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  …is universally admitted to have been set up by Melville and by Coulon who in my view was his unwitting accomplice. Coulon is a knowing fellow who speaks English and French but he is a bit off his head. He enjoyed the confidence of all.

  On the pretext of having fourneaux [casings for combustible substances] to make, he sent several anarchists to Walsall… They [including Battolla, a shoemaker and ‘a very nice man’] were condemned on simple presumptions. A mock-up of a bomb was found at the home of one of them and drawings at the home of another and at the home of another, the issue of Internationale in which Molasse describes the easiest way of blowing up the Opéra.

  …On the advice of Delbecque, Thompson who was Battola’s lawyer asked why letters from Coulon had been found at the homes of all those accused, and why he was not being searched. Melville replied that he didn’t have to reveal the names of anarchists who worked for him. This reply gave Coulon’s enemies more reason to accuse him. Coulon defended himself, accusing Nicoll, Capt and others of being narks, but up to now this hasn’t done him any good.25

  According to this report, Coulon had no friends left; his former friends wouldn’t speak to him, and two of them wanted to sack him from the general store they had set up in Balham.

  Patrick McIntyre worked on the case for Melville and three years later had cause to resent him after Melville took disciplinary action that led to his resignation. McIntyre published a sensational memoir over successive weeks of 1895 in Reynolds’ Newspaper which included the following:

  Some time previous to what was known as the Walsall bomb conspiracy, Coulon wrote a letter to ScotlandYard offering his services to the police. Now, the police generally take advantage of any offer of this kind, in view of the necessity of keeping secret political agitations under surveillance….

  It is not my desire to round on my former colleagues and it would be especially unbecoming of me to say anything to the disparagement of Inspector Melville, with whom I have been acquainted since I joined the force. Certainly it was he who carried out the inquiries that resulted in my own reduction, but I found no fault with him on that account, for he had to perform his duties. I am obliged, however, to allude to his connection with the Walsall business. At the time that Coulon wrote to the Yard, Melville was senior officer, and the letter was handed over to him, and it fell to him consequently to go and see Coulon. And Coulon afterwards became his ‘property’ – that is to say, all information that Coulon supplied was taken possession of by Melville, who submitted it to Mr Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police. Anderson would direct what action was to be taken in the matter. A police officer of any grade, from superintendent to constable, has to act under the orders of his superiors. In serious cases every iota of information has to be reported to the Assistant Commissioner…

  It is noteworthy that Coulon was constantly in London in the days and weeks following the trial. The last time I heard of him he was living in the neighbourhood of Brixton in a style that favourably contrasted with his humble circumstances when I first knew him as a resident of the Italian quarter, near Hatton Garden. Anyhow, the Walsall business appears to have enabled him to migrate to a semi-fashionable neighbourhood.26

  Melville did not lie in court. He simply ‘took refuge’ in McIntyre’s words

  behind the usual excuse that on public grounds he was not called upon to answer the questions. In this he was upheld by the Judge.

  Coulon never admitted to being a provocateur although he conceded, in a letter published in Reynolds’ Newspaper on 21 April 1895, that he had been paid. The extent of his role is only now apparent. Special Branch ‘special accounts’ show that he received his first payment from Melville as early as 18 July 1890. From 1891 onwards he was on the payroll (under the alias Pyatt). He got extra money in the spring of 1892 during the Walsall case, and briefly in April 1894; after that he received a regular income until his final £10 pay-off in 1904.27

  The archives show how excited the French were by all this. The arrests of Cails and Charles were reported back and cuttings from English and American newspapers were sent to Paris. Dynamite terror continued in the French capital and Kropotkin, the elderly theoretician exiled in England, predicted that the workers were about to arise. As far away as San Francisco, newspaper reports thrillingly described the arrest in Paris of a friend of the dynamitard Ravachol ‘suspected author of the Boulevard St Germain dynamite outrage’.

  The full-time spies returned a stream of incidental intelligence to the Préfecture which has great immediacy. It must have been sent by diplomatic bag. On 11 February 1892, for instance, one wrote that he hoped to be admitted as a member of the International Club next Sunday and in consequence, to ‘facilitate research’. He was more and more certain that Meunier and François lived nearby, which could not be better for them, as the quartier was crowded and there were a lot of ‘French Jews’ and ‘everything that was most crapule in London’. It would have been this agent’s business to track them down; Meunier (this is before the Café Véry outrage) was wanted for the bombing of a barracks.

  The International Socialist Club was at 40 Berners Street off the Commercial Road in the East End, and was of interest to foreign police, although generally disregarded by the English. The anarchist network was largely based in the West End, specifically in Fitzrovia. This was a seedy, lively, Bohemian place, notorious at the time for the Cleveland Street affair of the previous summer.28 It was a straggling grid of ill-maintained, third-rate Georgian terraced houses fronting the street and a few picturesque squares, with a bookshop or a pub, a tobacconist’s or a restaurant, on every corner and cramped rented rooms occupying the three or four bug-ridden floors above. A fugitive new to London could find friends in the back room of Victor Richard’s grocer’s shop in Charlotte Street, or at the Autonomie Club and library which occupied three storeys at 6 Windmill Street, or at Lapie’s bookshop at 30 Goodge Street.

  Typical reports describe, in cursive handwriting, who has been seen and what is being said.

  Last night, for instance (10 February) there was a meeting at the Autonomie Club, in German, about whether or not meetings should generally be multi-lingual; no conclusion was reached. On 18 February the socialists will hold a demonstration, but none of the anarchists will bother to turn up. The attempt to raise money for Meunier and François hasn’t raised much, and some of the comrades (Delbecque being one) think that François should look after himself, but Meunier should be helped to get away as soon as possible.29

  In July, agent Black reported from London that the gang with Schouppe in it had gone to Paris to steal and blow things up; some of the booty would be distributed among out-of-work comrades and some would be kept by Schouppe and a few others with the aim of getting Pini out of jail…

  Here, [i.e. in London] the anarchists are very pleased with themselves. When you mention the arrests to them, they say so what – we’re organised now, and everything’s working out.

  The police here know François’ wife’s address.

  François and Meunier are here and François will soon be tracked down – there’s a new lead. Meunier was in hiding with a M. Magret when he lived at 30 Fitzroy St. The Melnotte woman, who lived almost opposite, came often with her lover to see the Teron woman who lived in the same house as Magret. Last Saturday Melnotte and Magret moved away…30

  Agent Black had airily suggested about a month before that Meunier and François, once they were found, might well be kidnapped with paid assistance from the English police. The cost and tactics of this coup had obviously been the subject of animated conspiracy over a bottle of wine.

  According to a conversation with an informer here, the police will co-operate if the price is right and you could have the two of them in the bag within a week. Would the Government be inclined to donate a certain sum to be divided among those who took part? Because it would mean special surveillance and there’d be a certain number of men to organise.31

  Nothing more of this master pl
an remains in the files, although both Meunier and François were eventually nabbed – by Melville.

  In August of 1892 agent Zéro numéro 2 reports that he has spoken to comrades Delbecque and Gardrat, who are fed up with having to keep François & Meunier, who would never have had any trouble if they’d kept their mouths shut and not boasted to all comers; the explosion at the Café Véry would have been just as effective. Jourdan, ‘of whom much has been said of late’, corresponds with someone called ‘l’éveillé’ (‘wide-awake’) who’s written to him. He has shown the letter around and the agent encloses a copy he has managed to make.32 In September, the same agent sends a useful recipe (recently passed to him by a named visitor) for a bomb made of nitro-glycerine and coal which can be detonated from a distance, and asks for a password ‘so that if Monsieur F comes to London we can arrange a meeting without risk’.33 Meanwhile agent Zéro is keeping abreast of plans to publish. It seems Gardrat (who prints L’Autonomie) will print a new paper with the financial backing of Malatesta, Delbecque, Bordes and others. And so it goes on; accumulated in the archives is the small change, the va-et-vient of intrigue, every passing argument and infidelity, dream and boast, itemised, year after year, until the agent has formed opinions about who is dangerous, who is treacherous, and who is merely huddling together with his compatriots for warmth.

  One of the agents contributes a cutting from an unnamed French journal of 20 September headed La Bande à Melvil – ‘Melville’s gang’. It complains that Delbecque was hounded ‘as far as the homes of his clients’ and nearly lost his livelihood because of it. His wife, with the five-month-old baby, was interrupted by the police bringing false information about her husband, worrying her, trying to drag a confession out of her – and as a result her milk went bad and the little girl died. She emerged from the house of mourning to the hearse outside, and there stood police on the corner of Charlotte Street. They were responsible for the death of her child.

  The leader is called Melville, and within his trade he has the rank of Inspector. He is a nice-looking, kindly-spoken gentleman. As for his henchmen, anybody in London’s French quarter could point them out: a big devil, like a squaddie, with a rough red moustache and boxer’s fists, and a portly fellow with brown side-whiskers and greying hair who looks like a retired shopkeeper. These two are always together [The first is believed to be McIntyre and the second Sweeney]…Then there is the attendant rabble of pimps and boot-lickers who swell their coffers with the small change that narks always get. We all know who they are.

  One Monday, 1st August in the afternoon, while Delbecque was in his workshop, the Inspector did get in to see his wife and told her, with all the slyness of his trade, ‘Look here, you’re not well, your little one is very sick. For heaven’s sake be reasonable! Aren’t you tired of this endless struggle? I can get you out of the hole you’re in. Listen to me. You need rest and a quiet life. You can have it. Just tell me that Meunier lived here, tell me where he is now and I’ll leave you alone. You, and your six children and your husband. Can I say fairer than that? And don’t worry. No one will know. It’s between you and me.

  ‘…You don’t want to know? Too bad. Your husband won’t stay in work, you can be sure of that. We are very well informed… and then the kids… Look, understand this. It’s in your own interest. You’re a good woman and a good mother. It’ll be no joke when your children are howling from hunger. Look, I tell you what: five hundred pounds. And that’s just for starters. Five hundred pounds right away.

  ‘…You won’t listen? All right. I’m off. But think about it. There’ll still be time tomorrow…Think of it: your husband out of work and your children with nothing to eat…’34

  By mid-November the anarchists’ cheerful mood of the summer had plummeted. François, one of the alleged Café Véry bombers, had been arrested, in a blaze of publicity, by Melville – and against all expectations had been extradited to France. People were not sad for him (though they were sorry they’d lent him money) but worried about his children, who were still in London. As Zéro numéro 2 reported, Bordes couldn’t keep them for ever. Schouppe and Mathieu had a month’s work house painting, but that was about the only bright news for the community which was otherwise, by universal agreement, entirely infiltrated by cops.35

  The arrest and extradition of François was considered a personal triumph for Melville. The prosecution had cleverly argued that, since the Café Véry bomb had gone off as an act of revenge for the arrest and trial of a single person (Ravachol, executed in July), it was not a political crime. Its success had repercussions far and wide. At least one Russian diplomat (or possibly a policeman) proposed to leave for England in hopes of seeing Stepniak, too, extradited at last. The Okhrana’s (the Russian Secret Police’s) Paris archive contains a document in Russian, unsigned and undated which reads in translation:

  Before you leave for London I consider it my duty to warn you against being too enthusiastic about English ‘loyalty’ and to express my misgivings based on bitter experience of Russo-English relations.

  According to the 1886 Convention, we have the right to demand that S. Kravchinskii [Stepniak] be extradited as the murderer of General Mezentsev. But one of the Articles stipulates that political criminals may not be extradited, nor may those who ‘can prove’ that their extradition is being demanded from a desire to punish them for a political crime.

  Previously, when we have demanded the extradition of various petty rogues, the English judges have displayed an extremely nit-picking attitude towards our evidence: the exceptional personality of such a villain and murderer as Kravchinskii, therefore, will present them with an even greater temptation to exhibit their customary pedantry and arrogance and flaunt their ancient traditions of asylum even though the latter are totally inapplicable in the present case.

  As you know, through his lying and deception Kravchinskii has got himself patrons not only in English society and the press but also among Members of Parliament. Their understandable sense of self-esteem will not allow them to admit that a vile criminal has pulled the wool over their eyes; they will be ashamed of the extraordinary ‘Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’ which was founded on his initiative, and falsehood will be upheld quand même throughout the extradition proceedings. The wide scope for interpreting the above-cited article of the Convention in different ways will undoubtedly lead to well-publicised hostile propaganda against Russia and compel the judge to forgo a just assessment of the crime and truckle to this propaganda. Already, following the extradition of François, concerns are being voiced in the English press that Russia might demand the extradition of nihilists (even though these are murderers) and it is openly being announced in advance that nine tenths of the population will condemn such an extradition. The latter, of course, will happen precisely when your English friends are reassuring you that extradition is beyond doubt.36

  Nobody trusted the English. The Russian Government didn’t, and neither did the French socialists. At the height of the Paris bombing campaign in April a French paper, l’Autorité, had complained bitterly that:

  …John Bull, inventor of the Trade Unions, is very much responsible for all the crises we’ve been through, and will continue to go through unless we hurry up and stem the rising tide of anti-social theories with which – in a reversal of the truth – the anarchists besmear the great name of socialism.37

  According to this article, Ravachol and his friends learned bomb-making from the Anglo-Saxon dynamitards of 1882-85. And:

  Que dire des policiers londonniens? C’est l’incapacité multipliée par la vénalité et la sottise.

  (What can one say of London policemen? They represent incompetence made worse by corruptibility and dimness.)

  The Walsall case led to new interest from the French police, as well as the press, in the political scene in England, and they had rather more respect than L’Autorité did for the Met. One of their agents wrote a long report from London just after the trial, tracing links between English
socialists and foreign anarchists. It was conceded that they didn’t mix much, although they knew each other. In England, the report pointed out, it was not the bourgeois who were afraid of the anarchists (as in Paris) but the anarchists who were afraid of the bourgeois. The anarchists, very much harassed by the police, want to get rid of Matthews, Hawkins and above all, that enemy of Stepniak, Inspector Melville

  …who perhaps does not possess the admirable perspicacity of the late Williamson,38 but is an agent with great experience and much in favour with the Queen; and who – particularly in the matter of Russian refugees – would (had he not been prevented by his superiors) have rendered the greatest service to the Russian Government – whose cause, in this matter, is linked to that of any modern society.

  Melville is perfectly well aware of the links between English and foreign anarchists, of the complaisant attitude of the Fabians, and the indulgence of even moderate English socialists towards nihilists, communists, Fenians, Irish ‘invincibles’, Italian irredentists, and German and Austrian demagogues. There isn’t a London embassy that hasn’t had recourse to his services, no diplomat, no matter how unconcerned by all this, who hasn’t sought to get to know him, and in his opinion English anarchism – once suffocated in its cradle as it just has been – is of no danger to England. He reserves his opinion regarding foreign countries.39

  As far as these foreign intelligence agencies were concerned, it was Melville who mattered, not Anderson. In the course of his obsessive pursuance of Parnell, Anderson had lost his grip, and in May of 1892 he was already floundering:

  May I here take the opportunity of explaining that it is only in the case of refugees officially expelled from foreign countries that I can rely upon obtaining definite particulars… [where other refugees are concerned] it is a matter of difficulty even to obtain their names…40