by Andrew Cook
His failure to encounter much suspicion in the populace at large was probably partly because the German of popular imagination, the stiff-necked, pompous, conceited, humourless Prussian, was not yet the butt of popular dislike that he later became. The caricature of a Frenchman, on the other hand, the duplicitous garlic-munching ladies’ man, had been despised since the Napoleonic Wars. National and racial stereotypes prevailed in contemporary discourse at all levels of society and generally went unchallenged. Melville knew France, and the French, so he would not fall for that one; but the Germans were an unknown quantity and their intelligence service was certainly efficient. It was thanks to this that Paris had fallen in 1871.
Nonetheless, Melville must occasionally examine the French way of doing things, and sometimes in the context of a little spying of his own.
In 1904 we were very anxious to get the French bullet ‘D’ for the Lebel rifle. I sent several agents (Frenchmen) to France. They visited the various manufacturing centres but owing to supervision, chiefly in connection with the activities of German and Italian agents, they were unsuccessful.36
In December 1904 his Brussels agent, Hely Claeys, was supposed to set up a meeting with a disaffected soldier from the supplies division of the French war office who seemed ready to hand over samples of the new Lebel cartridges. On Christmas Eve it became evident that arrangements had been bungled, and Melville had to leave London for Brussels at once, thereby missing his traditional annual Christmas party at home. Thanks to him the Brussels meeting did take place, but not until New Year’s Day. As it happened the cartridges were of the old kind, although the new kind could probably be got so the meeting was not entirely fruitless. In the end they were obtained in London ‘and at a very low price’.
But Melville was disappointed at missing an annual family party that was so emotionally important and so unrepeatable. Perhaps this is what made him think he might be putting rather too much effort into this job than was merited by the reward.
He had only one yardstick to measure his salary by: Long, the other MO3 employee who generally worked abroad. But early in January while L was back in England Melville learned that the younger man was to take on an important undercover role in south-east Africa at a rate of pay twenty per cent higher than his own and with generous expenses.37 Melville considered this; and he thought about former colleagues who seemed well off since they left the police; and he asked Davies for a rise in pay to £500 p.a.
It is thanks to this request that we have an estimate of his true value according to his superiors. Colonel Davies consulted Sir Edward Henry, the police commissioner, who wrote confidentially on 21 January:
As you find him really useful might very reasonably recommend him for a rise from £400 to £500 by increments of £25 a year. I think it unlikely that for the same money you could get anyone equally serviceable, trustworthy and experienced. Littlechild no doubt makes a good living – but it has taken him many years to get together his clientèle and he started private business when he was comparatively young. I should doubt Sweeney making anything like the income stated. Whatever he may have made will be swallowed up by law expenses and damages, the outcome of his amazing indiscretion in publishing memoirs.38
The advantage of spreading the rise over a few years is that during that period he cannot well press for further concessions – L’appétit vient en mangeant.39
Davies considered this and wrote to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office, whose department was ultimately responsible for paying the bill.
M has raised the question of his salary, and asks for an increase. He says that old subordinates of his, who have also left the force, are earning better incomes than he is. He quotes ex-Inspector Littlechild whom he states to be earning £1,500, ex-Inspector Sweeney, who only left two years ago and who he says is making £850, and ex-Sergeant Thorpe, who gets £450 from the Russian Government for reporting the movements of anarchists, and lastly he points out that Long gets £500, that is £100 more than he, M, does. This last is an unfortunate circumstance and one which I always hoped he would not discover, to which end I have always paid Long direct. I pointed out to Melville that he must remember that L can be at any time called upon to undertake duty which may lead him into a foreign prison, and that considering the risks he has often run, and will shortly run again, his salary is not so high as it seems. M admitted that L had to run risks, but it evidently rankled that a subordinate of comparatively little experience should get more than he does. He is also anxious about the security of his tenure, and fears that a change of Government might lead to his dismissal, as he has got it into his head that a Liberal minister might disapprove of anyone being employed on such work as he is doing.
His application is that his salary be raised to £500 a year, and that he is to be appointed for five years conditional of course on good behaviour.
I am glad to be able to say that in my opinion M has worked very satisfactorily, and I doubt very much if we could get anyone else for the money who would do as well. He is very resourceful, and has a great capacity for picking up suitable persons to act as agents. Further he has a really good working knowledge of French, which is uncommon in men of his class and is most useful, in fact almost indispensable. His accent would certainly appal you, but he is quite fluent and fully capable of transacting business in French; moreover he can write quite a decent business letter in French.40
Sanderson sent this on to Lord Lansdowne. His covering note remarks
This is an application from ex-Superintendent Melville (who acts as intermediary for communications with the agents employed by the Intelligence Dept.) for increase of salary.
I never supposed that he would remain content with £400 a year. He is a useful man, and I should be disposed to advance him to £450 with a promise of £500 after another year’s service, and a year’s salary in case his employment should at any time be terminated without any fault on his part.41
By the end of the month, Melville had exactly this, and had written ‘a nice letter’ to Colonel Davies expressing his pleasure at the outcome.
Davies himself was having trouble with a Prussian – another disaffected foreign war ministry employee, this time from Munich – whose demands were outrageous. His price seems to have oscillated between £150 (‘I sent him £10 in a moment of weakness’, admitted Davies) and the enormous sum of £7,500, which Davies saw fit to follow with two exclamation marks. ‘I strongly suspect he is a fraud, and we shall lose our £10.’42 Finding trustworthy agents abroad was extremely difficult; Melville, since meeting the man in Brussels, was learning that all the French ex-soldiers who volunteered to impart secrets told the same story. He grew sceptical.
I found them generally very logical, but brimming over with suggestion. They offered their services to us in consequence of bad treatment while in the army. In fact, it became a matter of revenge. It was noticeable, too, that many of them told the same sort of yarns. It looked to me as though they had been coached in this direction. Above all, I found their great desire was to learn what we wished to know. In the result, after due consideration, none of these volunteers were employed.43
Nonetheless, agents must be found. Davies’s letter, in a mysterious postscript to the German story, mentions contacting the Japanese military attaché. The Foreign Office wrestled with questions about whom could they trust, and indeed where they most needed agents. In the autumn two memoranda were drawn up within the intelligence division. One was about ‘Secret Service in the event of a European war’ and the other ‘Secret Service arrangements in the event of a war with Germany’. It seemed that in the latter case, ‘the present is not a good moment for taking any active steps towards the organisation of a service – there is too much suspicion of our intentions’.44
It was mutual. Several times in his first few years of intelligence service Melville brought up the matter of German spies in England. Early in 1905, with a new Aliens Bill in the offing, the Home Office asked the Government to add a
clause intended to put spies off. The Prime Minister was not convinced since, as Sir George Clarke wrote to Mr Chalmers at the Home Office in February
…he doubts whether this could act as an effective deterrent. He thinks that it is desirable that these people should be watched by the local police as much as possible. Could you take steps to carry this out?45
Like Melville, Mr Chalmers had no faith in provincial police. Unlike Melville, he could see no possible way to sharpen their perceptions. He foresaw little in any attempt to involve them except bureaucratic time-wasting, inter-departmental squabbles over who would pay the bill, and smart Germans running rings round a bunch of plods.
…The German officers can be watched, but there are some preliminary difficulties I must talk over with you. We could send down a Met detective because the Met police are under the Home Office. You must first tell us where the [German] officers are and then if a Met officer is not to hand we can discover whether they are in the jurisdiction of the county or borough police. In either event we have no control over the local police and can only ask as a favour that they will watch the Germans. Probably the Watch Committee (or standing joint committee) will want payment, in which case the Treasury will have to find the money.
As to sending a person to discover what can be found out, I think it would require expert knowledge… The Germans of course are military experts.46
It was a bleak conclusion but the matter arose again at the end of the year when one of Melville’s reports made it to the desks of Lord Lansdowne, Mr Chalmers and Sir Edward Henry. Melville had spent several days in the middle of November investigating a German who had been staying at a Suffolk farm, having paid for a three-month course in agriculture. He made his way there – and to one fresh from Victoria Street, the place was in the middle of nowhere – and found that the German (a heavily built six-footer with sabre-cuts from duelling) had left only a week before.
Melville interviewed the farmer, Mr Smith (‘a very intelligent man and by the way an Imperialist’):
Mr Smith noticed that Mr Hederich knew quite as much about farming as he did, and also that he paid little attention to it. Smith said that he had now no doubt that Hederich was a spy… he drove much around the country and always took the German with him. Latter was persistent in asking and learning the names of roads and where they led to, the names of parishes, churches and mansions. They generally went to Ipswich perhaps twice a week and there the German left him and went around the town visiting the park, the docks and the vicinity. At Ipswich Hederich also bought a map of the country and made a trip by steamer from latter town to Clacton and back.
When at home (Hall Farm) he always retired to his bedroom immediately after luncheon and remained there till dinner, but he never made any reference as to how he occupied himself in the interval… He informed the Smiths that he was an officer in the German Army, they thought in the cavalry.47
In view of Hederich’s trips to nearby ports, Melville concluded grimly ‘no doubt he has returned to Germany with a complete map and valuable information of that part of the country and coast and the fortifications at Harwich and in the vicinity’.
To be fair to the police, there was not much they could do about tourists sketching and measuring picturesque features of the shoreline. Without proof of ‘intent to communicate… to a foreign state’,48 which was almost impossible to get, there was nothing illegal in it. But Melville would argue that this wasn’t the point; the idea was to let potential spies know that their curiosity did not go unremarked and that the police were vigilant. It was the prevailing lack of guile, the open-faced innocence of ill intent, which was so English and so irritating.
On 21 November Melville wrote another report. In the course of the Hederich enquiry he had come across two other East Anglian farmers who had played host to young Germans anxious to learn, thereby introducing them in good faith to the local community. It didn’t smell right.
Learning farming is out of the question as the Germans consider they are far ahead of Englishmen in that direction. No doubt they are; one has only to travel in Germany to see this.
While at Woodbridge I also learned that a volunteer Chaplain, the Reverend J. Garforth, had written to the East Anglian Daily Times warning the population of Suffolk as to the espionage being carried out by Germans.
Melville tracked down the Reverend Garforth, a former Army officer of sixty-five, quite quickly, and heard an astonishing story.
A friend of his had last summer been enabled to visit a military college in Germany and found that the thesis a number of students was working out was Having landed an army at Hastings, give a sketch showing the characteristics of the country, the names of the roads, villages and towns to be traversed en route to London.49
That this had been reported by ‘a friend’ does not seem to have rung warning bells. There was a party of extreme paranoia at this time – the Legion of Frontiersmen, who saw Prussians behind every hedge – and this is the sort of story they would have told, but Melville was not sceptical. Instead he put Garforth’s account into his report and suggested that confidential instructions should go from the Home Office to the chief constables of all maritime counties pointing out that there was a problem and their men should maintain a discreet look-out.
Lord Lansdowne of course thought that was perfectly reasonable.50 Mr Chalmers picked up his pen with a sigh. Of course the Home Office could write letters to County policemen, but
They would have to act through the village sergeant or constable I suppose.
There is a further difficulty. All the fortified places on the coast are under borough police who are under the borough (or city) watch committee. The county police cannot of course act in the borough and the borough police are usually not high class. You would probably have some stupid muddle or row arising.
PS Some months ago we wrote to War Office to above effect.51
The Home Office probably assumed that little of importance could be learned by mere casual observation and notation of arrangements which were, after all, open for all to see. Melville would be spy-watching for a good while before action was taken.
Nor had he forgotten the Russians. It was perfectly all right for his former subordinate, ex-Sergeant Thorpe, to work for them against nihilists in London; Thorpe had retired from the Yard in 1900 and worked to the Okhrana agent in London, a Frenchman called Farce. Farce lived in Hammersmith and was married to an Englishwoman. But since the mysterious affair of Mitzakis in 1900, Melville was no longer prepared to believe that all Russian agents were of friendly intent and he put himself out to track their present movements.
In 1902 Rachkovskii had moved from his Paris headquarters at the Russian Embassy, 79 Rue de Grenelle, to Brussels where he appeared to have retired on a pension. Milewskii, who worked for Rataev, had died. Melville had met Rataev before he left Special Branch, when in Paris with the King. In November and December 1904 he made notes on all of them, and in May 1905 he filed notes from memory about the physical appearance of Okhrana agents in Europe including Mitzakis, Harting, Rachkovskii, Golschmann and Rataev.
In February of 1905 the matter of Mitzakis, the mysterious Russian with influential friends, arose yet again, and in that month Melville wrote a full report headed ‘Russian Spies in London’. Mitzakis had long ago in 1899 moved into an apartment at 9 Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, before taking over the whole house and leaving it empty, apparently for occasional use by the embassy as a safe house. He now lived there again.
He has been on the continent for two to three months, being home only about a couple of weeks. He is a director of the Chatma Oilfields Co. Ltd, the office of which is at 1 Charing Cross. This company was formed in November 1902. Its property is at Chatma near Tiflis in Russia, and consists of naphtha springs.
The nominal vendor was a Mr Mathias of 67 Park Place, Cardiff, but Mitzakis was mixed up with the company’s business from its inception and there is little doubt that he was the principal in obtaining the
concession from the Russian Government. In June 1903, Mitzakis was appointed a director of the company. Among other directors are Lord Armstrong, Sir A. Noble, Bart., and Colonel W.A. Tufnell.
There is no doubt that Mitzakis was, up to about two years ago, in the employ of the Russian Government as a spy and it may be assumed that he is still, and that when recently on the continent he was so engaged.
Melville’s report has a page missing, but it concludes:
He professes to be an LLD, is keen at business thoroughly unscrupulous [sic], by nationality I believe a Greek and has all the cunning of his race.
It is not unlikely that Mitzakis might have been mixed up with the Hull business as he speaks English fluently.
What ‘the Hull business’ was, we shall never know. Melville’s memoir is silent on the subject.
NINE
SHIFTING SANDS
It was stated the other day, on Russian authority, that ex-Superintendent Melville, the famous detective, had joined the Czar’s secret police. The Russian police, it was declared, are to have the benefit of Mr Melville’s unequalled experience, and the alleged appointment was generally looked upon as the highest compliment that could be paid to a man of even his great reputation.
We learn that the report is unfounded. In a letter to the Daily Express Mr Melville says:
Permit me to state that I am still in London, quietly enjoying what, after thirty years of occasional excitement, I consider to be my well-earned retirement, and that now, like most people, I am content to follow revolutionary movements through the medium of my daily paper. Further, I may add that after an almost life-long and I hope honourable career in the public service, the assertion that I have entered the service of another Government, which service may at any moment bring me into conflict with my own country, is at once unfair and offensive.