The Forgotten Spy (18 page)

Elements of this are certainly true, but in reality Alfred had a thirst for adventure when younger which took him far beyond the confines of Europe. Initially, he headed for California in the early 1850s, drawn by the lure of the gold rush and became embroiled in a failed French military incursion against the Mexicans, which resulted in de la Chapelle being condemned to death and left
en capilla
– sharing a cell with his own coffin. However, he was pardoned by President Santa Anna (a man worthy of a book in his own right – known as the Napoleon of the West, he had one of his amputated legs buried with full military honours) and sent back to California in disgrace.

Given this experience, it is perhaps no surprise to find de la Chapelle appearing on the other side of world, chasing fame and fortune in Australia by
prospecting the outback in search of gold. His base was Melbourne, where on 17 September 1863 his son, Octave Xavier Alfred, was born at St Kilda. It is almost certain that Octave’s birth was illegitimate, as there is no record of marriage between Alfred and the mother, 20-year-old Kate Royal from Manchester. On his return to France, Alfred became close to the emperor, with Kate often staying at Camden Place during Napoleon’s exile. Alfred continued to run errands abroad, with important papers hidden in his garments or hat and trailed everywhere by detectives from the French Republic.

With this glorious background, it is perhaps no surprise that Octave similarly threw himself into the world of international intrigue and shady connections, albeit through a more conventional route – the law. In 1888 he trained as a solicitor in London, eventually establishing his own firm based in Gresham Street, a short walk away from London Wall where Bewick, Moreing and Co. were located. Through his family background and equally flamboyant nature, Octave was able to build a reputation as a leading international lawyer with contacts across the world based in Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Berlin, Alexandria, Florence, Bucharest, Melbourne and New York – ‘a popular figure in legal, City and social circles’ and, according to his great friend the journalist James Wentworth Day,

Aside from holding ‘many European secrets’, he was particularly close to Romanian affairs. During World War I, he acted as the legal counsellor to the Romanian ambassador in London, and played a key part in persuading the King of Romania to enter the war on the side of the Allies in August 1916. He was certainly feted thereafter, receiving several decorations from the grateful Romanian authorities as well as the Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish Red Cross decorations in 1922. His company, La Chapelle and Co., was regularly listed in Foreign Office correspondence, mainly as ‘lawyers
in London with knowledge of Romanian law’ and he clearly continued the family’s business interests in Melbourne.

His private life was equally colourful – though not everyone was aware of this. To the outside world, his working life was spent in the City or attending to his European businesses. He retired to his weekend and holiday retreat in Tollesbury, Essex, to pursue his love of ‘punt gunning’ – shooting wildfowl in the Essex marshes. On one occasion just prior to World War I, he was mistaken for a German spy and arrested, and had quite a task to protest his innocence. Known to locals simply as the Count, he was regularly accompanied by his wife Rachel and his daughter to Tollesbury, where they regularly threw parties and entertainment.

However, all was not quite as it seemed. For a start, and following in his father’s footsteps, there was no sign of a marriage to Rachel – probably because he was already married to a woman named Mary Evelyn Paddison, with whom he’d had a daughter in 1888. It looks like his first wife entered a convent in Stamford Hill, Hackney, where she was listed amongst the residents in the 1911 census. At the same time, Octave was living with Rachel and their four-year-old daughter, and claimed to have been married for five years. With no sign of a divorce from his first wife, who survived until 1950, the reasons for the deception – avoidance of bigamy – are perhaps clear.

Another of the Count’s great loves was jazz – and this is where some of the disparate strands that tie Lucy Wellsted and Oldham start to come together. Octave funded his own jazz band that regularly played in some of the emerging London venues. The capital’s jazz scene had really started to flourish after the war, especially when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band toured Britain in 1919. For those elements of society that could afford it, London in the 1920s was the place to socialise. Venues offering dinners, dancing and live music sprang up – tango teas at Murrays on Beak Street, cabaret and fine dining at the Café de Paris in Coventry Street or the Kit Kat Club in Haymarket – and the cares of the war were forgotten in a new breed of ‘nightclubs’ that drew the disapproval of more traditional elements of society who saw jazz as ‘riotous’ and thus dangerous. Many of the trends came over from Europe, so for a frequent visitor to Paris and
similarly racy destinations like Oldham, they were a natural attraction. It is highly likely that Oldham’s visit to Bucharest in March 1921 is significant in this context, either as the moment when they first met, or a mutual point of discussion thereafter.

Thus professional and social interests linked Oldham to de la Chapelle via the European legal and communication networks of the Foreign Office, while Lucy’s former life among the mining magnates from Melbourne to New York and throughout the continent also brought her into de la Chapelle’s circle. The appearance of the de la Chapelles at their wedding suggests a very strong bond between the two couples.

Whoever made the initial introduction, it proved to be successful. Lucy was strikingly beautiful and Oldham was handsome of sorts, judging by a family photograph from 1926 provided in the 1970s by Thomas Wellsted junior. They clearly had plenty to talk about, given their mutual connections, love of the high life and stories gathered from travelling the world. Oldham may well have regaled Lucy and the de la Chapelles with stories from Paris during the Peace Conference or snippets of gossip and overheard conversations from within the Foreign Office. It was the sort of harmless talk between couples that, in the wrong hands, could have been very useful if filed away by a legal mind with a sharp eye for business.

By this stage, Lucy’s eldest son Thomas had already flown the nest – setting out on the SS
Raiputana
on 20 August 1926, bound for Bombay. Aged 22, he had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a mining engineer, practising in one of the few parts of the world where his ancestors had not set foot – India. Therefore the Oldhams’ wedding was a rather small family occasion, graced by the presence of their closest friends.

It is clear that Oldham’s relationship with Lucy had brought him not only a wife and new family, but also something that could not be obtained by his job and background – money. Certainly, some of his ostentatious mannerisms make more sense in this context, such as the ability to afford a car and the annual fee for his club. It also explains an interest in sartorial elegance bordering on the flamboyant. He dressed in matching brown suits, shirts, ties and shoes – many of which had an ‘EHO’ monogram stitched into them. Expensive
taste could only be sustained through private funds, something which Lucy appeared to have in abundance, judging by the fact that the newly married couple purchased an upmarket house in Lucy’s beloved Kensington.

This was a big change from the small terraced house of his childhood that Oldham had lived in so far; his new home, 31 Pembroke Gardens, had been built that year by the Prudential Assurance Company on the site of an old Wesleyan chapel. It was designed using an amalgam of styles that incorporated cutting-edge steel and concrete technology by the company’s chief surveyor GA Coombe and built by James Smith and Sons. Two maids were hired to help around the house or walk the dogs that the couple owned. To complete the trappings of luxury, a Sunbeam Coupe, registration YH6368, was driven by their personal chauffeur Cowley. The car was parked in a basement garage with access to the street through a communal courtyard at the rear of the property. Today, 31 Pembroke Gardens is worth an estimated £3.5 million and even at 1927 prices it certainly put a dent in Lucy’s dwindling inheritance.

As a belated honeymoon, the Oldhams took their beloved Sunbeam to the continent, in July 1928, covered by AA insurance for a ‘tour abroad’ during which they visited places such as Dieppe and Behobia, Spain. Upon their return, two surprises were in store. Perhaps most significantly, Oldham was appointed on 24 August as the Staff Officer for the Communications Department on the retirement of John Gritton. With promotion came a salary increase to the £300 to £400 band. This was a position of real authority within the office as the lynchpin of the operation that provided a connection between the Head and his Deputy – Eastwood and Cotesworth respectively – and the work of the cipher clerks and despatch messengers. It may well have been his rise in social status, coupled with an ‘independent income’ – albeit one that he had married into – that helped to secure a promotion that must have seemed forever beyond him in the rather static world of the civil service. The second surprise was the visit of his uncle Ern, who had arrived at Southampton from Cape Town on the
Glengorm Castle
on 27 August to see his family. To cap a stunning year for the Oldhams, on 6 November 1928 Lucy’s family acquaintance Herbert Hoover secured a landslide victory in the US presidential election, winning 40 of the 48 states.

In the prime of life, with promotion, wealth, a glamorous (if somewhat older) wife and friends in the very highest circles in the world, Oldham must have thought that he was set for a glittering career. He was a trusted senior official, known to politicians and the Foreign Office hierarchy alike, and he played a pivotal role in enforcing national security through the smooth running of diplomatic communications. As 1929 dawned, further promotions were surely his for the taking; unfortunately, this was as good as it was going to get for Ernest Holloway Oldham.

On the morning of 2 October 1929, a fine crisp autumn day in Paris, tenants of a house in the Rue de Grenelle were startled to see a well-dressed young man scramble over the wall of their property, grazing his hands as he dropped into the courtyard below, and demand to be taken to the nearest gendarmerie. His name was Grigori Bessedovsky, the Soviet chargé d’affaires, and he was fleeing his own embassy in fear of his life.

As he explained to bemused officers at the gendarmerie, and later to various assembled journalists from the French press who scented a scandal brewing, he had been summoned from his work by a visiting representative of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party, Boris Roisenman. In front of the embassy staff, Bessedovsky was told that he had to report back to Moscow immediately to give an account of ‘politically heretical’ views he had expressed about the poor treatment of Russian peasants. A heated argument ensued and Bessedovsky refused to comply
with the demands to return, on the reasonable grounds that he would probably never reappear.

This was a period when Stalin was beginning to tighten his grip on the Communist Party and Soviet government, with the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky in 1927 serving as a warning to all. Furthermore, Stalin’s own personal assistant, Boris Bazhanov, had defected on 1 January 1928, eventually seeking asylum in France. Stalin had despatched OGPU agent Georges Agabekov to hunt him down and kill him, although Agabekov failed to achieve his mission. A British SIS agent stationed in Paris, Commander Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, had been granted an interview with Bazhanov from which he was able to compile 140 pages of notes about leading Communist Party members and the way OGPU operated.

Perhaps mindful of the damage caused by another defection so soon after Bazhanov, Roisenman drew his revolver and repeated his commands at gunpoint, instructing the embassy porters not to allow Bessedovsky or his family to leave – hence Bessedovsky’s recourse to desperate measures, forcing his way past his would-be captors and scaling the wall of the residence. He persuaded the French authorities that he had

In the meantime, a squad of gendarmes were despatched to the embassy to retrieve Bessedovsky’s family; the officials were forced to comply, but with the utmost reluctance. William Tyrrell, by now the British ambassador to France and stationed in Paris, alerted the Foreign Office to the incident and sent note of the fact that Bessedovsky was planning to reveal further information about the Soviet regime. The way his family was held hostage was seized upon as evidence of Soviet tyranny, with the confirmation that OGPU were spying on their own officials received with particular distaste. On 6 October, the Soviets issued a statement of their own: Bessedovsky was wanted in Moscow for questioning about the alleged use of public funds for private use – embezzlement – and
that it was not as a result of any difference of opinion with the embassy or official government policy. When the Soviet explanation was also relayed to Whitehall by Tyrrell, it was greeted with the acerbic comment that it was ‘a feeble explanation’.
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