Information may hibernate in our minds for decades until the moment comes when we can retrieve it to our advantage. On the other hand, an inescapable fact from the past may arise unbidden and unwelcome, representing a threat.
In 1902, when Melville was in his last eighteen months of office as Superintendent of Special Branch and the Boer War was drawing to a close, the Home Office was approached by the German Embassy with a request for information. In March of that year Melville filed a report on the object of their enquiry, Farlow Kaulitz. Kaulitz was a journalist born of a German father and English mother, and brought up in Germany. He had spent three years in a Prussian prison for lèse majesté and being rude about Bismarck in the Basler Nachrichten and had been expelled from France in 1898 because, as that paper’s Paris correspondent, he challenged the French Government over the Dreyfus affair.1 Interviewed by police at Victoria Station on arrival, he seems to have been perfectly frank about all this, and was allowed to go about his business. He took furnished rooms at first in 25 Bessborough Street, Pimlico, and worked as a journalist. Quite soon he had set himself up as a continental press agency. He employed a couple of assistants to hang around Fleet Street from 8.00 p.m. until 4.00 a.m. getting items from the wire services and newspaper offices – especially concerning the war in South Africa. When a newsworthy item became available Kaulitz’s man would hand it to his assistant, who would leap onto his bicycle and race back to Bessborough Street with the wire.
This early information gave Kaulitz a good start and pretty soon he was able to take a whole Pimlico house at 31 St George’s Square and install an expensive Exchange Telegraph Column Printing Instrument. This meant simultaneous transmission direct from a big agency and Kaulitz had prospered ever since; so much so that by the end of 1901 he had moved into 44 Temple Chambers, Temple Avenue, on the City borders. The building backs onto King’s Bench Walk, within the enclave of Temple, a foundation of ancient origin where barristers from two Inns of Court (the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple) have their chambers.
It was Special Branch practice to intercept mail or telegrams which might be of interest, and since the German Embassy wanted to know about Kaulitz, Melville instructed his officers to get hold of any messages to or from South Africa. He was interested to discover that normal GPO deliveries excluded Temple Chambers. Messages in the immediate vicinity were instead received and distributed by the Eastern Telegraph Company of Electra House, Finsbury Pavement. Inspectors Quinn and Walsh called at the company’s offices only to be firmly informed by the Assistant Secretary that ‘no information could be given respecting telegrams or those who send or receive them’.2 Since Special Branch was in no position legally to demand access to another person’s mail, that was that. The War Office, to which Quinn next had recourse, informed him that it was improbable that Kaulitz could be getting cables direct without attracting the attention of the military authorities. There the trail ended, and whether or not the Government passed on all the information to the German Embassy is unknown. Melville noticed the security of Temple, however, and retained it for future reference.
In 1906 his son James set out upon the path which would lead him to political prominence. After an unpromising start (he had left school to join the Eagle Insurance Company like his siblings) he had worked for several years for the rising barrister Douglas Hogg. Now, still only twenty-one, he was called to the Bar of the Middle Temple. The buildings of this Inn are slightly west of the grassy square, shaded by majestic trees, that is at the heart of the Inner Temple.
In October of 1909 Cumming noted at a meeting that Edmonds and MacDonogh ‘said they were going to keep M (the best man we have at present) in an office of his own, to which letters could be addressed’. Melville’s friend at the Royal Mail, Henry Freeman Pannett, whose two future sons-in-law had been witnesses at Sidney Reilly’s wedding, retired in 1908. From now on, how sure could Melville be that his own correspondence would not be tampered with?
After five years at 25 Victoria Street, the office of W.G. Morgan moved to the more discreet environment of Temple Avenue in December 1908. Temple Avenue was not isolated by its postal service alone. Only yards from the bustle of Fleet Street, it was close enough to the gates of Temple itself to be frequented mainly by lawyers who kept regular hours. Unfamiliar faces were remarked by beadles.
In October also, Melville’s old acquaintance Sidney Reilly paid the first of several visits to London from St Petersburg where he was now based. ‘Based’ is the word to use. Reilly was one of those rare people for whom everywhere is a jumping-off point to the next opportunity. Reilly was staying in Rachkovskii’s favourite London haunt – the extremely grand Hotel Cecil next to the Savoy, a few hundred metres along the river from the Temple. He took advantage of his temporary residence to regularise the change of name by deed poll which he had begun before his precipitate departure from England in 1899. He also re-formed the Ozone Preparations Company, which would be run from an office above Saqui and Lawrence, the jewellers, at 97 Fleet Street.
Two days after he filed the deed poll application from his temporary address at the Cecil, it seems that there arose, unbidden and unwelcome, a face from the past. A young woman called Louisa Lewis had been working at the Hotel Cecil for four years. On the evening of 25 October 1908 she was seen, dressed in outdoor clothes and hat, at the bottom of the hotel’s imposing marble staircase speaking to a man.
Later, when a search was mounted and the authorities notified, it would have gone unnoticed that Louisa Lewis was the daughter of Alfred Lewis, manager at the London and Paris Hotel, Newhaven; or that she had been working there when the Reverend Thomas was found dead, and had met ‘Dr T.W. Andrew’ who signed his death certificate. Neither the death nor the young doctor would easily have been forgotten by a young woman.
The man at the foot of the stairs answered Sidney Reilly’s description perfectly. Louisa Lewis was never seen again.3
The Ozone Preparations Company, managed in Rosenblum’s (Sidney Reilly’s) absence by his partner William Calder, ran for three years and was wound up in 1911. The choice of Fleet Street for its office may be significant; like Farlow Kaulitz earlier in the decade, Sidney Reilly understood that early knowledge can be converted into hard cash. He was at this time working for the St Petersburg agent for Blohm and Voss of Hamburg; in the course of chasing contracts he would place information, and mis-information, in a St Petersburg newspaper. The English wire services at the time physically received news at Fleet Street offices and hardly anywhere else.4
The British Secret Service was also aware how much the slant of international news could influence diplomatic, as well as commercial, events. A 1909 letter to the Ambassador in Peking proves that the Foreign Office subsidised Reuters’ office there in order to offer an alternative source of information to the German news going in and out of China.
Technically the Secret Service also had to keep up with the quickening pace of change. In 1906 Colonel Davies had been a delegate at an early international conference on wireless telegraphy. MacDonogh, besides being a former barrister, was a qualified engineer, and in the years leading up to the war would make it his business to understand advances in the field. Fortunately for Melville, the spy network he would eventually discover made little use of the new technology. Before the First World War, agents put it all down on paper.
Melville was unchallenged as Chief Detective of the new SSB. At one of Cumming’s first meetings with Edmonds and Kell in November of 1909 he noted that D – Drew – was already out of favour, to be used as little as possible as a matter of policy. Edward ‘Tricky’ Drew (‘time was when Edward Drew was the handsomest man in the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard’, sighed a biographer5) had probably found it hard to adjust. A lifetime in the Metropolitan Police did not necessarily make a man suitable for secret work. For one thing, he might keep on gossiping to his old cronies down the road. Melville never had that problem because he had made professional discretion a habit throughout his life; it had helped him maintain his authority. Nor could an ex-policeman necessarily understand the political and diplomatic niceties of counter-espionage work – unless, like Melville, he had already become familiar with highly placed civil servants and the everyday international intrigue of people at the top. And then, an SSB detective needed to be something of a self-starter; he needed to know when to show initiative, and when to hold fire and consult a senior officer. A lifetime in a hierarchy can undermine independence of thought.
Cumming noted two other policy decisions made at the same meeting. No other detectives were to be employed just yet. And M was to be present at all meetings with ‘rascals’ (suspects), presumably because his years of experience in dealing with criminals gave him a nose for them. Cumming had not yet met M. He would not meet him for some time. When an appointment was arranged (at Edmonds’s house) Melville failed to turn up – ‘disappointed to find on my arrival that a note had been left for me saying that the authorities had decided that the meeting had better be postponed’ wrote Cumming.6 MacDonogh was determined that Melville should not tell Cumming who the existing foreign agents were.
This unwillingness to share information was indicative of a deeper awkwardness afflicting the infant SSB. The Navy was sidelined, and Cumming with it. Although Kell and MacDonogh appeared friendly enough they were united in treating Cumming (who had been quietly working for naval intelligence for some years) as a junior partner. Worse: Cumming was older than Kell, and stouter, and up from the country (he had spent the past decade working on boom defences in the Solent). Where Kell was multilingual and thirty-six, Cumming was fifty and – although he spoke French – was only now beginning to learn German. Where Kell was urbane, impatient, and his talents obvious, Cumming was original, modest, patient and a clever engineer whose overriding enthusiasm was for new boats, planes and dirigibles. They were the hare and the tortoise.
The military men held onto their contacts. Bearing in mind point 4 of Kell’s report,
It is probably best to employ a first class detective under direction of an officer to collect and work agents abroad.
Kell’s chief operative, Melville, should have been working equally for both of them. His experience in many respects was unmatched by any senior officer and this is acknowledged by his gradual re-invention not as mere M, but ‘Mr M’, as Long and others came to call him. There is affectionate respect in their attitude to him.
Melville had personally sanctioned most of the MO5 agents overseas who were now supposed to be handed over to Cumming, but Cumming waited in vain; MacDonogh was playing power games. And naval intelligence had no counterpart network of civilian spies to offer him, because the Admiralty had been employing consular staff. But that policy had decisively changed following a rap over the knuckles from the Foreign Office.7
In the first months MacDonogh was inappropriately controlling, expecting Cumming to be ever-present at Drew’s empty Victoria Street office where nothing happened and there were no records or facilities. Unsurprisingly, Cumming was soon agitating to be permitted to move from Victoria Street to a headquarters of his own (six months later, in March 1910, he briefly relocated to Ashley Mansions in Vauxhall Bridge Road prior to a more permanent move to Whitehall Court). In November of 1909 he was allowed to meet his first foreign agent, B – Byzewski, who was already working in Berlin – but was only reluctantly permitted to pay him.8
Long, who had been valuable abroad, was back in England working for Melville. Again, this was all about the War Office maintaining control. In the August of 1910 the Admiralty showed that it was just as capable of petty behaviour when it prohibited coastguards from communicating with Kell.9 Yet over the years the SSB did become a more collaborative service, albeit one that eventually evolved into two separate services, headed respectively by Kell and Cumming, dealing with home and foreign intelligence. That it did so owed more to Cumming’s patience, sharpness and determination than to any unprompted generosity on the part of Kell or MacDonogh.10
With no espionage network so far uncovered, yet a certainty that systematic spying was going on, Melville’s investigations had to start from a wide base and narrow their focus to likely individuals. Kell had no problem with this; he was an orderly fellow who dealt well with card indexes and lists and his report had recommended
11. The registration of aliens which was enforced by Act of Parliament in 1798 and 1804 must be revived.
Conveniently, spies in Britain before the First War seem almost without exception to have been foreigners. If they sounded British and looked it, they usually turned out to have (exactly like Kell himself, as it happened) foreign parents. Inconveniently, the information-gathering must be unofficial because Parliament had not given the go-ahead for a register of aliens. So when Kell set out to compile his register of immigrants, rather than visitors, to Britain, he cast his net extremely wide. Nearly all of them would be safe. But among them would be people with something to hide – people subject to blackmail by the authorities in their own country; or people who would do anything for money; or (rarely) genuine patriots of another country. Most often, the tasks demanded of them seemed so harmless that the people themselves cannot have realised what terrifyingly deep water they might be stepping into.
It would be Melville’s task to investigate individual foreigners who, in his judgement and Kell’s, were up to no good. This represented a new departure because most of his work to date had been about investigating suspicious visitors and scaring them off. If he did uncover a network, in his view he should do exactly what he had done with the anarchists of the Tottenham Court Road: make them nervous without letting them know what he knew, then leave them alone so that he could learn more about them if he wanted to and pick them off if need be. This approach made efficient use of scant resources. It had worked for the Deuxième Bureau and Special Branch twenty years ago, and it would work again.
Kell kept memoranda of his activities in the first summer of SSB’s existence. M, L, and K (as Kell was known) met quite regularly at the Temple Avenue office. Melville’s plan for a round-robin was bettered, for in June 1910, Kell himself made a tour of chief constables to impress on them the need for vigilance. Henry Dale Long was encouraged to join the Legion of Frontiersmen to find men who would supplement the post-office and police authorities as the ‘few paid agents’ of Kell’s report, which at this stage remained the blueprint for activity. M hopped across to Ireland to investigate the sister of a deceased soldier called O’Brien (she was trying to sell plans of Portsmouth), and reported on a German who seemed to frighten all the foreign waiters around Folkestone. At Harrow School a drill instructor called Greening was under surveillance.
On the evening of 10 July 1910, a Sunday, M was to meet naval Captain Roy Regnart in Brussels. Regnart had been set to work with Cumming on the orders of Admiral Bethell, head of the Department of Naval Intelligence. There was evidently a ‘traitor’ in that city. The word is in inverted commas in Kell’s memorandum. The information had come to Kell via Cumming, whom Kell did not yet take entirely seriously, only slowly perceiving that Cumming’s preoccupation with dirigibles and other transport wizardry might be more to the point than it appeared. (The first plane had flown the Channel exactly a year earlier.)
If the Brussels lead proved genuine and Melville required an arrest to be made while they were in Belgium, Superintendent Quinn was on standby to provide a detective at short notice. On Wednesday 13 July everyone was back in England and Kell noted:
Meeting with C and Regnart in C’s room at 11am. Regnart gave a full account of the Brussels affair, which ended in a fiasco.
The following day:
Met M in his offices at 10am and he gave me an account of the Brussels affair. He seems to think they were taken in by Rouveroy and that no more confidence should be reposed in him. I told M to send in a written report.11
They would discover that in Brussels
…there were two very dubious agencies… which make a business of prying into the military secrets of all the big powers and selling information to the highest bidder.12
They would use them, too; but they needed their own man on the spot. Henry Dale Long, now working to Melville, would be relocated to Brussels for a second time in 1911. A continental posting was what Regnart wanted for himself. He was a troublesome colleague although he held Melville in high regard. In the course of his absence for the ‘fiasco’,
Cumming discovered yet more examples of his having given to agents addresses of his own for communications that should have been sent to Cumming. The trip, meanwhile, was disappointingly inconclusive but in one respect surprising: Regnart formed a high opinion of Melville and his methods, the tactical subtlety and penetration of which may be gauged by the following: ‘He [Regnart] says M is much bolder than he when dealing with strangers. He goes right up to them and peers in their faces.’13
It would become apparent that for Cumming’s purposes, spies in the inland capitals of Europe were less important than people who could survey the north German coast with an expert eye. This coastline of shifting sands was almost impenetrable of access from the sea without recent intelligence of sandbanks, mines, harbour works and submarines. The Admiralty were particularly interested in Borkum as a possible landing place because it was sufficiently distant from the Hochseeflotte’s base at Wilhelmshavn. Unfortunately, in August of 1910 the Germans would scent British interest in Borkum when a couple of amateur spies, Brandon and Trench, were caught snooping and taking pictures in the area. They were naval officers doing some inept detective work for the Admiralty (not SSB; Regnart acting on his own initiative) while on leave, and they were jailed in Germany.14
As this embarrassment must be followed by a tit-for-tat arrest, the first alleged spy to make headlines was a cheerful German soldier cadet who probably meant no harm. His capture had nothing to do with Melville at all.
In the summer of 1910 Lt Siegfried Helm, at twenty-one a very junior engineer officer of the 21st Nassau Regiment, visited England for a month. One of his friends had already been to London and had enjoyed a brief flirtation with a Miss Wodehouse. Helm wrote to her at her London address; he would appreciate her company on his visit to the capital. The reply that reached him in his Tooting boarding-house (the only people there were old ladies, he had complained, ‘from 45 to 70 years old’) came from Fratton. Miss Wodehouse had moved there with a family she was working for.15 Helm had told her he wanted to see Chatham and Aldershot and Portsmouth while he was in England. She told him Fratton was very close to Portsmouth, so he came to stay at the house next door for a few days.
Miss Wodehouse, probably missing her former beau, was impatient with Helm from the start. He sketched everything – forts, ships, anything he could see around Portsmouth – showed her the pictures and then said winningly ‘You won’t tell, will you?’ Miss Wodehouse did not find this romantic, or even interesting. He was an overgrown schoolboy. However, she probably wanted to enlarge her circle of male acquaintances locally and Helm unknowingly represented an opportunity. Following a tedious afternoon in his company she walked, emboldened by self-righteousness, right into the local barracks and spoke to a senior officer. He and a colleague watched Lt Helm in the days that followed and saw more sketching and some behaviour they interpreted as furtive. They stopped him and asked questions, and Lt Helm was detained for a couple of days in the Officers’ Mess at Fort Purbrook, where everyone was very hospitable, according to an anxious note he wrote to his betrayer. His capture seems to have been made with embarrassed good humour; the officers did it because they had been told to be vigilant rather than because they saw much harm in the young man.
Meanwhile, they applied for permission to charge him. (‘Captain Bonham Carter came up from Portsmouth with all necessary evidence and documents about Lt Helm’s espionage’, wrote Kell sternly in his diary.)16 The War Office permission, granted with alacrity in view of the Brandon and Trench fiasco, was implemented by Inspector Abel of the Hampshire police. Lt Helm was driven to Fareham Police Station by Lt Salmond, ‘the police following close behind in a trap’. He was charged with attempting to take a plan of Fort Widley for communication to a foreign power, a felony under the 1889 Official Secrets Act, and appeared in court in the second week of September 1910.17 News of his arrest was leaked to the Daily Express before the court appearance; the Admiralty were highly displeased and summoned Kell to explain himself. He told them airily that ‘…it was an excellent thing that the arrest should become known as soon as possible as it might have a soothing effect across the water’.18 After the first court hearing, the conservative German Kreuz Zeitung said indulgently that ‘the temptation was great, during his free time which was not devoted to the study of the English language, to practise technical drawing from nature’ and fancied the young man reclining idly in the grass drawing, quite by chance, picturesque naval installations. The writer then pulled himself together to face facts: ‘two real British spies’ were in German custody, so Helm would probably be in for the high jump. The National Zeitung pronounced the arrest ‘less of a mistake than a somewhat malicious revenge’.19
Helm, ‘a young man of soldierly appearance’, appeared a couple of times at Fareham Police Court to packed houses, with admission by ticket only.20 The prosecution insisted that the sketches could be ‘worked up’. Chief witness Miss Wodehouse accused a newspaper reporter of tricking her into giving an interview by claiming to be from the War Office. The German Embassy had engaged the famous barrister Travers Humphreys to put Helm’s case: that he was just a young pup, keen on playing soldiers, and obsessively keen on putting things down in his notebook. These included a description of a vicar on a train and measurements of the distance between his chest of drawers and the bed. There were also poems and stories. For the prosecution, Colonel Twiss of the General Staff sneered that he would omit translating the poetry to the court. The public gallery tittered. A former officer from the boarding house at Streatham had heard from Helm about his impending trip to Chatham. The evidence was mounting up strongly on the defence side, and when Helm was bailed to appear at Winchester Assizes the more serious part of the charge, about intent to communicate to a foreign power, was dropped; he was now charged with a misdemeanour only. His appearances at Winchester in November resulted in a guilty verdict and a binding-over. He was free to go back to Germany. The judge told him he hoped he would leave with a good impression of British justice.21 No doubt he did, although Colonel Twiss may have put him off keeping a notebook for ever. Kell travelled back to London in the same railway compartment as Helm and his father and noted that they did not say much to each other.
Thanks to Helm, the weaknesses of the 1889 Official Secrets Act had become apparent. Work to amend it had begun, but had not passed through Parliament before the first genuine spy was unmasked. He was working for Steinhauer, known to him as ‘R.H. Peterssen’, in Rotterdam, but he was barely more professional than Helm.
His name was Dr Max Schultz.22 He was a thirty-one-yearold doctor of philosophy claiming (falsely) to be an officer in a German Hussar regiment, and in the summer of 1911 he took a houseboat at Plymouth, hoisted the German flag, and proceeded, with another man as companion, to entertain young naval officers. The wine flowed freely and quite a little social scene developed, although the sailors preferred not to talk shop. One of the guests was a local solicitor, Mr Duff, who arrived with his friend Mr Tannen. They enjoyed Schultz’s company, although he often turned the conversation to matters of naval defence. Finally Schultz took Duff and Tannen aside. Schultz was a correspondent for a continental ‘Government’ newspaper, he said; it would pay well for accurate and specific information on naval topics but he couldn’t very well collect this himself. As a German, he could hardly approach his young English officer friends because they would think he was spying. But an English solicitor – now he would be answered freely enough. How about it? He would like Duff to submit reports from here in Plymouth and Tannen from Chatham, Portsmouth and other ports along the South Coast. The monthly retainers offered were extremely generous: £60 to Duff and £50 to Tannen. As to the material, he emphasised again that accuracy was paramount.
Duff and Tannen promised to think about it, did so, and sensibly approached the police who alerted the War Office. Kell and Melville proceeded in the time-honoured way. They told the helpful solicitor and his friend to go ahead and accept, and to keep them posted. Duff signed a ‘contract’ with the ‘newspaper’ which Schultz forwarded to a Mr Neumann (one of Steinhauer’s postbox addresses) at Walthamstow. Duff then received long lists of queries such as
What ships of the 3rd and 2nd divisions of the Home Fleet were put out of service on July 25, or about the end of July, or have reduced their crews, and the reason for so doing? How many officers and men are still aboard, and why is the programme altered?23
Kell and Melville allowed the correspondence to continue while feeding Duff with duff information. At the end of August Kell, supported by a posse of policemen, approached Schultz on the houseboat and identified himself. Schultz was found in possession of a cypher, incriminating letters, and banknotes sent from Germany. He was charged with attempting to procure Duff to commit an offence against Subsection 2, Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act of 1889;24 at the beginning of November he was found guilty at Exeter Assizes and sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment.
The case is interesting for several reasons. It was the last major case under the old Official Secrets Act, which required proof of intent to spy and warrants to arrest and search which must be signed by the Attorney General himself. And as usual the press reports indicated that only the police were involved. A detective sergeant was credited with intercepting the mail. This was Secret Service policy so that Kell, Melville, and War Office interference with the Royal Mail could remain undercover.25
Most importantly, Schultz’s correspondence provided proof that a German network was in existence. Kell had been following leads on this for a long time, and most of them led nowhere. In his diary for 27 July 1910, over a year before the Schultz trial, Kell had noted:
Called on the Home Office and saw Sir E. Troup, who said he would get the necessary warrant signed as soon as possible for watching the following addresses:
1. FA, 74 Poste Restante Berlin C25
2. Berlin. C Postlagernd C 25
3. F Keldermans 98 Boite Postale Aix-la-Chapelle.
The warrant was signed the same afternoon.
‘Watching the following addresses’ meant the interception of letters to those places. A couple of weeks later MO5 required copies of further letters and telegrams. The terms were minutely scrutinised before the GPO would accept responsibility. They were within their rights to insist, under the old Act, upon a specific warrant signed at the highest level.
I took the matter over to the Home Office in the afternoon, and Mr Churchill being on leave I left the warrant with Mr Byrne, who said he would ask Sir Edward Grey to sign it that afternoon.26
The ‘Neumann’ address used by Schultz was that of a German barber called Kronauer whom Steinhauer had recruited to receive mail and post it onward. Soon afterwards came the discovery of a second clearing-house for mail run by another barber, an Englishman born in Hoxton to German parents whose name was Karl Gustav Ernst. There are at least two versions of how the network was revealed and both are probably true. The first is the official version compiled at some time after 1931 from SSB files. It was released by the Public Record Office in November 2002 and reads in part:
In August 1911 Francis Holstein, proprietor of the Peacock Hotel, Trinity, Leith, received a letter from Germany, asking for information about the feeling of this country with regard to a war with Germany and its preparedness for such a war. This letter was discussed in a railway carriage in the presence of an officer of the security service. Enquiries were made, and it was discovered that Holstein had received two previous letters of the same nature in June and August 1909 and that they were signed ‘F Reimers, [an alias of Steinhauer] Brauerstrasse, Potsdam.’ This name and address were put under special censorship on the 14th September 1911, and by this means the ramifications of Steinhauer’s organisation were brought to light.27
On the other hand, why was the officer sharing a railway compartment with a German hotelkeeper, and presumably at least one other German, unless the man was already under surveillance? Leith is the port for Edinburgh, opening onto the Firth of Forth.
A different account has a German naval officer in the entourage of the Kaiser being watched at a London address.28 Late one evening this man drove away in mufti from the house where he was staying. He was followed, again by an unnamed shadow, to ‘a small shop, already closed for the night’ where ‘the side door opened as soon as the car stopped, and he went straight in without knocking’.29 This was at 402a Caledonian Road, where Ernst was getting a regular £1 a month from Germany.
Armed with a warrant to copy all incoming and outgoing mail, Kell and Melville could collect the names of correspondents in England who were in contact with Steinhauer’s cover addresses abroad. They could also manipulate the intelligence trickle from Ernst and Kronauer however they wished.
As it turned out, Ernst’s shop would gain some traffic after the ‘Neumann’ (Kronauer) address was exposed by the Schultz trial. Ernst’s fee would rise to £1 10s a week, plus expenses and an occasional ‘honorarium’ of £5.
Soon afterwards there came a third lead, this time to a friend of Ernst and Kronauer called Kruger living in Mountain Ash, a small town far inland in South Wales. Steinhauer generally had no interest in Germans outside the main ports and London, but through this contact he succeeded in recruiting Kruger’s nephew – a serving British naval officer called Ireland. By now SSB were aware, thanks to mail interceptions, that Steinhauer was in Britain:
A report dated December 1911 states that a German officer was found to be travelling through various counties and devoting much attention to maps and plans, but that he returned hurriedly to Germany before sufficient evidence could be collected to justify his arrest. Evidence that this was Steinhauer is to be found in the ‘Reimers’ letters. He evidently came to London and saw Ernst and Kronauer and then went north. On 30th December he wired to Kronauer from Rothesay under the name ‘MacMillan’, telling him to keep his letters until his return, and he wired again from Glasgow on 2nd January saying he would be in town on the third. He wrote to Kruger from Germany on 13th January saying that he expected to return before the end of the month, and to Kronauer on 22nd January he stated that he had left in a hurry as he feared he was being shadowed.
On 23rd February 1912, after the arrest of Ireland, Steinhauer wrote to Ernst, urging him to be very cautious in communicating with Kruger, who would be watched…30
Steinhauer used not only Reimers and Peterssen as aliases, but also Stein, Schmidt, Reimann, Tornow, Torner, Dinger, Tobler, Fritsches and others. He also used disguise, and would dress up as an elderly solicitor from the continent (‘big round glasses, black suit and a hand bag beyond suspicion’) bearing information about a huge inheritance owed to lost German relatives in an English port. There he would accost a local policeman.
It was easy for them to get a list of the foreigners in the town, and just as agreeable – with the reward in view – to meet me an evening or two later in the corner of some restaurant with a bottle of whisky and a few nice cigars to help along the discussion.31
This, before about 1910, led him into the British homes of a number of people who were afterwards persuaded, by a cautious follow-up letter, to work for the Fatherland. Kronauer had been on his books since about 1908 and Ernst since 1910.32
Kell fitted in. If he needed a signature or a decision he could wriggle swiftly upstream through the bureaucracy to the highest level because he had been to the right schools, came of the right class. (It has been suggested that he may have known Churchill at Sandhurst.)33 His predecessors in military intelligence, Davies and Trotter, had both moved on and were generals now. He, however, would never willingly release the reins of the Secret Service Bureau. It was a fascinating job, although he was frustrated by officials who were not, as he was, professionally vigilant. When, for instance, in October 1910 he discovered that the Lepel Wireless Company employee at Slough who habitually sent messages to Berlin was also able to intercept wireless communications from the Admiralty, he pointed out the security risk to the GPO Wireless Officer who ‘did not think any harm could arise’.34
Kell owed a great deal to Melville. The older man, lacking the social background required for acceptance into the Edwardian mandarin class, taught him tradecraft and discretion, patience and wariness. Melville also had a sense of proportion that Kell seems sometimes to have lacked: mostly, as Kell’s journal shows, his reports on ‘suspects’ were negative.
Kell, however, had an agenda that transcended petty issues of guilt or innocence. He was busy grinding down opposition to a register of aliens. Since this was not so far permissible he made do with an alien returns form of his own devising, which was circulated to chief constables in the winter of 1910-11. There were a few grumbles and raised eyebrows; but this, with other lists compiled from regional or professional records (for instance, German zinc-workers in Hartlepool) and individual reports from members of the public, formed the basis of an index that held up to 30,000 names by the start of the war.35 The idea was sound, given the political circumstances, though the form it took seems somehow less so.
The Central Registry was a card index in which the subjects were classified on a bizarre scale that ran from AA for the least dangerous to BB for the most. AA was Absolutely Anglicised or Absolutely Allied, denoting somebody who was definitely supportive of the British cause. A was Anglicised or Allied, i.e. supportive. AB was Anglo-Boche –allegiances unclear, but probably pro-British. BA was Boche-Anglo – allegiances also unclear, but probably pro- German. B was Boche, i.e. hostile. Where a subject’s hostility to the British cause was not in doubt, he or she was graded BB, or Bad Boche.36
Extra staff were gradually being brought on board. And then there was the technology.
Last week I asked M to look out for a good pocket-camera, which I think is indispensable for our work. M now writes that he considers the Ensignette camera (with an extra good lens) is the best for our purposes. I went to the Stores to inspect one and I quite agree. I have therefore authorised M to get one, price £3 10s.37
Expenditure for a second typewriter was sanctioned (in the new year of 1911, there would be ‘a lady type-writer’, Miss D. Westmacott, at £5 a month)38 and a telephone line was installed for SSB purposes at Melville’s home in Clapham. The Bureau was becoming a force to reckon with.
In January 1911, Kell joined Melville on the City borders. Cumming was now working out of his wife’s flat at Ashley Mansions in the Vauxhall Bridge Road.39 Kell and his assistant Captain Stanley-Clarke would henceforth work from 3 Paper Buildings, just a stone’s throw from Melville’s office and within the security of the Inner Temple. As an empire-building ploy the Central Registry was a work of genius. After all, it would take not only bigger better offices but an awful lot of M’s time to investigate 30,000 people. But the need for dozens of underlings does not seem to have occurred to Kell at first. It was March before he had a long talk with Melville and ‘impressed upon him the necessity of our being more energetic in the future, and that I expected him to think out new schemes for getting hold of intelligence’.40 The slightly panicky call to action is unsurprising. An important friend of Kell’s had recently informed him that there were 20,000 German agents in Britain ready to arise within twenty-four hours.41 Four more days passed, reason prevailed, and he suggested to Melville that pressure of work demanded two more detectives. Melville wasn’t keen. Detectives talk to each other, he pointed out, ‘and consequently all our business would become common property at the Yard’; and it would be almost impossible to find men with ‘knowledge and experience of the world, and full of discretion and tact’. He talked Kell into looking, instead, for retired men not above the rank of sergeant. In June, only weeks before the Schultz investigation began, the first man was hired: his name was Regan. He was to be known as R.
The law was about to be adjusted in SSB’s favour. July 1911 was the month of the Agadir crisis, when a German gunboat off Morocco made German hostility towards France only too apparent. Taking advantage of the nervous mood, Viscount Haldane (whose briefing material included a report by Kell) spoke on the Amendment to the Official Secrets Act in the Lords on 25 July:
The main change which the Bill made was a change of procedure. In order to convict anyone under the Official Secrets Act of 1889 it was necessary to prove a purpose of wrongfully obtaining information… That was often very difficult to prove.42
The Amendment represented more than ‘a change of procedure’; under its provisions someone sketching a fort, for instance, would have to prove his innocence – for guilt could legitimately be deduced ‘from the circumstances of the case or his conduct or his known character as proved’. 43 Haldane pre-empted criticism by citing a precedent for this in the Prevention of Crimes Act 1871: ‘loitering with intent’. Objectors could have pointed out that treason and espionage were capital offences in time of war, and therefore different in degree, but such arguments would not wash when the threat of invasion seemed so vivid. Haldane also asserted that currently
the places which were barred from public access were too few… Therefore it was proposed to widen the definition of those places and to give the Secretary of State power to be exercised in times of emergency to proscribe other places.44
Finally, if the Bill were passed, warrants for search and arrest would be available from a magistrate – not only from the Attorney General as at present and as still pertained during the Schultz case. The Amendment went through in due course. In the following year at the Newington Sessions William Melville took the oath as a Justice of the Peace for the County of London.