by Cook, Andrew
During the war years a junior lieutenant in the British Military Censor’s office probably went to more parties in high places than all the members of the Embassy staff put together.2
Bruce Lockhart was referring to Lt Oswald Rayner, whose job disguised his intelligence function. Rayner, a good-looking young man, was a Smethwick draper’s son, the least likely recipient, one might suppose, of the glittering favours that Prince Yusupov could bestow. Yet at twenty-seven he had been taken up by the inner circle of gilded youth. He had reached this position by his own intellect, industry, charm and great good fortune.
He had been born in November 1888 into modest circumstances, and would in due course have five younger brothers and sisters. At eleven he obtained a scholarship to King Edward’s School, then located in New Street, Birmingham.3 The boy absorbed education like blotting paper, but the son of a draper with six children could go only so far before lack of money would dictate that he go out in the world and obtain employment; and we know from correspondence that the family was in financial difficulties in the early years of the century.4 Rayner was good at languages, and when he left school he was fortunate enough to obtain a position as an English teacher at an establishment run by a Mr Ölquist in Helsinki. In Finland (which was then annexed to Russia) he would meet a Finnish couple whose generosity would change his life forever. In February 1907, when he was eighteen, he wrote home delightedly:
Dear Mother and Father,
I am writing to you in order to lay before you such a romance as you would scarce expect to find anywhere outside the bounds of fiction.
As you already know, people have been very kind and hospitable to me in Finland. Amongst those who have been kindest, I believe I have already mentioned Mr and Mrs Uno Donner. Mr and Mrs Donner have very often invited me to spend evenings with them at their flat. I have always enjoyed these visits more than any others; for from the first, I could be perfectly natural there. At all other places I have been obliged, more or less, to pose as a good deal older than I really am, in order to apologise as it were for my position as English Teacher in the Institute… To make a long story short, they have asked me if I would like to put myself under their charge and continue my studies at Oxford! They broached the subject just after dinner one evening a few days ago. Naturally I was quite overcome with astonishment and returned home dazed, expecting every moment to wake up from a more than usually vivid dream. I promised to give them a definite answer the following day at 12 o’clock. I was brooding over the matter during the night, and came to the conclusion that provided you agreed to the proposal, this strange turn of my fortunes would open out new roads for my future, and provide me with my highest aspiration realised – an Oxford University career.5
Thanks to this kind couple, Oswald Rayner was already soaring away from Smethwick. By April he had moved into the home of Mrs Sinebrichov, whom he described simply as a widow, and ‘Mrs Donner’s mother’. The Sinebrichov family had been providing Helsinki with fine port for over eighty years; in fact, they owned the monopoly on brewing in the city. They had amassed a superb collection of Old Masters and furniture, which was presented to the nation when Finland regained its independence after the First World War. Maybe Rayner was dining off Sèvres porcelain every night or maybe he wasn’t, but in any case he had flown so high that, sadly, his parents could no longer be expected to understand the social stratosphere he was living in. ‘There has not really… been anything extraordinary to write about – a constant round of dinners, and suppers, and clubs, and private entertainments, and parties of all descriptions…’. He gave an account, which was not intended to dazzle but could not fail to, of the lives of those with whom he was now associating.
Mr and Mrs Uno Donner left Finland on February 20th for Italy. They spent a month at Milano and Florence, thence proceeding to the Riviera – Cannes, Nice, Mentone, Monte Carlo &c… [I] shall… sail for England by the boat which leaves Helsingfors on the 15th of next month. By that time the Donners will probably be in England – that is to say in London. If so I shall go straight to London, and then arrive in Birmingham on the 20th or 21st of May. The Donners would like me to stay at Birmingham for about a fortnight and then to spend a month in Switzerland with them – at Aix-les-Bains… From Switzerland we shall go to Mrs Sinebrychoff’s [sic] country house for the summer, where there will be yachting, tennis, boating, swimming, riding horseback &c ad libitum. In the autumn the Donners will probably leave Finland for good, and settle down somewhere in England. For the autumn and winter they will hire a flat in London, and I shall begin studying Greek for Oxford. It will be impossible for me to join the University before January 1908.6
He was now part of a circle that included ‘Consul Cooke’, and Count Sparre and his wife. Count Louis Sparre was a gifted and famous Swedish artist who had trained as a painter in Paris. He lived in Finland for nearly twenty years and married a Finn. In the last decade he had been a pioneer of Finnish industrial art and design; he had even founded a factory to produce Art Nouveau furniture and other pieces.
When Mr Donner returns to Finland in summer, he will probably visit his father for some time, and I shall at the same time live at Count Sparre’s country house near Borgå. He is an artist and will give me some drawing lessons there.
Oswald Rayner loved his family, but he would never again live in a back-to-back terraced house with a draper’s shop in the front room. At Oxford he would study Modern Languages, and entered the university in October 1907, graduating with Honours in 1910. By that time Prince Felix Yusupov was already at University College, where he occupied rooms on the ground floor overlooking the street – rooms traditionally known, according to the Master, as ‘the Club’, no matter who lived there. It was here in 1909, through a mutual friend, Eric Hamilton (later Bishop of Salisbury and Dean of Windsor), that Oswald Rayner met Felix Yusupov. The three scholars shared a mutual love of languages and would remain close friends for the rest of their lives. Indeed, Rayner would later name his only son ‘John Felix Hamilton Rayner’ as a testament to his two closest friends.7
After university, Rayner applied for a post with the Times newspaper and, in November 1910, was duly appointed Second Assistant Correspondent in the Paris office at a salary of £150 per year.8
The following year he moved back to London and embarked on a career in elevated government circles as Private Secretary to Sir Herbert Samuel, Asquith’s Postmaster General. Samuel and Rayner sailed together through choppy waters when, in 1912, Sir Herbert, along with Sir Rufus Isaacs and David Lloyd George, was accused by Belloc and Chesterton of insider trading in Marconi shares (an enquiry later exonerated all three, although there can be little doubt that they successfully conspired to frustrate the process and conceal truth from Parliament). It was during the course of this long and drawn-out episode that Rayner made the acquaintance of Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, with whom he stayed in close contact for at least a decade afterwards.
Throughout his employment with Sir Herbert, Rayner was reading for the Bar. He was admitted with Honours in the Bar finals of 1914, and when the war began he joined the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court in September 1914. The Corps had immediately been embodied as a territorial force on the outbreak of war and had initiated a crash training programme for those seeking commissions. Rayner was among twenty-one new recruits to a company under Lt Reggie Trench, who initially described them as ‘an awful rabble’. They were immediately sent off to Richmond Park to begin the basic training that would ultimately lead most of them to service regiments on the Western Front. Rayner appears to have been an exception. In October 1914, a little over a month after he joined the Corps, he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, Interpreter. He was fluent in French, German, Russian and Swedish. It is generally known that Col Francis Errington, the Corps CO, actively resisted attempts by junior officers to transfer out. However, within three months Rayner had been seconded to ‘special duties’ in the Intelligence Department of the Wa
r Office.
Quite how and why, in January of 1915, he was given this secondment can only be the subject of speculation. Whether certain linguists like Rayner were simply identified by the War Office and transferred accordingly, or whether he had a sponsor who guided him in the direction of intelligence work, is unclear. He certainly had a number of influential political contacts in Whitehall through his employment with Sir Herbert Samuel, and as we shall see later on, he would not have been the first person to lobby for such a post.
It was while working for the War Office in 1915 that Rayner made the brief acquaintance of another junior officer, one Lt George Hill, who had initially gone to Ypres on the Western Front in a Canadian infantry battalion attached to the Manchester Regiment. Following a serious injury while on a mission in No Man’s Land, the multi-lingual Hill had then been seconded to the War Office’s Intelligence Department. Both Hill and Rayner, like other new recruits to the department, had a four-week course on intelligence work which covered shadowing, methods of using invisible inks, code and cipher systems and lock-picking among other skills. While their time together in London was to be brief, their paths would cross again some three years later when they would be among the first agents recruited to the new Stockholm SIS station run by Major John Scale.
Towards the end of 1915 Hill was sent to Greece, where he was to work with agents behind enemy lines. Not long after his departure, Rayner was also given his first intelligence posting abroad. In November of 1915 he and Major Vere Benet were assigned to the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd, where they were to take up responsibility for censorship. In a memo to Sir Samuel Hoare written shortly after Rasputin’s murder, Vere Benet discusses the nature of their censorship responsibilities and describes what ‘Rayner and I have done, are doing and still hope to do’:
Censorship does not mean reading private correspondence in the spirit of inquisitive curiosity, but is rather a branch of military intelligence, which if rightly used, is of great assistance to the Allies.
…I have avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs (except trade), and passed onto them all such internal matters as espionage and politics. I have impressed on them that my object, besides helping them, is to obtain information regarding the activity of the Scandinavian and neutral countries, whose agents act as intermediaries for German trade… MI8 wrote to me recently, ‘The copies you send are most useful to the Shipping Department of the Blockade and give us an entirely new and fresh lot of Scandinavian names’. Extracts from intercepted correspondence also show the enemy’s appreciation of ‘English Censorship’.9
Despite his claim to have ‘avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs’, it very much depends on how one interprets the words ‘avoided’ and ‘interference’. Benet and Rayner’s definition seems to have meant intercepting Russian communications of all kinds on a grand scale and, when they felt so inclined, sharing some of them with their Russian counterparts without playing any active role in what ensued. The report is also a very firm confirmation of the fact that very little news or information was changing hands between friends and foes alike in Petrograd without Benet and Rayner being in the know. Benet himself states elsewhere in the memo that he has ‘read, censored and made notes on some 28, 000 telegrams since April 1916’.
In wartime the Russian Imperial General Staff gave over part of their offices to the French and British Intelligence Missions. They were housed with various Russian government and police departments in a semi-circular sweep of offices, pierced by an arch over a busy road, overlooking the square in front of the Winter Palace. Almost all the British contingent spoke Russian fluently. Some, like Rayner, were censors. Others were engaged in identifying enemy units on the Russian front. This did not involve camouflage and binoculars. It was a desk job, usually accomplished by piecing together whatever snippets of news reached them from other theatres of war and working out which Germans the Russians must be fighting by a process of elimination.
Samuel Hoare, who had a nice eye for detail, wrote a wry account of what he found when he arrived at the Mission in the spring of 1916.
True to Russian type, the façade was the best part of the building. At the back of the General Staff was a network of smelly yards and muddy passages that made entrance difficult and health precarious. Inside, the bureaucracy showed its unshaken power by maintaining a temperature that in those days of fuel shortage was far beyond the reach of any private house… Our caps and galoshes were left in the keeping of a Finnish gendarme in a stuffy waiting-room. The Finn’s other duty was to bring us tea during the day.
Soon after my arrival, two tiresome events happened in the Mission. One of my galoshes was missed from the waiting-room, and the samovar simultaneously struck work.
Inevitably, the two crises were linked, the galosh having been left to stew in the samovar for several days. Office life, with its hourly glasses of sugar-laden tea, crawled by at a sluggish pace. There were time-wasting formalities when Russians visited the British office and vice versa; according to Russian military protocol, all personnel had to shake hands with everyone in the room on arrival and departure, and must wear swords at all times. The system was almost paralysed by this kind of thing, not to mention other imperatives to stop work.
Upon all public holidays the General Staff was closed, and our office with it… There were no less than fifteen public holidays in the month of May and five on end in the last week of August owing to a perfect covey of saint’s days and national anniversaries… Upon the Church festivals that were not important enough to be honoured with a whole holiday, services of considerable length would be held in the General Staff chapel… Even when the department was working, the hours were uncertain, and it was never easy to make an appointment with a Russian colleague. I remember, for instance, that at the time of my arrival the Quartermaster General, the senior officer of the General Staff, made a common habit of arriving at his office at about eleven at night, and of working until seven or eight the next morning.
Unsurprisingly, co-operation, indeed contact, through work was not so easy to achieve. Those members of the British Mission who already had Russian friends in Petrograd turned to them as a relief from life at the office. Rayner, of course, knew the second richest man in Russia, and it was not long before he and Yusupov renewed their acquaintance.
Yusupov was immensely generous, as only a man could be whose ancestors had been accumulating palaces, furniture, paintings, jewels, serfs, animals, factories, steppes, coastlines and oil fields since the founding of the family by a nephew of Mahomet; and like his great friend Dmitri Pavlovich, he was a great and enthusiastic anglophile. After his first year at Oxford he had invited Eric Hamilton to visit Russia as his guest. Hamilton, a friend of Rayner’s, was quite overwhelmed by the wealth of his host, and his kindness too. He would not have seen the more dissipated side of Yusupov. Oswald Rayner, who probably did, could hardly fail to be dazzled and amused, though it is unlikely that he went native and began to see himself as a Petrograd socialite rather than a British intelligence officer.
Rayner was not alone in the British Intelligence Mission in having friends in high places. Captain Stephen Alley, who shared a Petrograd apartment with Rayner and Vere Benet on the top floor of the Swedish Church Building, had been born forty years ago in the Krivo, one of the Yusupov Palaces in Moscow. His father, John Alley, was an engineer employed in Russian railway construction. Although he had begun life in conditions of privilege by comparison with Rayner, he had wider experience. Many years later he made notes about his early life.
I ran wild on our estate, called Malakhovo, until I was sent to the German school in Moscow, Fiedler’s. I used to travel up by train from Malakhovo with our neighbours the Obolenskis. My father used to take a house for the winter in Moscow and we lived in the Malakhovo house in summer.
Prince Serge Obolenski was a great friend of Felix Yusupov.
This went on until my father’s partner, Colonel John Davis, brough
t me to England. Apparently I was too old for one class of school, and too young for another.
Alley was fifteen when he arrived in England in the summer or autumn of 1891. It was decided that he would be placed as an apprentice with Dewrance & Co., a London firm, and that his academic education would continue by means of evening classes at King’s College.
It would, of course, have been possible to get a fifteen-yearold into a private school or even a crammer. Either because of business misfortune or illness, things at home in Russia may have been on a financial downturn when Stephen arrived in Britain.
But in 1891 he registered at King’s College to study maths, mechanics, Junior French and Junior German (most likely the lessons at Fiedler’s had been conducted in Russian).10 At the time he was lodging at 39 Paulet Road, Camberwell; but for most of the next three years he would stay with a Captain and Mrs Moody in Blackheath.
He was then sent to Scotland to further his apprenticeship in the works of his uncle (also called Stephen) at Polmadie, an industrial suburb of Glasgow which made more locomotives for export than anywhere else in the world. Alley and McLellan at Polmadie were marine engineers and enthusiastic exporters (during the First World War they would manufacture barges for neutral countries).11 In 1894 he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study analytical chemistry, mathematics and English literature. He was then living at 2 Park Terrace, Ayr and his father was still alive.12 He remained for a year, attending evening classes, and did not graduate, but accepted a job in London representing Alley and McLellan in their offices at 28 Victoria Street. ‘My uncle Stephen put me up for the St Stephen’s Club.’ This was on the corner of Bridge Street and the Embankment, between the Houses of Parliament and Scotland Yard, and the members tended to be civil engineers (from their professional institution a hundred yards away) or Conservative politicians; Disraeli had been a founding father. At home in Russia there seems to have been some family upheaval, for the 1901 census shows that Stephen’s mother, a British subject who had, like him, been born in Russia, was widowed and had come to live with her son in Greenwich.
