by Nick Barratt
Under the Conservative regime, fears of the communist threat deepened as relations with Germany normalised. The Locarno Treaty was signed at the Foreign Office on 1 December 1925, with Germany admitted to the League of Nations amid real hopes of lasting international peace. This was hailed at the time as a major diplomatic coup and the discussions that took place between 5 and 16 October in Locarno, Switzerland, were important for fixing the borders of to the west of Germany but leaving those to the east open to further interpretation. The Soviet Union was excluded from discussions, exacerbating feeling within the isolated country that it was being undermined from the west and heightening paranoia over German territorial interest.
Oldham was the man in the Foreign Office to whom responsibility was delegated for organising transport to and from Lorcarno. He reserved the requisite number of berths from the Sleeping Car company – a special coach of 16 together – when the British delegation left on 3 October, at the cost of £108.6.7. Only 11 people actually travelled, necessitating a great deal of work for the home messenger service to sort out the logistics. Oldham was forced to dip into his own pocket to the tune of £3.5.11 to cover some of their expenses which he claimed back from the office.135 At least he was not in charge of the refurbishment of the suite of rooms which were especially redecorated for the signing of the treaty in December once the conference had concluded – that was expenditure on an altogether different scale.
Meanwhile, steps against Bolshevism were being taken back home. On 14 and 21 October 1925, MI5 raided the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain, seizing various documents and arresting officials including Albert Inkpin (who had been charged during an earlier raid in 1921), Tom Bell, Ernie Cant, Harry Pollitt, Bill Rust, Arthur MacManus and, once again, J R Campbell. The following year, Soviet intervention was blamed for inflaming tensions between the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the government over the miner’s dispute, which led to the General Strike.
This was a period of general economic hardship, exacerbated by the re-adoption of the gold standard in 1925 and falling wages in many industrial sectors including coal mining. Initially, the government agreed to support the miners by providing a nine-month subsidy of their wages – a decision known as Red Friday, as it seemed to be a victory for the working classes. However, when they subsequently accepted the recommendation of a Royal Commission to introduce widespread change and greater national control, the Miner’s Federation of Great Britain refused to accept them and a lock-out of miners ensued on 1 May 1926. The TUC then called a general strike from 3 May onwards in support of the miners and targeted transport workers, dockers, foundry workers and printers to cause maximum disruption. The Tory press saw industrial action as tantamount to revolution, but the Daily Mail was unable to produce an editorial to that effect as their printing staff would not print it. Incidentally, King George V refused to condemn the strikers as ‘revolutionaries’ with the comment, ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them.’136
The strike lasted until 12 May and affected all government departments including the Foreign Office. With transport largely paralysed, alternative arrangements were made to ensure key staff could get into work.
On the Monday evening before the strike, a skeleton staff of men and women went home for their clothes after office hours and returned, some with great difficulty, prepared to sleep on the floor in the office for as long as they were required to do so. Fortunately, owing to offers of hospitality, all the women were, by the end of the week, sleeping out in various houses, but the men slept at the office during the whole period.
Arrangements were made to fetch as many as possible of the rest of the staff by cars, but a large proportion were left to find their own way to the office. Except in one or two cases where there was literally no means of transit whatever to bring them the 30 miles or so to London, the whole staff made every effort to attend regularly, some walking distances of eight or nine miles each way – five miles being quite a common occurrence, both for men and women.137
Those with cars were expected to provide transport for their colleagues – and it is with some surprise that we find Oldham listed amongst those who were giving lifts in an early form of car pool. He had been assigned the Enfield, Barnet and Finchley region where his parents lived and provided transport to shorthand typists Miss Grace Madeline Painter and Miss Florence Dorothy Good, along with Miss Hilda Emily Holdway and Mr Rance from the Chief Clerk’s Office (though he was only able to provide the service one way after 10 May).
More specifically, Oldham was involved in ensuring that the King’s Messenger service continued to function so that diplomatic bags containing correspondence and suchlike could be safely transferred to the relevant ports before they were taken to embassy and consular staff overseas. On 10 May, he drew up a report showing how certain of the bag services have been maintained by the use of cars supplied and driven by volunteer friends of members of the Communications Department.138 This was a clear reference to the trust mentioned by Antrobus – not just within the department, but extended to friends and acquaintances. Given the ongoing security risk, plus potential unrest at the ports:
It was considered desirable that the drivers should be accompanied by guards, who would also help as porters etc, and in the case of each messenger on the Bucharest and Constantinople journeys it has been necessary to send two cars.139
By this method, services were maintained for Newhaven to Paris, Dover to Bucharest and Constantinople, Harwich to Brussels and trips to Southampton for services to Washington and South America, for example. Various members of the Communications Department, such as Thomas Kemp, were involved as well. All volunteers received a letter of thanks on behalf of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austin Chamberlain, signed by Hubert Montgomery. However, some staff found themselves out of pocket and wanted to claim back their expenses, including Ernest Oldham. His request, received on 29 June, was rather unusual:
Encloses a statement of expenses incurred during the strike and enquiries how much is due in respect of his car. Explains that he was working late on several nights and had to have dinner, which cost about 5/- a night at his club. Enquiries whether he can claim any allowance for that.140
There are several points of interest here. Leaving aside the question about how a permanent clerk on £150 a year could afford a car which would have cost his annual salary or more, it is clear that Oldham had designs on stepping up in the world. He was perhaps mindful still of his humble background compared to some of his colleagues – possibly the factor that had tipped the balance against him when applying for the Diplomatic Service. One way to gain standing was to become a member of a London club, a reliable badge of honour among those who had gone to university or worked in the City. St James and Pall Mall in particular were at the heart of club-land, where over 200 establishments vied to attract members. At the very top, leading establishments where ministers would talk politics, such as the Carlton Club, would have prohibitively long waiting lists and recommendation rules for potential applicants, so many junior or specialist clubs were formed at more affordable prices.
For a man such as Oldham, still living in his parents’ terraced house in north London, the appeal of membership at a club to enhance his career prospects would have been compelling. It seems as though he was a member of the Junior Carlton Club, associated most strongly with the Tory party. The club had impressive premises at 30 Pall Mall, complete with dining and coffee rooms, a lounge for ‘strangers’, a smoking room and library. Many of Oldham’s associates were members of clubs, allowing him to mix in a different social circle – exactly the sort of environment where an up and coming Foreign Office hopeful could entertain diplomatic guests, for example.
It is strongly suspected that Oldham’s maternal uncle, Henry George Holloway junior, first introduced him to the club scene. Holloway was a member of several clubs in his own right and was an intriguing character, who, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, had a range of occupations and tu
rned a profit from most of them. By the 1920s, cinema had outstripped music hall and theatres as the entertainment of choice for a younger audience and Holloway had taken a financial interest in several cinemas. With the glamour of the silver screen came the taste for a luxurious lifestyle – for example, in 1936 he splashed out for a state room on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. Holloway cut an impressive figure and took the young Oldham under his wing as he made his way in the world.
Yet whilst Oldham enjoyed his time in London society and left his cares behind, security within Whitehall remained an issue and members of staff were expected to be ever-vigilant. An example of lax office-keeping was brought to Montgomery’s attention on 29 November 1926:
One evening recently the safe containing the confidential keys in Room 18 was found open at about 7.45 pm. This is believed to have been due to the inadvertence of a member of the office and it is therefore considered desirable to remind those who are responsible for taking out or returning keys that the greatest care must be exercised in ascertaining that the safe has been properly closed.141
Those fuelling the growing paranoia about Whitehall security were correct to be worried, as disturbing evidence emerged in 1927 about the level of Soviet infiltration within British society. On 12 May the headquarters of the All Russian Cooperative Society (ARCOS) at 49 Moorgate Street were raided by police following a surveillance operation by MI5 and SIS agents. It was the culmination of several years’ work by agents such as Jasper Harker, Her-bert ‘Con’ Boddington and John Ottaway. Since 1924 they had intercepted communications between William Norman Ewer, foreign editor of the Daily Herald and former police officer Walter Dale, who was tailed to both ARCOS and the offices of the Federated Press. Phones were tapped and it became apparent that seemingly legitimate organisations were a front for subversive Soviet activity. When it emerged in March 1927 that a classified signals training manual from the Aldershot military base had been copied within the ARCOS office, a decision was taken to raid the premises.
It was not an overwhelming success – apart from finding startled ARCOS employees frantically shredding documents, there was no smoking gun evidence of espionage. However the consequences were monumental. The Soviets were alerted to the fact that their surveillance operation in Britain had been compromised and changed their system of codes. This seriously hampered future British intelligence gathering operations, with the result that security services failed to spot other infiltrators. Two Special Branch officers, Sergeant Charles Jane and Inspector Hubert van Ginhoven, had already been recruited by Ewer and were also passing information to the Soviets from the inside.
The political fallout from the ARCOS raid was equally far reaching. Fuelled by scare-mongering newspaper reports, a furious British government severed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union on 24 May 1927, with Stalin commenting that peaceful co-existence with ‘the capitalist countries is receding into the past’.142 The Soviet Union, still outside the League of Nations, had officially supplanted Germany as the main threat to global peace and once again the world seemed a much more dangerous place. However, by this date Oldham’s own world had already been turned upside down by a very different event, in a very different way.
Chapter seven
LUCY (1927–1928)
Since our discussion yesterday morning, I have been puzzling about… how in the first instance EO came to meet my mother. I think he may have been introduced by her friend, a Lieutenant Commander Billy Everett, sometime in the early 1920s. Everett, impecunious and I fear a sponger, claimed to be a King’s Messenger.
THOMAS WELLSTED, 27 NOVEMBER 1974
On 9 July 1927, as the furore around the ARCOS raid and the cessation of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations started to abate, a wedding ceremony took place at Kensington Parish Church. This was the second marriage for the bride, who had been widowed in 1919. Her name was Lucy Wellsted, allegedly 40 years old with a deceased father named Frederick King. A married couple, Octave Count de la Chapelle and his wife Rachel, were the witnesses to the happy event. The groom, a 37-year-old civil servant who recorded his residence as the Foreign Office, Whitehall, claimed to be the son of a gentleman. His name was Ernest Holloway Oldham and this was about the only completely true statement recorded on the entire marriage certificate.
The wedding of Lucy Wellsted to Ernest Oldham represents a pivotal moment in his life. Of course, marriage is usually life-changing but in this case it was more than just leaving bachelorhood behind – it was a complete change in his social status. To understand why there were so many ‘inaccuracies’ on the certificate, we need to travel back in time several decades and across various continents to trace the story of his new wife, since she played a key role in the direction Oldham’s life would take over the next few years. Indeed, the friends and acquaintances that brought them together give us an insight into the circles that Oldham was now moving in, far beyond his humble origins. US presidents, international lawyers and high finance would become part of his world as he mixed with an altogether more flamboyant group then his colleagues in the Foreign Office. The change in Oldham’s circumstances is vitally important in understanding what happened thereafter.
Lucy Eliza’s birth surname was Kayser rather than King – it is possible that she decided to anglicise her father’s name when she remarried as a result of anti-German feeling caused by the war. Even nine years after the end of the fighting, suspicion still remained – a legacy of internment, as well as the sporadic violence and vandalism towards long-standing German communities that had taken place in the years following 1914.
Furthermore, Lucy Wellsted had not been not born in 1887 as she claimed, but five years earlier on 24 November 1882 in Waratah, Tasmania – making her 45 when she married Oldham, 12 years older than her new husband; no wonder he gallantly added a few years to his own age to help narrow the gap. For Lucy, it had been quite a journey from the place of her birth, a small Australian community almost entirely dependent on tin mining for survival, which, in turn, was almost entirely dependent upon her father, Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Kayser. We may now consider America to epitomise the 19th century land of opportunity, but ‘Ferd’, as he was known to friends and family, showed that it was possible to prosper ‘down under’ as well. He had been born at Clausthal, Hanover, in 1833 – the son of a mining engineer – before leaving Saxony to find his fortune in Australia. He landed in Adelaide in 1853 but moved to Melbourne the following year to try his luck in the emerging goldfields – wild, frontier territory where men could make their fortune or end up dead. Kayser found the former; by 1863 he had become a mining manager at Bendigo, one of the emerging new towns that acted as a magnet for other speculators and workers.
However, Kayser did not stay with gold but turned his attention to tin mining, moving to Tasmania in 1875 to manage the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Company at Waratah. It had only started operating two years before. If Bendigo was a growing frontier town in the 1860s, then Waratah was little more than a track leading to the mine – plus a post office, a few modest houses, a hotel and a road leading to Burnie, the nearest proper settlement perched on Tasmania’s northern coast. Yet Waratah became home to Kayser. The following year he married Mary Elizabeth Druce on 4 March in Melbourne and together they raised seven daughters and a son. During his time as manager, Kayser transformed the mine, the town and his own fortune – by 1898, when he retired, he had been responsible for the construction of proper homes, not just houses, to encourage families to settle, a hospital to provide healthcare, an iron tramway to Burnie and the Falls Creek dam to provide hydro-electric power which was used to light the town and mine. The power came years before the growing north London suburb of Edmonton would receive street lighting, it should be noted. True to his Baptist roots, there was a temperance hotel and a church.
No wonder people called him the Chief – he held the positions of magistrate, coroner, registrar of births, marriages and deaths and owner of the North-Western Advocate and effectively h
ad the power of life, death and opinion over the inhabitants of the town. He was a ‘humane despot’ in the words of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography – or a tyrant, according to disgruntled employees who resented the way he dictated the way they could live and even think. Beyond dispute, however, was the fact that his methods were successful; he claimed that by 1892 the mine had extracted 37,000 tons of ore, generated over £1 million in dividends for its shareholders and was the driving force of the Tasmanian economy.
We can catch glimpses of Lucy’s childhood growing up in Launceston where the family had their main house on York Street. She appeared at the Fancy Juvenile ball on 3 September 1897, for example, disguised in costume to represent ‘modern art’, alongside her sisters Cissie in the robes of a Bohemian dancing girl, Edie dressed as La République française and Bertha pretending to be Lady Teazle from Sheridan’s The School For Scandal. The following year, her eldest sister Agnes married politician George Crosby Gilmore on 26 April at St John’s Church, Launceston, which was ‘tastefully and lavishly decorated by the girlfriends of the bride’ according to the local paper. The reporter then provided an exceedingly detailed and lengthy account of the bride’s dress, and pretty much everyone else’s:
…the misses Bertha, Lucy and Edith Kayser, sisters of the bride, were bridesmaids and wore white silk dresses, the skirts edged with two narrow frills and the bodices trimmed with violet silk and white chiffon; violet silk girdles finished the waists and were knotted at the left side, the ends being edged with pearl fringe; their hats were of white felt, with a cluster of white ostrich tips and loops of violet velvet at the side, the brims having a pleating of mousseline de sole laid upon them; shower bouquets of violets, tied with white satin ribbon, were carried and gold dagger broaches [sic] set with pearls, the gift of the bridegroom, were worn.143