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.
At the outbreak of war Sir Samuel Hoare was a Conservative MP. He later recalled that in August 1914 he knew nothing of military matters and had no interest in them:
Army affairs I had particularly neglected. Never even a territorial… year by year I had sleepily heard the debates on Army Estimates.14
Although initially commissioned in the (territorial) Norfolk Yeomanry, he had, at the end of 1914, been declared unfit for active service and faced the prospect of being invalided out of the army. During 1915 he was running a recruitment office in Norwich Cattle Market, growing increasing restive and depressed at his misfortune. He therefore sought to pull political strings and find himself a job on ‘one of the remoter fronts where an Englishman might still be required’. In February 1916 a friend at the War Office told him of a possible post in Petrograd. After taking a course of Russian lessons in Norwich, Hoare arranged, through his friends and contacts in government circles, an interview with ‘C’, Captain Mansfield Cumming, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service: