The pressure left them, said Antrobus, ‘sweating like pigs, with hair awry and shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks aflame and collars pulp’. Their finished work was taken to a cacophonous adjoining room, where it was typed on noisy machines using wax stencils rather than paper to enable mass duplication. A careworn official checked every document for its sense: ‘Take this back to Room 22, and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe,’ he would shout when he found errors, shouting because behind him dispatch boxes were being slammed shut, before being taken by special messenger to the King, to every Cabinet minister, to departmental heads.3
Because of the incoming and outgoing coded messages, Room 22 had as clear a sense of international events as any other section in the Foreign Office. The latest news of treaty negotiations, conference adjournments, troop movements, armaments contracts, political chicanery, financial hanky-panky, sudden deaths, reprisal raids, incendiary speeches and ultimatums were decoded in that austere, noisy department.
Before the European war the Office had resembled ‘a small family party’, recalled Don Gregory, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1902 and resigned in 1928. But the European war and subsequent worldwide dislocation required huge expansion of Office responsibilities, activities and personnel. ‘Nowadays,’ Gregory lamented in 1929, ‘with its multifarious new activities, its ramifications, divisions and sub-divisions, its clerks and short-hand typists running here, there and everywhere, its constant meetings and interdepartmental conferences, its innumerable visitors, it is tending to resemble a large insurance office or, in times of stress, a central railway station on a bank holiday.’ With the exception of Lord Curzon, foreign secretaries and junior ministers in the Office were notably honeyed in their dealings with officials before 1929. Increasingly thereafter, complained Vansittart, diplomats encountered political chiefs ‘seemingly fresh from elevenses of vinegar’.4
In reaction to this hectic and unmanageable environment, some officials tried to rehabilitate the pace and temper of Edwardian England in the Office. ‘Its keynote was Harmony rather than Hustle,’ said Antrobus. Efforts to revive pre-war poise were personified by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, whom Lord Crawford described in 1927 as ‘urbane, a little more mysterious and stand-offish than most Foreign Secretaries, and moreover getting into the bad habit of making French gestures with very English-shaped hands’. George Slocombe, who met Chamberlain in Geneva and Locarno, likened him to Talleyrand striving to restore ‘the old douceur de vivre’ to a continent rent by war and revolution: ‘from his early readings in European history, Austen Chamberlain had formed, entirely in the tradition of Talleyrand, his own highly personal conception of diplomacy as the guardian of the necessary amenities of life, the custodian of the gracious conventions, the urbanities’.5
The chief of the Communications Department from 1925 until 1940 was Harold Eastwood, a product of Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, and brother of a Conservative MP. Eastwood believed that his staff would work best if he trusted them to do their jobs without his fretful interference: ‘Everyone was treated as a man of honour; he had his work to do, and if he did it well and quickly, it mattered not the least how he did it or, within limits, when he did it.’ There was less change of staff in Communications than in any other Foreign Office department: they knew every speck of one another’s capacity and temperament.6
Eastwood’s deputy Ralph Cotesworth was the son of an Anglican chaplain in Switzerland. His health had collapsed in 1915 while he was a commander in the Royal Navy, and when, after twenty years of encroaching illness, he died in 1937 aged forty-nine, his lungs were found to be rotted away. Cotesworth became a King’s Messenger in 1920, grew expert in the use of ciphers, and was in 1925 chosen as Eastwood’s deputy. Antrobus noted his ‘naval ideas of discipline and duty, large heart and quick sympathy’. Another colleague said with an affectionate tease that Cotesworth’s conscientiousness was ‘appalling’: ‘his quasi-boyish gaiety and his shrewdly humorous outlook’ contributed to the mood of Room 22.7
Algernon Hay, head of the cipher-room from 1919 until 1934, believed in ‘the tonic effect of crusted jokes’. He tried to unify his socially variegated staff by managing them in a ‘gentlemanly’ way. His successor as cipher-room chief was Antrobus, who averred: ‘Clever men, strong men, brave men, even good men, are all more readily come by than your man of the world with a conscience.’ This was all of a piece with a phrase of T. E. Lawrence’s to describe the British Empire: ‘the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing around the world’.8
Men found different ways to slacken the tension of a strenuous day in the Office. Curzon, as Foreign Secretary, prepared for his working day by going to Christie’s auction house and appraising the exhibited artworks that were going under the hammer. Vansittart spent the hour after work every evening playing fierce bridge at the St James’s Club. In the Underground railway carriage taking him home, Sir Owen O’Malley sat knitting woollen socks with purled ribs and basket-stitched heels. Sir Archie Clark Kerr liked talking and thinking about sex. Sir Maurice Peterson never stopped puffing his pipe, and enjoyed living in a converted pub in Belgravia called the Triumphal Chariot. (Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941–5, liked to start his long days with an action-packed Daily Mirror strip cartoon about a private investigator, Buck Ryan.) The encryption and decryption clerks, who worked long hours without break, unwound by chain-smoking and hard drinking. They resorted to the Mine, a drinking-hole in the basement of the Foreign Office run by the head office-keeper and his wife. The bar resembled a shabby French estaminet with just a pair of broad planks resting on upturned barrels. The tolerance of alcoholism in the Office went to the top: it was said in 1929 that Tyrrell, recently retired as PUS, ‘has not done a stroke of work for years, and has sometimes been so drunk that J. D. Gregory had to smuggle him out of the office’.9
One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.
In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.
Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying
