The Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police had been founded specifically as a corrective to the kind of provocative intrigues and manipulation in which Edward Jenkinson had engaged as head of Section D during the mid-1880s, with near-catastrophic consequences. Since then it had become a victim of its own success, the threat from Fenianism greatly diminished by its efforts in that area, with home-grown socialism hardly a compelling enough replacement to justify the cost of the Branch’s work to protect against subversion.
Already, in the previous four years, Special Branch had lost a fifth of its staff, its numbers falling from thirty-one to twenty-five at a time when Britain’s foreign spy networks were also being scaled back. Investment in the apparatus of state security was falling across Europe, with the ‘secret funds’ assigned by the French police cut by half in 1890, and only a belated sleight of hand by the Belgian interior minister preventing a three-quarters reduction in the budget of its Sûreté. Further cuts in Special Branch funding were imminent, unless a pressing danger could be identified. In the Britain of the early 1890s, the greatest risk of sedition appeared to lie in the gathering tide of strikes, but unless labour activism could be shown to entail some element of violent conspiracy, a force such as Special Branch had little legitimate role in its supervision.
The Continent provided clear examples of how the need for their involvement might be made apparent. In 1887, just as a series of general strikes in Belgium was about to force concessions from a strongly Catholic and deeply corrupt government, the high moral ground occupied by the socialist leader Alfred Defuisseaux crumbled beneath him when an associate called Léonard Pourbaix persuaded him to write an ultimatum to the government. The document was manipulated for publication so as to appear to threaten civil war and, following a series of bomb attacks, the socialist party was utterly discredited. Pourbaix himself, it would transpire, had supplied the dynamite, after a secret midnight consultation with the chief of the cabinet. Similarly in France, an escalation of violence around strikes and demonstrations on May Day 1891, provoked by police heavy-handedness, helped create a general sense of emergency, while Landesen’s contrivance of the bomb plot in 1890 had stiffened the case for French police action against foreign émigrés.
That the British government should be inhibited about such an approach was unsurprising, in light of its past experience with Jenkinson and the Fenians, but concern for public opinion and its patriotic belief in the virtues of liberalism in matters of policing was a more decisive factor. Lord Salisbury’s administration felt obliged to proceed cautiously, while the prime minister himself appeared sceptical about the true extent of the danger laid out in the Russian Memorandum and the reliability of information of conspiracies forwarded from the Okhrana. There were those in Special Branch, however, who felt a visceral antipathy towards anyone or anything that challenged the status quo in Britain, or even the authority of despotic foreign states, and found their own government’s timidity deeply frustrating. The most capable and determined among them was William Melville, the rising star of the Branch, whose knowledge of the French language and postings to Paris and the Channel ports over the previous few years would have made him amply aware of the machinations of Rachkovsky and others.
Calculating, perhaps, that his actions if successful, would receive the tacit approval of his superiors, in April 1891 Melville took matters into his own hands. Eschewing the usual diplomatic channels, and apparently keeping both Chief Inspector Littlechild and Assistant Commissioner Anderson in the dark, he wrote to warn the Italian police that Malatesta had left with a companion for Rome, to involve himself in the disturbances planned there for May Day. Then, only a few weeks later, he went much further in conniving with a foreign force. ‘I have made the acquaintance of Inspector Melville of the political police,’ wrote the Okhrana go-between, an expatriate French journalist named Jolivard to his contact ‘Richter’. ‘He has offered me his services complaining that his superiors at Scotland Yard act too feebly with regard to the nihilists. Do not pass up on this chance, my friend, it will not come your way again.’ It was, indeed, a proposition that ‘Richter’, in reality none other than Rachkovsky himself, could not afford to decline.
In Auguste Coulon, Special Branch had an informant whose activities over the previous few years might have been conceived with the very purpose of effective provocation. His involvement with the Socialist League had begun with the Dublin Branch in the mid-1880s, and he had cemented his position among the hard-line ‘individualist’ members during the Paris Congress of 1889, when anarchism’s moment of glory had seemed near at hand. It was then, presumably, that he had met Louise Michel, but it was the impressionable young anarchists from provincial England that were most beguiled by his outspoken beliefs: men such as Joseph Deakin of Walsall, and Frederick Charles Slaughter, a native of Norwich.
The latter, known by 1891 simply as Fred Charles, having dropped his surname as too sanguinary, offered an object lesson in the career of a new breed of British anarchist. Won over to anarchism by one of Mowbray’s speeches, which Charles had heard when serving as a special constable policing the crowd in his home town, he had begun his transformation by joining the local branch of the Socialist League. The political education it offered broadened his horizons and the trip to Paris opened his eyes to a wider world of international brotherhood and possibility. The next step on his journey of self-discovery was to Sheffield, under the saintly tutelage of Edward Carpenter, whom he had met at the congress. Whilst there, though, most notably during Carpenter’s lengthy absences on winter vacation to warmer climes, his ideological drift towards ‘individualist’ extremism had accelerated, thanks in part to the paternal influence of Malatesta’s friend from Buenos Aires, Dr John Creaghe.
Having seen too many Europeans arrive in Argentina full of hope, only to be ruthlessly exploited, Creaghe arrived back in England declaring that ‘at last the emigration fad is thoroughly played out’, and promptly established the Sheffield Anarchist newspaper. Its first edition called for a general strike the following January. The policy was consistent with his past work in South America, but the rhetoric soon began to shade into something rather different. ‘They’ll all be making final arrangements for the revolution! Which Brown [another of the group] says is to come off some time in January next,’ wrote Carpenter’s lover, George Hukin. There was little Carpenter could do, however, as he cruised through the Suez Canal, admiring the local talent: ‘These darkies are very taking – some of them, very good-looking and lively – though you have to be careful as some are regular devils.’ And his visit to India and Ceylon was essential, he had written, ‘to renovate my faith, and unfold the frozen buds which civilisation & fog have nipped!’
Whilst Carpenter’s weekly visits to the guru Gnani Ramaswamy were doubtless enlightening, the susceptible Fred Charles was left to the tender mercies of the hardliners. Sacked from his job for unpunctuality, the spring saw Charles move on to Walsall, in the industrial heart of the West Midlands, where Coulon, no less, had helped find him work as a clerk and translator at Gameson’s iron foundry. He was back visiting Sheffield in May and was perhaps still there a few weeks later when Creaghe and his acolytes tricked their way into a public meeting addressed by the African explorer and colonialist Henry Morton Stanley, heckling him and selling satirical pamphlets to the jingoistic crowd. But it was the darkening tone of Creaghe’s pronouncements, and of those who visited him in Sheffield, rather than brief moments of frivolity, that characterised the following months.
‘If you can find 15 or 20 to join me,’ Creaghe wrote in an article for Commonweal, ‘I promise you we will make an impression on the enemy and do more to make recruits to our cause than all the rest who only preach and write verses’; in the same edition, Charles Mowbray referred to the ‘determined men’ needed, and clarified that they must be ‘acquainted with the power which nineteenth-century civilisation has placed within their reach’. It was a clear call for dynamite, which made nonsense of C
reaghe’s pretence of taking offence at William Morris’ belief that anarchists were all advocates of conspiracy. The only questions were when exactly the conspiracy would come to a head, and who would direct it.
During the latter months of 1891, Mowbray, the equally incendiary Henry Samuels and Coulon himself were all frequent visitors to Sheffield; in all likelihood, only Carpenter’s return prevented the city turning into a centre of violent action. Coulon, though, had been quietly building his influence in Walsall too, with Deakin and Charles already in place. Soon after Melville had made his clandestine offer to collaborate with Rachkovsky, Coulon would find the final piece to complete the puzzle and his provocation would be ready to be set in motion.
It was events in France on May Day 1891 that delivered Victor Cailes into his hands. At Clichy, a western suburb of Paris, attempts to disperse a demonstration drove the mob into the town’s bars where the seditious toasts raised to the spirit of revolution provoked the police to initiate a shoot-out; the three ringleaders arrested were promptly sentenced to a total of eight years in prison. Meanwhile at Fourmies, a mining town close to the Belgian border, twitchy troops opened fire during a stand-off with marching strikers, killing at least nine, four of whom were women – including the first to die, while pleading with the troops – and only three aged more than twenty-four. Finding himself a wanted man after delivering an incendiary speech in Nantes on the same day, Cailes, a stoker by trade, fled to London.
Ascertaining his new friend’s vengeful state of mind, and perhaps supplying Cailes with the copy of the bomb-making manual L’Indicateur Anarchiste that was later produced as evidence against him, a solicitous Coulon promptly arranged work for him as a brush-maker at Westley’s Factory in Walsall. A foreigner a long way from home, Cailes could not have been more grateful, all the more so for the introduction to Charles and Deakin, and over the summer the three new anarchist friends went about their usual business until, in October, the time came for them to repay Coulon’s kindnesses.
The letter came from a mysterious source calling himself ‘Degnai’ and was addressed to Cailes, but the enclosed design for an egg-shaped bomb was to be realised at the foundry where Charles worked. Deakin was clearly concerned about the new turn of events, and somewhat suspicious, but a letter from Coulon in London soothed and reassured him. The bomb, as Coulon appeared already to have made clear to Charles and Cailes, was for use in Russia, against whose despotic rulers such methods were surely warranted.
None of the three Walsall anarchists, it must be presumed, had heard of Landesen’s epic provocation of 1890, although as the time approached for the bomb’s completion they did show some wariness. When Jean Battola, Coulon’s and Michel’s neighbour in Fitzroy Square assigned the role of ‘Degnai’, had arrived in Walsall to collect the ‘infernal machine’ earlier in December, the Special Branch surveillance team had to watch him return empty-handed. Their frustration must have been compounded by the announcement at the end of the month of a reduction in the unit’s budget that would entail the loss of four constables’ jobs. Assistant Commissioner Anderson expressed the view that further cuts would be rash, but he needed evidence. Then on 6 January, Deakin caught the train to London to probe whether the conspirators were being observed. Melville’s men pounced as he left the station for the Autonomie Club, a brown paper parcel containing chloroform that he was carrying sufficient to warrant his arrest under the Explosives Act of 1882. His Walsall associates were promptly apprehended too, along with the foundry worker charged with fabricating the device, while Battola was taken into custody a week later. Coulon was left untouched.
A week earlier, on the last day of 1891, a young anarchist poet and friend of Oscar Wilde called John Bartlas had fired a pistol at the Houses of Parliament. It was a futile gesture of the kind that seemed set to characterise anarchism in Britain: a movement full of men who had often been known to take off their jackets but never to fight, as David Nicoll would later remark of one of his colleagues at Commonweal. That perception was changed at a stroke by the Walsall bomb plot. Anarchist terror had come to Britain, and if anyone was in any doubt about the scale and reach of its ambitions, they need only have listened to the reading material that came to light at the trial as having been in the possession of the accused.
The Feast of the Opera offered a description of how to plant a bomb that would bring down the house, and then there were the blood-drenched ravings of Parmeggiani’s short-lived L’International, or the rough imperatives of Fight or Starve. There was even the document entitled The Means of Emancipation that Cailes himself had written, or at least transcribed: ‘to arrive at a complete emancipation of humanity, brutal force is indispensable…it is absolutely necessary to burn the churches, palaces, convents, barracks, police stations, lawyers’ offices, fortresses, prisons, and to destroy entirely all that has lived till now by business work without contributing to it.’ No one seemed to care that at least two of the publications were widely said to be incitements funded by the French police; all were taken as proof that Walsall was part of what The Times termed ‘a great system’ of terroristic activity, stamped with ‘the lust of bloodshed’.
It was clear who gained from Coulon’s subterfuge. Special Branch’s funding was restored and Melville’s ascendancy assured; excused by the judge from answering questions relating to his relationship with Coulon, his high-stakes gamble had paid off. Rachkovsky, meanwhile, prepared to publish a pamphlet lambasting the English for allying themselves with the nihilists. ‘Bearing in mind… the general indignation about the “dynamite-heroes,” into which category the nihilists fall,’ he commented gleefully to Durnovo, the interior minister and his ultimate superior in St Petersburg, ‘our pamphlet will cause a great stir; and it will be the first step of my agitation.’ Coulon himself received an immediate bonus from Special Branch of £4 with his weekly pay raised to £2, and was able to continue his double life, suspected by some among the anarchists but not wholly ostracised, yet giving anonymous interviews to the press from his office in Balham in which he claimed to be in the service of the ‘international police’.
There were losers too, with the greatest damage surely suffered by the British sense of justice and fair play, in which the public took considerable if often misplaced pride. In a stark example of the abuses that the hysteria surrounding the Walsall trial made possible, a completely innocent inventor from Birmingham spent several weeks in a police cell on account of an innovative device he had designed for blowing up rabbit warrens. Corrosive precedents were being set. Inevitably, though, it was the leading anarchists who experienced the antagonism most fiercely.
Louise Michel had been contentedly teaching her classes, ‘sitting in the midst of a group of very intelligent-looking but dirty children,’ as shocked visitors remarked, with the single word ‘L’Anarchie’ written across the blackboard for a history lesson and drawn below it graphic representations of the hanging of the Chicago martyrs and the massacres of the Bloody Week. According to Michel, and to her obvious distress, their enlightened education, free of capitalist indoctrination, came to an abrupt end when bombs were discovered in the basement. ‘There is nothing so terrible as to feel oneself surrounded by enemies, without being able to guess either their identity or purpose,’ she confided to a friend.
But not even her closest friends could be trusted: the Special Branch ledgers recorded a tip-off from someone intimate with her that ‘there is dynamite in London’, while a French agent confidently reported that Michel’s companion, Charlotte Vauvelle, was an Orléanist spy. And although Coulon was probably responsible for the planting of the bombs at the school, Special Branch knew of a Russian informant among the teachers. Curiously, not long after Rachkovsky informed St Petersburg that the next stage of his agitation was to involve incriminating the nihilists in London as counterfeiters of money, a package of counterfeiting equipment was deposited with Michel, which she and Vauvelle wisely threw on to a rubbish tip. In the unlikely event that the Okhrana wa
s indeed targeting Michel directly, the explanation may have lain in vindictiveness on Rachkovsky’s part towards a woman who sneered at France’s developing relationship with Russia, insiting that ‘you can’t have an alliance between free people and slaves’.
Insofar as Rachkovsky hoped to use terrorism to inflate popular opprobrium of the Russian nihilists, however, in Paris the anarchists appeared intent on doing his job for him.
Ever since May Day 1891, an appetite for vengeance had taken a firm hold among the most militant French anarchists, inspired by the example of their colleagues in Spain, who had exploded two bombs in the port city of Cadiz. Alongside the fifteen black flags of anarchist mourning paraded in the funeral procession for those killed at Fourmies had been thirty-two coloured red for revolution, while deeper grievances too were resurfacing. A month later, the inauguration of Sacré-Coeur reopened old wounds, as the French Federation of Free Thought indicated by condemning the ceremony as ‘an odious Jesuitical comedy played out on Montmartre in honour of the 35,000 victims of May 1871’. Only the intervention of baton-wielding police prevented a carnivalesque protest featuring a great red crown carried by horsemen from reaching its climax: the draping of a vast red flag over the half-finished basilica. It would not be long before a loosely affiliated band of young anarchist discontents would translate the symbolism of the blood-red banners into violent retribution.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 46
