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  I… wrote to Mr D’Arcy explaining to him the Admiralty’s interest in petroleum development and asking him, before parting with the concession to any foreign interests, to give the Admiralty an opportunity of endeavouring to arrange for its acquisition by a British syndicate.23

  On receipt of this letter Mr Knox D’Arcy returned to London to hear what the Admiralty had to say. They promised to approach Burmah Oil with a view to setting up a syndicate. He was perfectly in accord with this but in a hurry; Lloyds Bank, already committed to the tune of about £150,000, was demanding that he put up his Persian concession as security against further funding. He maintained an adamant refusal, but could not wait indefinitely for commitment from the Admiralty.

  Melville kept an eye on developments.

  In the middle of May 1904, at City Hall Westminster, he was presented with an illuminated address thanking him for his thirty-one years of police service, and a cheque for well over £2,000. Subscribers to the cheque included the embassies of America, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Japan, China, Mexico, Rumania and Peru. In his speech of thanks he said he was ‘terribly embarrassed at having to reply to this outburst of recognition for his services. During his career he had been in many tight places, but this was the tightest, especially as he had to thank not only the English subscribers but those of other nations. The honour had been bestowed on him, but it was due to the brave and gallant set of officers under his control.’

  Shortly after that happy day he learned that Knox D’Arcy could wait no longer. In late June there would be a meeting between Knox D’Arcy’s agent, John Fletcher Moulton, and Baron de Rothschild.

  Melville could hardly turn up by chance in the south of France a second time. Fletcher Moulton probably knew him at the very least by sight, or possibly as the bearer of the letter from Mr Pretyman summoning Knox D’Arcy to London. And Baron de Rothschild’s negotiations were a concern of the French Government, whose agents also knew Melville well from his visits to the Riviera with the King.

  Fortunately he had run into an old friend. He arranged a meeting with Sidney Reilly in Paris on 6 June. Here was the very person to take his place. Between them they came up with a somewhat dishonourable idea that Melville was quite happy to pay for.

  One of the most effective ways of scuttling the negotiations would have been to sow doubts in de Rothschild’s mind concerning the odds of oil being found in the area D’Arcy was drilling. Reilly was a creative fellow. If he saw a desired outcome he would manipulate events in order to achieve it.24 This particular little scheme could have drawn on his skills as a forger, although it is more likely that he exploited his network of contacts. Because by the time the de Rothschild-Moulton meeting took place later in the month, information from an ‘unfavourable outside interest’ had cast doubt on Knox D’Arcy’s ability to find oil. Fletcher Moulton was offered terms less generous than before and believed that Baron de Rothschild had cooled off the idea following sight of some unknown ‘report’.

  Thirty kilometres away at the Continental Hotel, St Raphael, Sidney Reilly was writing with satisfaction about a ‘most useful report’ that had helped him ‘turn the tide’. Melville would have been startled, though, had he seen that the Mrs Reilly twirling her parasol in the sunshine of St Raphael was no longer Margaret, but a quite different young woman. This Mrs Reilly is more than likely his first bigamous wife Anna, with whom he fled Port Arthur in early 1904, having sent Margaret packing back to England.

  Fletcher Moulton returned to England downcast, but in London he found Knox D’Arcy unexpectedly cheerful. It seemed Burmah Oil and the Admiralty were definitely setting up a syndicate that would continue exploration in Persia. In May of 1905, the deal was signed; Knox-D’Arcy got his backing and Burmah managed the exploration. The first field in the Middle East was discovered at Majid-i-Suleiman in 1908, and the following year the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded as a consequence. The British Navy was assured of oil during the First World War, and Anglo-Persian went on to become BP, today the world’s fifth-largest company.

  Despite their defeat, Boer groups were still plotting under the leadership of a Dr Leyds, who was based in Holland, and it was Melville’s business to find out the plans of ‘an incessant stream of South African suspects arriving at that time in this country’. Boers were hard to watch as they expected to have Scotland Yard men keeping an eye on them, but his memoir relates how he was once able to obtain a complete run-down of the intended movements of a party led by one Ledebour, ‘a very suspicious character’, as discussed while they had their boots polished outside Liverpool Street on arrival. Evidently they had spoken English to one another, for the shoeblack was able to oblige Melville with an account of everything they said.

  Thus ended one of the exciting episodes Melville saw fit to recall. In fact, he was also intermittently engaged in 1904 and 1905 in assessing the strength of Russian exile movements; but to go into detail, even in a confidential memoir intended for War Office eyes only, at the end of 1917 with the new Bolshevik Government in Russia, would perhaps have been incautious. As Melville dictated his memoir in 1917 some of the people he had pursued over the years were already in positions of power. Burtsev was, of all things, Chief of Police in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg). As for Lenin, Melville was keeping quiet, but Herbert Fitch, then a detective constable attached to Special Branch, later related a tale concerning the Bolshevik’s visit to London in April/May 1905 to attend the 3rd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

  Fitch, who had joined Special Branch when Melville was at its head, worked on numerous cases where Special Branch and the Secret Service had a joint involvement. He seems to have been particularly useful in situations where his multilingualism enabled him to observe and report on the activities of foreign nationals. Although prone to embellishment, Fitch’s account of this episode is actually corroborated in its essential details by a number of other sources.25 According to Fitch, he was detailed to shadow Lenin and other delegates, who held covert meetings in a number of public houses in Islington and Great Portland Street.26 Although Fitch does not refer to Melville by name, he makes it clear that the man he was writing about had left the Yard, yet is still in a position to call on Special Branch men when he needs them. The public houses he refers to are not specifically named, although the description of one in particular fits that of what was, at the time, the Duke of Sussex in Islington. In fact, a typed list of addresses compiled by Melville in April 1905 includes, ‘The Duke of Sussex, 106 Islington High Street; The Cock Tavern, 27 Great Portland Street and The White Lion, 25 Islington High Street’.27

  In his own memoir, Melville’s lips remained sealed – except for a brief reference to how the Russo-Japanese War had caused ‘severe political tension’ between Britain and Russia, resulting in a decision, ‘to get in touch with Poles, nihilist and other discontented Russian elements’ in Britain. As a consequence, Melville had written to an anarchist leader, a Pole called Karskii, claiming to be ‘an American of Polish sympathies’, requesting a meeting at the Charing Cross Hotel. To his dismay, Karskii insisted on the Nihilist Club, where everyone knew Melville by sight and knew who he was. He turned up anyway, deeply suspicious and full of trepidation. Melville found Karskii, ‘awaiting me at the entrance… when he opened the door off the entrance hall, the odour of garlic and pickled herrings smothered everything’.28 Karskii, who was ‘a born conspirator, taciturn and mysterious even to his immediate colleagues’ spoke to him alone for some time before ushering him out, unseen, by the back door. The interview was rather too successful, for it was followed up by others in less compromising surroundings and quite soon Melville found himself discussing plans to land men on the Polish coast and start a revolution. At this point, unsurprisingly

  Our people were getting cold on the subject, and finally I was told to drop the matter… [I] sent him a letter from the SS St Louis at Southampton, enclosing £10 for his propaganda fund, and informing him
I was sailing for New York the following morning… I duly received the newspaper of the Party, showing a subscription of £10 from an American sympathiser. Thus the door was left open to recommence pourparlers for starting an insurrection in Poland, should it become necessary.

  Why Karskii? Why would Melville pretend to be an American? Given that a century has passed, this is not easy to do. It is possible that he had heard about Karskii’s gun-running ambitions from Sidney Reilly who had heard it from Japanese intelligence or from his old friend Nikolai Chaikovskii; it is equally possible that he had picked it up from an Okhrana contact such as D.S. Thorpe. Nikolai Chaikovskii was a veteran Socialist Revolutionary and leading light of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in London in the latter part of the 1890s.29 Through the Society he knew Rosenblum/Sidney Reilly who spied for the Japanese in Port Arthur prior to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. The following year Chaikovskii was close to, and a conduit of funds from, the Japanese Colonel Akashi, who, from his base in Stockholm, tried to undermine the Tsarist Government during that conflict. Socialist Revolutionaries were among many dissident groups, including the Polish Socialists and some of the Letts, who accepted Japanese gold from Akashi to promote a Russian revolution. (On the other hand, Chaikovskii [according to the report by Okhrana agent Rataev, which places Chaikovskii and Rosenblum/Reilly together in London] was believed by London’s Polish émigrés to be an Okhrana agent. He had been seen meeting Mitzakis.)

  In the summer of 1905 Akashi financed the purchase of ‘16,000 rifles and three million bullets to be sent to the Baltic regions and 8,500 rifles and 1.2 million bullets to be sent to the Black Sea’.

  …It was decided that if the Socialist Revolutionaries took a leading role, the other parties would follow… They therefore set about buying arms… I decided to give the Poles money in advance and a free hand, but the other parties received money only after they had found arms for sale… Parties composed mainly of workers, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish Socialists, did not like rifles. In contrast the Finns and Caucasians, who were mainly peasants, preferred rifles.30

  Akashi also bought, through an English wine merchant called Dickenson, a 700-ton cargo vessel called the John Grafton. The arms were transported by train from Switzerland and loaded into it. The ship’s nominal owner was an American, Morton, who was believed by Akashi to be an anarchist and somehow connected to Mrs Vernon Hull, an American woman who owned two gun-running steamers, the Cysne and the Cecil.31

  The John Grafton had offloaded only some of the arms at Baltic ports when everything went horribly quiet. The only person who could tell Akashi anything about what had happened was Konni Zilliacus, the multilingual Finn who was his go-between all over Europe.

  Probably on 25th or 26th August Zilliacus came to Stockholm with a passport in the name of Long from England and said ‘I am really puzzled by the John Grafton business. She unloaded arms for the Lettish party to the north of Windau on 18th August. But no boat was waiting for her at the arrival point to the south of Viborg on the 19th. The crew were so apprehensive that they sailed her back to Denmark and begged me to give her new orders…’

  He did so. The ship then ran aground amid uncharted sandbanks, and within days its cargo became international news, with photographs of the wreckage in the newspapers. As an afterthought Akashi adds

  Prior to this, three machine guns and 15,000 bullets which the Cysne had on board were discovered by the English authorities, just before the ship left London. Morton from the United States, the nominal owner of these arms, was arrested and fined.

  The identity of Morton raises many interesting questions. It has been speculated, by Dr Nicholas Hiley, that in light of Melville’s account of his encounter with Karskii at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (in the guise of an American anarchist), Morton could well be a Japanese transliteration of Morgan, Melville’s chief alias at this time.

  No record as to whether Morton was in fact fined, and if so where, has so far been located. In light of Melville’s own testimony, the theory that Morton and Morgan were one and the same is therefore a plausible one.

  As early as 1901, Melville had begun to suspect that spies were interested in English coastal defences. A commercial traveller with the French name of Allain, who sold wines along the South Coast, ‘frequented soldiers a great deal’, presumably on the pretext that they would purchase wines for the mess. He asked questions about the armaments of the forts around Portsmouth and then turned up in Dover doing much the same kind of thing. Some papers of his were found on a cross-Channel ferry and proved to contain, among other incriminating material, a questionnaire about Dover Castle: ‘calibre of guns, strength of garrison, the best approaches thereto, &c.’32 It was believed that at least three NCOs had taken money in exchange for information. Although they had not been able to supply much of value, it was a worrying case.

  At the time, this kind of thing fell into a gap between military security and Special Branch. Later Allain, who was an American citizen, turned up in Cherbourg asking much the same questions, and from this

  …it was evident he was in the pay of Germany. But no person thought of such a thing at the time. In fact Allain came in for little attention from the police although he was under notice from November 1901 to November 1903.33

  The German Nachrichten Intelligence Service, had been run from Berlin by a Major Dame until 1900 and Major Dame had been perfectly happy to co-operate with Colonel Edmonds of the War Office in figuring out what the Russians and French were up to. But there was change shortly before Queen Victoria’s death. Dame was out, and a Major Brose was in, and he

  …was known for his anti-English views. Shortly after this Colonel Edmonds learned from several sources that a third branch of the German Secret Service had been formed to deal with England.

  In 1904, despite the ‘special duties’ MO3 being set up, possible spies still received no ‘attention from the police’ in England and Melville, who was now on the qui vive at all times, was frustrated by the sheer innocence of the policemen he met up and down the country. He was working for a War Office conscious that Russia would very much like to invade India, that Germany would take on the British Navy if it thought it could, and that the French were quietly preparing for conflict against the Germans. All these nations needed information about British naval and military strength and must get it by spying. But the average policeman had no idea of this. Germans in particular were accepted without question wherever they went.

  I had to travel to all parts of the country to make enquiries re suspected persons. In these duties I found the police, whether in London or the provinces, absolutely useless. Their invariable estimate of a suspect was his apparent respectability and position. Just as though only blackguards would be chosen for espionage. But the fact was the police could not understand these matters. The idea was foreign to them.34

  He was aware that railway lines into London were a prime target for destruction by Germany in the event of war. At Merstham in Surrey there is a particularly long tunnel, and information reached him that a German photographer had taken up residence in the village. Off went Melville to find out more; the German had vanished. The house where he lived was directly opposite one occupied by a police constable. The constable was naturally surprised and impressed when called upon by ex-Superintendent Melville. He knew the photographer of course – very nice chap, took landscapes, not portraits, and splendid they were, too. Melville (one imagines him hunched over the teacups in the front parlour) now approached a delicate topic with a meaningful air.

  It must be remembered that in those days I was absolutely forbidden to mention the word ‘spy.’ All sorts of pretexts had therefore to be resorted to, even with the police… I then spoke to the officer for some time on the fact that the times were strange, and that we all should take stock of those foreigners and have our suspicions of them, &c., &c. ‘Yes, Sir’, he said, ‘I am sure you are right; I believe these fellows are the a
uthors of nearly all the burglaries we have around the country.’

  Thus my eloquence was absolutely thrown away.35

  The German had made a comprehensive photographic survey of the entire district. His landlord, at the house where he lodged, worked at Merstham Railway Station. Among his duties he had to inspect the tunnel at least twice a week, and Melville would soon learn that the photographer had accompanied him quite frequently ‘out of mere curiosity’.

  Public awareness of the need for vigilance had not yet trickled down from readers of Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, which had appeared the previous year and was the first sensational spy novel. The War Office had no permission at this time to intercept private mail. Melville had built up relationships with people in the GPO over the years but outside central London it was a different matter. While up and down the country foreign waiters and farmers, salesmen and language teachers, shopkeepers and ‘persons of independent means’ explored the countryside and sent and received letters from abroad, among the locals ‘not to one in a thousand did the idea occur that Germans might be here on espionage’.

  And it takes one to know one. Melville had no difficulty in turning his attention to Germans who might be spies. He was firmly on King Edward’s side in this. He was all for an Entente and, by association, civilised tolerance of the Russians, but again like King Edward, was rather lukewarm about Germans and ready to believe they were up to no good. It was a prejudice he had.