DETECTIVE’S MEMOIRS

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 3 February 1923, Page 1

DETECTIVE’S MEMOIRS

NOTORIOUS SPY SCARES. No book at all like Sir Basil Thomson’s “Queer People” has appeared, go far as I know, in any language (says a writer in the Sundlay Chronicle). When it does happen, which is very Seldom, that great detectives produce memoirs, they are always very dull ones; and there has hitherto existed 1 no account of a great detective’s work in j war-time. Sir Basil Thomson has, or course, the advantage over most detectives of being a man of letters: he had a dozen or so of volumes to his credit When he went to the head of the Criminal Investigation Department in 1913. At the same time, his country might be excused for feeling a little- sheepish as it reads this record. For not a little of it is devoted 1 to description of the curious forms taken by suppressed panic in non-combatant England. Quite a number of us, for example, will look a little foolish at Sir Basil’s statement that “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.” And yet every case reported was taken up and 1 probed to the bottom by Sir Basil Thomson’s department. So with every one of the many similar delusions. And how keen the investigation was may be judged from the fact that Sir Basil’s men managed to trace back to its inventor that popular fable about the wounded German officer prisoner who, in gratitude to his English hospital nurse, warned her to “beware of the tubes in April.” I suppose nearly everyone in London heard, and many were influenced by, that ingenious lie. It began with April, 1915, and was told of each month up to the following September, when it became too stale for repetition. And it was traced back from mouth to mouth until the search ended in a woman teacher in a London Council school.

The feminine imagination, indeed, was answerable for much in those days. It makes one blush to think of the kind of stuff that educated and experienced people believed during the spy mania of 1915, and some of the wildest stories were invented by young girls. One unfettered' little general servant of sixteen terrorised a whole neighborhood by an elaborate romance about a German master spy who had her in his power, and was teaching her to operate a secret signalling machine.

And all this at a time when, thanks to Sir Basil Thomson’s department, the Army and Navy intelligence services and the Posit Office censorship, there were no German spies to speak of. At the moment of the declaration of war the whole German spy organisation in this country was laid by the heels. All its members, scattered over our naval and military centres, had 1 been known to the authorities for some time; and their ' arrest dropped an impenetrable veil 1 over the British mobilisation. So it was that General von Kluck never knew there was a British army up against it. But at home we would have it that the authorities were hopelessly incapable, and that the country was swarming with spies. Many people believe it still.

Of the many tales about suspected restaurant waiters, I like best that of the alarmed citizen who possessed himself of a plan which a Swiss waiter at his hotel had been seen drawing. The citizen told Sir Basil- it was obvirusly a plan of Kensington Gardens; but the waiter, when interrogated, showed) that it was a plan of the hotel dining room, with crosses against the tables which he had to look after. And then “the Russians.” Those phantom Russians of August, 19141 I can only say that the amount of solid lying done by respectable persons about “the Russians” was such that I believed in theqi myself for a few days. And Mr Asquith, marvelling at the myth, told Sir Basil this: “From a. legal and evidential point of view nothing was ever so completely proved as the arrival cf the Russians. “Their landing was described by eyewitnesses at Leith, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. They stamped the snow from their boots, and called hoarsely for Vodka at Carslisle and Berwick-on-Tweed. They jammed the penny-in-slot machines with roubles at Durham, four

of them were billeted on a lady at Crewe, who herself described the difficulty of cooking for Slavonic appetites.”

Then the gun-platform scare and the “secret wireless” scare, and the pigeon scare, and the agony column advertisement scare! In regard to this last one of the many private cypher experts who penetrated the meaning of those spy menaces became such a nuisance to the department that they had to discourage him. So Sir Basil made up and inserted in a newspapers the following :—

, “Will the lady with the fur boa, who entered No. 14 ’bus at Hyde Park corner, yesterday, communicate with Box 29.” Down came the expert immediately to announce that he had deciphered another message. He explained that this advertisement, which he produced, meant that six submarines were to attack the defences of Dover that very night! As for the real spies who did get into the country by one trick or another, and usually soon found themselves sitting in a certain historic arm chair in Sir Basil' Thomson’s private room we hear much about them in these pages. Spies of all kinds and descriptions, from Karl Lody, who “died' as one would wish all Englishmen to die,” facing with unflinching courage the firing party in the Tower, to George Breekow, who was “demented with fear,” and was believed to have died cf hteart failure before a shat touched him

Many perfectly innocent persons sat in that arm chair, and left it without a stain on their characters; many more or less harmful imposters, bogus “Russian princesses,” and the like, who had it. iirred suspicion; and not a few who went from the chair to trial and execution by shooting, or, as in Casement’s case, the rope. Strange fragments of information crop np. Whoever heard before that most of the confidence truck men in Lond'on arte Australians: that, before the war, most of them lived in Ealing; and that, after a successful coup, the two confederates usually abscond to Rome of all' places in the world. Many of us have heard of that burglar and ex-convict, well-known to Sir Basil, who won the V.C., and was afterwards killed in action. But how many of us heard that “eleven hundred habitual criminals were known to be fighting in 1915, and more than seventy had been kißed?”

Nor is it, I think, common knowledge that the rebels rush on Dublin Castle in the rising of 1916 was stopped by an officer who happened to be showing io the Under-Secretary one of the revolvers brought over from Germany by Boger Casement. The officer “had some cartridges in his pocket, with which he opened fire, keeping the rebels at bay for an hour and twenty minutes.”

And here, too, strangely enough, we find the full and detailed account of the assassination of Rasputin by Prince Youssoupoff with the aid of the Grand Kuke Dmitri. It is a ghastly story, for the monk was given poison enough in his wine to kill twenty men, and then, when he seemed unaffected, shot down with the Grand Duke’s revolver. Fatally wounded, he had still strength enough to half throttle his assailant; he escaped from the house, crossed the courtyard, and nearly succeeded in getting away into the street before Youssoupoff put an end to him with a policeman’s rubber truncheon. But there is little enough, on the Whole, of the element of naked horror in this book by an official who has seen much of it. He has a genial and a quaintly humorous pen. “Strange,” he remarks, “that we should ever have talked of Russia as the ‘steam roller.’ All that is left of it now is the red! flag.”

And there is point in his remark that, instead of “ a land fit for heroes to live in,” we have got a land in which only heroes can live.