M by Andrew Cook Page B

Ebury Street (and his salon of notabilities du jour such as Charles Dilke) to the grandeur of Grosvenor Square and membership, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, of the Marlborough Club. Rightly anxious to protect the great and good, Vincent had of recent years initiated security arrangements that could seem intrusive. His biography, conceding this, quotes a fuming diary entry of Gladstone’s from 1882 that describes the invasion of Hawarden by royal protection officers – ‘Vincent’s men’, blundering oafs disguised as flunkeys, who lurked behind every bush in his garden, broke his china and mistook tea urns for bombs. While Vincent considered himself responsible for security in England (Sir Edward Henderson was not a hard-working Commissioner) and Anderson considered himself responsible for avoiding threats to that security from the Irish, everything passed off well enough – even though Anderson was always tight with information and Sir Edward showed no sign of making way for a younger man. But matters got a lot more complicated in 1883, the summer when Jenkinson blew into town for the first time. According to Vincent’s biography he was ready to resign at the end of the year but ‘on Home Office request’ remained. In July of 1884, after the Scotland Yard blast, he left amid good humour from his officers and a strained relationship with Jenkinson. His position as Director of Criminal Intelligence was abolished in favour of a new job – the same job, working out of the same office in Scotland Yard, which by Act of Parliament would have a new title: Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID. The post was offered to James Monro, a devout Christian with twenty years of service in Indian courts, where he had been a barrister, a magistrate and a District Judge. Jenkinson, in his arrogance seriously underestimating the newcomer, condescendingly remarked of Monro that he was ‘a good man in his way’. 26
    Over in Whitehall Place the Special Irish Branch was expanding. Jenkinson already employed RIC men all over England, answerable directly to himself. But these dynamitards moved from country to country all the time. The French and American Governments would not lift a finger to help; to do so might lose them votes, especially in America. As soon as he got back to England in March, Jenkinson had begun to reorganise, insisting that there must be more men at all the ports, to watch comings and goings across the Atlantic.
    This included the French Channel ports where men had been stationed for some time. As early as 1880, a letter in Foreign Office files requests permission to install English agents there to combat the trafficking, then common between England and France, Holland and Belgium, of girl prostitutes. Maybe it was never granted. According to a Cherbourg police report written ten years later, 27 the English police presence in Cherbourg, Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Dieppe began in 1881 in reaction to suspicion that anarchists or nihilists might be crossing the Channel following the attempt on the Queen’s life. The first such detective ‘watching the Southampton line’ at Cherbourg had been a German subject called Schmitt (sic) who was attached to Scotland Yard.
    Since this initiative proved successful, the French report explained, the Yard later sent two more men to Le Havre and two to Calais. There had been several at Cherbourg since Schmitt and they worked happily alongside the French police – in fact, the foreign detectives were useful. Incidentally, the French policeman of 1894 pointed out, there had been a dramatic decline in petty thefts aboard cross-Channel passenger vessels since they arrived.
    Monro had the happy knack of maintaining discipline while inspiring loyalty in his team. When he made changes, he explained why. Long before Vincent’s time, detectives had been somewhat mistrusted because of the bounty system; everyone knew it was so,