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  Within weeks the Foreign Office concurred that in return for an agreement on the part of the other countries not to deport all their anarchists ‘wholesale’ to British shores, the British should consider tightening their own laws.20

  In the winter of 1898–99 the Rosenblums were living at Upper Westbourne Terrace. Nearly seventy years later, Robin Bruce Lockhart asserted that shortly after their marriage, Margaret sold the Hyde Park house and the couple moved into St Ermin’s Chambers, Caxton Street, Westminster.21 In fact they held onto the Church Commissioners’ lease of the Paddington house until June 1899 when they left the country.

  Rosenblum was still friendly with Voynich, who is said to have made money for the Society by selling fake medieval manuscripts, having obtained a supply of fifteenth-century paper from continental Europe. Now he needed to make the inks as authentic as possible. Early in 1899 it was Sigmund Rosenblum who, as Sigmund Rosenblum FCS FIC ‘&c’, applied for and was granted permission to use the British Museum Reading Room. Here he had access to a range of medieval books and manuscripts that contained the formula for a range of ancient inks, pigmentations and colours.

  It seems that having gained expertise in the field, he may have turned his attention to still more lucrative opportunities. On 17 April 1899, Rachkovskii wrote to Melville alerting him to the presence of a massive rouble-counterfeiting ring operating in London. His friend Fiodor Gredinger, the Deputy State Prosecutor of St Petersburg, was on his way to London to take charge of the case and would much appreciate Melville’s assistance (and any costs incurred would naturally be reimbursed.) To quote my own account in Ace of Spies – the True Story of Sidney Reilly:

  The counterfeiters had a contact inside the currency-printing firm of Bradbury and Wilkinson, and the contact obtained a plate that was copied by an engraver. The counterfeiters then carried out the printing themselves using their own ink and paper. Rosenblum’s name was not initially connected with the investigation. It emerged when attention turned to how the forged money was being shipped out of the country.

  According to Okhrana records, Rosenblum had an interest in the Polysulphin Company in Keynsham, Somerset. The factory produced a host of chemical products including soap, which it exported abroad. This was an ideal vehicle for smuggling money and indeed other commodities… [Also] in order to perpetrate such a scheme an expert knowledge of printing inks would have been required. As a chemist with some experience in this line, Rosenblum would therefore have played a wider role outside that of mere distribution. Once Rosenblum’s role was uncovered, Melville would have had good grounds to fear that his connection with Scotland Yard might prove a severe embarrassment…22

  Melville’s cleverest agent must vanish from the scene at once. In the first week of June 1899, Mr and Mrs Sigmund Rosenblum gave up their lease; Mr and Mrs Sidney Reilly sailed away from England. Sidney, at least, would be back.

  A year later, another unknown adventurer from overseas was to find himself in Melville’s orbit. Eric Weiss, who ironically shared the same birth date as Sidney Reilly, arrived in London with his wife Beatrice in May 1900 and moved into theatrical lodgings at 10 Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. Weiss, better known to posterity by his stage name, Harry Houdini the handcuff king, had so far made little impact in the United States, his adopted home. He had therefore resolved instead to conquer America by first making a name for himself in Europe. Knowing that a good number of successful acts whose reputations had been made in London, Paris and Berlin had an exalted value in New York, he set about securing London bookings. According to Beatrice Houdini, after some days of unsuccessful interviews, C. Dundas Slater, the Manager of the Alhambra, gave him an audition on 13 June.23 Apparently not wholly convinced of the young man’s abilities, he offered him a contract on the condition that he must first, ‘escape from handcuffs at Scotland Yard’. Slater was apparently acquainted with Melville and arranged for himself and Houdini to visit the Yard the following day.

  At the appointed hour they were welcomed by Melville who immediately ridiculed the notion that anyone could escape from Scotland Yard handcuffs. Stage handcuffs were one thing, he told them, but Scotland Yard cuffs were the last word in scientific manacles. Houdini, unabashed, insisted on rising to the challenge. Later that day he told Beatrice that within seconds Melville suddenly grabbed his arms, encircled them around a nearby pillar, produced a pair of cuffs from his coat and snapped them tightly around his wrists. ‘I’m going to leave you here and come back for you in a couple of hours’ Melville told him as he and Slater headed towards the doorway. To Melville’s astonishment, Houdini replied, ‘I’ll go with you’ as the opened cuffs fell to the floor. For over a century no corroboration of Beatrice Houdini’s recollections was thought to exist. However, in December 2003 a record of the meeting was found in New Scotland Yard records.

  Melville, although somewhat taken aback, held out his hand to Houdini in genuine astonishment, offering him his unreserved congratulations. Two weeks later, on 27 June 1900, Melville was Houdini’s guest at a special performance of his stage act at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square. There the London press were treated to his full routine of escapes from a variety of trunks, cabinets, chains, padlocks and shackles, many brought along by the audience themselves.

  It has often been maintained that Houdini could compress his knuckles so that they became smaller than his wrists, thus enabling him to slip out of manacles. In fact, he was unable to perform such a feat, relying instead on giving them a single sharp rap in a certain spot. For more complex manacles he used a unique picklock he had devised while working for a locksmith in Appleton, Wisconsin. He could also improvise a picklock from a piece of wire, a pin or a watch spring, all of which were easily concealable. Over and above this, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every type of lock and locking system imaginable and a unique collection of locks and mechanisms. Melville was to remain an acquaintance of Houdini’s long after their first encounter at ScotlandYard and, like a number of other police officers around the world, gave Houdini a glowing written testimonial. When, a decade later, Melville began his Spy School lectures to new Secret Service recruits, he often gave advice on the art of entering locked premises, and could well have drawn on the knowledge that Houdini was rumoured to have imparted to him.

  Around the turn of the century Special Branch had done such a good job that the general public were no longer threatened by terrorism. Fenian bombs were a thing of the past, the wilder English elements were mutinous but had never succeeded in doing any harm, and foreign anarchists could hardly make a move without its being reported, and knew it.

  Covert detection was no longer regarded as sly or underhand, but rather as an intellectual challenge worthy of the finest minds. There was a perceptible change in attitude. There could be many reasons for this, all of them plausible; the fact is that while Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, failed to make a stir in 1887, ten years later Sherlock Holmes was wildly popular.24

  Conan Doyle could not have plucked his hero from the ranks of the police because such a hero would not be believable. Everyone knew that ‘the finest minds’ were those of sophisticated, international, and classically educated men. Class prejudice was endemic. Policemen could be brave, as the newspaper-reading public knew since the arrest of Meunier, but everything was somehow obvious about a policeman. The progress of his career was there on paper for all to see. Policemen, with their nondescript backgrounds, suburban families and thumping boots,25 lacked the urbanity, the mystery, of the upper-middle-class detective, free of domestic encumbrances in his book-lined room. However:

  Values were changing, no doubt under the pressure of material circumstances. Old taboos were lifting, and among them the Briton’s old maidenly blushes at the thought of a plain-clothes police. Whether this would spread to embrace political police was yet to be seen. Plain-clothes detection and disguises were only a step away from espionage, but it was still a very long step… The spy story as a genre
had not yet been born.

  In naval and military circles, the old preoccupation with honourable conduct – not sneaking or spying – was beginning to lose ground, faced with the need to prevent the Boers from obtaining guns from Europe and to keep up with German technical progress. Now that the Europeans had carved out their Empires and there was no easily conquerable land left in Africa or elsewhere, the threat faced by British governments was more likely to come from other states than from isolated terrorists. But the Army and Navy would not turn to ScotlandYard for expertise, for they had cobbled together their own intelligence services over the years.

  So Special Branch had been too efficient for its own good. Like any department of Government, it could only increase in importance by developing a larger workload. At least one Special Branch policeman therefore turned his attention to a phenomenon he considered equally capable of destroying the social fabric. The Naughty Nineties had seen coverage in the newspapers of the Oscar Wilde trial, and Inspector John Sweeney was among those horrified by its revelations. Littlechild, now a private detective, had had a walk-on part as discoverer of a nest of rent-boys in Alfred Taylor’s flat at 13 Little College Street. Three years later in 1898, when Sweeney turned his beady eye upon it, the ‘Legitimation League’ hardly represented what Bernard Porter calls ‘sexual anarchy’.26 It was founded on nothing more than a well-meaning desire to remove the taint of bastardy from illegitimate children. But Inspector Sweeney single-mindedly pursued these people in the belief that they posed a threat to the foundations of society. He persuaded the League’s secretary, who made a living from the sale of progressive literature, to sell him Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex, a book intended as a serious scientific study of homosexuality. No sooner was it handed over than he arrested the fellow on an obscenity charge. Sweeney persuaded his terrified prey that if he pleaded guilty, he would get off with a fine and no publicity; but he must shut down the League and its publication, The Adult.27

  Quite what Melville, who presumably sanctioned this pursuit of the Legitimation League, was thinking is unclear. It has been suggested that the prosecution would have appealed rather to Anderson, ‘who was just the kind of person to perceive a threat to the national fibre in the encouragement of free love’.28 This was the one occasion on record when the Special Branch seems to have acted in a frankly paranoid way toward liberal progressives who did not claim to be anarchists, and it calls the personality of Melville into question. Was he obsessively strait-laced? Surely he could not have done his job if he was. Nothing he wrote implies any kind of moral disapproval: despair at the foolishness of mankind perhaps, strong dislike of violent anarchy certainly, but perhaps something more akin to Conrad’s dismissal of the average anarchist as hopelessly lazy and cowardly rather than ‘evil’. There is no apparent obsession with other people’s sex lives. His easy familiarity with people in all walks of life implies a certain tolerance, his writings indicate a sense of humour, and his Will shows that he was kind and considerate. The Legitimation League affair was in Sweeney’s own opinion one of his finest achievements,29 but Melville did not take any credit for it.

  He and Amelia had, as it happened, had a little girl together in 1896. She was a child of their middle years; Amelia was forty-four when she gave birth. Unbelievably, he lost this third little daughter to meningitis. Amelia Norah Melville died, aged three, in the Throat Hospital in Golden Square, Soho, in August of 1899.

  In October David Nicoll’s play about the Walsall affair, its villain le vile Melville, was performed at the Athenaeum Rooms in the Tottenham Court Road to raise money for Deakin and the others who had just been released.30 Special Branch was hardly bothered. English anarchists represented about three per cent of those they knew about.31 What was more worrying was the continuing shift among violent anarchists on the continent from bombing campaigns to political assassination, and the diplomatic awkwardness that resulted from attempts to get the formal cooperation of Special Branch. This came to a head after 1900, the year in which the Prince and Princess of Wales were shot at by a teenage boy in Brussels and King Humbert of Italy really was assassinated, by a Mafioso from New York; perhaps Anderson’s story had not been so ‘far-fetched’ after all.32

  Count Hartsfeldt, the German Ambassador, approached the Foreign Office in the summer of 1900 with a request that Prussian police commissioner Ossip should bring six of his constables to London ‘for the purpose of improving their knowledge of police duty in attendance on the Royal Family and in the Criminal Branch’.33 The Commissioner, on the basis of advice filtering up from Melville who had now been created Superintendent, would not countenance the idea; and it fell to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office to compose a suitably diplomatic response based on what Sir Edward Bradford had told him.

  As regards attendance on the Royal Family he says that efficiency does not depend on any rules of practice, but on the possession of a large amount of common sense, judgement and presence of mind, and the power of dealing with difficulties and emergencies irrespective of rules and without reference to a superior officer.

  With regard to the general work of the Criminal Branch, the laws which govern the work of the Metropolitan police are so different from those in Germany that Sir E. Bradford believes that any attempt to derive instruction from our practice would rather confuse than assist your police officers.34

  In case that was not enough to see off the Prussians, the letter concluded with the Government’s view that collaboration with foreign police would prove unpopular with the public.

  The Italians enquired next. This was all very complimentary; Special Branch were obviously doing a better job than any other royal protection squad, but as Anderson had pointed out to the Germans, this was not merely a matter of training but of police culture and public expectation. In January of 1901 Signor Sessi, the Commissioner of Police for Rome, approached the Italian Consul General in London asking for information about how the English did things – there having been a ‘great misfortune’ in July 1900 (the assassination of the King at Monza), in response to which the Italian police had set up a criminal investigation department within the Royal household. Sessi wanted the answers to ten questions, among them ‘are any of the officers ever sent abroad among the anarchists for the purpose of obtaining information?’ and ‘are there any agents on cycles?’ and ‘what measures are taken to ensure the safety of foreign princes, guests of the state?’

  Anderson resigned a few months later, apparently after many difficulties with Sir Edward Bradford. As similar queries landed on the desk of Sir Edward Henry, his successor, the groans from that office must have been audible right down the corridor.

  If one of the Kaiser’s own police officers is to be believed, Melville appears to have been perfectly happy to work with the German police so long as they collaborated without professional formalities. In January 1901 Queen Victoria lay on her deathbed, and Gustav Steinhauer, as the royal bodyguard, was sent to England with Kaiser Wilhelm II who wished to pay his last respects.35 Melville had heard that assassination attempts were planned for the funeral. Both the Kaiser and King Leopold of the Belgians were allegedly in danger. He discussed the matter with Steinhauer within hours of the German party’s arrival.

  This Melville was a silent, reserved man, never given to talking wildly.

  ‘I have spoken to the Prince of Wales’, he informed me, ‘and he has requested that neither the Kaiser nor any of the members of his suite shall be told what is in the air. The Prince thinks it more than likely, if the Kaiser has any reason at all to fear assassination, that he will not attend the funeral. That would be disastrous from a political point of view.’

  The Queen died and as the funeral approached Steinhauer consulted Melville again.

  ‘Tonight’, said Melville slowly, ‘I hope to arrest three of the most dangerous nihilists in Europe. It may be that I shall want your assistance. In the meantime, not a word to any one.’

  By now they were both at Osborne, and tha
t afternoon Melville took Steinhauer with him to London by train. On their way to Waterloo –

  ‘Steinhauer’, he began, ‘I hope you have made your will.’

  ‘So’, I said, ‘it is as bad as that!’

  It was. It was worse.

  At Scotland Yard, Melville issued Steinhauer with a revolver, ammunition and a black silk scarf with which he must, later that night, cover his face, bandit-style, and his white shirt-front. He then took him to Simpson’s Grand Cigar Divan in the Strand, where one could dine in discreet opulence off such rib-sticking British fare as steak-and-kidney pudding or roast beef followed by syrup roly-poly. After dinner and ‘one or two bottles of wine’ they sat over their coffee and cigars until 11.00 p.m. when Melville judged the time right to leave.

  Outside, in the brilliantly-lit Strand crowded with people, we got into a hansom cab. Melville gave the driver an address somewhere in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. With my nerves tingling with excitement, we drove up Fleet Street, through the deserted thoroughfares of the City, and thence over London Bridge to some squalid street close by the station. Telling me he would not be more than a minute or two, Melville, surprisingly active for a middle-aged man,36 jumped out of the cab, and without knocking went inside a house that was in pitch darkness.

  When Melville emerged from the house (in Vine Lane, off Tooley Street leading down to the river) he was followed by a woman in a dark mackintosh who got into another cab, which theirs followed. They were conveyed over the bridge towards the East End. In an alleyway somewhere in Whitechapel the first cab stopped, followed by the second.