by Nick Barratt
This is hardly a mystery worthy of the detective powers of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, but nevertheless the sudden disappearance of his parents haunted Michael from that day on. Equally, he was vaguely puzzled by the fact that around this time his grandparents decided to move to Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight, leaving their home of 20-plus years in Edmonton.
Michael’s mystery was dramatically solved in 2002 with the release of an MI5 file at The National Archives into a man called Ernest Holloway Oldham, who was his maternal uncle – and therefore my great-uncle. It contained some shocking revelations about Oldham‘s life, including the newspaper clipping at the start of this introduction. The file also revealed that the date that Michael went on his ‘grand adventure’ to the hospital was the same one as the inquest into Oldham’s death, 2 October 1933. My grandmother Marjorie Holloway Oldham had decided to attend, but only if her husband, George Bernard Barratt came too – hence the decision to leave their six-year-old son at home.
Thus with one mystery solved, an even greater one was posed: who really was Ernest Holloway Oldham? For the first time, this book tells the remarkable tale of a seemingly unremarkable man who became the forgotten spy of the Cold War.
In the 1920s, communist Russia had supplanted Germany as the nation most feared by British intelligence services, until the rise of Hitler, fascism and the Nazis in the 1930s shifted attention westwards once more. The secrets of Britain’s communication network lay in Room 22 at the heart of the Foreign Office in London, where a man in a brown suit plotted to betray his colleagues and countrymen as stock markets tumbled, the League of Nations failed and the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe once more.
It is a story of weakness, greed and a tragic descent into treachery, deception and desperation played out in the shadowy world of inter-war espionage. It is the story of my great-uncle.
Chapter one
AN ORDINARY LIFE (1894–1914)
I think it is not untrue to say that in these years we are passing through a decisive period in the history of our country. The wonderful century which followed the battle of Waterloo and the downfall of Napoleonic domination, which secured to this small island so long and so resplendent a reign, has come to an end. We have arrived at a new time. Let us realise it. And with that new time strange methods, huge forces, larger combinations – a Titanic world – have sprung up around us.
THE TIMES, 24 MAY 1909
Many dramatic stories have a humble beginning and this one is no exception. On 10 September 1894, a boy was born at 6 Sunningdale Cottages, a small property on Bury Street in the recently developed London suburb of Lower Edmonton. The boy’s parents, Frank Oldham and Carrie Holloway, were talented and hard-working teachers who had married in Christ Church, Ramsgate, on the first day of the year; rather endearingly, Carrie firmly believed that she had conceived on her wedding night.
A few weeks after her son’s birth, she set out to formally register his appearance in the world, walking the short distance from her cottage past rows of recently built terraced houses, towards the Green – nothing more than a small triangle of grass in the centre of Edmonton that was a reminder of the rural village that had been slowly transformed into a built-up residential area, a haven for families drawn to the outskirts of London by the promise of work who now formed part of a new class of suburban commuters.
Crossing the Green, Carrie bought a ticket at Lower Edmonton station and, after a short wait, joined the north-bound train. Two stops later she alighted at Enfield Town, where she trudged with babe in arms to the registry office. She named him Ernest Holloway Oldham, probably in honour of her half-brother Alfred Ernest Holloway, who was affectionately known to his friends and family as ‘Ern’.
Carrie had met her husband, Frank Oldham, while they were both teachers. Frank was much younger than his wife, born on 3 June 1867 in Station Road, Hadfield, a small village in Derbyshire’s Peak District that today is perhaps best known as the setting for the fictional town of Royston Vasey in the BBC’s quirky dark comedy The League of Gentlemen. Hadfield formed part of the manor of Glossop, long the possession of the dukes of Norfolk, who spotted an opportunity to capitalise on the growing movement towards mechanised factories in the early 19th century and decided to transform Glossop into an industrial town.
Neighbouring Hadfield was developed along similar lines by the Sidebottom family, who purchased the Waterside and Bridge Mill complex from John Turner and John Thornley in 1820 and spent the remainder of the 19th century developing the site as a large spinning and weaving combine. For example, they funded and built their own branch railway to the mill so that raw materials could be brought in and finished goods transported around the country or to the ports for export. This was a thriving business – in 1880, the mills ran 293,000 spindles at 4,800 looms and Frank’s father had a key position as loom manager, sufficiently well paid to enable him to purchase and convert six stone cottages in Post Street, Padfield, which were rented out, apart from the one that the family lived in. This was a typical story of working-class man turned middle manager, rising through the factory ranks to obtain a better station in life.
However, young Frank decided the world beyond Hadfield and Padfield had other attractions, possibly as a result of an unhappy apprenticeship as a grocer when he was 12, and maybe due to lingering trauma caused by the 1874 death of his only sibling, five-year-old Lowe Oldham, of scarlet fever – a known killer before the discovery of antibiotics which would affect one of Frank’s grandsons many years later in 1933. Frank left home to attend the Westminster Training College on Horseferry Road, London, which specialised in training teachers for Methodist schools. Formal training to qualify as a certified teacher had become more widespread after the 1870 Elementary Education Act, with the provision of education still seen as a vocation akin to that of a missionary ‘bringing enlightenment to the uneducated masses’,3 but it was still quite a journey and even steeper learning curve for a young man with an industrial background from a small village in the Peak District. Frank had to adapt to the discipline of a formal training course in the bustling metropolis that London had become.
After graduation, Frank Oldham returned north to take a position as first assistant master at Wellington Street board school in Oldham between 1889 and 1891. He lodged with the Lee family in Churchill Street, a school placement that was probably secured through connections within the Methodist movement via the training college. In 1892, Frank moved south from Lancashire to Cheshire to become the headmaster at the Tarporley British school. It is said that his hair was completely white by the time he reached the age of 25, so perhaps his employment in Tarporley was not entirely to his liking or the children in his care were somewhat of a more disruptive nature than he had been used to. Either way, he left the same year and headed back to London for a new challenge, securing promotion as assistant master at Croyland Road board school in Edmonton – the equivalent to a deputy headship today.
Carrie’s journey to the north was more challenging. She was born on 27 January 1859, the last of four daughters, to Henry George Holloway senior and Caroline Wood. The couple had met while employed as the school master and mistress of the Minster workhouse on the Isle of Thanet, Kent, and married on 7 July 1851. Shortly after their wedding, the couple became master and matron of the workhouse – a big change in status that was accompanied by a pay rise (£60 per year between them as opposed to £20 each as teachers) and a house of their own within the grounds of the workhouse, complete with the provision of meals, coals and washing facilities.
Tragically, Caroline died of apoplexy on 19 October 1864 when Carrie was only five years old, leaving Henry without a wife, the children without a mother – and the workhouse without a matron. These were expedient times and within a year Henry remarried. His bride, 13 years his junior, was Rosina Wood, who appears to have been Caroline’s half-sister. To avoid a scandal and awkward questions about the legality of the relationship under the terms of the 1835 Lyndhurst Act (
which equated the status of sister-in-law with sister in issues of consanguinity), Henry and Rosina took a train to Margate and married in the Zion Chapel of a rare non-conformist sect, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Confession. They were in the presence of an assistant registrar whose wife, alongside an official from the chapel, acted as the witnesses.
Within a year of her own mother’s death, Carrie had a stepmother to deal with, followed swiftly by five half-siblings. It was not an easy situation for the feisty Carrie and in 1875, aged 16, she quarrelled with her stepmother and ran away from home. She ended up in Higher Booths, Rawtenstall, in Lancashire – a small hamlet whose residents were economically dependent like so many others on the cotton factories for employment.
Following in her parents’ footsteps, Carrie at first found work teaching day-release pupils – children aged 12 who attended half of each school day, as long as they had employment for the rest of the time, and who left school at 13 to take up full-time work. Barely older than the children in her care, Carrie probably started out as a pupil teacher – a system whereby elementary school pupils aged over 13 would act as teachers throughout the day and then themselves receive tuition from the head teacher after school hours. Hers was a paid position, with boys receiving considerably more than girls, and the head teacher securing an emolument for the education of their charges.
Life in the classroom of a northern industrial town was not easy. This was an era when you grew up fast and most of the half-day students resented being treated like children when they were considered adult enough to work for the remainder of the day, often alongside their parents and older siblings. Discipline was a common problem in the village classroom, particularly for a young southern girl who was only a few years older than her charges and – unlike Frank – had not undergone any formal training to become a certified teacher.
In the 1870s, children normally wrote on slates with slate pencils – grey sticks of rock that squeakily left a whitish grey trace on a heavy slice of shale that would be fitted into a wooden frame for ease of handling. Once, a rebellious boy, on being rebuked by Carrie for failing to pay attention to his work, waved his slate at Carrie with the words ‘I’ll buzz t’slate at t’head’.4 Unfazed by this threat, Carrie reached up to the boy’s ear – she was much shorter than most of her pupils, never reaching five feet in height as an adult – and dragged him off to the head teacher’s office to receive corporal punishment, then deemed acceptable to dispense at that time.
When she first started work she lodged with Jane Rushton, a widow who let rooms in her property in Rock Terrace, but by 1891 she was living as a boarder at 3 Mount Terrace, Higher Booths, Rawtenstall, with George Littlewood, the school master and his wife Maud and their son Harry Beau-mont Littlewood who was a 13-year-old pupil teacher in Carrie’s school.
Quite how and when Frank and Carrie met is a matter of conjecture, but they decided to tie the knot and married on the first day of 1894 at Christ Church, Ramsgate. Carrie moved back temporarily into her father’s house in St Lawrence, Thanet, safe in the knowledge that her stepmother Rosina had passed away ten years previously, in 1884. The newlyweds set up home in 6 Sunningdale Cottages, Lower Edmonton, Frank having found work as a teacher in the local elementary school.
Croyland Road board school catered for the educational needs of the local community. It was opened in 1884 with the capacity for 200 boys, 100 girls and 261 infants and it had been necessary to enlarge the school in 1889 and 1891 to cater for the growing population as Edmonton continued its expansion as a commuter suburb. In the Bury Street district alone, the population grew from a shade under 23,500 people in 1891, just prior to Frank’s move into the area, to around 62,000 in 1911. Despite Frank’s position in the school, he was still teaching in the lower echelons of the education hierarchy. Certified teachers – let alone uncertified ones such as Carrie – were still seen as second class, mainly drawn from working-class roots and somewhat unfairly categorised as ‘struggling to move out of their class on the basis of limited academic and social aptitude and training’.5 This was in comparison to secondary school teachers, who tended to find employment in grammar or private schools. They often came from a similar background to their middle or upper-class pupils and usually held a university degree in their chosen subject.
Carrie’s firm hand and strong character were probably essential qualities in the Oldham household. The family expanded over the next six years with the arrival of Marjorie Holloway Oldham on 26 December 1896 and Kathleen Helen Oldham on 22 June 1900. By 1911 the cottage was no longer large enough and they had moved to a new house on the same road, 135 Bury Street, which would remain the family home throughout Ernest’s childhood and indeed for much of his adult life as well. It was a cramped space by modern standards, built out of brick and slate but comfortable for the time. Upstairs were three rooms – Marjorie and Kathleen were forced to share – with two rooms and a scullery downstairs and a further room at the rear. Their small garden backed onto glass houses associated with the long-standing nurseries in the area and a brick works. Beyond that lay a few open fields.
The house was uncluttered by the range of domestic technology that we’d take for granted today – there was no radio or television to provide household entertainment, unlikely to be a telephone given the annual cost of a line and no electrical appliances to help with the daily chores or indeed heat the property – a real concern when trying to look after a new baby, especially during the harsh winter of 1894–95 when temperatures in mid-February never crept above freezing. Hand-powered washing machines had been in use from Victorian times but refrigerators for food storage were not invented until the 1910s and remained unwieldy, unaffordable and often unsafe until the 1920s’ introduction of Freon. This was an early CFC which was far less dangerous to people in terms of domestic leaks but, as we now know, incredibly damaging to the ozone layer.
When the Oldham children were growing up at the start of the 20th century, people used outdoor pantries to keep food chilled but mostly bought daily produce from local shops, farms or dairies. Electric street lighting had started to appear in the area from the early 1900s, although it wasn’t until 1913 that Edmonton fully abandoned gas lamps. The supply of domestic electricity from 1907 brought the enticing prospect of modern conveniences, although on the grounds of cost most appliances would remain a dream for many of the residents of Bury Street. Into the first decades of the 20th century and beyond, women like Carrie would still beat carpets and rugs in the street and scrub their doorsteps while her children played in the car-free roads outside.
Frank embraced his new life in the community. He already had a talent for music and was asked by the vicar of St Michael’s to become the organist for the congregation. His position secured his family their seats in the vicar’s pew at the front of the church for every service and his children a first-hand view of the sermons that were preached. Frank also found time to train local choirs, reputedly to competition-winning standard, and spent the remainder of his spare time involved in study, acquiring a range of certificates and diplomas to prove his academic merit.
Despite never breaking through the class divide to teach at Latymer school, Edmonton’s nearby grammar school, in 1903 he was selected to serve as first assistant master of Houndsfield Road council school before eventually being made headmaster in 1916, a position he retained until his retirement in 1930. The council school was a much larger establishment than its older and more refined neighbour; in contrast with the 24 pupils taught at Latymer’s new buildings which opened in 1910, the staff at Houndsfield had over a thousand students in their care. As such, it is fair to assign to Frank the rather hackneyed but well-merited description of pillar of the community, for which he was formally recognised by the Anglican Consultative Council with the award of the Distinguished Service Medal in 1928. A clasp was granted for it five years later, when he and Carrie made the somewhat sudden and unexpected decision in 1933 to leave their home of 40 years and retire to Shanklin
on the Isle of Wight.
Ernest Oldham, however, attended Tottenham County School, one of the first co-educational secondary schools in the county that had been established by Middlesex County Council in 1901, pre-empting Balfour’s Education Act passed the following year which gave more power to local councils to create state schools. Then, instead of following in his parents’ footsteps and pursuing a career in community-based education – and perhaps reinforcing the aspirational nature of Frank’s rise through the elementary school ranks – a decision was taken to send Ernest to Muncaster House school, often rather confusingly called Muncaster College, a small sixth-form boarding school situated in the small village of Laleham on Ferry Lane by the banks of the River Thames.
This was the sort of school usually reserved for the sons of senior army officers or even the offspring of members of Parliament – by no means an elite public school such as Eton, but nonetheless a step up from Ernest’s social background and a world away from the working-class terraces of Edmonton. Behind the scenes, one detects the influence of Carrie’s family, who were continuing to move up in the world – her brother, Henry George Holloway junior, was building a commercial empire in Thanet whilst performing civic tasks as a registrar and collector of local taxes. Another brother, William, was despatched at the earliest possible opportunity into the Royal Marines where he eventually attained the rank of lieutenant. Meanwhile, Ern Holloway had chosen a career overseas in the Diplomatic Service and rose through the echelons of the postal service in Southern Rhodesia, to the point where he was listed in the Colonial Office lists as a key civil servant in the administration. By coincidence, he returned to England on 6 August 1909, having sailed first-class on the Imanda from Durban and it may well have been his encouragement – and possibly funding as well – that enabled his nephew to attend Muncaster House. This was the sort of schooling that would prepare a young man for a white collar professional career or a commission in the army.