by Nick Barratt
Whatever the motivation for the later part of his schooling, the experience had the desired effect. Rather than train as a teacher, Ernest Oldham decided to apply to join the civil service, which at the time was only accessible via competitive examination. Later documents, based on information provided by Oldham himself, stated that he successfully sat and passed the test for the position of second division clerk in the civil service on 13 November 1913. This is untrue. There was no examination for second division clerk held on that date and the surviving papers kept by the Civil Service Commission for the examination held on 22 September 1913 fail to reveal Oldham’s name amongst the candidates. Earlier records show that he actually sat the exam on 7 October 1912, just after his 18th birthday, having left Muncaster House in the summer. The reason for this deception is clear when the results are examined more closely; candidate no 721, EH Oldham, came a disappointing 702nd out of a field of over 1,500 candidates – only the top 150 were offered jobs, which meant that he was unsuccessful in securing work.
His English and handwriting weren’t too bad – 380 and 360 marks out of a possible 400 respectively – but manuscript-copying, an important skill for a clerk, only earned him 136 marks out of 200, while he was weak in languages (Latin 195 out of 400, French much better with 307, but no attempt made to take German) and he hardly covered himself in glory with his mathematical abilities (elementary maths and arithmetic 230 and 290 out of 400). In fact, his strongest subject aside from English was science (360 marks).6
At the tender age of 18, this setback should have marked the end of Oldham’s aspirations for a civil service career before it had even got off the ground, but there was still a glimmer of hope. Many of the unsuccessful candidates ended up being selected over the course of the year as those above them failed to take up their posts and replacements were summoned further down the list. Even so, it would have been an awfully long time before Oldham could have expected to be called up, given his lowly position. Once again the influence of his uncle can be discerned behind the scenes.
Ern Holloway returned to England from East London, South Africa, on the Galician, docking at Southampton on 23 July 1913 – once again travelling first-class but this time accompanied by his young wife who was 18 years his junior. Holloway was described as a civil servant on the passenger list and one suspects that during his stay in England he caught up with his London chums in the service and put in a good word for his nephew, as one did in those days, before he returned to South Africa on 15 November. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ernest Oldham was called up for the civil service the same month and on 11 December 1913 was formally appointed to the Board of Education.
It is fair to say that he did not hang around – certainly not long enough to leave any trace in the official records – as 20 days later he was transferred to the Board of Trade where he commenced his new duties on New Year’s Day 1914. His employment there was of only slightly longer duration, as he moved to the Foreign Office on 1 April 1914 as a second division clerk in the Chief Clerk’s Department. The institution was steeped in history, there being an unspoken assumption that to succeed one needed to have schooled in Eton. Nevertheless, despite these obstacles that would have blocked most other men, Oldham’s career at the heart of Britain’s global diplomatic network had begun.
Chapter two
INSIDE THE FOREIGN OFFICE (APRIL–AUGUST 1914)
No one knows so well as the politician whose privilege it is for the time being to represent the Foreign Office in Cabinet and in Parliament, how impossible his task would be if it were not for the devoted and disinterested labour of the men whose life-work lies within the walls of the Department.
SIR JOHN SIMON, FOREIGN SECRETARY (1931–1935)
Ernest Holloway Oldham had joined one of the most venerable institutions in Britain, if not the world, at a time when the global reach of the Foreign Office was never wider or its role in international politics more challenging. Indeed, challenging described the environment in which the 19-year-old Ernest Oldham found himself working – especially when you consider that he was state-school educated in an age when most of his new colleagues had attended one or other of the finest private schools in the land and he was still living in his parent’s working-class terraced cottage in Edmonton.
The Foreign Office was a highly structured world, a hierarchical mix of politicians, permanent civil servants and temporary staff, despite changes which had seen attempts at modernisation over the previous decade. At the very top was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (or Foreign Secretary), Sir Edward Grey. He was assisted by an Under-Secretary of State the Liberal MP for Camborne, Sir Francis Dyke Acland. However, politicians came and went on the shifting tides of public opinion expressed at the ballot box, so a body of professional civil servants undertook the bulk of the work as well as provided necessary continuity. In charge was the Permanent Under-Secretary – not to be confused with Acland’s role – who was by this stage the real Head of the Foreign Service and the main advisor to the Secretary of State. The role frequently required him to receive foreign ambassadors, oversee the general running of the office, and act as the point of liaison with other government departments, especially with the armed services and rudimentary intelligence services. In 1914, this important position was held by Sir Arthur Nicolson, who had entered the service of the Foreign Office in 1870 and was coming to the end of his career; it was his misfortune to be overshadowed by his dynamic Assistant Under-Secretary of State, Sir Eyre Crowe, who oversaw widespread changes to the way the office was run after 1905 in response to new technology such as the telegram and later the telephone, which generated a vast increase in the volume and speed of communication.
Crowe’s fellow Assistant Under-Secretary was Sir John Tilley, and he described the main points of the reforms – in particular the creation of a General Registry to log the influx of correspondence and papers, with subsidiary registries which would be maintained by second division clerks such as Oldham:
They were to take complete charge of the archives, and deal with all such matters as docketing, registration, finding and putting away papers, and with the distribution and management of the print.7
Thus all correspondence and official material – much of it highly sensitive – passed through the hands of fairly junior staff. However, there was a problem, as Tilley identified:.
[They] soon acquired much the same familiarity with their subjects as we had previously had. They saw all the papers, read them carefully in order to give a correct description of them on the dockets and in the registers and, if they wished to be efficient, learned the subjects in such a way as to be able to produce the correct papers at the correct moment, but they did not express opinions, except perhaps an occasional verbal one. After a few years of this work, their occupation naturally tended to become monotonous and they were bound to wish for release in favour of the higher class of work for which they considered that their training had made them competent.8
Tilley also revealed his disdain for the means of examination that was used to recruit new staff, an attitude from the ‘old days’ of the Foreign Office – goodness knows what he made of Oldham’s performance:
I have already pointed out that they were recruited by means of a competitive examination of relatively great simplicity and it would have stultified our system of recruiting to say that their training in routine matters placed them on an equality with the new recruit who was the finished product of university. Moreover, if the Office wishes to attract that finished product it must maintain an adequate number of annual vacancies and a reasonable rapidity of promotion. In so small a Service every vacancy that is filled otherwise than from the normal source has a discouraging effect. At the same time, there were obviously good brains among the second division clerks and their disposal was a serious problem.9
In total, there were usually three or four assistant under-secretaries, one of whom was Oldham’s superior, the Chief Clerk – the post that Tilley had
held since October 1913. His job was one of utmost importance – the pivot around which most of the daily routine within the Foreign Office turned, covering the general establishment of the office, and all its finances:
[The Chief Clerk’s] department pays the salaries, records the promotions, receives the medical certificates, lists the misdeeds, notes the qualifications, in short, supervises the activities generally of the entire staff of the office. He it is who makes the principal contacts with the Treasury, who holds the purse strings and without whose approval no appointment can be made and no additional personnel engaged… He must have not only ability and force of character; he must have tact, vision, and a sound psychological instinct.10
In terms of the other departments in existence when Oldham joined, a quick summary of the key areas will suffice, as he had little connection with them during his early days in the Foreign Office. The routine management of the Registry fell within the remit of the Librarian, whose department managed the internal archives of the Foreign Office. The Parliamentary Department, originally set up to prepare materials should questions for the Secretary of State arise in the House of Commons, mainly dealt with the ciphering and deciphering of communications and housed the King’s Messengers. This was the body of staff who had traditionally delivered diplomatic messages at home and abroad and whose work was somewhat diminished by the rise of telegraphy but was still nonetheless important in ensuring the secrecy and security of Britain’s communications. One of their number, Victor Wheeler-Holohan described the two categories of messenger that operated in Oldham’s time:
The Home Service Messengers are appointed by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and are carefully picked men of the warrant officer type. They carry secret papers from Whitehall to persons in London and the same country and are a fine body of men. At one time they wore the badge, but this practice has now ceased. They need no passports for their work, and have other means of identification.
The Foreign Service Messengers are also appointed by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, after they have passed the necessary Civil Service examination and have also been recommended by a selection board. They are given the Silver Greyhound badge, their passports are printed in red (describing the holders as being ‘charged with despatches’) and are also bound in red cloth stamped in gold with the legend ‘King’s Messenger’s Passport’.11
These were so-called Red Passports and were a much prized possession, along with the Silver Greyhound badge, as it provided a form of diplomatic immunity when on one’s travels.
The remaining staff of the Parliamentary Department numbered no more than four or five secretaries and a Staff Clerk who would deal with the administration of the department plus the care of the records, archives and – most importantly – the cipher books and codes. This was Mr John Gritton who was, in the inimitable view of another of the King’s Messengers, George Antrobus:
One of the most loyal and devoted public servants I have ever known. He seemed to work 12 to 15 hours a day and I do not remember his taking a holiday in the 20 years I knew him. He was never ill and never tired and his work, which involved a vast and intricate mass of detail, was always up to date. How he did it I never knew; if you asked him he would just smile and murmur: ‘Nothing, my dear fellow, it’s nothing at all when you’re used to it.’12
The main diplomatic work of the Foreign Office was dealt with by various political departments which were arranged geographically; a separate Consular Department handled correspondence to the various consulates around the world; and the Treaty and Royal Letter Department prepared formal documents of diplomatic representation, including matters of protocol, rather than the actual negotiation of treaties. The Passport Office issued passports, as its name suggests.
Aside from introducing the Registry and implementing changes to the internal administrative machinery within the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe also attempted to bring in young men such as Oldham from a wider range of backgrounds, and therefore develop a new class of civil servant. According to Antrobus, ‘his contempt of the public school system led him to distrust and therefore not to make the best use of, its products’.13 This was an oblique reference to the fact that many people working in both the Foreign Office itself, as well as the diplomatic and consular service around the world in embassies and consulates, were the product of the public school system, with a perception held widely throughout society (as well as by men within the Foreign Office such as Tilley) that scholars from Eton generally received the top jobs.
Furthermore, there had been a property qualification of £400 in place – an independent income was considered important to maintain a suitable standard of living overseas, as well as possibly remove the risk of any temptation from corrupt local officials – with the result that the diplomatic corps before 1914 was largely staffed by those from a more aristocratic background. There was still a clear class divide in operation, according to Antrobus:
Life in 1915 was still much as it had been a generation earlier. Society in England still lay in well-defined strata of two main orders. You belonged either to what were known as the Upper Classes or you did not and there, so far as ‘Society’ with a capital S was concerned, was an end of it. But the great point about these two divisions – a point which is now usually forgotten – is that they had nothing to do with wealth or position or occupation. They were concerned solely with birth, breeding and (in a less degree) education.14
Oldham had joined the Foreign Office when many of these restrictions were being swept away, but these reforms would only fully take hold in the decades after World War I, when the Foreign Office was merged with the Diplomatic Service and the property qualification was finally removed. However in 1914, some traditions remained. In keeping with the fashion of the day, Oldham would have conformed to the smart dress code expected of a civil servant described by Antrobus:
The man about town of the early years of the century never walked abroad without three essential articles of adornment – the morning coat, the top hat – or, as hatters would say, the silk hat – and the walking stick.15
This was the world that Oldham had joined from his more humble roots – hierarchical, with strict codes of dress and professional conduct that reflected the legacy of an ‘old boy’ network that was still largely in place. He travelled to work from his parents’ house in Edmonton by public transport, catching the train to Liverpool Street station and then commuting across town to Whitehall. His working hours were predominantly 10.00 am till 5.00 pm, with an hour for lunch, working on files in the Chief Clerk’s Department and drawing an initial annual salary of £100.
The nature of work was routine and, dare one suggest even slightly dull, throughout the spring and early summer of 1914, until the morning of Sunday 28 June. Just after 10.45 am Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were shot dead in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb belonging to a group that supported the formation of a separate Yugoslavian state. Although the assassination took place at a weekend, everyone associated with the Foreign Office who heard the news would have known that the delicate balance of alliances and treaties that maintained an uneasy peace within Europe had just been shattered. They would have waited in trepidation for the return to work the next day. Meanwhile, those officers who remained on duty over the weekend, such as the cipher clerks and King’s Messengers, were faced with a growing flood of telegrams and correspondence from around the world as consular staff and diplomats tried to contact the politicians and senior civil servants who would frame Britain’s reaction to the shocking news.
The atmosphere on Monday was tense but there was no great sense of panic; these were, after all, seasoned professionals. Nevertheless, the following days must have been deeply unnerving for the young Ernest Oldham, still a novice within the corridors of the Foreign Office, watching his elders and superiors involved in constant discussions about what responses to send out. The bigwigs at the
top were summoned for crisis meetings with the Prime Minister and his Cabinet while messages flowed thick and fast via the King’s Messengers, all ciphered or deciphered with the help of the clerks before the urgent correspondence was typed up and despatched.
Sir John Tilley recalled the unfolding drama from the perspective of one of the senior – and therefore calmer – heads in the department, and naturally emphasised how well the Foreign Office coped with the sudden increase in business:
The first difficulty in any great crisis in the Office is to deal with the flood of telegrams which have to be ciphered and deciphered; this is work which must be done and must be done at once; moreover, at such moments, telegrams are not only much more numerous but much longer than usual; communications to be made to this or that government, lengthy arguments by this or that government in favour of some particular course of action, mean a tremendous burden of work for the Office and the embassies.16
The standard answer was to throw resource at the problem – not all of it willing, by the sound of it. Many staff found themselves co-opted into working longer hours or switching to new duties dealing with the influx of correspondence. Even this was not sufficient to cope with demand. For perhaps the first time in its long history, the Foreign Office worked around the clock:
In normal times the telegrams which arrived after office hours were dealt with by the Resident Clerk on duty. At an ordinary time of crisis the Resident Clerks were helped by benevolent juniors... In July and August 1914, it soon became evident that no arrangement of this sort would suffice and the department responsible for ciphering and deciphering was largely augmented and divided into three shifts so that the work could be carried out continuously. Juniors, diplomatic or consular, returning from enemy countries, provided an immediate increase of staff.17
