M by Andrew Cook

Author:Andrew Cook [Cook, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: M15’S First Spymaster
ISBN: 9780752469614
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-09-28T14:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

W. MORGAN, GENERAL AGENT

The new century saw Melville at the prime of life and the peak of his career. At 16 Lydon Road, Clapham, the two eldest children, Kate and William, then aged eighteen and seventeen respectively, were clerks in an insurance office.1 James, at fifteen, was a pupil at Westminster City School, only half a mile from Scotland Yard. A young woman born in London but bearing the reassuringly Irish name of Bridget Joyce lived in and helped Amelia.2 There was also a live-in maidservant called Beatrice. Melville’s youngest brother George was living in the Ladbroke Grove area of London, married to an Irish girl. They had two children and George was a constable in the CID.

Melville was well known and respected as the royal bodyguard: ‘the King’s detective’. In the autumn of 1903, he had run Special Branch for a decade and had spent the few weeks preceding his annual leave escorting King Edward to Lisbon, Rome, Paris and Vienna.

So the announcement in November that he would retire at the end of the month came as a great surprise.

Ill-informed but knowing types probably allowed suspicion to cross their minds. In the spring, Melville had been put in sole charge of considerable Special Branch funds for secret out-of-pocket payments. Was it possible that some irregularity had come to light?3 This retirement was so entirely unexpected. Patrick Quinn, hastily appointed Melville’s successor, was not yet qualified by examination for the rank of Superintendent. Surely something was going on.

What had been going on, and was now over, was the Boer War. The British Government’s struggle to retain control of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had succeeded, but it had revealed an army intelligence service flawed in both war and peace. Like senior policemen years earlier, many military men were inappropriately fastidious when it came to spying. As late as 1895, Colonel G.A. Furse found it necessary to point out, in Intelligence in War:

In war, spies are indispensable auxiliaries and we must discard all question of morality. We must overcome such feelings of repugnance for such an unchivalrous measure because it is imposed on us by sheer necessity.4

This had been understood at the highest level during the Boer War, and a large amount of money and up to 132 specialist officers put at the disposal of military intelligence, pro tem. But money and men were not enough: the military culture was all wrong. Very few of these new appointees knew Afrikaans or any African language and they tended to be inappropriately complacent about their own cleverness.5 And the old amateurism persisted in men like the young Robert Baden-Powell who ‘treated spying rather like cricket, as a game for the gentleman amateur’.6

Another major problem was lack of co-ordination. Threats to British interests all over the world were perceived and dealt with by a variety of agencies who might employ anyone, from envoys in the palaces of Constantinople to officers braving bullets on the veldt and plain-clothes men lurking at British ports.

Despite

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