Cast Iron Ranges How AGA Became an Icon
and saboteurs at Camp X, ocially Special Training
School 103, a top secret British training school on the
north shore of Lake Ontario in Canada. ere, he
said, he was taught the tricks of the trade: how to
follow people without being observed, how to blow
up bridges and how to kill a man with his bare hands.
Instead of being parachuted behind enemy lines, as he
expected (or, more likely, feared), Ogilvy was placed
in charge of collecting economic information from
Latin America, to assist BSC agents in foiling
businessmen known to be working against the
Allies by supplying Hitler with strategic materials.
Ogilvy’s basic job, according to intelligence
expert Richard Spence, was to spin polling
information considered harmful
(or helpful) to British interests. BSC wanted results
that would steer opinion toward support of
Britain and the war – front-page sto-
ries that showed people were more
interested in defeating Hitler
than staying out
of war.
Spymaster Stephenson put
on record his high regard
for Ogilvy’s abilities –
“literary skill, very keen
analytical powers,
initiative and special
aptitude for handling
problems of extreme
delicacy,” adding that
“David not only made a good
intelligence ocer, but he was
a brilliant one”.
Francis Ogilvy
David Ogilvy was not alone. While he was at BSC,
his elder brother, Francis, was working in British
intelligence. He made a memorable impression on
one assignment in Scotland. Hyde talks about Francis
arriving “complete with black hat and striped trousers,
in a remote Scottish village, and, on asking the post-
master if he would accept two parcels of stores, was
promptly handed over to the police.”
Safely extricated from police custody, he went on to
serve in a less conspicuous but more inuential role.
When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940,
he dened one of the requirements for his sta as the
ability to write well, listing among several candidates a
professor of English at Oxford and “that man who’s
writing the bombing reports”.
It was Francis Ogilvy’s reports that Churchill had
been reading. For most of the Second World War,
Squadron Leader F. F. Ogilvy lived in the Cabinet
War Rooms, where he was on watch every night.
Kenneth Roman adds: “As he described it, you’d get
to sleep at some unearthly hour, the Old Man would
come down, shake you and dictate – not verbatim as
one would to a secretary, but in broad general terms,
outlining what he wanted to say, leaving it to the
transcriber to do the actual writing, in Churchillian
style. I want a cable to Roosevelt, Churchill might
say. Copy to Stalin, copy to the Joint
Chiefs of Sta. en he would
outline his ideas. ‘And have it
ready for me at breakfast’. ”
Francis Ogilvy believed,
when he started the
job, that he had some
talent as a writer. He
later said: “I realised I
couldn’t. But by the
time he [Churchill]
nished shouting at
me and educating me,
by the end I thought
perhaps I could.”
By 1945 he was back with
W. T. Wren working on
launches of the AGA cooker and
Rayburn cooker and helping his brother
set up the New York branch of the advertising agency.
e brothers remained close, with David writing
to Francis almost weekly to discuss personal and
business issues, including a paper proposing
irty-Nine Rules for advertising copywriters.
Kenneth Roman writes: “With his paper, [David]
Ogilvy took credit for reorienting Francis’s agency
away from “poetry, typography and nonsense” and
“an opportunity to patronize ne writers, modern
writers and typographers.” q
THE WAR YEARS
W. T. Wren
e rst documentary evidence of W. T. Wren having
le AGA Heat Ltd to play his part in the Second
World War comes in an executive minute in which
it is agreed that his salary and bonus would –
reassuringly – be paid on the same basis as if he were
still carrying out his duties with the company.
Upon Wren’s return to the company in 1945 he is
referred to as Colonel Wren. Sources then mention
him being involved in dierent ways during the
war, most oen as an MI6 section V ocer
(counter-espionage) and eventually as Head of the
Security Branch in London of British Security
Coordination (BSC).
While Wren seems to have ended the War based in
London, he is recorded as having lived in Trinidad for
several years in the early 1940s as MI6 head of station
there. He travelled a lot, and is recorded as having
been in New York oen, as well as in Sweden (1939
and 1940), Canada (1942), and was in charge of
operations in Spain by 1943.
David Ogilvy
According to his biographer, Kenneth Roman,
David Ogilvy also worked for British Security
Coordination (BSC). In his book, e King of
Madison Avenue: David Ogily and the Making of
Modern Advertising, he writes that Ogilvy had been
moonlighting since 1939 as an adviser to the British
government on American public opinion. In 1942,
with the United States now embroiled in the Second
World War, he went to work full time in British
military intelligence, initially in New York. His new
boss in the spy business was Sir William Stephenson,
head of BSC and the central gure in covert
operations involving Britain and the United States in
the years leading up to the war. BSC was to represent
all British intelligence services in the Western
Hemisphere. A compelling personality, Stephenson
became a model for Ian Fleming’s famous secret
agent, James Bond 007.
Kenneth Roman writes: “A small man with piercing
blue eyes, the strong-willed Stephenson – Ogilvy
described him as “quiet, ruthless, and loyal”– took
on the dicult task of combining propaganda for
the British cause with intelligence work and
counterespionage and carving out a working
arrangement with American intelligence within
the limits of the Neutrality Act.
“Stephenson was not a professional spy, nor were
many of the people he recruited. His unlikely team
was largely comprised of enthusiastic amateurs
whose names and faces were not known to enemy
intelligence agencies. e team included actors Leslie
Howard, David Niven and Cary Grant, the movie
director Alexander Korda, author Roald Dahl (who
would later assist on a history of BSC) and Noel
Coward.”
“[David] Ogilvy was perhaps the most remarkable of
the younger men to join Stephenson’s BSC,” wrote
the man who recruited him, Harford Montgomery
Hyde in his insider’s book Room 3603.
He started his new job by attending a course for spies
a VErY sEcrET sErVicE
Called away from their work at the outbreak of the Second World War,
W. T. Wren, David Ogilvy and his elder brother Francis Ogilvy found
themselves volunteering for the murky world of counter-espionage…
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