Charles Jocelyn Hambro Air Commodore Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro , ( 3 October 18971963 ) was a merchant bank er and intelligence officer . Career . Hambro was born into a banking family of Danish origin which had settled in Dorset and the City of London in the early 19th century . He was the son of Charles Eric Hambro , a partner in C . J . Hambro & Son ( later to become Hambros Bank ) and a Conservative Member of Parliament for UK Parliament constituency between 1900 and 1907 . Between 1910 and 1915 Charles was educated at Eton College , joining the cricket team in 1914 and becoming the Captain in 1915 . After leaving he immediately went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst , being made an Ensign in the Coldstream Guards in 1916 . He was immediately posted to the Western Front , serving for two years until demobilisation and being awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous bravery in action . After initial training with the Guaranty Trust Company in New York ( where he and his wife lived with Harry Morgan ) he joined his family bank J . C . Hambro & Sons ] , playing a large part in its merger with the British Bank of Northern Commerce in 1920 , with the combined bank taking the name Hambros Bank in 1921 . In 1928 , when only 30 , Charles was elected a director of the Bank of England , and between 1932 and 1933 he put all work outside the bank to one side to work on establishing the bank ' s exchange control division under the direction of Montagu C . Norman , the Bank of England director . In 1937 Charles was asked to succeed Norman as director , but he turned it down as he was suffering from oral cancer , although surgical operations and radiation therapy later helped him recover . At the start of World War II he was asked by Ronald Cross to join the " Ministry of Economic Warfare " , a cover organisation for the Special Operations Executive . Hambro was placed in charge of activities in Scandinavia , arranging smuggling and sabotage operations . Through his contact with Ebbe Munck , an anti - Nazi journalist , Charles linked up with the Danish resistance , and was made KBE for his work in 1941 . Hambro refused to accept any wages for his military work during wartime . Between December 1940 and November 1941 Charles was also in charge of overseeing the French , Belgian , German and Dutch sections of the SOE , and from November 1941 he was deputy leader of SOE for 5 months . In 1942 he succeeded in persuading the British and Norwegian organisations to form a planning commission , which was instrumental in the formation of Operation Grouse and Operation Swallow , instrumental parts of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage missions . By this time Charles was on the Executive Committee of the SOE , and was promoted to Air Commodore . Roundell Palmer , now head of the SOE , appointed him to succeed Frank Nelson . His first major action as head of the SOE was to meet with Colonel William Joseph Donovan , the head of the OSS and his opposite number . A disagreement over actions in the Middle East led Charles to resign in 1943 . For the rest of the war he acted as head of the " British raw materials mission " in Washington ; a cover for exchanging information and technology between Britain and the United States which led to the detonation of the first Atomic Bomb as part of the Manhattan Project . Family . In 1919 Charles married Pamela Cobbold , with whom he had four children : In 1936 he re - married : his second wife was Dorothy Helen Mackay : her first husband had been Marcus Wallenberg ( junior ) 1899 – 1982 ) . They went on to have a daughter , Sally . A relative , Carl Joachim Hambro , ( the younger ) was a politician and civil servant in Norway and in exile during World War II in Sweden .