A secret is no longer a secret once it is revealed.
This self-evident truth is difficult for most people to grasp. William Melville, M of the British Secret Service, had no problem with it. In the last months of his life he was persuaded to commit a brief account of his career to paper. He had, after all, been known as Le Vile Melville to revolutionaries from St Petersburg to New York; men had been jailed for conspiring to kill him. This being known, a less revelatory memoir would be hard to imagine.1
It did, however, confirm suspicion that he had not, as the public thought, retired in 1903, but instead had worked in some secret capacity at a time when MI5, according to official histories, did not yet exist.
His life’s work depended upon discretion. So did his reputation, which was the foundation of his family’s prosperity, and he was never such a fool as to threaten that. There were skeletons in Melville’s cupboard that he never expected to emerge.
Concluding his short memoir, he offered mild advice to those who proposed to embark upon a career in counter-espionage.
Above all, the mysterious manner should be avoided. It only engenders distrust. A frank and apparently open style generally gains confidence... people as a rule are not averse to seeing you again. One can joke and humbug much in a jovial manner; one can talk a great deal and say nothing.
The genial mask concealed a ruthless operator.
Melville came out of the back of beyond, but the present inhabitants of his home town would thank no one for saying so. Sneem in County Kerry is a thriving tourist centre and one of the prettiest little places in the west of Ireland, its gaily painted houses set around an old stone bridge over a tumbling stream amid greensward surrounded by hills. But at a longitude of nearly 10 degrees west of Greenwich, it is further out in the Atlantic than almost anywhere else in Europe.2
Sneem suffered badly in the famine of the 1840s. From good beginnings as the hub of many outlying cabins and cottages, with a couple of schools, a penny post to Kenmare, seven markets a year and a post of constabulary, by 1850 – when Melville was born there – Sneem had declined into no more than a sad huddle of grey houses and listless people: ‘a poor, dirty village’ in the words of one traveller.
William was the son of James and Catherine Melville. As far as we know he was their first child. Family legend3 has it that Catherine (née Connor) gave birth to him at a place called Direenaclaurig Cross (a junction of two roads) on the shore side of Kenmare Road, which leads east. The road itself had been officially called into existence some twenty years before. Until then, west of Kenmare towards Sneem and the ocean there had been no more than a track, impassable in bad weather.
Sneem in 1850 had a population of 360 living in about sixty dwellings, from the poorest one-roomed mud cabins with rags stuffing the windows to those slate-roofed, mortar-covered houses, mostly terraced, which survive today set around two triangular greens.
Having been born on 25 April 1850, William was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church the following day. There was no Irish civil registration until 1864. The baptismal record we owe to the often erratic attention of the parish priest. Father Walsh, the inspiration for Father O’Flynn in a popular song of that name, was priest in Sneem from 1829 until his death in 1866. He rarely preached a sermon from one year’s end to another and was a notorious backslider when it came to record-keeping. Speaking English and Irish, he kept the books, when he bothered, in dog Latin. He devoted himself to hunting, being the proud owner of six or seven greyhounds even during the famine (‘though nobody could tell how he was even able to feed himself’), as well as a collection of jackdaws and hawks; his usual garb was a battered hat and hairy suit made of buffalo skin and he and the local doctor once caused an explosion while concocting home-made gunpowder.4 We must, in the circumstances, be grateful for what little information we have.
The very poorest of the native Irish at this time lived in medieval conditions, in earth-floored dwellings having only one or two rooms. They burned turf for cooking and warmth and would share their roof with the animals overnight in winter. They had to live at subsistence level off whatever they could grow, and the animals they could keep, on any strip of land rented from English landlords. Getting cash depended on employment by these landlords on their land or at the nearest Big House. Otherwise farming and fishing, a little discreet smuggling of brandy, wine or tobacco by sea, or a skilled trade were the only options short of emigration to America or England.
Perhaps because the well-off Anglo-Irish around Sneem intermarried with each other over generations and generally put down roots, thus supporting the economy and the smuggling to a greater extent than elsewhere, the village was not entirely deserted like so many during the famine; most unusually for this time and place, the population actually increased in the ten years before William was born.
James Melville is recorded as a tenant, apparently a farmer, in the land valuation records of 1852, and in the next few years he and Catherine got enough money together to start a business in the middle of the village. They kept a bakery and also sold liquor. The traditional Irish pub with a shop at one end of the counter is still familiar.5 Quite how many children they had is uncertain. Two girls, Catherine and Mary, and three boys, survived to be baptised, and these at long intervals.6 After William came Richard in 1859, who was enrolled at the village school when he was five, and George in 1868, who does not appear on the school rolls until 1875. Unlike his brothers, William’s school attendance would appear to have been somewhat erratic to say the least, tailing off during his last year to virtual non-attendance. As the eldest, his duties in the bakery would almost certainly have come before schooling.7
He would have learned the practical skills of rural life. Almost every family, even the tradespeople, kept a few chickens and grew vegetables, and James Melville as baker and liquor-seller kept a pony and cart for haulage and would have expected his sons to help out. As his parents ran a cash business the boy was probably acute enough about figures.
With Father Walsh to offer pastoral care, and the town’s Roman Catholic chapel being left to crumble, religion is unlikely to have played a major part. Sneem’s Catholic community was not to be allowed to slide into non-observance, however. In 1855 the Earl of Dunraven took a holiday home locally, and converted to Catholicism. When he saw the leaky old earth-floored shack of a chapel in Sneem he determined to donate something better, and commissioned no less a man than Philip Hardwicke, the distinguished London architect, to design a new church. As is usual in such matters, construction hit a snag. The local builder, Mr Murphy, died. But the new church had found a practical saviour in his son, who, at nineteen, was just six years older than William Melville. Murphy managed to get the church completed on time and its consecration in 1863 was followed by a bonfire and festivities, which continued until dawn. So well did the young Murphy, another Sneem boy made good, profit from building Sneem’s church that he went on to found the multi-national construction company that still bears his name.
William Melville would have been a familiar figure to everybody in that village of only three or four hundred people. We gather that he did not leave home until his later teens, because he was known locally as a great hurley player.8
In the Melville family it is said that as he grew up, William used to take the pony and cart each Wednesday to Killarney Station to collect supplies. One Wednesday he did not return. A search was mounted and the pony was found, patiently waiting at the station. William had taken the train to Dublin.9
Whether he stopped for days, or years, in Dublin, Liverpool or anywhere else, is impossible to say. He could have left Sneem at seventeen or at twenty-one; we do not know for sure. Reports he wrote later in life demonstrate a high degree of literacy, so he may have done as many ambitious young English men did and attended evening classes after a day’s work in a shop. Self-help – social and financial advancement through hard work, good books and respectable living – was in vogue in these mid Victorian years, and as he would have known from personal observation, money spent on drink – money that he may have wanted to send home – would be wasted. The first record so far discovered of Melville’s presence in England is his acceptance into London’s police in 1872; yet it doesn’t seem likely that what Dubliners are pleased to call a bog-trotter, however bright and adaptable, could have crossed from Sneem to London and within months acquired the basic worldly wisdom required of even the greenest police constable. William probably spent a few years in a big city after he left home.
London was at this time the largest conurbation on earth, with a population approaching four million and growing fast.10 Lambeth, comprising the parts of London immediately south of the Thames, which is where Melville was working when he applied to join the police force, was decidedly mixed. Along the riverbank, Waterloo was the haunt of prostitutes, cheap music halls and the usual con men and hustlers who congregate around railway stations; Vauxhall was blighted by terrible poverty and the dirt and smell of dockside workshops, potteries and distilleries; and in both districts the roar and steam of the railways were ever present. Behind them lay Kennington, a central suburb where many of the stately Georgian houses were now in multiple occupation. In winter, a noxious cloud of river fog and coal dust would descend upon the entire area for days at a time.
When Melville joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty-two, he is said to have been a baker in the employ of James Macaulay at 99 Kennington Road, Lambeth.11 No.99 is gone now, but it was one of a row of houses backing onto the grounds of Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital for the insane. James Macaulay the baker is shown living there, with his wife and six children and a middle-aged lodger, in the 1871 census.12 Upstairs was the home of the secretary of a religious society and his family. Kennington was quite respectable.
Maybe it was the sight of new police accommodation being built just along Kennington Road at No.47 that sparked Melville’s idea of becoming a London policeman. Irishmen quite often did; they comprised around six per cent of the force at a time when the Irish in Ireland had good reason to consider themselves oppressed by an imperial power. Indeed, Irish-American agitators, having failed in a half-hearted bid to promote an uprising in Dublin, had settled for terrorism in mainland Britain. There had been a devastating Fenian attack on the Middlesex House of Correction in Clerkenwell in 1868, with twelve people killed, though mercifully few signs of violent insurrection since.
Melville, although he was Irish and proud of it, had no truck with that sort of thing. He was sober and intelligent with a strong constitution and the social skills necessary to deal with the public. Metropolitan Police officers must be at least five feet eight inches tall. This was above the average. At five feet eight and a half, Melville got in.
And promptly got out again. Having been admitted as PC 310 to the register of E Division (Bow Street and Holborn) on 16 September 1872, he was one of over a hundred officers dismissed for insubordination on 20 November.
In a way the problem went back to the Clerkenwell bombing. It had been after this that the Government, threatened with further terrorism, realised that effective defence required a better-informed, more astute body of police. At the time there were 8,000 men in the Metropolitan Police and according to the Home Secretary just three of them were ‘educated’.13 On ‘Irish duty’ (that is, watching known Fenians), they were already routinely armed. Beat officers were not respected by their superiors, yet a job as demanding and responsible as this must attract men of high calibre. This meant better pay and a less militaristic approach. But the Government took a long time to draw up new pay scales, and some senior policemen took even longer to change their authoritarian attitudes towards the rank and file.
When Melville joined in 1872 nothing had been done. The proposed pay increases were almost insultingly stingy, and at a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel, all those present elected PC Henry Goodchild to be secretary of a Pay and Conditions Negotiating Committee to represent them. They specifically ruled out strike action; they had simply set up the machinery for collective bargaining.
This alone was enough to alarm the Home Office. It immediately made a better offer, to the great satisfaction of Sir Edward Henderson, the Commissioner. Unfortunately, Assistant Commissioner Labalmondière and the Superintendents, many of whom had a military background, saw things differently. The Superintendents demanded that Goodchild give them details, in writing, of all the men who had been at the meeting, or meetings, where the Pay and Conditions Committee had been voted into existence. He refused. They told him he was going to be transferred; he saw this for the punishment it was, and asked to have the charges against him read out. The Assistant Commissioner sacked him on the spot for insubordination.
Goodchild quickly canvassed his supporters. The Commissioner’s enquiry stated that on Saturday evening, 16 November:
At Kensington, 43 men of T Division, when paraded by their Inspector for night duty at 9.45 p.m., refused to move off to their beats. Of these, four men, on the appeal of the Superintendent, at once went on duty. The remaining 39 men persisted in their refusal until 12.45 p.m.
At Bow Street a similar course was pursued by 71 men of E Division, who refused to go on duty until 11.30 p.m.
At Molyneux Street, 65 men of D Division, when ordered to move off, at first refused, but on the Superintendent’s appeal at once went on duty.14
All the offenders in E Division, and 39 from T division, were dismissed. Nearly all were reinstated a week later, dropping a ‘class’. Melville had not far to fall, and after this hiccup his upward progress in the force recommenced on 29 November. The future trajectory of Goodchild, a brave man, is not recorded.
Melville was based during his first six months at Bow Street; this was Metropolitan HQ, Scotland Yard not yet having been built. As a constable, Melville would carry a truncheon and a whistle and, accompanied by a more experienced officer, patrol E Division from Covent Garden to Holborn.
The ideology of the 1870s was proudly bourgeois, with a social conscience. There was a sense that government brought responsibilities, as well as rights. So, although Gustave Doré had illustrated the smoke-laden, overcrowded nightmare of central London as recently as 1869, the squalor in which the poorest people lived was slowly lessening. In the last decade or so investment in a new sewage system had made the Thames cleaner and connected private houses to efficient main drains. The London Underground railway was expanding, allowing better-paid workers access to the suburbs. As business grew there were more clerical jobs and, with universal education, more people capable of doing them. Public hangings had stopped (one of the Clerkenwell culprits was the last man hanged in public). The filth and cruelty of Smithfield’s livestock market had been replaced by a properly organised meat market. Cock-fighting and prize-fighting were not the socially acceptable pastimes they used to be. And Shaftesbury Avenue would soon be driven through the notorious rookeries of St Giles where policemen dared not go.
The West End may have been tidied up, but the Bow Street force must have smirked at Sir Edward Henderson’s diktat of the previous year. Alarmed by a spate of thefts from washing lines, the Commissioner had earnestly instructed all constables ‘to call at the houses of all persons on their beats having wet linen in their gardens, and caution them of the risk they run in having them stolen’.
E Division was rough, and policing it a twenty-four-hour job. It contained not only St Giles, but a major railway station at Charing Cross, the sinister black arches of the Adelphi along the river – full of rough sleepers, and the Strand, with its theatres and restaurants attracting gullible provincials and sophisticated Londoners alike. Opposite Bow Street, a gas-lit Covent Garden market began trading in fruit, vegetables and flowers long before dawn; the pubs were always open, fights commonplace, and prostitutes never off the streets. Behind the great thoroughfares, above the warren of lanes strewn with horse dung and rotten vegetables, in cold and threadbare rooms there slept, and worked, a motley band of fly-by-night purveyors of abortifacients and dubious publications by mail order. E Division was a good place to start if you wanted an overview of human life at its most desperate.
In April of 1873 PC Melville was transferred to L Division, Lambeth and Walworth, where he occupied police accommodation at 47 Kennington Road just off the Westminster Bridge Road. Some of the faces would have been familiar, for many of the prostitutes who lodged around Waterloo crossed the bridges in the evenings to pick up customers along the Strand and bring them back to York Road or other streets within walking distance of the river.
That there was a huge gulf between the behaviour of the indigent and streetwise of London and the new ‘respectable’ classes is demonstrated by the first case of Constable Melville’s that we know about, from The Times in 1876.15 The complainant was one Kate Beadle, a young woman who had for several years been housekeeper to a Mr Crisp and his family at Islington. She said that her gold watch, diamond rings and earrings, to a total value of about £30, had been stolen from her by Henry Levy, aged thirty-nine, ‘a betting man’. Hers was a sad tale of a maid gone wrong. In August of 1876 she went to Brighton Races with Miss Crisp. Upon leaving they became separated. Two well-dressed men reassured her that they had seen Miss Crisp and she wasn’t far away; she would soon turn up. Miss Beadle went with them to a nearby public house. They bought her a glass of what she thought was ‘lemonade and claret’. She must have ‘got stupid’. The next thing she knew she woke up next morning sitting on a doorstep and noticed to her dismay that her diamond ring, valued at £24, was gone.
She tottered off towards Brighton, and along the way a working man told her she could find a bed for the day – presumably to sleep off the effects of that single, devastating lemonade and claret – at a house near the town. She found the place and was relating her woes to the landlady when a young man who overheard said she could come to his house instead.
So – the court did not enquire too deeply here – she stayed with him for three or four days. Then they went to London together and took lodgings in Hercules Buildings, Westminster Bridge Road. He was a gentlemanly fellow, and single, but unfortunately in the habit of taking everything she put down. Jewels and earrings just vanished into thin air. Distraught, Miss Beadle made discreet enquiries and was told that if she were truly contrite she could return to her work at Mr Crisp’s. This she decided to do; but when she announced her intention Henry, who had a persuasive way with him, swore that if she did he would send daily letters and wait outside the house. So – with unprecedented cunning – she pretended she would stay, but went to visit the Crisps at Islington anyway. When she came back he had taken all her clothes.
At this point we may assume that she approached the kind policeman of Kennington Road and Mr Henry Levy’s fate was sealed. Detective Melville followed him all the way to Muswell Hill and took him into custody at the Alexandra Races. The accused allegedly said ‘I know all about it. I wish I’d never seen her. I’ve lost more than I’ve gained by her.’ Pawn tickets were found. He claimed that all the goods had been taken with Miss Beadle’s consent. He had a wife and children, and according to another detective who gave evidence in court, was ‘a rogue and a vagabond, well known at racecourses’.
In this stratified society, women of all but the very highest and lowest class were treated like children, and in consequence they were as naïve as children.
The Times already referred to Melville as a detective. He was not a member of the central Detective Branch, which was quite small and had been in existence since 1842. He was probably relieved not to be, because neither its effectiveness nor its probity were held in great esteem. Each division used officers as detectives, but they were occasional, plain-clothes ‘winter patrols’ of two working on a monthly shift system in the divisions.16 So Melville would have been a detective for part of the time and pounding the beat in uniform for the rest.
The next case of his to be reported in The Times17 showed him in contact with a much rougher type, and off duty. As he was in plain clothes, he was probably rather useful. Two couples living at Tennison Street, York Road, were followed late one dark afternoon in November 1877 by Detective Sergeant Ranger and Sergeant Walsh. Off-duty Constable Melville was also following. At Brixton, the two couples were joined by a man named Smith. The police suspected all three men of a series of burglaries in South London, and when Detective Sergeant Ranger and the others approached, one of the women was found to be concealing a jemmy and skeleton keys. At the station they were all charged with loitering with intent in possession of house-breaking implements, and the men were accused of burglary. The police bungled here, as possession of jemmies and skeleton keys was evidently less serious at 6.00 p.m., when they were taken in, than it would have been had the police waited until 9.00 p.m. The chairman of the Surrey Sessions, regretting this anomaly in the English law, awarded Melville £1 for his trouble anyway. This kind of gratuity by results was at the discretion of the magistrates and was common. The result in this case was crime prevention.
The burglars probably came to the knowledge of the police through an informer. This was perfectly obvious and yet it was not mentioned. Unless an informer (a criminal associate) or informant (an uninvolved observer) is known to bear a grudge against a person who is innocent, or otherwise stands to gain from a conviction in court, there is no point in the defence raising the matter. To this day informers are usually invisible: detectives ‘act on information received’ and no questions are asked. In the 1870s the use of informers was particularly problematic. The most senior policemen had not risen through the ranks, and did not approve of their officers consorting with criminals and spending time in pubs. Quite apart from the risks of collusion and alcohol dependency, they believed (rightly) that this gave detectives a bad name. Further, because detectives had to advance money out of their own pockets for information, and could not claim the money back unless a crime was attempted and someone convicted, their evidence was always suspect.18 This was never acknowledged in court either.
In February 187919 Melville appeared in the witness box at Southwark court with his right hand in a sling. The week before he and ‘another detective’ called Beale had followed a couple of ticket-of-leave convicts (men released on parole). They saw them enter 1 Windmill Street, and emerge having changed their clothes. They followed the men to a window of Sarah Bennett’s shop at 30 Blackfriars Road where one fellow surreptitiously cut a pane out of the window, seized two boxes of cigars, and passed his booty to the other. Constable Melville raced across the road but the pair had begun to run; he grabbed the one with the cigars and in the ensuing struggle his hand was severely cut with glass before he overcame the offender. Added to the charge of theft was that of cutting and wounding Constable Melville of L Division.
Melville was plainly well suited to this kind of work. He gave evidence confidently and stated no assumptions that could provide an opening for an astute cross-examiner. He liked to see without being seen and, with the policeman’s towering helmet off, he had the detective’s required ability to melt into a crowd: he was an open-faced young man, ordinary in every way.
It so happened that the central Detective Branch was being reformed after a scandal that emerged in 1877. A Madame de Goncourt had been swindled out of £30,000 and two men associated with horse-racing fraud, Benson and Kerr, were wanted to answer charges. Benson was in custody in Amsterdam and the Superintendent of the Detective Branch, Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Williamson, sent a smart, multi-lingual Chief Inspector Druscovitch to Holland to collect him. Bringing him back to London seemed unusually difficult. At home, Sergeant Littlechild and a couple of other officers were on the track of Kerr, but he too kept slipping through their fingers. No sooner did they find out where he was staying than he had moved on. Littlechild was getting suspicious by now, and he was not the only one. Finally they caught up with him in Edinburgh. Kerr tried to make a run for it; Littlechild raced after him and the man pulled a gun. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t make a fool of yourself, it means murder!’ cried Littlechild.20 Kerr submitted, and the story began to unravel.
For the past four years – between 1873 and 1877 – a Detective Inspector Meiklejohn had been in Kerr’s pay – hence the tip-offs. And Meiklejohn, who knew that Druscovitch was worried by his brother’s debts, had offered Druscovitch the opportunity to earn backhanders from Kerr as well. A chief inspector called Palmer was also implicated. Palmer, Druscovitch and Meiklejohn (who later went into business as a private detective) were jailed for a couple of years and the scandal tainted ‘Dolly’ Williamson’s career. He was not corrupt, but his supervisory skills were called into question. An enquiry was set up and an opinionated young barrister and journalist called Howard Vincent saw his chance: this was a golden opportunity for him to make a strong representation to the enquiry, and to come in as a new broom who would lead the detective force.
Charles Howard Vincent was not yet thirty. After Westminster School, where as a frail, undistinguished scholar he had failed to shine, he had served in the Army for five years and in the Territorials; he had lived in Paris and Dresden, Moscow and Constantinople; he was war correspondent to the Daily Telegraph. As a barrister he was ambitious and hard-working but lacked professional focus, and therefore preferment in the law. But he knew English politicians and senior civil servants, and had enough contacts in Paris to put his plan into action.
He travelled to Paris and with the help of a préfet in the Sûreté wrote a précis of the way the French criminal investigation system worked, with recommendations for its adaptation to English use. This he refined, according to his biography, eighteen times.21 The result was short, readable and incisive. The service required re-structuring. The central Detective Branch should be enlarged and divisional detective patrols should liaise with it, the whole thing forming a criminal investigation department.
The enquiry committee were impressed; everyone admired the French system, and here it was, on paper ready to be implemented. Vincent moved on to the next step: to gather support for himself as holder of the Head of CID post that would necessarily be created if his recommendations were adopted. He concentrated attention upon his legal experience – there were quite enough ex-soldiers in the police already and they seemed to be part of the problem – and his four languages, and attracted the backing of the Attorney General and several members of the committee including Sir William Hardman, the Chairman of Surrey Sessions (who had coincidentally given Constable Melville his £1 reward). Sir Richard Cross, the Tory Home Secretary, was pleased to offer him a job. Vincent’s salary, at his own suggestion, was set at that of an assistant commissaire – £1,100 pa. His title was to be Director of Criminal Intelligence. His position was at first anomalous, for he was both subordinate to the Commissioner and independent; in charge, but with no power of enforcing directives to staff.22
Despite press scepticism, Vincent created the job through trial and error without experience, thanks largely to guidance from Sir Adolphus Liddell, a senior civil servant at the Home Office. Vincent, who was friendly with M. Lepine of the Sûreté, grasped from the start the international scope of crime, but had to create a frame within which everyone could work. A letter from the Home Secretary dated 14 September 1878 gently chides the new Director on the political niceties:
while direct communication between yourself and foreign police authorities for the purposes of information is unobjectionable, all demands for arrest, whether by telegram or otherwise, must be made through the diplomatic channel and the Foreign Office, and all demands for arrest on the part of the English police must be sent to the Secretary of State for transmission to the competent authorities abroad through the Foreign Office.23
There was always pressure from abroad about London’s refugees, and anarchists especially. Vincent was relaxed about social-democratic clubs, and thought they posed no threat whatsoever. And at first the Fenians were of no particular concern, for he discovered that there was a shadowy character called Anderson at the Home Office who monitored their activities. But anarchists were different. The anarchist movement was of course opposed to authority, but beyond that it split. While some simply wanted the freedom to do as they wished and expected that if everyone did so capitalism would just crumble away, others believed that this process would take too long unless given a helping hand. This ‘helping hand’ was propaganda by deed; in other words, showing just how great life could be if you summarily got rid of the symbols of repressive order. Kings, seats of government, expensive restaurants and police headquarters were favourite targets chosen on the basis that ‘scum rises to the top’.
Vincent was aware that royal lives could be in danger from assassins, and also that continental governments believed the English dealt much too lightly with openly anarchist refugees. Certainly revolutionaries could meet and publish in London in a way they were not free to do anywhere else. It always irritated foreign countries when their home-grown anarchists fled across the Channel, wrote rallying cries to violent action, printed them and sent them home.
It was also politically awkward, as the Foreign Office for its own reasons would not, and would not be seen to, bow to political pressure to deal with foreign revolutionaries. Further, the British ruling classes claimed that a fundamental difference in political philosophy was involved: they claimed that the ‘safety valve’ of social clubs, freedom of speech and movement and peaceful demonstration functioned well. Their relative liberality allowed them to keep an eye on potential troublemakers and defused revolutionary intentions in a cloud of hot air. So, with M. Lepine and others demanding action, and the Home Office and Foreign Office refusing to act, ‘Vincent... lived under a constant cross-fire of alternating censure’.24 All he could do was visit socialist and anarchist clubs on the quiet, in disguise (which, according to his biographer, he did25), and make sure that there was strong but unobtrusive security around visitors like the Kaiser, who made a State visit in 1879. He also employed a single Scotland Yard inspector, Von Tornow, who quietly kept an eye on political insurgents from continental Europe.26
The police force had some difficulty in accommodating itself to the new CID set-up. From the start in 1878 the uniformed men resented having a permanent plain-clothes branch in every division; they were seen as having a financial advantage, as one tradition carried over from the old detective force was that of rewarding them out of treasury funds. Over the years it had become a bounty system in all but name. They were not particularly well paid but could double their income if a senior officer recommended rewards by results in big cases.27 Also, since there were fewer of them, they had the career advantage of being more noticeable in work, which by its nature required initiative.
Melville at least must have felt quite sanguine about his prospects in the force. Just seventeen days after his appearance at Southwark Magistrates’ Court with his arm in a sling, on 20 February 1879 he got married. His bride was an Irish girl, Kate Reilly from a village in County Mayo, far north of Kerry but also way out along the west coast. She worked at Barratt’s the drapers on the Westminster Bridge Road and they married just around the corner – in Southwark but still within a hundred yards of the Lambeth police accommodation – at St George’s Roman Catholic Church.
Melville’s confidence was justified. Four months after the wedding he was promoted from Constable to Detective Sergeant in the CID. He was now stationed in P Division, which abuts L Division and includes Camberwell, Walworth and Peckham, districts slightly further south of the river. He was still dealing with straightforward crime of the kind that is motivated by greed or jealousy rather than ideals, and still ending up in street brawls for his pains, according to The Times.28 An account of a case at Marylebone Police Court shows him making a difficult arrest in Clerkenwell.
A Mr Tufts, of Westbourne Park near Paddington, was first into the witness box, and described how he and his wife had gone out the previous Saturday evening at 7.00 p.m. and returned around midnight. They were still up at 1.00 a.m. when they heard a lot of noise upstairs and their two servants (who had been with them for years) rushed down terrified. The police were called. They found the attic skylight open and all in confusion, and a thousand pounds’ worth of gold, jewellery and clothing gone from three bedrooms over two floors.
Melville explained to the court how the following Tuesday evening at 5.00 p.m. he, along with Inspector Peel and two sergeants of G Division, went to Clerkenwell and waited two hours for one of the suspected men, a twenty-seven-year-old ‘general dealer’ called Armstrong, to come out of his house in Bowling Green Lane. He made the arrest, but Armstrong refused to go quietly and put up a furious fight. Quite a crowd gathered. It was probably not a crowd supportive of the police. Melville, by his own account (one detects an underlying bitterness) had just about reached the limit of his endurance when Inspector Peel finally broke it up.
At the police station, and at the houses of Armstrong and his co-accused, cash, revolvers, cartridges, diamonds and skeleton keys were discovered. One of the men was seen by Melville surreptitiously passing his ill-gotten gains to the wife of the other and, as in the earlier Lambeth case, both couples were charged. Detectives like Melville were aware of the usefulness not only of informants (for this arrest clearly depended upon information received) but of burglars’ womenfolk to the breaking-and-entering trade. Women wore such a lot of clothes. At dead of night, a woman wearing a bonnet and cape over a voluminous dress could conceal the booty about her person and depart innocently arm in arm with her lover from the scene of the crime. If the fellow had to make a run for it, the police would pass her by and even if they didn’t, they couldn’t search her without taking her to the police station; there were no women police.
While stationed at P Division Melville probably worked out of Walworth Road Police Station. No.44 Liverpool Street, the house where he and Kate and their eighteen-month-old baby Margaret were living at the time of the 1881 census, would have been conveniently close. The street name was later changed to Liverpool Grove but the house is still there, one of a pretty, three storey terrace with Gothic windows opposite a leafy churchyard. It was a tranquil backwater, convenient for East Street market and omnibuses to the Elephant and Castle just half a mile away.
The Elephant and Castle was the major commercial centre for inner South London and its huge department store, Tarn’s. At six storeys high with associated factories and accommodation for nearly three hundred staff, Tarn’s was a magnet for eager ladies from nearby Blackheath and Dulwich, Clapham and Stockwell who could not resist – straight from Paris! – its parasols, hats, furs, dress materials (‘New Shades in French Beiges, Summer Serges, Indian Cachemires, and Merinos, Alpacas and Russell Cords’29), bedsteads, Davenports and Canterburies, overmantels and dressing sets, bamboo whatnots, and on, and on. No doubt Kate Melville spent a few rapturous hours gazing into its plate glass windows.
One woman who was quite a lot richer was also distracted by the delights of the Elephant and Castle in August of 1880. She took £400 in cash from her bank there: three £100 notes, one £50, four £10 notes and the rest in gold and silver. She put the cash in a purse inside a bag before setting off for an absorbing shopping trip with her little girl and her sister-in-law. When at last they caught a tramcar home to Clapham, she asked her sister-in-law for the money and was told the little girl had it; but the bag was open and the money gone. She asked the conductor urgently to stop the tram, insisting that she must return to the bank and get the notes stopped. He ignored her and rang the bell, but she grabbed her skirts, jumped off and hurried to the bank as her sister-in-law and daughter rode away.
Within weeks, Detective Sergeant Melville had traced some of the notes. The tram conductor had ordered a new suit from a Clapham tailor and changed a £10 note to pay for a gold watch and chain for his girlfriend. At Lambeth Police Court he was remanded week after week, but continued to insist that he had not only ‘found’ the original cash, but ‘thrown away’ the other £280. To help him remember where he had thrown it, he was remanded until November; and there The Times, infuriatingly, ends its tale.30
In January of 1882 Melville’s name appeared again when he was one of the officers investigating a couple of shoplifters;31 and at the end of that year, he bore witness against a light-fingered, twenty-four-year-old assistant to a milk roundsman, who was accused of stealing from funds received, which he was supposed to deposit twice daily. He had been employed by the roundsman for four months. ‘Detective Melville in answer to the magistrate said he believed the prisoner had been living at a rather high rate, and on Sunday week had entertained some sixteen persons at dinner.’32
Melville had now been a policeman for over a decade. The little family was growing. This year Kate had given birth to a baby girl also called Kate. Perhaps Melville expected to carry on indefinitely outwitting the burglars and embezzlers of South London until he retired; but the opportunity soon arose to become part of something altogether more exciting.