M

M: MI5's First Spymaster, by Andrew Cook (Stroud: Tempus, 2004; pp. 287. £20). Well, we guessed right. Auguste Coulon was the agent-provocateur who ‘fitted up’ the Walsall anarchist bombers of 1892, on the orders of William Melville of the Special Branch. Later on it was Melville who, after his mysterious resignation from the Branch in 1903, was the ‘ex-policeman’ who helped set up what turned into MI5. Twenty years ago the Home Office and Metropolitan Police were still trying to cover this up by denying access to the relevant files (after more than 80 years!) to academic historians. Now that has changed. New files have been opened, though only to ‘trusties’: in one case a serving Special Branch officer doing a part-time PhD on the early Special Branch; then to the ‘foreign affairs and defence specialist’ Andrew Cook, whose ‘contacts’ (according to the dust-jacket) gave him special access to this material. Lucky them! Poor old academics! Readers of this review will excuse, I hope, a slight tone of resentment here, from one of those academics. But it is satisfying to know that we got it right. And some compensation, also, that this book about Melville turns out in fact to be such a superlative one. Biographically it rounds Melville out convincingly and even attractively, especially with its (often sad) domestic detail. Professionally it reveals an intelligent and resourceful, if occasionally unscrupulous, operator. (Melville wanted to show the foreign anarchists, writes Cook, that he could ‘play dirty’: p. 101.) It elaborates our picture of the early Special Branch enormously. There may be an irony here: an Irish Catholic (and a proud one) playing such an important part in defending Britain against terror, including Irish terror. The book's account of Melville's activities in the ‘gap’ years between his Special Branch and MI5 careers is entirely new and fascinating. Its revelation of the scale of secret service activities after around 1910 against domestic Leftists, not just German spies—which, again, many have suspected—is important. Cook does not, thankfully, fall into the old trap of many sympathetic secret service historians of believing his characters’ every boast. He may tend to exaggerate slightly the contribution of these agencies to national security. For example: ‘Around the turn of the century Special Branch had done such a good job that the general public were no longer threatened by terrorism’ (p. 130). The first part of that sentence does not necessarily follow from the second. Nonetheless this account is admirably balanced and reliable overall. And the new information in it is fascinating, and also significant, in revealing just a little more of the underside of late Victorian and Edwardian government than we knew was there. An academic historian, if allowed to see the material, could not have done any better; and probably would not have written it up as readably as this. Highly recommended

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