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  In Parliament, arguments were being made in favour of removing the Metropolitan force from the Home Secretary’s remit and transferring it to local control, probably by Watch Committees of the type that prevailed in every other city. Harcourt was fully aware of Anderson’s view that at any moment the Irish-Americans might begin a violent campaign in Britain. He was certain that such outrages could not be dealt with by policemen subject to the picayune demands and strategic ignorance of local committees. Harcourt knew that the Home Office must be in charge. If anything happened he would be blamed, but so be it.

  Something did happen. The Irish outrage at Salford in January of 1881 was followed by the discovery of other bombs in Liverpool, Chester and Manchester. On 23 January Harcourt told Howard Vincent of the CID to devote the next month of his time to the Fenian outrages and nothing else. The Fenian Office became a department within CID at Scotland Yard. It was at the heart of communication between Vincent, Anderson, Sir Edward Henderson the Police Commissioner, the regional police, the DMP, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and Colonel Majendie, an explosives specialist based, like Anderson, at the Home Office. Between them this crowd, reporting to the Home Secretary, saw off any remaining reservations that senior Metropolitan officers may have had about running the CID as a pro-active detective force.

  In May of 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and the German Government protested that a German socialist paper from London called Freiheit had celebrated the event and encouraged repeat performances. The Queen’s links with Germany, and her alarm, could not be ignored. In July Freiheit’s editor Johann Most was tried for incitement to murder and imprisoned for eighteen months. In America, President Garfield was assassinated.

  In the summer of 1881 Harcourt was in no great panic over threats from continental revolutionaries because he had taken action. In the light of Garfield’s assassination, royal protection was stepped up. Howard Vincent was to have foreign communist and social-democratic groups and publications watched from now on. Importantly, the Most trial had calmed foreign diplomatic concerns about British firmness.

  But Anderson was still coming up with intelligence about Irish-American threats. Michael Davitt, who had been released from Dartmoor in 1877, was arrested within three weeks of the Salford bomb and found guilty of incitement to insurrection. Although he was detained in Portland prison for over a year, in Ireland the Land League (which he had inspired) did not wither away. There was strong support for land reform, and rent strikes and boycotting were used as a means to coerce the less stalwart supporters of the principle. Where an Irish tenant refused to withhold rent, the local community would boycott (that is, not trade with) him. Evictions and serious hardship followed from this, making Ireland’s political problems worse and increasing support in England for the League’s aims, which were promoted in Parliament by the charismatic Member for Meath, Charles Parnell.

  Anderson knew Parnell’s thinking, as he had heard his spy Le Caron’s account of a meeting with Parnell in London in the spring of 1881. Thanks to a larger Secret Service grant Anderson was also making contacts within rank-and-file London activists. ‘What grand copy it would have been for the newspapers of that time if, in describing the Fenian procession… they could have added that the band instruments had been taken out of pawn with money supplied by the Home Office!’4 Certain people in power still had reservations about the wisdom of employing agents. Gladstone, knowing this, preferred to remain unaware of the details of secret intelligence and Harcourt had to take the full weight of threats against the state upon his own shoulders. For decades the conventional view had been that by paying informers, one encouraged them to act as agents provocateurs. Anderson, a deeply religious man, was poker-faced.

  I warned the leaders who were in my pay that if outrages occurred I should possibly denounce them and certainly stop their stipends. I use the word ‘stipend’ advisedly. In work of this kind payment by results may operate as a positive incitement to crime, whereas the regular payment of a fixed amount has a marvellous influence on the recipient.

  Le Caron certainly had no problem with it. In Chicago in the August of 1881 he was a delegate to what he called the ‘Grand Dynamite Convention’ of Clan-na-Gael. (The Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood had re-invented themselves as Clan-na-Gael in 1867). The majority of those present in the large, smoke-filled hotel meeting room – according to Le Caron they were predominantly lawyers – decided upon direct action in mainland Britain. Afterwards a small group of militants discussed strategy for a future terror offensive. They would leave the Royal family alone, but any other British institution was fair game.

  Home Secretary Harcourt, a volatile character and still, in this summer of 1881, in a sanguine mood, dismissed threats of a London bombing campaign as ‘a Fenian scare of the old clumsy kind.’5 But nothing focuses the mind so much as a double assassination, and when in May of 1882 the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his Permanent Under-Secretary were stabbed to death as they walked across Phoenix Park in Dublin, security flew to the top of the agenda. The well-informed wondered whether the Land League and its supporters in Parliament would break decisively with the Fenian group from across the Atlantic over this; if they did, they predicted,6 there would be no brake on Fenian violence whatsoever. What in fact happened was that the Land League treasurer moved to Paris, from which city he could quietly divert funds to Clan-na-Gael activities upon request.7

  Chief Inspector Littlechild of the CID spent five months in Dublin after the Phoenix Park murders working with the Irish police. ‘I assisted the Dublin police by posing as a certain character, and staying in low hotels in the city, in which it was thought that information might be gained of the perpetrators of the deed.’8 In response to a plea from Earl Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant, the Cabinet set up an extremely well-funded anti-Fenian department there under a Colonel Brackenbury. Brackenbury’s view, partly informed by Spencer, was trenchant: for a variety of reasons, the RIC and the DMP were an inadequate defence against Fenian plotters. A small, separate investigative branch with wide powers must be created to deal with them. Brackenbury personally did not want to be at the head of it. He did not want this Irish posting and never had; he wanted to fight with the British Army in Egypt.

  Fortunately for him Earl Spencer had a private secretary called Jenkinson who was only too pleased to assume Brackenbury’s position. Edward Jenkinson had liberal views about Ireland. He was a Home Ruler, believing that the grievances of the Irish were genuine and must be addressed. He was opposed to Irish-American terrorism because he believed that it would harden British attitudes while creating Irish martyrs. He had been a divisional commissioner in India and like most ex-colonial officers he was accustomed to the principle and practice of infiltrating spies into the civilian and/or criminal population. He had no background in international espionage. But he seized the opportunity, for which Brackenbury had prepared the ground, to create an Irish-American intelligence network. At Dublin Castle he had Anderson’s brother Samuel to assist him, but Jenkinson was no collaborator; he respected only his own intellect. But he revelled in the work. Within months he was convinced that nothing other than a multi-tentacled secret police initiative covering Europe, North America and the whole of Great Britain could be truly effective; and he was the man to run it.

  Irishmen, not Irish Americans, were arrested for the Phoenix Park murders. Five were hanged, eight were jailed, and five got away to France or America. Terrorist attacks worsened. In Glasgow in January of 1883 bombs were left at a railway station and an aqueduct and a large gas-holder was dynamited to smithereens. But it was London that faced the major threat to public institutions and transport. It was far larger and more anonymous than other cities and held the most important targets. On the night of Thursday 15 March a bomb went off at Printing House Square, home of The Times; on 16 March another exploded behind the Home Office.

  Superintendent Williamson instituted the new Special Irish Branch on St Patrick’
s Day, Saturday 17 March; its base was a first-floor office in an alley with a dog-leg bend called Whitehall Place. Howard Vincent was based at Scotland Yard, less than a hundred yards away, and retained overall control of the CID, which included the SIB. Williamson was to liaise with Vincent and Anderson and to report matters of immediate significance directly to the Home Secretary.

  At 10.00 a.m. on Tuesday 20 March his hand-picked force of twelve detectives, to be directed in operational matters by Chief Inspector Littlechild, gathered in the corner office overlooking the Rising Sun pub for the pep talk and induction session. ‘Dolly’ Williamson, an equable character with a dry sense of humour who liked to stroll around London in a floppy hat with a flower in his buttonhole, began with two advantages. One was his own experience. For some time he had been deployed by Vincent to investigate political matters. The other was that his new force had the London bombings fresh in their mind.

  Explosions gave the public a shudder of horror, outrage and sympathy; but a detective’s work can be tedious. One of Melville’s reports, written on 4 April 1883 a fortnight after the first meeting of the SIB, describes a typical day.

  PC Enright and PC McIntyre report that at 12.30 p.m. 3rd inst. O’Connor left Pond Place and proceeded by Piccadilly to Brewer Street, Soho, but did not call at any house there; then to the American Reading Rooms, 14 Strand, where he left at 4.15 p.m. and then proceeded to the Embankment over Westminster Bridge and down the Albert Embankment by St Thomas’ Hospital. Here he leant on the parapet of the embankment, took out a paper and appeared to be surveying the Houses of Parliament and at the same time was making notes onto the paper. He proceeded onto Lambeth Bridge from which he seemed to be surveying the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace (Lambeth Palace) and also making notes on the paper. He then went along the Wandsworth Road and thence to 2, Ponton Terrace, Nine Elms Lane, occupied by Mr Enright, which he entered at 7.00 p.m.

  P.Sgts Melville & Regan report continuing the observation at above address, and at 11.00 p.m. saw O’Connor and Enright leave there, the two proceeding very slowly and apparently in earnest conversation to Battersea Bridge [Chelsea Bridge] where they parted, Enright turning towards his home as above. We followed O’Connor via Sloane Square to his home at Pond Place, which he entered at 11.30 p.m.9

  One imagines Melville quietly giving Regan the wink and taking a right turn at Sloane Square, rather than a left towards Pond Place, and skiving off to get the last train home from Victoria. Who were they following and why? O’Connor certainly seems to have had the profile of a plotter, spending the day reading the papers and designing the downfall of the state and the evening over a bite and a jar discussing it. Quite who he was, and why Enright and PC Enright shared the same name, is lost to us, although a clue may lie in the list of detectives gathered at Scotland Yard for that first meeting on 17 March. Littlechild’s twelve apostles were Inspectors Hope and Ahern, Sergeants Jenkins, Melville and Regan, Constables O’Sullivan, Walsh, McIntyre, Foy, Thorpe and two Enrights.

  O’Connor, whoever he was, was probably being drawn into some sting inspired by a London informer of Anderson or Jenkinson. None of this matters except in serving to illustrate the many frustrations and red herrings of the job. The foot-slogging underling can only follow orders, which sometimes prove to have been futile in intent.

  Melville wrote his report on a Wednesday. Having spent Tuesday evening hanging about waiting for his mark to emerge from 2 Ponton Terrace, by Friday he was putting in his overtime in a comfy room in Bloomsbury; a fact that would emerge when The Times reported the Dynamite Conspiracy10 trial at Bow Street with Harry Poland prosecuting. (Court cases were theatre, and at this time well-known barristers attracted an audience.)

  Jenkinson’s intelligence was said to be behind the Dynamite Conspiracy arrests. A florid character called Gallagher, well financed by American Fenians, had recced the House of Commons and planned to blow it up with explosives made in Birmingham. Birmingham detectives had followed a trail that led from manufacturer to bomb-makers and had picked up some of the gang involved. The rest were taken into custody in London. Among their effects were orders for admission to the House of Commons last November, clothes bearing heavy traces of nitro-glycerine, maps including maps of London, and other evidence which appeared incriminating.

  In the dock were Gallagher and a brother of his, and their alleged co-conspirators Whitehead, Dalton, Wilson, Curtin (also known as Kent) and Ansburgh.

  Curtin, an American, had come to London on 5 April, a Thursday; he was charged with ‘conspiring with others to take possession of explosives in order to commit a felony’. Chief Inspector Littlechild explained that upon his arrival Curtin had been followed to a modest hotel at 11 Upper Woburn Place, Bloomsbury. Melville gave evidence that in the evening of Friday 6 April he had, acting under instructions, booked a room at this hotel, and on Saturday morning he had breakfasted with Mr Curtin. He had engaged the fellow in conversation: it was difficult to know what to do with yourself in London when you don’t know anybody, he had remarked, and Curtin agreed, saying that he had only arrived the day before yesterday and would leave tomorrow. When Curtin left the hotel Melville and another officer followed him. Curtin was seen to stand outside the post office, Lower Strand, for fifteen or twenty minutes watching the Charing Cross Hotel. Then he went to a pawn shop.

  Inspector Littlechild said that on Saturday 7 April he and Sergeant Melville and other police officers took Curtin into custody (without explanation) in Euston Square as he made his way towards the station. They all took a four-wheeler to Scotland Yard.

  When they got there Superintendent Williamson asked Curtin for his story. He claimed to be living at 11 Upper Woburn Place, and to have come from New York where he lived at 301 East 59th Street. He had crossed the Atlantic to Queenstown, then travelled to Glasgow where he had worked at a shipyard; he had arrived in London the Thursday before.

  He was taken to Bow Street and charged, and proved to have money in pounds and dollars. He denied knowing any of the others. He was shown a letter with his signature on it addressed to one of the Gallagher brothers; the letter had been taken from Gallagher’s room at the Charing Cross Hotel. (Littlechild asserted that when they met, Curtin and Gallagher shook hands in mutual recognition.) While Curtin was interviewed at Scotland Yard Melville returned to the hotel in Upper Woburn Place and searched Curtin’s room. In a portmanteau he found a couple of shirts labelled ‘Kent’.

  The case continued at the Old Bailey in June. All the big guns were there: the Lord Chief Justice, the Attorney General, Colonel Majendie (‘Her Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives’) and representatives of the Royal Irish Constabulary, among others. The prisoners were ‘taken from and brought to the court under a strong guard of mounted police’. The stage was set. Against this sombre background, it would have been hard to convince a jury of their innocence.

  A man Curtin had worked with in Glasgow confirmed the story that he had worked there in a shipyard.

  Ansburgh was brought before the court and Littlechild described his arrest at Savage’s Hotel, 38 Blackfriars Road. The accused – Ansburgh – cross-examined Melville. Hadn’t Melville told him (Ansburgh) that if he turned Queen’s evidence he would get off, and pick up a £500 reward into the bargain? Melville denied it strongly. It would never occur to him to say such a thing. Ansburgh said ‘You are a notorious liar.’

  Melville was making a reputation, of a kind. All the same, Ansburgh was acquitted and so was Gallagher’s brother.

  Within a few weeks Melville and Kate would suffer a tragedy all too common in late Victorian England.

  They had moved to Brixton. It was a more convenient commute than the house in Liverpool Street, Walworth. They were living – with a toddler of three, a one-year-old baby and another due at the end of June – in Tunstall Road. It was only a hundred yards from the railway station and a good train service to Victoria and Scotland Yard, and conveniently for Kate it was next door to the Bon Marché, another South Londo
n emporium.

  When Kate Melville was due to have her baby they arranged for Margaret Gertie, who was nearly four, to go and stay with relatives in East London near the Royal Victoria Docks. Whether, as seems likely, they made this decision because with two tiny children at home already Kate would otherwise have too many to handle, or whether it was because Margaret Gertie had suspected scarlet fever and must be removed on medical advice, is unknown. But by the end of June scarlet fever had taken hold and the little girl was living at 31 Barnwood Road, Plaistow, in the O’Halloran household. Mr O’Halloran was her uncle, presumably the husband of Kate’s sister.11 Scarlet fever is an infection which was in those days untreatable, although most children recovered from it. It usually meant a throat infection, and always a fever and a nasty skin rash. It could take hold and reach a peak within a week. In Brixton on 3 July, Kate gave birth to William John, and Margaret died on the same day.

  In the spring, Edward Jenkinson had been brought to London for a short stay to co-ordinate anti-Fenian activities from a temporary office in the Admiralty. He kept one eye on his key informer from New York, a binge drinker called ‘Red Jim’ McDermott, whose cover would be blown in the course of the summer and who would narrowly escape being shot by an Irish assassin. McDermott had been sent to England to initiate bogus bomb plots financed by money from Earl Spencer’s fund, administered by Jenkinson.12

  Jenkinson was never happier than when dreaming up entrapment operations of this kind. He was not impressed by the Yard men and still less by Anderson, and treated all of them with disdain. He profited from his moment of glory following the Dynamite Conspiracy arrests to insist that Fenian intelligence could not be adequately handled by disparate agencies. It needed one man (himself) to whom all would report, and who would have full control.