The Forgotten Spy (3 page)

Life in the classroom of a northern industrial town was not easy. This was an era when you grew up fast and most of the half-day students resented being treated like children when they were considered adult enough to work for the remainder of the day, often alongside their parents and older siblings. Discipline was a common problem in the village classroom, particularly for a young southern girl who was only a few years older than her charges and – unlike Frank – had not undergone any formal training to become a certified teacher.

In the 1870s, children normally wrote on slates with slate pencils – grey
sticks of rock that squeakily left a whitish grey trace on a heavy slice of shale that would be fitted into a wooden frame for ease of handling. Once, a rebellious boy, on being rebuked by Carrie for failing to pay attention to his work, waved his slate at Carrie with the words ‘I’ll buzz t’slate at t’head’.
⁴
Unfazed by this threat, Carrie reached up to the boy’s ear – she was much shorter than most of her pupils, never reaching five feet in height as an adult – and dragged him off to the head teacher’s office to receive corporal punishment, then deemed acceptable to dispense at that time.

When she first started work she lodged with Jane Rushton, a widow who let rooms in her property in Rock Terrace, but by 1891 she was living as a boarder at 3 Mount Terrace, Higher Booths, Rawtenstall, with George Littlewood, the school master and his wife Maud and their son Harry Beau-mont Littlewood who was a 13-year-old pupil teacher in Carrie’s school.

Quite how and when Frank and Carrie met is a matter of conjecture, but they decided to tie the knot and married on the first day of 1894 at Christ Church, Ramsgate. Carrie moved back temporarily into her father’s house in St Lawrence, Thanet, safe in the knowledge that her stepmother Rosina had passed away ten years previously, in 1884. The newlyweds set up home in 6 Sunningdale Cottages, Lower Edmonton, Frank having found work as a teacher in the local elementary school.

Croyland Road board school catered for the educational needs of the local community. It was opened in 1884 with the capacity for 200 boys, 100 girls and 261 infants and it had been necessary to enlarge the school in 1889 and 1891 to cater for the growing population as Edmonton continued its expansion as a commuter suburb. In the Bury Street district alone, the population grew from a shade under 23,500 people in 1891, just prior to Frank’s move into the area, to around 62,000 in 1911. Despite Frank’s position in the school, he was still teaching in the lower echelons of the education hierarchy. Certified teachers – let alone uncertified ones such as Carrie – were still seen as second class, mainly drawn from working-class roots and somewhat unfairly categorised as ‘struggling to move out of their class on the basis of limited academic and social aptitude and training’.
⁵
This was in comparison to secondary school teachers, who tended to find employment in grammar or
private schools. They often came from a similar background to their middle or upper-class pupils and usually held a university degree in their chosen subject.

Carrie’s firm hand and strong character were probably essential qualities in the Oldham household. The family expanded over the next six years with the arrival of Marjorie Holloway Oldham on 26 December 1896 and Kathleen Helen Oldham on 22 June 1900. By 1911 the cottage was no longer large enough and they had moved to a new house on the same road, 135 Bury Street, which would remain the family home throughout Ernest’s childhood and indeed for much of his adult life as well. It was a cramped space by modern standards, built out of brick and slate but comfortable for the time. Upstairs were three rooms – Marjorie and Kathleen were forced to share – with two rooms and a scullery downstairs and a further room at the rear. Their small garden backed onto glass houses associated with the long-standing nurseries in the area and a brick works. Beyond that lay a few open fields.

The house was uncluttered by the range of domestic technology that we’d take for granted today – there was no radio or television to provide household entertainment, unlikely to be a telephone given the annual cost of a line and no electrical appliances to help with the daily chores or indeed heat the property – a real concern when trying to look after a new baby, especially during the harsh winter of 1894–95 when temperatures in mid-February never crept above freezing. Hand-powered washing machines had been in use from Victorian times but refrigerators for food storage were not invented until the 1910s and remained unwieldy, unaffordable and often unsafe until the 1920s’ introduction of Freon. This was an early CFC which was far less dangerous to people in terms of domestic leaks but, as we now know, incredibly damaging to the ozone layer.

When the Oldham children were growing up at the start of the 20th century, people used outdoor pantries to keep food chilled but mostly bought daily produce from local shops, farms or dairies. Electric street lighting had started to appear in the area from the early 1900s, although it wasn’t until 1913 that Edmonton fully abandoned gas lamps. The supply of domestic electricity from 1907 brought the enticing prospect of modern conveniences, although on
the grounds of cost most appliances would remain a dream for many of the residents of Bury Street. Into the first decades of the 20th century and beyond, women like Carrie would still beat carpets and rugs in the street and scrub their doorsteps while her children played in the car-free roads outside.

Frank embraced his new life in the community. He already had a talent for music and was asked by the vicar of St Michael’s to become the organist for the congregation. His position secured his family their seats in the vicar’s pew at the front of the church for every service and his children a first-hand view of the sermons that were preached. Frank also found time to train local choirs, reputedly to competition-winning standard, and spent the remainder of his spare time involved in study, acquiring a range of certificates and diplomas to prove his academic merit.

Despite never breaking through the class divide to teach at Latymer school, Edmonton’s nearby grammar school, in 1903 he was selected to serve as first assistant master of Houndsfield Road council school before eventually being made headmaster in 1916, a position he retained until his retirement in 1930. The council school was a much larger establishment than its older and more refined neighbour; in contrast with the 24 pupils taught at Latymer’s new buildings which opened in 1910, the staff at Houndsfield had over a thousand students in their care. As such, it is fair to assign to Frank the rather hackneyed but well-merited description of pillar of the community, for which he was formally recognised by the Anglican Consultative Council with the award of the Distinguished Service Medal in 1928. A clasp was granted for it five years later, when he and Carrie made the somewhat sudden and unexpected decision in 1933 to leave their home of 40 years and retire to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight.

Ernest Oldham, however, attended Tottenham County School, one of the first co-educational secondary schools in the county that had been established by Middlesex County Council in 1901, pre-empting Balfour’s Education Act passed the following year which gave more power to local councils to create state schools. Then, instead of following in his parents’ footsteps and pursuing a career in community-based education – and perhaps reinforcing the aspirational nature of Frank’s rise through the elementary school ranks – a decision
was taken to send Ernest to Muncaster House school, often rather confusingly called Muncaster College, a small sixth-form boarding school situated in the small village of Laleham on Ferry Lane by the banks of the River Thames.

This was the sort of school usually reserved for the sons of senior army officers or even the offspring of members of Parliament – by no means an elite public school such as Eton, but nonetheless a step up from Ernest’s social background and a world away from the working-class terraces of Edmonton. Behind the scenes, one detects the influence of Carrie’s family, who were continuing to move up in the world – her brother, Henry George Holloway junior, was building a commercial empire in Thanet whilst performing civic tasks as a registrar and collector of local taxes. Another brother, William, was despatched at the earliest possible opportunity into the Royal Marines where he eventually attained the rank of lieutenant. Meanwhile, Ern Holloway had chosen a career overseas in the Diplomatic Service and rose through the echelons of the postal service in Southern Rhodesia, to the point where he was listed in the Colonial Office lists as a key civil servant in the administration. By coincidence, he returned to England on 6 August 1909, having sailed first-class on the
Imanda
from Durban and it may well have been his encouragement – and possibly funding as well – that enabled his nephew to attend Muncaster House. This was the sort of schooling that would prepare a young man for a white collar professional career or a commission in the army.

Whatever the motivation for the later part of his schooling, the experience had the desired effect. Rather than train as a teacher, Ernest Oldham decided to apply to join the civil service, which at the time was only accessible via competitive examination. Later documents, based on information provided by Oldham himself, stated that he successfully sat and passed the test for the position of second division clerk in the civil service on 13 November 1913. This is untrue. There was no examination for second division clerk held on that date and the surviving papers kept by the Civil Service Commission for the examination held on 22 September 1913 fail to reveal Oldham’s name amongst the candidates. Earlier records show that he actually sat the exam on 7 October 1912, just after his 18th birthday, having left Muncaster House in the summer. The reason for this deception is clear when the results are
examined more closely; candidate no 721, EH Oldham, came a disappointing 702
^nd
out of a field of over 1,500 candidates – only the top 150 were offered jobs, which meant that he was unsuccessful in securing work.

His English and handwriting weren’t too bad – 380 and 360 marks out of a possible 400 respectively – but manuscript-copying, an important skill for a clerk, only earned him 136 marks out of 200, while he was weak in languages (Latin 195 out of 400, French much better with 307, but no attempt made to take German) and he hardly covered himself in glory with his mathematical abilities (elementary maths and arithmetic 230 and 290 out of 400). In fact, his strongest subject aside from English was science (360 marks).
⁶

At the tender age of 18, this setback should have marked the end of Oldham’s aspirations for a civil service career before it had even got off the ground, but there was still a glimmer of hope. Many of the unsuccessful candidates ended up being selected over the course of the year as those above them failed to take up their posts and replacements were summoned further down the list. Even so, it would have been an awfully long time before Oldham could have expected to be called up, given his lowly position. Once again the influence of his uncle can be discerned behind the scenes.

Ern Holloway returned to England from East London, South Africa, on the
Galician
, docking at Southampton on 23 July 1913 – once again travelling first-class but this time accompanied by his young wife who was 18 years his junior. Holloway was described as a civil servant on the passenger list and one suspects that during his stay in England he caught up with his London chums in the service and put in a good word for his nephew, as one did in those days, before he returned to South Africa on 15 November. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ernest Oldham was called up for the civil service the same month and on 11 December 1913 was formally appointed to the Board of 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, there
being 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.

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 and
went 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.