As Chief Inspector of the Special Branch, Melville cleverly exploited his contacts with the press. One cannot write ‘contacts with the media’. There was one news medium only – print – and no mass communication other than the newspapers, which were only just beginning to use photographs.1 Since the arrest of Meunier, Melville had developed a public profile. His bravery was a model for the public’s acceptance of, and indeed their growing fascination with, covert detective work. But given that the enemy were so often young hot-heads determined to kill heads of state or chiefs of police, his cheerful self-advertisement was an act of defiance. It was a way of standing up to bullies: ‘Here I am; what are you going to do about it?’ Also, more importantly, the press stayed well clear of his investigations when it was necessary that they do so, and that was part of the deal.
In 1895 Patrick McIntyre got his own back and he too exploited the power of the press. From February onwards he told the story of the Walsall anarchists in Reynolds’ Newspaper in such a way as to cast doubt on Melville’s good character. By that time Melville was unassailable, and despite murmurs of protest and a criminal libel suit by Coulon (which failed) the Government refused to revisit the events of 1892. Too much would have been revealed.
Yet Melville was kept in check. In May Sir Edward Bradford, the Commissioner, refused to allow him to accept the Légion d’Honneur.2 And Melville was certainly not expected to assist foreign governments on his own account. Sometimes the Foreign Office made enquiries of Special Branch, out of courtesy on request from ambassadors in London;3 diplomatic channels, of course, were perfectly in order.
Had the public known that Special Branch occasionally helped the Russian regime to prosecute, some might say persecute, their political refugees, Melville would have been dropped into very hot water indeed, if only to save face.
The Imperial Russian secret police was the Okhrana; he knew its chief officer for Western Europe, Piotr Rachkovskii, who was based in Paris, and they renewed the acquaintance during 1896 when Melville was guarding the Tsar at Balmoral.4 Rachkovskii was a self-dramatising character and Melville once told a friend that the most difficult aspect of royal protection, when it came to the Russians, was
…looking after the foreign police who accompanied their Majesties. The Russian police had to be taught that they could not shoot at sight and that suspects could not be carried off into the unknown without certain formalities.5
Melville remained interested in Stepniak and his Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, presumably because Stepniak had stabbed to death a previous head of the Okhrana. Against the Society were ranged Olga Novikov and her influential liberal friend from the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead. From the early nineties, Novikov had ‘embarked on a crusade against the Society with the purpose of whitewashing the Tsarist Government’.6 Liberal opinion was unconvinced, and support for the Society’s cause widened thanks to its eloquent speakers and trustworthy news reports from Russia. As for Melville’s own attitude to the Tsar’s repellent regime, we can if we are feeling charitable assume that he was not necessarily a supporter of all it stood for but rather a hater of anarchic violence under any circumstances, and of police assassins in particular. He was also on friendly terms with the French police, who collaborated quite happily with the Russian police while sharing their mistrust of the Germans.
Stepniak was killed in a railway level-crossing accident at Bedford Park, Chiswick, in December 1895. There were witnesses – the unfortunate man had simply ambled across the track deeply engrossed in a letter, and failed to hear warning cries. A number of Russian and English ‘Friends’ took over publishing and distribution after Stepniak’s death, and the Society continued to smuggle anti-Government literature into Russia. Melville was particularly interested in a prominent member called Wilfred Voynich, a Russian Pole who ran a bookshop in Soho Square and specialised in rare medieval manuscripts. A young friend of Voynich in the Society, and newcomer from Russia via Germany and France, was one Sigmund Rosenblum.7
Then aged twenty-two, he is believed to have left Paris in the last week of December 1895 with a large amount of money gained by the robbery and knife murder of an anarchist. The victim, an Italian, was making his way out of Paris by train, probably heading towards Switzerland with funds collected for the comrades.
Early in 1896 Rosenblum set himself up in a spacious new flat in Albert Mansions, Vauxhall, London, and began trading as Rosenblum & Co. of 9 Bury Court in the City of London. His business was the patent medicine racket, marketing miracle cures to the desperate and gullible.
In the summer of 1896 he obtained a fellowship of the Chemical Society, and in the spring of 1897 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. He was good company and a wonderful storyteller, but also a man who would say, and promise, anything.
In the spring of 1896, in the course of his application to the Chemical Society, his Russian birth certificate was scrutinised by Special Branch. A report to Melville by Special Branch Sergeant O’Brien showed that the young man had been born Salomon Rosenblum in the gubernia of Kherson, north-east of Odessa near the Black Sea, in March 1873. Later he claimed that he had had an affair with Ethel Boole, a writer nine years older than himself who later married Wilfred Voynich. He certainly knew her, and all the other leading lights of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in which he is known to have played an active part.8
These contacts eased Rosenblum’s absorption into émigré circles in London. Informers were the most significant intelligence sources Special Branch had in terms of the Russian and Polish émigré communities. Some were recruited through the course of everyday enquiries while others offered their services. As Chief Commissioner Sir Edward Bradford reflected a decade later, this area of intelligence gathering was a most difficult one for officers due to the language and cultural barriers of the community they were seeking to infiltrate. Whether they were approached or had volunteered, their motive was usually the same – monetary reward. Although Rosenblum was reasonably well heeled, he was somewhat of a spendthrift and a gambler. Money was one of the prime motivators in his life and was, without doubt, the reason he became a Special Branch informer.
In 1897 he met through his patent remedies the Reverend Hugh Thomas, a very comfortably-off invalid aged sixty-two. He attended this gentleman both at the Manor House at Kingsbury, North London and at Thomas’s town house at 6 Upper Westbourne Terrace, Paddington. To Sigmund Rosenblum, the immediate fascination of this new client was his twenty-three-year-old wife Margaret.
At around the same time the Russian police in St Petersburg received the first (April) issue of a new émigré paper called Narodovoletz, printed in London, and edited by one Vladimir Burtsev. The Deputy Director of the Police Department, alarmed because an article appeared to incite the murder of the Tsar, passed the first issue to Rachkovskii in Paris, who wrote to Melville asking his opinion. For Melville to respond without referring the matter to his superiors was highly irregular. He was not supposed to be co-operating with the Russian secret police, which now had an ‘almost universal reputation in Britain as an agency of tsarist tyranny’.9 That he was able to manipulate events indicates the extent to which Special Branch operated beyond political control.
Early in July Melville responded to Rachkovskii as follows:
A copy of the newspaper… was passed on to me by someone who provided me with a summary of that issue’s contents, and I did not discern anything serious in it. However, since you are writing to me about it, I shall naturally not rely on the impression I have formed of it since, as you yourself well know, one cannot trust translators.
Where the question that you put to me is concerned, our laws are very strange. I do not think that our laws could punish the editor or managing director of a newspaper in which terroristic ideas, murder &c are advocated in a vague form, so to speak. It is a different matter if an article propagating such ideas identifies particular people; then we are dealing with a crime that is covered by English laws.
He cites as examples the Most case and the Commonweal case, both of which resulted in successful prosecutions, and continues:
If you found it possible to bring a case against Burtsev & Co., you could only go about it in the following way. Send the aforementioned newspaper to the Russian Ambassador in London, having marked in it the most relevant passages, and accompany it with a letter in which you insist on the need to prosecute the editor. Ask the Ambassador to bring this letter to the notice of our Foreign Secretary, who, in his turn, will send it to our Home Secretary. The latter will surely pass it on to me. As you see, one will have to act through the diplomatic channel.
For myself, I need hardly mention that I shall be happy to be of service to you and to get at these scoundrels, who essentially are neither more nor less than common murderers. In a word, you may be sure that I shall neglect nothing that may facilitate the successful completion of this matter. I should very much like you to make the above-mentioned approach, because even if nothing comes of it I, at least, will gain the opportunity to worry these fellows and drive them from one end of London to the other. Furthermore, information about the methods Burtsev & Co propagandize for their struggle will make our Government turn its attention to them and, whether it comes to a court case or not, the matter will pass through my hands, so I shall avail myself of the opportunity to inform the Government what these fellows are.
Around the 1st of August I am going away for about three weeks to take the waters in the south of England. I hope the file will arrive on my desk either before or after my holiday. At the moment, Burtsev is working on the second issue of his newspaper. The nihilist Feliks Perl has just arrived in London and is staying in Beaumont Square with Dembskii, who will shortly move to a different flat.
Finally, I hope you will be able to construe my long letter and I assure you that I retain the most pleasant memory of the time we spent together.10
Burtsev was not a member of the Society, but he had been living in London since 1891, had known Stepniak, and knew its leading members well. Some of them warned him that the English police would not put up with provocation to regicide, and they were right.11 Melville seems to have an efficient informant among the Russian community and it is likely to have been Sigmund Rosenblum, who in his private life at this time was wooing the besotted Mrs Thomas.
In August 1897 Melville may well have spent some time ‘taking the waters’ but his letter left the Russians with plenty to do. The Chargé d’Affaires in London made his feelings known to the Foreign Office, which in September presented its report on Narodovoletz and that paper’s opinion that throughout the last seventeen years under Tsars Alexander III and Nicolas II
…reaction ought… to have given rise to the strongest resistance on the part of the revolutionists, and to have caused their plan of campaign to be summed up in one point, regicide, and if it appeared necessary a whole series of regicides, and a systematic political terrorism.12
Wheels turned exactly as Melville had said they would. By December Mr Burtsev of 16 Westcroft Square, Ravenscourt Park, London W. was legitimately in his sights. Melville himself made the arrest, which took place on 16 December when the astonished young man was leaving the British Museum Reading Room. Later that day he took Burtsev’s keys and, with some fellow officers, travelled to Ravenscourt Park and turned over the flat. A van-load of documents was removed; Burtsev was the unofficial archivist of the Russian revolutionaries abroad. When, before the trial, Rachkovskii and other Okhrana agents required sight of these they were prohibited from seeing them. The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom breathed a sigh of relief and kept on raising money for Burtsev’s defence fund. A question was asked in parliament and
...assurance was given that the papers were under seal. They had been seen by no one except the prosecution and would not fall into the hands of any foreign Government.13
Melville’s action in confiscating these documents may have saved lives. We still do not know what happened to the incriminating material.
In February of 1898 the unfortunate editor of Narodovoletz was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. Melville received an effusive thank-you note from Rachkovskii in French (the language in which they usually communicated). The Okhrana supreme in Europe congratulated him on the ‘outstanding outcome’ and the fair-mindedness of British juries who were not swayed by political considerations and continued
I don’t need to add that the success of this case has saved us from any inconvenience at a personal level: I would have been sorry to see you so badly rewarded for so much goodwill.14
One wonders what ‘inconvenience at a personal level’ Inspector Melville avoided with success in the British case. One implication could be that he sometimes worked for two masters – Russian as well as English; and somebody, perhaps in St Petersburg, had demanded results, or a cessation of funding. However, there is nothing in the Okhrana files to confirm this.
At the shop in Soho Voynich, meanwhile, was also attracting unwelcome interest from the security services. He was not only distributing what the Okhrana saw as seditious material, but his business was believed to be a conduit for revolutionary funds. Special Branch knew this, and it seems likely that they knew because Sigmund Rosenblum kept Melville informed. Melville was of course interested in this unprincipled young man, and not just because native Russian-speaking informers were almost impossible to find; Rosenblum was also clever, daring and could talk the birds out of the trees.
In March of 1898 the invalid Reverend Thomas died suddenly in a Newhaven hotel. For the past year he had been in the care of a nurse who, unknown to him, was a murder suspect who had evaded the law abroad.15 The death certificate was signed by a young Dr T.W. Andrew, MRCS, who, according to the researches of this author over a century later, did not exist under that name; he was seen by hotel staff, but quickly left; the burial took place within two days. Thomas had made a new will just twelve days before he died, and left his great wealth to his widow Margaret (who just five years before had been employed as his maid).
By the summer of 1898 Melville knew that Rosenblum wished to marry Mrs Margaret Thomas, and he knew also that Rosenblum was keen to change his identity. He wished to return to Russia, but could not do so under his current identity, as he was eligible for army service, which he had effectively evaded when he left in 1893. Melville was aware of Sigmund Rosenblum’s value as an informant and would go out of his way to assist. Circumstantial evidence for his role in what followed is strong, particularly since Rosenblum now prepared to adopt the surname of Melville’s first wife Kate.
The oldest known way of satisfying officialdom about one’s identity is to produce evidence of place of birth. It was not until 1971 that Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller Day of the Jackal revealed to the world the ease with which a deceased infant’s identity can be assumed. Melville would have known about it in the 1890s as Special Branch sometimes needed to create new identities for people. It so happened that a Sidney Reilly had been born to Michael and Mary Reilly in Belmullet, County Mayo, in 1878 and had died soon afterwards. Quite what relationship Michael was to Kate Melville is unclear. (Civil registration of births in Ireland did not begin until 1864.) But since Michael Reilly bore Kate’s name and came from the same small place, it is on balance probable that Melville knew of the baby Sidney Reilly’s birth and almost immediate death.16
The birth of a single Sidney Reilly in Ireland, in the 1870s, was traceable; that would be enough. At the time Irish-born men and women were subjects of the Queen.
When, in August of 1898, Sigmund and Margaret married, both the witnesses were future sons-in-law of a man called Pannett, who worked for the Royal Mail and knew Melville in a professional capacity. In the register Margaret, whose maiden name was Callaghan and who had been born and brought up in Ireland, gave her father’s middle name as Reilly (which it was not).
Shortly after the wedding Sigmund Rosenblum departed, well supplied with money, for Spain, leaving Margaret to move out of the Manor House in Kingsbury and dispose of the contents. They would henceforth reside at Upper Westbourne Terrace, Hyde Park. Rosenblum, with his fine-eye awareness of appearances, never called it ‘Paddington’.
Quite what his business in Spain was is unclear. He could have been doing something for Melville, who had been approached through diplomatic channels by the Spanish Government in the past. They had recently deported a number of anarchists, inevitably to England, and there were moves afoot to co-ordinate international reaction to violent anarchists who now appeared to favour assassination by knife or gun, rather than bombs in public places. In 1897 the Spanish Prime Minister Canovas de Castillo had been murdered by an Italian and, in September 1898, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary was killed.
Late in 1898 an anti-anarchist congress was held in Rome. The participants were, on the hard-line side Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany; on the other, Britain, France and the rest.17 Before the conference, Robert Anderson wrote of the congress’s intention that certain laws should be co-ordinated:
The chief effect upon my mind produced by reading these documents is to deepen the misgivings I entertain that the Congress will result in increasing our difficulties – serious enough at all times – in dealing with the alien revolutionists who congregate in London. I am clear that the level of peace and order which we have been able to maintain in recent years has been due to action taken by this department which was (if I may coin a word) extra-legal; I hesitate to use the ordinary word which seems applicable to it. But if the proposed legislation is obtained at the cost of a public statement of what are the actual powers of the police in this country, then the methods which successive Secretaries of State have sanctioned, and which have been resorted to with such excellent results, will be shown to be without legal sanction, and must be abandoned. Sir E. Lushington’s memo brackets ‘surveillance’ with expulsion as ‘practices unknown to English law.’ But is it not strange that foreign anarchists should be unaware of this, having regard to the statement in Sir P. C[illeg.]’s declaration ‘I do not need to add that any individual suspected of intending to commit one of the criminal acts already referred to in contravention of English law is subject to scrutiny by the police.’18 Such indeed has been our practice in dealing with anarchists. So recently as a few weeks ago it enabled us to break up a conspiracy for the assassination of the King of Italy.
Someone has scrawled in the margin beside this last sentence – This appears to me very far-fetched – PRIB.
After the conference, Robert Anderson wrote an even clearer confidential memo pointing out that the law should be left as it was and the Expulsion of Aliens act tightened, since the police seemed quite effective at driving anarchists away rather than prosecuting them; and regarding anarchy in general
…I would say emphatically that in recent years the police have succeeded only by straining the law – or in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things – at intervals, to check this conspiracy; and my serious fear is that if new legislation affecting it is passed, police powers may be thus defined, and our practical powers seriously impaired. Within the last few weeks I have by means such as I allude to driven away two of the most dangerous anarchists in Europe, who were plotting to murder one of the crowned heads of Empire. A power to expel such men would prevent such plots altogether.’19
Within weeks the Foreign Office concurred that in return for an agreement on the part of the other countries not to deport all their anarchists ‘wholesale’ to British shores, the British should consider tightening their own laws.20
In the winter of 1898–99 the Rosenblums were living at Upper Westbourne Terrace. Nearly seventy years later, Robin Bruce Lockhart asserted that shortly after their marriage, Margaret sold the Hyde Park house and the couple moved into St Ermin’s Chambers, Caxton Street, Westminster.21 In fact they held onto the Church Commissioners’ lease of the Paddington house until June 1899 when they left the country.
Rosenblum was still friendly with Voynich, who is said to have made money for the Society by selling fake medieval manuscripts, having obtained a supply of fifteenth-century paper from continental Europe. Now he needed to make the inks as authentic as possible. Early in 1899 it was Sigmund Rosenblum who, as Sigmund Rosenblum FCS FIC ‘&c’, applied for and was granted permission to use the British Museum Reading Room. Here he had access to a range of medieval books and manuscripts that contained the formula for a range of ancient inks, pigmentations and colours.
It seems that having gained expertise in the field, he may have turned his attention to still more lucrative opportunities. On 17 April 1899, Rachkovskii wrote to Melville alerting him to the presence of a massive rouble-counterfeiting ring operating in London. His friend Fiodor Gredinger, the Deputy State Prosecutor of St Petersburg, was on his way to London to take charge of the case and would much appreciate Melville’s assistance (and any costs incurred would naturally be reimbursed.) To quote my own account in Ace of Spies – the True Story of Sidney Reilly:
The counterfeiters had a contact inside the currency-printing firm of Bradbury and Wilkinson, and the contact obtained a plate that was copied by an engraver. The counterfeiters then carried out the printing themselves using their own ink and paper. Rosenblum’s name was not initially connected with the investigation. It emerged when attention turned to how the forged money was being shipped out of the country.
According to Okhrana records, Rosenblum had an interest in the Polysulphin Company in Keynsham, Somerset. The factory produced a host of chemical products including soap, which it exported abroad. This was an ideal vehicle for smuggling money and indeed other commodities… [Also] in order to perpetrate such a scheme an expert knowledge of printing inks would have been required. As a chemist with some experience in this line, Rosenblum would therefore have played a wider role outside that of mere distribution. Once Rosenblum’s role was uncovered, Melville would have had good grounds to fear that his connection with Scotland Yard might prove a severe embarrassment…22
Melville’s cleverest agent must vanish from the scene at once. In the first week of June 1899, Mr and Mrs Sigmund Rosenblum gave up their lease; Mr and Mrs Sidney Reilly sailed away from England. Sidney, at least, would be back.
A year later, another unknown adventurer from overseas was to find himself in Melville’s orbit. Eric Weiss, who ironically shared the same birth date as Sidney Reilly, arrived in London with his wife Beatrice in May 1900 and moved into theatrical lodgings at 10 Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. Weiss, better known to posterity by his stage name, Harry Houdini the handcuff king, had so far made little impact in the United States, his adopted home. He had therefore resolved instead to conquer America by first making a name for himself in Europe. Knowing that a good number of successful acts whose reputations had been made in London, Paris and Berlin had an exalted value in New York, he set about securing London bookings. According to Beatrice Houdini, after some days of unsuccessful interviews, C. Dundas Slater, the Manager of the Alhambra, gave him an audition on 13 June.23 Apparently not wholly convinced of the young man’s abilities, he offered him a contract on the condition that he must first, ‘escape from handcuffs at Scotland Yard’. Slater was apparently acquainted with Melville and arranged for himself and Houdini to visit the Yard the following day.
At the appointed hour they were welcomed by Melville who immediately ridiculed the notion that anyone could escape from Scotland Yard handcuffs. Stage handcuffs were one thing, he told them, but Scotland Yard cuffs were the last word in scientific manacles. Houdini, unabashed, insisted on rising to the challenge. Later that day he told Beatrice that within seconds Melville suddenly grabbed his arms, encircled them around a nearby pillar, produced a pair of cuffs from his coat and snapped them tightly around his wrists. ‘I’m going to leave you here and come back for you in a couple of hours’ Melville told him as he and Slater headed towards the doorway. To Melville’s astonishment, Houdini replied, ‘I’ll go with you’ as the opened cuffs fell to the floor. For over a century no corroboration of Beatrice Houdini’s recollections was thought to exist. However, in December 2003 a record of the meeting was found in New Scotland Yard records.
Melville, although somewhat taken aback, held out his hand to Houdini in genuine astonishment, offering him his unreserved congratulations. Two weeks later, on 27 June 1900, Melville was Houdini’s guest at a special performance of his stage act at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square. There the London press were treated to his full routine of escapes from a variety of trunks, cabinets, chains, padlocks and shackles, many brought along by the audience themselves.
It has often been maintained that Houdini could compress his knuckles so that they became smaller than his wrists, thus enabling him to slip out of manacles. In fact, he was unable to perform such a feat, relying instead on giving them a single sharp rap in a certain spot. For more complex manacles he used a unique picklock he had devised while working for a locksmith in Appleton, Wisconsin. He could also improvise a picklock from a piece of wire, a pin or a watch spring, all of which were easily concealable. Over and above this, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every type of lock and locking system imaginable and a unique collection of locks and mechanisms. Melville was to remain an acquaintance of Houdini’s long after their first encounter at ScotlandYard and, like a number of other police officers around the world, gave Houdini a glowing written testimonial. When, a decade later, Melville began his Spy School lectures to new Secret Service recruits, he often gave advice on the art of entering locked premises, and could well have drawn on the knowledge that Houdini was rumoured to have imparted to him.
Around the turn of the century Special Branch had done such a good job that the general public were no longer threatened by terrorism. Fenian bombs were a thing of the past, the wilder English elements were mutinous but had never succeeded in doing any harm, and foreign anarchists could hardly make a move without its being reported, and knew it.
Covert detection was no longer regarded as sly or underhand, but rather as an intellectual challenge worthy of the finest minds. There was a perceptible change in attitude. There could be many reasons for this, all of them plausible; the fact is that while Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, failed to make a stir in 1887, ten years later Sherlock Holmes was wildly popular.24
Conan Doyle could not have plucked his hero from the ranks of the police because such a hero would not be believable. Everyone knew that ‘the finest minds’ were those of sophisticated, international, and classically educated men. Class prejudice was endemic. Policemen could be brave, as the newspaper-reading public knew since the arrest of Meunier, but everything was somehow obvious about a policeman. The progress of his career was there on paper for all to see. Policemen, with their nondescript backgrounds, suburban families and thumping boots,25 lacked the urbanity, the mystery, of the upper-middle-class detective, free of domestic encumbrances in his book-lined room. However:
Values were changing, no doubt under the pressure of material circumstances. Old taboos were lifting, and among them the Briton’s old maidenly blushes at the thought of a plain-clothes police. Whether this would spread to embrace political police was yet to be seen. Plain-clothes detection and disguises were only a step away from espionage, but it was still a very long step… The spy story as a genre had not yet been born.
In naval and military circles, the old preoccupation with honourable conduct – not sneaking or spying – was beginning to lose ground, faced with the need to prevent the Boers from obtaining guns from Europe and to keep up with German technical progress. Now that the Europeans had carved out their Empires and there was no easily conquerable land left in Africa or elsewhere, the threat faced by British governments was more likely to come from other states than from isolated terrorists. But the Army and Navy would not turn to ScotlandYard for expertise, for they had cobbled together their own intelligence services over the years.
So Special Branch had been too efficient for its own good. Like any department of Government, it could only increase in importance by developing a larger workload. At least one Special Branch policeman therefore turned his attention to a phenomenon he considered equally capable of destroying the social fabric. The Naughty Nineties had seen coverage in the newspapers of the Oscar Wilde trial, and Inspector John Sweeney was among those horrified by its revelations. Littlechild, now a private detective, had had a walk-on part as discoverer of a nest of rent-boys in Alfred Taylor’s flat at 13 Little College Street. Three years later in 1898, when Sweeney turned his beady eye upon it, the ‘Legitimation League’ hardly represented what Bernard Porter calls ‘sexual anarchy’.26 It was founded on nothing more than a well-meaning desire to remove the taint of bastardy from illegitimate children. But Inspector Sweeney single-mindedly pursued these people in the belief that they posed a threat to the foundations of society. He persuaded the League’s secretary, who made a living from the sale of progressive literature, to sell him Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex, a book intended as a serious scientific study of homosexuality. No sooner was it handed over than he arrested the fellow on an obscenity charge. Sweeney persuaded his terrified prey that if he pleaded guilty, he would get off with a fine and no publicity; but he must shut down the League and its publication, The Adult.27
Quite what Melville, who presumably sanctioned this pursuit of the Legitimation League, was thinking is unclear. It has been suggested that the prosecution would have appealed rather to Anderson, ‘who was just the kind of person to perceive a threat to the national fibre in the encouragement of free love’.28 This was the one occasion on record when the Special Branch seems to have acted in a frankly paranoid way toward liberal progressives who did not claim to be anarchists, and it calls the personality of Melville into question. Was he obsessively strait-laced? Surely he could not have done his job if he was. Nothing he wrote implies any kind of moral disapproval: despair at the foolishness of mankind perhaps, strong dislike of violent anarchy certainly, but perhaps something more akin to Conrad’s dismissal of the average anarchist as hopelessly lazy and cowardly rather than ‘evil’. There is no apparent obsession with other people’s sex lives. His easy familiarity with people in all walks of life implies a certain tolerance, his writings indicate a sense of humour, and his Will shows that he was kind and considerate. The Legitimation League affair was in Sweeney’s own opinion one of his finest achievements,29 but Melville did not take any credit for it.
He and Amelia had, as it happened, had a little girl together in 1896. She was a child of their middle years; Amelia was forty-four when she gave birth. Unbelievably, he lost this third little daughter to meningitis. Amelia Norah Melville died, aged three, in the Throat Hospital in Golden Square, Soho, in August of 1899.
In October David Nicoll’s play about the Walsall affair, its villain le vile Melville, was performed at the Athenaeum Rooms in the Tottenham Court Road to raise money for Deakin and the others who had just been released.30 Special Branch was hardly bothered. English anarchists represented about three per cent of those they knew about.31 What was more worrying was the continuing shift among violent anarchists on the continent from bombing campaigns to political assassination, and the diplomatic awkwardness that resulted from attempts to get the formal cooperation of Special Branch. This came to a head after 1900, the year in which the Prince and Princess of Wales were shot at by a teenage boy in Brussels and King Humbert of Italy really was assassinated, by a Mafioso from New York; perhaps Anderson’s story had not been so ‘far-fetched’ after all.32
Count Hartsfeldt, the German Ambassador, approached the Foreign Office in the summer of 1900 with a request that Prussian police commissioner Ossip should bring six of his constables to London ‘for the purpose of improving their knowledge of police duty in attendance on the Royal Family and in the Criminal Branch’.33 The Commissioner, on the basis of advice filtering up from Melville who had now been created Superintendent, would not countenance the idea; and it fell to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office to compose a suitably diplomatic response based on what Sir Edward Bradford had told him.
As regards attendance on the Royal Family he says that efficiency does not depend on any rules of practice, but on the possession of a large amount of common sense, judgement and presence of mind, and the power of dealing with difficulties and emergencies irrespective of rules and without reference to a superior officer.
With regard to the general work of the Criminal Branch, the laws which govern the work of the Metropolitan police are so different from those in Germany that Sir E. Bradford believes that any attempt to derive instruction from our practice would rather confuse than assist your police officers.34
In case that was not enough to see off the Prussians, the letter concluded with the Government’s view that collaboration with foreign police would prove unpopular with the public.
The Italians enquired next. This was all very complimentary; Special Branch were obviously doing a better job than any other royal protection squad, but as Anderson had pointed out to the Germans, this was not merely a matter of training but of police culture and public expectation. In January of 1901 Signor Sessi, the Commissioner of Police for Rome, approached the Italian Consul General in London asking for information about how the English did things – there having been a ‘great misfortune’ in July 1900 (the assassination of the King at Monza), in response to which the Italian police had set up a criminal investigation department within the Royal household. Sessi wanted the answers to ten questions, among them ‘are any of the officers ever sent abroad among the anarchists for the purpose of obtaining information?’ and ‘are there any agents on cycles?’ and ‘what measures are taken to ensure the safety of foreign princes, guests of the state?’
Anderson resigned a few months later, apparently after many difficulties with Sir Edward Bradford. As similar queries landed on the desk of Sir Edward Henry, his successor, the groans from that office must have been audible right down the corridor.
If one of the Kaiser’s own police officers is to be believed, Melville appears to have been perfectly happy to work with the German police so long as they collaborated without professional formalities. In January 1901 Queen Victoria lay on her deathbed, and Gustav Steinhauer, as the royal bodyguard, was sent to England with Kaiser Wilhelm II who wished to pay his last respects.35 Melville had heard that assassination attempts were planned for the funeral. Both the Kaiser and King Leopold of the Belgians were allegedly in danger. He discussed the matter with Steinhauer within hours of the German party’s arrival.
This Melville was a silent, reserved man, never given to talking wildly.
‘I have spoken to the Prince of Wales’, he informed me, ‘and he has requested that neither the Kaiser nor any of the members of his suite shall be told what is in the air. The Prince thinks it more than likely, if the Kaiser has any reason at all to fear assassination, that he will not attend the funeral. That would be disastrous from a political point of view.’
The Queen died and as the funeral approached Steinhauer consulted Melville again.
‘Tonight’, said Melville slowly, ‘I hope to arrest three of the most dangerous nihilists in Europe. It may be that I shall want your assistance. In the meantime, not a word to any one.’
By now they were both at Osborne, and that afternoon Melville took Steinhauer with him to London by train. On their way to Waterloo –
‘Steinhauer’, he began, ‘I hope you have made your will.’
‘So’, I said, ‘it is as bad as that!’
It was. It was worse.
At Scotland Yard, Melville issued Steinhauer with a revolver, ammunition and a black silk scarf with which he must, later that night, cover his face, bandit-style, and his white shirt-front. He then took him to Simpson’s Grand Cigar Divan in the Strand, where one could dine in discreet opulence off such rib-sticking British fare as steak-and-kidney pudding or roast beef followed by syrup roly-poly. After dinner and ‘one or two bottles of wine’ they sat over their coffee and cigars until 11.00 p.m. when Melville judged the time right to leave.
Outside, in the brilliantly-lit Strand crowded with people, we got into a hansom cab. Melville gave the driver an address somewhere in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. With my nerves tingling with excitement, we drove up Fleet Street, through the deserted thoroughfares of the City, and thence over London Bridge to some squalid street close by the station. Telling me he would not be more than a minute or two, Melville, surprisingly active for a middle-aged man,36 jumped out of the cab, and without knocking went inside a house that was in pitch darkness.
When Melville emerged from the house (in Vine Lane, off Tooley Street leading down to the river) he was followed by a woman in a dark mackintosh who got into another cab, which theirs followed. They were conveyed over the bridge towards the East End. In an alleyway somewhere in Whitechapel the first cab stopped, followed by the second.
‘Now’, whispered Melville, ‘mind you obey instructions and keep your pistol handy. We are getting near the spot.’
They followed the woman on foot as she made her way through a neighbourhood that ‘fairly reeked with smells foreign to London’. When she entered another darkened house, Melville and Steinhauer lurked unnoticed in the black and silent street. She emerged and took Melville into the house. Then she came back and Steinhauer followed her. He felt her be-ringed fingers through her glove as she took his hand. Inside the house was ‘blacker than ink… one of those terrifying darknesses you can almost feel’. He and Melville stood motionless and waited.
Then, so rapidly that we were taken unawares, there was tragedy on the floor above. We saw a flash of light from an open door, heard the crash of a pistol shot and an agonizing cry of pain in a woman’s voice. In almost the same moment there came a hail of bullets from above.
Bang! Bang! Bang! One, as we discovered subsequently, went through Melville’s hat, another struck me on the arm. But it did no great damage beyond a temporary numbness; it must have ricocheted from the wall and spent its force – luckily for me.
Our own pistols were out almost as soon. Like madmen we blazed away into the light above and were rewarded by a cry and a fall which proved someone had been hit.
Upstairs, the woman and a man lay dying. Two men had leapt from the window into the street; they dashed off in a cab and succeeded in giving Melville and Steinhauer, who pursued them in another cab, the slip. Back to the house went the two policemen, only to find the upstairs room empty.
The girl had disappeared, and so had the man who had been lying wounded on the floor beside her. The handcuffs Melville had put on him… had been broken off and lay on the floor. We lit the gas and saw a scene of terrible disorder. The room itself looked as though it belonged to a woman of the streets. There was a bed in it, a table, two or three chairs, a couple of mirrors and a small oven. On the walls were photographs of actresses. Over the bed were a number of pictures in the nude and a large paper fan which Melville took away with him. There was blood all over the floor.
It seemed that the runaways had returned for their friends. Why Melville wanted the fan is unclear. The idea that a crime scene should remain undisturbed for forensic examination in situ had not yet emerged. However forensic science was on the horizon and fingerprinting was probably in his mind. A Home Office committee had recently reported upon methods of ‘Identification of criminals by measurement and fingerprints’. The new Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Sir Edward Henry, had a passion for the subject and was publishing a book, The Classification and Use of Fingerprints. The subject was not entirely new, but Henry’s appointment in the spring of 1901 represented commitment to a fingerprinting system and rejection of the old unscientific Bertillon system, which had proved useless since it relied largely on cranial measurements, definition of the ‘stunted’ criminal physique, chaps whose eyes were too close together, and so on.
Three Russian nihilists had got away, but the body of the woman informer was dragged from the Thames some weeks later.37 Melville told Steinhauer she was an Italian, who had volunteered information about a Russian plot to kill the Kaiser and King Leopold after being rejected by one of the men. When her lover’s two companions arrived from the continent one dark night, she travelled to Melville’s private address to alert him. She was able to show him their plan to escape from the funeral procession: this had been torn up and thrown into the fire, but she retrieved enough of the charred map to satisfy Melville that she told the truth. The anarchists were not found in London, although long after the funeral
A clue to their fate came in Berlin one day when an official of the Russian Secret Police informed me that two anarchists who had come from England had been hanged. One of them had had an arm amputated on account of a shot in the left shoulder. The description of this man strikingly resembled that in the possession of Melville.38
Never very communicative at the best of times, Melville no doubt continued the chase long after my return to Germany. What astounded me more than anything else was the cleverness he displayed in keeping the details of this dramatic affair out of the Press. Such a thing would not have been possible in Germany.
In America, President McKinley was assassinated in September. The German and Russian Governments once again hinted that British practice should fall into line with theirs in dealing with anarchists. A certain sense of déjà vu develops. Edward Henry presented two reports in 1902 which, though couched more tactfully, and even disingenuously, than Anderson’s, followed the usual line:39
…the police have always been compelled to keep a number of suspects under more or less sustained observation, an observation not sanctioned by express provision of the law but by usage only and by the general acquiescence in it of the community who realise that it is worked under direct departmental control and under the indirect but effective control of the Courts to whom any person aggrieved by police action can apply for redress. It is to this form of observation exercised not only through plain-clothes officers, but also through other agents that anarchists are subjected, and it is quite certain that the working efficiency of the police would not be much increased if an Act of the legislature conferred upon them special powers in this direction.
And precious little help they were getting, either:
Their work… has been carried on under difficulties, the Special Branch receiving but little assistance from the Continental Police. It is true that periodically they receive from France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Switzerland and Holland reports from either the Police or the Minister of Justice regarding the anarchist movement in these countries and when expulsions are made the fact is occasionally noticed but such expulsions are often made weeks before the reports arrive. The last list of expulsions received from France is dated December 1901, the preceding list having come in the January of that year. No such list has at any time been sent by Germany, Russia, Spain or Italy…
Having rehearsed once again the concessions the British were and were not prepared to make, Henry went on to say that no interference with the freedom of the press was required either. The newspapers of Most, Burtsev and Nicoll had been put out of action by existing laws and English juries. Some flexibility was desirable; all sorts of newspapers were currently telling their readers that Mr Chamberlain:
…because he is recognised to be a masterful exponent of a policy of colonial expansion of which their readers disapprove, has been pilloried in their publications as responsible for the blood that is now being shed in South Africa and for all the deaths among the women and children of the refugee camps. Without any express intention of so doing these writers have enlisted to their side the active partnership of anarchist association by whom Mr Chamberlain… is denounced as the common enemy of the human race and there is little doubt that the more violent and desperate spirits among them would view his removal as a laudable and meritorious act. Thus indirectly these newspapers are inciting irresponsible and unreflecting persons to commit crime, but no legislation that could be devised would meet the danger…
Behind all the objections and excuses lay mistrust of the competence of certain foreign police. The need for secrecy in dealing with informers and informants was as important to Melville as it had been to Jenkinson and Anderson, and the issue was brought into the foreground by the Rubini case in 1902, the year of Edward VII’s coronation.40
The man known as Rubini was an Italian anarchist who arrived in England in May 1897 and did not come to the attention of Melville’s surveillance team until September, when he wrote to Reynolds’ Newspaper praising Agiolilli, the assassin of the Spanish Prime Minister. Rubini married an Englishwoman in Soho in the December after his arrival, and thereafter worked as a newsagent for various employers in Soho. The couple had a baby. There was a pattern of petty theft, frequent changes of address and failed attempts to set up in business alone or with a partner.41 In June of 1900, having been denounced in a widely-circulated leaflet as a spy for the Italian police, Rubini was no longer able to obtain work in the expatriate community and could not pay rent or buy food. Special Branch’s observations confirmed that he was peddling worthless information to an Italian policeman at the embassy. As he was, so to speak, on their side and out of favour with the comrades anyway, they watched him less keenly from then on.
In May of 1902 with the Coronation looming, the Italian Ambassador wrote a memorandum to the Foreign Office suggesting collaboration between an Italian police officer, living in London since last year, and Scotland Yard. In view of the Rubini case, this got a dusty response from Sir Edward Bradford.42 Special Branch had known of Inspector Prini’s arrival, and ‘have been in a position to appraise the value of the information he received and transmitted to his Government.’ He had deliberately exposed his informer to danger by circulating a leaflet.
This leaflet printed in Italian, headed WARNING and addressed to ‘Companions and the public’ calls attention to one Rubini who has been proved to be a spy in the service of the Italian Agent, gives the address of the Agent and also of Rubini, and mentions the assumed name as well as the real name of the Agent.43
Rubini had been called to account by the anarchists but instead sent a letter, admitting that he had been an informer but had fed Prini only lies. The bearer of the letter admitted that he too had been approached, and had indeed been told ‘that there was money in the business as it would be easy to concoct plots with a view to their being discovered’. In Sir Edward’s opinion, the Italian Government was making matters worse. Not only were they inciting violence and making fools of themselves by paying for dud information, but their treachery impelled the anarchists to greater secrecy. The door to collaboration between English and Italian police was slammed and bolted, and at the Foreign Office Lord Lansdowne smoothly issued the usual response about different practices being incompatible.
Later in the year Rubini resurfaced. He was arrested in Belgium, having made an attempt on the life of Leopold, King of Belgians. He was also apparently plotting against Edward VII. ‘I marked down the English Prince of Wales for death! It has been tried once! You have got me, but somebody else will take on the job!’44 Melville and the Special Branch were asked for information. They intercepted mail and immediately traced and interviewed Rubini’s wife. She had left him after the financial disaster of his betrayal to the comrades, and had gone to live with her sister. By now the sister had agreed to adopt the child and the young mother had found employment as a cook. They were given to understand that Rubini had indeed been receiving a handsome retainer from Prini, amounting to three pounds ten shillings a week (more than double a working man’s wage). He had bought a revolver too; detectives interviewed the shopkeeper who sold it to him.
This time Sir Edward Bradford was able to point out that both Rubini and Agiolilli had been incited to murder because, having been betrayed, they must restore their own credibility, Agiolilli also having been drummed out of London as a police spy.45 His fear that the Italian police’s leaden-footed activities made violence more, rather than less, likely had been proved well founded. Secret informants must not be compromised.
Melville was shifting his position on other police forces. At one time, having worked closely with the French police, he had been disposed to treat the police of all other nations as an international brotherhood transcending cultural barriers. It was in this spirit that he had gone out of his way to help the Okhrana over Burtsev. But times had changed. As early as 1896, when he was talking to one of the Tsar’s bodyguards at Balmoral, he found doubts creeping in. In 1904 he would write about Rachkovskii’s colleagues in the Okhrana in Western Europe:
I also know Harting well. He occupies the next position to Rataev. For about the past five years he has been stationed in Berlin, in charge of the Russian officers apparently engaged respecting nihilists in London and the protection of the Tsar and Tsarevitch. For immediately either of the latter left Russia they followed on or preceded them for protection. I feel convinced however that they were also engaged as a matter of course on espionage. In 1896 they were with the Tsar at Balmoral and on that occasion Harting in conversation remarked that he had been several months in Ireland, but did not further refer to it. I thought at the time, what could he be doing there? Certainly not after nihilists.46
Late in 1899 Special Branch undertook to investigate a Russian called Mitzakis, who was believed to be reporting to a Russian agent in Paris called Hansen. At this time Mitzakis lived with his wife and child in a flat in Earls Court while also appearing to maintain a smart house in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, which was kept empty, locked and in the charge of a servant. From time to time it was used for overnight stays by Mitzakis’s colleagues. Inspector Sweeney reported that Mitzakis and two other men, all three either Russian or Greek, occupied offices in a City building where they appeared to do little but accept mail; they were associated with a military fellow, living at the Cecil Hotel, whom Sweeney suspected of having shown them ‘plans of fortifications’.47 The military man proved to be associated with a respectable English railway syndicate. Mitzakis, Rachkovskii the head of the Okhrana in Western Europe, and an Okhrana man called Golschmann48 were ‘endeavouring to form a syndicate which would have the monopoly of sending English coals to Russia’. The three of them were also
…engaged in Paris with a poor Italian inventor who brought out an electric accumulator which was patented on the continent, but Mitzakis brought it to London and exploited it on his own account making thereby an immense amount of money… Mitzakis was correspondent of some newspaper using some such initials as E.J.B... 49
The newspaper accepted mail as ‘Paris Tid-Bits’, 87 Bd de Courcelles.50 Mitzakis ‘followed Rachkovskii everywhere, even to Copenhagen,’ yet when Melville made discreet enquiries of Okhrana agents he knew they ‘always characterised him as a filou’ (a crook). Melville must have been rather puzzled and disappointed by this dubious connection between the Okhrana and the Establishment. In his memoir he wrote:
When in London Rachkovskii always called on me at New Scotland Yard. He was a very hospitable man and of genial character, but still he was mysterious. On calling upon me he would always say ‘I only arrived this morning. I could not rest until I called upon you.’ (This of course I put down at its proper value) – ‘I brought no person with me from Paris.’
Without knowing exactly why, I got somewhat suspicious of Rachkovskii. One day he called to see me at New Scotland Yard, told me the same story – I suddenly called the same afternoon at the Hotel Cecil. I learned he had been there for a week and had several gentlemen with him. I went upstairs to his suite of rooms and found Rachkovskii at a table with six or seven others, all apparently writing. He certainly looked very silly over it… What was his object in thus deceiving me? Of course I did not refer to the matter but it left an unpleasant impression on my mind. This was somewhat relieved when on one occasion I was at Copenhagen. Rachkovskii was there at the same time. The Chief of Police, Hensen, was a fine frank sort of man. One day he said to me ‘Yes, Rachkovskii is a fine character, but I would like him better if there was not so much silly mystery about him. Why does he tell me he only arrived in Copenhagen last night when I know he has been here a fortnight? Why does he say he is all alone when I know he is accompanied by six of his officers?’
The Russians had a great antipathy to the Germans. They said the latter were all-powerful at the Russian Court, and generally, so to speak, were the lions of society, all through it being known they had the Court behind them.
The Mitzakis plot did not satisfactorily thicken, but remained a confusing minestrone of disparate and irreconcilable elements. When the well-connected Princess who lived with Mitzakis arrived to have a word with Sir Edward Bradford, the investigation was peremptorily halted.51 (‘She moves in good society.’52) But Melville’s appetite for intrigue was whetted, and his new awareness broadened: enemies of the state were not limited to self-proclaimed revolutionaries.