Denis Capel-Dunn

In the Channel Four TV adaptation of the novels Widmerpool was played by the Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale who was said to bear a resemblance to Capel-Dunn. Russell Beale was subsequently elected President of the Anthony Powell Society, an office he held until 2011.

Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn (1903 – 4 July 1945) was a British lawyer and military bureaucrat immortalised by Anthony Powell in many aspects of the character of Kenneth Widmerpool, the anti-hero of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels. Capel-Dunn served as secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) between 1943 and 1945.

Noel Annan recorded Capel-Dunn's role in the JIC, noting that "as the youngest of the JIC members, and a civilian, it took [its chairman, Bill] Cavendish-Bentinck time and patience to galvanise his colleagues, and only when Churchill spoke could he at last set up a secretariat under an elusive, secretive barrister, Denis Capel-Dunn, and impose some sort of discipline upon them.". Capel-Dunn was to remain secretary of the JIC until the end of hostilities, after which he presided over a post-war review of intelligence published for classified circulation under his name in 1945.

Capel-Dunn died in an air crash off Newfoundland in 1945 when he was returning with other officials from the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations. As the royal biographer Kenneth Rose has pointed out, had he not sacked Powell the novelist would probably have shared his fate. "As it was, the subordinate survived to make his boss immortal". His early death cut off a career that seemed set for a ministerial position in politics or as a Whitehall Mandarin. Powell attributes to Widmerpool a Life Peerage and chancellorship of a redbrick university.

An accomplished Whitehall in-fighter, Capel-Dunn over-reached himself when he attempted to take control of the Security Service (MI5). Appearing unannounced at their headquarters on 24 October 1944, he claimed to be acting on behalf of the JIC in an investigation into all sources of intelligence and their distribution. When asked by the Director-General for his credentials he was unable to produce them. Threatened with an enquiry of the Minister, Capel-Dunn withdrew and no more was heard of the investigation. However he achieved a revenge of sorts when, at war's end, he published (for classified circulation only) an assessment of intelligence operations.

Powell served under him whilst on attachment to the Cabinet Office for nine weeks in 1943. When Powell, an acting major, asked to be retained in his post for a further fortnight in order that his rank might become substantive, Capel-Dunn dismissed the request on the grounds that "My nerves wouldn't stand it".

He was commissioned into the Essex Regiment as a Territorial Army (United Kingdom) officer. In 1940 he joined the offices of the War Cabinet and Ministry of Defence. He became assistant secretary and then secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee and finally head of the Joint Staff Secretariat. In this capacity he attended the conferences at Moscow and Yalta. He rose rapidly during the Second World War to the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Intelligence Corps. He was awarded an OBE in 1944.

He was married to Elizabeth/Betsy Hessey, daughter of Brigadier-General William Francis Hessey DSO (died 1939). They lived at Stowmarket, Suffolk. Their daughter Hester M. A. Capel-Dunn married Gerald Dacres Olivier, brother of the actor Sir Laurence Olivier.

The son of a consular clerk in Leipzig, where he was born, Capel-Dunn attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit public school in Old Windsor, until 1921, and thereafter Trinity College, Cambridge. He was private secretary to Lord Lloyd, then spent three years in Persia and was at HM Legation in Havana before being called to the Bar. He became Secretary to the Air Transport Authority and worked on the inquiry into the loss of HMS Thetis.