Tucked away in an unassuming HQ in London’s Baker Street, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was launched in July 1940 as an all-new branch of the UK’s covert world. While MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – later known as MI6) would continue to handle traditional spying, a memo to the Cabinet Office stated that SOE would “coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas”.

However, if it was going to make all that mayhem, this intentionally dubious taskforce would need integrity at its core and a firm hand on its financial tiller. That hand would belong to one John Franklyn Venner FCA.

Strong accounting pedigree

SOE’s zeal for outward-facing havoc contrasted starkly with its internal, structural rigor. Unlike MI5 and SIS, it resembled a corporation, with a Chief Executive, Directors for key divisions and Heads for a variety of geographical sections. While precise details of Venner’s hiring are unknown, his strong accounting background may explain why he came to the unit’s attention.

Born in Streatham in 1902, Venner had accountancy in the blood. His father Edwin was a City-based Chartered Accountant who had trained with the firm Edward Moore & Sons. His mother Ethel, meanwhile, was a daughter of the firm’s founder, Edward Moore. In 1922, one of Edward’s sons and Venner’s uncle, Sir Edward Cecil Moore would become Lord Mayor of London and, the following year, President of ICAEW.

At the time of the First World War, Venner was a pupil at Rugby School. As the war raged, the school’s memorials recorded the deaths in active service of almost 700 former pupils – all officers. Venner also lost two cousins to the fighting. After Rugby, Venner joined Moore’s firm as an unpaid articled clerk, where he was trained not just in the full range of classical accounting disciplines but, crucially, impeccable ethical standards. By 1926, he had risen to Partner and married Margaret Peech, daughter of a steel magnate. A decade later, he became an ICAEW Fellow.

Even though, as a chartered accountant over the age of 30, Venner was deemed to be in a reserved occupation, he was commissioned into the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in 1939, aged 36. Venner would remain an RAAF officer throughout the war and reach the rank of Group Captain.

When SOE came calling, it made ‘Honest John’ Venner its Director of Finance and Administration. This most orthodox of accountants would now be required to support a succession of highly unorthodox plots, right up to the war’s end.

Precise accounting of corruption

At SOE, for the good of the war effort, Venner pivoted his immense financial skills to the facilitation of bribery, corruption and the use of black markets for foreign currency trading.

In a colourful example of how that worked, SOE swept into neutral Portugal and homed in on Lisbon, a city teeming with spies, industrialists, racketeers and bent cops. In April 1941, SOE’s Head of Lisbon Station Jack Beevor reported “a very reasonable chance” of being able to bribe chiefs of the Portuguese International Police to work in SOE interests. “If this could be done,” he wrote, “it would materially assist certain immediate projects in hand."

Typically, operatives would procure foreign currency notes from contacts all over the world and exchange them on the black market for high rates of return. As well as topping up field agents’ wallets and bankrolling operations, a major demand driver was the need to maintain a food chain of foreign currency purses handed to crewmembers of Allied warplanes to help them get by, in case they were shot down overseas. In particular, the SOE needed used, small denomination notes which were hard to find. The last thing an agent stranded in France wanted was a crisp, mint-condition, 100 Franc note to try to buy a loaf of bread or a train ticket.

In an October 1941 memo to Churchill, Venner’s team hailed SOE’s “contribution to the financial munitions of war”, noting that the taskforce had obtained “vast quantities” of currencies by clandestine means to prepare for the brewing Operation Overlord – particularly for stocking up aircrews’ escape purses.

In parallel with managing a dizzying traffic of dirty cash from an array of disparate sources, Venner used his talents to defend SOE as an institution. As a newcomer to the UK’s secret world, SOE had ruffled MI5 and SIS from the word go. While those agencies reported to the Home and Foreign Office, SOE liaised with Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, who had a direct line to Churchill – sparking mutterings of favouritism.

MI5 and SIS were also irked by SOE’s mayhem brief, calling the unit “amateurish” and dubbing it “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. Plus, SOE’s state finance came from a covert funding stream which was not subject to public scrutiny. Eventually, tensions boiled over, and SIS and senior voices in the armed forces formally accused SOE of wasting taxpayers’ money.

Venner came to the rescue. In the ensuing 1942 Williams/Playfair Review – a top-to-tail probe of SOE’s funding model – he showed in a seven-page document and numerous interviews that he had applied stringent, classical reporting and control mechanisms across personnel and expenditure to prevent misuse of funds. While the nitty-gritty of SOE’s work unfolded down in the mud, ‘Honest John’ Venner had ensured that the organisation’s finances were spotless.

A heavy toll

As SOE grew, it hatched even more elaborate ways to fund its global operations, such as trading diamonds and designer watches and liquidating Chinese bank accounts frozen in India. By 1943, it was so effective that it was channelling reams of currency to the RAF to help the service gear up for D Day, planned for the following year.

At the end of the war, SOE itself was liquidated, with Venner on hand to steer the process. Many of its financial records were destroyed, and an official history published in 2000 left the bulk of its dealings in the shadows.

Venner may yet have followed his father-in-law into the highest echelons of the accounting profession. However, in May 1955, he died of a heart attack, aged 52. SOE’s third CEO, Major Colin Gubbins, said: “There is no doubt whatever that those years took a heavy toll on his health, for which the price has had to be paid.”

In the King’s Birthday Honours of 1945, Venner was awarded the distinguished honour Companion of the Order of Saint Michael and St George (CMG). His SOE colleague Bickham Sweet-Escott later wrote: “There were very few harder earned CMGs in the whole war than John Venner’s.”

ICAEW’s Deputy President, Derek Blair says: “I am delighted that ICAEW is delving into its archives and liaising with academic historians to reveal the stories of quiet, everyday, heroism displayed by trainee and qualified members of our Institute in times of international crisis.

“John Venner displayed so many of the attributes ACAs and FCAs still hold dear today – rock-solid integrity, sound governance, creative problem solving, modesty and of course, discretion. It is wonderful that John’s story is finally being shared and his contribution to the Free World is being recognised.”