Maurice Oldfield

Sir Maurice Oldfield (16 November 1915 – 11 March 1981) was a British intelligence officer and espionage administrator. He served as the seventh director of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 1973 to 1978.

Early life Oldfield was born on 16 November 1915 at his grandmother's farm just outside Youlgrave, a village in Derbyshire. He grew up at a house called Mona View in Over Haddon and was the first of 11 children of Joseph Oldfield, a tenant farmer, and his wife, Ada Annie Dicken.

He was educated at Lady Manners School in the nearby market town of Bakewell, before winning a scholarship to the Victoria University of Manchester, where he stayed at Hulme Hall. There, he studied under the historian A. J. P. Taylor and specialised in medieval history. He graduated with a first-class degree and was elected to a fellowship.

Intelligence career During the Second World War, Oldfield joined the British Army. Initially a sergeant in Army Field Security (which was absorbed into the Intelligence Corps in 1940), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in July 1943.

By the end of the war, Oldfield had been promoted to major. In 1946, he was awarded an MBE.

After the war, Oldfield joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6. From 1947 to 1949, he was deputy to Brigadier Douglas Roberts, the head of counter-intelligence, with whom he had served in Egypt during the war. A large explosive device was discovered by officers from Special Branch hanging on railings outside Marsham Court on 13 October 1975. The bomb was near Lockett's restaurant which was directly under Oldfield's flat.

In 1979 the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, asked Oldfield to coordinate security and intelligence in Northern Ireland.

Oldfield died in March 1981, aged 65. He is buried next to his parents and sister in St Anne's churchyard, Over Haddon, Derbyshire.

Legacy

Oldfield was reputedly one of the models for John le Carré's fictional character George Smiley, though Le Carré denied this.

In October 2012, it was reported by the BBC's current affairs programme Panorama, that he had been linked to the Elm Guest House child abuse scandal, supposedly involving senior MPs and security personnel, by the Operation Midland investigation, and a Metropolitan Police informant. The investigation ended without charges, and in 2017 Oldfield was cleared of all allegations of child abuse at Elm Guest House and elsewhere. The accuser in the Operation Midland case, Carl Beech, was subsequently convicted of making up the allegations in 2019.