by Andrew Cook
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.
ELEVEN
DRIFT TO WAR
James Melville was a surprising young man. He was an impressive barrister, well liked, and interesting work came his way.
Like his father, he was proud of his Irish background. Unlike his father, he had an ambivalent relationship with the Establishment. This extended beyond his professional life. It was true that Sarah Tugander, the girl he was seeing, was private secretary to the next leader of the Conservative party, but she was neither Irish nor Conservative; she was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and both she and James Melville were, of all things, Fabian socialists. Twenty-five years before, his father would have been lurking outside their homes making notes in a little black book.
James was beginning to find work through his left-wing contacts, and he was part of the legal team that defended two refugees accused after the Houndsditch Murders. The murders, in December 1910, had been followed by a pursuit that ended in the Siege of Sidney Street. This notorious siege, despite its political overtones and the newsworthy presence of Winston Churchill at the showdown, appears to have been a City Police and Special Branch affair in which the infant SSB played a comparatively minor role. Years later, MI5 wished it had paid more attention.1
Special Branch was still headed by Melville’s old colleague Superintendent Patrick Quinn. The public believed it to be Britain’s only, and rock solid, line of defence from insurgents of all kinds, be they German spies or striking miners. Kell and his superiors liked it that way; they wanted SSB to remain unknown. After all, there was not much use in a Secret Service that wasn’t. So Special Branch handled arrests, court appearances, and state ments to the press in cases that SSB had in fact investigated and brought to the point where charges could be preferred.
Special Branch retained a separate internal political role of its own. It kept an eye on suffragettes, Indian nationalists and trade-union agitators and watched the few remaining ‘anarchists’, although these last were now more likely to be anarcho- syndicalists, breakaways from socialist or communist groups, disapproved of by the majority but nonetheless dedicated to empowering the working class by force if necessary.
The Siege of Sidney Street originated in an ordinary police investigation, when, as Harold Brust, a former Special Branch officer, gasped:
…a strange concatenation of circumstances spewed to the surface the dregs of London’s Underworld, when police and soldiers armed with rifles battled with infuriated alien gunmen, when Mr Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary rushed to the scene of the fight to direct in person the operations of the Scots Guards and artillery.2
The facts were these: on 16 December 1910, at a jeweller’s shop in Exchange Buildings, Houndsditch, which had been closed for the night, some robbers were disturbed. They ran away and holed up in a house close to the scene of the crime. The police surrounded the house; there was a shoot-out; the men fired, killing two police constables and accidentally wounding one of their own party, who later died.3
In the ensuing confusion several suspects escaped. A man-hunt was mounted to find anyone who had been in the Houndsditch house and survived. Witnesses reported having seen a man carried, wounded, through the alleyways of the quarter. Girlfriends were questioned. Two men in their early twenties, Yourka Dubov and Jacob Peters, were among those taken into custody. Special Branch files showed that both were political refugees from Latvia (then under Russian rule). Dubov was a member of the Lettish Social Democratic Party who had come to England less than a year ago; Jacob Peters was a fellow member, as well as belonging to the British Social Democratic Federation and the Working Men’s Federated Union.4 They remained in custody over Christmas and the New Year.
That these young men might be politically involved refugees was nothing new: crime was a favourite way of raising money for the desperate underground back home in Russia and the occupied lands of the Baltic. The local (H Division) Metropolitan Police did not necessarily take the political angle seriously. In 1931 one of them, Frederick Porter Wensley, reminisced:
Nothing… that I learned during or after the investigation has ever led me to think that there was any political significance about the affair. The Houndsditch plot was hatched and carried out by a bunch of foreign thieves who happened to find the so-called Anarchist Club in Jubilee Street – which was simply a meeting-place for foreigners, some of whom, no doubt, held revolutionary opinions – a convenient rendezvous.5
He was right in a way; yet there was a political background to the affair and documents found at the Houndsditch hide-out, and retained for many years in the files of the City police, confirm this. ‘Most of the documents found consisted of letters, accounts, or in the case of Gardstein, recipes for manufacturing explosive’. 6 Houndsditch was still occupied mostly by immigrants from eastern Europe, swelled after 1905 by Russians fleeing from retribution after the attempted revolution. Lenin’s Bolsheviks, desperate for funds, had proclaimed a readiness to seize funds from ‘the enemy, the autocracy’. This was discussed at the 1906 Stockholm Congress. One result was a drift towards violent anarchy on the part of a renegade group from the Lettish Social Democratic Party in London.
Following the rise to power of the Bolsheviks in 1917, MI5 (as MO5 had subsequently been renamed) opened reconstituted files on Sidney Street and Jacob Peters. In the files is a letter from a man who was part of the Whitechapel émigré community at the time; by 1932 he was interested in being naturalised and was perfectly happy to help MI5 in any way he could. Having enumerated eight separate groups of Russians, Poles, Jews and Letts, he goes on:
Besides these fractions there were several groups of anarchists with their headquarters in Jubilee Street, London E.
Although discussions about general political changes in Russia between these various groups took place daily, the fractions worked more or less separately, especially the anarchists who worked in groups of three or four persons, but as their tendency was leaning towards expropriation of other people’s property, they did not get any sympathy from the Social Democrats and Revolutionaries and generally speaking they were looked upon as social outcasts and expropriators.7
The little group that included the robbers was only about a dozen strong. The police were hunting especially for an anarchist (as distinct from a Social Democrat) known as Piatkov, or Peter the Painter.
On 3 January 1911, some other members wanted for questioning about the Houndsditch affair were traced to nearby 100 Sidney Street. The police surrounded the house but the occupants held their ground. The Home Secretary Winston Churchill arrived; so did journalists, photographers and troops. The house was fired upon by the overwhelmingly superior body of soldiers and set alight. Cruelly the observers allowed it to burn to the ground. Two charred bodies were found. One dead man was Fritz Svaars. He was a cousin of Jacob Peters, the man in custody. The other was Jacob Vogel, also known as Sokolov. Of Peter the Painter there was no sign.8
When the case against Peters, Dubov and the others opened at the Guildhall on 23 January, the Prosecutor asserted that Gardstein, the man who had been injured and later died, had been responsible for the death of the first policeman on 16 December. But at committal in March and at the Old Bailey in May, Peters and Dubov were charged with murder. A witness appeared who swore to having seen them, before the Houndsditch shoot-out, with pistols.
Neither their association with socialist political views, nor their foreign-ness, would
play well with an English jury: they were on trial for their lives. Peters claimed that he was an ordinary, hard-working man, not an armed robber at all, who had been mistaken for his notorious revolutionary cousin. Indeed Svaars, Peters’ dead cousin, had borne such a strong resemblance to him that the case rested on unsatisfactory evidence. Melville was eloquent in pointing out, also, that both Peters and Dubov had assisted the police since their arrest.9 They were acquitted. Peters, ironically echoing the gifts of the Tsar to William Melville, in his gratitude gave his young barrister an inscribed cigarette case. 10
James Melville made news again in March of 1912, when he defended some printers and a writer from The Syndicalist against charges of incitement to mutiny. They were remanded on bail and their sureties (who were in court) included George Lansbury, Will Thorne and Josiah Wedgwood. The accused men had published an article purporting to represent a call from working men to servicemen. It began:
Boys! Don’t do it! Act the man! Act the brother! Act the human being! Property can be replaced! Human life never!
The prosecution was led by the chief Treasury Solicitor, Mr (later Sir) Archibald Bodkin. Bodkin would appear for the Government at every pre-war spy trial; his brief would come directly from Kell and would include detective work by Melville. The Okhrana had a comprehensive file on the Sidney Street affair that included material supplied by and to Melville, and gives the strong impression that he knew a great deal more about the case than came out at the time. Among the surveillance reports are several on Piotr Piatkov, the gang leader known to posterity as ‘Peter the Painter’. These include reports from Riga, Irkutsk and Mitava (1910) and from London and Paris (1911).
MO5 was concerned, not just with spies, but with subversion by ‘the enemy within’. Melville had always been good at snooping on outfits like The Syndicalist and following up suspicions about where their money was coming from, and Kell was ever-vigilant in case dissidents were being funded from abroad. The Government was particularly suspicious of pacifist and trade-union organisations from about 1910 onwards. Late that year a series of strikes, persisting through the summer of 1911, led to civil disorder and a few rioters were killed by troops in Liverpool and North Wales.11 Syndicalist unionism, should it get mass support, would make a dangerous alternative power-base. In case of war the dockers, transport workers and miners acting in unison could paralyse the country. And such a syndicate of unions could ultimately make common cause with the working classes abroad. Workers of the world would unite. This would undermine nationalism, imperialism and everything the Government stood for.
So in August 1910, when Mr and Mrs William Melville took their holiday at Ilfracombe, it was probably not coincidental that their fellow guests at the hotel included Mr & Mrs Will Crook, the Labour MP for Woolwich and his wife. Woolwich, with its arsenal and docks, was key to the new arms race and would be crucially important in wartime. Melville would have found it useful to hear Crook’s opinion of the state of labour relations.12
Two years later James Melville would defend The Syndicalist. He was unsuccessful; the syndicalists got six months’ hard labour.13
1911 was the turning point: after Agadir, well-informed men no longer said ‘if ’ war comes, but ‘when’. Churchill, as Home Secretary in 1910 and 1911, was avoiding delay and serenely disregarding the protection of civil liberties by signing ‘general warrants’ – warrants to examine the correspondence of listed individuals.14 The list was updated from Kell’s alien return forms whenever anything suspicious was reported.
Steinhauer, in the English version of his autobiography, insists that he quickly discovered that mail to and from the Caledonian Road and Walthamstow addresses was being opened because a postman told Ernst it was.15 His strategy after that was to send misleading information through the post. This does not fit the facts. Although most of his network remained in place and under surveillance, some spies were informed upon, arrested and charged before the war and incriminating letters to and from Steinhauer came up more than once in evidence. He does not appear to have understood the extent to which his communications must be penetrated. If he did, he would surely have dropped the whole set-up and started again.
The first man to be tried under the new Official Secrets Act of 1911 was Heinrich Grosse, masquerading as merchant marine Captain Hugh Grant. He was an ex-convict who had been given a ten-year sentence in Singapore in 1898 for forging banknotes. Steinhauer, as Richard H. Peterssen, had hired him in Brussels.
Grosse had persuaded Steinhauer into giving him the job, but that was a minor hurdle; when he got to Portsmouth, he had no idea how to obtain the information that was wanted. In desperation, he decided to pay for it. He saw an advertisement placed in a local paper by ‘William Salter, Inquiry Agent’, and invited the man to visit him at his lodgings. When he arrived Grosse introduced himself as the Captain of a merchant ship who needed information about how much coal was in the dockyard at Southsea. As there was a strike in the offing, he explained that he was hoping to find a market in England for German coal.
As the case officer was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and so was the spy, it was only fitting that the inquiry agent should be a fraud too. William Salter was in fact a retired Chief Petty Officer trying his hand at detective work for the first time (and as it turned out, the last). When Grosse next asked him to find out how many men were stationed at the Royal Naval Barracks at Portsmouth, he became suspicious and told the police. They referred him to the Admiral-Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, who told the Admiralty. SSB was approached; the Bureau provided information so that Salter could string his client along. As in the case of Schultz, duff information was provided and coded letters to ‘Peterssen’ in Hamburg intercepted.
By November of 1911 Melville had been snooping in the district. When the case came up at Winchester Assizes there was evidence from local people about stories Grosse had told them. To one he had said he was in Portsmouth on a fishing trip, to another that he was writing a book, to another that he needed information about the Navy to settle a bet, and so on; these variant accounts did not inspire confidence. Grosse was arrested and appeared at Winchester Assizes in February.
Grosse stepped briskly into the dock. He was smartly dressed in a dark suit and a black overcoat with velvet collar. His strong-looking face was quite stolid at first, but as the charges were read out an expression of anxiety overcast his features.16
As well it might. The charges included conspiracy (with Peterssen) which carried a seven-year sentence. He maintained his plea of not guilty at Winchester Assizes, but was sent to jail for three years.17
At about the same time an even odder character was jailed. This was Dr Armgaard Karl Graves, the self-mythologising ‘doctor’ (‘he was never a spy of mine’, growled Steinhauer.)18 He later claimed he had been a spy since the old days in Port Arthur, when his masters in Berlin had barked that
You must abstain from intoxicating liquors. You are not permitted to have any women associates. You will be known to us by a number. You will sign all your reports by that number…
That was before he got there and found himself ankle-deep in wine and surrounded by slappers from four continents (see Chapter 8).
Most newspaper reports of the 1912 Graves case have been destroyed, so we are mainly reliant on his own account which was published in New York in 1914. It deals with his entire career and is written in a somewhat narrow-eyed style, typically
Slowly inhaling the smoke of my excellent Mejideh, I fell into a sort of contemplative reverie while waiting for the Prince…19
His ‘mission’ on this occasion was particularly dangerous, for the new Official Secrets Act was ‘so elastic and convenient for convictions that a judge could charge a jury to find a man guilty on suspicion only’. 20 He was risking seven years’ penal servitude – in England, ‘plain hell’. However, duty called from Berlin, so he set off to Edinburgh posing as an Australian doctor engaged in postgraduate work at the University. He was looking for i
nformation about Scapa Flow, and claims to have struck up an acquaintance with a keeper of the Forth Bridge and through him the ‘waterguard’ (coastguard?) who knew the Firth of Forth well. He filed his intelligence but he had already aroused suspicion: the landlady let searchers into his room, and he was followed. He confronted the local police chief who knew nothing about any searchers. But he moved to Glasgow to be on the safe side.
In Glasgow he paid for, and claims that he obtained, plans of naval guns then being manufactured by Beardmore & Co. But it was all wasted effort; his support staff let him down. He was using fake Burroughs & Wellcome envelopes and according to him, the people at the mail-drop misdirected his reports to the real company, who called the cops. His account of his arrest by four burly, plain-clothes men is quite gripping; one is impressed that he was ready to inject himself with deadly poison, obviously, but the circumstances were inappropriate. And the police did not behave like gentlemen.
The Inspector seemed to me to subsequently try and get a lot of publicity out of my arrest as if he himself had detected the whole concern, instead of having it thrust under his nose by the London chemical company.
He was sentenced to eighteen months, spent some time incarcerated in Bairlinnie, and was released when the British realised what they were missing.
In the fifth week of my imprisonment I was taken to the office of the Governor of the prison. As I entered I saw a slight, soldierly looking English gentleman of the cavalry type – (a cavalry officer has certain mannerisms that invariably give him away to one who knows).
