by Nick Barratt
When pressed for more detail about Joe Perelly, Kemp’s ‘encyclopaedic’ memory grew somewhat hazy.
Kemp of course remembered the Oldhams very well but he did not at first recall anything about Joe Pirelli [sic]. However, he later said that he did remember such a man having been mentioned by Oldham and Mrs Oldham, but was not sure whether he himself had met him. In view of this he was not, of course, able to give me a description of Pirelli [sic].391
I showed Mr Kemp the drawing made by Pieck of HANS and he looked at it for some time, saying that the face did seem familiar to him.392
Kemp was hiding behind the fact that 17 years had elapsed since the Oldham suicide had been covered up and probably did not want his role in proceedings dragged up again in case they damaged his new seniority. Indeed, given his role in tracking Joe, it was stretching credulity to breaking point to suggest that he was not sure whether he had met him – something picked up by Glass later in her report. It may simply have been embarrassment, to be confronted with the image of a man who had made him look foolish and almost brought his career to an abrupt halt.
It will be seen from 21a of Oldham’s file, extract at lv of Pirelli’s file, that Mr Kemp did in fact meet Joe Pirelli in 1933, but since he does not remember him the only hope of discovering whether he may be identical with Pieck’s HANS is to try and find Mrs Oldham through her sons, the Wellsteds.
While gossiping about Oldham, Mr Kemp said that Mrs Oldham would certainly remember Pirelli and suggested that we should be able to find her through her sons by her first marriage, Thomas and Raymond Wellsted. Mr Kemp has not heard of her since the beginning of the war, when she went to join her son Raymond who was in the army and stationed in Belfast.393
This line of investigation would instigate the final tragic act in the Oldham saga as attention turned to the whereabouts of his widow in the hope that she might be able to reveal more information about Pirelli/Hans. Records show that Lucy had taken a series of furnished lodgings in west London with her son, James Raymond Wellsted, in the 1930s before indeed joining him in Belfast during the war. They reappeared in Hammersmith in 1945 and 1946 before dropping out of official records. However, within a month of Ann Glass’s note, Lucy had been found – floating in the Thames, her body dragged out of the water at Richmond Pier at 5.55 am on 27 June 1950.
An MI5 agent, WJ Skardon, was hastily despatched to find out more from the coroner’s officer for Richmond, PC William Bridges, who was attached to the nearby Kingston police station. Skardon filed a report on 4 July based on his discussion, which raised almost as many questions as it answered:
Certain difficulties have arisen in this case since the only person who could identify the body, Bohdan Tymieniecki, a Pole and the landlord at 24 Drayton Street [Ealing, where Lucy had been living in furnished apartments] was able to do so only to a limited extent. He said that the clothing was the clothing of Mrs Oldham and the earrings on the body were hers, but he thought that the face was fuller than that of his lodger. The autopsy shows that the body was in the water for about half an hour and there would be no change in such a short time, although it is agreed that the effect of refrigeration does have the effect of producing a somewhat bloated condition.394
At the time of her death, Lucy had been living with James Wellsted, but according to the report he
…vanished from the same address at the same time, or within a few minutes, of his mother on the morning of 26 June.395
James was eventually apprehended and charged on 10 July with obtaining £3 by fraud, while various other creditors came forward demanding money. He was put on probation for two years, with the chairman of the magistrates stating that his was a ‘tragic case’. At the coroner’s inquest into Lucy’s death, a verdict of suicide was returned with worries about her financial situation given as the main reason for drowning herself in the Thames.
There seems to be a sufficient reason for mental depression in the case of Mrs Oldham, due to the fact that her banking account with the Westminster Bank, Ealing branch, is overdrawn. Correspondence found at her lodgings by the coroner’s officer also shows that Coutts’ Bank, Park Lane branch, have closed Wellsted’s account and asked him to return unused cheques. Further letters indicate that Wellsted is in debt and has uttered a number of worthless cheques locally during recent months.396
Yet there are inconsistencies that do not quite add up. Both mother and son were unaccounted for during a period up to 24 hours and at least from 2.30 pm the previous afternoon (witness statements disagree on the exact time of their last sighting) before Lucy’s body was recovered from the river the following morning. Where were they during this time? Why had Lucy ended up in Rich-mond and decided to end her life by drowning at 5.30 am? It is unlikely that we will ever know the answer. It is tempting to speculate that she was alerted about the reopening of the investigation into her husband’s activities, and that it was primarily focused on her. Given Kemp’s former connection with the Oldham family it is not unreasonable to assume that he let her know what was happening. It may have been this knowledge that drove her to suicide.
With Lucy dead, there seemed little point in pursuing the inquiry further. In any case, far more damaging revelations were to follow with the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow in 1951, holding a press conference on 11 February to announce their defection to the USSR. Five years later, the King affair became public knowledge when Levine published a book about the case in America. The Foreign Office at first denied the story and then, embarrassingly, was forced to admit the leaks once they realised a Member of Parliament was planning to raise a question in the House of Commons. Intriguingly, Thomas Kemp chose this year to retire from the Foreign Office, enjoying a full pension until his death in Sussex in 1978.
One last effort was made to contact Lucy’s older son, Thomas Wellsted, at the height of the Cold War in 1974, part of the Fluency Committee’s attempt to flush out any further Soviet operatives within government after the defection of Philby in 1963. However, Wellsted could provide no further information about Oldham or Perelly, other than a photograph taken in the garden of the Bell Inn at Hurley around 1926. Thereafter, Oldham’s file was left to gather dust.
What the British forces did not know was that the hunt for Bystrolyotov had been in vain. Oldham’s handler had also been caught up in Stalin’s purge and, following his return to Moscow in 1935, witnessed at first-hand the end of the Great Illegals and the dismemberment of the entire espionage machinery. Abram Slutsky died in mysterious circumstances on 17 February 1938; Mally was imprisoned on 7 March 1938 and executed six months later; Bazarov was arrested on 3 July 1938 and Bystrolyotov was rounded up on 18 September. He was sent to the prison camps, and was not released until 1954. Bystrolyotov died in 1975, but not before revealing some of the secrets of his work as a Soviet agent to Emil Draitser in an interview in 1973, just before the final entries were made on Oldham’s file. Bystrolyotov had outwitted the British to the last.
*****
When writing about shadowy figures such as Ernest Holloway Oldham, it is tempting to claim a retrospective significance when the contemporary reality was something different. This is usually a result of the historian’s curse of hindsight, when mistakes can be spotted and consequences more easily discerned over a longer period of time. The men and women of the Foreign Office, MI5, SIS and Special Branch were not afforded such perspective, nor did they have anything like the surveillance technology of today. Card indexes, phone taps and a network of contacts were their tools, so success depended primarily on their wits, instinct and hard work.
Nevertheless, the case of Oldham and the ‘cipher boys’ should rightly rank alongside the Cambridge spy ring as one of the greatest breaches of British security in history. The decision to hold an internal investigation within the Foreign Office conducted by amateurs such as Kemp, rather than hand the entire matter over to the professionals, meant that the full extent of Oldham’s activities were left undetected for a decade. It was p
referable to cover up the entire episode and protect the reputation of senior civil servants rather than pursue the unpalatable concept that highly confidential material had been sold to overseas agencies. However, other parties were equally culpable.
The operation from 14 July onwards was compromised by mistakes – in particular the decision not to intercept phone calls from the continent when Oldham was holed up in the Jules Hotel which might have led SIS to Bystrolyotov, or indeed the hesitancy to bring Oldham in for questioning for fear of the revelations that might ensue. Perhaps most damaging of all, no investigation was ever conducted into his travels abroad either before or after his dismissal from the Foreign Office, especially given his position at the League of Nations or pivotal role at the heart of Room 22. Indeed, the reluctance to believe a trusted official within the Foreign Office had betrayed state secrets can be traced all the way back to 1929 when Bessedovsky jumped over the wall of the Soviet embassy in Paris talking about ‘Mr Scott’; the wrong man was under suspicion until 1947. Even after Oldham’s death, MI5 and SIS had the name Perelly with which to work but failed to pursue this line of inquiry and it seems that no attempt was made by Vivian or his associates to link the King inquiry to that of Oldham until 1950.
It is this catalogue of cumulative failure that allowed Oldham to become the forgotten spy, a legendary figure and a cautionary tale within the Foreign Office amongst junior staff. Yet no widespread changes were made within Whitehall until after the King case, when Oake and Quarry were dismissed and the entire Communications Department staff were replaced with the exception of Kemp, who not only kept his job but also earned advancement, perhaps on the tacit understanding that he would maintain his silence over the events of 1933. Even then, the entire affair was deliberately covered up until 1951. In contrast, when the Soviet sources are examined, it is clear that great importance was placed on Oldham’s activities, and he was seen as a key informant during a difficult period for Soviet intelligence. He was the man who had given access to the heart of the British diplomatic machinery.
The flow of information, patchy at first but invaluable during the pivotal Lausanne Conference, demonstrated to the Soviets the necessity of having men on the inside. Thus Oldham became the first in a line of moles within the Foreign Office who provided sensitive intelligence, while the parallel policy of cultivating ideological recruits from universities, who would take up prominent positions within the establishment, was launched in the wake of Oldham’s death. It is no coincidence that OGPU mourned the loss of one of their key assets. It is only the British who have not accepted Oldham’s status as the progenitor spy who, if not the man who started Cold War espionage, certainly helped shape its terms of reference.
Yet it is easy to overlook the person amidst the hyperbole. One of the reasons that this book concentrates on Oldham’s entire career, rather than just events after 1929, is that it hopefully gives greater perspective to the forces that shaped his life. In many ways, he is a tragic and complex figure, a product of his time as the world struggled to come to terms with cataclysmic events and Britain moved from the Victorian era to a new, fast-paced age of technology and rapid change. On one hand he was a war hero, fighting for King and country only to return home a changed and damaged man, stepping back into civilian life in a government department that had failed to stop the carnage in the first place and then asked to help shape the peace that defined the world in which he lived. On the other hand, he was weak and greedy, prepared to betray the same King and country for financial gain to support the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed and literally addicted.
It is easy to write Oldham off as another hopeless alcoholic, but clearly he was an intelligent and skillful man who had transcended his station in life – the ability to hold OGPU at bay after first contact for nearly two years, followed by the equal ability to give British intelligence the slip for a month at the end of his life, shows that he could have been a formidable asset to British intelligence had he been given the chance in 1918. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that, had he been brought in for questioning by MI5 and SIS in the summer of 1933, Oldham would have been devastatingly useful as a double agent. The role of Lucy is equally hard to fathom – was she a fully complicit Lady Macbeth figure who suggested that Oldham should sell secrets to foreign powers to prop up her lavish lifestyle, or yet another victim of events as her life spiralled increasingly out of control? In the murky world of espionage, nothing is clear-cut and there are no definite answers.
It should be no surprise to learn that one person at least had a strong view on the matter and it seems fitting that the last word should go to one of Oldham’s contemporaries and our companion throughout, the proud King’s Messenger George Antrobus. His feelings of hurt and bitterness and his sense of betrayal are contained in a passage that he wrote in 1940 with Oldham clearly in mind. It still has the power to sting today. Initially, Antrobus’s polemic was sparked by indignation towards people who brought the name of the messengers into disrepute, but it soon became far more specific:
King’s Messengers suffer more severely from pretenders to their own title. It is bad enough to find that some bumptious, overbearing, Englishman-abroad, whipper-snapper with a temporary red passport has been calling himself a King’s Messenger and making the name stink in the nostrils of porters, ticket collectors, and customs officers – all of whom are the Greyhound’s [King’s Messenger’s] best friends and with whom he takes great pains to keep on the friendliest of footings. It is far worse when a downright knave takes his name in vain.
This has happened more than once, but the most serious and embarrassing instance of it concerned a man – I can hardly call him a gentleman – who was himself a Foreign Office official. He was a clever little upstart, a permanent civil servant, with a face like a rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples. He took advantage of his position to make himself an agent for smuggling articles of value in the bags and when a consignment of particular importance turned up he provided himself with a red passport and took the bag in person. He had of course a confederate in the embassy at a big European capital and his delinquencies were not discovered until after his death.
It turned out that he had married a wealthy woman whose assets he had succeeded in transferring to himself. He lived in impressive style, with a fine house in London; a big car, and a smart chauffeur; he arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen and fared sumptuously. So sumptuously indeed did he fare that he contracted delirium tremens, absented himself from office and rounded off an interesting career by committing suicide. I am afraid, with all our humanity, we never succeeded in producing anything in the least like this permanent civil servant; I comfort myself with the thought that he was not typical of his order.397
Given the way that the King affair was covered up, it is astonishing that Antrobus was permitted to publish this passage – another sign of lax Foreign Office security, perhaps? However, it is interesting that Oldham attracted An-trobus’s withering and vitriolic verdict rather than King. Given some of the earlier passages in Antrobus’s book about the plight of the temporary clerks, he perhaps had sympathy for the actions of the cipher boys, given his own future without the financial security of a pension.
Maybe Oldham deserved Antrobus’s epitaph, but then people can be weak or greedy, make terrible mistakes for which there seems no chance of retribution and pay the ultimate penalty; the repercussions of their actions often resonate many years down the line in the most unexpected ways. However, consider the words of one of Ernest’s nephews, Anthony Stanforth, who has been instrumental in piecing together many of the family connections described above:
We wonder how much Ernest’s parents knew, and whether they protected Michael and my mother from the details. My mother only ever spoke well of her brother. She clearly idolised him, and said his death was from ‘never having properly recovered from being blown up in the Great War.’ No mention of marriage, suicide, or worse. But that was anothe
r age, when shameful secrets were kept hidden, even within the family.398
For better or for worse, Ernest’s tale is now told in full. This book is partly written for those who have been unwittingly affected by events outside their control. It is a lesson that history is woven from many different perspectives with unforeseen repercussions, not just for the principal players, but for the families that often stand in the shadows and suffer equal or greater collateral damage and loss.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
There are several key publications that lie behind this one. The first is Emil Draitser’s account of Oldham’s handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov, based on an interview that took place in 1973 just before the Soviet agent’s death. This is supported by Nigel West and Olgev Tsarev’s account of Oldham’s activities during this period. Both works draw heavily on Bystrolyotov’s files in the KGB archives, from which many quotes are taken.
Equally, the accounts of life in the Foreign Office by Tilley and Gaselee, and Wheeler-Holohan are important; but the marvellously irreverent and idiosyncratic memoirs of George Antrobus help to paint a vivid picture of Oldham’s working environment during the period covered. Tragically, Antro-bus was killed in World War II when his home suffered a direct hit during a German bombing raid; he never saw his work in print.
Most of the key works are listed in the endnotes, including articles and books used for short quotes. The following is a core expanded reading list that has been used to research Oldham’s life and times.