To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (11 page)

Throughout his employment with Sir Herbert, Rayner was reading for the Bar. He was admitted with Honours in the Bar finals of 1914, and when the war began he joined the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court in September 1914. The Corps had immediately been embodied as a territorial force on the outbreak of war and had initiated a crash training programme for those seeking commissions. Rayner was among twenty-one new recruits to a company under Lt Reggie Trench, who initially described them as ‘an awful rabble’. They were immediately sent off to Richmond Park to begin the basic training that would ultimately lead most of them to service regiments on the Western Front. Rayner appears to have been an exception. In October 1914, a little over a month after he joined the Corps, he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, Interpreter. He was fluent in French, German, Russian and Swedish. It is generally known that Col Francis Errington, the Corps CO, actively resisted attempts by junior officers to transfer out. However, within three months Rayner had been seconded to ‘special duties’ in the Intelligence Department of the War Office.

Quite how and why, in January of 1915, he was given this secondment can only be the subject of speculation. Whether certain linguists like Rayner were simply identified by the War Office and transferred accordingly, or whether he had a sponsor who guided him in the direction of intelligence work, is unclear. He certainly had a number of influential political contacts in Whitehall through his employment with Sir Herbert Samuel, and as we shall see later on, he would not have been the first person to lobby for such a post.

It was while working for the War Office in 1915 that Rayner made the brief acquaintance of another junior officer, one Lt George Hill, who had initially gone to Ypres on the Western Front in a Canadian infantry battalion attached to the Manchester Regiment. Following a serious injury while on a mission in No Man’s Land, the multi-lingual Hill had then been seconded to the War Office’s Intelligence Department. Both Hill and Rayner, like other new recruits to the department, had a four-week course on intelligence work which covered shadowing, methods of using invisible inks, code and cipher systems and lock-picking among other skills. While their time together in London was to be brief, their paths would cross again some three years later when they would be among the first agents recruited to the new Stockholm SIS station run by Major John Scale.

Towards the end of 1915 Hill was sent to Greece, where he was to work with agents behind enemy lines. Not long after his departure, Rayner was also given his first intelligence posting abroad. In November of 1915 he and Major Vere Benet were assigned to the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd, where they were to take up responsibility for censorship. In a memo to Sir Samuel Hoare written shortly after Rasputin’s murder, Vere Benet discusses the nature of their censorship responsibilities and describes what ‘Rayner and I have done, are doing and still hope to do’:

Censorship does not mean reading private correspondence in the spirit of inquisitive curiosity, but is rather a branch of military intelligence, which if rightly used, is of great assistance to the Allies.

…I have avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs (except trade), and passed onto them all such internal matters as espionage and politics. I have impressed on them that my object, besides helping them, is to obtain information regarding the activity of the Scandinavian and neutral countries, whose agents act as intermediaries for German trade… MI8 wrote to me recently, ‘The copies you send are most useful to the Shipping Department of the Blockade and give us an entirely new and fresh lot of Scandinavian names’. Extracts from intercepted correspondence also show the enemy’s appreciation of ‘English Censorship’.
⁹

Despite his claim to have ‘avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs’, it very much depends on how one interprets the words ‘avoided’ and ‘interference’. Benet and Rayner’s definition seems to have meant intercepting Russian communications of all kinds on a grand scale and, when they felt so inclined, sharing some of them with their Russian counterparts without playing any active role in what ensued. The report is also a very firm confirmation of the fact that very little news or information was changing hands between friends and foes alike in Petrograd without Benet and Rayner being in the know. Benet himself states elsewhere in the memo that he has ‘read, censored and made notes on some 28, 000 telegrams since April 1916’.

In wartime the Russian Imperial General Staff gave over part of their offices to the French and British Intelligence Missions. They were housed with various Russian government and police departments in a semi-circular sweep of offices, pierced by an arch over a busy road, overlooking the square in front of the Winter Palace. Almost all the British contingent spoke Russian fluently. Some, like Rayner, were censors. Others were engaged in identifying enemy units on the Russian front. This did not involve camouflage and binoculars. It was a desk job, usually accomplished by piecing together whatever snippets of news reached them from other theatres of war and working out which Germans the Russians must be fighting by a process of elimination.

Samuel Hoare, who had a nice eye for detail, wrote a wry account of what he found when he arrived at the Mission in the spring of 1916.

True to Russian type, the façade was the best part of the building. At the back of the General Staff was a network of smelly yards and muddy passages that made entrance difficult and health precarious. Inside, the bureaucracy showed its unshaken power by maintaining a temperature that in those days of fuel shortage was far beyond the reach of any private house… Our caps and galoshes were left in the keeping of a Finnish gendarme in a stuffy waiting-room. The Finn’s other duty was to bring us tea during the day.

Soon after my arrival, two tiresome events happened in the Mission. One of my galoshes was missed from the waiting-room, and the samovar simultaneously struck work.

Inevitably, the two crises were linked, the galosh having been left to stew in the samovar for several days. Office life, with its hourly glasses of sugar-laden tea, crawled by at a sluggish pace. There were time-wasting formalities when Russians visited the British office and vice versa; according to Russian military protocol, all personnel had to shake hands with everyone in the room on arrival and departure, and must wear swords at all times. The system was almost paralysed by this kind of thing, not to mention other imperatives to stop work.

Upon all public holidays the General Staff was closed, and our office with it… There were no less than fifteen public holidays in the month of May and five on end in the last week of August owing to a perfect covey of saint’s days and national anniversaries… Upon the Church festivals that were not important enough to be honoured with a whole holiday, services of considerable length would be held in the General Staff chapel… Even when the department was working, the hours were uncertain, and it was never easy to make an appointment with a Russian colleague. I remember, for instance, that at the time of my arrival the Quartermaster General, the senior officer of the General Staff, made a common habit of arriving at his office at about eleven at night, and of working until seven or eight the next morning.

Unsurprisingly, co-operation, indeed contact, through work was not so easy to achieve. Those members of the British Mission who already had Russian friends in Petrograd turned to them as a relief from life at the office. Rayner, of course, knew the second richest man in Russia, and it was not long before he and Yusupov renewed their acquaintance.

Yusupov was immensely generous, as only a man could be whose ancestors had been accumulating palaces, furniture, paintings, jewels, serfs, animals, factories, steppes, coastlines and oil fields since the founding of the family by a nephew of Mahomet; and like his great friend Dmitri Pavlovich, he was a great and enthusiastic anglophile. After his first year at Oxford he had invited Eric Hamilton to visit Russia as his guest. Hamilton, a friend of Rayner’s, was quite overwhelmed by the wealth of his host, and his kindness too. He would not have seen the more dissipated side of Yusupov. Oswald Rayner, who probably did, could hardly fail to be dazzled and amused, though it is unlikely that he went native and began to see himself as a Petrograd socialite rather than a British intelligence officer.

Rayner was not alone in the British Intelligence Mission in having friends in high places. Captain Stephen Alley, who shared a Petrograd apartment with Rayner and Vere Benet on the top floor of the Swedish Church Building, had been born forty years ago in the Krivo, one of the Yusupov Palaces in Moscow. His father, John Alley, was an engineer employed in Russian railway construction. Although he had begun life in conditions of privilege by comparison with Rayner, he had wider experience. Many years later he made notes about his early life.

I ran wild on our estate, called Malakhovo, until I was sent to the German school in Moscow, Fiedler’s. I used to travel up by train from Malakhovo with our neighbours the Obolenskis. My father used to take a house for the winter in Moscow and we lived in the Malakhovo house in summer.

Prince Serge Obolenski was a great friend of Felix Yusupov.

This went on until my father’s partner, Colonel John Davis, brought me to England. Apparently I was too old for one class of school, and too young for another.

Alley was fifteen when he arrived in England in the summer or autumn of 1891. It was decided that he would be placed as an apprentice with Dewrance & Co., a London firm, and that his academic education would continue by means of evening classes at King’s College.

It would, of course, have been possible to get a fifteen-yearold into a private school or even a crammer. Either because of business misfortune or illness, things at home in Russia may have been on a financial downturn when Stephen arrived in Britain.

But in 1891 he registered at King’s College to study maths, mechanics, Junior French and Junior German (most likely the lessons at Fiedler’s had been conducted in Russian).
¹⁰
At the time he was lodging at 39 Paulet Road, Camberwell; but for most of the next three years he would stay with a Captain and Mrs Moody in Blackheath.

He was then sent to Scotland to further his apprenticeship in the works of his uncle (also called Stephen) at Polmadie, an industrial suburb of Glasgow which made more locomotives for export than anywhere else in the world. Alley and McLellan at Polmadie were marine engineers and enthusiastic exporters (during the First World War they would manufacture barges for neutral countries).
¹¹
In 1894 he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study analytical chemistry, mathematics and English literature. He was then living at 2 Park Terrace, Ayr and his father was still alive.
¹²
He remained for a year, attending evening classes, and did not graduate, but accepted a job in London representing Alley and McLellan in their offices at 28 Victoria Street. ‘My uncle Stephen put me up for the St Stephen’s Club.’ This was on the corner of Bridge Street and the Embankment, between the Houses of Parliament and Scotland Yard, and the members tended to be civil engineers (from their professional institution a hundred yards away) or Conservative politicians; Disraeli had been a founding father. At home in Russia there seems to have been some family upheaval, for the 1901 census shows that Stephen’s mother, a British subject who had, like him, been born in Russia, was widowed and had come to live with her son in Greenwich.

The firm in Glasgow was also undergoing great changes at the end of the century. In 1898 his uncle Stephen of Alley and McLellan died, and his son, Stephen’s cousin Stephen Evans Alley (who was only twenty-six), took over his share of the business. McLellan retired in 1903 and Stephen Evans Alley absorbed a rival firm, starting to develop the Sentinel Steam Wagon in Glasgow: it would eventually be used in road vehicles as well as railway locomotives.

With the new regime came the inevitable family dispute.

I disagreed with my cousin as to commissions and started my own office in Westminster.

He also joined the Surrey Imperial Yeomanry, whose ‘A’ Squadron was conveniently close to Victoria Street in Pimlico. The following year, with the Russo-Japanese War in progress, he translated the Japanese sappers’ secret manual (obtained in Russian) into English for the War Office.

But there were business problems.

Whilst I was on my own I represented Hodgkinson, Stokers’ tyre lever which I had patented and started pushing, but… the business went wrong and I got into debt. For the time being, I had a partner who helped me and took over my affairs. I went abroad in order to repay my debts.
¹³

In 1910 he went to Russia for three years to help build the first heavy oil pipeline to the Black Sea. This was the period of the Caspian oil boom; the Nobels and the Rothschilds were backing the Russian endeavour to transport oil out of Baku, then part of the Tsar’s empire. Huge fields lay beneath the Caucasus, and Russian oil transported by Shell already accounted for about a third of the world’s production.

On the outbreak of war in 1914, having the rare advantage of being truly bilingual, Alley was recruited by the Military Intelligence Department and sent to Petrograd. On a brief period back in London on leave, he attended a Secret Service course in Russell Square where he was ‘taught the art of counter-espionage and many other things’ by former Scotland Yard Superintendent William Melville, by then MI5’s Chief Detective. Back in Petrograd as part of the British Intelligence Mission, he:

…collected a lot of suitable officers in Russia, all who really could speak the language, and popped them about to keep me informed as to what was happening. Folks at home were apparently not satisfied with the information they were getting and they sent out Sam Hoare.