The Forgotten Spy: Talk to Winchelsea Literary Soc by Dr. Nick Barrat 19 March 2021

 

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 4^th and 5^th 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