The Communications Department
Reader Bullard reflected while Consul General in Leningrad in 1934: ‘Schools are not meant to give boys a good time, but to teach them to be happy together even when they are not having a good time.’ The office culture of the Communications Department was an extension of school: the staff there tried to be cheery in a hard place, valued camaraderie and professed individual self-respect as their creed; its vulnerabilities were easy for Oldham and King to exploit. Their male colleagues swapped banter and chaff, forgave and covered each other’s mistakes. They aspired to be tolerant, unflappable and conscientious. The departmental spirit precluded grudges and doubts among colleagues. They were not social equals, but they found their common ground as men. As a nationality, the English had too high and yet too juvenile a reckoning of themselves. ‘The strength of the British lies in never quite growing up,’ Vansittart, PUS of the Foreign Office, said with satisfaction: ‘the cause of our mercifully arrested development is that we have not been liable to introspection.’1
Boyish ideas about good sports were ubiquitous. The deputy governor of Parkhurst prison during the detention there of the spy Wilfred Macartney was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ and was popular with most inmates. In 1930, on Jumbo’s last Sunday at Parkhurst, after his promotion to be governor elsewhere, the prisoners held a farewell concert to honour him. ‘I’ve found you fellows a jolly fine set of sports in playing the game,’ he told them after the concert in his pronounced Oxford accent. ‘Cheer up, and don’t forget that the game is not over till the stumps are drawn or the final whistle blown.’ Although these virile sentiments may seem laughable in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s they meant the world for many men: Jumbo was cheered for a full five minutes by the Parkhurst prisoners.2
The office culture of the Communications Department is richly evoked in the memoirs of George Antrobus. ‘Bozo’ Antrobus was born in 1892, the only child of an official in the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He was educated at Westminster School before reading history at Oxford. He lived as a bachelor with his parents a short walk from Leamington Spa station, and commuted daily by train. He appeared punctually at the Foreign Office in suits shiny with age, with a tattered umbrella and greasy bowler hat. He liked musty smells: wet straw, tar, coal-dust, oil, dead rats, fried fish, sweat and spilt beer are all praised in his memoirs. He was an obsessive compiler of railway statistics whose tabular reports on the punctuality of trains are still used by train-spotters today.
Antrobus joined the Foreign Office in 1915 as a temporary clerk in the Parliamentary Department. This designation was a classic of misdirection, because the department had sole charge of the urgent, heavy wartime traffic in ciphered messages. He soon learnt the skills necessary for decoding or encrypting messages at top speed. By 1917 he had some forty temporary wartime colleagues, including ‘gentlemen of leisure’, the filmstar Athole Stewart and the portrait-painter John Collier. Antrobus was one of the minority who stayed in government service when, in 1919, a new Communications Department to handle coded messages was organized. He was at the same time appointed a King’s Messenger.
King’s Messengers were the men – often ex-officers – who carried confidential material to and fro between the Foreign Office and its embassies and legations in Europe. They travelled by train and steamer, bearing a red passport marked courier du Roi, transporting versions of Post Office bags, which were known as ‘crossed bags’ because their labels bore a conspicuous black cross. Under the 1919 arrangement of the Communications Department, these couriers spent the intervals between their European journeys working on encoding and deciphering in the Office. This was craft work, for which they were adequately but not lavishly paid. Members of the department were ranked with diplomatic staff, but unlike other officials they were not pensionable, and received on retirement lump sums computed on the length of their service. Their status in the building was ambiguous, their financial position felt precarious and these anomalies intensified their esprit de corps.
Outgoing Office telegrams were enciphered and incoming messages were deciphered in Room 22. It was a gaunt and lofty space lit by two vast, rattling windows looking northwards. The furniture was hard and plain: half a dozen tables, a dozen chairs, two ranges of cupboards 9 feet high. All was fuggy and frenetic. The clerks were ‘a hard-bitten lot’, recalled Patrick Reilly. They chain-smoked pipes and cigarettes, working in pairs, one calling aloud from the codebook and the other transcribing the message, at a speed of thirty codewords per minute when encoding and fifty words per minute when decoding – all this hour after hour. The pressure left them, said Antrobus, ‘sweating like pigs, with hair awry and shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks aflame and collars pulp’. Their finished work was taken to a cacophonous adjoining room, where it was typed on noisy machines using wax stencils rather than paper to enable mass duplication. A careworn official checked every document for its sense: ‘Take this back to Room 22, and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe,’ he would shout when he found errors, shouting because behind him dispatch boxes were being slammed shut, before being taken by special messenger to the King, to every Cabinet minister, to departmental heads.3
Because of the incoming and outgoing coded messages, Room 22 had as clear a sense of international events as any other section in the Foreign Office. The latest news of treaty negotiations, conference adjournments, troop movements, armaments contracts, political chicanery, financial hanky-panky, sudden deaths, reprisal raids, incendiary speeches and ultimatums were decoded in that austere, noisy department.
Before the European war the Office had resembled ‘a small family party’, recalled Don Gregory, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1902 and resigned in 1928. But the European war and subsequent worldwide dislocation required huge expansion of Office responsibilities, activities and personnel. ‘Nowadays,’ Gregory lamented in 1929, ‘with its multifarious new activities, its ramifications, divisions and sub-divisions, its clerks and short-hand typists running here, there and everywhere, its constant meetings and interdepartmental conferences, its innumerable visitors, it is tending to resemble a large insurance office or, in times of stress, a central railway station on a bank holiday.’ With the exception of Lord Curzon, foreign secretaries and junior ministers in the Office were notably honeyed in their dealings with officials before 1929. Increasingly thereafter, complained Vansittart, diplomats encountered political chiefs ‘seemingly fresh from elevenses of vinegar’.4
In reaction to this hectic and unmanageable environment, some officials tried to rehabilitate the pace and temper of Edwardian England in the Office. ‘Its keynote was Harmony rather than Hustle,’ said Antrobus. Efforts to revive pre-war poise were personified by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, whom Lord Crawford described in 1927 as ‘urbane, a little more mysterious and stand-offish than most Foreign Secretaries, and moreover getting into the bad habit of making French gestures with very English-shaped hands’. George Slocombe, who met Chamberlain in Geneva and Locarno, likened him to Talleyrand striving to restore ‘the old douceur de vivre’ to a continent rent by war and revolution: ‘from his early readings in European history, Austen Chamberlain had formed, entirely in the tradition of Talleyrand, his own highly personal conception of diplomacy as the guardian of the necessary amenities of life, the custodian of the gracious conventions, the urbanities’.5
The chief of the Communications Department from 1925 until 1940 was Harold Eastwood, a product of Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, and brother of a Conservative MP. Eastwood believed that his staff would work best if he trusted them to do their jobs without his fretful interference: ‘Everyone was treated as a man of honour; he had his work to do, and if he did it well and quickly, it mattered not the least how he did it or, within limits, when he did it.’ There was less change of staff in Communications than in any other Foreign Office department: they knew every speck of one another’s capacity and temperament.6
Eastwood’s deputy Ralph Cotesworth
was the son of an Anglican chaplain in Switzerland. His health had collapsed in 1915 while he was a commander in the Royal Navy, and when, after twenty years of encroaching illness, he died in 1937 aged forty-nine, his lungs were found to be rotted away. Cotesworth became a King’s Messenger in 1920, grew expert in the use of ciphers, and was in 1925 chosen as Eastwood’s deputy. Antrobus noted his ‘naval ideas of discipline and duty, large heart and quick sympathy’. Another colleague said with an affectionate tease that Cotesworth’s conscientiousness was ‘appalling’: ‘his quasi-boyish gaiety and his shrewdly humorous outlook’ contributed to the mood of Room 22.7
Algernon Hay, head of the cipher-room from 1919 until 1934, believed in ‘the tonic effect of crusted jokes’. He tried to unify his socially variegated staff by managing them in a ‘gentlemanly’ way. His successor as cipher-room chief was Antrobus, who averred: ‘Clever men, strong men, brave men, even good men, are all more readily come by than your man of the world with a conscience.’ This was all of a piece with a phrase of T. E. Lawrence’s to describe the British Empire: ‘the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing around the world’.8
Men found different ways to slacken the tension of a strenuous day in the Office. Curzon, as Foreign Secretary, prepared for his working day by going to Christie’s auction house and appraising the exhibited artworks that were going under the hammer. Vansittart spent the hour after work every evening playing fierce bridge at the St James’s Club. In the Underground railway carriage taking him home, Sir Owen O’Malley sat knitting woollen socks with purled ribs and basket-stitched heels. Sir Archie Clark Kerr liked talking and thinking about sex. Sir Maurice Peterson never stopped puffing his pipe, and enjoyed living in a converted pub in Belgravia called the Triumphal Chariot. (Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941–5, liked to start his long days with an action-packed Daily Mirror strip cartoon about a private investigator, Buck Ryan.) The encryption and decryption clerks, who worked long hours without break, unwound by chain-smoking and hard drinking. They resorted to the Mine, a drinking-hole in the basement of the Foreign Office run by the head office-keeper and his wife. The bar resembled a shabby French estaminet with just a pair of broad planks resting on upturned barrels. The tolerance of alcoholism in the Office went to the top: it was said in 1929 that Tyrrell, recently retired as PUS, ‘has not done a stroke of work for years, and has sometimes been so drunk that J. D. Gregory had to smuggle him out of the office’.9
Ernest Oldham
One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.
In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.
Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying and selling foreign currencies at good rates. The offices of every embassy or legation in a foreign capital were alike, with similar stationery, filing cabinets, pencils, punches and calendars and the same red copies of the Foreign Office List and Who’s Who, as Owen O’Malley recounted. ‘In the residential part of the house too, though the servants may be white or black or yellow, there will be the same kindly discipline, the same Lux [soap], Ronuk [floor-polish], chintz, pot-plants, water-colours, large bath towels and Bromo [a patent cure for hangovers and upset stomachs], which the Englishman carries round the world like a snail its shell: which form indeed the temple and fortress of his soul.’ To these familiar surroundings King’s Messengers brought office talk from Whitehall and from other European capitals, and exchanged it for local gossip. All the staff, from the Ambassador downwards, pumped Oldham about diplomatic trends, promotions, political currents and whatever was afoot in London.10
Oldham was given charge of managing the routes for King’s Messengers across Europe. The location of the League of Nations in Geneva required his frequent visits to Switzerland, either as a courier of documents or as an encrypter and decrypter. For ten years meetings of the League there were held in the Hôtel Victoria. ‘By day the hotel was a babel of strange sounds,’ as Slocombe remembered: ‘conversations in many languages, the machine-gun rattle of typewriters, the shrilling of telephone bells, and the whine of the mimeograph machines multiplying copies of speeches just made in the drab hall beyond the faded plush of those Victorian sitting-rooms’. At night there was heavy drinking and poker. It was into this mêlée that the boy from Tottenham County School was pitched.11
A change in Oldham’s circumstances came in 1927 when, falsely describing his father as a gentleman and giving the Foreign Office as his home address, he married a prosperous Australian widow twelve years his senior. With his wife’s money, they bought 31 Pembroke Gardens (near Kensington High Street) and employed two housemaids and a chauffeur for their Sunbeam coupé. Oldham filled his wardrobe with monogrammed clothes, and could afford to drink spirits more deeply than ever. ‘He arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen, and fared sumptuously,’ said Antrobus. ‘So sumptuously … that he contracted delirium tremens.’ As an auspicious sequel to this marriage, Oldham was promoted to be Staff Officer of the Communications Department in 1928.12
In October 1929 Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, who had been ordered back to Moscow for punishment after being denounced for criticizing Stalin’s maltreatment of the peasantry, fled over the embassy wall and was granted asylum by the French government. Maurice Oldfield, a future head of SIS, used to say that ‘defectors are like grapes; the first pressings are always the best’. Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, SIS’s station head in Paris, who had spent his boyhood in Odessa and spoke Russian fluently, interviewed Bessedovsky three days after his defection, but did not press him well. Dunderdale discounted Bessedovsky’s material because he found him sharp, ‘but neither frank nor principled’. Although Dunderdale had a reputation for shrewdness, he was prone to SIS’s cultural contempt for foreigners. ‘British intelligence’, recalled Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘appeared to consider the Soviets mere rabble.’13
Early reports of Bessedovsky’s revelations were garbled, but indicated that some months earlier an Englishman had called at the Russian embassy offering secret cipher books of the British government. The ‘walk-in’, as such unheralded visitors were called, was seen by the OGPU Director Vladimir Ianovich (born Wilenski), a coarse man who had previously been a dock-worker. Ianovich’s wife managed OGPU finances in Paris (she received large dollar bills in the diplomatic mail, and exchanged them for francs). Her impersonations of a Hungarian countess in Berlin, of a Persian diplomat
’s wife in Vienna and of a diamond merchant’s widow in Prague were admired by the illegals, although her husband was not. Ianovich took away the codebooks, saying that he had to show them to the Ambassador, but gave them instead to his wife, who had a brightly lit room for taking photographs and a well-equipped darkroom for developing them. After she had copied the codebooks, Ianovich – either suspecting an agent provocateur’s trap or wishing to save OGPU money – threw them back at the walk-in Englishman and ejected him from the embassy in an insulting fashion.
SIS continued to assess Bessedovsky as shifty, talkative and imprudent. This was not far wrong: years later he tried to make money by forging the journals of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Affairs Commissar of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1929, Special Branch did not investigate his tale of purloined codebooks. Norman Ewer’s Daily Herald on 29 October pooh-poohed Bessedovsky’s information in a manner that suited Russian interests: it depicted the fugitive diplomat as an opportunist whose stories were derided in Whitehall. If leakages had occurred, the Communications Department was a likely source, and its Staff Officer, Oldham, should have led an investigation. He was however both the walk-in with the codebooks and absent undergoing treatment for alcoholism from mid-October until March 1930. It can be surmised that his collapse began with a panicky binge after Bessedovsky’s story appeared in London newspapers.
Bessedovsky’s warning was duplicated in 1930 by Georges Agabekov, then the most senior OGPU officer to have defected. The English parents of his young girlfriend complained to the French authorities that he was a seducer who had alienated her loyalty to them: he was deported to Belgium (more on grounds of public morality than national security) in July 1930. After his deportation, Jasper Harker, head of MI5’s B Division (investigations and inquiries), Guy Liddell of Special Branch and Jane Sissmore, who was MI5’s specialist in Russian community activity, agreed that Agabekov and his correspondence should be put under surveillance. Liddell was sent to interview him in Brussels, and maintained telephonic contact with Sissmore while in the Belgian capital. Agabekov was pressed about the Soviet agent who was obtaining Foreign Office secrets (now known to be the Rome embassy servant, Francesco Constantini). He described OGPU’s network of agents and their operations to Liddell. He also reported that Moscow received copies of the secret exchanges between the Foreign Office and the High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Lloyd. This renewed confirmation of a breach in coded traffic was reported to the Foreign Office. It is known that the Communications Department led an internal investigation, but the identity and report of the investigators are unknown. Agabekov made similar revelations in newspaper articles and in two essays which were published together in a garbled, facetious English edition in 1931.
Enemies Within Page 17