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Yet Melville was kept in check. In May Sir Edward Bradford, the Commissioner, refused to allow him to accept the Légion d’Honneur.2 And Melville was certainly not expected to assist foreign governments on his own account. Sometimes the Foreign Office made enquiries of Special Branch, out of courtesy on request from ambassadors in London;3 diplomatic channels, of course, were perfectly in order.
Had the public known that Special Branch occasionally helped the Russian regime to prosecute, some might say persecute, their political refugees, Melville would have been dropped into very hot water indeed, if only to save face.
The Imperial Russian secret police was the Okhrana; he knew its chief officer for Western Europe, Piotr Rachkovskii, who was based in Paris, and they renewed the acquaintance during 1896 when Melville was guarding the Tsar at Balmoral.4 Rachkovskii was a self-dramatising character and Melville once told a friend that the most difficult aspect of royal protection, when it came to the Russians, was
…looking after the foreign police who accompanied their Majesties. The Russian police had to be taught that they could not shoot at sight and that suspects could not be carried off into the unknown without certain formalities.5
Melville remained interested in Stepniak and his Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, presumably because Stepniak had stabbed to death a previous head of the Okhrana. Against the Society were ranged Olga Novikov and her influential liberal friend from the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead. From the early nineties, Novikov had ‘embarked on a crusade against the Society with the purpose of whitewashing the Tsarist Government’.6 Liberal opinion was unconvinced, and support for the Society’s cause widened thanks to its eloquent speakers and trustworthy news reports from Russia. As for Melville’s own attitude to the Tsar’s repellent regime, we can if we are feeling charitable assume that he was not necessarily a supporter of all it stood for but rather a hater of anarchic violence under any circumstances, and of police assassins in particular. He was also on friendly terms with the French police, who collaborated quite happily with the Russian police while sharing their mistrust of the Germans.
Stepniak was killed in a railway level-crossing accident at Bedford Park, Chiswick, in December 1895. There were witnesses – the unfortunate man had simply ambled across the track deeply engrossed in a letter, and failed to hear warning cries. A number of Russian and English ‘Friends’ took over publishing and distribution after Stepniak’s death, and the Society continued to smuggle anti-Government literature into Russia. Melville was particularly interested in a prominent member called Wilfred Voynich, a Russian Pole who ran a bookshop in Soho Square and specialised in rare medieval manuscripts. A young friend of Voynich in the Society, and newcomer from Russia via Germany and France, was one Sigmund Rosenblum.7
Then aged twenty-two, he is believed to have left Paris in the last week of December 1895 with a large amount of money gained by the robbery and knife murder of an anarchist. The victim, an Italian, was making his way out of Paris by train, probably heading towards Switzerland with funds collected for the comrades.
Early in 1896 Rosenblum set himself up in a spacious new flat in Albert Mansions, Vauxhall, London, and began trading as Rosenblum & Co. of 9 Bury Court in the City of London. His business was the patent medicine racket, marketing miracle cures to the desperate and gullible.
In the summer of 1896 he obtained a fellowship of the Chemical Society, and in the spring of 1897 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. He was good company and a wonderful storyteller, but also a man who would say, and promise, anything.
In the spring of 1896, in the course of his application to the Chemical Society, his Russian birth certificate was scrutinised by Special Branch. A report to Melville by Special Branch Sergeant O’Brien showed that the young man had been born Salomon Rosenblum in the gubernia of Kherson, north-east of Odessa near the Black Sea, in March 1873. Later he claimed that he had had an affair with Ethel Boole, a writer nine years older than himself who later married Wilfred Voynich. He certainly knew her, and all the other leading lights of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in which he is known to have played an active part.8
These contacts eased Rosenblum’s absorption into émigré circles in London. Informers were the most significant intelligence sources Special Branch had in terms of the Russian and Polish émigré communities. Some were recruited through the course of everyday enquiries while others offered their services. As Chief Commissioner Sir Edward Bradford reflected a decade later, this area of intelligence gathering was a most difficult one for officers due to the language and cultural barriers of the community they were seeking to infiltrate. Whether they were approached or had volunteered, their motive was usually the same – monetary reward. Although Rosenblum was reasonably well heeled, he was somewhat of a spendthrift and a gambler. Money was one of the prime motivators in his life and was, without doubt, the reason he became a Special Branch informer.
In 1897 he met through his patent remedies the Reverend Hugh Thomas, a very comfortably-off invalid aged sixty-two. He attended this gentleman both at the Manor House at Kingsbury, North London and at Thomas’s town house at 6 Upper Westbourne Terrace, Paddington. To Sigmund Rosenblum, the immediate fascination of this new client was his twenty-three-year-old wife Margaret.
At around the same time the Russian police in St Petersburg received the first (April) issue of a new émigré paper called Narodovoletz, printed in London, and edited by one Vladimir Burtsev. The Deputy Director of the Police Department, alarmed because an article appeared to incite the murder of the Tsar, passed the first issue to Rachkovskii in Paris, who wrote to Melville asking his opinion. For Melville to respond without referring the matter to his superiors was highly irregular. He was not supposed to be co-operating with the Russian secret police, which now had an ‘almost universal reputation in Britain as an agency of tsarist tyranny’.9 That he was able to manipulate events indicates the extent to which Special Branch operated beyond political control.
Early in July Melville responded to Rachkovskii as follows:
A copy of the newspaper… was passed on to me by someone who provided me with a summary of that issue’s contents, and I did not discern anything serious in it. However, since you are writing to me about it, I shall naturally not rely on the impression I have formed of it since, as you yourself well know, one cannot trust translators.
Where the question that you put to me is concerned, our laws are very strange. I do not think that our laws could punish the editor or managing director of a newspaper in which terroristic ideas, murder &c are advocated in a vague form, so to speak. It is a different matter if an article propagating such ideas identifies particular people; then we are dealing with a crime that is covered by English laws.
He cites as examples the Most case and the Commonweal case, both of which resulted in successful prosecutions, and continues:
If you found it possible to bring a case against Burtsev & Co., you could only go about it in the following way. Send the aforementioned newspaper to the Russian Ambassador in London, having marked in it the most relevant passages, and accompany it with a letter in which you insist on the need to prosecute the editor. Ask the Ambassador to bring this letter to the notice of our Foreign Secretary, who, in his turn, will send it to our Home Secretary. The latter will surely pass it on to me. As you see, one will have to act through the diplomatic channel.
For myself, I need hardly mention that I shall be happy to be of service to you and to get at these scoundrels, who essentially are neither more nor less than common murderers. In a word, you may be sure that I shall neglect nothing that may facilitate the successful completion of this matter. I should very much like you to make the above-mentioned approach, because even if nothing comes of it I, at least, will gain the opportunity to worry these fellows and drive them from one end of London to the other. Furthermore, information about the methods Burtsev & Co propagandize for their struggle will make our Government turn its attention to
them and, whether it comes to a court case or not, the matter will pass through my hands, so I shall avail myself of the opportunity to inform the Government what these fellows are.
Around the 1st of August I am going away for about three weeks to take the waters in the south of England. I hope the file will arrive on my desk either before or after my holiday. At the moment, Burtsev is working on the second issue of his newspaper. The nihilist Feliks Perl has just arrived in London and is staying in Beaumont Square with Dembskii, who will shortly move to a different flat.
Finally, I hope you will be able to construe my long letter and I assure you that I retain the most pleasant memory of the time we spent together.10
Burtsev was not a member of the Society, but he had been living in London since 1891, had known Stepniak, and knew its leading members well. Some of them warned him that the English police would not put up with provocation to regicide, and they were right.11 Melville seems to have an efficient informant among the Russian community and it is likely to have been Sigmund Rosenblum, who in his private life at this time was wooing the besotted Mrs Thomas.
In August 1897 Melville may well have spent some time ‘taking the waters’ but his letter left the Russians with plenty to do. The Chargé d’Affaires in London made his feelings known to the Foreign Office, which in September presented its report on Narodovoletz and that paper’s opinion that throughout the last seventeen years under Tsars Alexander III and Nicolas II
…reaction ought… to have given rise to the strongest resistance on the part of the revolutionists, and to have caused their plan of campaign to be summed up in one point, regicide, and if it appeared necessary a whole series of regicides, and a systematic political terrorism.12
Wheels turned exactly as Melville had said they would. By December Mr Burtsev of 16 Westcroft Square, Ravenscourt Park, London W. was legitimately in his sights. Melville himself made the arrest, which took place on 16 December when the astonished young man was leaving the British Museum Reading Room. Later that day he took Burtsev’s keys and, with some fellow officers, travelled to Ravenscourt Park and turned over the flat. A van-load of documents was removed; Burtsev was the unofficial archivist of the Russian revolutionaries abroad. When, before the trial, Rachkovskii and other Okhrana agents required sight of these they were prohibited from seeing them. The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom breathed a sigh of relief and kept on raising money for Burtsev’s defence fund. A question was asked in parliament and
...assurance was given that the papers were under seal. They had been seen by no one except the prosecution and would not fall into the hands of any foreign Government.13
Melville’s action in confiscating these documents may have saved lives. We still do not know what happened to the incriminating material.
In February of 1898 the unfortunate editor of Narodovoletz was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. Melville received an effusive thank-you note from Rachkovskii in French (the language in which they usually communicated). The Okhrana supreme in Europe congratulated him on the ‘outstanding outcome’ and the fair-mindedness of British juries who were not swayed by political considerations and continued
I don’t need to add that the success of this case has saved us from any inconvenience at a personal level: I would have been sorry to see you so badly rewarded for so much goodwill.14
One wonders what ‘inconvenience at a personal level’ Inspector Melville avoided with success in the British case. One implication could be that he sometimes worked for two masters – Russian as well as English; and somebody, perhaps in St Petersburg, had demanded results, or a cessation of funding. However, there is nothing in the Okhrana files to confirm this.
At the shop in Soho Voynich, meanwhile, was also attracting unwelcome interest from the security services. He was not only distributing what the Okhrana saw as seditious material, but his business was believed to be a conduit for revolutionary funds. Special Branch knew this, and it seems likely that they knew because Sigmund Rosenblum kept Melville informed. Melville was of course interested in this unprincipled young man, and not just because native Russian-speaking informers were almost impossible to find; Rosenblum was also clever, daring and could talk the birds out of the trees.
In March of 1898 the invalid Reverend Thomas died suddenly in a Newhaven hotel. For the past year he had been in the care of a nurse who, unknown to him, was a murder suspect who had evaded the law abroad.15 The death certificate was signed by a young Dr T.W. Andrew, MRCS, who, according to the researches of this author over a century later, did not exist under that name; he was seen by hotel staff, but quickly left; the burial took place within two days. Thomas had made a new will just twelve days before he died, and left his great wealth to his widow Margaret (who just five years before had been employed as his maid).
By the summer of 1898 Melville knew that Rosenblum wished to marry Mrs Margaret Thomas, and he knew also that Rosenblum was keen to change his identity. He wished to return to Russia, but could not do so under his current identity, as he was eligible for army service, which he had effectively evaded when he left in 1893. Melville was aware of Sigmund Rosenblum’s value as an informant and would go out of his way to assist. Circumstantial evidence for his role in what followed is strong, particularly since Rosenblum now prepared to adopt the surname of Melville’s first wife Kate.
The oldest known way of satisfying officialdom about one’s identity is to produce evidence of place of birth. It was not until 1971 that Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller Day of the Jackal revealed to the world the ease with which a deceased infant’s identity can be assumed. Melville would have known about it in the 1890s as Special Branch sometimes needed to create new identities for people. It so happened that a Sidney Reilly had been born to Michael and Mary Reilly in Belmullet, County Mayo, in 1878 and had died soon afterwards. Quite what relationship Michael was to Kate Melville is unclear. (Civil registration of births in Ireland did not begin until 1864.) But since Michael Reilly bore Kate’s name and came from the same small place, it is on balance probable that Melville knew of the baby Sidney Reilly’s birth and almost immediate death.16
The birth of a single Sidney Reilly in Ireland, in the 1870s, was traceable; that would be enough. At the time Irish-born men and women were subjects of the Queen.
When, in August of 1898, Sigmund and Margaret married, both the witnesses were future sons-in-law of a man called Pannett, who worked for the Royal Mail and knew Melville in a professional capacity. In the register Margaret, whose maiden name was Callaghan and who had been born and brought up in Ireland, gave her father’s middle name as Reilly (which it was not).
Shortly after the wedding Sigmund Rosenblum departed, well supplied with money, for Spain, leaving Margaret to move out of the Manor House in Kingsbury and dispose of the contents. They would henceforth reside at Upper Westbourne Terrace, Hyde Park. Rosenblum, with his fine-eye awareness of appearances, never called it ‘Paddington’.
Quite what his business in Spain was is unclear. He could have been doing something for Melville, who had been approached through diplomatic channels by the Spanish Government in the past. They had recently deported a number of anarchists, inevitably to England, and there were moves afoot to co-ordinate international reaction to violent anarchists who now appeared to favour assassination by knife or gun, rather than bombs in public places. In 1897 the Spanish Prime Minister Canovas de Castillo had been murdered by an Italian and, in September 1898, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary was killed.
Late in 1898 an anti-anarchist congress was held in Rome. The participants were, on the hard-line side Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany; on the other, Britain, France and the rest.17 Before the conference, Robert Anderson wrote of the congress’s intention that certain laws should be co-ordinated:
The chief effect upon my mind produced by reading these documents is to deepen the misgivings I entertain that the Congress will result in increasing our difficulties – serious enough a
t all times – in dealing with the alien revolutionists who congregate in London. I am clear that the level of peace and order which we have been able to maintain in recent years has been due to action taken by this department which was (if I may coin a word) extra-legal; I hesitate to use the ordinary word which seems applicable to it. But if the proposed legislation is obtained at the cost of a public statement of what are the actual powers of the police in this country, then the methods which successive Secretaries of State have sanctioned, and which have been resorted to with such excellent results, will be shown to be without legal sanction, and must be abandoned. Sir E. Lushington’s memo brackets ‘surveillance’ with expulsion as ‘practices unknown to English law.’ But is it not strange that foreign anarchists should be unaware of this, having regard to the statement in Sir P. C[illeg.]’s declaration ‘I do not need to add that any individual suspected of intending to commit one of the criminal acts already referred to in contravention of English law is subject to scrutiny by the police.’18 Such indeed has been our practice in dealing with anarchists. So recently as a few weeks ago it enabled us to break up a conspiracy for the assassination of the King of Italy.
Someone has scrawled in the margin beside this last sentence – This appears to me very far-fetched – PRIB.
After the conference, Robert Anderson wrote an even clearer confidential memo pointing out that the law should be left as it was and the Expulsion of Aliens act tightened, since the police seemed quite effective at driving anarchists away rather than prosecuting them; and regarding anarchy in general
…I would say emphatically that in recent years the police have succeeded only by straining the law – or in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things – at intervals, to check this conspiracy; and my serious fear is that if new legislation affecting it is passed, police powers may be thus defined, and our practical powers seriously impaired. Within the last few weeks I have by means such as I allude to driven away two of the most dangerous anarchists in Europe, who were plotting to murder one of the crowned heads of Empire. A power to expel such men would prevent such plots altogether.’19