The Forgotten Spy

by Nick Barratt

  Chapter five

  DECIPHERING THE NEW WORLD ORDER (1920–1924)

  Coolness of head and temperateness of action were not at that period at all characteristic of the Foreign Office… From 1922 onwards crisis succeeded crisis in a hideous, unending chain… The world was upside down and any attempt at reconstruction could be nothing more than empiric.

  GEORGE ANTROBUS, KING’S FOREIGN SERVICE MESSENGER, WRITING IN 1940

  Caught up in the greatest diplomatic event the world had ever seen and having witnessed at close quarters how the ‘other’ side of the service worked, Old-ham’s appetite for a similar career was truly whetted. No doubt numerous conversations at the Majestic with consulate staff had fired up his enthusiasm for a peripatetic life in far-flung embassies situated in exotic climes. So, on 12 April 1919, during a crucial phase of the conference, he reactivated his application to join the consular service that had first been submitted back in 1916.

  Given the focus of attention on Paris and then the subsequent process of finalising treaties with the other Central Powers, it is not surprising that it took the best part of a year before a meeting of a small Foreign Office Departmental Committee could be convened. On 26 January 1920, the committee considered the applications of 40 hopeful candidates who had been granted either temporary or honorary posts and whose claims were still pending.

  At this stage, Oldham was very confident of success. Not only had he been part of the peace process, working tirelessly behind the scenes gathering firsthand experience of diplomacy in action but also he had been formally recognised for his role in the process – earning promotion to junior executive grade on 1 January 1920. Sir John Tilley, who had signed Oldham’s release papers into the army and supported his career throughout, was one of the board members – but crucially he had not been present in Paris to witness Oldham operating under the daily pressures of the conference.

  Of the 40 candidates, 15 were accepted and 14 rejected. Oldham was one of 11 left in limbo with applications held over, pending further inquiries. Nevertheless, he was nominated to a permanent post in the consular service on 29 January 1920, upheld by a promotions board on 10 February. His languages, which now included French, Spanish, Italian and German, had earned him a position as the Third Vice Consul in Rio – an admittedly junior role in an embassy, supporting the consul, but about as far away from the European battlefields as it was possible to get.

  However, his dreams of an exotic posting to South America were cruelly dashed. The promotions board met again on 18 February and made various changes to the proposed list of new appointments, including the note that ‘a fresh proposal to be made for the appointment of Third Vice Consul at Rio, as Mr Oldham is not to be taken into the Consular Service.’88 The recommendation was placed on file to this effect on 26 February, but it would take until 15 March before a letter was sent to Oldham to put him out of his misery:

  With reference to Foreign Office letter No 515146/250K of 12 April past in which you were informed that your application for permanent employment in the Salaried Consular Service was being reserved for further consideration, I am directed by Earl Curzon of Kedleston to inform you that your case has been carefully reviewed and that he regrets to be unable to accept your candidature for admission to the services.89

  With his hopes of a diplomatic career dashed by the new Foreign Secretary who replaced Balfour in October 1919, Oldham was faced with a return to mundane duties within a reformed Foreign Office. His bitter disappointment perhaps made him miss the fact that his superiors within the Chief Clerk’s Department fully appreciated his work – hence his promotion – and that he was transferred to a key position within a new Communications Department, created as part of a wider restructure of the Foreign Office.

  The Foreign Office had already taken charge of Britain’s Diplomatic and Consular Services. Among other changes, the Central Registry and sub-registries were overhauled and replaced by a single Registry with three branches. In addition, a temporary Historical Section, set up during the war, was made permanent and transferred to the Librarian to manage and the Parliamentary Department was disbanded, with the King’s Messengers and cipher clerks moving to the new Communications Department. The Foreign Office also took over the responsibility of the Government Code and Cipher School from the Admiralty in 1922, with oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service. These were important changes and reflected the way in which the work of the office had grown during the conflict and continued to expand with Britain’s role within the new League of Nations. However, the general antipathy felt by the Foreign Office towards the League, its international rival, was reflected in the fact that only a sub-section of the Western political department was initially assigned to League business.

  The origins of the new Communications Department lay in earnest attempts to provide a career for both messengers and cipher staff alike. A note placed on file in March 1919 sketched out the thinking behind the proposed merger of the two units, at the express wish of Lord Hardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office whose experiences in Paris made him realise the importance of a unified system. The unnamed author was blunt to the point of insulting about the calibre of recruits:

  One difficulty about forming a cipher department is how to make it a tolerable career. No young man ought to settle down to a life of ciphering just as no young man ought to settle down to a life of carrying bags. Moreover, we could not expect to get the Treasury to sanction a new service with an inferior entrance exam calculated to meet the requirements of people with no sufficient brains for the diplomatic or consular services but with qualifications which would make them absolutely trustworthy. They might however sanction an extension of an existing service such as the Messenger Service. For that there is no exam worth mentioning.90

  It is worth bearing in mind that Oldham was now categorised amongst those ‘with no sufficient brains’ for the Diplomatic Service and was selected for the new department, albeit in an elevated position as one of the permanent clerical officers. The aim of the merger was to ensure the maintenance of a body of men who could undertake both ciphering and message deliveries:

  I think the two services would fit in with each other: occasional journeys would relieve the monotony of ciphering and teach the cipherers a good deal that would be useful about places and things. The messengers would be employed during their spells at home and would be more in hand.91

  The finer points of recruitment to the new combined group were then discussed further, with new admissions limited to British subjects – men, of course – between the ages of 30 and 40 who had previously served in one of the Armed Forces.

  It is essentially a service for men who have done something else and not one which should be used for giving soft jobs to young men. Two or more experts now serving in Cipher Department might be taken on although they have not served.92

  Some degree of qualification was required, with the introduction of an exam covering English, French and arithmetic which was to be ‘rather more severe than for messengers’, followed by a selection board from within the Foreign Office. However, pay was to be less than permanent staff, initially proposed at £300 rising £20 per year to a maximum of £500, with a compulsory retirement age set at 60 and – crucially – no pension. The four remaining King’s Messengers were brought across, with the temporary cipher staff. It was initially envisaged that even junior diplomats ‘should have a turn in the department, vice consuls also, even if only for a month or two,’ so that they gained valuable insight into the way communications were managed at the centre before they were given a post overseas.

  So what exactly did the new Communications Department do? In the words of Sir John Tilley:

  The primary duty of the Communications Department is the ciphering and deciphering of telegrams and the arrangements for the transmission of written matter to and from our posts abroad. A lifetime entirely spent on the latter work must necessarily be rather dull and perhaps trying to the eye
sight and brain; it is clearly better that a man should have occasional respites from work on telegrams by going on periodical journeys abroad as King’s Messenger.93

  However, to really understand the work we need look no further than George Antrobus, who served in the new department and described the intricate workings that took place behind the walls of the Foreign Office in Whitehall, largely in the functional spaces where Oldham and his co-workers were situated, away from the grandly furnished state areas reserved for the politicians and visiting dignitaries.

  The inside of the building is a hodge-podge of amorphous rooms and dark, straggling corridors… The visitor is still struck with… the smell of Irish stew… I have often savoured steak-and-onions, and sometimes even roast pheasant, in the Foreign Office. These gastronomic odours, presumably from the housekeeper’s kitchen, are not made easier to endure by the fact that there is no canteen or restaurant within the office.94

  The Communications Department’s premises consisted of a good-sized room for the ciphering and coding, a similar room for typing and copying, a small room known as the Distribution Room, another small room for the administrative and clerical work of the department, and a slightly larger room for the chief. They were very conveniently placed, close to the entrance, and all but one faced northward over the Horse Guards Parade. A north aspect, as artists know, is by far the best to work so long as the windows are ample, as it avoids the direct sunshine but gives a good light.95

  Given Antrobus’s criticism of the ‘dark’ and ‘cramped’ Foreign Office described earlier, he changed tack when justifying his own space and put a rather hypocritical brave face on his own working conditions:

  There is a good deal of nonsense talked about office accommodation; vast and palatial rooms are often a great mistake and lead to more physical exertion owing to their size; cramped quarters – and ours were decidedly cramped – frequently give the best results.96

  Yet he provides an insider’s view of some of the most secretive and important rooms in the UK’s entire diplomatic network – the fabled Room 22 where messages were coded and despatched around the world.

  The cipher room itself, on which all others depended, was numbered 22; Room 22 will be a familiar title to many civil servants, both of the Foreign Office and of other Departments. It was a room with an atmosphere of its own – bare, gaunt, exceptionally lofty and lighted by two vast, rattling, plate-glass sash windows, it had no pretensions to art or beauty.

  At the heart of the process lay the ciphering and deciphering of letters and telegrams. To do this, the temporary clerical officers would make reference to the official code books which were used in standard form across Britain’s diplomatic networks so that only personnel with access to them could decipher the messages. To have the official cipher code books fall into enemy hands would compromise the entire communications operation, leaving Britain’s diplomatic correspondence open to interpretation by others. Nothing short of a full reissue of new code books would ensure that a leak was closed – a costly and time-consuming business.

  In theory, according to Antrobus, the process of coding was simple.

  A code book… is nothing more than a dictionary in which you look up the equivalent in the code language of an English word or phrase. The only difference between a code book and an ordinary dictionary is that the code words are usually limited in number so that each one of them has to serve for two or more English interpretations in close alphabetical proximity.97

  Thus several words of similar spelling could lead to accidental confusion when interpreting the message – as indeed happened on occasion:

  There have, of course, been many improvements in code books since the days of which I am speaking… But even in 1915, I do not think the decoder had much excuse for making a perfectly respectable consul say that the distance between his residence and his office was four miles as Sir Eyre Crowe flies.

  Antrobus described the daily bustle of activity in Room 22 in vivid detail, as staff coded and decoded the various telegrams piled high in the respective out- or in-trays – square and deep tin trays sitting on a small table beside the chief’s desk.

  Picture to yourself a room about 25 feet by 20, furnished with half a dozen tables, a dozen chairs of a plain office pattern, two big ranges of cupboards 9 feet high, a rather more elaborate desk for the chief, and the inevitable water bottle and glass without which no Whitehall room is complete.98

  The atmosphere in the room was a heady mix of noise and smoke:

  The smoke comes from the pipes and cigarettes – the pace is too hot for cigars – of those who write; the noise comes in a rhythmical roar from the lips of those who read. For the whole secret of really high-speed working is cooperation; you work in pairs, one reading from the code book and the other writing. A good coder can dictate from the code book as fast as a good writer can take it down, that is to say at the rate of 25 to 30 code words a minute. In decoding, this means that the writer must be able to take down, in reasonably legible longhand, a good 50 words a minute and keep it up hour after hour.99

  In charge of Room 22 was Algernon Hay, who possessed ‘the supreme art of making others obey him without knowing they were obedient’. Antrobus wrote fondly of his former boss, commenting:

  He knew how to talk, not merely to those in his own station of life but to everyone, from a royal duke to a scullery maid. He never let anyone down or gave anyone away – things which are much easier to do than the uninitiated may imagine; true loyalty, such as his, needs qualities of the head as well as of the heart. He had all a Scotsman’s mixture of shrewdness and generosity.100

  Under Hay, what went on in Room 22 stayed in Room 22, a code of silence that ensured that any problems were resolved within the closed circle of the King’s Messengers.

  Once the correspondence had been coded or decoded, it was taken next door to the typists’ room, where up to 16 girls worked where there is ‘less smoke but even more noise’.

  They are all working on wax stencils, as the copies have to be duplicated afterwards and the clatter of the ribbon-less machines is deafening. We notice that the girls, even at the feverish pace they have to work, are in no wise [sic] discomposed.101

  Next, the typed up material needed to be copied.

  In a little room adjoining are the duplicators, three or four machines operated by as many girls. These young ladies are, strange to say, not Foreign Office employees; they are on the staff of the Stationery Office and only temporarily attached. They are skilled experts in the manipulation of their machines, each of which is now a producing a snowstorm of foolscap sheets. The standard of work is very high; the paper is of the best, and the quality of the typing is a joy to behold.102

  Once the copies had been completed, the final stage of the process got under way in Room 5.

  The next room, which is called the Distribution Room, offers perhaps the most animated spectacle of all. Here the typescript of every telegram is checked against the manuscript, the duplicated copies are sorted out and distributed among the pigeonholes of a gigantic cabinet and the finished products enclosed in despatch boxes for conveyance by the home service messengers to their destinations. Every important telegram goes not only to the various departmental heads of the office, but to the King, the Cabinet – a separate copy for each member – and to various important personages in any other office that may be concerned.103

  Antrobus also sketched the role of the various clerical officers who worked in the department – not involved with the ciphering process as such, but ensuring the smooth running of the operation as well as tackling any wider issues as they arose:

  He reads the telegrams and marks them but he has no time to digest them; he has an automatic eye for an error, for both coders and typists make mistakes… he blue-pencils a line and rings a bell. ‘Take this,’ he says to the girl who answers, ‘back to Room 22 and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe. And when they’ve put it right you’ll have to do an amended copy.’ He
has to shout, for all the while another girl is slamming down the lids of a series of despatch boxes, locking them, and crashing them down on a table near the door.104

  Across the passage was another room that Oldham and his colleagues would have been familiar with. Administration for the travelling arrangements of the King’s Foreign Service Messengers was carried out here. It included the itineraries for all journeys to be undertaken, complete with timetables and any necessary directions.

  It is a small room, cumbered with a good deal of large furniture in the severest official style. Every unoccupied space, on the floor, the tables and even the one chair that is not being sat on, is crammed with a miscellaneous collection of parcels, boxes, envelopes, bags, cases, sacks, cartons, pouches, wallets, locks, keys, cipher books, code books, waybills, schedules, rosters and a job lot of large and small objects including a safe, a pair of antlers from some exotic beast, an opera hat and three dozen tins of bully beef [corned beef].105

  Thus, amid the clutter and chaos, it was easy for important items to go missing. It is fair to say that security within the Foreign Office was somewhat lax, despite office keepers and a locksmith whose presence was designed to ensure that a semblance of order was enforced and that the presses in which documents were kept remained locked when not in use. The senior staff officer would preside over all these areas, an important role:

  He distributes all the cipher and code books, special circulars, and instructions – in itself a vast and complicated task. Moreover, he superintends the locks, keys, safes, strong rooms – in a word, the security of British Diplomatic and Consular property throughout the world. It is no wonder that he looks a little careworn.106