered particularly dangerous or important by the Nazi surveillance apparatus, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, special SS units following the occupation troops would find and arrest them with special priority should be.

In November 1941 Dennys was posted to Cairo to represent Section V (Section V) of MI6, where he disguised his intelligence work by officially holding the post of head of the British Middle East Office.

After the war, Dennys was successively head ( station chief ) of the MI6 office in Paris and - as successor to Kim Philby - of the MI6 office in Istanbul .

In 1958 Dennys joined the College of Arms, the UK's leading heraldry institution. On August 8, 1961, he was entrusted as the successor to Walter Verco with the position of Rouge Croix Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary. In 1967 he was appointed to the position of Somerset Herald of Arms in Ordinary, which he held until his retirement in 1982. As an emeritus he held the title of Arundel Herald of Arms Extraordinary.

Since 1969 Dennys was a 4th grade member of the Royal Victorian Order. In 1982 he was raised to the rank of Commander in this.

In 1983, Dennys became East Sussex High Sheriff.

family

Dennys was married to Elizabeth Greene, a sister of Graham Greene . With her he had a son and two daughters.

Fonts

• The Heraldic Imagination Clarkson N. Potter, New York 1975.
• Heraldry and the Heralds , Jonathan Cape, London 1982 and 1984.

literature

• Keith Jeffrey: MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 , 2010.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Dennys on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .