M (18 page)

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.

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.