When Murrey Yeovil returns to London from a shooting holiday in Siberia, the changes are subtle but chilling. Continental cafes line Regent-Strasse, the German imperial eagle adorns every red post box, and walking on the grass in parks is ‘Verboten’.
Britain has fallen to the Kaiser.
Such is the doomsday scenario of When William Came, a 1913 fantasy novel by the Scots author HH Munro, better known as ‘Saki’. It is ripping thriller, but entertainment was never Saki’s primary purpose: like Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands and John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, When William Came was a bitter warning about Britain’s unpreparedness for war in the 1910s, the danger of German militarism, the real yet dread possibility of invasion by the Kaiser’s legions.
‘The 39 Steps’ would go on to be adapted numerous times.
That old adage, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’? The British spy thriller of the early 20th was the proof positive. It caused a change in Britain’s pre-WW1 military and naval policy. Strangest of all, the genre was directly responsible for founding MI5 and MI6. Life imitated art.
The man who started up the whole German-scare spy genre was one George Tomkyns Chesney, with The Battle of Dorking, published in 1871. Chesney’s yarn posits Britain falling to an unnamed power (but clearly Germany), which eliminates the Royal Navy with a mysterious wonder weapon. Weakened by cuts and diluted by garrisoning Ireland and India, the British Army is no match for the cruelly efficient enemy, which bests the narrator and his scratch force in an apocalyptic battle in the Surrey hills. Looking back on defeat, the narrator moans that Blighty’s undoing was its failure to enforce the ‘arming of its manhood’. The need for conscription would become a familiar trope of the genre.
Chesney was an Army colonel, the first of a regiment of soldiers and politicians who found the spy thriller a useful medium for airing their views. Indeed, as the cultural historian IF Clarke noted, the spy thriller (sub-genre: German invasion story) replaced the tract and pamphlet as the means by which the British elite debated its anxieties. Hundreds of other ‘The Germans Are Coming!’ spy novels swamped Edwardian Britain’s bookshops, in their own sort of invasion.
Well, the Kaiser’s regime was scary. All Europe had been shocked by Germany’s triumphal use of technology –telegraph, rail, and artillery- in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Hence the obsessive concern with futuristic weapons in invasion stories. In The Danger, a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a dastardly underwater boat brings Britain to its knees by sinking merchant ships, thus precisely anticipating the German use of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Great War. HG Wells’ The War of The Worlds, 1898, proffers the ultimate invasion consternation: Martians land in the Home Counties with an array of astonishing armaments against which the earthlings have no chance.
As time rolled on, there seemed more for Britons to be anxious about. The German Navy Law of 1898 commenced a ship-building programme to challenge the Royal Navy. Then, of course, the Army made a hash of the scrap against the insignificant Boers, which seemed to suggest imperial decline.
A 1909 Paulding Class Destroyer.
Panicky invasion tome succeeded tome, only challenging each other in the dullness of their titles. The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Quex is as narcoleptic as its handle suggests; it is also the most influential forgotten book in British history.
William Le Quex was the Frederick Forsyth, the Mick Herron, the John Le Carre of his day. He had a whole hive of bees in his bowler about the imminence of German invasion, and managed to persuade Lord Roberts of Kandahar to act as his military advisor on tales of Teutonic threats. ‘Bobs’ was Britain’s best-loved soldier, a winner of the VC, the ex-chief of the Army. He had a personal sword to sharpen; he was the head of the National Service League which campaigned for conscription. What better advert could there be for the NSL than a German scare yarn by Le Quex?
Le Quex and Bobs then had their light-bulb moment; they asked Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, to sponsor Le Quex’s novel. Northcliffe said ‘yes’, with two stipulations; he received the right to serialize the novel in his newspapers…and that the invading Hun horde passed through every sizeable town in Britain where the Mail needed a sales boost. Poor Royston in Hertfordshire was clearly a Daily Mail-free zone; it got absolutely blitzed before the Huns finally meandered their way around Britain to the capital. Which of course fell, because there was no mass conscript army to protect it. ‘If only’, woodenly lament the book’s characters ad infinitum, ‘we had listened to Lord Roberts.’
The Invasion of 1910 was published in 1906. In the neatest of advertising stunts, Northcliffe dressed sandwich board men as German soldiers, complete with spiked Pickelhaube helmets and Prussian blue uniforms, and marched them up and down Oxford Street.
Sales of the Daily Mail soared. Bound as a book, The Invasion of 1910 made a fortune for Le Quex. Over a million copies were sold.
Le Quex’s book rang alarm bells as loudly as it did shop tills. So deafening was the public anti-Hun clamour whipped up by The Invasion of 1910 that the Liberal government was forced to take notice. The 1906 overhaul of the Army by Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane, the increased spending on the Navy’s super battleships, the Dreadnoughts, were both stimulated by Le Quex’s thriller.
Government policy being dictated by spy novelists? It was too deliciously funny for a struggling young writer of school stories, called PG Wodehouse. You have probably heard of him. In The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England, Wodehouse rampantly parodies the invasion genre, with England generously invaded by Russia, Germany, the Mad Mullah, the Swiss, the Chinese, Monaco, the Young Turks, Morocco, and Bollygolla. ‘England’, noted Wodehouse dryly, ‘ was not merely beneath the heel of the invader: It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing room’.
PG Wodehouse reading PG Wodehouse
A nervous British public failed to see the joke, and Wodehouse moved on to more successful spoofing, that of the inter bellum aristocracy with Jeeves & Wooster.
Truth to tell, some bits of the British nation were getting in a paranoid lather. There were 57,000 Germans living in Britain…What if the secret advance guard of the Hun invasion was ALREADY here?
Fact and fiction became hopelessly elided. One MP seriously asked Haldane about the 60,000 German ‘reservists’ living in the Home Counties. Le Quex himself set up a private bureau to monitor German spies, with his vast readership employed as snoops. Tanked up on profiteering and patriotism, Le Quex penned Spies of the Kaiser, 1909 , a novel, he said, based on the damning evidence garnered by his agency of a German 5th column.
Spy mania hit the land. There were Pickelhaubes under every bed. Le Quex and his readers bombarded 10 Downing Street with sightings of ‘German agents’ . To appease Le Quex and his lobby, the government set up a sub-committee on counter-espionage. Fantastically, the sub-committee took its main evidence from Le Quex’s own files - the contents of which came direct from the author’s imagination. Reality was by-passed; Le Quex’s files were the original sexed up dossiers. Thoroughly convinced by Le Quex of Hun infiltration, the government approved the founding in 1909 of a new ‘Secret Service Bureau’, soon split into MI5, charged with counter-espionage at home, and MI6, tasked with running spies abroad. The agencies shared a spartan office at 64 Victor Street behind Buckingham Palace.
Placed in charge of MI5 was Major Vernon Kell, intellectual, asthmatic, with a penchant for a pince-nez. He diligently set to work. While Kell did not discover the mass spy-ring of Le Quex’s mad make-believe, he did find German spies. Between 1911 and the outbreak of war, 41 German agents in Britain were identified and arrested.
It is easy to be snide about Le Quex. I have done so above. But ponder this: At the start of the Great War the entire British Expeditionary Force was able to slip across the Channel unnoticed by Germany, and frustrate Berlin’s plans for conquest. The Kaiser was furious at the failure of German intelligence. ‘Why have I never been told we have no spies in England?’, he shouted. Well, there were no spies because they had all been rounded up by MI5.
And MI5 only existed because of a novelist. By the name of William Le Quex.
This is Part II of a 30 part series commemorating the 110th anniversary of WWI.