GUARDING OF KINGS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22709, 23 October 1935, Page 6

GUARDING OF KINGS

DRAMATIC MOMENTS MEMORIES OF A DETECTIVE How a British detective, disguised as a butcher's boy, foiled a plan to seize the throne of Rumania, is told in the memoirs of ex-Detective Inspector Brust, lately published in London. As a private detective, Mr Brust was employed by supporters of the existing regime in Paris to watch Prince Carol during his stay in England in 1928. The Prince had already been notified that he must leave England when the author learned that thousands of pamphlets, intended to be dropped from aeroplanes, had been ordered, for delivery at the country house in Surrey where the Prince was staying. This vital evidence of a plot to recapture the throne of Rumania was delivered at the tradesmen's entrance to the house. "Hastening down the road," says Mr Brust, " I located a butcher's shop and purchased the finest shoulder of lamb in stock. The shopman must have thought me completely mad when I craved the loan of a stained blue emock and a wooden tray on which to carry the joint. " I trudged back to the house, passed .through the gates and reached the kitchen door. I tapped. There was no answer. I tried the door, pushed it open. Luck was with me. There on the floor of the kitchen, cheek by jowl with the groceries, was the parcel of leaflets. ORDERED TO LEAVE ENGLAND. "It was the work of a few seconds to obtain a few leaflets. Just in time I thrust them into my pocket and straightened up as a servant came to relieve me of the meat. My presence was not questioned. Within an hour a copy of the leaflet was on its way to Paris. It was the notorious ' Carol Manifesto,' addressed to his adherents in Rumania. Next morning my colleague of a few months before, Inspector Haines of the 'Yard,' served Prince Carol with an order to leave England immediately." Mr Brust, after an apprenticeship as an ordinary constable, served for 18 years as a member of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard. His duties included the guarding of many royal personages, including King Edward VII. Be tells how King Edward once chaffed the, Kaiser on his guard of German secret police. " The Kaiser frowned. ' But you have your own police guard' —and he nodded his head toward the spot where I and two other Special Branch men stood watching our royal charge. "'Those fellows?' King Edward chuckled. ' Those fellows are not guarding me! They are just to see that I don't get up to mischief.'" * While guarding British royalty was usually a safe, if anxious, task, guarding politicians in times of stress was often dangerous. When Mr Brust was with Mr (later the Earl of) Balfour at Washington in wartime a man calling himself Captain Bolton and giving the correct password brought an official envelope to be delivered to the British statesman in person. BOMB IN A POCKET. "As he stood in the hall I had a .curious premonition, an instinctive suspicion of the man, and his object in coming here. I went behind him to seize him. It was the test of innocence or guilt. The instant he found my arms round him he sprang into action like a wounded tiger. Other detectives sprang to help. "I could feci a hard, cylindricalshaped object in his pocket; It proved to be a bomb, filled with sufficient trinitrotoluol to have blown Mr Balfour, the mansion, the mission, and the garrison sky-high." Mr Brust tells of a nightmare walk through the streets of Dublin with the Earl of Birkenhead when three gunmen, under orders to assassinate them, shadowed them along the route. Later one of the would-be assassins told the author that it was only Lord Birkenhead's calm indifference to the threat of which he already knew that saved his life.