The Abingdon Foundation, Park Road, Abingdon, Oxford OX14 1DE 01235 521563 • Edited by Julia Cooke – [email protected] 01235 849123 • Design – [email protected] Abingdon Out of the Past @abingdonschool @abingdonschool @abingdon_school linkedin.com/school/abingdonschool This defection was just a few months after the recent graduate Royd Barker joined the School as Director of Music. OAs of the 1950s always held that he worked for MI5. Whether he was working for them in the early 1950s who could tell but, according to Nigel West’s Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, Barker ended his career as Deputy Head of the Security Service (MI5) 1981-83. The 1954 Common Room, Royd Barker back row second from right As an excellent school, of course we have an interest in intelligence but the recent publication of Just Hugh, a portrait of the distinguished Arabist and School benefactor, Hugh Leach (OA1953), prompted thoughts of members of the Abingdon community with an interest in another kind of intelligence. Between 1959 and 1961, Leach served as a Desert Intelligence Officer in Muscat and Oman for which he was awarded an MBE (Mil). His intelligence role continued in his next posting as Political Officer in the West Aden Protectorate 1963-67, after which he joined the Foreign Office. As a fluent Arab speaker, Leach spent the rest of his career in the Middle East and was awarded an OBE on his retirement. There was an earlier OA with a similar interest in the Middle East. Herbert William Childs (OA 1886) was named in Dr John Fisher’s book, Gentleman Spies – Intelligence Agents in the British Empire and Beyond (2002), as someone who travelled widely throughout Asia Minor between 1909 and 1920 gathering information for the British Government. Another OA with an interest in intelligence is Ben Macintyre (OA 1983) author of Rogue Heroes, recently serialised by the BBC, and of Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle published last year. Several of Macintyre’s books are concerned with spies and spying including Agent Sonya (2017) in which Ursula Kuczynski, alias the Oxfordshire housewife Ruth Werner, turned out to be Klaus Fuchs’ handler passing his nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union allowing them to build their own atomic bomb. Fuchs at one time lodged in Lacies Court, the Headmaster’s house, at that time let out as a guest house. Fuchs wasn’t the only nuclear scientist with a connection to Abingdon School. The formation of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in 1946, and the creation of the Harwell estate on the other side of Bath St, meant that many of the scientists sent their sons to the School. This included Gil Pontecorvo (OA 1950) son of the nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo. It was Gil’s failure to return at the beginning of the Michaelmas term 1950 that as much as anything else set off the world-wide search for his father who had defected to the Soviet Union. A School with an Interest in Intelligence Gil Pontecorvo back row left
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