One of her main responsibilities was to manage the secretaries, mostly girls from "good families" several notches up the social scale from the "desk officers" for whom they worked. Legend has it that they were recruited, at Barbara Ridler's insistence, under a "1,000-acre test" (possibly on the ground that no girl whose father owned anything less could possibly live on CRD wages). Once hired, the assorted Amandas and Victorias occupied the best rooms overlooking St James's Park, while their nominal bosses made do with pokier billets.