Shortly after her retirement as Director-General of the Security Service (MI5), Dame Stella Rimington paid tribute to the founding fathers of the Service and publicly acknowledged the role of William Melville, the man ‘who came to be known as M’. At the start of the twentieth century, when London fogs – pea-soupers – blanketed the city, it was Melville who, from a small secret office in London’s Victoria Street, determinedly lobbied the Government to create an effective counter-intelligence service. Today, MI5, the organisation he strove to create, is a household name and one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies.
Melville talked to kings and murderers, con men and wily diplomats; he had a way of getting what he wanted from them all. In his day he was a master of detection. He had a devious mind and a bleakly humorous view of humanity, and because he understood the motive of the criminal or the desperate, he was able to pioneer methods and tactics that still work – today, methods improved by advanced technology.
Melville was the son of a publican in rural Ireland. Guileful and single-minded, he came to London when it was the hub of the Empire and worked his way through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police. As the most famous detective in England and head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, he retired at the start of the new century and disappeared from public view. The enduring achievement of his life lay ahead: to transfer the ethos and practices of detection to the War Office, its spies and agents all over the world.
He died in 1918, and eighty years passed before his true significance as MI5’s first spymaster became apparent with the release of early Secret Service documents to the Public Record Office. Very little further documentation about Melville and his career has come into the public domain since. To piece together an accurate picture of his extraordinary life, I have drawn on as many primary sources as possible. Melville’s family and the descendants of those who played key roles in his story have been tracked down and interviewed; they have been invaluable in illuminating a life’s work that pitted Melville against Jack the Ripper, Irish terrorists, anarchist assassins and German spy rings.
Now, with the help of recently declassified records, family accounts and documents that still await official release, the full story of his incredible career can finally be told for the first time.