Oxford's Master Spy

(First published in Radley News February 2026) By Victoria Bentata Azaz
Oxford’s spies have traditionally kept a low profile, not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the Cambridge spies, who were of course traitors.  However, the city has educated a remarkable number of loyal agents, whose work has led to many unsung victories and even helped win World War II.
The most successful spy was surely Frederick W Winterbotham.  He was born in Gloucestershire in 1897 and joined the Gloucestershire Yeomanry in WWI, being put in charge of training ‘100 Bristol butcher boys’ to handle 100 horses.   His spirits were rather dampened when the army subsequently put his horses on trains to be turned into meat whilst his cavalrymen were issued with bicycles.  He decided instead to fly, joined the Royal Flying Corps, was soon shot down and became a POW for the rest of the war.  However, his experience in Germany and acquisition of the German language was later to prove extremely useful.  
Demobbed, and because all the friends he was planning to go to Cambridge with had been killed, he went to study at Christ Church in Oxford.  On his arrival the Dean, who was keen to re-start the college’s equestrian sports, put him in charge of assembling a beagle pack and teaching the students to hunt and play polo (so there is a possibility that he came galloping through Radley at some point…).  After a short two years he acquired a law degree but working in a solicitor’s office reminded him of his imprisonment and he elected to become a farmer instead. Sadly, farming paid so poorly he eventually had to look for another job.  It was at this point that he was recruited to found the RAF section of the Secret Intelligence Service. 
One of his agents, a Baltic German Baron called Billy de Ropp, turned out to know another Baltic German called Alfred Rosenberg, who was right hand man to a certain Adolf Hitler. In 1934, Billy suggested that Winterbotham invite Rosenberg to London to meet some important people.  Rosenberg was duly impressed and reciprocated (which had been the plan all along).  So the head of secret RAF intelligence was now invited to lunch with Hitler’s top generals, where they openly told him not only the size of their forces, but also of their plans to invade the Soviet Union and precisely how they were intending to do it.
His advice for aspiring agents: ‘Never ask a direct question, talk to them as if you have known them all your life and as though you admire them.’  It seemed the Nazis were longing to talk to people and felt they could talk to the British, not the French or the Italians, but they were great admirers of the British. Charm, it seems, was his secret weapon and so successfully did he wield it, that he was eventually taken to see the Führer himself, by whom he seems to have been rather amused, though he was absolutely clear that Hitler was in total charge and nobody was pulling his strings. This acquaintanceship opened doors to wherever he wanted to go.   ‘All the information that I gathered was given to me on a plate, because originally I was a friend of Hitler’s, or not a friend but I knew the Fuhrer and he had accepted me.’
The only problem Winterbotham had was persuading the British authorities that what he was telling them was true…. 
He wrote several books including The Ultra Secret and The Nazi Connection.  If you want to know more about him, you have only to go to the Imperial War Museum’s website where you can listen to 36 half-hour recordings of him telling his life story. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80007264
If you want to hear more about Oxford’s secret history, gather a group of friends and book a WWII tour of Oxford with me. www.oxfordcitywalks.co.uk