One of his first jobs was to run Wolfgang zu Putlitz, First Secretary at the German Embassy and the journalist, Jona von Ustinov. Vansittart arranged for Elliott to join MI6. More than any other Whitehall mandarin, Vansittart stood for rearmament and opposition to appeasement." (5) He dined regularly with Sinclair, was also in (less frequent) touch with Kell, and built up what became known as his own private detective agency collecting German intelligence. According to Christopher Andrew, the author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009): "Robert Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office, was much more interested in intelligence than his political masters were.
Vansittart worked very closely with Admiral Hugh Sinclair, the head of MI6, and Vernon Kell, the head of MI5. Vansittart shared Elliott's views on the danger of Hitler and was one of the most senior critics of the government's appeasement policy. Elliott was horrified by what he saw in Nazi Germany and returned to The Hague "with two new-minted convictions: that Hitler must be stopped at all costs and that the best way of contributing to that end would be to become a spy." (4) Nicholas Elliott - MI6ĭuring a visit to Ascot, Elliott was introduced to Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office. It included the largest military parade in the history of the Third Reich.
In April 1939 Elliott visited Berlin and watched the celebrations taking place to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Adolf Hitler. Nevile simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he (Sir Neville Brand) knew me and had been at Eton with my father." (3) (2) "There was no serious vetting procedure. After leaving university he worked briefly in the Netherlands under Sir Neville Bland. He was educated at Eton School and Trinity College. There was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape." (1) His biographer, Ben Macintyre, argues that "Elliott was therefore brought up by a succession of nannies, and then shunted off to Durnford School in Dorset, a place with a tradition of brutality extreme even by the standards of British prep schools: every morning the boys were made to plunge naked into an unheated pool for the pleasure of the headmaster. John Nicholas Elliott, the son of Claude Aurelius Elliott, who taught history at Cambridge University, was born in London on 15th November 1916.
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