by Nigel West
– General Cases: 154.
– Proposed internment under DRR 14B: a man with an Irish name, deserted in 1914; cases associated with Indian seditionists, contributed articles to the Indian Sociologist, corresponded with Krishnavarma, who became a German agent.
– Correspondence: fifty. Blueprints of the Royal Aircraft Factory were returned from America through the Dead Letter Office. Conclusion: the censorship of American mails en bloc is essential.
– Enemy Aliens: 196.
– Refusal to endorse application for release from internment: a Czech, formerly chauffeur to General Officer Commanding Cromarty defences.
– Easterns: thirty-five cases, showing that the extremist section of the Indian Revolutionary Party had fallen largely under German influence and were being used by the Germans for their own purposes; an Oriental Literary Society, an offshoot of the Anglo-Ottoman Society was reported to be hostile to Great Britain and interested in peace propaganda.
– Alien Europeans other than Belgians: compelled to reside in a definite area under DRR 14, a man suspected of espionage but against whom there was no definite proof.
– Government offices: twenty.
– Dismissed: lady employed in Postal Censorship living among pro-Germans.
– Munition works: twenty-eight.
– Description circulated and Ministry of Munition informed: a man employed in three high-explosive factories since July, in each case left suddenly and then disappeared.
– Press: fifteen.
– Restrictions under DRR 14: a man who posed as a correspondent of The Daily Telegraph and pretending to be an American tried to get a permit to enter the Zone of the Armies.
– Suspects abroad: 192.
– From October onward MO6(c) dealt with these cases, the action of MO5 being restricted to precautionary measures against their landing in British Dominions.
– Circulated for search and information to be sent to MO5: a German consul in Spain; a British subject of German origin; a merchant and director of a mining and water company.
– Description circulated: a man arrested for supposed espionage in Switzerland and released for want of evidence, reported to be going to spy in France.
Statistics showing the growth of the office work between July and December1915
July December Total for six months
Personal dossiers 1,097 1,274 7,543
Telegrams 728 287 3,559
Letters 649 1,435 7,690
Suspects circulated 334 415 2,980
Internments recommended 25 7 81
Internments sanctioned 70
Deferred internment and alien restriction 5 2 30
Sanctioned 30
Permit September 28–30
Applications 598 1,396 4,874 (for three months and one week)
Statistics for 1916
January December Jan–June June–Dec Totals Jan–Dec
Personal dossiers 1,173 732 5,893 4,764 10,657
Telegrams 308 472 2,541 3,329 5,870
Letters 2,129 2,201 15,410 17,847 33,257
Irish American 358 342 2,992 2,559 5,551
Peace letters 161 314 1,225 1,512 2,737
Disloyalty 367 250 66 1,900 1,966
Suspects circulated 221 386 1,327 1,847 3,174
Internments recommended 4
Sanctioned 3
Permit applications 1,381 2,783 9,324 15,595 24,919
Inland passes Total for six months: 192
*
Jonkheer Johan Jakob Calkoen came to England to promote some company to trade in coconuts. He stayed at the Savoy Hotel from 14 May to 7 June 1915 when, under pressure from the Dutch consul he was allowed to leave the United Kingdom against the advice of the police. He was given a no return permit. In July he was known to be working for Klein, alias Cremer, the officer in charge of the German espionage centre at The Hague, and a search of telegraphic money orders showed that he had received £40 and £10 from N. Cleyton, Rotterdam, in May. Subsequent reports connected him with Pompe van Meerlevvoort, also a German agent, and with the agent Reichmann who had supplied the funds for the Calkoen-Reichmann Bank to further contraband dealings in stolen securities. Calkoen was also reported to be conducting questionable money operations in Switzerland. Finally it was known that Reichmann, Calkoen and Kinzler were intimate friends and all engaged in making money as best they could.
Calkoen appears on the Antwerp List of 1917 as A-3. His task was to manipulate Dutch firms connected with England. He was described as educated, reliable and with good connections but unable to return to England where he had previously worked for the Zweigstelle. Calkoen had been the subject of two circulars to the ports: in the first dated 31 August instructions were given to search him and signal his arrival to Scotland Yard but not to alarm him and not to arrest him unless the necessary evidence were found on him. In the second, dated 29 April 1916, orders were given to take his papers at the port and to send him up to Scotland Yard.
H. F. P. Kinzler was seen at Scotland Yard on 24 May and confessed to having received instruction as a spy against England. He was deported and orders were given that he was not to be allowed to re-enter the United Kingdom.
Pauline Slager and Georgine Ulrich (Ulricht or Ullrich) landed at Tilbury on 29 July; they were searched, their passports were taken from them and they were told to call at Scotland Yard. There they stated that, after performing at various places in Italy, they had come to England to earn their living as music-hall artists, and that if they succeeded in obtaining a contract they would settle in a flat. They were told that as soon as they notified their permanent address their passports would be returned to them. However, on 11 August, without notifying the police, they went to Glasgow and on 14 August to Edinburgh. They there aroused some suspicion by putting up at the best hotel and by presenting themselves for registration without producing passports. In consequence, the Chief Constable referred to the Metropolitan Police. Meanwhile two wires sent from the Victoria Hotel, London, to Adolf Carre, Zwaardecroonstraat 41a, Rotterdam, and to Van Straalen, Binnenamatel 42, Amsterdam, were answered by van Straalen wiring £40 to Slager. A third wire was sent from Edinburgh on 19 August and £40 came in reply from Van Straalen on 20 August. The Metropolitan Police had been deceived by Slager’s half-truths, but the bureau telephoned on 19 August to the Chief Constable of Edinburgh repeating her message to van Straalen and asking for a full enquiry. As a result the women were detained at Edinburgh on a charge of entering a prohibited area without the necessary identification papers; they were admonished in the Sheriff’s Court, sent back to London, and left the United Kingdom on 25 August with a no return permit.
Pauline Slager was half-sister to Kinzler. She beguiled the police by giving worthless information against Mrs Helene Schurmann. As soon as the women had left, information began to come in against them and from Belgian and French sources the following details were ascertained: Ulrich used the alias D’Aumont or Dumont and was associated with the German spies Droesse and Dr Reichmann.
A photograph of Slager was sent to the bureau with the information that she and Ulrich were coming again in October; a letter to her, which was intercepted in Holland, showed that negotiations were proceeding for buying her a horse and that she was to tour Glasgow, Inverness, Edinburgh and then the southern and eastern ports.
Her photograph was circulated to the ports with instructions to allow her and her friend to land but to keep in touch with her and to inform the bureau, and the Metropolitan and local police. She did not come in October. In December she was again reported to be coming but did not appear. In December 1915, a troupe consisting of Mrs R. A. Madigan, Swedish circus-rider, Miss E. M. Ojers, Dutch circus-rider, Hendrik Hinsmau, a Dutchman, and Vittorio Corini, an Italian stableman in charge of Adolphe Carre’s circus-horses landed at Hull and went through to Liverpool on 20 December. They returned to Rotterdam on 16 February. Corini was afterwards reported to have been intimately connected with Pauline and her half-sister Eleanore De
zentie, née Kinzler.
It was not till January 1917, when he was reported to be going to America with elephants, that Corini was signalled as a suspect, or till March 1917 that this former journey to Liverpool seems to have become known to the bureau and then, in reporting it, the British agent explained that in the absence of definite cause for suspicion visas had been grafted to the troupe though unwillingly. Orders were issued to arrest Corini on board any ship. At the end of the year 1917, the British consulate supplied details of Pauline’s family: her mother Catherine Donkers had married first Henry Slager and secondly Henry Kinzler and of her numerous family four at least were proved spies or suspects. These were Marguerite, married to Hermann Droesse; Pauline mentioned above; Eleonora Dezentie, and Henry Kinzler. Catherine herself collected the reports sent in by her children and forwarded them to the Germans. During 1916 and 1917, Pauline and Eleonora were repeatedly said to be travelling in Italy for espionage purposes. They were also said to be in touch with Karpesteyn, a Dutch circus-rider who acted for the Austrian legation, and with Suzanne van Damme. On the Antwerp List of 1917, Slager figures as A-54.
Task: establishment of relations with suitable persons in artists circles with a view to their going to England. Characteristics: artiste, clever.
According to Hans Eils, she did offer to come to England again after the 1915 fiasco but was not allowed. It is worth noting that repeatedly rumours were set afloat that a spy who had been in trouble with the authorities here was returning to this country, but the Germans never did send them back. Hence the rumour may have been a German method to divert attention from the person whom they really were sending. On leaving the United Kingdom in August 1915 the two women had given their address in Holland, at 69 Baendelstraat in The Hague, which was the address of Pauline’s mother.
An Indian named Sopher, who had been a dresser and then a clerk in the Indian hospital at Brighton and had incurred suspicion for wearing his uniform after his discharge, applied in February 1916 for a permit to go to visit Mrs D’Aumont at 69 Daendeletraat in The Hague. On being interviewed, he at first lied asserting that D’Aumont was a journalist but, on being shown his error, he dropped all pretence and admitted a very cursory acquaintance with D’Aumont and De Regals (Ulrich and Pauline Slager), whose addresses were found on him. A prosecution under DRR 16A for carrying a spy address was not considered advisable; it would have involved one of the officers who had interrogated Sopher going into the witness box to prove the man’s lies and consequent guilty knowledge of the nature of the address, and it was not certain that, if convicted, Sopher would be detained for the duration of the war. He was interned on the grounds of his hostile associations and attempt to renew a dangerous connection, and the order was upheld by the Advisory Committee. Other persons whom the bureau watched in connection with the case of Pauline Slager were her brother, Wilhelm Cornelis Slager, a musician and refugee in London, and his wife and first cousin Maria Juliana née Dronkers who, after spending some months in London, went in July 1915 to live at 69 Baendelstraat in The Hague. Their correspondence was undoubtedly suspicious, but nothing was proved against them. By agreement with the Belgian authorities, Wilhelm Slager was not to be allowed to leave the country but he never attempted to do so. On the other hand, when his wife wished to return to him in London, she was kept out of the country for some ten months and when she at last got a visa to come, she was interrogated at Scotland Yard and all her effects were examined but without result.
*
Eva de Bournonville, aged forty-one, was by birth a Dane, but became a naturalised Swede, was employed as a shorthand clerk and typist at the Danish legation in Stockholm. She procured a passport to come to England ‘for recreation’ on 30 August 1915. She left Stockholm on 20 September and travelling via Christiania, Bergen and Newcastle, reached London on 24 September spending the night at the Kenilworth Hotel. Next day she went to live at 7 Kensington Crescent, moved on 9 October to a residential ladies club at 11 St George’s Square, and on 16 October to the Whitehall Hotel, 15-16 Bedford Place. She gave the Danish legation at 29 Pont Street as her address and her letters were forwarded from there, enclosed in envelopes bearing the legation crest.
Miss de Bournonville had satisfied the Aliens Officer at Newcastle as to her bona-fides: she carried letters of introduction from the secretary of the Danish legation at Stockholm to Count E. Reventlow, secretary to the Danish legation in London and from the Danish minister in Stockholm to the Danish legation in London. Miss de Bournonville is said to have been a friend of Dr Sven Hedin.
Since 1903 Miss de Bournonville had known and corresponded intermittently with Miss Jeanie Snall Johnstone, a schoolteacher who in 1915 resided at 63 High Street, Dumbarton. Early in October, de Bournonville wrote to Miss Johnstone and received from her an introduction to that lady’s brother, William Johnstone, a steel and iron traveller who lived at Hackney. Miss de Bournonville called upon Mr and Miss Johnstone three times and on the last occasion roused their suspicion by her conversation. She asked where the new anti-aircraft guns were fixed; she stated that she was applying for a post at the Censorship and asked Mrs Johnstone to answer any questions set by the War Office, adding: ‘We must both tell the same tale’.
Miss de Bournonville spoke Swedish, Danish, French, English and German. On coming to London, she immediately got in touch with the PoW Help Committee. Between 25 September and 1 November, she wrote twelve letters to an address in Stockholm recording the letters on the back of her writing block.
All these letters were signed with fictitious names, the signature changing with every letter; the name of the addressee also varied but the address remained always: 35/37 Birger Jarlsgatan in Stockholm. In these letters she referred vaguely to persons whom she was actually meeting or writing to in England, taking care to disguise their names. It was the vagueness and lack of interest of these letters, no doubt, which first aroused the suspicion of the postal examiner, who on 2 October intercepted the third letter of the series. It was tested and found to contain a secret message about the falling off of recruiting and a sorrowful admission of failure on the writer’s part.
A message in the fifth letter showed that the writer had a correspondent in Dumbarton and had some thought of attempting to get into the War Office. In the sixth, the spy was trying to get in touch with officers and using ‘charity’ as a means to this end. Reports followed of the damage by the Zeppelins at Croydon, of airships under construction, of air defences in and about London, of the impossibility of sending newspapers except through newsagents owing to the fact that the British counter-espionage had found out the use made of them by the German spies.
A duplicate of this last report, numbered eleven and addressed to Major Charles Hohlay, Belgian PoW, Interned at Blankenburg (Mark) Germany etc., was intercepted by the Censor who found the en clair message unusual and the signature incorrect. The Censor intercepted ten letters in all. The bureau endeavoured without success to trace the writer through clues contained in the letters; she was identified towards the end of the month by her handwriting on a telegram despatched on 20 October to an address in Stockholm. The first step taken was to ensure that she should not slip out of the country by asking that the permit office should refer to the bureau any application made by Miss de Bournonville. Observation was kept upon her and she was followed to Mr Johnstone’s house who was interviewed by the police. One of the agents employed by the bureau put up at the Whitehall Hotel, and supplied Miss de Bournonville with incorrect information which she duly sent on to her employers. Meanwhile, a Lieutenant Holmes, who was staying at the hotel with his mother, Lady Holmes, had noticed that the police were watching the hotel and realised their object. He told the officer that de Bournonville had asked some curious questions about barracks in England. De Bournonville was arrested on 5 November. Among her papers were found the writing-block mentioned above, a picture postcard addressed to Captain Maclean of Ardgour, a PoW at Blankenburg, Germany, an envelope addressed to Major Horlay
, and three copies of instructions regarding communication with PoWs abroad.
Other documents showed that she had made great efforts to obtain a post in the Censorship and that, although Count Reventlow refused officially to give her a reference, unofficially he had helped her to the best of his ability. Moreover, she had used her connection with Danish diplomats for furthering her private correspondence and for placing certain addresses and medical prescriptions in safety. She possessed materials for secret writing including tablets of soap impregnated with potassium ferro-cyanide, also a strong magnifying-glass which may have been used either for deciphering or writing secret messages.
In her examination at Scotland Yard, de Bournonville confessed her activities as soon as she was confronted with her letters and she admitted that she had received money sent from the German legation through a bank in Stockholm. The German military attaché at Stockholm and another person who had come to Sweden from Germany had made the arrangements. It was ascertained that the money was paid in cheques drawn on the London City & Midland Bank, made payable to Miss Eva Bournonville, Danish legation and endorsed E. Reventlow, secretary to the legation. Miss de Bournonville received cheques for £15 dated 15 and 23 October and one for £30 dated 3 November. She banked the money with Count Reventlow who from time to time sent her small sums. She also deposited £12 at Lloyd’s Bank.
On 12 October the bureau had learned that the address in Sweden to which de Bournonville had posted her letters was a German Secret Service bureau under the direction of a Baron von Oppel, who was almost certainly identical with a former secretary of the German military attaché in London; also that direct communication was maintained between spies in England by means of letters addressed to PoWs and marked with some sign known to the German Censor. The date of this information shows that it preceded the discovery of de Bournonville’s communications through the addresses of PoWs.
