M (12 page)

From June of 1889 Melville became responsible to a new Commissioner. It had all happened out of the blue.

James Monro had been far-sighted. Understanding the importance of efficient working conditions and high morale, he had commissioned a new building to replace the ‘collection of dog-holes' in Scotland Yard, and had worked hard for months over proposals for a Metropolitan Police pension scheme. When the pension scheme was rejected, in June, he resigned. The men were sorely disappointed and at Bow Street there were outraged meetings, after which forty policemen were sacked. Salisbury smoothly explained things away by telling the Queen that Monro had

posed not as your Majesty's servant… but as if he had been captain of a band of allied troops taken into your service… It was owing to this contrivance that first Mr Jenkinson, afterwards Sir Charles Warren, were induced to resign.

Monro must have suffered from back-stabbing such as this for some time before finally becoming discouraged, for judging by his past record he was not a man to give up without a fight. He was replaced as Commissioner by a one-armed hunting man, formerly of the Indian Police, who had only weeks before returned from escorting the Prince of Wales's eldest son on a tour of the subcontinent. Sir Edward Bradford, as Secretary of the India Office's Secret and Political Department, had like Monro and Jenkinson before him acquired guile in many years of colonial counter-insurgency. Also officially appointed was another old colonial: Melville MacNaghten, Monro's friend from Bengal, came in as Assistant Chief Constable to assist Robert Anderson.

In the first week of July 1889, Inspector Melville was charged with protecting a sexagenarian, middle-eastern potentate on a state visit to London. So far as the Queen and Lord Salisbury were concerned, nothing in the world was too much trouble for the Shah of Persia. He and his retinue of forty were accommodated in Buckingham Palace. He visited the Queen at Windsor, was taken to the play at Covent Garden, to luncheon at the Guildhall and to dinner at Marlborough House; he was invited to the sparkling glass wonderland of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and cheered in the streets. The newspapers slyly suggested his moustachios were suspiciously black for one of his years, and the Prince of Wales giggled as he told his intimate circle how the Shah had advised the decapitation of some nobleman who was visibly wealthier than the royal family – but in public, all was dignity, majesty and pomp. The Shah's kingdom blocked Russia's route to India. The Shah must be stroked and humoured like a tabby-cat.

The Tsar of Russia would be watching closely, of course, as would the Germans and the French. So the Royal Family played a trump card: they announced an engagement. The Shah simply must stay longer for the Queen's granddaughter's wedding at the end of the month. His two-week visit was prolonged to three and his visit to France postponed. His parting gifts to the staff at Buckingham Palace were lavish and he even stayed with one of the Sassoons at Brighton for a few days before finally tearing himself away from this delightful country. The message was clear. The Shah was a loyal friend of the British.

He had barely departed when Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived at the beginning of August for a state visit. He was still in his twenties and the Prince of Wales could not stand him. They purred at each other, hackles raised, the younger looking down his nose and the elder suppressing hostility.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was still a concern, though Melville's attempts to recruit informers mostly failed. According to the ‘Black Notebook' of Michael Davitt, Melville paid a few Irishmen he met in East End pubs for information, although a number went straight back to Davitt with the tale, pocketing their pieces of silver in glee.
¹
No row ensued, for throughout the first half of 1889 all eyes were on the Parnell Commission. At great expense Anderson had persuaded his key spy, Le Caron, to end his clandestine career, cross the Atlantic, and swear to Parnell's support for bombing and mayhem. His evidence was heard and his role in loyally informing for England exposed to the world. Yet English people had very serious reservations about spies; in every class of society, sneaks were unpopular; and suddenly, a few weeks later, the Commission hearing turned into a triumph for the Home Rule-ites. A hack called Pigott admitted that the letters were forgeries and he, not Parnell, had written them. He then fled, and when Inspector Quinn caught up with him in a lonely hotel room in Spain, he shot himself.

Jenkinson rejoiced for Parnell. He had known the truth about the forgeries for some time and, at long last, he had got his revenge on Anderson.

Home Rule looked like becoming reality, the fear of terrorism receded and the Special Irish Branch, Section B, was decidedly under-employed. As Scotland Yard expanded in 1890 and 1891 into the new building on the Embankment designed by Norman Shaw, there was no urgent call to accommodate the SIB. Funding for counter-terrorism depended – as Jenkinson had known only too well, hence the Jubilee ‘plot' – upon a
perceived
threat. The section was reduced; hovering between twenty-five and forty officers, in the next couple of years it was at its lowest ebb.

Special Branch, Section D in which Melville worked, was in the fortunate position of having a less exclusive brief. It was supposed to guard against violent anarchists, and if it needed extra men, it had other CID sections to draw on. Accordingly Special Branch's attention turned from ‘Irish duty' to England's role as refuge for foreign anarchists. Freedoms of speech and assembly were highly valued, but vigilance was necessary.

Foreign governments favoured scrutiny of socialists as well as anarchists. Special Branch were not particularly interested in socialists, wherever they came from. The existence of international socialist clubs in the East End was known and tolerated. The trickle of refugees from Russia had grown to a flood in the 1880s.
²
Most were poor and worked in the garment trade around Whitechapel. Those were the sort of people who went to these clubs. The majority were politically aware but powerless, and spent their time working towards a more prosperous future and maintaining their identities as Jews, rather than agitating about the persecution they had left behind them.

French, Italian and to some extent German dissidents congregated in Soho and Fitzrovia but might live anywhere in London, and most of them were harmless enough.

When the police were asked by the Austrian Government in 1890 about projected May Day demonstrations in Britain… the best they could come up with was a newspaper cutting; which does not suggest any very active surveillance of left-wing groups.
³

As for home-grown socialists, they were part of the scenery. John Hyndman and William Morris, Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx were well-regarded members of the establishment who on balance were markedly less likely to present a physical threat than Parnell was. Sergei Kravchinskii, the Russian who now used the alias Sergei Stepniak and who had assassinated the Chief of the Secret Police inSt Petersburg in 1878, lived in England and enlisted the assistance of just such a group of respectable socialists, freethinkers and Fabians in setting up the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. He seemed perfectly in accord with their agenda.
⁴
They would do all they could to publicise the Russian cause in England and if their accounts of oppression and pogroms were smuggled into Russia, in Russian, so much the better; but both he and they were opposed to violent action in the Russian cause outside that country's boundaries. English socialists were persuaders and demonstrators rather than violent activists and Stepniak referred disdainfully to anarchism as ‘middle-class individualism pushed to the ultimate'.
⁵
Whatever Melville thought of Stepniak, and as we shall see his view diverged from the official line, as a ‘socialist' the Russian was generally disregarded.

Anarchist clubs and pamphlets were altogether more threatening. Many of the anarchist refugees from the continent were wanted men abroad. Foreign governments had an awkward habit of asking for information about fugitives, and a blank response increased suspicion that the English were actively encouraging refugees to use London as a base from which to mastermind revolt at home. The Foreign Office was anxious to promote the impression abroad that the English police were in command of the situation. They constantly defended the English
laissez-faire
attitude but a major plank of their defence was a keen and knowledgeable secret police – which as far as the English public were concerned, was alien to the national spirit of tolerance. Special Branch was not in an easy position.

Traditionally there had been no secret force, just inoffensive Inspector Tornow on surveillance duty unknown to the public, and the French in particular had employed their own agents to watch anarchists in London. In fact, as the following recollection by a Special Branch detective shows, from at least 1887 English policemen were watching

…prominent propagandists, and [men] being suspected of complicity in various explosions… One could never be sure of what these fellows would be up to at any moment, so that Scotland Yard had an anxious time keeping every movement of theirs under surveillance. We knew the addresses of most of them, and the places where they worked, when they did any honest work, and we kept watch on those places; that should anyone be absent, even for a few hours only, we should have no difficulty in cornering him and making him account, if he could, for his absence.
⁶

Foreign governments were somewhat mollified by the efficiency of the police in Irish affairs, but Special Branch would never really gain their confidence until they were able to respond swiftly and knowledgeably to their queries and collaborate productively with foreign police spies in England. Reformed character or not, Stepniak's freedom to live unpunished in England remained a source of annoyance to the Russian Government and they had not given up trying to get their hands on him.

At Scotland Yard Anderson was disappointingly unconcerned. He was otherwise occupied collaborating in the destruction of his old adversary, Parnell, as the unfortunate politician was dragged through the divorce courts. Having lost a battle, Anderson was determined to win the war. Captain O'Shea, the cuckolded husband of Parnell's lover Kitty, had been one of the Black Propagandists behind the forged letters. He and Anderson were still fighting to destroy Parnell's good character. At the beginning of 1890 Gosselin was retailing gossip to Anderson about the marital scandal in which Parnell was about to become embroiled –

…when young O'Shea returned from Germany in December last, he went with his father to Brighton… he went to his mother's house. She not having dressed could not see him immediately and to pass the time he entered a room next his mother's and there found enough to show Parnell was in the habit of using it – pill boxes, medicine bottles addressed to ‘Charles Stewart' and his clothes were all about the place. On this the lad attacked her… he retaliated and made admissions which he told his father...
⁷

This was Anderson's day-to-day obsession. Back and forth flew allegations about whether or not Pigott's orphaned sons had been given money by the Government, or whether attempts had been made to bribe this or that informer during
the Times
case of 1888-89, or who had seen Parnell going into Kitty's house. The world had moved on, yet agitators from the continent, whose surveillance was so key to the Foreign Office's relationships overseas, barely registered with Anderson.

The Special Branch was small and had not yet proved its worth. It could save itself from plunging into the doldrums by getting a grip on what was happening in non-English-speaking communities. For one who had so recently returned from abroad, Melville seems to have made his mark forcefully, and quickly, on the Special Branch, so heis likely to have been voluble in support of this strategy; itwould have been nothing new to him. Violent anarchism was of particular concern at this time on the continent, where there had been attempted political assassinations in France, Russia and Spain.

There was no shortage of requests for information from abroad. But to what extent did the original members of Special Branch understand the ideologies they were opposed to? Had they merely followed orders, as soldiers do, they would have been inefficient. As detectives, Special Branch men were required to grasp, although not to concur in, the ideas that distinguished one group of immigrant dissidents from the next. Since their overriding aim was maintenance of the Queen's peace, they would not seek to antagonise their targets. They would approach them softly while keeping an eye on them and if they needed to make an arrest prior to extradition, the Home Office preferred the excuse of ‘ordinary' crime abroad.
⁸
This was necessary not just to protect the Government from charges of illiberalism, but because of legal difficulty in obtaining an order to extradite from England. In 1890 an extradition order had been quashed on appeal on grounds that the murder which had taken place abroad had been political in origin. This set a precedent: anyone who could prove a political motive for a murder committed abroad was probably safe.

Special Branch often found that foreign governments asked them to investigate threats that proved exaggerated. To at least one historian

This suggests that the Special Branch discriminated. It was less impressed by hearsay than its continental informants, and less apt to confuse sedition with dissent.
⁹

In this the Branch officers were not alone. Opinions expressed in the English press, in magistrates' courts and by respected members of society generally, indicate that a clear distinction was made between a sane, legal desire for radical change and a determination to commit propaganda by the deed.
¹⁰
Melville was a sophisticated observer but no liberal. In his own mind there was a clear distinction between self-deluding ‘anarchists', who might be dropouts but were probably harmless, and violent anarchists whom he preferred, by every means at his disposal, to exclude from society.