British Secret Service During the Great War

by Nicholas Everitt

The year 1914 opened auspiciously. Future prospects looked brilliant. In the past there had been depression owing to political extravagances, but everything pointed to a change in the minds of the people; to an awakening, to future betterment. Money was plentiful and cheap. Labour was an active market with plenty of it. Good business seemed to be in the air. All around there appeared to be a general cheerfulness. Then came the lull before the storm. An ominous calm, a dull, dead, mysterious cloud of invisible, inexplicable, unintelligible danger threatened. No one could penetrate it; no one could fathom what it was; but everyone felt instinctively that something great and terrible was going to happen.

The stock markets sagged and fell away in a most extraordinary fashion, no matter how the Bulls or surrounding circumstances supported them. Buyers of properties suddenly stayed their hands. Speculators by natural impulse held aloof. Rumours began to circulate, strange stories passed from mouth to mouth which none believed, but which left an impression of gloom and impending disaster behind them.

The man in the street, the one and only true barometer of England's real feelings, showed an uneasy restlessness which could not be interpreted.

The multitude of German spies, who swarmed like locusts throughout the British Isles, assured themselves that the seditious seeds they had been sowing so energetically during the past years in the receptive and nourishing soil of Radicalism and Socialism, plenteously manured by liberal administrations from the vast financial resources at their disposal, were at last bearing a rich harvest of rare and refreshing fruit. They assured themselves that revolution would devastate Ireland, perhaps part of England, Wales, and Scotland as well. The Unions of the working classes they knew had been nurtured by their fond attentions until they had grown to mighty proportions. Working men of German blood or of strong Teutonic tendencies had agitated amongst the masses again and yet again, for "less time, more pay, and greater and more extended privileges." German Secret Service money had provided the sinews of an underground labour war. Countless thousands of honest, hard-working British labourers neither knew of, nor recognised, nor even suspected, the traitorous hand which so gently stroked them down the back whilst their ears were being tickled with persuasive suggestions and argumentative reasoning, prompting a greater dissatisfaction the more they were pandered to, and petted, and spoilt, and bribed by the Liberal Government who were the men in power over them. It must not be forgotten that for some years previous to 1914 prominent members of the Government of the day had been roundly rated in the Press for encouraging and expressing pro-German sentiments and inclinations; whilst the Government itself had been accused of shattering the Constitution of the United Kingdom, of muzzling the House of Lords, of trampling on the rights of Democracy, of humiliating the Crown, and of robbing the Church of England.

Whether there was truth in these accusations the historian will record, but that civil war was a seriously threatened danger there can be no doubt; whilst the proverbial slackness of our phlegmatic British nature is such that Englishmen permitted much to transpire which no other nation in the world would have tolerated. Mr. W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, speaking in the London Stock Exchange on March 20th, 1916, more eloquently describes us: "A people slow to anger, unsuspicious of guile in others, foolishly generous in throwing open their land to the world, offering sanctuary to all, even to those who proposed first to exploit and then betray them, before we as a nation awoke to the peril."

It was only too well known to certain members of Scotland Yard, probably others as well, that German Secret Service agents had reported to their respective headquarters, that "the English Radical Government would never dare to intervene in a war waged by Germany." They knew, or rather thought they knew, that England was utterly unprepared for a war of any magnitude; that for years military and naval estimates had been cut down rather than added to, which was substantiated by a collection of innumerable press cuttings showing the violent public agitation in consequence; that the Government did not believe a great European war could be possible within the next fifty years; that the United Kingdom was on the verge of revolution over Ulster's dissent from Home Rule; that the Labour Unions had grown so vast, so all-embracing and so powerful that they could and would paralyse the Government's action if by any possible chance it did decide on intervening; that Egypt, India, and South Africa were ripe for revolt and only too anxious for an opportunity to shake off British rule; that Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were anxious to declare their respective independence; in fact that the whole British Empire beyond the seas was itching for disintegration, if only "The Day" would dawn giving half a chance of striking a blow for freedom and exemption from control of the hated British yoke; and that the welding together of all these (believed-to-be) irreconcilable nations and peoples in a common battle cause was an unthinkable impossibility.

It was common knowledge to the Secret Service agents of all nations that the Liberal-Radical Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was tottering to a fall. Its popularity with the masses had waned; its hypocrisy with the middle classes had become a byword; its disloyalty to the Empire with the upper classes had become revolting; its days had become numbered. The German War party saw this and realised the fact better than the English. It knew that it was of vital importance to its world-power dream to make war only when a Liberal, Radical, and Socialist party was in office in England; it would be courting disaster to do so if a Unionist Government were in power.

Yea, verily, the Kaiser believed that the harvest of his sowing was ready for the garnering.

All these things were reported in gloating glee by the army of Teutonic spies in our midst to their respective headquarters, thence conveyed to their Central Office at Berlin with an openness that might have seemed an insult to the intelligence of Scotland Yard and those who direct and control that very effective and efficient department; only our astute police service happened to be much more wide awake than it appeared to be.