Odd People
Page 1
To my colleagues, whose tact and unselfish devotion averted many dangers
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
1. THE DETECTIVE IN REAL LIFE
2. THE IMAGINATIVE LIAR
3. THE LURE OF SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
4. THE FIRST DAYS
5. THE SPECIAL BRANCH
6. WAR CRIMES
7. THE GERMANS AND THE IRISH
8. THE CASEMENT CASE
9. STRANGE SIDESHOWS
10. THE GERMAN SPY
11. MULLER AND OTHERS
12. THE HIRELING SPY
13. THE LAST EXECUTIONS
14. SOME AMERICANS
15. WOMEN SPIES
16. CURIOUS VISITORS
17. THE END OF RASPUTIN
18. RECRUITS FOR THE ENEMY
19. THE DECLINE OF MORALE
20. THE BOGUS PRINCESS
21. FOOTNOTES TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE
22. THE ROYAL UNEMPLOYED
23. UNREST AT HOME
24. OUR COMMUNISTS
25. THE RETURN TO SANITY
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
BASIL THOMSON WAS an astonishing character and a dominant figure within the British intelligence community for a period that covered the First World War and the subsequent, and to a degree resultant, growth in support for left-wing ideas. As the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, Thomson was in charge of hunting down German spies, in tandem with MI5, and, in the three years following the war, communist subversives within the trade unions. He dealt with some of the most interesting spies and traitors of that period, including the infamous female spy, Mata Hari, and Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist hanged for his attempt during the First World War to get the Germans to support a republican uprising.
Queer People, as this book was originally called (we have changed the title for obvious reasons), remains a rollicking read. Thomson provides a fascinating account of the main stories from that period. His dismissal of the various spy scares propagated by military intelligence and its successors in MI5 is entirely appropriate, albeit in part the result of an intense rivalry. Thomson held ambitions to take charge of a security and intelligence service which would absorb MI5 under his control. Although it was largely MI5 which uncovered the German spies sent to Britain ahead of, and during, the First World War, it was Thomson who arrested and interrogated them. His account here reflects a number of the common prejudices of the period, including Thomson’s reference to Casement’s homosexuality as ‘obsessions’ which could only have been induced by some form of madness. Thomson supposedly cannot bring himself to use the word ‘homosexual’, although he unscrupulously used Casement’s diaries to smear him ahead of the trial. Similarly, Thomson’s description of his interview with Mata Hari is underlain by what seems now to be an incomprehensible degree of misogyny in his dismissal of the effectiveness of women as spies, particularly given the fact that their effectiveness in that area is now generally accepted, and used, by the world’s intelligence services. Nevertheless, it was a common view which Thomson shared with his rivals in MI5.
It is inevitably the stories of the spies he met which generate interest, but Thomson was an extraordinarily colourful character in his own right. The son of a future Archbishop of York, he was educated at Eton and then went up to New College, Oxford. Suffering from severe depression, he quit after two terms and went to America to find a new life, before joining the colonial service and working in Fiji first, then Tonga and finally New Guinea. Thomson returned to Tonga in 1899 to successfully fight off a German attempt to gain control of the islands.
After a spell as governor of a number of prisons, including Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs, he was appointed to the post of Assistant Commissioner in charge of criminal investigations at Scotland Yard, becoming Director of Intelligence in 1919. His ambitions to take over MI5 operations, and his thoroughly justified dismissal of their effectiveness during that period, ensured him many enemies, as did his efforts to root out left-wing elements within the post-war labour movement. This ultimately brought about his downfall. He was sacked in 1921 on the insistence of Prime Minister Lloyd George, ostensibly because of IRA graffiti daubed on the walls of Chequers (the Prime Minister’s newly acquired country residence) and brought to public disgrace by an incident in Hyde Park in 1925 involving the well-known prostitute Thelma de Lava. His friends insisted it was a sting aimed at discrediting him and there remain good grounds for suspecting they were right. He died in March 1939.
Michael Smith
Editor of the Dialogue Espionage Classics series
October 2014
PREFACE
MY READERS WILL be divided between those who think that I have not told enough, that I have told too much and that I had better have told nothing at all. I bow my head to them all.
The list of those to whom my thanks are due is too long to set out in a preface. It would include the names of my admirable staff, of sailors, soldiers and civilians of many countries besides our own in almost every walk of life and even of a few of our late enemies. No drama, no film story yet written has been so enthralling as our daily repertory on the dimly lighted stage set in a corner of the granite building in Westminster. In a century after we, with our war-weariness, are dead and gone, the Great War will be a quarry for tales of adventure, of high endeavour and of splendid achievement; when that time comes even some of the humbler actors who play their part in these pages may be seen through a haze of romance.
My thanks are due to Mr Milward R. K. Burge for permission to use his verses on the Hotel Majestic during the Peace Conference.
Basil Thomson
London, 1922
CHAPTER 1
THE DETECTIVE IN REAL LIFE
IF I WERE asked what were the best qualifications for a detective I should say to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. That, perhaps, is because I happen to be an indifferent jack-of-all-trades myself and I cannot remember any smattering that I acquired in distant corners of the earth that did not come in useful at Scotland Yard.
Other countries try to make specialists of their detectives. They would have them know chemistry, surgery and mineralogy; they would have them competent to appraise the value of jewels, to judge the time a corpse has been dead, or how long a footprint has been impressed upon damp earth. They forget that there is a specialist round every corner and that a detective who knows his work knows also where to find a jeweller or a doctor or skilled mechanic who will give him a far better opinion than his own. All that they succeed in doing is to furnish a very alluring laboratory for the edification of visitors and saddle themselves with a host of theorists who make a very poor show by the test of the statistics of discovered crime.
Real life is quite unlike detective fiction; in fact, in detective work fiction is stranger than truth. Mr Sherlock Holmes, to whom I take off my hat with a silent prayer that he may never appear in the flesh, worked by induction, but not, so far as I am able to judge, by the only method which gets home, namely, organisation and hard work. He consumed vast quantities of drugs and tobacco. I do not know how much his admirable achievements owed to these, but I do know that if we at Scotland Yard had faithfully copied his processes we should have ended by fastening upon a distinguished statesman or high dignitary of the Church the guilt of some revolting crime.
The detection of crime consists in good organisation, hard work and luck, in about equal proportions; when the third ingredient predominates the detective is very successful indeed. Among many hundred examples the Voisin murder at the end of 1917 may be cited. The murderer had cut off the head and hands of his victim in the hope that identification woul
d be impossible and he chose the night of an air raid for his crime because the victim might be expected to have left London in a panic; but he had forgotten a little unobtrusive laundry mark on her clothing and by this he was found, convicted and executed. That was both luck and organisation. Scotland Yard has the enormous advantage over Mr Sherlock Holmes in that it has an organisation which can scour every pawnshop, every laundry, every public-house and even every lodging-house in the huge area of London within a couple of hours.
I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department in June 1913. The late Sir Melville Macnaghten, my predecessor, who wrote his reminiscences, held the view that the proper function of the head of the CID was to help and encourage his men but not to hamper them with interference. He had an astonishing memory both for faces and for names: he could tell you every detail about a ten-year-old crime, the names of the victim, the perpetrator and every important witness and, what was more useful, the official career of every one of his 700 men and his qualifications and ability. Unlike my predecessors, I had already a wide acquaintance among criminals, chiefly those of the professional class. To read their records was to me like looking at crime through the big end of the telescope. At Dartmoor I had 1,200 of them, nearly all professionals with anything from one to thirty previous convictions. There were Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Englishmen, with a good sprinkling of foreigners, some of whom had come to England when their own countries had become too hot to hold them. When you read of crime in the magazines or the detective novels it is nearly always murder. You have to be in charge of a prison in order to realise that the murderer is rarely a criminal by nature at all. But for the grace of God he is just you and I, only more unlucky. For the real criminal you have to go to the crimes against property. Most murders are committed without any deep-laid plot, whereas the professional thief or forger or fraud has carefully planned his depredations before he sets out to commit them: the murderer is repentant and is planning only how he can earn an honest living after he is discharged; the others are thinking out schemes for fresh adventures.
Criminal investigation was not quite what I expected to find it. The department was well organised, though perhaps a little rusty in the hinges. The danger of centralisation had been realised long before. London had been divided into twenty-one divisions, each with a criminal investigation staff whose business it was to know everything about its portion of the huge city. These divisional staffs dealt with all the ordinary crime that occurred in the division: it was only the graver crimes or those that were spread over several divisions that were taken up by the staff of the Central Office. In such cases it was usual to detach a Chief Inspector to take charge of the inquiry. Every day we received a thick bundle of forms in which every crime, however small, committed in London during the previous twenty-four hours was reported. The graver of these formed the subject of a separate report and there was the excellent practice of making a detailed report upon every suspected crime as soon as it occurred, because one could never tell into what it might develop.
The Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard is not responsible for the crimes committed out of London, but by an arrangement with the Home Office a chief constable may ask the department for help to unravel any serious crime committed in his area without any cost to the local authority. That this permission is not always acted on is due less to the very natural amour propre of the local force than to the difficulty in determining what difficulties lie ahead. The larger cities have, moreover, efficient detective organisations of their own: most of them have sent men to be trained in the Detective Classes at New Scotland Yard; these have greatly distinguished themselves in the examinations.
The training of detectives was almost entirely legal and, as far as it went, it was admirably done. It was essential that they should know the rudiments of the criminal law as well as the procedure of the criminal courts, otherwise they were bound, sooner or later, to commit some solecism that would incur the comments of the judge. But on its practical side their education was neglected. Very few were craftsmen and if it came to making an exhaustive search of a house they might be expected to look conscientiously in all the obvious places and make no search for such hiding-places as a short board in the floor or the space behind the wainscot; probably none of them had ever watched a house in the course of erection. It is only by experience and by failure that real proficiency in the matter of searching is acquired. Nor were they taught any uniform method of description. The average police description was a very colourless document, for in any crowd one might find a dozen men with a ‘fresh complexion, blue eyes, brown hair, oval face and medium height’. Such matters as peculiarities of gait and speech were very often omitted. They did not always know the trade names of articles of clothing or plate or jewellery, nor could they distinguish between real stones and pearls and their counterfeits. The more intelligent picked up these things by experience, but the others did not. Many of them seemed to me to be unimaginative in the matter of observation; at any rate, they seemed seldom to follow a man without his becoming aware of it. On the other hand, they were admirable when it came to dealing with the public. Their courtesy never failed and naturally it brought them much help from the people living in their locality.
I soon found that the London detectives were naturally divided into two classes, the detective and the ‘thief-catcher’. The latter belonged to the class of honest, painstaking policeman without sufficient education to pass examinations for promotion, but who made up for this deficiency by his intimate knowledge of the rougher class of criminals, his habits and his haunts and by personal acquaintance with the pickpockets themselves, who had the same regard for him as a naughty little boy has for a strict and just schoolmaster.
The thief-catcher has no animus against the people he has to watch. He keeps his eye upon them warily, as the keeper at the zoo keeps his eye upon the polar bears and when it comes to business he arrests them impartially without rancour and without indulgence. This explained what I had never been able to understand in prison – how the convicted criminal seldom bears malice against the detective who brought him to justice provided he thinks that he was treated fairly. ‘The man was only doing his dooty,’ he says. The danger of over-educating your detective is that, little by little, you will eliminate the ‘thief-catcher’ for whom there is a very definite place in the scheme. I remember one whose zeal had communicated itself to his wife. At that time we were overwhelmed with complaints about pickpockets at the stopping-places of the buses in the crowded hours. They would take part in the rush to get in, crowding on with the other passengers and relieving them of the contents of their pockets; if they were disappointed of a place, they fell back and waited for the next bus to continue their business. If they saw any one eyeing them they would mount the bus until they came to a stopping-place where they thought they would be more free from observation. My ‘thief-catcher’ was a rather conspicuous person and when he appeared on the scene the pickpockets would melt away. He could not be everywhere at once, but he used to make a sort of ‘busman’s holiday’ of his days off duty and go out with his wife. She mounted the bus with a gaping handbag, which was as effective a bait for a pickpocket as roast pork is for a shark; the pickpocket followed and just behind him went the husband to take him into custody in the very act. It must have been a quite exciting sport for both.
Every now and then the ‘thief-catcher’ would show a rare gleam of imagination. I remember the case of a man who was expected to pledge a stolen watch. It was impossible to search him until he did, because if he had not got the watch in his possession he would ‘have the law on you’. The suspect vapoured about the railings of St Mary Abbot’s church, watched from the kerbstone by John Barker’s, where people are always waiting for the bus. There was a pawnshop at the corner. Suddenly he formed a resolution and walked quickly across the street to the pawnshop, but the ‘thief-catcher’ was too quick for him. Flinging off his coat as he went, he plunged into the s
hop, dashed behind the counter and received the suspect in his shirt sleeves, resting on his knuckles in the conventional style and asked him what he could do for him. ‘What will you give me on this?’ said the man, producing the watch.
‘Come along to the police station and I’ll tell you and I caution you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you at your trial.’
I have no doubt that the suspect said something which was not fit to use in evidence when he realised what a trap he had fallen into.
In one respect the Central Office was very much alive. Besides its admirable system of identification by finger prints, elaborated by Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner, a system since adopted by the whole civilised world, it had a very complete and practical method of record-keeping.
The late Dr Mercier was responsible for the fallacy that there was an almost invariable tendency on the part of criminals to repeat the method in which they had been successful on a former enterprise. But a glance at criminal histories shows that Dr Mercier’s theory was only partly true. Most of the practitioners vary their methods according to local conditions. You will find the blackmailer taking an occasional hand in a burglary; a pickpocket indulging in shoplifting; an area thief boldly breaking in through the front door. All that can be said is that a man who has successfully poisoned a dog in one case is more likely than another man to do the same again. The only successful organisation in detecting crime must have method, industry and local knowledge and I found all these strongly cultivated at New Scotland Yard.
The London thief is preternaturally quick in detecting that he is being followed. Even if he is not quite sure, he will adopt the expedient of turning sharp on his heel and walking for 50 yards in the opposite direction before resuming his journey and during that 50 yards his sharp eyes have taken a mental photograph of every person he has passed. In really big affairs he will pay a confederate to follow him at a distance, taking note of any other follower remotely resembling a policeman. The tubes are very useful to him. He books for a long journey, sits near the door and slips out at the next station just before the gates of the car are slammed and there is no time for the policeman to alight and having thus shaken him off, he sets off for his real destination. Four well-known thieves tried this device once with a pair of detectives in attendance. All went well up to the point of slamming the gate and then things began to go wrong. The detectives had the gate reopened. The lift was one of those that are operated by a liftman standing at the bottom and as it went aloft the detective explained the position to the liftman. Something went wrong with that lift: it stuck halfway for quite five minutes – time enough for the detectives to climb the stairs and summon uniformed policemen to man the gates on the level of the street. The feelings of the trapped rat who sees a group of terriers waiting for the wirework door of his cage to be opened must have descended upon the spirits of those four thieves when their cage rose at length to the surface.