The Spy Who Painted the Queen (3 page)

The passing of the two pieces of legislation didn't calm the spy scare; in fact the announcement that twenty-one had been rounded up on the first day of the war probably boosted it. In an early debate in the House of Lords, Lord Leith of Fyvie alleged that the law, as it stood, gave the police few powers against aliens ‘against whom we have no absolute proof' and also that some eighty-two enemy aliens were at large in Aberdeen, some of whom were ‘known' to have been signalling on the coast and others to have been photographing fishing boats. He went on:

A much more serious item is this. Within a mile-and-a-half of our principal naval wireless station at Aberdeen lives a noted German. He is an ex-captain in the Prussian Army and has been called out, twice. Each time it has been said, ‘Never mind; you stay there.' Anyhow he has gone through two wars with honours given to him, and yet he is allowed to reside within a mile-and-a-half of our principal naval wireless station. The Police have no power to go into his house. They have at present two men constantly shadowing him.

The number of alleged spies was legion. Alfred Thielemann was charged with being in possession of photographic apparatus, military maps and other items without a permit. A detective officer described how he'd found a number of photographic negatives of Hull harbour and Liverpool docks as well as permits to photograph the Port of London and the Manchester Ship Canal. The defendant pleaded that he was employed by a German company, the European Lantern Slide Company, which had an office in Newgate Street, London, and that he had been sent from Berlin in April to take photographs for them and had been unable to get back to Germany on the outbreak of war. Remanding him in custody, the magistrate remarked, ‘This case may turn out to be one of importance.' It didn't.

A German named William Hark was arrested at the headquarters of the Royal Engineers' Territorial Regiment whilst dressed in military uniform. He was charged with failing to register but pointed out he'd lived in England for twenty-five years and served as a volunteer soldier for twenty, so he had assumed the law did not apply to him. An officer vouched for his service and character, but he was remanded in custody.

Sergeant Bottcher of the 6th (Territorial Force) Battalion of the Essex Regiment was investigated because:

while stationed on the East Coast, [he] endeavoured to get his late employer to ask for him to come to London for three days, the said Serjeant associating with the cook at a house the owner of which is a Sin Feiner and the cook of which was in the habit of visiting Germany.

Whatever the result of the investigation, Bottcher went on to serve honourably in the Middle East, ending the war as a company quartermaster sergeant major with the 1914/15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal and Territorial Force Efficiency Medal.

A member of a Southsea concert party who was on a ferry from Ventnor was arrested for looking at a naval vessel through a pair of opera glasses, but released after a short detention.

Mrs Lockwood, wife of a former army officer, reported a suspicious German on Primrose Hill whom she had seen walking his dog. When she turned to look at him, she saw ‘a pigeon on a level with his head about three yards in front flying away … though she did not actually see the pigeon leave his hand, she considered it must have come from him (and) she noticed a little white paper under the pigeon's wing'. Peter Duhn, aged 28, described as a well-dressed German living in Charlotte Crescent, Regent's Park, had quite correctly registered himself with the police as required, but was charged with not notifying them that he owned a pigeon (though no evidence apart from that of Mrs Lockwood seems to have been presented that he did). He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment.

It wasn't just the police and MI5 that were deluged with reports. A naval investigator in Devon submitted a report in January 1915 on a house known as ‘Snail's Castle' near Totnes, where the owner, a London-based lawyer, Mr Blackwell, had been reported for his suspicious behaviour. He visited the property in the company of a mysterious lady and was reported on one occasion to have taken a car, late at night, to Torcross Sands and to have been left there with no obvious means of going on. An interview with the driver proved that, in fact, he'd been taken to a local hotel. His visits were irregular and, it was said, he always arrived late at night, which had occasioned much gossip. As the investigator noted, ‘Mr Blackwell is a married man and the lady who accompanies him to Snail's Castle is not his wife, which may account for something.' It almost certainly accounted for everything.

The military were inevitably caught up in the scare as well. MT1(b), the War Office section that collated and circulated home defence intelligence reports, issued regular updates. These included those of an army officer who had visited the works of the Danish Butter Company at Erith and reported:

I climbed to the roof which is made of concrete 2 ft thick. This roof is flat and dominates the two Railways North and South of the river, the Arsenal, the Purfleet magazines and the whole of the river up to Tilbury on the one side and the Becton Gas Works on the other. There are a considerable number of people employed here, and the majority are Germans, the Manager of the business we learned is a retired German Naval Lieutenant, and we particularly noticed that any of the workpeople who passed us during our Inspection of the Buildings invariably saluted him.

Scores of other buildings, both industrial and domestic, were examined by the police and soldiers who commented on their positions commanding important roads and railways. Other reports detail strange lights seen on the coast, apparently signalling to submarines, though the reports are usually inconclusive. There are reports of strange motor cars in the vicinity of vital points, of strangers buying Scottish islands that might be used as submarine or Zeppelin bases, and mysterious persons asking too many questions.

As far as I can see there is only one genuine case of spying that MT1(b) picked up – that of ‘a yacht, the
Sayonara
(which) has been cruising round certain ports on the West Coast of Ireland'. Unfortunately, and unbeknown to the military authorities, this was actually part of a Naval Intelligence and Secret Intelligence Service operation to examine the coast for German submarine bases. Needless to say, it found none.

There were voices that were all too keen to keep the ‘spy menace' in the public eye for their own interests. William Le Queux wrote a long article in
The People
on 28 February 1915, headlined ‘Hotbeds of Alien Enemies and Spies in the Heart of the Metropolis',
alleging the Home Office was turning a blind eye to ‘treason mongers and traitors'. It told vivid tales of the authorities allowing ‘the scum of Europe' to sit in obscure Soho cafés and restaurants gloating over their ‘piratical successes' (the U-Boats) and discussing the coming of the Zeppelins as a signal for thousands of secret agents to combine, presumably in the previously much-vaunted attacks on military and political targets. He described ‘a man singing an obscene German song, in which the vilest abuse was levelled against England – our one enemy', with the English being described as ‘big heads', ‘swine' and ‘vermin'. A confidential Special Branch report described Le Queux as a man ‘who writes sensational novels on the secret service activities of Germany' and noted that ‘Mr Le Queux, in this way advertises himself and his works'. Special Branch was quite right about Le Queux – and, as events were to show, there were others quite happy to jump on the bandwagon of hostility to aliens.

There were suspicions that highly-placed Germans and other enemy aliens, ‘some naturalised, some not', were in secret sympathy with Germany and might pose a security risk. An anonymous writer to the letters page in
The Times
advised that the newspaper's correspondence, telephone calls and telegrams be closely monitored, adding in a sinister manner, ‘I do not wish to be an alarmist, but I know what I am writing about.'

The Times
, commenting on the plethora of reports coming from around the country and the large number of letters it had received from the public, advised, ‘The duty of the public is a simple one. It is to report to the police wherever they think there is justification for such a step. A watchful public will form an excellent adjunct to the already hard worked police and the Special Police Force.' With advice such as this, from such an august source, was it surprising that spy fever and fear of foreigners gripped the nation throughout the war?

T
HE OUTBREAK OF
war saw the creation of two other, highly effective, defensive and intelligence-gathering organisations. The monitoring of telegrams and letters, as advocated by the anonymous
Times
correspondent, began as soon as the war started. During the Boer War there had been extensive interception of telegrams round the world, and though the organisation responsible for this had been wound up, the necessary machinery still existed to restart it. Cable censorship began immediately, as the War Office had a plan and officers in place to carry out the work. The British had realised at the start of the war that control of information was going to be vital. Their first act of the war was to signal the Post Office cable ship
Alert
, standing by off the German coast, to grapple, cut and reel up the German transatlantic cables, thus forcing the Germans to use neutral cables, which ran through London and could be intercepted. Among the countries that had no cable system of their own was Holland, which was obliged to use the British-controlled lines, as were the other neutral countries in northern Europe. The elimination of key radio transmitters such as the German one in Togoland also helped force the Germans to use neutral cables or their own powerful transmitters in Germany, which could, of course, be picked up by anyone who knew the frequency. Naval Intelligence soon set to work breaking German ciphers, which they managed to do with great success.

During August 1914, censorship was introduced on all post to and from Holland and Scandinavia. Communication with family and friends in enemy countries was not actually banned and censorship rules relating to harmless social communications with alien enemies were simple. Provided they were sent through the normal mail via an intermediary in a neutral country, against whom nothing was suspected, communications were allowed to pass abroad. A note on the subject on De László's file (which has been crossed out) does make the point that, ‘This course avoided undue hardship and provided HM Government with a lot of useful information.' The official report on postal censorship states that, gradually, from scraps picked up in individual letters, it was possible to build up a picture of which men were being called up, details of where units were posted, information on troop morale, casualties, details of how German ships in distant waters received supplies, information on new submarines and, from postal censorship sources alone, the writing of a ‘Who's Who' of the German Naval Zeppelin Service with biographies of most of its officers. Letters sent through suspect intermediaries were thoroughly scrutinised by the censorship staff and, unless they were clearly utterly harmless, were stopped from going forward.

Business letters and transfers of money were also allowed to pass, provided they were licensed by the Board of Trade or Treasury and sent through an unobjectionable intermediary. The chief postal censor received copies of all licences issued under the Trading with the Enemy legislation so that any correspondence could be checked against the current list of licences.

In August 1917, arrangements were made with Thomas Cook & Sons to act as a bulk intermediary to help poorer people who might otherwise struggle to find an approved neutral, though other approved intermediaries could still be used.

Any letter posted in the usual way (i.e. without going through an approved intermediary and without the relevant authority), within Britain but to an address abroad that hinted at transfers of money to an enemy, were passed to the relevant authorities for action to be taken. Similarly, any letter that mentioned or hinted at communication being sent through the agency of a neutral embassy, consulate or legation should also be passed over, firstly to the Foreign Office, so that they could, if necessary, make representations to the legation to have it stopped, and secondly to any other authority concerned with the breach of the law. As we shall see, due to the volume of mail being checked, some such correspondence was not always identified.

Though the censorship services were by no means perfect, especially early in the war, they did valuable work. They'd helped MI5 to score its first success against visiting German agents when, in August and September 1914, a telegram and letter sent to a suspicious address in Stockholm were identified. The Germans were not aware that their pre-war addresses for receiving spy communications had been compromised, and continued to use them. A Post Office clerk, Malcolm Brodie, a specialist in the clandestine opening of envelopes and in codes and invisible inks who had been seconded to MI5 since July 1913, identified the message in the telegram as a code and, on opening the letter, found a sealed envelope inside addressed to Berlin which, when opened, contained a letter in German giving details of shipping losses and locations of naval vessels. Further letters were intercepted and MI5 realised the sender was going under the name of Inglis and was based in Edinburgh. Edinburgh Police tracked down where he had been staying but in the meantime another intercepted letter revealed he had travelled to Dublin and that the amount and quality of the information he was sending were dangerously improved. The Royal Irish Constabulary traced him to Killarney and arrested him in his hotel there. He turned out to be Carl Hans Lody, a German who had spent time in America and could pose successfully as an American. Despite MI5's objections, he was tried in public at the Old Bailey. Against overwhelming evidence against him, his behaviour in the dock, where he was revealed to be a German officer and not just a ‘common spy', won him much admiration. He was, nevertheless, found guilty and sentenced to death. He was shot by firing squad in the Tower of London on 6 November 1914, the first of a dozen to be executed there during the war.