The King’s detective

In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty that grew and shrank according to need. But there was no permanent, established capacity for espionage or counter-espionage, and no secret — or, as they came to be called, political — police.

By the time Melville died in 1917 there was M15 for counter-espionage, MI6 for espionage and the police Special Branch for conducting investigations and arrests. Melville, known within the intelligence establishment as M and in public as ‘the King’s detective’, was either formative or instrumental in the early work of all three. He was also a friend and admirer of Houdini and the case officer of Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’.

The impoverished baker’s son from Ireland joined the Metropolitan Police in 1872. After early years amongst the rough and tumble of daily crime in south London — and it was pretty rough — he became one of the founding officers of the new Special Irish Branch. Established in response to the 1881 Fenian bombing campaign, its remit soon broadened to include the international anarchists who were later to be brilliantly and pathetically evoked by Conrad in The Secret Agent. Special Branch work depended on agents and Melville was clearly a gifted recruiter and handler. ‘Above all,’ he wrote in a brief memoir, ‘the mysterious manner should be avoided. It only engenders distrust. A frank and apparently open style gains confidence … people as a rule are not averse to seeing you again.