The Forgotten Spy

by Nick Barratt

  The pace of work was often frenetic, as the aforementioned passages would suggest – with the urgency of messages increasing the pressure was on the cipher staff to come up with the goods. As a result, there was always the potential for mistakes to be made, or – even worse – to unwittingly ‘leak’ sensitive information to the press.

  Unlike other departments, ours was open on Sundays. We then suffered much interruption from various outside sources with which we did not come into contact on weekdays. Newspapers, who knew well that the regular channels of information were less easily accessible on Sundays, often rang us up and tried to extract details of some particular event. They were, of course, fully aware of what they ought to do: the News Department always made thorough and complete arrangements for such emergencies when the office, as a whole, was closed; but Fleet Street guessed rightly that any news there was must come to us first and I daresay they hoped to entrap one of us into an indiscreet disclosure.107

  This was one of the reasons behind the strict application process – to ensure the recruitment of the calibre of person who could be trusted with sensitive information.

  We can discern glimpses of Ernest Oldham’s work during this period and it is clear that he enjoyed considerable influence over the future direction of the Communications Department, especially the King’s Messengers. For someone acting as a clerical officer, he certainly appeared in some exotic locations in the early 1920s – there is no way he can be described as a desk-bound civil servant. In 1921, he was charged with undertaking a round trip to Constantinople, with the outward journey by sea and the return leg overland via some of the key drop-off points on the King’s Messenger itinerary. The purpose of his mission was to explore ways in which the routes could be reorganised. Oldham left London on 4 February 1921, returning home two months later on 3 April. However, it took him the best part of a year before he submitted his expenses to the Claims Department on 17 March 1922, asking for £18.16.1½ that was due to him. He added an explanation of various items that he’d included in the account along with his report on the messenger service.108

  To get a sense of the journey Oldham undertook that spring, we can turn once more to Antrobus, with an occasional aside from Wheeler-Holohan, seasoned travellers who independently captured some of the excitement Oldham must have felt as he set out for the first time. This was a major undertaking for Oldham, taking in some of the more exotic parts of eastern Europe as well as the jewel of the Bosphorus, Constantinople.

  Picture, then, the vestibule of the Foreign Office. It is a rather forbidding looking place… There are some massive columns and arches, there is a large weighing machine; oil-paintings hang on the walls; boxes, parcels and crates litter the floor. Near the back, under the arches, stand two rows of bags, confidential and non-confidential, the former distinguished by the black crosses on their labels.

  It is the eve of the King’s Messenger’s departure. The bags are sealed by four o’clock in the afternoon and an hour or two later the Messenger appears, glances over the bags he will have to take and makes a rough mental estimate of just how much room will be left for himself in the Wagon-Lit’s compartment [sleeping carriage].109

  Oldham would have travelled on the train with the bags in the compartment at all times, often crammed into the space under his feet. The first task was to take the uncrossed bags containing regular post to Victoria station for storage in preparation for the boat-train to the coast which would leave the following day. The next morning, Oldham returned to the Foreign Office to pick up the crossed bags containing secret or sensitive material. Having collected his waybills, special red courier’s passport and any last-minute instructions, Oldham jumped in the waiting car, followed by the traditional refrain of the doorkeeper to send him on his way – ‘A good journey and safe return, sir.’

  At Victoria, Oldham embarked on the boat-train to Dover and locked himself in the special compartment reserved for the King’s Messenger, having asked the porter and inspectors to help him load the heavy bags into the compartment. This would have been the first of many cash ‘tips’ that Oldham was entitled to distribute, all part of the routine and ritual of the journey.

  You have got to tip the right people at the right time and on the right scale – no more and no less; and you have to bear in mind that you must render an account of all your disbursements against the advance you have received. This is very nicely calculated to cover, not the whole of your living expenses, but the additional ones entailed by the journey.110

  A few hours later on arrival at Dover, the porters would load the bags onto his cabin.

  At the Channel, he scores heavily over the ordinary traveller. He is in no hurry, everyone knows he is coming and his cabin on the steamer and his compartment on the continental train are reserved for him. He can, and if he is wise he does, take his time in getting both on to and off the steamer.111

  According to Wheeler-Holohan, the experienced King’s Messenger would lock his cabin and then settle down for the journey

  [in the] smoking room, gazing reflectively into the amber of a glass of beer or a whisky and soda.112

  On landing at the port, Oldham would have secured the services of another porter to disembark the bags, make his way through passport control and customs showing his red passport marked courier du Roi and found his reserved sleeper car for the long journey across Europe.

  The great European express trains have an air of mystery and romance about them. Truth to tell, this is but ill-deserved… They are slow, they stop often and they have the irritating habit of traversing the finest scenery at night.

  The King’s Messenger has a comfortable journey. His main temptation is to eat too much on the first day; lack of exercise and the strange cuisine of eastern Europe will then land him at his destination in the full glow of indigestion. Time hangs heavy on his hands… You read and you sleep, you sleep and you read; at the frontiers you rouse yourself for the passport examination and at intervals you are met by branch couriers or Chancery servants (the office-keepers of diplomatic missions) and hand them the bags they have come to collect.113

  Wheeler-Holohan described the final leg of Oldham’s journey, one that he had taken many times.

  In those days the Orient Express had not been re-established. The Messengers went via Paris to Rome, thence to Brindisi, whence they sailed on one of the Lloyd-Triestino steamers. The next call was Corfu, then came the journey through the Corinth Canal to the Piraeus: here one disembarked and went up to Athens, in a few hours returning to the ship and so on to Constantinople through the Dardanelles. With what mingled feelings did those who had served on that ill-omened peninsula gaze on the place again! Constantinople was reached in the early hours of the morning; here the ship lay to, and a naval tug came alongside to take the King’s Messenger ashore and so avoid the delay of pratique and customs. Constantinople from the sea in the early morning, almost veiled in the mist rising from the water, with its domes and minarets gleaming in the sun, what it promised the imagination and what a sink of a city one found it to be when, after landing at Top Hani, one drove up to Pera through the filthy and smelly back streets!114

  According to both Antrobus and Wheeler-Holohan, at journey’s end the King’s Messenger would have some time to himself for a few days.

  During this time his services are ‘at the disposal of the ambassador’, though as a rule he has his time as much to himself as social functions will allow.115

  As a first time visitor, Oldham probably undertook some sightseeing in Constantinople, but equally given his status as a King’s Messenger he would have been required to mix and mingle with the varied British diplomats, press representatives and secret service officers who congregated at the various bars and hotels such as the Club, a favourite haunt for international travellers.

  His discretion is thoroughly tested, for he is the link between the diplomatic missions; he hears all the gossip; he knows what is going on in London and his acquaintance with Whitehall and Down
ing Street is up to date and first hand. A fool or a talker could make untold mischief.116

  Alternatively, he could meet some very interesting people and it would appear that Oldham struck up a friendship with Harold Courtenay Armstrong, a former Indian Army officer who had a colourful campaign in Mesopotamia, suffering capture and imprisonment at the siege of Kut-el-Amarah before subsequently escaping from captivity. After the war, Armstrong was posted to Constantinople as military attaché to the British High Commission, where he stayed on the staff of the Allied Forces of Occupation in Turkey after the break-up of the Ottoman empire; he would eventually write a series of books about his time in Constantinople, including a biography of the great Turkish leader Mustapha Kemel Ataturk, Grey Wolf, in 1932. Oldham considered Armstrong as one of his closer associates.

  The return journey was by train and took in all the key European capitals so that Oldham could examine the conditions under which the King’s Messengers operated, as well as the costs, risk and dangers in the upturned post-war world of the 1920s. One of the places that Oldham visited was Bucharest, where he was issued with a new passport on 17 March. As with Constantinople, it would appear that he made some important connections while in Romania that would serve him well in later life.

  This was a period during which alliances between the expanded Kingdom of Romania, the newly formed Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were drawn up, known as the Little Entente. This followed wars with the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. The new alliances were of interest to Britain as a counterweight to the threat of Communism that, as we will shortly see, was gripping the attention of many post-war states. Once again, the King’s Messenger had a pivotal role to play in passing on information – formal and often more importantly informal – to various classes of folk – lawyers as well as diplomats.

  Given the travelling, interspersed with bursts of sociability with strangers wanting to make his acquaintance because of what he represented as much as who he was, this would have been a gruelling month for Oldham. Added to this was the burden of his assignment – to assess, analyse and improve upon the system.

  He is probably rather jaded and weary. The mental strain of keeping watch over the bags is beginning to tell; and the monotony of the Wagon-Lits, the lack of exercise, and the hasty meals necessitated by guarding the bags have had their effect on his temper and his optimism… He arrives in London and drives to the Foreign Office, where he deposits his bags and hands over his waybill.117

  Oldham’s mission was clearly a success that brought him even greater prominence within the department – because a month after his return from mainland Europe, he was given an assignment of the highest prominence imaginable. On 9 May 1922, an urgent message was sent through to the Foreign Office on behalf of the King, who was in Belgium visiting the newly laid-out Commonwealth war cemeteries. A document was requested without delay. The only way to transport the material during the King’s visit was to despatch a King’s Messenger by plane and Oldham was the man chosen for the job.

  While his colleagues made the necessary arrangements with Instone Air Line Limited, Oldham was handed the relevant envelope and rushed to the airfield. He donned flying gear and jumped on board a de Havilland DH.18 – a single-engine biplane made predominantly of plywood and wire that was a larger version of the planes he had first seen fighting to the death over the skies of France in 1918. This time Oldham was himself a passenger, seated inside the enclosed cabin whilst the pilot navigated his way across the Channel to the landing field on the other side. On touchdown, he would have been whisked off to hand the paperwork to a high-ranking dignitary, most likely the ambassador or one of his staff. All told, the emergency trip cost £40 in airfares – a vast amount for the time – as well as £4.13.0 in sundry expenses and 12 shillings worth of tips. Oldham was the hero of the hour.118

  However, Antrobus recalled the incident slightly differently, albeit nearly two decades after the event:

  Some time ago a King’s Messenger was hurriedly summoned and despatched to Paris in a special plane. It was a record job and the Communications Department was rather proud of it. With an air of modest triumph the Messenger handed an envelope to the grateful ambassador and returned to London in a glow of duty well done. Unfortunately, the vital document was left behind and the envelope – on whose transport such care and cost had been lavished, contained – if I remember right – an information from a London club that the prices of the members’ luncheon had been raised by sixpence. I need hardly add that neither the King’s Messenger nor the Communications Department were responsible for the accidental substitution, and that the little comedy led to no tragic result.119

  Oldham was involved in other last-minute and sensitive journeys as well. For example, in December 1920 he submitted an expenses claim for two recent journeys, one to Lucerne and the other to Brussels. The first was almost certainly linked to the ratification of the Treaty of Sèvres which was held at Lucerne in late August 1920, while the second was associated with the Council of the League of Nations meeting in Brussels that mainly focused on the wars that had erupted between Poland, Russia and Lithuania in 1919.120

  On 23 and 24 September 1922, he was travelling to Calais via Boulogne to meet ‘Mr Gascoigne’, who had ‘special minutes of the conference’ – probably a reference to the frantic negotiations to end the Greco-Turkish war in which Britain was involved following the collapse of the Treaty of Sèvres and the rise of the Turkish independence movement led by Ataturk. Oldham was required to explain various extra items of expenditure ‘which were owing to the time of the journey’, suggesting it took place outside normal hours and therefore at relatively short notice.121 Having been involved at various stages of the framing, ratification and collapse of the Treaty of Sèvres, there is a neat symmetry to the fact Oldham was summoned in September 1923 to undertake three journeys in short succession between London and Dieppe.122 It is likely that it was in connection with the conference at Lausanne, where the Treaty of Sèvres was finally amended to take account of the conclusion of the Turkish wars. No wonder Oldham was so interested in Harold Armstrong’s insights into the career of Ataturk.

  When he wasn’t dashing around Europe on urgent business himself, Oldham was involved in organising the routes of others. It was not just regular King’s Messengers that undertook journeys on his behalf. The use of unofficial messengers to carry diplomatic despatches was not uncommon. During the war, officers of the army and navy were detailed by the Admiralty and War Office to carry bags, as indeed were trusted captains in the merchant navy. The practice was continued in the years following the Paris Conference and the day books of the Foreign Office are littered with requests from men of military rank or status claiming for their travel expenses as King’s Foreign Service Messengers. However, men such as Antrobus, who considered themselves the real King’s Messengers, appointed through open competition, grew quite irate with the number of men outside their ranks who falsely laid claim to their title. According to Wheeler-Holohan,

  Some of these gentlemen were called, or used to call themselves, ‘King’s Messengers’. I knew two of them personally and remember that they used that title. This caused intense feeling as far as the real King’s Foreign Service Messengers were concerned.123

  But like it or not, a separate system was indeed in place, and Oldham built up a network of trusted men to send, often junior staff such as Raymond Oake, who regularly appeared in the Foreign Office day books, claiming expenses that Oldham would authenticate. Tensions between the official and unofficial King’s Messengers never really abated.

  Therefore by the mid-1920s, Oldham enjoyed an influential position within the Foreign Office – he was the puppet-master, pulling the strings of Britain’s communications network with Europe and the near east, ensuring the most expedient routes to destinations both close and distant. As part of the team of permanent officials entrusted with ensuring the safety of both message and messengers, Oldham found himself a
cting for King and country in the front line once more, albeit in a very different struggle. Instead of facing German machine guns in the woods at St Quentin, a more subtle foe lay in the shadows. This enemy could strike at home or abroad at any time – agents of the Bolshevik revolutionary forces that were sweeping out of Russia, a communist menace that sought to gain access to the heart of Britain’s diplomatic network in whatever way they could.

  Chapter six

  THE MARCH OF THE BOLSHEVIKS (1924–1927)

  Bolshevism is moving steadily westwards, has overwhelmed Poland, and is poisoning Germany.

  US PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON, 1919

  Within a year all Europe will be communist.

  GRIGORI ZINOVIEV, PRESIDENT OF COMINTERN (COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL), 1919

  If the Russian revolutions of 1917 sent a shockwave through the world, then the brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 17 July 1918 was met with revulsion and disbelief, as well as realisation that the Bolshevik movement was prepared to do whatever it took to preserve its hold on power.

  Ernest Oldham’s life and work in the Communications Department were directly affected by events in Russia after 1917. Without spending too much time on the details, it is important to understand just why European states were so concerned about the impact of the Russian revolutions. First, and perhaps most importantly, the collapse of the Triple Entente had ushered in a new era where ideological class warfare – communism against capitalism, the proletariat versus the privileged bourgeoisie – created international tension in a post-Versailles world shattered by the recent global conflict. The threat of armies clashing along geo-political lines was replaced by fears of communist agents of change operating within states to foment revolution, fears which grew more hysterical throughout the 1920s and 1930s.