The Forgotten Spy Read Online Free Page B

Education.
    It is fair to say that he did not hang around – certainly not long enough to leave any trace in the official records – as 20 days later he was transferred to the Board of Trade where he commenced his new duties on New Year’s Day 1914. His employment there was of only slightly longer duration, as he moved to the Foreign Office on 1 April 1914 as a second division clerk in the Chief Clerk’s Department. The institution was steeped in history, therebeing an unspoken assumption that to succeed one needed to have schooled in Eton. Nevertheless, despite these obstacles that would have blocked most other men, Oldham’s career at the heart of Britain’s global diplomatic network had begun.

Chapter two
INSIDE THE FOREIGN OFFICE (APRIL–AUGUST 1914)
    No one knows so well as the politician whose privilege it is for the time being to represent the Foreign Office in Cabinet and in Parliament, how impossible his task would be if it were not for the devoted and disinterested labour of the men whose life-work lies within the walls of the Department
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    S IR J OHN S IMON , F OREIGN S ECRETARY (1931–1935)
    Ernest Holloway Oldham had joined one of the most venerable institutions in Britain, if not the world, at a time when the global reach of the Foreign Office was never wider or its role in international politics more challenging. Indeed, challenging described the environment in which the 19-year-old Ernest Oldham found himself working – especially when you consider that he was state-school educated in an age when most of his new colleagues had attended one or other of the finest private schools in the land and he was still living in his parent’s working-class terraced cottage in Edmonton.
    The Foreign Office was a highly structured world, a hierarchical mix of politicians, permanent civil servants and temporary staff, despite changes which had seen attempts at modernisation over the previous decade. At the very top was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (or Foreign Secretary), Sir Edward Grey. He was assisted by an Under-Secretary of State the Liberal MP for Camborne, Sir Francis Dyke Acland. However, politicians came andwent on the shifting tides of public opinion expressed at the ballot box, so a body of professional civil servants undertook the bulk of the work as well as provided necessary continuity. In charge was the Permanent Under-Secretary – not to be confused with Acland’s role – who was by this stage the real Head of the Foreign Service and the main advisor to the Secretary of State. The role frequently required him to receive foreign ambassadors, oversee the general running of the office, and act as the point of liaison with other government departments, especially with the armed services and rudimentary intelligence services. In 1914, this important position was held by Sir Arthur Nicolson, who had entered the service of the Foreign Office in 1870 and was coming to the end of his career; it was his misfortune to be overshadowed by his dynamic Assistant Under-Secretary of State, Sir Eyre Crowe, who oversaw widespread changes to the way the office was run after 1905 in response to new technology such as the telegram and later the telephone, which generated a vast increase in the volume and speed of communication.
    Crowe’s fellow Assistant Under-Secretary was Sir John Tilley, and he described the main points of the reforms – in particular the creation of a General Registry to log the influx of correspondence and papers, with subsidiary registries which would be maintained by second division clerks such as Oldham:
    They were to take complete charge of the archives, and deal with all such matters as docketing, registration, finding and putting away papers, and with the distribution and management of the print. 7
    Thus all correspondence and official material – much of it highly sensitive – passed through the hands of fairly junior staff. However, there was a problem, as Tilley