Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  The longest-lived of the delusions was that of the night-signalling, for whenever the scare showed signs of dying down a Zeppelin raid was sure to give it a fresh start. As far as fixed lights were concerned, it was the best-founded of all the delusions, because the Germans might well have inaugurated a system of fixed lights to guide Zeppelins to their objective, but the sufferers went a great deal farther than a belief in fixed lights. Morse-signalling from a window in Bayswater, which could be seen only from a window on the opposite side of the street, was believed in some way to be conveyed to the commanders of German submarines in the North Sea, to whom one had to suppose news from Bayswater was of paramount importance. Sometimes the watcher – generally a lady – would call in a friend, a noted Morse expert, who in one case made out the letters ‘P. K.’ among a number of others that he could not distinguish. This phase of the malady was the most obstinate of all. It was useless to point out that a more sure and private method of conveying information across a street would be to go personally or send a note. It was not safe to ignore any of these complaints and all were investigated. In a few cases there were certainly intermittent flashes, but they proved to be caused by the flapping of a blind, the waving of branches across a window, persons passing across a room and, in two instances, the quick movements of a girl’s hair-brush in front of the light. The beacons were passage lights left unshrouded. The Lighting Order did much to allay this phase of the disease. Out of many thousand denunciations I have been unable to hear of a single case in which signals to the enemy were made by lights during the war.

  The self-appointed watcher was very apt to develop the delusion of persecution. She would notice a man in the opposite house whose habits seemed to be secretive and decide in her own mind that he was an enemy spy. A few days later he would chance to leave his house immediately after she had left hers. Looking round, she would recognise him and jump to the conclusion that he was following her. Then she would come down to New Scotland Yard, generally with some officer friend who would assure me that she was a most unemotional person. One had to listen quite patiently to all she said and she could only be cured by a promise that the police would follow her themselves and detain any other follower if they encountered one.

  Even serving officers were not immune. Near Woolwich a large house belonging to a naturalised foreigner attracted the attention of a non-commissioned officer, who began to fill the ears of his superiors with wonderful stories of lights, of signalling apparatus discovered in the grounds and of chasing spies along railway tracks in the best American film manner, until even his general believed in him. Acting on my advice the owner wisely offered his house as a hospital and the ghost was laid.

  Sometimes the disease would attack public officials, who had to be handled sympathetically. One very worthy gentleman used to embarrass his colleagues by bringing in stories almost daily of suspicious persons who had been seen in every part of the country. All of them were German spies and the local authorities would do nothing. In order to calm him they invented a mythical personage named ‘von Burstorph’, and whenever he brought them a fresh case they would say, ‘So von Burstorph has got to Arran,’ or to Carlisle, or wherever the locality might be. He was assured that the whole forces of the realm were on the heels of ‘von Burstorph’, and that when he was caught he would suffer the extreme penalty in the Tower. That sent him away quite happy since he knew that the authorities were doing something. The incarnation of ‘von Burstorph’ reminded me of a similar incarnation in the Criminal Investigation Department many years ago. When one of my predecessors appeared to be blaming his subordinates for a lack of enterprise in the case of some undiscovered crime they would shake their heads and say, ‘Yes, I recognise the hand. That is some of Bill the Boatman’s work,’ but ‘Bill the Boatman’ was a most elusive person and he has not been arrested to this day.

  On one occasion a very staid couple came down to denounce a waiter in one of the large hotels and brought documentary evidence with them. It was a menu with a rough sketch plan in pencil made upon the back. They believed it to be a plan of Kensington Gardens with the Palace buildings roughly delineated by an oblong figure. They had seen the waiter in the act of drawing the plan at an unoccupied table. I sent for him and found before me a spruce little Swiss with his hair cut en brosse and a general air of extreme surprise. He gave me a frank account of all his movements and then I produced the plan. He gazed at it a moment and then burst out laughing.

  So that is where my plan went! Yes, monsieur, I made it and then I lost it. You see, I am new to the hotel and, in order to satisfy the head waiter, I made for myself privately a plan of the tables and marked a cross against those I had to look after.

  The Germans, as we now know, had the spy-mania even more acutely. It became dangerous for Americans in Berlin to speak their own language: gamekeepers roamed the country armed to deal with spy cars and Princess Ratibor and several other innocent persons were shot at and wounded. Our own anti-German riots in which the shops of bakers with German names were damaged had their counterpart in the mob attacks upon the British embassy in Berlin.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE SPECIAL BRANCH

  THROUGHOUT THE WAR the Special Branch was combined with the Criminal Investigation Department. There is a dividing line between ordinary and political crime. In normal times the function of the Criminal Investigation Department is to unravel crimes that have been committed and of the Special Branch to foresee and to prevent political agitators from committing crime in order to terrorise the community into granting them what they want. At that time there were about 700 criminal investigation officers, of whom rather over a hundred belonged to the Special Branch.

  The Special Branch was instituted in the early ’80s to cope with the Irish dynamite outrages in London and elsewhere. Scarcely had these been put down when foreign anarchists began to follow the Irish example. The lives of ministers were threatened, public buildings were attacked and legislation in the shape of the Explosives Act was passed through both Houses at panic speed. The arrest and sentence of the Italian anarchists, Farnara and Polti, both caught red-handed with bombs in their possession, the fate of the anarchist who blew himself to pieces when attacking Greenwich Observatory and, even more, the hostility of the crowd when the anarchists under the protection of a strong escort of police attempted to give the man a public funeral, were so depressing to criminal aliens that this form of outrage ceased. Shortly afterwards one of the popular weekly newspapers offered a reward to the man who would suggest the most effective form of advertisement and some bright spirit conceived the plan of sending the Home Secretary a bomb containing a copy of the newspaper in question. From the point of view of advertisement it achieved more than he had counted upon. The parcel containing the bomb was opened by the private secretary, who immediately summoned the Inspector of Explosives. When he entered the room he found the bomb lying on the hearth-rug before a bright fire with an office chair standing over it and a group of Home Office officials in a respectful semicircle round it. He asked what the chair was for. They explained that if the bomb went off they thought it would be some protection. It reminded the inspector of an episode at Shoeburyness, when a live shell fell in the mud in the middle of a class of young gunners. ‘Lie down, gentlemen,’ shouted the instructor and no one moved. When the shell had been rendered harmless he asked why they had not obeyed orders: they might all have been blown to pieces. One of them faltered, ‘Well, sir, it was so muddy.’

  To return to the advertisement competition. When the bomb was opened and the newspaper was disclosed it was found that it was not an offence to scare the wits out of a Cabinet minister. But the young gentleman had neglected one precaution: he had not removed from the bomb a percussion cap and this was his undoing, for under the Postal Act it was unlawful to send explosives by post. When he appeared at the police court upon this heinous charge he had all the advertisement that he wanted.

  If there was any disposition to reduce or
disband the Special Branch at that time, the criminal activities of Indian students, which culminated later in the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie, showed that the branch could not be dispensed with and while the Indian students were still active the suffragettes took to crime. I am not sure that these ladies were not a more troublesome problem than all the rest put together. They steered clear of assassination, but they burned down churches, blew up the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, damaged priceless pictures, set valuable property on fire, smashed half the plate-glass windows in Regent Street and attempted to throw the King’s horse at the Derby. Most of them had quite forgotten the vote and were intent only upon the excitement. Many of them lived in studios where they could plot and contrive street pageants uninterrupted by their elders to their hearts’ content. When they were caught they used to scream down the witnesses or the magistrate and when they were committed to prison they went on hunger-strike. The so-called ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act was devised to meet this contingency, but many of them eluded re-arrest by a large expenditure of money on cars and by an ingenuity that might have been employed upon a better cause. In official circles I was stigmatised as an incurable optimist when I said that the violent tactics of the suffragettes would end as suddenly as they had begun and perhaps they were right, because neither I nor anyone else had foreseen the war. On 5 August 1914 there were actually three women in custody for an assault upon Downing Street. On that morning a deputation of suffragettes called at the Home Office to demand their release. It was felt that these women quite probably would throw all their misdirected energies into the national cause. The three culprits were released and from that moment the militants undertook war work and in not a few cases gave conspicuous service to the country. Sometimes their enthusiasm was embarrassing, as when they began to denounce the wrong people as being traitors to their country, but on the whole they did more good than harm.

  With the outbreak of the war the work of the Special Branch became more exacting than that of the Criminal Investigation Department. It was maid-of-all-work to every public office, for, being the only department with a trained outdoor staff, it was called upon for every kind of duty, from the regulation of carrier pigeons to investigating the strange behaviour of a Swiss waiter. Ordinary crime decreased progressively with every month of the war. The very qualities of enterprise and adventure that swept so many youngsters into crime during peace time took the same men to the recruiting office and when conscription came in our prisons were more than half empty.

  Looking back over the eight years in which the branch was responsible under my control for the safety of ministers and distinguished foreign visitors, it is natural to take satisfaction in the fact that there has never been a mishap. Apart from the obvious danger run by the Viceroy and the Chief Secretary of Ireland, there have been anxious moments, especially during the Prime Minister’s travels abroad; and if it had not been for the network of information of the plans of international assassins, against which precautions could be taken beforehand, there might have been incidents that would have left their mark upon history.

  In 1915, 1,100 habitual criminals were known to be fighting; more than seventy had been killed. One of these had stood his trial for murder and had been condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life and in due course he had been set at liberty on licence. He was one of the first to answer the call. In one case an ex-warder serving as a private recognised in his sergeant a former prisoner who had been in his ward, but, like a wise man, he held his tongue. One ‘old lag’ did give a comrade away. The colonel of a certain battalion had chosen as his sergeant-major an old soldier who had rejoined, who feared nobody and was a strict disciplinarian. All went well until one day a corporal asked for a private interview with the colonel and imparted to him the news that the sergeant-major was an ex-convict. It turned out that he had attempted to trade upon this knowledge with the sergeant-major himself but had failed and now he was having his revenge. Having made his revelation the corporal deserted, knowing that his sergeant-major was no less redoubtable with his fists than he was with his tongue.

  The police who had the duty of supervision over ex-convicts drew the line only at the Royal Army Medical Corps. It was their duty to prevent crime wherever possible and it was not considered fair to men of these antecedents to place them in the way of temptation in the shape of the kit and valuables of the dead and wounded. There were, of course, a few backsliders. Many of the men gravitated to the lines of communication rather than to the trenches and there were cases of the purloining of stores and rations and comrades’ property. Generally, however, the punishment awarded by court-martial was suspended and the men were given another chance in the trenches.

  In one case a man who had been convicted for burglary won the Victoria Cross. He volunteered on a night of heavy rain to crawl to the enemy’s trenches alone and silence a machine-gun post. He told the officer before he left that if he did not return in half an hour the company was free to open fire, ‘and never mind me’. Just before the interval expired he dropped back into his own trench, plastered with mud from head to foot. Returning again to the Front after the award of the VC, he was killed in action. I knew the man – a rough, silent, Lancashire lad, who had come to grief, I believe, through a love of adventure and who was as free from egotism, pose and self-consciousness as any of the men I knew. When the Great Book is opened his crimes, such as they were, will, I think, be found erased on the debit side of his account and the Recording Angel will have set down virtues which had but a tardy recognition while he walked this earth.

  The Criminal Investigation Department was called upon to provide trained men for the personnel of the Intelligence Corps in France. They were the nucleus of what afterwards became an important body – the Intelligence Police, who took control of the passenger traffic at the ports and of counter-espionage on the lines of communication. Several of them who obtained commissions reverted quite cheerfully to the rank of sergeant of police after the Armistice. One of them whose work in London had been the detection of white slave traffickers was detailed to protect the Commander-in-Chief, Lord French. In the street of GHQ he recognised a man whose deportation from England had been due to his investigations. He followed the man, who went straight to Lord French’s quarters. He stopped him on the doorstep and taxed him with his identity. There, at least, one would have said that the capture was important, but no! It turned out that the man had been engaged by someone who knew nothing of his unsavoury character, to assist in the kitchen.

  It may be imagined that the enormous rush of correspondence in those first days of the war dislocated the smooth-running machinery of the Special Branch. There was likely to be a shortage of trained police officers and we took on a number of pensioners to cope with the correspondence. I remember the hopeless expression on their faces when I visited them about a week after they had started. Piles of unopened letters lay on the floor, great stacks of docketed letters stood on every table. They were working I do not know how many hours overtime and still the flood of correspondence was threatening to submerge them. In those first few months I do not think that any of us left the office before midnight. If all the angry people who poured in their complaints had realised that everyone had to suffer some inconvenience in the war we might have done better work.

  I really think that at this time the American tourist was the most difficult. Not content with besieging his own embassy, he would sometimes come to demand satisfaction from me for the outrage of having had questions put to him at the port of arrival. These ladies and gentlemen had never seen a war before and they could not understand why it should be allowed to interfere with the elementary comfort of a neutral who was ready to pay liberally for everything. Sometimes I am afraid that my subordinates paltered with the sacred truth, for they had discovered that the quickest way to smooth the ruffled feelings of these tourists was to say, ‘Do you know that you are the first American who has ever complained of such inco
nveniences? We have always found Americans so quick to realise our difficulties and to make allowances for them.’ That never seems to have failed to put the angriest of them on their good behaviour. It made them, in a sense, custodians of their country’s reputation. But when the first tourist rush had been seen safely off to the other side of the Atlantic I began to find the Americans, both official and unofficial, a very great help and I made many permanent friends among them. The temptation to win affection in this country by displaying unneutral feelings must in some cases have been very great and yet, though I knew many official Americans intimately, I never heard one of them go outside the reserve which every official neutral was expected to entail. The announcement that America had entered the war must have been to some of them like removing the top from a boiling saucepan.

  I knew that not a few Englishmen thought that when America began to send over staff officers to Europe they would not want to learn from our experience but would be more inclined to put us under instruction. They were quite wrong. The whole attitude of the American officer was exactly what good sense would prescribe. We had been buying our experience at great cost for nearly four years and we were prepared to give it all freely to our new allies. They, on their part, came over to learn and when they had learned all that we were able to teach them they began to make discoveries for themselves. Never during the whole course of the war or afterwards was there any difference between my American friends and myself. We worked as one organisation and when they had had time to extend theirs until it reached all over Europe I thought sometimes that it was the better of the two. Nor must I forget the American journalist. It had been a tradition in some British official circles to be afraid of the journalist, probably lest his trained persuasiveness might have induced them to open their mouths when they meant to keep them shut. I have always found it best to be perfectly open with them; to tell them as much as they ought to know for the proper understanding of the question and then to settle with them what they shall publish. I have never known an American journalist exceed the limits within which he has promised to keep. Sometimes when it was essential that a matter should be made public they have gone out of their way to publish it. No doubt the European representatives of the great American newspapers are very carefully chosen: I have been surprised at their wide knowledge of international affairs and the excellent forecasts they have made.