Discussion Post: His Last Bow
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is His Last Bow and the chosen topic is Victorian, Edwardian and WW1 Spies.
A few facts:
🕵 The roots of our modern-day intelligence agencies are to be found in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. ...the spy game as we know it from popular series like James Bond, I Spy and Alias, is a direct descendant of the many, many secret service units formed between the middle of the 19th century and WWI.
In Britain alone, there were the WOID, the NID, the SB, the SSB and finally, in 1909, MI5 and MI6 (though they weren’t to receive those titles until 1915). On the other side of the Channel, France had their intelligence covered by the Deuxieme Bureau (DB), the Sûreté, and the cabinet noir, while the German Empire possessed the brutally efficient German Secret Service located in the Wilhemstrasse, and Russia’s Okhrana kept watch by their method of the agent provocateur. Other countries such as the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary possessed their own methods of intelligence, but none played the game as deeply as Britain, Russia, France and Germany...
Until the 1909 formation of MI5 and MI6, the methods for obtaining information were split between the War Office Intelligence Department, the Naval Intelligence Department and the Special Branch–the WOID, NID and SB. The Special Branch, a department created within the Metropolitan Police was founded in 1882, (initially named Special Irish Branch) with William Melville as one its founding officers, to combat the growing menace of anarchists and Fenians. After retiring from the Branch after an eventful career of guarding the Shah of Persia and Queen Victoria, and foiling a plot to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm in 1901, Melville set up shop as a private investigator. When Anglo-German relations cooled after 1903, he lobbied the government to create a counter-espionage service.
Though Melville successfully formed an informal Secret Service Bureau in 1903, effective counter-espionage tactics had yet to be formed or approved of by the Government. Being a spy was a dirty business, the sort no true gentleman would willingly undertake, and the sort of organization the very gentlemanly British Government was loathe to fund. Most intelligence officers came from the middle classes, being the sons of military men or were military men themselves. In effort to combat this stigma, in the mid-1900s, supporters of a strong intelligence agency impressed upon Viscount Haldane, Secretary of State for War, the need for a well-financed, co-ordinated system...
MI5 and MI6(SIS), were a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The Bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialized in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities respectively. The first director of MI6 was Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, whose typically signed correspondence with his initial “C” in green ink, no doubt inspired authors such as Fleming and W. Somerset Maugham to refer to their head of sections by an initial. Vernon Kell, a former head of the German Section of the War Office, became director of MI5...
In hindsight, while we reap the benefits of secret service and intelligence agencies, their development, ostensibly to protect the national interests of each country, served only to increase the mutual suspicion and wariness of the pre-war years… With so many guns pointing at imagined enemies, the guns which thundered in August 1914 were inevitable. [Evangeline Holland]
🕵Modern tactics of espionage and dedicated government intelligence agencies were developed over the course of the late 19th century. A key background to this development was the Great Game, a period denoting the strategic rivalry and conflict that existed between the British Empire and the Russian Empire throughout Central Asia. To counter Russian ambitions in the region and the potential threat it posed to the British position in India, a system of surveillance, intelligence and counterintelligence was built up in the Indian Civil Service. The existence of this shadowy conflict was popularised in Rudyard Kipling's famous spy book, Kim, where he portrayed the Great Game (a phrase he popularised) as an espionage and intelligence conflict that 'never ceases, day or night'.
Although the techniques originally used were distinctly amateurish – British agents would often pose unconvincingly as botanists or archaeologists – more professional tactics and systems were slowly put in place. In many respects, it was here that a modern intelligence apparatus with permanent bureaucracies for internal and foreign infiltration and espionage was first developed. A pioneering cryptographic unit was established as early as 1844 in India, which achieved some important successes in decrypting Russian communications in the area. [Wikipedia]
🕵 ...the Secret Service Bureau... was founded in 1909. The Bureau was a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialised in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities, respectively. This specialisation was because the Admiralty wanted to know the maritime strength of the Imperial German Navy. This specialisation was formalised before 1914. During the First World War in 1916, the two sections underwent administrative changes so that the foreign section became the section MI1(c) of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. [Wikipedia]
🕵 The Secret Service Bureau was the forerunner of Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services (usually known as MI5 and MI6 respectively). By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the domestic service had gained a range of powers to undertake counter-espionage and protect British security: these included a new Official Secrets Act, an unofficial Aliens register, Home Office warrants to interfere with the mails, and press censorship powers. The foreign section meanwhile began sharing intelligence with French agencies, created a database on Germany, and opened its first foreign station in Rotterdam.
During the war MI5 rounded up a pre-war German spy ring and ran a successful counter-espionage and security service; MI6 created a range of key stations around the enemy, with varying degrees of success. Both services established themselves as essential to the protection of the British state in peace and war. [Cambridge University Library]
🕵While the state had been in effect 'hacking' the Royal Mail for some time, it wasn't until the 19th Century that it erupted into a public scandal.
In March 1844 the British government accepted a request by the Austrian ambassador to secretly open and copy mail addressed to Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London. By June Mazzini had grown suspicious. A friendly MP petitioned parliament for the interception to cease and the scandal broke. For two months Victorian society, author Charles Dickens included, fiercely debated its right to privacy, and a Commons committee was ordered to investigate state surveillance of private mail. [BBC]
🕵 In the 1880s Irish republicans terrorised London with a diabolical new invention - dynamite. The Home Office hit back with a new weapon of its own, Britain’s first secret police force...
As a train entered London Underground’s Praed Street station on 30 October 1883, a bomb was thrown from a first-class carriage. It exploded as a third-class carriage passed. The driver, Stephen Harris, recalled that every light on the train was extinguished and there was a loud shriek of horror among the passengers...
Dozens were hurt, with injuries including shock, facial wounds, burns and deafness.
Within minutes a further explosion was heard halfway across the city, this time at Charing Cross. Another bomb had been thrown toward the lower carriages as a train left for Westminster. Such an audacious bombing attack on public transport had never been experienced before in western Europe, and the following day hundreds of commuters avoided the Underground network as a sense of terror swept through London. Addressing this fear, 600 Underground railway workers denounced the bombings and called upon commuters to go about their daily lives unintimidated...
Further attacks followed… These explosions were part of the 1881–85 Fenian dynamite campaign. This had the aim of bringing the Irish question to the heart of British politics, a prelude to the establishment of an Irish Republic. To meet the Fenian challenge a new detective department was formed at Scotland Yard under Adolphus Williamson and Inspector John Littlechild on 17 March 1883.
Known as the Special Irish Branch, the new force initially consisted of four CID officers and eight uniformed policemen. Its very existence represented a remarkable innovation because there was no tradition of detective work within British policing. This in turn was partly because the liberal political culture of the era in Britain was antithetical to secret or political policing… However, the approach of Special Irish Branch was still shaped by this liberal tradition. Rather than employing agents, it sought to prevent Fenian attacks by using a strategy peculiar to Victorian Britain: picketing. This involved identifying individuals as threats to national security.
Once identified, plain-clothes policemen would maintain a brief surveillance of the suspect, with no attempt to incubate informers. After monitoring a suspect’s movements, the officers would follow their observations with an arrest and questioning of those believed to be ‘dynamitards’. If the evidence was solid against a prisoner, and he could not account for himself, he was charged. Foremost in this strategy was a preference for openly recorded arrests and clear evidence...
On 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed chief secretary for Ireland, and his assistant Thomas Henry Burke, the most senior civil servant in Ireland, were assassinated in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The two were murdered by Fenians known as the Invincibles. In the aftermath of the killings, the Irish police force was reorganised. At its apex was a permanent secret service department known as the Office of the Assistant Undersecretary for Police and Crime. This department sought to neutralise conspiracies through intelligence. To this end, it employed spies and agents provocateurs.
Edward George Jenkinson headed the new unit… Jenkinson was dismissed in 1887, his secret operation disbanded and his clandestine network replaced by the Special Irish Branch...
In 1909, the War Office officially established the Secret Service Bureau. Its director, Irishman William Melville, had been an active participant in the battle against Fenian dynamitards. Ironically, though, he wasn’t one of Jenkinson’s men – someone who operated in the shadows – but a founder member of the Special Irish Branch. [Dr Shane Kenna]
🕵 Its decision in 1897 to build a naval force to rival the Royal Navy brought Imperial Germany into conflict with Great Britain. Germany had a tiny coastline and a small overseas empire, and the High Seas Fleet was perceived as having only one purpose: to menace Britain. Germany supplanted France and Russia as the principal foreign threat, and in the process fears of a sudden invasion were exacerbated.
Central to the supposed threat was the belief that German spy networks were operating within the United Kingdom. These fears were heightened by political leaders, journalists, and novelists such as Erskine Childers and William Le Queux. Le Queux’s invasion fiction was serialised in the Daily Mail from 1906, both author and newspaper benefiting from the publicity and anxiety it generated; by 1914 The Times could write that ‘the Germans seem to have almost converted themselves into a race of spies’. Lack of knowledge of German plans, and official credence in an extensive system of German espionage in Britain, helped to bring about the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909. [Cambridge University Library]
🕵 In pre-war [that is, pre-WW1] Britain, the growing military threat of Germany created a climate in which popular novels about espionage thrived. Writers such as Erskine Childers, author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and William Le Queux depicted a sophisticated German intelligence network laying the foundations for an invasion of Britain.
The truth was more prosaic. A small number of spies employed by the German navy were active in pre-war Britain. But between August 1911 and July 1914, the War Office's counter-espionage department (known today as MI5) arrested just 10 suspects. Britain's own attempts to establish a spy network in Germany met with similarly little success.
The triumph - even in the highest government circles - of journalistic fantasy over mundane reality had immediate repercussions when war broke out in August 1914. An unprecedented 'spy mania' gripped Britain. Although 21 real German spies were arrested on 4 August, thousands of imaginary acts of espionage were reported to credulous police and military authorities...
In reality, the wartime operations of German espionage in Britain under Gustav Steinhauer were limited and largely unsuccessful. Between August 1914 and September 1917, only 31 German spies were arrested on British soil, 19 of whom were sentenced to death and a further 10 imprisoned. Enemy spy activity thereafter was so negligible that no further espionage trials took place during the war.
Many of the men recruited by the Germans for intelligence operations were untrained and inept amateurs…
British espionage and counter-espionage, though far from perfect, clearly outshone its German counterparts. MI5 - which had expanded rapidly from 19 members of staff in August 1914 to 844 by November 1918 - developed an effective system of cable and postal censorship that intercepted correspondence sent by a number of German spies. Aided by the Russian capture of the German navy's codebook from the wreck of the Magdeburg in October 1914, cryptographers working in Room 40 at Admiralty headquarters in London successfully decoded wireless signals sent to and from the German naval fleet throughout the war.
Even on the Western Front, where War Office intelligence operations did not always run smoothly, there were great successes, most notably the use of homing pigeons to carry messages to and from operatives working behind enemy lines. Espionage thus played a small but significant role in the eventual Allied victory over Germany and its allies in 1918. [National Archive]
🕵 Soon after the outbreak of World War One, the Germans sent a spy to Edinburgh to gather intelligence. The untrained spook's "amateurish" methods soon led to him being caught and executed by firing squad at Tower of London.
Towards the end of August 1914 a man checked into what is now the Balmoral Hotel in the centre of Edinburgh claiming to be an American tourist.
In reality he was a German spy who had been sent to gather intelligence from the British.
Carl Lody, by now 37 years old, was a junior naval officer who had been forced to retire for health reasons but was looking for other ways to serve the fatherland…
After his arrest he was taken to London where he was put on trial, charged with spying for Germany, convicted and executed by firing squad at the Tower of London on 6 November 1914.
Prof Jackson says: "Lody's was the first execution carried out at the tower for 150 years.
"Lody's behaviour was impeccable during his trial. He refused to give the names of any of his superiors in German naval intelligence. He also seems to have been resigned to his fate and to meet it with honour and courage, commensurate with that of a German officer." [Steven Brocklehurst]
🕵 If asked to name a female spy, probably most people would be able to cite Mata Hari of World War I fame. Her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle McLeod, born in the Netherlands but who posed as an exotic dancer who was supposed to come from India. While there is little doubt about Mata Hari's life as a stripper and a sometimes prostitute, there is actually some controversy about whether she was ever actually a spy.
Famous as she was, if she was a spy she was fairly inept at it, and she was caught as the result of an informant and executed by France as a spy. It later became known that her accuser was himself a German spy and that her real role was in doubt. Likely she is remembered both for being executed and for having a memorable name and profession.
Another spy famous from World War I was also executed as a spy.
Her name was Edith Cavell and she was born in England and was a nurse by profession. She was working in a nursing school in Belgium when the war erupted and although she was not a spy as we generally see them, she worked undercover to help soldiers from France, England and Belgium escape from the Germans.
At first she was allowed to continue as matron of a hospital and, while doing so, helped at least 200 more soldiers to escape. When the Germans realized what was happening she was put on trial for harboring foreign soldiers rather than for espionage and convicted in two days. She was killed by a firing squad in October of 1915 and buried near the execution site despite appeals from the United States and Spain.
After the war her body was removed back to England and buried in her native land after a service in Westminster Abbey led by King George V of England. A statue erected in her honor in St, Martin's Park carries the eloquent epitaph of "Humanity, Fortitude, Devotion, Sacrifice." The statue also carries the quote she gave to the priest who gave her communion the night before her death, "Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." She had in her life cared for anyone in need, regardless of which side of the war they were on, out of religious conviction, and died as valiantly as she had lived. [Pat Fox]
Some useful resources:
Secret History of the Secret Service By Evangeline Holland, on Edwardian Promenade.
Espionage: Modern development On Wikipedia.
William Melville On Wikipedia.
Secret Intelligence Service On Wikipedia.
When did the state start to spy on us? On the BBC website.
The Victorian war on terror By Dr Shane Kenna, on HistoryExtra.
Category:World War I spies On Wikipedia.
Female Spies in World War I and World War II By Pat Fox, on ThoughtCo.
The female spies whose lives made fiction look tame By Nigel Jones, on the Telegraph website.
World War One: Carl Lody - Edinburgh's WW1 spy By Steven Brocklehurst, on the BBC website.
Espionage On the National Archives.
Our History On the Secret Intelligence Service website.
Top secret: A century of British espionage By Simon Usborne, on the Independent website.
Under Covers: Documenting Spies On the Cambridge University Library website.
Spy fiction: Nineteenth century On Wikipedia.
The British spy: how our national obsession led to Bond and Smiley By Robert McCrum, on the Guardian website.
Spy hysteria! On The Illustrated First World War.
Espionage By Emmanuel Debruyne, on 1914-1918 Online.
Spying on the enemy On DKfindout!
Victorian Secret Service Agents & Spies: Flip Sides of the Same Hollow Coin, Part I By Denise Eagan, on Slip Into Something Victorian.
Wilhelm Stieber On Wikipedia.
Women Spies of the Civil War On the Smithsonian.
Steampunk Spy-Fi: Real-life gadgets perfect for a Victorian Era James Bond By Lauren Davis, on io9.
Cats and dog suspected of spying on WWI trenches by British intelligence officers By Heather Saul, on the Independent website.
Spies in the Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence By Stephen Wade A preview on Google Books, so may or may not work for you. And ‘the total pages displayed will be limited.’
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
🕵 The roots of our modern-day intelligence agencies are to be found in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. ...the spy game as we know it from popular series like James Bond, I Spy and Alias, is a direct descendant of the many, many secret service units formed between the middle of the 19th century and WWI.
In Britain alone, there were the WOID, the NID, the SB, the SSB and finally, in 1909, MI5 and MI6 (though they weren’t to receive those titles until 1915). On the other side of the Channel, France had their intelligence covered by the Deuxieme Bureau (DB), the Sûreté, and the cabinet noir, while the German Empire possessed the brutally efficient German Secret Service located in the Wilhemstrasse, and Russia’s Okhrana kept watch by their method of the agent provocateur. Other countries such as the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary possessed their own methods of intelligence, but none played the game as deeply as Britain, Russia, France and Germany...
Until the 1909 formation of MI5 and MI6, the methods for obtaining information were split between the War Office Intelligence Department, the Naval Intelligence Department and the Special Branch–the WOID, NID and SB. The Special Branch, a department created within the Metropolitan Police was founded in 1882, (initially named Special Irish Branch) with William Melville as one its founding officers, to combat the growing menace of anarchists and Fenians. After retiring from the Branch after an eventful career of guarding the Shah of Persia and Queen Victoria, and foiling a plot to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm in 1901, Melville set up shop as a private investigator. When Anglo-German relations cooled after 1903, he lobbied the government to create a counter-espionage service.
Though Melville successfully formed an informal Secret Service Bureau in 1903, effective counter-espionage tactics had yet to be formed or approved of by the Government. Being a spy was a dirty business, the sort no true gentleman would willingly undertake, and the sort of organization the very gentlemanly British Government was loathe to fund. Most intelligence officers came from the middle classes, being the sons of military men or were military men themselves. In effort to combat this stigma, in the mid-1900s, supporters of a strong intelligence agency impressed upon Viscount Haldane, Secretary of State for War, the need for a well-financed, co-ordinated system...
MI5 and MI6(SIS), were a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The Bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialized in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities respectively. The first director of MI6 was Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, whose typically signed correspondence with his initial “C” in green ink, no doubt inspired authors such as Fleming and W. Somerset Maugham to refer to their head of sections by an initial. Vernon Kell, a former head of the German Section of the War Office, became director of MI5...
In hindsight, while we reap the benefits of secret service and intelligence agencies, their development, ostensibly to protect the national interests of each country, served only to increase the mutual suspicion and wariness of the pre-war years… With so many guns pointing at imagined enemies, the guns which thundered in August 1914 were inevitable. [Evangeline Holland]
🕵Modern tactics of espionage and dedicated government intelligence agencies were developed over the course of the late 19th century. A key background to this development was the Great Game, a period denoting the strategic rivalry and conflict that existed between the British Empire and the Russian Empire throughout Central Asia. To counter Russian ambitions in the region and the potential threat it posed to the British position in India, a system of surveillance, intelligence and counterintelligence was built up in the Indian Civil Service. The existence of this shadowy conflict was popularised in Rudyard Kipling's famous spy book, Kim, where he portrayed the Great Game (a phrase he popularised) as an espionage and intelligence conflict that 'never ceases, day or night'.
Although the techniques originally used were distinctly amateurish – British agents would often pose unconvincingly as botanists or archaeologists – more professional tactics and systems were slowly put in place. In many respects, it was here that a modern intelligence apparatus with permanent bureaucracies for internal and foreign infiltration and espionage was first developed. A pioneering cryptographic unit was established as early as 1844 in India, which achieved some important successes in decrypting Russian communications in the area. [Wikipedia]
🕵 ...the Secret Service Bureau... was founded in 1909. The Bureau was a joint initiative of the Admiralty and the War Office to control secret intelligence operations in the UK and overseas, particularly concentrating on the activities of the Imperial German government. The bureau was split into naval and army sections which, over time, specialised in foreign espionage and internal counter-espionage activities, respectively. This specialisation was because the Admiralty wanted to know the maritime strength of the Imperial German Navy. This specialisation was formalised before 1914. During the First World War in 1916, the two sections underwent administrative changes so that the foreign section became the section MI1(c) of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. [Wikipedia]
🕵 The Secret Service Bureau was the forerunner of Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services (usually known as MI5 and MI6 respectively). By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the domestic service had gained a range of powers to undertake counter-espionage and protect British security: these included a new Official Secrets Act, an unofficial Aliens register, Home Office warrants to interfere with the mails, and press censorship powers. The foreign section meanwhile began sharing intelligence with French agencies, created a database on Germany, and opened its first foreign station in Rotterdam.
During the war MI5 rounded up a pre-war German spy ring and ran a successful counter-espionage and security service; MI6 created a range of key stations around the enemy, with varying degrees of success. Both services established themselves as essential to the protection of the British state in peace and war. [Cambridge University Library]
🕵While the state had been in effect 'hacking' the Royal Mail for some time, it wasn't until the 19th Century that it erupted into a public scandal.
In March 1844 the British government accepted a request by the Austrian ambassador to secretly open and copy mail addressed to Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London. By June Mazzini had grown suspicious. A friendly MP petitioned parliament for the interception to cease and the scandal broke. For two months Victorian society, author Charles Dickens included, fiercely debated its right to privacy, and a Commons committee was ordered to investigate state surveillance of private mail. [BBC]
🕵 In the 1880s Irish republicans terrorised London with a diabolical new invention - dynamite. The Home Office hit back with a new weapon of its own, Britain’s first secret police force...
As a train entered London Underground’s Praed Street station on 30 October 1883, a bomb was thrown from a first-class carriage. It exploded as a third-class carriage passed. The driver, Stephen Harris, recalled that every light on the train was extinguished and there was a loud shriek of horror among the passengers...
Dozens were hurt, with injuries including shock, facial wounds, burns and deafness.
Within minutes a further explosion was heard halfway across the city, this time at Charing Cross. Another bomb had been thrown toward the lower carriages as a train left for Westminster. Such an audacious bombing attack on public transport had never been experienced before in western Europe, and the following day hundreds of commuters avoided the Underground network as a sense of terror swept through London. Addressing this fear, 600 Underground railway workers denounced the bombings and called upon commuters to go about their daily lives unintimidated...
Further attacks followed… These explosions were part of the 1881–85 Fenian dynamite campaign. This had the aim of bringing the Irish question to the heart of British politics, a prelude to the establishment of an Irish Republic. To meet the Fenian challenge a new detective department was formed at Scotland Yard under Adolphus Williamson and Inspector John Littlechild on 17 March 1883.
Known as the Special Irish Branch, the new force initially consisted of four CID officers and eight uniformed policemen. Its very existence represented a remarkable innovation because there was no tradition of detective work within British policing. This in turn was partly because the liberal political culture of the era in Britain was antithetical to secret or political policing… However, the approach of Special Irish Branch was still shaped by this liberal tradition. Rather than employing agents, it sought to prevent Fenian attacks by using a strategy peculiar to Victorian Britain: picketing. This involved identifying individuals as threats to national security.
Once identified, plain-clothes policemen would maintain a brief surveillance of the suspect, with no attempt to incubate informers. After monitoring a suspect’s movements, the officers would follow their observations with an arrest and questioning of those believed to be ‘dynamitards’. If the evidence was solid against a prisoner, and he could not account for himself, he was charged. Foremost in this strategy was a preference for openly recorded arrests and clear evidence...
On 6 May 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed chief secretary for Ireland, and his assistant Thomas Henry Burke, the most senior civil servant in Ireland, were assassinated in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The two were murdered by Fenians known as the Invincibles. In the aftermath of the killings, the Irish police force was reorganised. At its apex was a permanent secret service department known as the Office of the Assistant Undersecretary for Police and Crime. This department sought to neutralise conspiracies through intelligence. To this end, it employed spies and agents provocateurs.
Edward George Jenkinson headed the new unit… Jenkinson was dismissed in 1887, his secret operation disbanded and his clandestine network replaced by the Special Irish Branch...
In 1909, the War Office officially established the Secret Service Bureau. Its director, Irishman William Melville, had been an active participant in the battle against Fenian dynamitards. Ironically, though, he wasn’t one of Jenkinson’s men – someone who operated in the shadows – but a founder member of the Special Irish Branch. [Dr Shane Kenna]
🕵 Its decision in 1897 to build a naval force to rival the Royal Navy brought Imperial Germany into conflict with Great Britain. Germany had a tiny coastline and a small overseas empire, and the High Seas Fleet was perceived as having only one purpose: to menace Britain. Germany supplanted France and Russia as the principal foreign threat, and in the process fears of a sudden invasion were exacerbated.
Central to the supposed threat was the belief that German spy networks were operating within the United Kingdom. These fears were heightened by political leaders, journalists, and novelists such as Erskine Childers and William Le Queux. Le Queux’s invasion fiction was serialised in the Daily Mail from 1906, both author and newspaper benefiting from the publicity and anxiety it generated; by 1914 The Times could write that ‘the Germans seem to have almost converted themselves into a race of spies’. Lack of knowledge of German plans, and official credence in an extensive system of German espionage in Britain, helped to bring about the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909. [Cambridge University Library]
🕵 In pre-war [that is, pre-WW1] Britain, the growing military threat of Germany created a climate in which popular novels about espionage thrived. Writers such as Erskine Childers, author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and William Le Queux depicted a sophisticated German intelligence network laying the foundations for an invasion of Britain.
The truth was more prosaic. A small number of spies employed by the German navy were active in pre-war Britain. But between August 1911 and July 1914, the War Office's counter-espionage department (known today as MI5) arrested just 10 suspects. Britain's own attempts to establish a spy network in Germany met with similarly little success.
The triumph - even in the highest government circles - of journalistic fantasy over mundane reality had immediate repercussions when war broke out in August 1914. An unprecedented 'spy mania' gripped Britain. Although 21 real German spies were arrested on 4 August, thousands of imaginary acts of espionage were reported to credulous police and military authorities...
In reality, the wartime operations of German espionage in Britain under Gustav Steinhauer were limited and largely unsuccessful. Between August 1914 and September 1917, only 31 German spies were arrested on British soil, 19 of whom were sentenced to death and a further 10 imprisoned. Enemy spy activity thereafter was so negligible that no further espionage trials took place during the war.
Many of the men recruited by the Germans for intelligence operations were untrained and inept amateurs…
British espionage and counter-espionage, though far from perfect, clearly outshone its German counterparts. MI5 - which had expanded rapidly from 19 members of staff in August 1914 to 844 by November 1918 - developed an effective system of cable and postal censorship that intercepted correspondence sent by a number of German spies. Aided by the Russian capture of the German navy's codebook from the wreck of the Magdeburg in October 1914, cryptographers working in Room 40 at Admiralty headquarters in London successfully decoded wireless signals sent to and from the German naval fleet throughout the war.
Even on the Western Front, where War Office intelligence operations did not always run smoothly, there were great successes, most notably the use of homing pigeons to carry messages to and from operatives working behind enemy lines. Espionage thus played a small but significant role in the eventual Allied victory over Germany and its allies in 1918. [National Archive]
🕵 Soon after the outbreak of World War One, the Germans sent a spy to Edinburgh to gather intelligence. The untrained spook's "amateurish" methods soon led to him being caught and executed by firing squad at Tower of London.
Towards the end of August 1914 a man checked into what is now the Balmoral Hotel in the centre of Edinburgh claiming to be an American tourist.
In reality he was a German spy who had been sent to gather intelligence from the British.
Carl Lody, by now 37 years old, was a junior naval officer who had been forced to retire for health reasons but was looking for other ways to serve the fatherland…
After his arrest he was taken to London where he was put on trial, charged with spying for Germany, convicted and executed by firing squad at the Tower of London on 6 November 1914.
Prof Jackson says: "Lody's was the first execution carried out at the tower for 150 years.
"Lody's behaviour was impeccable during his trial. He refused to give the names of any of his superiors in German naval intelligence. He also seems to have been resigned to his fate and to meet it with honour and courage, commensurate with that of a German officer." [Steven Brocklehurst]
🕵 If asked to name a female spy, probably most people would be able to cite Mata Hari of World War I fame. Her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle McLeod, born in the Netherlands but who posed as an exotic dancer who was supposed to come from India. While there is little doubt about Mata Hari's life as a stripper and a sometimes prostitute, there is actually some controversy about whether she was ever actually a spy.
Famous as she was, if she was a spy she was fairly inept at it, and she was caught as the result of an informant and executed by France as a spy. It later became known that her accuser was himself a German spy and that her real role was in doubt. Likely she is remembered both for being executed and for having a memorable name and profession.
Another spy famous from World War I was also executed as a spy.
Her name was Edith Cavell and she was born in England and was a nurse by profession. She was working in a nursing school in Belgium when the war erupted and although she was not a spy as we generally see them, she worked undercover to help soldiers from France, England and Belgium escape from the Germans.
At first she was allowed to continue as matron of a hospital and, while doing so, helped at least 200 more soldiers to escape. When the Germans realized what was happening she was put on trial for harboring foreign soldiers rather than for espionage and convicted in two days. She was killed by a firing squad in October of 1915 and buried near the execution site despite appeals from the United States and Spain.
After the war her body was removed back to England and buried in her native land after a service in Westminster Abbey led by King George V of England. A statue erected in her honor in St, Martin's Park carries the eloquent epitaph of "Humanity, Fortitude, Devotion, Sacrifice." The statue also carries the quote she gave to the priest who gave her communion the night before her death, "Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." She had in her life cared for anyone in need, regardless of which side of the war they were on, out of religious conviction, and died as valiantly as she had lived. [Pat Fox]
Some useful resources:
Secret History of the Secret Service By Evangeline Holland, on Edwardian Promenade.
Espionage: Modern development On Wikipedia.
William Melville On Wikipedia.
Secret Intelligence Service On Wikipedia.
When did the state start to spy on us? On the BBC website.
The Victorian war on terror By Dr Shane Kenna, on HistoryExtra.
Category:World War I spies On Wikipedia.
Female Spies in World War I and World War II By Pat Fox, on ThoughtCo.
The female spies whose lives made fiction look tame By Nigel Jones, on the Telegraph website.
World War One: Carl Lody - Edinburgh's WW1 spy By Steven Brocklehurst, on the BBC website.
Espionage On the National Archives.
Our History On the Secret Intelligence Service website.
Top secret: A century of British espionage By Simon Usborne, on the Independent website.
Under Covers: Documenting Spies On the Cambridge University Library website.
Spy fiction: Nineteenth century On Wikipedia.
The British spy: how our national obsession led to Bond and Smiley By Robert McCrum, on the Guardian website.
Spy hysteria! On The Illustrated First World War.
Espionage By Emmanuel Debruyne, on 1914-1918 Online.
Spying on the enemy On DKfindout!
Victorian Secret Service Agents & Spies: Flip Sides of the Same Hollow Coin, Part I By Denise Eagan, on Slip Into Something Victorian.
Wilhelm Stieber On Wikipedia.
Women Spies of the Civil War On the Smithsonian.
Steampunk Spy-Fi: Real-life gadgets perfect for a Victorian Era James Bond By Lauren Davis, on io9.
Cats and dog suspected of spying on WWI trenches by British intelligence officers By Heather Saul, on the Independent website.
Spies in the Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence By Stephen Wade A preview on Google Books, so may or may not work for you. And ‘the total pages displayed will be limited.’
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 12:26 pm (UTC)Holmes himself mentions three spies he's aware of - although one of them doesn't survive (and probably the other two ended up on ill-fated sea voyages.)
no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 04:09 pm (UTC)And I kind of hope the two spies just did their time in prison and that was that. Being sent on an ACD sea voyage is a cruel and unusual punishment ^^"
no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 05:10 pm (UTC)From the Denise Eagan article: In 1884 Baden-Powell published Reconnaissance and Scouting, in which he declared “the best spies are unpaid men who are doing it for the love of the thing”. Huh. And it seems he wrote a whole book about spying, too: My Adventures as a Spy (1915). This is probably flippant of me, but I keep envisioning it as being full of back-of-the-cereal-box secret decoder rings.
Also, same source, Arthur Ransome was also a spy...??? Goodness. Again, I have to assume that what he was doing on those battlefields was much more earnest than the children's games in Swallows and Amazons. Nevertheless, I am getting the impression that in the early 20th century spying was something one did for a lark (if one had the time and money), much like being a naturalist was ca. mid-19th c.
Also, I want to know how much damage that six-shooter ring gun at IO9 can do. It can't have that much of a kick; that's only a tiny little bone that's meant to support it.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 11:53 pm (UTC)I found this (http://thegunsman.com/2012/01/dyson-lepetit-protector-ring-pistol/). To quote the relevant bit:
I don’t imagine the kick on this little package of concealed protection would be anything to fret about. If anything, when fired, it might feel like flicking yourself on the finger.
And in the comments the author of the article replies to someone with this:
A precise shot could be fatal, such as in an eye socket or directly into the heart. If anything, it would deliver a blow to the perpetrator which would allow you time to escape or find an exit. You can’t tell me that getting shot in the chest or head with a pellet gun wouldn’t cause a little damage. This would be pretty close to that kind of force, I would imagine.
However this post (http://peashooter85.tumblr.com/post/39004560902/the-le-petite-protector-ring-pistol-made-in-the) states:
Made in the mid 1800’s by a French company called Dyson, the Le Petite protector was a very small 5 or 6 shot pinfire revolver mounted on a ring. Popular for its ease of carry and concealibiliy, this little pistol fired a tiny 5mm pinfire cartridge that was barely powerful enough to pierce skin. Obviously this is a close up weapon and one would need be very desperate to use one in self defense.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-31 12:23 am (UTC)So their guesses are similar to mine: unlikely to serious damage unless conditions are Just So, but still enough bite to it that it might be strategically useful, depending.