Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Warnings about future wars were not entirely confined to the shock fiction and drama of invasion literature, however. One of the most influential books of the pre-war period was a tract for the times, The Great Illusion, written in 1909 by Norman Angell, a radical Liberal journalist (later, with the decline of Liberalism, Angell, like Haldane, would become a Labour supporter). Angell wrote at a rather more elevated intellectual level than his fellow Northcliffe scribe Le Queux (Angell edited the European edition of the Daily Mail). His book was superficially a rationalist, pacifist plea that in an increasingly interlocking world, war no longer made economic – or any other sort of – sense. It was, argued Angell, ruinously expensive, never paid for itself, and in the end was as bad for the interests of the ‘victors’ as it was for those of the vanquished.

  Beneath the high-flown prose, Angell’s book, as well as being a high-minded protest against Europe’s gathering militarist clouds, was also a plaintive plea to the powers in Berlin from a British imperialist scared stiff by ever-increasing German economic clout and sabre-rattling. Influenced by the prevailing invasion literature and spy mania that he could read in his own newspaper, Angell was attempting to persuade Germany that, even if it succeeded, invasion and conquest of Britain would merely result in mass impoverishment and starvation, as would any attempt to dismember the British empire – which was a force for stability and prosperity in the world. Essentially, Angell’s argument is a plea for the status quo, and an attempt to deflect Germany’sGriffnach der Weltmacht (‘grab for world power’) by the force of sweet reason. Addressed from a power already in decline to one all too obviously on the rise, it was doomed to failure.

  SPY FEVER: THE BIRTH OF THE SECRET SERVICE

  By 1909, the year that Curties and Le Queux published their lurid espionage warnings, the government – admittedly sluggishly and with laughably few resources – stirred itself to respond to the danger their novels had highlighted. That year saw the birth of the modern British intelligence community. Britain had always had an informal secret service, which tended to wake from long periods of torpor at times of national emergency when the threat of invasion was high: under Elizabeth I’s spymaster Francis Walsingham; under the spy chief of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, John Thurloe; and during the Napoleonic Wars. But in the Victorian age, when Britain’s naval supremacy and empire meant that it felt secure from foreign attack, intelligence efforts were concentrated on the ever-active eruptions of Irish nationalism, combating which was left largely to the Metropolitan Police and its Special Branch, founded in the 1880s. In the empire, military intelligence concentrated on playing what Kipling, in his novel Kim, called the ‘GreatGame’ – a power play to frustrate imperial Russia’s designs against India, the jewel in the British empire’s crown.

  In 1903, in the wake of the less than brilliant conduct of the Boer War in South Africa, a Royal Commission of Inquiry had concluded that military intelligence had been undermanned and underfunded. In response, the War Office had bestirred itself to set up two new departments: MO2, to look after foreign intelligence; and MO3, to keep an eye on domestic affairs – and specifically to counter foreign espionage. These two tiny outfits were the direct ancestors of today’s secret intelligence and security services, MI6/SIS and MI5. A Special Branch detective, William Melville, who had proved very effective in countering Irish Fenian terrorists, was brought in to serve both departments – an indication of their tiny size.

  Melville was the mainstay of the secret service until the formal foundation of MI5 and MI6 in 1909. At first he directed his energies at the menace posed by Russian revolutionaries living in London and even co-operated with his German opposite number – Gustav Steinhauer, the Kaiser’s combined personal bodyguard and secret service chief – against the Russians. By 1909, however, Melville’s active mind was chiefly focused on Germany, whither – espionage being a two-way street – he had despatched his deputy, Herbert Dale Long, on a spying mission as early as 1904.

  There is no doubt that the craze for invasion literature, merging into a panic about German spies roaming every street and dockyard, was the chief spur behind the creation of a more professional intelligence apparatus than Melville could muster. It came about despite the fact that the invasion scare had been discounted in 1908 by a high-powered special subcommittee of the Committee for Imperial Defence set up to consider the alleged threat. The committee was chaired by the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and attended by his top cabinet colleagues and the armed service chiefs. After no fewer than sixteen meetings spread over a year, the committee pronounced a surprise invasion an impossibility. But, despite their reassuring conclusion, public alarm refused to be assuaged.

  PRESS LORD: the influential newspapers of Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, including the EstablishmentTimes and the populistDaily Mail, shaped and articulated the hopes and fears of the elite and the masses alike.

  With Northcliffe– who now owned that voice of the Establishment, The Times, as well as the Daily Mail– whipping it along, and vociferously backed by the Tory opposition, public opinion settled on a demand for the immediate building of eight new Dreadnought battleships – two more than the Admiralty itself were asking for. ‘We want eight and we won’t wait!’ ran the slogan. Faced with such a patriotic campaign, the Liberal government, terrified of being accused of weakness, caved in and agreed to the construction of the ships.

  Meanwhile, a new broom had taken over the direction of intelligence at the War Office. While Henry Wilson was reputedly the ugliest soldier in the British Army, Sir James Edmonds was allegedly the cleverest – a reputation secured by his passing out first in his year among the cadets of Sandhurst, Britain’s leading military academy. Edmonds, who would one day write the official history of the Great War, had lived in France as a child, where he had witnessed the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Like Colonel Chesney (see page 28), he had been much impressed by the efficiency of the German conquest and occupation, which he believed had been assisted by an unseen host of German spies.

  Placed in charge of the War Office’s intelligence department in 1909, Edmonds was almost immediately inundated by a stream of reports from concerned citizens, mainly members of the public who had read invasion literature and believed that they had identified German spies. Much of this spy fever was the work of the ubiquitous William Le Queux, who had just produced his new shocker, Spies of the Kaiser, which, though billed as fiction, was, the author claimed, based on his own private investigation into the existence of ‘a vast army of German spies’. Le Queux passed on the letters and reports from his own vast army of readers to Edmonds, who took them all very seriously – sometimes sending his assistants scurrying down to dockyards such as Chatham and Portsmouth to investigate reports of foreigners and strangers acting suspiciously – and in turn passed them to his boss, war minister Haldane.

  The newly popular Edwardian pastimes of cycling and photography aided the spy scare no end. Hitherto remote parts of the countryside were becoming used to the sight of young gentlemen in tweed caps and Norfolk jackets, swishing silently through their lanes on bicycles, often dismounting to photograph a particularly pleasing view. With a little imagination, such sights were swiftly translated into stories such as the one that appeared in the popular Graphic newspaper in 1908. This reported how a bike-borne trio of German spies had rented a house in rural Essex, from which they had allegedly sallied out to photograph a ‘secretmagazine’ of munitions and even – presumably to allay local suspicion – organized musical evenings around the piano at Ye Old Thatched House Hotel in Epping.

  The dizzy heights of absurdity reached by some of the espionage and invasion fever were not lost on writers with a more developed comic turn of mind than the unintentionally hilarious Le Queux. Invasion literature gave birth to a spoof sub-genre which mocked the wilder fantasies of its parent. In 1909, with scare stories at their height, A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, writing in Punch magazine, had the Kaiser
himself alighting at Basingstoke station and asking for the restaurant. In the same year P. G. Wodehouse penned a whole novel, The Swoop, or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion– a conflation of all previous invasion stories in which the combined armies of Germany, Russia, China, Morocco and Turkey, accompanied by the Mad Mullah from Somaliland, and even pacific Switzerland and little Monaco overrun England, only to be foiled by the book’s eponymous hero. Even Heath Robinson, one of the great cartoonists of the era, got in on the act the following year, publishing an illustrated series on the theme in TheSketch in 1910.

  In spite of the mockery, one important person who did take the dire warnings of spying and subversion seriously was Haldane. Though initially sceptical that his dearly beloved Germany could be employing such underhand methods on a large scale, Haldane allowed himself to be persuaded by Edmonds that there was serious substance behind Le Queux’s claims. Haldane’s credulity was due at least in part to his admiration for the German qualities of thoroughness and meticulous military preparedness, which he had witnessed during a recent visit to Berlin – the so-called ‘Haldanemission’ – in an abortive effort to persuade the Germans to call off the arms race.

  Haldane’s response to Edmonds’s alarm was to set up yet another cabinet sub-committee, chaired by himself, to inquire into the nature and extent of the espionage threat. Like Haldane, the subcommittee members were dubious at first, but allowed themselves to be persuaded by the stream of reports of foreigners behaving strangely supplied by Edmonds and Le Queux, many of them apparently emanating from the fevered brain of the novelist. Even the sober-minded foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was infected by spy fever; he believed that a ‘great number of German officers spend their holidays in this country… along the East and South coast… for no other reason except that of making strategical notes about our coast’.

  Eventually, perhaps to justify their own existence, the subcommittee approved the setting-up of a new ‘Secret Service Bureau’, with a dual brief to monitor the activities of enemy agents at home and to control British spies abroad. In this haphazard and indeed absurd way, as a response to a newspaper scare campaign, the revered modern British secret services, which were to achieve spectacular spying successes over the next century and to survive equally extraordinary fiascos of treachery and betrayal, came into being.

  From the start, the new service’s activities were cloaked in the strictest secrecy. Indeed, the very existence of any British intelligence service was officially denied by the state until towards the end of the twentieth century. The blanket of secrecy was, however, torn asunder early in January 1910 by none other than the ever-busy William Le Queux, who wrote indignantly to the (then Manchester) Guardian, then as now the leading voice of Britain’s Liberal Left, which had cast doubt on the extent of German espionage, claiming that it was a ‘myth’. Cut to the quick, Le Queux openly revealed that a new spy service had been born when he boasted:

  The authorities in London must have been considerably amused by your assurances that German spies do not exist among us, for it may be news to you to know that so intolerable and marked has the presence of [these] gentry become that a special Government Department has recently been formed for the purpose of watching their movements.

  Though strictly guarded, the vaunted secrecy of the new secret service was always open to penetration.

  When founding the new bureau, Edmonds decided to convert the two existing War Office bureaux, MO2 and MO3 (the latter having been renumbered MO5), into two distinct departments with clearly divided responsibilities for foreign and domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence. The department which would become MI6, often called the ‘Secret Intelligence Service’ (SIS), would be responsible for running Britain’s agents abroad. MI5, or the ‘SecurityService’, would counter the threats of enemy espionage and subversion by home-grown traitors both in Britain and throughout the British empire. To head up – indeed, at first, so limited were the available resources, to provide the sole staff members for – the new apparatus, Edmonds chose two remarkable men: one military, Major Vernon Kell, to run MI5; and, after consulting with the Admiralty, the other naval, Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, as chief of MI6.

  SUPER SPOOK: Sir Vernon Kell, first head of MI5, ran Britain’s internal secret service throughout the Great War, dismantling many German spy networks. He stayed in charge until sacked by Churchill in 1940.

  Both men had already been involved in intelligence work. Kell, who was half-Polish, was an intellectual – small, asthmatic and sporting pince-nez – who spoke half a dozen languages fluently. Cumming, in contrast – a bluff, broad, monocled figure, whose active naval career had been brought to an end, ironically, by his seasickness – had once journeyed through Germany in disguise, picking up intelligence titbits despite not speaking a word of German. These two contrasting characters were allotted an office to share at 64 Victoria Street, behind Buckingham Palace and close to where Edmonds’s office was located.

  They moved in in October 1909 and started work. There was no shortage of things for the odd couple to do. Despite the random nature of the often spurious spy stories and rumours that had brought their Secret Service Bureau into being, there certainly was at least one genuine German espionage network at work in Britain – though it was nothing like as widespread as popular opinion believed. Between August 1911 and the outbreak of war three years later, ten German spies were arrested, and six were jailed for espionage. Berlin’s espionage effort was mainly directed at ferreting out Britain’s naval secrets, and many of her spies were centred on naval bases such as Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and Rosyth outside Edinburgh.

  Gustav Steinhauer, the Kaiser’s bodyguard, spymaster and master of disguise, had established his own spy ring largely by the bizarre and rather too blatant method of writing out of the blue from his HQ at Potsdam, outside Berlin, to Germans resident in Britain, asking them to spy for the Fatherland. Since one of Kell’s earliest successes had been to establish an office within the Post Office to intercept suspicious letters to and from German citizens, MI5 soon got wind of the network and monitored it closely. Immediately on the outbreak of war in August 1914, thirty-one members were arrested in one fell swoop. Germany’s intelligence-gathering within Britain was neutralized at a stroke.

  THIRTY-NINE STEPS TO WAR

  The supreme example of spy literature – a thriller which continues to fascinate today – was completed in the summer of 1914, when the events it dealt with were already moving towards the climax of a European, then a world, war. Its author, John Buchan, a Scottish polymath of titanic energy combining the roles of novelist, historian, biographer, statesman and – not least – intelligence officer, had long been worried about the threat from Germany.

  In the summer of 1914, while convalescing from a duodenal ulcer brought on by worry and overwork, Buchan and his family took seaside lodgings in Broadstairs on the Kent coast – an area also favoured by Lord Northcliffe, another Germanophobe, who had taken his title from his home there. Buchan was accompanied by his wife Susan and their six-year-old daughter Alice, who had also been ill, having had a mastoid operation. Though Buchan spent much of the holiday in bed, Alice ventured out, descending a wooden staircase to a private beach on Broadstairs’ North Foreland. She told her father that she had counted the steps and that there were thirty-nine of them. Somehow, the figure stuck in the writer’s head.

  Buchan began writing a ‘shocker’ which became perhaps the most famous spy thriller in history. Repeatedly filmed and staged, The Thirty-Nine Steps owes its enduring popularity to its theme of a single man on the run from two enemies – the British police who believe he is a murderer, and a gang of German spies who know he is the key to undoing their nefarious schemes to plunge the world into war. Many cuts above Le Queux, and more exciting than its only peer in the genre, Childers’sThe Riddle of the Sands, Buchan’s fiction – the first of several books featuring the same hero, Richard Hannay– reflects the febrile atm
osphere of a world plunging into the abyss.

  That abyss yawned wide when the Serb nationalist GavriloPrincip fired his shots in Sarajevo on 28 June of that fateful year, 1914. Although much of the press, the public and even the more sober minds in Britain’s government were concerned to the point of obsession with what they perceived as the growing threat from Germany, there were signs in plenty that not all was well within England either.

  Beneath the placid surface of Edwardian England, seething currents were stirring. The historian George Dangerfield famously alluded to the eddying of these undercurrents in the title of his 1935 book The Strange Death of Liberal England. In this he identified the murderers of that idyll, like the many suspects on board Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, variously as the suffragettes, Green and Orange Irishmen, foreign terrorists, trade unionists, socialists, and the great constitutional clash between Peers and Commons, Liberals and Tories, compromising ‘Hedgers’ and die-hard ‘Ditchers’. In the summer of 1914, all these long-bubbling cauldrons of discontent seemed to come to the boil together.