of Independence as a model for the organisation. Sir Frank Nelson was nominated by SIS to be director of the new organisation, and a senior civil servant, Gladwyn Jebb, transferred from the Foreign Office to it, with the title of Chief Executive Officer. Campbell Stuart left the organisation, and the flamboyant Major Grand was returned to the regular army. At his own request, Major Holland also left to take up a regular appointment in the Royal Engineers. (Both Grand and Holland eventually attained the rank of major-general.) However, Holland's former deputy at MI(R), Brigadier Colin Gubbins, returned from command of the Auxiliary Units to be Director of Operations of SOE. One department of MI(R), MI R(C), which was involved in the development of weapons for irregular warfare, was not formally integrated into SOE but became an independent body codenamed MD1. Directed by Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Millis Jefferis, it was located at The Firs in Whitchurch, Buckinghamshire and nicknamed "Churchill's Toyshop" from the Prime Minister's close interest in it and his enthusiastic support. Leadership The director of SOE was usually referred to by the initials "CD". Nelson, the first director to be appointed, was a former head of a trading firm in India, a back bench Conservative Member of Parliament and Consul in Basel, Switzerland, where he had also been engaged in undercover intelligence work. In February 1942 Dalton was removed as the political head of SOE (possibly because he was using the SOE's phone tapping facility to listen to conversations of fellow Labour ministers, or possibly because he was viewed as too “communistically inclined” and a threat to SIS). He became President of the Board of Trade and was replaced as Minister of Economic Warfare by Lord Selborne. Selborne in turn retired Nelson, who had suffered ill health as a result of his hard work, and appointed Sir Charles Hambro, head of Hambros Bank, to replace him. He also transferred Jebb back to the Foreign Office. Hambro had been a close friend of Churchill before the war and had won the Military Cross in the First World War. He retained several other interests, for example remaining chairman of Hambros and a director of the Great Western Railway. Some of his subordinates and associates expressed reservations that these interests distracted him from his duties as director. Selborne and Hambro nevertheless cooperated closely until August 1943, when they fell out over