harbour lesbian and pro-German sympathies, as well as a German maid, and was thus held in similar odium, while several ministers and MPs were also denounced as traitors.
The enduring spy mania inspired countless dramatic and literary works of varying quality. During the first two and a half years of the war no fewer than 50 plays concerning spies were submitted to the Lord Chancellorâs office, all of which were produced, and during 1917 and 1918 a further 43 spy dramas were performed. One of the first was a popular play, The Man Who Stayed at Home , written by Lechmere Worral and Harold Terry, and based squarely on scaremongering rumours. The piece was set in an East Coast boarding house kept by a woman whose first husband was a German general, and whose son was a spy at the Admiralty. The hero, a monocled fop, at one point accepts a white feather from his fiancée, which he puts into his pipe and smokes. He is able to risk doing so because, unbeknownst to his dearly beloved, he is busy breaking up a local spy ring. The play offered an abundance of cliché: there was a naturalized German governess and a Dutch waiter who kept pigeons, each with a map or message tied to its leg. Behind the fireplace lurked a secret wireless set, while a U-boat skulked offshore, awaiting the requisite signal. The play spawned a number of imitators. In Time of War offered a German princess-spy, who passed herself off as a nurse while adding poison to the hospital water filters. Even as late as October 1918 yet another melodrama set on the East Coast, The Female Hun , climaxed with a British general shooting dead his treacherous wife, less than half an hour after his butler had been shot as a spy.
The writer John Buchan took full advantage of the spy mania, and found a huge audience for his celebrated trilogy of Richard Hannay adventures: The Thirty-Nine Steps , Greenmantle and Mr Standfast . The first of these appeared in 1915, and swiftly elevated Buchan to the front rank of British novelists, although by day Buchan was variously employed as a journalist and propaganda writer. The bookâs central and complicated chase sequence offered a vivid image of Scottish glens bristling with enemy agents, while the rest is a potent cocktail of derring-do and high intrigue. The central premise on which the trilogy is based is given early in The Thirty-Nine Steps : âAway behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people.â At the centre of the web is a sinister master spy who has to be outwitted by Hannay, the heroic colonial adventurer. In Mr Standfast , published in 1918, Hannay is ordered to infiltrate a cell of pacifists in the fictional town of Biggleswick, where treason is afoot, and proceeds to âsink down deep into the life of the half-bakedâ. The books were skilfully written, and reinforced the popular myth of the ubiquity and cunning of German espionage networks â ruthless, exploitative, and endlessly wicked.
Arthur Conan Doyle also exploited the spy scare to bring Sherlock Holmes out of retirement for the second and last time. The short story His Last Bow was first published in the Strand Magazine and Collier âs in September 1917, and was originally subtitled âthe war service of Sherlock Holmesâ. The story itself is set at the beginning of August 1914 and concerns Von Bork, the chief German spymaster in Britain. On the eve of war Von Bork prepares to return to Germany with a rich haul of stolen documents, while awaiting the arrival of his chief informant, Altamont, who has gained possession of the key to the Royal Navyâs signal codes. When Altamont appears, however, he overpowers the German, ties him up, and is revealed as Sherlock Holmes. It transpires that Holmes has also netted all of Von Borkâs agents, and ensured that the information previously sent back to Berlin is entirely false. In the epilogue,
The enduring spy mania inspired countless dramatic and literary works of varying quality. During the first two and a half years of the war no fewer than 50 plays concerning spies were submitted to the Lord Chancellorâs office, all of which were produced, and during 1917 and 1918 a further 43 spy dramas were performed. One of the first was a popular play, The Man Who Stayed at Home , written by Lechmere Worral and Harold Terry, and based squarely on scaremongering rumours. The piece was set in an East Coast boarding house kept by a woman whose first husband was a German general, and whose son was a spy at the Admiralty. The hero, a monocled fop, at one point accepts a white feather from his fiancée, which he puts into his pipe and smokes. He is able to risk doing so because, unbeknownst to his dearly beloved, he is busy breaking up a local spy ring. The play offered an abundance of cliché: there was a naturalized German governess and a Dutch waiter who kept pigeons, each with a map or message tied to its leg. Behind the fireplace lurked a secret wireless set, while a U-boat skulked offshore, awaiting the requisite signal. The play spawned a number of imitators. In Time of War offered a German princess-spy, who passed herself off as a nurse while adding poison to the hospital water filters. Even as late as October 1918 yet another melodrama set on the East Coast, The Female Hun , climaxed with a British general shooting dead his treacherous wife, less than half an hour after his butler had been shot as a spy.
The writer John Buchan took full advantage of the spy mania, and found a huge audience for his celebrated trilogy of Richard Hannay adventures: The Thirty-Nine Steps , Greenmantle and Mr Standfast . The first of these appeared in 1915, and swiftly elevated Buchan to the front rank of British novelists, although by day Buchan was variously employed as a journalist and propaganda writer. The bookâs central and complicated chase sequence offered a vivid image of Scottish glens bristling with enemy agents, while the rest is a potent cocktail of derring-do and high intrigue. The central premise on which the trilogy is based is given early in The Thirty-Nine Steps : âAway behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people.â At the centre of the web is a sinister master spy who has to be outwitted by Hannay, the heroic colonial adventurer. In Mr Standfast , published in 1918, Hannay is ordered to infiltrate a cell of pacifists in the fictional town of Biggleswick, where treason is afoot, and proceeds to âsink down deep into the life of the half-bakedâ. The books were skilfully written, and reinforced the popular myth of the ubiquity and cunning of German espionage networks â ruthless, exploitative, and endlessly wicked.
Arthur Conan Doyle also exploited the spy scare to bring Sherlock Holmes out of retirement for the second and last time. The short story His Last Bow was first published in the Strand Magazine and Collier âs in September 1917, and was originally subtitled âthe war service of Sherlock Holmesâ. The story itself is set at the beginning of August 1914 and concerns Von Bork, the chief German spymaster in Britain. On the eve of war Von Bork prepares to return to Germany with a rich haul of stolen documents, while awaiting the arrival of his chief informant, Altamont, who has gained possession of the key to the Royal Navyâs signal codes. When Altamont appears, however, he overpowers the German, ties him up, and is revealed as Sherlock Holmes. It transpires that Holmes has also netted all of Von Borkâs agents, and ensured that the information previously sent back to Berlin is entirely false. In the epilogue,
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