M Page 13

  London, Zéro 6, 4 December

  Grandidier is a wanted man, hiding out in Camden up the Hampstead Road with Latour (Lutz), a Swiss mandolin maker – very tall with a glass eye and a light maroon overcoat. Malatesta lives at 112 Camden High Street. Grandidier sometimes goes to see Corti at 18 Little Goodge Street, 3rd floor; or Marceau, who is 19 and has a hoarse voice (cross reference to a report by another cop.)

  London, Monte Carlo, 8 December

  A Frenchman is in town who speaks good German and has a big dog – Melville’s men are watching him. In future I will be Jarvis, not Monte Carlo. One of my letters from you was opened, and I had to show it round saying it was an attempt to hire me as a nark. It worked well.

  London, Jarvis, 8 December

  Melville’s men are watching Latour; he and Grandidier and the others are trying to leave for Buenos Aires.

  London, Jarvis, 12 December

  At the Trafalgar Square meeting last Sunday Malatesta got two black eyes, and Agresti had his left cheek smashed up, by Melville’s men.

  London, Jarvis, 12 December

  Squabbles at the Autonomie meeting over funds – how to defend anarchy against new anti-anarchy laws. Escaré suggested subsidising a kind of cheap canteen with theatrical performances like the one on Sunday. Melville wanted to close down the Lapie bookshop, but was dissuaded.

  Melville’s personal profile was high. The people he was dealing with were not all, by any means, hopeless idealists or useless windbags; some of them were dangerous, not merely with a bomb in their fists but with a knife. He was running a considerable personal risk by being so constantly in public view. And in February of the new year, just in case anyone doubted that there was a risk from bomb-makers in England, one Martial Bourdin blew himself up in Greenwich Park.

  This was the event which resounded over a decade later in Conrad’s classic The Secret Agent. In Conrad’s version, which is heavily influenced by the later case of Rubini as well as by the Greenwich Park tragedy, an anarchist in the pay of a foreign embassy is ordered to create an explosion in order to frighten the public into an awareness of the anarchist threat. He employs his simple-minded brother-in-law who unwittingly goes to his death.

  The real-life explosion took place at dusk on a winter’s day and probably was an accident. On Thursday 15 February Bourdin, an inarticulate, unremarkable young man, took a late-afternoon train from Charing Cross to Greenwich, a distance of about four miles. Emerging from the station, he turned in the direction of the empty park. He walked through the winding High Road away from the river, turned up the lane alongside the Royal Naval College and passed through the imposing gates set into a brick wall. The park would soon close for the night. Before him rose the steep green hillside, dotted with ancient trees and surmounted by the Observatory. (Why he was going to the Observatory, no one ever did make out, unless it was the only unguarded public building he knew.) Up he climbed, up and up in his heavy overcoat, gasping from the exertion; from on high he could have turned back to see the river twinkling under a red winter sunset, the Pool of London crowded with lighters and barges and high-masted, ocean-going clippers, the docks, the City lamps twinkling into life and the blackened dome of St Paul’s. But he probably didn’t look. Bourdin tripped on a tree root; and that was the end.

  According to the ticket inspector at Greenwich, only one other man had alighted from that train. There were reports that Bourdin was followed by ‘a French spy’. There was something unconvincing about the whole event. Nothing was clear-cut, neither the motive, nor the chain of events. The flash and bang on that cold Tuesday afternoon shook the neighbourhood, and a park-keeper panted up the hill to find a young man with most of an arm and both hands blown off, his face and overcoat covered in blood and his entrails gleaming in the dusk. A finger and bits of scarlet flesh were found in the trees days later.

  Bourdin pleaded to go home. What was left of him was piled onto a stretcher and carried down to the Naval Hospital, where he died within half an hour of the explosion.

  All anyone knew was that he was a tailor who worked with his brother at a shop in Great Titchfield Street in Fitzrovia; he had something to do with an anarchist rag, and had once lived in Montréal. His brother and sister-in-law, who lived in Kilburn, didn’t want anarchists at the funeral.

  It was more sad and disturbing than frightening. But it was the excuse for a major raid on the Autonomie Club the following night, and as was usual with Melville, journalists were present. The Daily Graphic reported

  Inspector Melville and a large force of men quietly took over the club at nine o’clock. There were not yet many present, but the anarchists who were there were immediately conducted to the basement, where detectives searched them for documents while other detectives, armed with bulls’ eye lanterns, made a minute inspection throughout the club.

  As other members arrived, the door was opened for them and they walked into the arms of the police.

  ‘This way’, said Inspector Melville with his best smile, showing them to the bar where he immediately began to interrogate them in French and English, their answers being noted down by secretaries…

  ‘Are you armed?’ our reporter asked one of the detectives.

  ‘We didn’t come here with rosewater sprays, I can tell you that much. We’ve a fine haul downstairs, about seventy altogether.’...

  There were very few Englishmen. Most were French or German. The Inspector met them at the entrance in the most friendly fashion.

  ‘Just the man I wanted!’ he would say as newcomers arrived. ‘Come this way a moment.’

  ‘I don’t speak English’, one would sometimes respond.

  ‘Qu’à cela ne tienne’, Inspector Melville would reply, in excellent French. ‘Vous êtes tel et tel?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Où demeurez-vous?’

  And so on.17

  Melville was a public figure; the hero of the hour, for the popular papers. Among the crowd at the Autonomie Club was at least one German journalist. A week later a Frenchman turned up to interview him in his office.

  M. Melville immediately told us not to reveal his name, as the Government wouldn’t at all approve. We therefore accept entire responsibility for breaking a promise which was, besides, made in the most ambiguous way possible.

  The office of the Chief Inspector [He was not officially a Chief Inspector until July] into which we were shown is remarkable for that sparkling cleanliness so typical of an English office. It is furnished with numerous complicated speaking tubes, and one might (so different is it from our own administrative offices with their grubby green carpets and worn chairs) believe one was in a bank, were it not for certain symbolic insignia above the immaculate walnut mantelpiece: namely two service revolvers and two truncheons – so innocuous in appearance, and such skull-crushers in reality…

  M. Melville does not look at all fierce or at all like a typical policeman. Full-faced, welcoming, yet sometimes you catch that sharpness that you see in our own Chief of Security, M. Goron – towards whom Melville professes the greatest goodwill, as towards M. Jeaume and M. Fédée.18

  He could do no wrong. He spoke French; he had lived in France; most of the London anarchists, he said, were Germans. Only the Germans were less active than the French; more prone to theorising. As for English anarchists, there was no such thing, he insisted, telling the journalist that

  ‘When Bourdin’s cortège went past, people hissed and whistled it all the way. The red flags that had been brought were torn up before they were even used. Nobody showed any respect to the coffin, as you would in France no matter who it was. People here think that if they showed respect to a murderer it would be an insult to decent people.’

  ‘But if anarchists are so despised, how can they continue to live here?’

  ‘It depends how they behave. In the last few days we’ve had to protect their club from being torn to the ground…’

  The French were almost envious. The previous week there had been
another café bomb in Paris. Yet here – the police were so efficient, and M. Melville so stern. He showed them. That was the way. Could Melville’s reputation rise higher?

  Mais oui. At the beginning of April he arrested Meunier, who like François was wanted for the Café Véry bomb, at Victoria Station. George Dilnot, in Great Detectives and their Methods published in 1928, has him spotting the furtive Meunier in a railway carriage, disguised as a hunchback and carrying a gun.19

  Melville was entirely unarmed. He did not even have a walking stick. To enter the small compartment in an endeavour to make the arrest would give Meunier such an advantage as to make the attempt almost suicidal. He would have to be lured into the open. Quietly Melville summoned a railway official. ‘There is a hunchback in the fifth carriage from the engine. I want to get him out of the train without arousing his suspicions. Will you inspect his ticket and tell him that he is on the wrong train?’ The official agreed and, with Melville keeping in the background carried out his instructions. Meunier, a little concerned at the mistake he had made, sprang hurriedly for the platform. As he emerged the detective leapt at him. Together they toppled to the ground, the anarchist underneath, fighting like a mad dog. Amazed passengers gathered round while the two men writhed and twisted for mastery. Strong man though Melville was he had all that he could do to retain his grip. Meunier strove with all that was left of his strength to drag his captor under the wheels of the train, which was on the point of starting. They were on the verge of the platform when some railwaymen came to the aid of the detective. Even then the fight went on for minutes, but the odds against the fugitive were too great. He was overpowered, and uttering oaths and threats, he was taken away.

  Contemporary reports were less highly coloured. Journalists must have been primed to be on the scene; there was a sketch of the arrest, a full action shot with Melville, black of moustache and stern of mien, dominating the cowed criminal, appropriately in the Daily Graphic. Another man, Ricken, had been arrested at the same time and appeared before the magistrates first, as he spoke English.

  Chief Inspector Melville stated that at 8.20 on Wednesday evening he was on the London and Chatham platform of Victoria Station just as a train was leaving for Queenborough. He saw the prisoner speak to Meunier as they passed each other on the platform. The witness spoke to the railway officials, telling them who he was, and then laid his hand on Meunier’s shoulder and seized him by the arm. He said to him in French ‘Meunier, I arrest you.’ Meunier began at once to struggle violently, but the witness was assisted by the railway officials. While the struggle was going on the prisoner Ricken rushed up and said in French ‘What are you doing with that man?’ At the same time Ricken tried to drag the witness and the railway officials away, the other prisoner struggling furiously in the meantime. Eventually Meunier and the prisoner got separated, and the former was detained by the railway officials, and witness kept hold of the latter, and told him he would be charged with attempting to rescue a prisoner. He still struggled violently, and had to be thrown to the ground. He was afterwards taken to Bow Street and charged. He made no reply. The witness added that during the struggle he told Ricken that he was an inspector of police. He also shouted out ‘This man (meaning Meunier) is wanted for murder!’ He recognised Meunier by his photograph.

  Melville was now forty-four, and as ready to jump into a brawl with a dynamitard as he had been twenty years before, arresting shop-lifters in Lambeth. Meunier (who was unusually handsome, according to the astonished Standard reporter) would, much to the consternation of the Autonomie crowd, be extradited a few months later and would spend the rest of his life in jail.

  Later in April Melville was involved in another sensational case. Like Bourdin’s, it was poignant with wasted life. An Italian boy called Polti, whose teenage wife had just miscarried with twins, had been determined to blow something or someone up and himself as well, and had fallen in with an anarchist called Farnara (known as Carnot). Farnara had directed Polti to an ironworks in the Blackfriars Road where he could get a casting made. Of course, the manager of the ironworks – knowing perfectly well that this order could only be intended to contain a bomb – alerted the police, who watched.

  Melville sent Inspector Quinn and a couple of others all the way out to Stratford to arrest Farnara in the middle of the night. The place was a doss-house. Farnara slept in a room with six other men, sharing a bed with a stranger; he owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in and a change of shirt. The police trooped through the house in their big boots at 2.00 a.m. and shone their lanterns onto the cots until they found him.

  As for Polti, his situation aroused universal sympathy but he seemed determined to make a martyr of himself and when arrested had already written a suicide note to his parents. An account of everything he said appeared within twenty-four hours in the Standard:

  Polti declares that Carnot was chosen to direct operations in England… the money was always brought to Carnot in coins by a companion. How for such a long period Carnot has succeeded in changing the foreign coins into English money without being discovered has yet to be explained, and active enquiries are in progress... Polti asserts that Carnot was responsible for the manufacture of the bomb which exploded in Greenwich Park, and handed Bourdin the money found on him after he was found fatally injured.20

  ‘It is curious’, a Home Office hand has written on the cutting provided ‘that so much information should get out – not from examination in open court – but from what would appear to have been communicated by the police.’ Melville, it seems, had no sooner questioned a prisoner than he related the whole conversation to some journalist.

  It had been Farnara’s intention to make a bomb for use in France or Italy, but he could not afford the ferry fare; so he decided to destroy the Royal Exchange because, he said, it was the seat of capitalism. Everyone looked pityingly at him and supposed that he must mean the Stock Exchange. He talked wildly. If he had had a gun, he could have shot Melville, he said. The court could not hurt him – he would soon be dead anyway.21

  The tragedy of poverty and endless disappointment stood like a spectre in the dock beside a highly dangerous, unhinged individual like this. Maybe Melville saw it. He occasionally had sympathy for someone he investigated. Later in the year, after rewards for the Farnara case had been distributed and he had finished guarding the Tsar during a state visit, he sat down to write a report on the Countess Clémentine Hugo of 55 Guildford Street, widow of a brother of Victor Hugo.

  At present this lady is reduced in circumstances and is endeavouring to obtain a livelihood by writing books &c. She frequents the British Museum daily. It is said that when in France she was exceedingly generous to any person requiring assistance… I have spoken to the Countess a few times, principally on anarchism, when she was eloquent in denouncing outrages &c. She is however to my knowledge intimately acquainted with Louise Michel, Malato and other leading anarchists but I believe this is due in great measure, if not entirely, to the fact that those persons are generally in a chronic state of want, and the Countess invariably assists them, even when her means are very slender. [She]… loses no opportunity of denouncing what she calls the mad ideas of Louise Michel and those acting with her. At the same time she says she has much sympathy with the poor classes who she says have been badly treated, but I do not think she would go beyond this.22

  His view of this lady is unusually calm and reasonable, and might just have been influenced by her social position. Was Melville a snob? He was conscious of rank, as respectable Victorians were required to be, but had he been obviously subservient he is unlikely to have got on as well as he did with the Tsar, the Shah, and the Prince of Wales. Being a royal protection officer is rather like being a royal doctor: you have to maintain the appearance of deference while making your charge do as you wish – and you must be prepared to issue peremptory orders in order to save the life that is in your care. Unlike a doctor, however, you are also expected to put yourself between the King and
the assassin’s bullet.

  Melville was keen to defend the people at the top of the social heap. He lived at a time when royalty were more than figureheads: they occupied an important political position. It could be argued in defence of his attitude that had there been self-sacrificing protection for Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the First World War might not have happened. But it would never have occurred to most English people that Melville’s position as defender of kings needed to be justified. Yet this loyalty to the monarchy, loyalty which could have meant sacrificing his life, does highlight one of several contradictions in the character of one who always thought of himself as Irish and brought up his children to remember their Irish heritage.

  SEVEN

  THE LODGING HOUSE

  As Chief Inspector of the Special Branch, Melville cleverly exploited his contacts with the press. One cannot write ‘contacts with the media’. There was one news medium only – print – and no mass communication other than the newspapers, which were only just beginning to use photographs.1 Since the arrest of Meunier, Melville had developed a public profile. His bravery was a model for the public’s acceptance of, and indeed their growing fascination with, covert detective work. But given that the enemy were so often young hot-heads determined to kill heads of state or chiefs of police, his cheerful self-advertisement was an act of defiance. It was a way of standing up to bullies: ‘Here I am; what are you going to do about it?’ Also, more importantly, the press stayed well clear of his investigations when it was necessary that they do so, and that was part of the deal.

  In 1895 Patrick McIntyre got his own back and he too exploited the power of the press. From February onwards he told the story of the Walsall anarchists in Reynolds’ Newspaper in such a way as to cast doubt on Melville’s good character. By that time Melville was unassailable, and despite murmurs of protest and a criminal libel suit by Coulon (which failed) the Government refused to revisit the events of 1892. Too much would have been revealed.