The Forgotten Spy (11 page)

It was not long before the press picked up on extra-curricular activities.
The Times
reported on The Majestic at play in March 1919.

In particular, the report drew attention to an evening entertainment put on by the British delegation’s dramatic company, which packed out the theatre situated in the basement. The first play was in French; the second was a typical piece of British self-mockery – a series of skits in which all aspects of the conference were gently ridiculed.

As the conference dragged on into yet another month, the
Times
correspondent summed up the mood back in England:

This was a little unfair on the ‘140 clerks’ whose workload was relentless while the committees sat, continued to discuss and produced ever more paperwork – all of which was categorised, indexed and filed for reference. Yet men like Oldham, involved at the heart of the bureaucracy and thus privy to the multiple lines of negotiation, would still have had time to join the throngs of diplomats and politicians mingling in the foyer of the Majestic for the various receptions, as well as their counterparts from other delegations and countless international lawyers who regaled them with tall tales over dinner or at the bar. Such conversations and contacts could make or break careers – especially if the right information was passed to the correct interested party who could return the favour later on. It is hard to describe this ‘below the counter’ diplomacy as espionage, as technically everyone was on the same side and working towards a common goal. However, a large amount of horse trading was conducted at the Majestic and elsewhere that would decide the fate of millions, as borders were drawn and redrawn based on subtle negotiations outside the committee rooms. It was in this environment that Oldham saw how diplomacy worked at grass roots level, despite Hardinge’s reminder to delegates and support staff against ‘indiscreet talk’.

Then, suddenly, a new pace was injected into proceedings in mid-April when the Council of Four invited the Germans to hear their peace terms, summoning them to attend the conference at the start of May. A quiet panic
gripped the Foreign Office staff as they redoubled their work in the hope that they could iron out all the issues with the proposed treaty. Headlam-Morley expressed his grave concerns on 21 April:

The final push brought most of the delegates to their knees – Nicolson confided in his diary on 13 May that he was ‘nearly dead with fatigue and indignation’.
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Nevertheless, a draft treaty was ready to present to the Germans on 7 May. Gallic desire to weaken Germany as much as possible had largely won the day. When rebuked over the severity of the terms, Clemenceau scolded Lloyd George that Britain had the safety of the Channel to protect it whereas France had to share a land border. This paranoia lay behind huge territorial demands and continued occupation of the left bank of the Rhine, coupled with stringent financial reparations to the Allies in compensation for damage caused during the war and a wider demilitarisation of the German state. Equally contentious was the admission of German war guilt. Needless to say, when the German delegation was invited to Versailles to hear the conditions that were to be imposed their Foreign Minister, Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, declared:

The Germans protested that they had not been permitted to take part in the negotiations and therefore that the terms they were being asked to accept were unjust – exactly what many Foreign Office staff had been concerned about. Despite a deep aversion to the conditions, which had provoked widespread condemnation back home, they were given no choice but to sign – although this only took place on 28 June 1919 under the threat of renewed hostilities, with Allied troops prepared to march out of the Rhineland to force compliance if the final deadline was not met.

If the aim was to humiliate Germany, then the Versailles ceremony was a success – the acknowledgement of war guilt was still in place. The ceremony took place in the glittering hall of mirrors in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, with hundreds of dignitaries present to watch the historic moment. Nicolson was one of them and he vividly recalled when the time came for the Germans to sign:

Later that night he added that there were:

Although the main work was done, the peace process continued beyond Versailles as, one by one, the Central Powers were brought to account. Austria signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain on 10 September; Bulgaria agreed to the Treaty of Neuilly on 27 November while it took until 4 June 1920 before Hungary was able to sign the Treaty of Trianon, given internal upheavals and war with its neighbours throughout most of 1919. The last peace agreement was concluded with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Sèvres on 10 August 1920. However, by this date the British secretariat at the Majestic had long since disbanded and drifted home. By the end of June 1919 the hotel was virtually empty. Oldham and his associates had played their part in making history and with some regret returned to London to face their abandoned colleagues in a vastly different Foreign Office to the one they had left behind.

Caught up in the greatest diplomatic event the world had ever seen and having witnessed at close quarters how the ‘other’ side of the service worked, Old-ham’s appetite for a similar career was truly whetted. No doubt numerous conversations at the Majestic with consulate staff had fired up his enthusiasm for a peripatetic life in far-flung embassies situated in exotic climes. So, on 12 April 1919, during a crucial phase of the conference, he reactivated his application to join the consular service that had first been submitted back in 1916.

Given the focus of attention on Paris and then the subsequent process of finalising treaties with the other Central Powers, it is not surprising that it took the best part of a year before a meeting of a small Foreign Office Departmental Committee could be convened. On 26 January 1920, the committee considered the applications of 40 hopeful candidates who had been granted either temporary or honorary posts and whose claims were still pending.

At this stage, Oldham was very confident of success. Not only had he been
part of the peace process, working tirelessly behind the scenes gathering firsthand experience of diplomacy in action but also he had been formally recognised for his role in the process – earning promotion to junior executive grade on 1 January 1920. Sir John Tilley, who had signed Oldham’s release papers into the army and supported his career throughout, was one of the board members – but crucially he had not been present in Paris to witness Oldham operating under the daily pressures of the conference.

Of the 40 candidates, 15 were accepted and 14 rejected. Oldham was one of 11 left in limbo with applications held over, pending further inquiries. Nevertheless, he was nominated to a permanent post in the consular service on 29 January 1920, upheld by a promotions board on 10 February. His languages, which now included French, Spanish, Italian and German, had earned him a position as the Third Vice Consul in Rio – an admittedly junior role in an embassy, supporting the consul, but about as far away from the European battlefields as it was possible to get.

However, his dreams of an exotic posting to South America were cruelly dashed. The promotions board met again on 18 February and made various changes to the proposed list of new appointments, including the note that ‘a fresh proposal to be made for the appointment of Third Vice Consul at Rio, as Mr Oldham is not to be taken into the Consular Service.’
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The recommendation was placed on file to this effect on 26 February, but it would take until 15 March before a letter was sent to Oldham to put him out of his misery:

With his hopes of a diplomatic career dashed by the new Foreign Secretary who replaced Balfour in October 1919, Oldham was faced with a return to
mundane duties within a reformed Foreign Office. His bitter disappointment perhaps made him miss the fact that his superiors within the Chief Clerk’s Department fully appreciated his work – hence his promotion – and that he was transferred to a key position within a new Communications Department, created as part of a wider restructure of the Foreign Office.

The Foreign Office had already taken charge of Britain’s Diplomatic and Consular Services. Among other changes, the Central Registry and sub-registries were overhauled and replaced by a single Registry with three branches. In addition, a temporary Historical Section, set up during the war, was made permanent and transferred to the Librarian to manage and the Parliamentary Department was disbanded, with the King’s Messengers and cipher clerks moving to the new Communications Department. The Foreign Office also took over the responsibility of the Government Code and Cipher School from the Admiralty in 1922, with oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service. These were important changes and reflected the way in which the work of the office had grown during the conflict and continued to expand with Britain’s role within the new League of Nations. However, the general antipathy felt by the Foreign Office towards the League, its international rival, was reflected in the fact that only a sub-section of the Western political department was initially assigned to League business.

The origins of the new Communications Department lay in earnest attempts to provide a career for both messengers and cipher staff alike. A note placed on file in March 1919 sketched out the thinking behind the proposed merger of the two units, at the express wish of Lord Hardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office whose experiences in Paris made him realise the importance of a unified system. The unnamed author was blunt to the point of insulting about the calibre of recruits: