Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

Thanks to this kind couple, Oswald Rayner was already soaring away from Smethwick. By April he had moved into the home of Mrs Sinebrichov, whom he described simply as a widow, and ‘Mrs Donner’s mother’. The Sinebrichov family had been providing Helsinki with fine port for over eighty years; in fact, they owned the monopoly on brewing in the city. They had amassed a superb collection of Old Masters and furniture, which was presented to the nation when Finland regained its independence after the First World War. Maybe Rayner was dining off Sèvres porcelain every night or maybe he wasn’t, but in any case he had flown so high that, sadly, his parents could no longer be expected to understand the social stratosphere he was living in. ‘There has not really… been anything extraordinary to write about – a constant round of dinners, and suppers, and clubs, and private entertainments, and parties of all descriptions…’. He gave an account, which was not intended to dazzle but could not fail to, of the lives of those with whom he was now associating.

Mr and Mrs Uno Donner left Finland on February 20th for Italy. They spent a month at Milano and Florence, thence proceeding to the Riviera – Cannes, Nice, Mentone, Monte Carlo &c… [I] shall… sail for England by the boat which leaves Helsingfors on the 15th of next month. By that time the Donners will probably be in England – that is to say in London. If so I shall go straight to London, and then arrive in Birmingham on the 20th or 21st of May. The Donners would like me to stay at Birmingham for about a fortnight and then to spend a month in Switzerland with them – at Aix-les-Bains… From Switzerland we shall go to Mrs Sinebrychoff’s [ sic ] country house for the summer, where there will be yachting, tennis, boating, swimming, riding horseback &c ad libitum. In the autumn the Donners will probably leave Finland for good, and settle down somewhere in England. For the autumn and winter they will hire a flat in London, and I shall begin studying Greek for Oxford. It will be impossible for me to join the University before January 1908. 6

He was now part of a circle that included ‘Consul Cooke’, and Count Sparre and his wife. Count Louis Sparre was a gifted and famous Swedish artist who had trained as a painter in Paris. He lived in Finland for nearly twenty years and married a Finn. In the last decade he had been a pioneer of Finnish industrial art and design; he had even founded a factory to produce Art Nouveau furniture and other pieces.

When Mr Donner returns to Finland in summer, he will probably visit his father for some time, and I shall at the same time live at Count Sparre’s country house near Borgå. He is an artist and will give me some drawing lessons there.

Oswald Rayner loved his family, but he would never again live in a back-to-back terraced house with a draper’s shop in the front room. At Oxford he would study Modern Languages, and entered the university in October 1907, graduating with Honours in 1910. By that time Prince Felix Yusupov was already at University College, where he occupied rooms on the ground floor overlooking the street – rooms traditionally known, according to the Master, as ‘the Club’, no matter who lived there. It was here in 1909, through a mutual friend, Eric Hamilton (later Bishop of Salisbury and Dean of Windsor), that Oswald Rayner met Felix Yusupov. The three scholars shared a mutual love of languages and would remain close friends for the rest of their lives. Indeed, Rayner would later name his only son ‘John Felix Hamilton Rayner’ as a testament to his two closest friends. 7

After university, Rayner applied for a post with the Times newspaper and, in November 1910, was duly appointed Second Assistant Correspondent in the Paris office at a salary of £150 per year. 8

The following year he moved back to London and embarked on a career in elevated government circles as Private Secretary to Sir Herbert Samuel, Asquith’s Postmaster General. Samuel and Rayner sailed together through choppy waters when, in 1912, Sir Herbert, along with Sir Rufus Isaacs and David Lloyd George, was accused by Belloc and Chesterton of insider trading in Marconi shares (an enquiry later exonerated all three, although there can be little doubt that they successfully conspired to frustrate the process and conceal truth from Parliament). It was during the course of this long and drawn-out episode that Rayner made the acquaintance of Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, with whom he stayed in close contact for at least a decade afterwards.

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.