Winchelsea’s pride of
loyal literary lions gathered round their cyber water hole to watch acclaimed
genealogist and TV family history celebrity, Dr. Nick Barratt, take the plunge
off the top board into his own ancestral gene pool and emerge after a lung-bursting
immersion waving a copy of his recent book, The Forgotten Spy. This
tale removed the grit from one family member’s oyster in solving the mystery of
Uncle Michael’s Big Day. Back in the
1930s the 6 year old Michael was assiduously coached by his parents to
negotiate North London’s busy streets
and walk to his local Fever Hospital and find out whether his younger brother had
succumbed to scarlet fever and was now posted among the deceased in the daily
bulletin. Happily he was able to report
his sibling’s continued survival to his uncharacteristically distant and distracted
parents. Nick’s plunge into his family
history revealed the reason for this parental detachment – they had learnt at
that day’s inquest into the suicide of Mum’s
brother, Ernest Holloway Oldham, that he had been a spy.
Born in 1894 and educated
at private schools, courtesy of a legacy from an uncle in Southern Rhodesia, Oldham finished in mid-table in the Civil
Service exams he took on leaving school.
This secured a post at the Board of Trade and after a stint in Education
the outbreak of the Great War saw him in the Cipher Department of the Foreign
Office. He enlisted in the Artists’
Rifles and was placed on the Reserve List before seeing action in the
Staffordshire Regiment after completing officer training. He was
then seconded to Military Intelligence but was blown up, concussed and
nearly buried alive at Saint Quentin during the German Spring Offensive in 1918:
all enough to be repatriated to Blighty.
The war’s end had him back at the F.O. and in their delegation to the
Versailles Peace Conference. Limited foreign language skills scotched a
potential diplomatic posting in Rio and after a spell overseeing Whitehall’s
King’s Messengers he was back in the shadowy world of security,, intelligence
and ciphers. He was involved in co-ordinating
the Government’s activities in the General Strike of 1926 and the following
year married an apparently rich widow, 10 years his senior, with 2 sons and a
house in Kensington.
Far from fading into the
rosy glow of domestic bliss, Barratt’s tale burst into flame as one Charlie
Scott walked into the Soviet Embassy in Paris offering them grazing rights on British
Intelligence’s cables by selling them the cipher code book for £50,000. This triggered a cascade of investigations as
the Soviets sought authentication of Scott and the British charged Ernest Oldham
with elucidating the matter. The Russian
agent, posing as a Hungarian count Joseph Pereli,. tracked Scott and learnt this
was Oldham’s alias. He even went to Oldham’s house, met his wife, arranged a
lunch assignation at the Ritz and began an affair with her which culminated in him
living with the Oldhams in a ménage à trois. Life in espionage’s fast lane proved
stressful and his increasing reliance on alcohol as a prop necessitated Oldham’s
admission to a Suffolk Rehab. Clinic.
Although later said to
have been behaving increasingly
erratically, Barratt opined that Oldham’s presence at the summit meeting where
Germany was admitted to the League of
Nations in 1932 and the intelligence that he gave the Soviets helped forge the
partnership with Germany that resulted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the
1939 dismemberment of Poland. In a
bizarre final act Oldham was sacked and denied pension rights in November 1932,
possibly indicative of realisation dawning in British Intelligence. His wife, Lucy, left him in early 1933 and
the Russians requested a swan song – stealing the cipher code book. The slapstick abortive attempted theft added Oldham’s
colleague Kemp to his pursuers in the role of amateur sleuth and MI5 started to
tap his phone. He still had the use of
his red diplomatic passport and managed to elude his British hunters for
several months on the Continent before being spotted by chance in Jermyn Street
when he returned penniless to London. Nick
Barratt felt that the evidence against Oldham was only circumstantial but the
pressure drove him to suicide by placing his head in the gas oven of his
kitchen Lucy also committed suicide some years later
and Tereli was recalled to face Stalin’s purges in the 1930s but seems to have
survived his years in the Gulag..
Access to both British
and Soviet archives allowed Nick to appraise his great-uncle’s espionage career. The Soviets rated Arno (Oldham’s code name) one
of their top assets and his demise a great loss. The British view is ambivalent with much being made of his
alcoholism and erratic behaviour but little of his ability to consistently give
British Intelligence the slip or to explain why he continued to be given tasks and
access to the Foreign Office despite his wayward lifestyle. Maybe he was quite a good spy. The egregious
maverick British Intelligence officer, Peter Wright of Spycatcher
fame, was also exercised about the Oldham case as he crashed around Whitehall
in the 70s and 80s on his own campaigns of destabilisation.
Our speaker hypothesised
that the Soviets suffered buyer’s regret after Oldham and their next batch of
recruits, the Cambridge 5, were more ideological fellow travellers. The 4th and 5th men,
Blunt and Cairncross, managed to see out their careers as pillars of the British
Establishment although we are assured the security services had everything
under control by the 1960s. Hmmmm.
Family history and genealogy
are increasingly popular pursuits and the evening concluded with an animated
audience engaging Nick in a lively Q and A session.
William Doherty
