The Forgotten Spy (16 page)

For a man such as Oldham, still living in his parents’ terraced house in north London, the appeal of membership at a club to enhance his career prospects would have been compelling. It seems as though he was a member of the Junior Carlton Club, associated most strongly with the Tory party. The club had impressive premises at 30 Pall Mall, complete with dining and coffee rooms, a lounge for ‘strangers’, a smoking room and library. Many of Oldham’s associates were members of clubs, allowing him to mix in a different social circle – exactly
the sort of environment where an up and coming Foreign Office hopeful could entertain diplomatic guests, for example.

It is strongly suspected that Oldham’s maternal uncle, Henry George Holloway junior, first introduced him to the club scene. Holloway was a member of several clubs in his own right and was an intriguing character, who, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, had a range of occupations and turned a profit from most of them. By the 1920s, cinema had outstripped music hall and theatres as the entertainment of choice for a younger audience and Holloway had taken a financial interest in several cinemas. With the glamour of the silver screen came the taste for a luxurious lifestyle – for example, in 1936 he splashed out for a state room on the maiden voyage of the
Queen Mary
. Holloway cut an impressive figure and took the young Oldham under his wing as he made his way in the world.

Yet whilst Oldham enjoyed his time in London society and left his cares behind, security within Whitehall remained an issue and members of staff were expected to be ever-vigilant. An example of lax office-keeping was brought to Montgomery’s attention on 29 November 1926:

Those fuelling the growing paranoia about Whitehall security were correct to be worried, as disturbing evidence emerged in 1927 about the level of Soviet infiltration within British society. On 12 May the headquarters of the All Russian Cooperative Society (ARCOS) at 49 Moorgate Street were raided by police following a surveillance operation by MI5 and SIS agents. It was the culmination of several years’ work by agents such as Jasper Harker, Her-bert ‘Con’ Boddington and John Ottaway. Since 1924 they had intercepted communications between William Norman Ewer, foreign editor of the
Daily Herald
and former police officer Walter Dale, who was tailed to both ARCOS and the offices of the Federated Press. Phones were tapped and it became apparent that seemingly legitimate organisations were a front for subversive Soviet activity. When it emerged in March 1927 that a classified signals training manual from the Aldershot military base had been copied within the ARCOS office, a decision was taken to raid the premises.

It was not an overwhelming success – apart from finding startled ARCOS employees frantically shredding documents, there was no smoking gun evidence of espionage. However the consequences were monumental. The Soviets were alerted to the fact that their surveillance operation in Britain had been compromised and changed their system of codes. This seriously hampered future British intelligence gathering operations, with the result that security services failed to spot other infiltrators. Two Special Branch officers, Sergeant Charles Jane and Inspector Hubert van Ginhoven, had already been recruited by Ewer and were also passing information to the Soviets from the inside.

The political fallout from the ARCOS raid was equally far reaching. Fuelled by scare-mongering newspaper reports, a furious British government severed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union on 24 May 1927, with Stalin commenting that peaceful co-existence with ‘the capitalist countries is receding into the past’.
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The Soviet Union, still outside the League of Nations, had officially supplanted Germany as the main threat to global peace and once again the world seemed a much more dangerous place. However, by this date Oldham’s own world had already been turned upside down by a very different event, in a very different way.

On 9 July 1927, as the furore around the ARCOS raid and the cessation of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations started to abate, a wedding ceremony took place at Kensington Parish Church. This was the second marriage for the bride, who had been widowed in 1919. Her name was Lucy Wellsted, allegedly 40 years old with a deceased father named Frederick King. A married couple, Octave Count de la Chapelle and his wife Rachel, were the witnesses to the happy event. The groom, a 37-year-old civil servant who recorded his residence as the Foreign Office, Whitehall, claimed to be the son of a gentleman. His name was Ernest Holloway Oldham and this was about the only completely true statement recorded on the entire marriage certificate.

The wedding of Lucy Wellsted to Ernest Oldham represents a pivotal moment in his life. Of course, marriage is usually life-changing but in this case it was more than just leaving bachelorhood behind – it was a complete change in his social status. To understand why there were so many ‘inaccuracies’ on
the certificate, we need to travel back in time several decades and across various continents to trace the story of his new wife, since she played a key role in the direction Oldham’s life would take over the next few years. Indeed, the friends and acquaintances that brought them together give us an insight into the circles that Oldham was now moving in, far beyond his humble origins. US presidents, international lawyers and high finance would become part of his world as he mixed with an altogether more flamboyant group then his colleagues in the Foreign Office. The change in Oldham’s circumstances is vitally important in understanding what happened thereafter.

Lucy Eliza’s birth surname was Kayser rather than King – it is possible that she decided to anglicise her father’s name when she remarried as a result of anti-German feeling caused by the war. Even nine years after the end of the fighting, suspicion still remained – a legacy of internment, as well as the sporadic violence and vandalism towards long-standing German communities that had taken place in the years following 1914.

Furthermore, Lucy Wellsted had not been not born in 1887 as she claimed, but five years earlier on 24 November 1882 in Waratah, Tasmania – making her 45 when she married Oldham, 12 years older than her new husband; no wonder he gallantly added a few years to his own age to help narrow the gap. For Lucy, it had been quite a journey from the place of her birth, a small Australian community almost entirely dependent on tin mining for survival, which, in turn, was almost entirely dependent upon her father, Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Kayser. We may now consider America to epitomise the 19th century land of opportunity, but ‘Ferd’, as he was known to friends and family, showed that it was possible to prosper ‘down under’ as well. He had been born at Clausthal, Hanover, in 1833 – the son of a mining engineer – before leaving Saxony to find his fortune in Australia. He landed in Adelaide in 1853 but moved to Melbourne the following year to try his luck in the emerging goldfields – wild, frontier territory where men could make their fortune or end up dead. Kayser found the former; by 1863 he had become a mining manager at Bendigo, one of the emerging new towns that acted as a magnet for other speculators and workers.

However, Kayser did not stay with gold but turned his attention to tin
mining, moving to Tasmania in 1875 to manage the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Company at Waratah. It had only started operating two years before. If Bendigo was a growing frontier town in the 1860s, then Waratah was little more than a track leading to the mine – plus a post office, a few modest houses, a hotel and a road leading to Burnie, the nearest proper settlement perched on Tasmania’s northern coast. Yet Waratah became home to Kayser. The following year he married Mary Elizabeth Druce on 4 March in Melbourne and together they raised seven daughters and a son. During his time as manager, Kayser transformed the mine, the town and his own fortune – by 1898, when he retired, he had been responsible for the construction of proper homes, not just houses, to encourage families to settle, a hospital to provide healthcare, an iron tramway to Burnie and the Falls Creek dam to provide hydro-electric power which was used to light the town and mine. The power came years before the growing north London suburb of Edmonton would receive street lighting, it should be noted. True to his Baptist roots, there was a temperance hotel and a church.

No wonder people called him the Chief – he held the positions of magistrate, coroner, registrar of births, marriages and deaths and owner of the
North-Western Advocate
and effectively had the power of life, death and opinion over the inhabitants of the town. He was a ‘humane despot’ in the words of the
Australian Dictionary of National Biography
– or a tyrant, according to disgruntled employees who resented the way he dictated the way they could live and even think. Beyond dispute, however, was the fact that his methods were successful; he claimed that by 1892 the mine had extracted 37,000 tons of ore, generated over £1 million in dividends for its shareholders and was the driving force of the Tasmanian economy.

We can catch glimpses of Lucy’s childhood growing up in Launceston where the family had their main house on York Street. She appeared at the Fancy Juvenile ball on 3 September 1897, for example, disguised in costume to represent ‘modern art’, alongside her sisters Cissie in the robes of a Bohemian dancing girl, Edie dressed as
La République française
and Bertha pretending to be Lady Teazle from Sheridan’s
The School For Scandal
. The following year, her eldest sister Agnes married politician George Crosby Gilmore
on 26 April at St John’s Church, Launceston, which was ‘tastefully and lavishly decorated by the girlfriends of the bride’ according to the local paper. The reporter then provided an exceedingly detailed and lengthy account of the bride’s dress, and pretty much everyone else’s:

Four years later, the Launceston
Daily Telegraph
reported another marriage for one of the Kayser girls – this time second daughter Bertha, who married an Englishman called Thomas Gibbons on 27 February 1902. However, the report noted that:

Sure enough, on 18 March the local papers – including the enchantingly named
Emu Bay Times
– noted the departure not just of Ferd Kayser, but also his family for a ‘well-earned holiday’ where he ‘proposed to visit England and to return to Tasmania via America in about six or eight months’ time’.
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As if to justify this time away, the paper noted that ‘during Mr Kayser’s management, the Mount Bischoff mine had returned in dividends of £1,618,500’. This was clearly a family used to enjoying the benefits of wealth, and Lucy had
developed an aspiration to live to these luxurious standards throughout her life, regardless of the cost.

As family trips went, this was pretty special. A typical voyage to Europe could take around a month, once the requisite trunks of clothes and personal possessions were loaded onto the boat and the final farewells to friends and family said at the harbour. This holiday lasted around four months and almost certainly included professional networking for Ferd, after which the family embarked upon the
Ophir
at London on 15 August 1902, bound for Melbourne and home. The first Australian port they reached was Fremantle on 12 September, and the
Western Australian
duly noted the names of some of the more prominent people on board, including Mr and Mrs Kayser and family. They had been joined by Thomas Wilhelm Wellsted, a young mining engineer and newly appointed partner to one of the oldest mining companies in the world. He had joined the party in London and was ostensibly travelling on business; in reality, he had fallen for Lucy’s charm and beauty and the couple was soon engaged. Within six months, Lucy and her mother were repeating the journey back to Europe, sailing on the
Friedrich der Grosse
on 24 February 1903 from Melbourne to prepare for an April wedding in London where Lucy would make her home with her new husband.

Wellsted was a partner with Bewick, Moreing and Company, based at Broad Street House, 62 London Wall but with regional offices around the world, including Melbourne. The business was involved both with the technical development of mining operations and mineral extraction as well as purchasing and operating mines globally – in particular in North America, Australia and the far east, but also increasingly into the European markets and Russia, with a growing interest in the uses of oil. This was a period of upheaval, though; the partnership terminated the services of mining engineer Anthony Stanley Rowe through personal bankruptcy and a scandal involving forged cheques, as announced in
The Times
on 7 January 1903. However, the company was still able to draw upon the talents of one of the most remarkable men of his time – Herbert Clark Hoover. He had been hired in 1897 and enjoyed an adventurous career around the world – even if he did not think so himself – which resulted in his promotion to full partnership in the company on 18 December 1901,
when he based himself in London although his new remit was to oversee the company’s Australian gold mining operations. Thomas Wellsted and Herbert Hoover were close working companions and often dined together, although many associates noted the rather lifeless atmosphere of a Hoover dinner party. The events would often pass in virtual silence – ‘never was he heard to mention a poem, a play, a work of art’, wrote one attendee – which was hardly surprising as Hoover’s whole focus was devoted to making money.
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