Read Online M by Andrew Cook - Free Book Online Page A

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