Air Commodore Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro, KBE MC (3 October 1897 – 28 August 1963) was a British merchant banker and intelligence officer.
Hambro was born into a banking family of Danish Jewish origin which had settled in Dorset and the City of London in the early 19th century.
[5] In 1937 Hambro was asked to succeed Norman as director, but he turned it down as he was suffering from oral cancer, although surgical operations and radiotherapy later helped him recover.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Hambro was placed in charge of activities in Scandinavia, arranging smuggling, intelligence networks and sabotage operations.
After the fall of France in June 1940, Hambro was made a colonel on the General Staff and was asked by Ronald Cross to join the Ministry of Economic Warfare, a cover organisation for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
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.
[10] In 1934, Hambro built the village hall for Winterborne Stickland to replace its Reading Room, which had been sold off with the rest of the Milton Abbey estate, and named it after his late wife.
[11] A relative, Carl Joachim Hambro, (the younger) was a politician and civil servant in Norway and in exile during World War II in Sweden.