The Spy Who Painted the Queen Read Online Free Page A

He visited the property in the company of a mysterious lady and was reported on one occasion to have taken a car, late at night, to Torcross Sands and to have been left there with no obvious means of going on. An interview with the driver proved that, in fact, he’d been taken to a local hotel. His visits were irregular and, it was said, he always arrived late at night, which had occasioned much gossip. As the investigator noted, ‘Mr Blackwell is a married man and the lady who accompanies him to Snail’s Castle is not his wife, which may account for something.’ It almost certainly accounted for everything.
    The military were inevitably caught up in the scare as well. MT1(b), the War Office section that collated and circulated home defence intelligence reports, issued regular updates. These included those of an army officer who had visited the works of the Danish Butter Company at Erith and reported:

    I climbed to the roof which is made of concrete 2 ft thick. This roof is flat and dominates the two Railways North and South of the river, the Arsenal, the Purfleet magazines and the whole of the river up to Tilbury on the one side and the Becton Gas Works on the other. There are a considerable number of people employed here, and the majority are Germans, the Manager of the business we learned is a retired German Naval Lieutenant, and we particularly noticed that any of the workpeople who passed us during our Inspection of the Buildings invariably saluted him.

    Scores of other buildings, both industrial and domestic, were examined by the police and soldiers who commented on their positions commanding important roads and railways. Other reports detail strange lights seen on the coast, apparently signalling to submarines, though the reports are usually inconclusive. There are reports of strange motor cars in the vicinity of vital points, of strangers buying Scottish islands that might be used as submarine or Zeppelin bases, and mysterious persons asking too many questions.
    As far as I can see there is only one genuine case of spying that MT1(b) picked up – that of ‘a yacht, the Sayonara (which) has been cruising round certain ports on the West Coast of Ireland’. Unfortunately, and unbeknown to the military authorities, this was actually part of a Naval Intelligence and Secret Intelligence Service operation to examine the coast for German submarine bases. Needless to say, it found none.
    There were voices that were all too keen to keep the ‘spy menace’ in the public eye for their own interests. William Le Queux wrote a long article in The People on 28 February 1915, headlined ‘Hotbeds of Alien Enemies and Spies in the Heart of the Metropolis’,alleging the Home Office was turning a blind eye to ‘treason mongers and traitors’. It told vivid tales of the authorities allowing ‘the scum of Europe’ to sit in obscure Soho cafés and restaurants gloating over their ‘piratical successes’ (the U-Boats) and discussing the coming of the Zeppelins as a signal for thousands of secret agents to combine, presumably in the previously much-vaunted attacks on military and political targets. He described ‘a man singing an obscene German song, in which the vilest abuse was levelled against England – our one enemy’, with the English being described as ‘big heads’, ‘swine’ and ‘vermin’. A confidential Special Branch report described Le Queux as a man ‘who writes sensational novels on the secret service activities of Germany’ and noted that ‘Mr Le Queux, in this way advertises himself and his works’. Special Branch was quite right about Le Queux – and, as events were to show, there were others quite happy to jump on the bandwagon of hostility to aliens.
    There were suspicions that highly-placed Germans and other enemy aliens, ‘some naturalised, some not’, were in secret sympathy with Germany and might pose a security risk. An anonymous writer to the letters page in The Times advised that the