Authors: Nick Barratt
The Forgotten Spy (10 page)
While, in view of the provision of free board and lodging in Paris, as well as outfit allowances, My Lords cannot but regard as somewhat illogical the proposal to fix an overriding minimum salary of £150 for male clerks and £130 per annum for certain women clerks employed there and while they would have preferred the simple principle of arranging that all officers should draw their London salaries, they are willing in the exceptional circumstances to sanction its adoption on the understanding that the salaries fixed are in all cases inclusive of all overtime worked.
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Also approved were payments for Mr Bebb from the Exchequer and Audit Department, who would be the Accounting Officer for the Establishment – supported by Miss Cullis and her team of clerks responsible for payroll – and for Captain Butler-Stoney, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, to act as Secretary to the Establishment Committee.
However, given the relentless time pressure to have everything in readiness for the politicians and experts at the end of December, the Treasury endorsement was provided retrospectively. The Establishment Section was required immediately so that they could assist with the preparations. An advance party was originally scheduled to leave England on 11 December but due to various delays finally departed three days later. Oldham found himself part of a group consisting of his five clerical colleagues, 70 lady clerks, ten girl guides, two nurses, a doctor, a representative from the Ministry of Food and Alwyn Parker. All waited at Charing Cross station for their Pullman car to leave at 11.00 am, destined for Folkestone Harbour station.
Once they had disembarked from the train and ferried their luggage to the
harbour, they caught the 2.15 pm boat to Boulogne. They docked at 4.00 pm – arrangements having been made in advance to ensure the minimum delay at customs, with everyone vouched for by Thomson – before catching another train, complete with dining car, at 5.30 pm, to arrive in Paris four hours later. Parker, reliable as always, had sent a telegram the night before to ensure that they were met by cars at Gare du Nord, the Paris station, to escort them to the Majestic, along with two motor lorries for their bags.
Someone who accompanied Oldham to Paris in December was George Antrobus, who provided his own take on proceedings:
This preliminary party consisted, if I remember right, of some two dozen men and 96 women… The Government had taken over the palatial Hotel Majestic in the Avenue Kleber to house the personnel and had made pretty complete arrangements for a long stay. The noble army of peacemakers even included a doctor – a noted Mayfair accoucheur [male midwife], whose presence suggested to the Parisians that we had come to stay for nine months at least… The Majestic was filling up with a vast assemblage, drawn from every corner of the Empire, of delegates, negotiators, experts, technicians, clerks, advisers and hangers-on, all bursting with enthusiasm to make the world safe for Democracy. Most of them brought their wives (or some substitute therefore), some their children and some again their cousins, sisters and aunts.
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It probably came as a relief to learn from the politicians that no meaningful dialogue would take place until 13 January 1919. One factor in the delay was Lloyd George’s decision to hold a snap election after the Armistice so that he could negotiate with a clear national mandate. This was scheduled to take place on 14 December but because of the large number of votes cast by returning troops, the official count could not take place until 28 December. This was the earliest date that the beleaguered Parker thought that the Hôtel Astoria would be ready for the various staff, although he was already trying to put off Penson and his intelligence clearing house until 2 January 1919. Their
offices had already been moved up to the seventh floor of the Astoria in a final bid to accommodate everybody below.
It is easy to dismiss Antrobus’s observations about the nature of the diplomatic corps that began to descend on Paris from 8 January onwards, given his track record for acerbic commentary, but a more sober and senior member of the Foreign Office, Stephen Gaselee, confirmed that there was already a pessimism amongst the clerical staff about the outcome of a process bloated by ‘experts’:
Immediately after the War the Foreign Office had to spare for the Versailles Conference something like half the Office while many of the temporary clerks were transferred to Paris, where a huge office was set up. Among them were an army of experts on every subject that was likely to be discussed. I gather that those in the highest places were at times bewildered, to repeat a word already used, by the multitude of counsellors. The ‘hands’ that Lord Salisbury disliked were so numerous that it seemed impossible ever to reach a correct conclusion on questions, for instance, of nationality and frontiers. Those matters, however, are, in Queen Elizabeth’s phrase, ‘too great’ for the writers of this book.
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Nevertheless, the diplomatic perspective was slightly more optimistic, with seasoned professionals excited by the opportunity that Paris represented for their careers, given this was a once in a lifetime chance to forge a new world order. In the words of senior Foreign Office mandarin Robert Vansittart:
I was notified that I should attend the Peace Conference… for a moment I felt a cockiness which I had not experienced since my small boyhood… I became briefly ‘brilliant’… this conference was the finest and most promising thing in the world.
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Vansittart would continue his rise through the Foreign Office off the back of his presence in Paris, eventually ending up Permanent Under-Secretary in 1930 and playing an important role in Oldham’s life.
To echo Gaselee, a full rendition of conference proceedings is outside the scope of this book, so a summary of the key points shall suffice as they directly shaped the world in which Oldham worked. Once the delegates had started to arrive from 8 January, an inter-Allied preparatory meeting was held on 12 January to decide the shape of the main Peace Conference. It was agreed that there would be an initial Plenary Conference on 18 January at the Salle de l’Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay; 70 delegates representing 27 countries attended. Expectations were wildly optimistic, as there was no real consensus about the remit of the conference or the mechanisms for reaching decisions. However, from the outset, the proceedings were dominated by the main powers – Britain, France, the USA and Italy – who had their own agendas and quickly framed the parameters for the other countries. Indeed, Clemenceau’s attitude was described by Foreign Office delegate Harold Nicolson as:
High-handed with the smaller Powers: ‘y-a-t-il d’objections? Non?... Adopté’. Like a machine gun.
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The American position was for a wider settlement, underpinned by a new ‘world governance’ in the form of the League of Nations championed by President Wilson. For Clemenceau and the French, the main aim was to completely dismantle the German military machine and ensure it was not rebuilt; harsh reparations, territorial gains and acceptance of the blame for starting the war were their objectives. The British position was somewhere in the middle. Lloyd George wished to ensure Germany paid reparations and disarmed, whilst redrawing the world map was an opportunity not to be missed. However, he also realised that the Germans needed to be able to pay their debts and should not have access to free trade markets restricted. Lurking in the background was the spectre of the revolutions in central and eastern Europe, with fears that too harsh a settlement would drive Germany into the arms of the Bolsheviks. Russia had not been invited to take part in the Allied conference, as the new regime had already made peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. In the eyes of many
British delegates, their omission from the peace talks was a mistake – Nicolson wrote in his diary on 9 January:
We hear that the Russians are constituting a committee or ‘conference’ of ambassadors... This will be highly awkward for those who wish to ignore Russia. I am delighted. After all, we are dealing with Russian interests behind their backs and the above committee have only to formulate a protest in writing for the [Paris] conference to be branded, in the history of a future Russia, as having deserted her in her trouble.
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Also excluded from the process were the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, who had to wait until the conference concluded before they heard the terms they would be offered if they wished to secure peace. In many ways this was diplomacy down the barrel of a gun, since the Allied forces had an army of occupation in place in the Rhineland, waiting to resume hostilities at the first sign of disquiet.
The conference proceeded in stages, with a Bureau de Conference or ‘Council of Ten’ formed by two delegates from the main powers, including Japan. Britain was represented by Lloyd George and Balfour. However, it took another week to set up five general committees to look at specific issues – the League of Nations, reparations, the responsibilities of the authors of the war, international labour legislation and an international regime for ports, waterways and railways. Delays, plus a refusal by the politicians to communicate with the Foreign Office staff, led Hardinge to comment on 24 January that:
A precious fortnight has been wasted, our great men having thought that they could settle everything themselves, even to the smallest details, and that such things as committees were childish inventions of the FO [Foreign Office] or of the devil.
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Matters went from bad to worse. Territorial committees were set up at the end of January to deal with regional discussions but it wasn’t until
27 February that a central territorial committee was established to coordinate discussion across the others. By then, most of the work had been done in isolation. Headlam-Morley observed that:
The result was that week after week went by, each of the sections continued working by itself and no official arrangement was made for communication and consultation. Practically, owing to the fact that we were working in the same building and living in the same hotel, a great deal of informal and personal consultation took place, but this was at the beginning only very partial and, as far as I could make out, some of the sections – especially the economic and the financial which were of very great importance – continued to work on their own without any consultation or communication with others.
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The results were potentially catastrophic. As Nicolson put it:
We were never for one instant given to suppose that our recommendations were absolutely final. And thus we tended to accept compromises and even to support decisions which we ardently hoped would not, in the last resort, be approved.
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Despite a warning from Hardinge against ‘indiscreet talk’ at the Hôtel Majestic, most of the important business was conducted outside the official meetings – over dinners, in the bar or between sessions. In fact, the clerks where Oldham was working were almost certainly more aware of the bigger picture than some of the delegates themselves, as they saw a far wider range of material pass before their desks. However, the Foreign Office delegation felt increasingly frustrated by the lack of consultation, with Sir Eyre Crowe grumbling that:
I see no object in our collecting reports and information. Nobody wants or uses them, and our pigeonholes are being filled with masses of papers which represent nothing but wastes of energy.
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Matters became even worse when the Council of Ten became the Council of Four in March, when Japan dropped out and the leaders of Britain, France, USA and Italy met informally to speed things along – although Italy also walked out over a territorial disagreement. Thus even Balfour was excluded from the decision-making process, with Hardinge complaining that:
I cannot help feeling that things here are going very badly. The settlement of the terms of peace is now in the hands of the four Prime Ministers who meet and draw up terms without expert advice and without any record being taken of what passes.
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The pressure on Hardinge eventually told as he found himself ‘for the first time in my life on the verge of a breakdown from overwork and over strain’. He began to suffer acute insomnia caused by:
Annoyance at the way I saw the negotiations being conducted here in Paris, regardless of the knowledge and experience of foreign affairs of which there were plenty in the British delegation, but which was absolutely ignored by the negotiators as being inconvenient towards some of their projects.
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There was also the stress of keeping things ticking over in London. Balfour commented in early February that, ‘I confess to find it very difficult in all cases whether a subject is being dealt with in London at the Foreign Office or in Paris or both.’
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Nicolson wrote in his diary on 17 April: ‘How they must hate us over there, poor people. We never tell them what is happening and we never answer any of their letters.’
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This was a pertinent remark; after all, junior staff such as Oldham were faced with the challenge of re-integrating amongst their colleagues in Whitehall after the conference concluded.
The length of time it was taking to resolve the various issues was not lost on the watching world, who were suspicious that everyone was enjoying themselves a little bit too much. The Foreign Office had already turned
down an offer from Thomas Cook in December 1918 to help with various tours of Paris – ‘excursions in and around Paris are not contemplated for the British delegation to the Peace Conference, who will all be engaged on urgent official work’
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– but it was unreasonable to expect that Paris would be all work and no play. Everyone who was anyone could be found on the fringes of the conference. Nicolson noted a typical evening’s entertainment: