February 28, 2026|Reports

“The Forgotten Spy” – Dr Nick Barratt

Dr Nick Barratt joined over sixty Wickham History Society members on Zoom for the society’s first talk of 2026 on 27 January. Last year Nick spoke to us on Magna Carta — this year he jumped forward seven hundred years to talk about his great-uncle. Not many of us have a great-uncle who was a Russian spy (although of course we may not know), and understandably Nick’s family had “airbrushed” Ernest Holloway Oldham out of the family memory as much as possible.

Ernest was not an endearing person by all accounts, and he and his wife Lucy were determined to live well beyond their means. By maintaining his anonymity, he secured large sums of money from the Soviets in the 1930s in exchange for substantial amounts of copied material from the Foreign Office. An enterprising Russian agent was eventually able to track him down (in a rehabilitation clinic) and, amazingly, moved in with him and may even have ended up having an affair with Lucy.

Despite his increasingly erratic behaviour, it took years before the Foreign Office called in MI5, and their investigation failed to reveal anything. Although the Foreign Office eventually dismissed him without a pension, they closed ranks and refused to allow MI5 to interview him or investigate further. Conveniently for the Russians, both he and, some years later, Lucy apparently committed suicide — Lucy on the day before an MI5 interview.

Although we do not know exactly what was passed on, Nick felt it was likely Ernest was able to give the Russians the “inside track” on the tricky negotiations involved in allowing Germany to re-enter the League of Nations. This may have helped Stalin and Molotov in their negotiations with the Germans that led to the German–Russian Pact, which emboldened Hitler to invade Poland.