Although Mrs Gray liked having her twenty-four-year-old daughter living with her, in her modest house on the outskirts of Birmingham, by 1931 she had begun to wonder when or whether her eldest was going to find herself a husband. Her daughter’s name was Olga. She was a typist. Mrs Gray, the young woman’s widowed mother, ran a local youth club and volunteered for the Conservative Party. Through this connection she had come to know the wife of her local member of Parliament, Neville Chamberlain, the future Prime Minister, and it was probably through Mrs Chamberlain that, in 1931, Mrs Gray was invited to a summer garden party in the home of the local Conservative Party electoral agent. Rather than attend by herself, she decided to bring her daughter.
Olga Gray was one of the younger guests at No. 21 Clarendon Road that day, as well as being the most striking. With her peroxide bob and hourglass figure, she was hard to miss. She was also quick, curious and strong-minded. Yet beneath her confident façade was an altogether different person, one who was captive to her past.
More than a decade earlier, Olga’s father, Charles Gray, had been killed during the war at the Battle of Passchendaele. The news of his death had hit the Grays hard, yet it had not sent Olga spiralling off into paroxysms of grief. Instead, she confessed many years later to feeling a small sense of relief.
The turning point in her childhood, she later realised, had come several years before the start of the war when her older brother died in a tragic accident. Olga had been just five. Her father never really recovered from this loss. Overwhelmed by grief, he began to lash out at Olga. He wanted her to take his dead son’s place, but he was not sure how. He told Olga to be more like him. Harder. More boyish. Olga started to morph into a tomboy, yet by the time her transformation was complete, her two younger sisters had blossomed into blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls – dainty and pretty and the epitome of everything that Olga was not. Now, her father urged her to be more like them.
He bullied Olga about her looks, telling her that she was either too feminine or not girly enough. She fought back, and a vicious antagonism developed between father and daughter, fuelled, in many ways, by the similarities between them. Charles Gray recognised parts of himself in Olga – the stubbornness, the pride, the primal certainty – and it spurred him on. When his job as Northern Night Editor of the Daily Mail became stressful he would take it out on Olga. He was violent towards her, but never in front of her siblings or her mother, so that when she told them about what had happened, after he had died, they did not believe her.
Fourteen years after her father’s death, Olga Gray was still coming to terms with her childhood and its effect on the way she saw herself. Beneath her frank and sometimes combative demeanour was a person who despaired of her looks and found it hard to make lasting relationships with the opposite sex. She was convinced that nobody would ever find her attractive.
It is unlikely that any of this bubbled up to the surface during the sunny chit-chat at the Conservative garden party in Birmingham, one bright day in the summer of 1931. It certainly did not suit the mood of the occasion. Although the political situation elsewhere in the country was dire, with unemployment close to three million and the new coalition or ‘National’ Government committed to a programme of economic austerity, the mood in the local Conservative Party was upbeat. The venue for that gathering was the home of Robert Edwards, the local Conservative agent, who was confident of success for his candidates in Birmingham at the forthcoming General Election. Amid the happy hubbub of conversation that afternoon there was also the occasional happy yelp from guests playing games on the lawn. One of these activities was clock golf, in which players took turns putting at a flag while moving around the hours of a clock face. At one point that afternoon, Olga agreed to play a round of clock golf with a woman she had got to know at work: an impressive, upright individual called Dolly Pyle.
Though Olga Gray had been a disruptive presence at most of her schools, and had been asked to leave at least one, she had always done well at games. At St Dunstan’s, Plymouth, she had impressed the nuns in charge by becoming captain of the school hockey team. So, she would have been good at clock golf. Who knows, she might have been winning when Dolly Pyle asked a question that would stay fresh in her mind for the rest of her life:
‘I say, old thing, have you ever thought of working for the Secret Service?’1
Had Olga ever thought of this? In all likelihood, yes, but only in a fantastic and essentially abstract sense.
By 1931, espionage novels were fashionable and popular, as they had been for several decades in Britain, yet this was also the dawn of the golden age of spy films. Fritz Lang’s breath-taking Spione, in 1927, had been the harbinger, followed by the first ‘talkie’ from Alfred Hitchcock, Blackmail, and another classic spy caper, The W Plan, directed by Victor Saville. The popularity of spy films and spy novels was such that Olga and many others her age had almost certainly daydreamed at some point about what it would be like to be a spy. But she had never imagined that for someone like her, with her background, her qualifications and her lack of social connections, this might ever become a reality. Spies seemed to operate on some higher plane; they were grander and more debonair than anyone she had ever met. She knew nothing to suggest otherwise. Olga’s understanding of ‘the Secret Service’ was based entirely on fictional representations of espionage. At the time even the name MI5 was classified. To be asked to work for the Secret Service in 1931 was like being invited to star in a film. It felt mysterious, exotic and stupendously unreal – which was why Olga thought Dolly Pyle was pulling her leg.
‘Gosh, Doll,’ she replied, playing along, ‘that sounds jolly exciting.2 I’d love to.’
Only then did she realise that ‘Doll’ was being serious.
In the moments that followed, Olga had to make a life-changing decision. It is possible that she put down her putter.
Though she did not yet know what the work might involve, it would surely mean leaving home – it was hard to imagine there being many state secrets for a spy to guard or steal in the outskirts of Birmingham. In that case, accepting this offer would mean leaving her mother. This might also involve considerable risks to herself and her reputation.
The fictional female spies that Olga had encountered on-screen or read about in books were cast in the mould of the legendary female spy Mata Hari: they were beautiful harlots who used sex as a weapon. ‘Any woman who values her virginity would be well advised to keep away from the spy-business,’ warned one former intelligence officer.3 There was no such thing as a spy novel in which the female agent had a successful espionage career before going on to get married, have children and otherwise lead a happy and fulfilled life. Things did not end well for female spies. By agreeing to Dolly Pyle’s proposal, Olga might be risking her reputation and her prospects; and, at the same time, this dilemma brought her up against her old enemy, her crippling lack of self-esteem. How could she ever play the part of a Mata Hari if men did not find her attractive?
Ultimately, Olga’s curiosity overcame her fear.
She said yes.
The next step, Dolly Pyle explained, was for Olga to meet a man from MI5, who would introduce himself as Captain King.