Through the agency of a young Spaniard a small felucca named La Virgen del Socorro was bought at Corunna and sailed round to Vigo Harbour, where it was tied up alongside between the German ships, and secretly provisioned from their stores. Its presence there did not escape the notice of Allied observers, but they had no official position which would entitle them to interfere; and the little ship was so small, so apparently useless for any purpose of war, that protest against its position alongside the liners would have only raised difficulties for the Allied services. Its cost was only £400, even in those days when anything which could masquerade as a sea-going ship commanded a fabulous price. No doubt too, the Port Authorities gave to the Virgen del Socorro their kindliest inattention. Meanwhile, by car and by train, non-commissioned officers from Pampluna and Alcala began to slip into Vigo and hide themselves on the German liners; and in the dusk of the afternoon of October 7th this little felucca, crowded up with the best part of twenty soldiers, tacked out between the headlands of the harbour and plunged gallantly out into the storms of the Bay of Biscay.
The Virgen del Socorro had not even a motor. She was a tiny, decked sailing-boat, low in the water, and rigged with a great lateen sail, such as is used about the coast of Spain for fishing. She ran into bad weather immediately, and the life of these soldiers crowded together on board this nutshell and tossed from billow to billow in the welter of the Bay of Biscay during the equinoctial storms must have been hideous in its discomfort. Meanwhile the news of this ship’s departure had been spread abroad, and cost us in the Western Mediterranean a great deal of anxiety.
The reason for our anxiety was this. The French were at that time holding their huge zone of Morocco — its prosperity still only in the bud — with a good deal less than the minimum of troops required. They were holding it by the prestige of their arms and the wisdom of their great Governor-General, le Marechal Lyautey. They held it by continuing their great harbour works at Casablanca, and the extension of their high roads through Mequinez and Fez across the breadth of the country to the frontier of Algiers, as though no ruinous and devastating war were in progress at all. They held it too by their policy and their administration. Step by step they had brought peace and security into Morocco. The process was, first the sharp lesson, then the utmost goodwill, then the handing over of local and municipal administration to the tribesmen and sheiks under the advice of French administrators. Left to herself France would have felt herself established securely in Morocco: but of course she was not left to herself. For just to the north of her ran the Spanish Zone with its great tracts unoccupied and ungoverned. These tracts were in the hands of wild and bellicose tribesmen, in whom Germany found an easy weapon. A German named Bartels, who was in the Consular Service in Morocco at the outbreak of war, managed to escape into this Spanish Zone, and received every month some twelve or thirteen thousand pounds through Tetuan and Melilla from German sources at Seville, without any real hindrance from the Spanish authorities. With this large sum of money Bartels collected and armed two thousand men from the surrounding tribes. He built himself a fortified camp close upon the borders of French Morocco, and whenever Monsieur le Marechal Lyautey was in a position by training Moorish troops to send reinforcements into France for the Western front, Bartels and his tribesmen would boil over the frontier line, burn, destroy, levy war and compel the retention in Morocco of the troops which should have been fighting in France. These troops would then be run up country to deal with Bartels, but long before they could reach him he and his men had hopped back over the border into the Spanish Zone, and the French were powerless to punish them or put an end to this astute form of warfare. At a later date Bartels’ camp was destroyed, his men scattered, and his command extinguished by the use of aeroplanes, which, bombing him and the crops which surrounded his camp, drove him from refuge to refuge, until the tribesmen themselves found him too dangerous and embarrassing a neighbour. But at the time when the Virgen del Socorro put out to sea, Bartels was at the height of his strength.
On the south of the French Zone too, trouble of another kind was brewing. The Sus country beyond the Atlas range of mountains had never acknowledged the suzerainty of the Sultan any more than had the Riffs; and a powerful chieftain of the Sus country, El Hiba, had been bribed with promises to raise a flag of revolt against the Sultan on behalf of Germany. The Sultan, it must be remembered, had declared war himself on the side of the Allies and was at this time nominally a belligerent.
Messages from El Hiba for Germany had been intercepted praying above all for two particular things, arms and ammunition for one, and German non-commissioned officers for the other. That arms and ammunition had been already landed we had some sort of evidence. That an attempt was being made to land more we knew, for a French patrolship had picked up in the Atlantic close to the Sus coast a raft, stacked with German rifles and cartridges, which had been clearly dropped according to plan by a passing ship.
It will be seen, therefore, that our anxiety as to the destination of the Virgen del Socorro was justified. For there were on board of her a sufficient number of non-commissioned officers with a record of war-service to be of the utmost value to El Hiba and of the utmost annoyance to France. The Sus country also was much the most likely spot for this felucca with its overload of men and its low freeboard to make for. She would be running fairly close to land the whole time, and the farther south she went the better weather she would get. The most careful patrol therefore was established on the waters along the Atlantic coast of North Africa; but day after day passed and no big lateen sail was seen swinging down to the south, and no capture was reported. After some weeks we came to the conclusion that the Virgen del Socorro had either sunk in a gale or had somehow managed to slip through our patrol and reach her destination. Then suddenly seven weeks later, towards the end of December, a message came over the wires that a Spanish felucca called the Virgen del Socorro had been captured off Deal in the Downs at 3.30 on a foggy December afternoon when night had already begun to fall. She had managed somehow to survive the storms in the Bay of Biscay. On coming out of the Bay she had set her course for the west of Ireland, meaning to round the north of Scotland and make for the coast of Norway. But whilst she was still hundreds of miles to the south of Ireland, she ran into the worst gale she had encountered; and buffeted by those mountainous seas she lost her rudder. Captain Koch and his gallant little company somehow managed to rig up a jury rudder, but it was no longer possible for them to hope to round Cape Wrath. Also their provisions were running short, and they could, of course, put in nowhere to get a fresh supply. They turned and drove eastwards before the gale. They were almost wrecked upon the Scilly Isles, but the weather taking up, and the wind abating, they slipped by the Longships Lighthouse and boldly entered the English Channel, jury rudder, lateen sail, and all. The felucca ran past Falmouth, past Bolt Head, across the West Bay to Portland Bill, through St. Albans Race and round the Isle of Wight; past Dover; and she was never stopped.
It would seem incredible that a ship with so foreign a rig could possibly pass through narrow seas guarded as were the seas of the English Channel in those days, without being held up and inspected. But she kept to the traffic-route and moved on normally with the rest of the ships to the Downs, where all were rounded up and examined.
But even then the Virgen del Socorro might have slipped through the net. It was growing dark, the weather was foggy, the month was December. Had Captain Koch so timed his sailing upon that last day as to arrive at the South Foreland Lighthouse an hour and a half later than he did, there was a chance for him. Twelve hours later he would have been lost from view in the North Sea. In eighteen hours he might actually have landed his men on a friendly, if not his native, shore. He made a second mistake which was fatal to his chance. Either to escape examination, or in ignorance of the regulations, he ran out of the traffic-route and steered eastward of the Goodwin Sands. He was pounced upon at once by the drifters Paramount and Present Help.
&
nbsp; Thus the adventurous voyage ended. With soldiers where there should have been sailors, with amateur navigators on a little ship which nearly foundered a hundred times, short of food, drenched to the skin, day and night, the men from Pampluna and Alcala were within an inch of success. And there was, I think, even at that bitter moment of war, a sort of regret amongst English sailors that so gallant an exploit had miscarried.
THE END
The Short Stories
A company of the Manchester Regiment on the march in France, 1915 — Mason served with the Manchester Regiment in the First World War, being promoted Captain in December 1914.
Major Mason, c. 1918
List of Short Stories in Chronological Order
THE GINGER KING
ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY.
THE MAN OF WHEELS.
MR. MITCHELBOURNE’S LAST ESCAPADE.
THE COWARD.
THE DESERTER.
THE CROSSED GLOVES.
THE SHUTTERED HOUSE.
KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.
THE CRUISE OF THE “WILLING MIND.”
HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.
HATTERAS.
THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE.
A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.
THE FIFTH PICTURE.
THE CLOCK
GREEN PAINT
NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
ONE OF THEM
RAYMOND BYATT
THE CRYSTAL TRENCH
THE HOUSE OF TERROR
THE BROWN BOOK
THE REFUGE
STRINGER’S CANDY. PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR, R. STRINGER, DRUGGIST TO THE KING.
PEIFFER
THE EBONY BOX
THE AFFAIR AT THE SEMIRAMIS HOTEL
UNDER BIGNOR HILL
THE STRANGE CASE OF JOAN WINTERBOURNE
THE WOUNDED GOD
THE CHRONOMETER
SIXTEEN BELLS
THE REVEREND BERNARD SIMMONS, B.D.
A FLAW IN THE ORGANIZATION
THE LAW OF FLIGHT
THE KEY
TASMANIAN JIM’S SPECIALITIES
THE ITALIAN
MAGIC
THE DUCHESS AND LADY TORRENT
WAR NOTES
MATA HARI
THE CRUISE OF THE “VIRGEN DEL SOCORRO”
List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order
A FLAW IN THE ORGANIZATION
A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
ENSIGN KNIGHTLEY.
GREEN PAINT
HATTERAS.
HOW BARRINGTON RETURNED TO JOHANNESBURG.
KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.
MAGIC
MATA HARI
MR. MITCHELBOURNE’S LAST ESCAPADE.
NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
ONE OF THEM
PEIFFER
RAYMOND BYATT
SIXTEEN BELLS
STRINGER’S CANDY. PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR, R. STRINGER, DRUGGIST TO THE KING.
TASMANIAN JIM’S SPECIALITIES
THE AFFAIR AT THE SEMIRAMIS HOTEL
THE BROWN BOOK
THE CHRONOMETER
THE CLOCK
THE COWARD.
THE CROSSED GLOVES.
THE CRUISE OF THE “VIRGEN DEL SOCORRO”
THE CRUISE OF THE “WILLING MIND.”
THE CRYSTAL TRENCH
THE DESERTER.
THE DUCHESS AND LADY TORRENT
THE EBONY BOX
THE FIFTH PICTURE.
THE GINGER KING
THE HOUSE OF TERROR
THE ITALIAN
THE KEY
THE LAW OF FLIGHT
THE MAN OF WHEELS.
THE PRINCESS JOCELIANDE.
THE REFUGE
THE REVEREND BERNARD SIMMONS, B.D.
THE SHUTTERED HOUSE.
THE STRANGE CASE OF JOAN WINTERBOURNE
THE TWENTY-KRONER STORY.
THE WOUNDED GOD
UNDER BIGNOR HILL
WAR NOTES
The Non-Fiction
Storrington, a large village in the Horsham District of West Sussex — in his final years Mason shared his days living in a flat in London and a house in Storrington.
The Royal Exchange (1920)
CONTENTS
PART I. THE HOUSE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
PART II. THE BUSINESS.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
PART I. THE HOUSE.
CHAPTER I.
SIR THOMAS GRESHAM AND THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE.
ON THE AFTERNOON of January 23rd, in the year 1571, Queen Elizabeth went from her Palace of Somerset House to dine with Sir Thomas Gresham at his fine mansion in Austin Friars. She went in state with her Trumpeters and Halberdiers, but the visit was no such great mark of distinction as in these days it would be. For one thing, Sir Thomas was a person of much importance in the Realm. He was a member of the Mercers’ Company which was established as long ago as 1172; he was the Royal Agent in the Low Countries, and by other important services had Her Majesty in his debt. There was another reason not to be lost sight of in any narrative which is concerned with the City of London. The social barriers — which at a later date were to divide the City from the Court for the best part of a couple of centuries — had not yet been erected. Wars and the art of soldiering have been from time immemorial the great origins of social divisions, and these were times of peace. Seventeen years had still to come before the Armada was to sail out of Corunna harbour. Moreover, there was no West End. Great nobles lived cheek by jowl with the great merchants, and the latter held their own in social esteem much as they have done during the last fifty years.
The Queen was on her way to open Sir Thomas Gresham’s new Burse, and she sat at dinner with Sir Thomas Gresham upon her right hand, and upon her left the French Ambassador, Monsieur La Motte Fénélon, to whom we are indebted for an account of his share in that great woman’s conversation. We have no record, worse luck, of what passed between her and Sir Thomas Gresham. But no doubt she whispered to him her intention to dignify his Exchange with the epithet of “Royal,” and no doubt he took the occasion to embroider upon certain passages from a letter which he had had the honour to write to her from Bruges: “The Stillyard hath been the chiefest point in the undoing of this your Realm and the Merchants of the same.”
We are not to picture Sir Thomas as unduly elated; the building was, to be sure, a great thing in the history of London and a definite help to the commerce of England. It had been mooted before. His father, Sir Richard Gresham, Master of the Mercers’ Company and Lord Mayor of London, for many years had advocated the erection of an Exchange in London and to him credit for the original conception must be given. Henry the Eighth in the twenty-sixth year of his reign sent his letters to the City for the making of a new Burse at Leadenhall, but by a show of hands the City had refused it, preferring that the merchants should still meet to conduct their business on the cobble stones of Lombard Street. Now, however, the Exchange was a fact. It stood facing Cornhill with the great gilt Grasshopper of Sir Thomas Gresham’s crest perched on the top of its tall tower. But the Exchange was not the end of Sir Thomas Gresham’s policy — it was no more than the half-way house on the road of his high ambitions. It was to be one of the means by which Englishmen were to become masters in their own City and the pernicious rule of the Lombardy men, and above all of the Stillyard was to be destroyed.
The Stillyard was, to the modern understanding, one of the strangest institutions which the world has ever seen. It took its origin from the debts of the early English kings and the money with which the German traders from the Baltic, the Easterlings as they were called, were able to provide them. These Easterlings or Emperor’s men — the latter designation in time came to supersede the earlier — were the representatives in England of the famous
Hanseatic League, and for the greater part of the five centuries which followed upon the reign of Edward the Confessor, they used England’s inability to finance her wars on the Continent, and her Crusades in the East, to fix a stranglehold upon British Commerce. They were established in rights and privileges which no English shared with them; they paid fixed taxes; they held a monopoly of the export of the most valuable raw materials, such as wool, and of the import of the most valuable finished products. The early history of this country gives many a significant little proof of the great power which they held. They were responsible for the upkeep of Bishopsgate, except the hinges, for which the Bishop of London was responsible, and on account of this obligation they were relieved from the tax called “Murage,” which was devoted to the upkeep of the City walls. In 1303, Edward the First, when replying to a Petition, presented by the Mayor, Aldermen and Commoners of the City of London, asking that the Lombards might be forbidden from dwelling in the City, acting as brokers, or buying and selling by retail, stated, that if the Citizens would put the City under good government, no foreigner should be allowed so to dwell or act in the City or its Liberties, save and except the merchants of the Hanseatic towns. They were exempted, moreover, from the particular service of keeping watch against the Pirates, who from the 13th to the 16th Centuries infested the Channel and the mouth of the Thames. This exemption is all the more remarkable since the Alemanes or Alemans — another of their many designations — having practically the monopoly of the sea-borne commerce, were the first to benefit by that vigilance. How dangerous these Pirates were, can be easily understood from the fact that when Henry the Fourth crossed the Thames from Queenborough in Sheppey to Leigh in Essex, in order to escape a pestilence which was raging in London, one of his ships, containing his baggage and some of his retinue, fell into the hands of Pirates, while the King narrowly escaped capture himself. The power of the Stillyard was thus a formidable thing, and its governors had surrounded it by such precautions and safeguards as made it doubly difficult to destroy. The Members of the Steelyard or Stillyard — spelling was never an exact science until a very recent date — lived, for instance, upon the Monastic plan. No guild or corporation or trades union which ever existed set so strict a limit to the number of its members. Its great yards and buildings stood upon the bank of the Thames where to-day the arches of the South Eastern Railway carry the lines into Cannon Street Station. They were known first of all as the “Stapelhof,” the Stapel House; this name was contracted into “Staelhof”; the Staelhof in its turn became anglicised into “Stilliards,” and then, by a change which had nothing to do with the meaning of the institution, was transmuted in common parlance into “the Steelyard.” The Steelyard, which had subsidiary houses at Boston and Lynn, was the great storage building of England. The raw products for exportation, of which tin, hides and wool were the chief, were assembled there. Thither, too, came the imports from abroad — wheat, rye, grain, cables, wax, steel, linen, cloth and tar in particular. The walls were fortified against attack — a very necessary precaution considering the ill-feeling which the Yard aroused amongst British Londoners. No member of the Still yard was allowed to marry or even to visit any person of the other sex. At a fixed hour in the evening, all had to be at home, and the gates were rigidly closed; and at a fixed hour in the morning the gates were opened again. All meals were taken in common, and the members submitted themselves to a Government which consisted of a Master, two assessors and nine common councilmen. This committee held office for a year, the election taking place upon New Year’s Eve, and the new Master, with his council, solemnly took oath upon the following day to uphold all the rights and privileges entrusted to his vigilance. It can be easily imagined, therefore, what power a body of this kind possessed, a body without home life or any interests except its commerce, having besides not only the crown of England in its fee, but the monopoly of its sea-borne commerce, and the monopoly of its great product, wool — for it was said in the 14th Century that England with its wool kept the whole world warm — and the stupendous efforts required to destroy it. Yet to destroy it, was again not all of Sir Thomas Gresham’s policy. He meant, while destroying it, to graft upon English commerce the business methods by which the Hanseatic League had achieved its pre-eminence. Amongst these methods, by the way, was insurance.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 832