Ultimately, however, belief in the irrational must for the most part elude rational explanation.
James Hayward
June 2005
1
Spy Mania
In December 1911, during the Kaiser’s state visit to London, a senior German naval officer formed the habit of visiting a barber’s shop situated at 402A Caledonian Road. The shop was run by a British subject, Karl Gustav Ernst, the son of a German surgical instrument manufacturer who had emigrated to England during the 1860s. Since this somewhat obscure establishment was hardly the kind of place which a high-ranking attaché might normally be expected to frequent, this activity aroused the suspicions of the newly formed British counter-intelligence service, then called MO5 and headed by Captain Vernon Kell.
Kell obtained a warrant from the Home Secretary to intercept all mail sent to and from 402A, and placed the shop under regular observation. These letters revealed that some 22 paid German spies located at Sheerness, Chatham, Portland and elsewhere were communicating with a German handler named Steinhauer (aka Madame Reimers), and as such the shop was revealed as a front for the entire German espionage network in Great Britain. In this way M05 were able to identify every member of the nascent spy ring, and on the morning that war was declared, August 4th 1914, a series of raids were executed by the Special Branch. Ernst was arrested for breaches of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, while swoops elsewhere netted another 21 professional spies. A single man escaped via the port of Hull. The following day another 200 suspected German agents were rounded up under the auspices of the new Aliens Restriction Order, among them several waiters and higher officials from a number of West End hotels and restaurants. After a two-day trial at the Old Bailey in November 1914, Ernst, described disparagingly as a hairdresser, was sentenced to seven years in prison. At a stroke the entire German espionage network in Great Britain had been neutralized, and a curtain cast over the country at the vital moment of mobilization. Although further agents were sent into the field by Germany during the war, the network never really recovered.
The first such operative to arrive after hostilities began, a naval reserve lieutenant named Carl Lody, proved to be an ill-trained amateur. His letters were immediately intercepted, and after a six-week tour that took in Edinburgh, London and Liverpool and during which he travelled in the guise of an American tourist, he was arrested in October at Killarney in Eire. Tried by a court martial held at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster at the end of the month, Lody offered no defence, and on November 6th 1914 went down in history as the first man in 150 years to be executed at the Tower of London. Lody’s trial, to which the press were allowed access, was widely reported, and did much to fan the flames of an already fierce national obsession. Michael McDonagh of The Times recorded:
The prisoner sat in the dock between two Grenadier Guards armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. He was a young man, dark-complexioned and clean-shaven. What was most prominent in his features was his nose, which was remarkably long. . . . At last this spy business has yielded something sensational and dramatic – and real. Hitherto we have had but the gibbering phantoms of the inventiveness and credulity of disordered minds.
The ‘gibbering phantoms’ and mental disorder to which McDonagh alluded was the rampant – yet largely irrational – spy mania, which had gripped the collective popular imagination across Europe even before the outbreak of hostilities. In Britain, fictional and dramatic works such as The Battle of Dorking by George Chesney (1871), The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903), The Invasion of 1910 and Spies of the Kaiser by William Le Queux (1906 and 1909) and When William Came by Saki (1914) had also done much to foster the myth that a veritable army of spies were at large across the country, diligently touring the east coast in motor cars, flashing signals to airships and submarines, and arranging secret landings by aeroplanes in South Wales. Across the Channel in France the trend was, if anything, stronger, where works such as La Vermine du Monde furnished faintly absurd accounts of the ubiquity and consummate cunning of the Hidden Hand.
During the first few days of the war, the spy scare in Britain was coloured largely by factual reports of the destruction of the espionage ring run by Karl Ernst. Between August 4th and 10th it was variously reported that in London police had seized a quantity of arms and ammunition from an address in Chancery Lane, and had discovered at the apartment of a waiter named Hammer a Winchester repeater rifle ‘of the thumb trigger model’, as well as maps and an atlas. In the City, members of the Stock Exchange were required to disclose the names and addresses of all foreign clerks, and enemy aliens were excluded from the banking business. At Dover a figure seen tampering with a telephone cable was fired on, but managed to escape. A small railway bridge at Guildford was reported as having been blown up on the 5th, and at Conway in Wales two men were arrested after a local claimed to have overheard them discussing a plot to blow up the steel bridge spanning the Menai Straits. Further north, the German Consul in Sunderland was arrested and remanded in Durham Gaol, while the following day all German males resident in the same town ‘capable of bearing arms’ were similarly detained, amounting to 60 in all. Like measures were taken in Manchester, Nottingham and Glasgow. In Liverpool, an Austrian cabinet maker named Berger was arrested and charged after being found on the premises of the 8th Battalion, the King’s Liverpool Regiment, on suspicion of attempting to gain information likely to be of use to the enemy. More sinister still, at Edenbridge in Kent a troop train was fired upon, and a rifle bullet found in the woodwork of a carriage. The description of the suspect circulated by the local constabulary suggested ‘spy’ without actually saying so: ‘tall and dark, with a sallow complexion and a dark moustache’.
The prevailing alarmist mood infected even the police and the armed services. Upon the outbreak of war, the Isle of Wight military warned that there were ‘a number of spies’ at large, and counselled the public against the risk of being shot should they be foolish enough to approach defences or military positions after dark. At Berkhamsted the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps (OTC) were called out to block the Great North Road, down which a German armoured car was said to be advancing towards London. On August 11th a Territorial was fatally wounded during a false alarm at Birkenhead, while a fortnight later a sentry from the Royal Field Artillery was shot dead by an unknown assailant while on guard at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. A distinctly ambiguous armed spy scare was noted in Essex near the port of Harwich at the beginning of September:
The inhabitants of Mistley and neighbouring parishes were alarmed at 10.15 on Tuesday night by a quick succession of explosions. Some got out of bed and looked out from their windows, whilst others congregated at street corners discussing the situation, some thinking that German aeroplanes or airships were dropping bombs. It soon transpired that a spy was discovered in the act of approaching the Tendring Hundred Waterworks station at Mistley Street, which is close to the Harwich branch railway and Mistley station, flashing an electric light. The military sentries on duty challenged the man, and getting no answer fired volley after volley and chased him. The man eventually escaped through a wood in the vicinity, and none of the shots apparently stopped his progress.
At nearby Chelmsford, the location of the sensitive Marconi wireless works, a ‘tragic happening’ was recorded by a local vicar on November 5th:
At the Marconi station there, one of the sentries was shot dead. It was presumed that this was done by German agents in a motor. Hasty telephones in all directions to the troops to close outlets from Chelmsford. This brought troops in fiery haste from Broomfield to the ash tree at Waltham.
Some have suggested, however, that these stories of shootings were a deliberate invention, intended to keep troops on their toes. Another example of nervous Territorials is drawn from the memoirs of Sir Basil Thomson, who had been made head of CID at Scotland Yard in June of the previous year, and as such also controlled the Special Branch. On August 5th, Thomson records a visit to the War O
ffice for a meeting with a senior intelligence officer, in order to obtain authority to evict a number of alien tenants from leased railway arches:
While I was talking to him it grew dark, and there was a sudden peal of thunder like an explosion. He said, quite gravely, ‘A Zepp!’ That was the state of mind we were all in. That same night my telephone became agitated; it reported the blowing up of a culvert near Aldershot and of a railway bridge in Kent. I had scarcely repeated the information to the proper authority when the bell rang again to tell me that both reports were the figments of some jumpy Reservist patrol.
At the same time the Yard announced that the effect of the new Aliens Restriction Order (ARO) was to place enemy aliens under ‘certain disabilities’ in respect of the possession of firearms, motor vehicles, petroleum, homing pigeons, wireless sets and sundry other articles. Aliens were also subjected to strict registration requirements, and barred from prohibited areas, chiefly coastal and military districts. At the same time the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) made espionage a military offence triable by court-martial, under penalty of death.
Taken together, and read at face value, these various reports, rumours and measures gave the impression of constant and widespread espionage activity by desperate enemy agents. Michael McDonagh, a Times journalist, kept a valuable journal throughout this period, published in 1935 as In London During the Great War. On August 11th McDonagh recorded the general tenor of the perceived spy peril:
That jade Rumour has begun to flap her wings. London is said to be full of German spies. Popular resentment against German tradesmen, principally bakers, provision dealers, watchmakers, waiters and barbers, has developed in some instances into wrecking their shops. It is said that German purveyors of food are putting slow poison in their commodities. As for barbers, it is said you run the risk of having your throat cut by them instead of your hair.
So deep ran the fear of the alien peril that on August 9th the Home Secretary was obliged to issue a formal statement, promising that:
The public can rest assured that the great majority of Germans remaining in this country are peaceful and innocent persons from whom no danger is to be feared.
Predictably, this appeal to reason fell on deaf ears. Between the 11th and the 18th it was reported that no less a figure than the Mayor of Deal had been arrested on suspicion of espionage, and that the cells at Felixstowe were filled to overflowing with men arrested as spies. At Aldershot a military picket claimed to have arrested two men caught cutting telephone wires, and at Fishguard a pair of ‘well-dressed Germans’ was detained after their bags were found to contain bombs and wire cutters. As a result of police activity in London, so it was said, enemy reservists and agents had hastily abandoned stockpiled arms, with the result that quantities of rifles and ammunition had been found ‘in waste spaces and unoccupied houses’ across the city. At Mile End a council worker was slightly injured after picking up a brass cylinder containing nitroglycerine. In all likelihood, these weapons had been dumped by their owners for fear of attracting at very least a punitive fine under the Aliens Restriction Order, and were hardly the actions of ruthless saboteurs.
The spy mania was particularly rife in garrison towns such as Colchester and Aldershot. In the latter it was widely rumoured in September 1914 that a German had been caught at the waterworks with a quantity of poison concealed inside his shirt. The spy, it was said, had been the ‘chief hairdresser’ in Aldershot for 20 years. Writing to his brother in Canada, a local named Oliver gleefully reported that the man:
Was put up against a wall and shot forthwith . . . As far as I can make out, some hundreds of spies have been shot at naval and military barracks since the opening of the war, though not a single one of the cases has been in the papers.
In the wake of such reports, anti-German paranoia blossomed quickly to manifest itself in a variety of activities. During the first few days of the war these were for the most part petty: German spa water, previously a favourite at fashionable tables, was spurned in favour of English water from Buxton. In theatrical circles it was seen as treason to use Leichner’s greasepaint, previously regarded as the best money could buy. The London Gazette began to publish a steady stream of official notices of changes in the surnames of British citizens of German origin, and also of shops and companies. A number of firms also took out conspicuous press advertisements to reassure customers that their shareholders and workers were British through and through. Indeed the grocers Liptons were so nettled by unpatriotic smears instigated by their commercial rival Lyons that they threatened to utter a libel writ. On a different level of commerce, German prostitutes in Piccadilly became ‘Belgian’ overnight.
However, the spy mania soon took on a more violent hue. Famously, dachshund dogs (though not apparently Alsatians) were put to sleep or attacked in the streets, a persecution which endured so long that in the years following the war the bloodline had to be replenished with foreign stock. Before long this xenophobia resulted in outbreaks of serious violence. As early as August 9th anti-German disturbances broke out in Peterborough, resulting in a reading of the Riot Act. Two days later McDonagh observed in London:
All I could discover as I walked about town is that in the windows of German provision shops, such delicatessen as sauerkraut and liver-sausage are now labelled ‘Good English Viands’ and that Union Jacks are being flown over the doors . . . But these precautions did not save some of the shops in the East End from being plundered. The delicatessen was carried off and eaten, and no doubt it was enjoyed none the less because of its German origin.
On August 12th The Times was able to report that only two bakers and a grocer had been physically attacked in the capital, although this figure is probably an underestimate. Their largely sympathetic correspondent went on to state:
So far the evidence goes to show that the perpetrators of acts of violence have not been Englishmen, but the more lawless of the other foreign elements, between some of whom and the German residents feeling always runs high. At present the Germans themselves are for the most part keeping outwardly serene; but not a few are silently disposing of their businesses at any figure that they can get, and are preparing to disappear.
Reports of German atrocities against Belgian and French civilians began to circulate in earnest during the third week of the war. Like the imagined spy peril, reports of German ‘frightfulness’ across the Channel were frequently wildly exaggerated, but nonetheless played a part in fuelling xenophobia in Britain. On October 18th riots broke out in Deptford, where for three nights a mob of 5,000 roamed the streets looting German shops and restaurants, starting fires, and singing patriotic songs. Order was restored only by the intervention of 200 police officers and 350 men of the Army Service Corps. The riots triggered by the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, and the alleged crucifixion of a Canadian soldier at Ypres, were worse still. Outbreaks of mob violence were not confined to the capital, and in Keighley several pork butchers had their shops attacked and looted. According to one eyewitness the hostile crowd was mostly Irish, and drunk, and had been stirred into action by reports of German atrocities in Belgium.
After the initial spate of factual arrests and seizures in August, the spy mania took on an increasingly fantastical aspect as tall stories were further improved by word-of-mouth, or simply invented. The press also played an enthusiastic part in the myth-making, as this vitriolic comment from The Times of August 25th clearly demonstrates:
Many of the Germans still in London are unquestionably agents of the German government, however loose the tie may be. . . . They had in their possession arms, wireless telegraph apparatus, aeroplane equipment, motor-cars, carrier-pigeons, and other material which might be useful to the belligerent. The weapons seized by the police make an extensive armoury. They are more numerous than had been suspected. There are Mausers, rook rifles (strange weapons to be found in London suburbs), and pistols. Some of the rifles are of an old pattern and were obviously used in the Franco-German War of 18
70 . . .
It has been remarked by the observant that German tradesmens’ shops are frequently to be found in close proximity to vulnerable points in the chain of London’s communications such as railway bridges . . . The German barber seems to have little time for sabotage. He is chiefly engaged in removing the ‘Kaiser’ moustaches of his compatriots. They cannot, however, part with the evidences of their nationality altogether, for the tell-tale hair of the Teuton will show the world that new Smith is but old Schmidt writ small.
Michael McDonagh records some of the wilder spy legends in circulation in Britain by the end of October, at the same time reflecting a degree of scepticism that was all too rare:
A large section of the public continue to suffer from the first bewildering shock of being at war. Their nerves are still jangling, and they are subject to hallucinations. They would seem to be enveloped in a mysterious darkness, haunted by goblins in the form of desperate German spies . . . The wildest stories are being circulated by these people of outrages committed by Germans in our midst. Attempts have been made to the destroy the permanent ways of railways and wreck trains! Signalmen in their boxes, and armed sentries at bridges, have been overpowered by bands of Germans who have arrived speedily on the scene and, their foul work done, as speedily vanished! Germans have been caught red-handed on the East Coast, signalling with lights to German submarines. Carrier pigeons have been found in German houses! More damnable still, bombs have been discovered in the trunks of German governesses in English country families! The fact that these things are not recorded in the newspapers does not prove them untrue – at least not to those subject to spy mania.
Myths and Legends of the First World War Page 2
