In March of 1883, when Kate was six months pregnant with their third child, Melville was offered a position within a new covert branch of the CID based at Scotland Yard. Headed by Superintendent ‘Dolly’ Williamson, it would be called the Special Irish Branch (SIB).
Although the Special Irish Branch was new, its approach was not. It had developed out of existing efforts to contain Irish discontent. It was established in response to a Fenian bombing campaign which had begun in 1881 and was causing increasing alarm.
Since the Clerkenwell bomb of 1867 (an attempt to blow up the Middlesex House of Detention to release a Fenian prisoner), the British Government had employed Robert Anderson, an Anglo-Irish barrister, on Irish matters – that is, spying and counter-terrorism. At first he worked out of Dublin Castle where his brother occupied a senior position. The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) relied on a network of clandestine agents all over Ireland (publicans, butchers, ordinary people in ordinary towns) to warn them of anti-British feeling. In other words they operated as an internal Secret Service. In England, this pro-active attitude to detection even of ordinary criminal cases had been considered too morally reprehensible to acknowledge as a police tactic until Howard Vincent took over the CID in 1877 and legitimised such cunning continental ways for use in criminal cases.
From 1868 onwards Robert Anderson was based at the Home Office in Whitehall, but he was not associated with the police. His position was anomalous for the next decade or so. From the start his most important agent was Henri Le Caron. Le Caron had been born Thomas Miller Beach in Suffolk. After four years working in Paris, at the age of twenty-one he emigrated to America and served in the Civil War, adopting a new French name and rising to become a Major. Afterwards he studied medicine. His contacts with Fenians during the war intrigued Anderson and on a visit to England in the autumn of 1867, they met at 50 Harley Street, where Le Caron – as he put it – ‘entered British service’. He would faithfully report the mood and intentions of those Irishmen in America who busied themselves raising money to drive the British out of Ireland.1
In 1870, therefore, Anderson was able to take credit for gathering the evidence against Michael Davitt. Davitt, a Lancashire man originally from County Mayo who spent time in America and later became a Member of Parliament, was jailed for running guns into Ireland. And yet, Anderson fumed forty years later in his autobiography ‘this very time was chosen by the War Office to sell off stores of discarded rifles’.2 Departments of state did not communicate with each other about security. The armed services had not yet confronted the realities of espionage, counter-espionage or terrorism. But if the success of a counter-terrorist effort is to be judged by the ability of a populace to go about its business unafraid, then Anderson and Le Caron between them successfully kept any Fenian threat largely out of the public’s sight and mind throughout the 1870s. In this they were assisted by the Irish Americans’ incompetence, in-fighting and dishonesty – as well as by betrayal from within.
In 1880 there was a change of Government and the Liberals came in. Anderson went on a six-month holiday, and had barely returned when Fenian intelligence spectacularly failed. In January of 1881 the United Irishmen of America blew a hole in Salford Infantry Barracks and their bomb killed the garrison butcher’s seven-year-old son. In the Queen’s Speech a few days later, Victoria declared her Government’s intention to pass a Coercion Act for Ireland. Gladstone, now Prime Minister, had been drawn into this against his will. In Anderson’s view, stated in his biography of 1910, a Coercion Act – which if passed would permit detention without trial, trial in camera or without a jury, curfews and other essential weapons of a police state – was entirely necessary in London as in Ireland; neither place could be governed without one.3
Sir William Vernon Harcourt, the new Home Secretary, was already reviewing security. The three perceived threats were assassination, bombs and published incitements to violence of the kind printed in America’s United Irishman. Harcourt was under pressure on all sides. Queen Victoria leant on him from above. She sat at the head of a pan-European royal clan, devoured newspapers and letters in several languages and kept a keen eye on ‘revolutionists’. In the course of her reign she had been subject to several assassination attacks, and in recent years the King of Italy had been set upon by a man with a dagger, and the Tsar, the Kaiser and the King of Spain had all been shot at least twice.
In Parliament, arguments were being made in favour of removing the Metropolitan force from the Home Secretary’s remit and transferring it to local control, probably by Watch Committees of the type that prevailed in every other city. Harcourt was fully aware of Anderson’s view that at any moment the Irish-Americans might begin a violent campaign in Britain. He was certain that such outrages could not be dealt with by policemen subject to the picayune demands and strategic ignorance of local committees. Harcourt knew that the Home Office must be in charge. If anything happened he would be blamed, but so be it.
Something did happen. The Irish outrage at Salford in January of 1881 was followed by the discovery of other bombs in Liverpool, Chester and Manchester. On 23 January Harcourt told Howard Vincent of the CID to devote the next month of his time to the Fenian outrages and nothing else. The Fenian Office became a department within CID at Scotland Yard. It was at the heart of communication between Vincent, Anderson, Sir Edward Henderson the Police Commissioner, the regional police, the DMP, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and Colonel Majendie, an explosives specialist based, like Anderson, at the Home Office. Between them this crowd, reporting to the Home Secretary, saw off any remaining reservations that senior Metropolitan officers may have had about running the CID as a pro-active detective force.
In May of 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and the German Government protested that a German socialist paper from London called Freiheit had celebrated the event and encouraged repeat performances. The Queen’s links with Germany, and her alarm, could not be ignored. In July Freiheit’s editor Johann Most was tried for incitement to murder and imprisoned for eighteen months. In America, President Garfield was assassinated.
In the summer of 1881 Harcourt was in no great panic over threats from continental revolutionaries because he had taken action. In the light of Garfield’s assassination, royal protection was stepped up. Howard Vincent was to have foreign communist and social-democratic groups and publications watched from now on. Importantly, the Most trial had calmed foreign diplomatic concerns about British firmness.
But Anderson was still coming up with intelligence about Irish-American threats. Michael Davitt, who had been released from Dartmoor in 1877, was arrested within three weeks of the Salford bomb and found guilty of incitement to insurrection. Although he was detained in Portland prison for over a year, in Ireland the Land League (which he had inspired) did not wither away. There was strong support for land reform, and rent strikes and boycotting were used as a means to coerce the less stalwart supporters of the principle. Where an Irish tenant refused to withhold rent, the local community would boycott (that is, not trade with) him. Evictions and serious hardship followed from this, making Ireland’s political problems worse and increasing support in England for the League’s aims, which were promoted in Parliament by the charismatic Member for Meath, Charles Parnell.
Anderson knew Parnell’s thinking, as he had heard his spy Le Caron’s account of a meeting with Parnell in London in the spring of 1881. Thanks to a larger Secret Service grant Anderson was also making contacts within rank-and-file London activists. ‘What grand copy it would have been for the newspapers of that time if, in describing the Fenian procession… they could have added that the band instruments had been taken out of pawn with money supplied by the Home Office!’4 Certain people in power still had reservations about the wisdom of employing agents. Gladstone, knowing this, preferred to remain unaware of the details of secret intelligence and Harcourt had to take the full weight of threats against the state upon his own shoulders. For decades the conventional view had been that by paying informers, one encouraged them to act as agents provocateurs. Anderson, a deeply religious man, was poker-faced.
I warned the leaders who were in my pay that if outrages occurred I should possibly denounce them and certainly stop their stipends. I use the word ‘stipend’ advisedly. In work of this kind payment by results may operate as a positive incitement to crime, whereas the regular payment of a fixed amount has a marvellous influence on the recipient.
Le Caron certainly had no problem with it. In Chicago in the August of 1881 he was a delegate to what he called the ‘Grand Dynamite Convention’ of Clan-na-Gael. (The Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood had re-invented themselves as Clan-na-Gael in 1867). The majority of those present in the large, smoke-filled hotel meeting room – according to Le Caron they were predominantly lawyers – decided upon direct action in mainland Britain. Afterwards a small group of militants discussed strategy for a future terror offensive. They would leave the Royal family alone, but any other British institution was fair game.
Home Secretary Harcourt, a volatile character and still, in this summer of 1881, in a sanguine mood, dismissed threats of a London bombing campaign as ‘a Fenian scare of the old clumsy kind.’5 But nothing focuses the mind so much as a double assassination, and when in May of 1882 the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Permanent Under-Secretary were stabbed to death as they walked across Phoenix Park in Dublin, security flew to the top of the agenda. The well-informed wondered whether the Land League and its supporters in Parliament would break decisively with the Fenian group from across the Atlantic over this; if they did, they predicted,6 there would be no brake on Fenian violence whatsoever. What in fact happened was that the Land League treasurer moved to Paris, from which city he could quietly divert funds to Clan-na-Gael activities upon request.7
Chief Inspector Littlechild of the CID spent five months in Dublin after the Phoenix Park murders working with the Irish police. ‘I assisted the Dublin police by posing as a certain character, and staying in low hotels in the city, in which it was thought that information might be gained of the perpetrators of the deed.’8 In response to a plea from Earl Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant, the Cabinet set up an extremely well-funded anti-Fenian department there under a Colonel Brackenbury. Brackenbury’s view, partly informed by Spencer, was trenchant: for a variety of reasons, the RIC and the DMP were an inadequate defence against Fenian plotters. A small, separate investigative branch with wide powers must be created to deal with them. Brackenbury personally did not want to be at the head of it. He did not want this Irish posting and never had; he wanted to fight with the British Army in Egypt.
Fortunately for him Earl Spencer had a private secretary called Jenkinson who was only too pleased to assume Brackenbury’s position. Edward Jenkinson had liberal views about Ireland. He was a Home Ruler, believing that the grievances of the Irish were genuine and must be addressed. He was opposed to Irish-American terrorism because he believed that it would harden British attitudes while creating Irish martyrs. He had been a divisional commissioner in India and like most ex-colonial officers he was accustomed to the principle and practice of infiltrating spies into the civilian and/or criminal population. He had no background in international espionage. But he seized the opportunity, for which Brackenbury had prepared the ground, to create an Irish-American intelligence network. At Dublin Castle he had Anderson’s brother Samuel to assist him, but Jenkinson was no collaborator; he respected only his own intellect. But he revelled in the work. Within months he was convinced that nothing other than a multi-tentacled secret police initiative covering Europe, North America and the whole of Great Britain could be truly effective; and he was the man to run it.
Irishmen, not Irish Americans, were arrested for the Phoenix Park murders. Five were hanged, eight were jailed, and five got away to France or America. Terrorist attacks worsened. In Glasgow in January of 1883 bombs were left at a railway station and an aqueduct and a large gas-holder was dynamited to smithereens. But it was London that faced the major threat to public institutions and transport. It was far larger and more anonymous than other cities and held the most important targets. On the night of Thursday 15 March a bomb went off at Printing House Square, home of The Times; on 16 March another exploded behind the Home Office.
Superintendent Williamson instituted the new Special Irish Branch on St Patrick’s Day, Saturday 17 March; its base was a first-floor office in an alley with a dog-leg bend called Whitehall Place. Howard Vincent was based at Scotland Yard, less than a hundred yards away, and retained overall control of the CID, which included the SIB. Williamson was to liaise with Vincent and Anderson and to report matters of immediate significance directly to the Home Secretary.
At 10.00 a.m. on Tuesday 20 March his hand-picked force of twelve detectives, to be directed in operational matters by Chief Inspector Littlechild, gathered in the corner office overlooking the Rising Sun pub for the pep talk and induction session. ‘Dolly’ Williamson, an equable character with a dry sense of humour who liked to stroll around London in a floppy hat with a flower in his buttonhole, began with two advantages. One was his own experience. For some time he had been deployed by Vincent to investigate political matters. The other was that his new force had the London bombings fresh in their mind.
Explosions gave the public a shudder of horror, outrage and sympathy; but a detective’s work can be tedious. One of Melville’s reports, written on 4 April 1883 a fortnight after the first meeting of the SIB, describes a typical day.
PC Enright and PC McIntyre report that at 12.30 p.m. 3rd inst. O’Connor left Pond Place and proceeded by Piccadilly to Brewer Street, Soho, but did not call at any house there; then to the American Reading Rooms, 14 Strand, where he left at 4.15 p.m. and then proceeded to the Embankment over Westminster Bridge and down the Albert Embankment by St Thomas’ Hospital. Here he leant on the parapet of the embankment, took out a paper and appeared to be surveying the Houses of Parliament and at the same time was making notes onto the paper. He proceeded onto Lambeth Bridge from which he seemed to be surveying the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace (Lambeth Palace) and also making notes on the paper. He then went along the Wandsworth Road and thence to 2, Ponton Terrace, Nine Elms Lane, occupied by Mr Enright, which he entered at 7.00 p.m.
P.Sgts Melville & Regan report continuing the observation at above address, and at 11.00 p.m. saw O’Connor and Enright leave there, the two proceeding very slowly and apparently in earnest conversation to Battersea Bridge [Chelsea Bridge] where they parted, Enright turning towards his home as above. We followed O’Connor via Sloane Square to his home at Pond Place, which he entered at 11.30 p.m.9
One imagines Melville quietly giving Regan the wink and taking a right turn at Sloane Square, rather than a left towards Pond Place, and skiving off to get the last train home from Victoria. Who were they following and why? O’Connor certainly seems to have had the profile of a plotter, spending the day reading the papers and designing the downfall of the state and the evening over a bite and a jar discussing it. Quite who he was, and why Enright and PC Enright shared the same name, is lost to us, although a clue may lie in the list of detectives gathered at Scotland Yard for that first meeting on 17 March. Littlechild’s twelve apostles were Inspectors Hope and Ahern, Sergeants Jenkins, Melville and Regan, Constables O’Sullivan, Walsh, McIntyre, Foy, Thorpe and two Enrights.
O’Connor, whoever he was, was probably being drawn into some sting inspired by a London informer of Anderson or Jenkinson. None of this matters except in serving to illustrate the many frustrations and red herrings of the job. The foot-slogging underling can only follow orders, which sometimes prove to have been futile in intent.
Melville wrote his report on a Wednesday. Having spent Tuesday evening hanging about waiting for his mark to emerge from 2 Ponton Terrace, by Friday he was putting in his overtime in a comfy room in Bloomsbury; a fact that would emerge when The Times reported the Dynamite Conspiracy10 trial at Bow Street with Harry Poland prosecuting. (Court cases were theatre, and at this time well-known barristers attracted an audience.)
Jenkinson’s intelligence was said to be behind the Dynamite Conspiracy arrests. A florid character called Gallagher, well financed by American Fenians, had recced the House of Commons and planned to blow it up with explosives made in Birmingham. Birmingham detectives had followed a trail that led from manufacturer to bomb-makers and had picked up some of the gang involved. The rest were taken into custody in London. Among their effects were orders for admission to the House of Commons last November, clothes bearing heavy traces of nitro-glycerine, maps including maps of London, and other evidence which appeared incriminating.
In the dock were Gallagher and a brother of his, and their alleged co-conspirators Whitehead, Dalton, Wilson, Curtin (also known as Kent) and Ansburgh.
Curtin, an American, had come to London on 5 April, a Thursday; he was charged with ‘conspiring with others to take possession of explosives in order to commit a felony’. Chief Inspector Littlechild explained that upon his arrival Curtin had been followed to a modest hotel at 11 Upper Woburn Place, Bloomsbury. Melville gave evidence that in the evening of Friday 6 April he had, acting under instructions, booked a room at this hotel, and on Saturday morning he had breakfasted with Mr Curtin. He had engaged the fellow in conversation: it was difficult to know what to do with yourself in London when you don’t know anybody, he had remarked, and Curtin agreed, saying that he had only arrived the day before yesterday and would leave tomorrow. When Curtin left the hotel Melville and another officer followed him. Curtin was seen to stand outside the post office, Lower Strand, for fifteen or twenty minutes watching the Charing Cross Hotel. Then he went to a pawn shop.
Inspector Littlechild said that on Saturday 7 April he and Sergeant Melville and other police officers took Curtin into custody (without explanation) in Euston Square as he made his way towards the station. They all took a four-wheeler to Scotland Yard.
When they got there Superintendent Williamson asked Curtin for his story. He claimed to be living at 11 Upper Woburn Place, and to have come from New York where he lived at 301 East 59th Street. He had crossed the Atlantic to Queenstown, then travelled to Glasgow where he had worked at a shipyard; he had arrived in London the Thursday before.
He was taken to Bow Street and charged, and proved to have money in pounds and dollars. He denied knowing any of the others. He was shown a letter with his signature on it addressed to one of the Gallagher brothers; the letter had been taken from Gallagher’s room at the Charing Cross Hotel. (Littlechild asserted that when they met, Curtin and Gallagher shook hands in mutual recognition.) While Curtin was interviewed at Scotland Yard Melville returned to the hotel in Upper Woburn Place and searched Curtin’s room. In a portmanteau he found a couple of shirts labelled ‘Kent’.
The case continued at the Old Bailey in June. All the big guns were there: the Lord Chief Justice, the Attorney General, Colonel Majendie (‘Her Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives’) and representatives of the Royal Irish Constabulary, among others. The prisoners were ‘taken from and brought to the court under a strong guard of mounted police’. The stage was set. Against this sombre background, it would have been hard to convince a jury of their innocence.
A man Curtin had worked with in Glasgow confirmed the story that he had worked there in a shipyard.
Ansburgh was brought before the court and Littlechild described his arrest at Savage’s Hotel, 38 Blackfriars Road. The accused – Ansburgh – cross-examined Melville. Hadn’t Melville told him (Ansburgh) that if he turned Queen’s evidence he would get off, and pick up a £500 reward into the bargain? Melville denied it strongly. It would never occur to him to say such a thing. Ansburgh said ‘You are a notorious liar.’
Melville was making a reputation, of a kind. All the same, Ansburgh was acquitted and so was Gallagher’s brother.
Within a few weeks Melville and Kate would suffer a tragedy all too common in late Victorian England.
They had moved to Brixton. It was a more convenient commute than the house in Liverpool Street, Walworth. They were living – with a toddler of three, a one-year-old baby and another due at the end of June – in Tunstall Road. It was only a hundred yards from the railway station and a good train service to Victoria and Scotland Yard, and conveniently for Kate it was next door to the Bon Marché, another South London emporium.
When Kate Melville was due to have her baby they arranged for Margaret Gertie, who was nearly four, to go and stay with relatives in East London near the Royal Victoria Docks. Whether, as seems likely, they made this decision because with two tiny children at home already Kate would otherwise have too many to handle, or whether it was because Margaret Gertie had suspected scarlet fever and must be removed on medical advice, is unknown. But by the end of June scarlet fever had taken hold and the little girl was living at 31 Barnwood Road, Plaistow, in the O’Halloran household. Mr O’Halloran was her uncle, presumably the husband of Kate’s sister.11 Scarlet fever is an infection which was in those days untreatable, although most children recovered from it. It usually meant a throat infection, and always a fever and a nasty skin rash. It could take hold and reach a peak within a week. In Brixton on 3 July, Kate gave birth to William John, and Margaret died on the same day.
In the spring, Edward Jenkinson had been brought to London for a short stay to co-ordinate anti-Fenian activities from a temporary office in the Admiralty. He kept one eye on his key informer from New York, a binge drinker called ‘Red Jim’ McDermott, whose cover would be blown in the course of the summer and who would narrowly escape being shot by an Irish assassin. McDermott had been sent to England to initiate bogus bomb plots financed by money from Earl Spencer’s fund, administered by Jenkinson.12
Jenkinson was never happier than when dreaming up entrapment operations of this kind. He was not impressed by the Yard men and still less by Anderson, and treated all of them with disdain. He profited from his moment of glory following the Dynamite Conspiracy arrests to insist that Fenian intelligence could not be adequately handled by disparate agencies. It needed one man (himself) to whom all would report, and who would have full control.
Harcourt knew that it would be politically unacceptable to put an official secret police chief in charge. Instead, by the end of the summer Jenkinson had become controller of Irish counter-terrorism in America, Ireland and continental Europe. On his recommendation Major Nicholas Gosselin looked after the same thing in cities like Birmingham and Manchester.
Jenkinson was a figure from an earlier age; a Machiavellian courtier, loyal mainly to Earl Spencer but essentially unsubtle. From his arrival in London onwards, Spencer and Harcourt received conspiratorial memos, often along lines suggesting that Jenkinson knew even more than he could possibly say but to reveal it just yet would mean certain death to his agents. Typical is this, to Spencer about P. J. Sheridan: ‘as Y.E. [Your Excellency] knows I have a little game going on with him in America and any false step here might spoil the game…’13 In Glasgow, where six months before, bombs had been left at a station and an aqueduct and a large gas-holder dynamited, Jenkinson urged Harcourt (in July 1883) that Gosselin be dissuaded from making a move until Jenkinson’s own scheme for trapping the culprits had come to fruition. Everything depended on his personal retention of ‘the threads’, as he called them, of Fenian plotting.
In London, Superintendent Williamson was supposed – in Jenkinson’s view – to report to Major Gosselin. He seems to have kept on talking to Vincent, though. Jenkinson despaired of this unwillingness to sideline Scotland Yard, although thanks to Jenkinson’s sniping and manoeuvring Anderson, at least, was fast fading out of the picture. The former spymaster was still working at the Home Office, but with less and less to do. His only advantage was Le Caron in America. Just as Jenkinson refused to reveal who his sources were, so did Anderson.
Jenkinson returned to Ireland late in the year. He had given Harcourt to understand that while Anderson had one source in America who might occasionally come up with the goods, he had few agents of value in England. Harcourt grew impatient and Anderson often had to submit to his ‘dynamite moods’. He would be summoned to visit the Home Secretary at 7 Grafton Street only to be confronted with an outburst of frustration.14
Intelligence was still unreliable. At the end of October 1883 a bomb on a London Underground train at Paddington injured seventy-two people. This was followed by an explosion in a tunnel on the District Line at Westminster. Jenkinson was convinced that he had uncovered a plot to attack the Houses of Parliament. Nobody knew who or what to believe. Typical of this time is a note from Harcourt to Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary, who had just accompanied Her Majesty safely to Windsor by royal train:
I had one of the usual scares last night about your journey. Williamson at 12.30 a.m. came in with a letter fresh from the US describing the machine with which and the manner in which you were to be blown up on your way from Balmoral. As Hartington and the Attorney General were sitting with me we consulted what to do on this agreeable intelligence but as you were already supposed to be half way through your journey it was not easy to know what course to take…15
In February of 1884 a series of railway-station bombs in London proved only too real. Out of office hours, telegrams like this one from Colonel Pearson came straight to Harcourt’s home:
A serious explosion took place at nine this morning at the parcels office Victoria Station [–] porters injured. Cause at present unknown. [I cannot] say, but from what I can see I do not think gas is the cause. I have posted police all round until the arrival of Colonel Majendie to whom I have telegraphed. Nothing will be touched. Ticket office, parcels office and waiting room of the Brighton Line completely destroyed.16
In March the British Consul in Philadelphia wrote to the Foreign Office that his agent had it on excellent authority that this summer, unprecedented violence would be visited upon the English. O’Donovan Rossa himself, the voice of United Irishman, had read from a letter stamped and sent to New York by Royal Mail. He managed later to copy some choice extracts:
Can not give you the whole of it but if we had not been disturbed Birdcage Walk would have echoed and more than one stone would have tumbled... Pall Mall would have been shaken up more than Charles Street was. The fuse got detached from the cap and before we could make connection again we were spotted. You can look for something soon in either of these places…17
Sure enough, it would not be long before a bomb went off outside the Junior Carlton Club, just off Pall Mall. There were well-financed Irishmen in Antwerp, Bremen and London ready to dynamite the Queen, the Prime Minister, various other notables and all the bridges of London.18 HM Consul in Florence communicated intelligence about American Fenians living in Old Compton Street and the Consul in Philadelphia spent some time chasing around American chemical works on Col. Majendie’s instructions investigating the substance sold as ‘Atlas Powder’ he had found in a bomb.19 Vernon Harcourt was overwhelmed by reports on ‘Irish matters’. He recalled Jenkinson to London. Jenkinson arrived, still arguing about his terms and conditions of service, in March.
In April a man called Daly was arrested with bombs in Liverpool. Daly had been fitted up, although nobody knew that at the time. On 12 April Jenkinson wrote from England to Spencer about
…three hand bombs which came over about three days ago in the City of Chester…Our difficulty was to get the things passed to Daly and then to arrest him, with the things on him, without throwing suspicion on our own informant.20
But that was secret intelligence. For everyone else, the threat averted made the blood curdle just to think of it; and as if to prove the point, in May a police constable discovered dynamite at the base of Nelson’s Column.
And then the Special Irish Branch blew up. When it happened, on 30 May, Jenkinson had settled to work permanently out of Room 56 at the Home Office. He had insisted at first that the visit must be on his own terms.
The work in the ‘ordinary’ Crime Branch is now so entirely distinct and separate from that in the ‘special’ Crime Branch that without any confusion, or the necessity for any special arrangements, the work in the former Branch could be carried on by Mr Anderson while all papers belonging to the latter could be sent to me daily in London… Mr Anderson… dealing with all papers belonging to the Ordinary Branch. All reports either from Mr Anderson, Major Gosselin, Mr Williamson or from any of the local police authorities in Great Britain, all information and all despatches from the Foreign or other offices relating to Fenian organisations or the operations or movements of dynamiters would be sent to me…21
The man had no life. Besides retaining his current position in Ireland he still wanted ‘a recognised official position in the Home Office’.22 Harcourt had impressed Spencer that the English administration could not defend itself without him. Spencer sent him over but they remained in constant touch.
The Scotland Yard bomb went off at 8.40 p.m. in a cast-iron urinal beneath the Special Irish Branch’s first-floor offices, on the corner opposite the Rising Sun. It blew the corner off the building: the corner office vacated at 8.00 p.m. by Chief Inspector Littlechild.23 As the dust and paper settled it would have been out of character for Jenkinson to resist Schadenfreude. He wrote to Harcourt two days after the explosion:
I did not find out till Saturday that there was a public urinal in Scotland Yard under the room in which the detectives sat. And the dynamite was no doubt placed in that urinal. Fancy their allowing the public to go in there at night, or indeed at any time, after the warnings they have received!24
This was accompanied by a helpful diagram of the office, the urinal, and the pub, in which a bullseye marked the spot where the constable on watch should have been stationed, and X marked the spot where he actually was.
In the weeks that followed, heads rolled. Superintendent Williamson (‘very slow and old-fashioned’, according to Jenkinson in a note to Spencer25) was replaced by Chief Inspector Littlechild, whom Jenkinson knew from Dublin. The Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Howard Vincent, resigned. He had married a rich wife in 1882, and had since moved from Ebury Street (and his salon of notabilities du jour such as Charles Dilke) to the grandeur of Grosvenor Square and membership, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, of the Marlborough Club. Rightly anxious to protect the great and good, Vincent had of recent years initiated security arrangements that could seem intrusive. His biography, conceding this, quotes a fuming diary entry of Gladstone’s from 1882 that describes the invasion of Hawarden by royal protection officers – ‘Vincent’s men’, blundering oafs disguised as flunkeys, who lurked behind every bush in his garden, broke his china and mistook tea urns for bombs. While Vincent considered himself responsible for security in England (Sir Edward Henderson was not a hard-working Commissioner) and Anderson considered himself responsible for avoiding threats to that security from the Irish, everything passed off well enough – even though Anderson was always tight with information and Sir Edward showed no sign of making way for a younger man. But matters got a lot more complicated in 1883, the summer when Jenkinson blew into town for the first time. According to Vincent’s biography he was ready to resign at the end of the year but ‘on Home Office request’ remained. In July of 1884, after the Scotland Yard blast, he left amid good humour from his officers and a strained relationship with Jenkinson. His position as Director of Criminal Intelligence was abolished in favour of a new job – the same job, working out of the same office in Scotland Yard, which by Act of Parliament would have a new title: Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID. The post was offered to James Monro, a devout Christian with twenty years of service in Indian courts, where he had been a barrister, a magistrate and a District Judge. Jenkinson, in his arrogance seriously underestimating the newcomer, condescendingly remarked of Monro that he was ‘a good man in his way’.26
Over in Whitehall Place the Special Irish Branch was expanding. Jenkinson already employed RIC men all over England, answerable directly to himself. But these dynamitards moved from country to country all the time. The French and American Governments would not lift a finger to help; to do so might lose them votes, especially in America. As soon as he got back to England in March, Jenkinson had begun to reorganise, insisting that there must be more men at all the ports, to watch comings and goings across the Atlantic.
This included the French Channel ports where men had been stationed for some time. As early as 1880, a letter in Foreign Office files requests permission to install English agents there to combat the trafficking, then common between England and France, Holland and Belgium, of girl prostitutes. Maybe it was never granted. According to a Cherbourg police report written ten years later,27 the English police presence in Cherbourg, Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dieppe began in 1881 in reaction to suspicion that anarchists or nihilists might be crossing the Channel following the attempt on the Queen’s life. The first such detective ‘watching the Southampton line’ at Cherbourg had been a German subject called Schmitt (sic) who was attached to Scotland Yard.
Since this initiative proved successful, the French report explained, the Yard later sent two more men to Le Havre and two to Calais. There had been several at Cherbourg since Schmitt and they worked happily alongside the French police – in fact, the foreign detectives were useful. Incidentally, the French policeman of 1894 pointed out, there had been a dramatic decline in petty thefts aboard cross-Channel passenger vessels since they arrived.
Monro had the happy knack of maintaining discipline while inspiring loyalty in his team. When he made changes, he explained why. Long before Vincent’s time, detectives had been somewhat mistrusted because of the bounty system; everyone knew it was so, but they also knew that if the system were completely abolished pay would have to be improved. Monro understood that the CID must be held in respect or it would be ineffective. He supported a move away from the rewards-for-results system in every way he could. Rewards were more sparingly given, but serious crime decreased.
On the other hand, Jenkinson’s influence was all-pervasive.
Every detective in the Special Irish Branch was a Metropolitan policeman through and through. Even if they were Irish – and most were – this was the case. If you were not stationed in London, most specifically in or around Scotland Yard, you didn’t really know what was going on. You could never catch up. You were out of sight, and too far away for any hope of promotion. Go to the provinces, even to other parts of London, and you might never be seen again.
And yet when, in March of 1884, Jenkinson applied to have nine of Littlechild’s original twelve men leave London and work with customs officers at the ports, Melville chose a posting as far as he could get from Scotland Yard. However ambitious he was, there is always a nagging question for a man with two children under the age of four who follows a dangerous occupation. Is he placing his wife under intolerable strain? Twice, now, police constables had found and defused bombs. He and Kate had survived the death of their child together. Was this daily confrontation with violence fair to her or the children?
Even if he gave no thought to ambition and did not feel endangered, he and Kate needed to make a new start after the bereavement of last summer. So Sergeant Melville and Kate, little Kate and the baby William packed their trunk, left the inspectors recruiting new men, and travelled to France to the first time: to the port city of Le Havre.