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Over in Whitehall Place the Special Irish Branch was expanding. Jenkinson already employed RIC men all over England, answerable directly to himself. But these dynamitards moved from country to country all the time. The French and American Governments would not lift a finger to help; to do so might lose them votes, especially in America. As soon as he got back to England in March, Jenkinson had begun to reorganise, insisting that there must be more men at all the ports, to watch comings and goings across the Atlantic.

This included the French Channel ports where men had been stationed for some time. As early as 1880, a letter in Foreign Office files requests permission to install English agents there to combat the trafficking, then common between England and France, Holland and Belgium, of girl prostitutes. Maybe it was never granted. According to a Cherbourg police report written ten years later,
²⁷
the English police presence in Cherbourg, Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dieppe began in 1881 in reaction to suspicion that anarchists or nihilists might be crossing the Channel following the attempt on the Queen's life. The first such detective ‘watching the Southampton line' at Cherbourg had been a German subject called Schmitt
(sic)
who was attached to Scotland Yard.

Since this initiative proved successful, the French report explained, the Yard later sent two more men to Le Havre and two to Calais. There had been several at Cherbourg since Schmitt and they worked happily alongside the French police – in fact, the foreign detectives were useful. Incidentally, the French policeman of 1894 pointed out, there had been a dramatic decline in petty thefts aboard cross-Channel passenger vessels since they arrived.

Monro had the happy knack of maintaining discipline while inspiring loyalty in his team. When he made changes, he explained why. Long before Vincent's time, detectives had been somewhat mistrusted because of the bounty system; everyone knew it was so, but they also knew that if the system were completely abolished pay would have to be improved. Monro understood that the CID must be held in respect or it would be ineffective. He supported a move away from the rewards-for-results system in every way he could. Rewards were more sparingly given, but serious crime decreased.

On the other hand, Jenkinson's influence was all-pervasive.

Every detective in the Special Irish Branch was a Metropolitan policeman through and through. Even if they were Irish – and most were – this was the case. If you were not stationed in London, most specifically in or around Scotland Yard, you didn't really know what was going on. You could never catch up. You were out of sight, and too far away for any hope of promotion. Go to the provinces, even to other parts of London, and you might never be seen again.

And yet when, in March of 1884, Jenkinson applied to have nine of Littlechild's original twelve men leave London and work with customs officers at the ports, Melville chose a posting as far as he could get from Scotland Yard. However ambitious he was, there is always a nagging question for a man with two children under the age of four who follows a dangerous occupation. Is he placing his wife under intolerable strain? Twice, now, police constables had found and defused bombs. He and Kate had survived the death of their child together. Was this daily confrontation with violence fair to her or the children?

Even if he gave no thought to ambition and did not feel endangered, he and Kate needed to make a new start after the bereavement of last summer. So Sergeant Melville and Kate, little Kate and the baby William packed their trunk, left the inspectors recruiting new men, and travelled to France to the first time: to the port city of Le Havre.

Le Havre extended along a windswept curve of coastline under a vast northern sky. Its docks, tucked into the north side of the wide estuary of the Seine, were the seat of its prosperity. In the eighteenth century, local dynasties had been founded on fortunes made from the triangular trade in sugar and slaves between Africa, France and the French Antilles, and Melville would have found out quickly enough that their names still carried weight in the town a hundred years later. Families like the Foaches and the Begouens once built ships, bankrolled the trade, even insured it and refined the sugar. Thanks to them Le Havre was endowed with a grand Hotel de Ville, a number of private mansions in the city centre, an imposing Palais de Justice and the deep Vauban Docks, based on those in the Port of London, that Melville would come to know well.

Nearly 300 metres of massive stone breakwater protected the port and people ashore would point out ships poised beyond the bar, awaiting pilots to bring them in. Since the first passenger steamships ploughed their way across the Atlantic in the 1830s, Le Havre had become more prosperous than ever, and now with mass emigration from the east, all Europe seemed to want to embark here for a new life in America. The steamship lines competed to offer something different. Some were technologically advanced, some more luxurious, some, like the Chargeurs Réunis, specialised in freight. Melville would have seen scores of ships of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and Messageries Maritimes.

It was a good place to bring up a family. Le Havre was a sort of cross between Brighton and Bristol: a station balnéaire and commercial port combined. Along the Boulevard Albert Premier facing the long beach, tall balconied hotels were springing up to satisfy the new fashion for seaside holidays. Kate could wheel the perambulator towards the Cap de la Hève which towered out of the sea, or inland towards the old Priory on a hill overlooking the bay. All this, after the smoke and grime of London: they would have had no regrets. Melville was working with French customs officers every day, and began to learn French.

The exact date of Melville's posting to France is uncertain. In March of 1884 an English Port Policeman at Le Havre reported two Irish-American suspects on the New York boat; we know this from a letter from the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office to his opposite number at the Foreign Office.
¹
That policeman may have been Melville, who was the sergeant there along with a PC Durham. By April, Monro was definitely employing Inspector Maurice Moser on Irish duty in Paris.
²
The first proof of Melville's presence at the coast is a letter from the Consul, Frederic Bernal, to Jenkinson in London, in December of 1884.

Havre, December 16th 1884

Sir

Sergeant Melville called this morning at the Consulate General and showed me a memorandum he had just received from London with instructions to call on me for my intervention in the event of his discovering the presence in this town of a certain individual. I at once telegraphed you as follows. ‘In case necessity arising could do nothing without instructions from Foreign Office.'

You will remember a conversation I had with you some months ago when I told you that the Foreign Office wished to know what instructions the Home Office desired should be given me. I have heard nothing more on the subject.

Were I to know that an individual who was on his way to commit, or had committed, some attempt to blow up a place in England, was here, it would be necessary for me 1st, to get the police to arrest him – provisionally, and 2nd, to formally apply to the
Procureur de la République
for his detention (that official would immediately ask for instructions from the Minister of Grace and Justice), but up to the moment I have no instructions which would justify my incurring such a [sic] responsibilities.
³

Bernal sent a copy to the Foreign Office which was minuted by various hands. If this happened, who would deal with it? The Foreign Office decided that if Sergeant Melville or anyone else reported the presence of Irish dynamitards on French soil, they should inform the relevant British Consulate in America so that the men could be picked up there.

It is clear from Bernal's letter that after nearly eighteen months working directly to Harcourt, Jenkinson had not grasped the niceties of communication within departments of state in England, far less the diplomatic and legal complexities of enforcing his will abroad. He made people feel threatened. At the Foreign Office, in consulates abroad, and in Scotland Yard, people felt their authority undermined by his sweeping demands and force of character. Turf wars sprang up like brush fires.

In February of 1885, for instance, Jenkinson began to agitate for a sort of roving ambassador to tour consulates in every one of the United States and encourage them to… well, what? It depended how you read it. Maybe they were supposed just to keep their ears open, and maybe they were supposed to spend a little money (whether out of Foreign Office funds was unclear) employing agents, in which case they would become part of Jenkinson's empire at one remove. In a moment of carelessness, or weariness, Sir Julian Pauncefote at the Foreign Office allowed Jenkinson's emissary to go forth but his arrival did not always go down terribly well. There exists for instance an exasperated letter to London from Lord Sackville West at the Washington Legation; he personally had been begging for a dedicated employee to do this very job for some time. His requests had been ignored and now, it seemed, the Home Office was proposing to interfere in foreign affairs.
⁴

As for Monro, he could get no co-operation from Jenkinson whatsoever. The CID was ignored. Jenkinson trusted only his RIC men, who were quietly operating in London as elsewhere in England entirely under his control, answerable to no one else. (He acknowledged that there were ten of them,
⁵
although later events would show that there were more.) Monro found this intolerable. Worse, Jenkinson would not share information; he insisted
⁶
that he was under no obligation to do so and could not work if he did. So Moser, in Paris in the summer of 1884, had found himself watching men who were working for Jenkinson. Nothing could be more futile. And the Special Irish Branch Port Police, leaving home at the crack of dawn on icy mornings for the docks, and prepared to do all they could to warn the authorities of the movements of suspects, needed something better to go on than a ship's manifest. How was Melville to investigate, or even identify, suspects on the New York boats if he had only a sketchy idea of who they were or why they were suspected? Jenkinson had proved dismissive of the SIB from the start and by the spring of 1885 matters were coming to a head.

In London there had been bombs at the Tower and the House of Commons. There was also social unrest which had nothing to do with Ireland, and following riots in Trafalgar Square, Commissioner Henderson resigned.

On 8 April James Monro and Edward Jenkinson, like a couple of recalcitrant schoolboys, sat down before the new Commissioner Sir Charles Warren. Warren was a military man. He settled the argument at once. When they departed he was entirely persuaded that Jenkinson's promise to communicate with him directly, cutting out Monro, would somehow ensure that Jenkinson volunteered information and that Monro would no longer concern himself with the work on which his detectives were engaged. Neither was remotely likely. Jenkinson on principle did not volunteer information. Monro remained rightly protective of his status and that of the Special Branch, and had been used to running his own show and letting Sir Edward Henderson as Commissioner do the PR and take the credit while he did the work. Now, in Warren, he was up against a man who was used to obedience from subordinates. As Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Monro was expected to take orders.

Six weeks later Home Secretary Harcourt called Jenkinson and Monro into his office in an attempt to mediate. He too failed. Monro was reasonable; all he wanted was to see the RIC off his patch and get some information to work with. Jenkinson was ‘like a dog with a bone', Harcourt told him irritably, insisting ‘It is monstrous that the London detectives should not know of these things.'
⁷

Jenkinson had every reason to be wary. He had recently been approached, via the Consulate in Mexico and the Foreign Office, by a potentially invaluable spy, General F.F. Millen, who had been a leading Irish-American activist for twenty years (and had worked for the British in the 1860s on the recommendation of Lord Salisbury, who was keeping silent on the matter). He worked for the
New York Herald,
besides being a military man.

Millen would be risking his life and, in any case, expected a certain standard of living for his family. He would be a serious charge on the Secret Service budget.

Jenkinson dared not reveal Millen's identity. He thought Scotland Yard men were incompetent; thanks to them, his own name had already appeared in the newspapers. He insisted that he alone should be the judge of when to convey information to Monro, that Monro on the other hand should be under an obligation immediately to convey information to him, and that he should retain the RIC men. On the other hand Jenkinson had been made a fool of, recently, by ‘the Burkham affair' in which bogus information was offered and largely paid for.
⁸

By 17 June – at another, stormy tripartite confrontation – Harcourt had had enough.

Sir W. Harcourt regretted to see that Mr Jenkinson manifested such a temper and frame of mind... and when Mr Jenkinson displayed such a state of mind in dealing with him, it gave rise to the impression in Sir W. Harcourt's mind that Mr Jenkinson might display the same feeling towards others, and that perhaps he had done so in dealing with Mr Monro…

Mr Jenkinson asked what was to become of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Sir W. Harcourt observed that on the whole he thought the sooner they quitted London the better…

Mr Jenkinson observed that that being so, he did not see that there was much use in his appointment.

Sir W. Harcourt said that was a matter for him.
⁹

Jenkinson, who was a little more subdued after this, spent the next few days producing a long memo setting out his case.
¹⁰
He was willing to concede almost nothing. At the end of June the Liberal Government fell, and would remain out of office for the next seven months. Harcourt went with it and departed in anger, as Jenkinson with characteristic arrogance had announced that Lord Spencer was coming over and would settle the dispute in his favour with the new Conservative Home Secretary, Sir Richard Assheton Cross.
¹¹
Monro calmly wrote a note explaining why Jenkinson's scheme was not only operationally unsound, but unconstitutional.
¹²