Kerry GAA fanatic was real spy chief behind Bond’s M
As new 007 arrives, Irish spy’s heroics form fascinating backdrop to franchise
AKERRYMAN the inspiration for James Bond? Preposterous! Well, no, actually. With the hugely anticipated new 007 film, Spectre, arriving in cinemas soon, the relatively unknown story of one of the great spymasters of modern times is a tale that competes easily with Bond’s exploits – and without any of the fiction.
William Melville, born in 1850 in the tiny hamlet of Direenaclaurig Cross, near Sneem, led a life packed with more villains and global intrigue than Bond author Ian Fleming could dream of. In the aftermath of the Famine, there was little future for Melville in the family’s small bakery, forcing him, like many others, to take the emigrant boat to England.
Joining London’s Metropolitan Police, the quietly spoken Kerryman rose quickly to the top of the force and eventually capped his stellar career by becoming England’s top spymaster at the formation of the Secret Service. Melville was even known as ‘M’– a shadowy title in an era of danger that would later inspire the many adventures of Fleming’s agent ‘with a licence to kill.’
In 1903, the British War Office set up a Directorate of Military Operations, head-hunting Melville to act as a controller of a web of agents spread across Europe and the Middle East. In later years, the Directorate grew into the Secret Service Bureau, established into home and foreign sections, known as MI5 and MI6.
‘Melville was referred to by the War Office as “M” or “the Spy-master” from almost the beginning,’ explains Andrew Cook, author of M: MI5’s First Spy-master.
During a career blistering with more excitement than those famous mous 007s, Sean Connery and Daniel niel Craig, put together, ‘Melville of the Yard’, as the 19th- Century pressress dubbed him, gloried as a central tral player in preventing the Jubilee ee Plot assassination of Queen n Victoria; thwarting a number of f the Fenian bombing campaigns; tracking the man many believed was Jack the Ripper; becoming the confidant of the Russian Tsar and Harry Houdini; and constructing the first European network of spies ahead of World War I. In his obituary, entitled d ‘Death Of A Great Detective’ by y the London Times, he was lauded d as ‘an officer of whom any police ce force of any country might well be proud.’
ONE of the striking issues sues in the Melville storyry is the irony that here was an Irish Catholic, who was proud of his Irish identity, defending Britain from terrorist threats that included Irish terrorism,’ says Kerry County Museum curator Helen O’Carroll.
A 2007 exhibition at the museum ‘helped illuminate the fascinating history of this forgotten figure,’ she has added.
In a London constabulary where 6 per cent of the force were of Irish descent, Melville’s innate talents of deduction and dogged pursuit saw him quickly promoted from a ten bob-a-week bobby on the beat to detective sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department.
By 1883, he was recruited into the Special Irish Branch, set up to combat the Fenian ‘Dynamite War’, ending in the 1887 plot to bomb Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations.
Melville also found himself involved in the Jack the Ripper hunt – one of London’s most notorious murder sprees in the late 1880s. The Kerryman singled out an American quack doctor, Francis Tumblety, as his chief suspect, pursuing him to France, only to be foiled by the tardiness of the authorities at Le Havre, who allowed the suspect slip away due to lack of paperwork.
The murders i n Whitechapel ceased after Tumblety took flight, and further Ripper- style killings continued i n various American towns he subsequently lived in.
At a time when weekly penny crime novels and the exploits of Sherlock Holmes captured i maginations, Melville’s exploits made him a perfect Fleet Street hero. When he arrested anarchist bomber Théodule Meunier at Victoria Station, the Frenchman vainly tried to drag him under the moving wheels of a locomotive, screaming: ‘To fall into your hands, Melville! You, the only man I feared, and whose description was engraved on my mind!’
The Kerryman’s reputation as one of England’s most effective policemen saw him frequently requested to lead the security teams protecting visiting royalty to London.
Prestigious though the assign- ments may have been, they came with very real danger attached given the spate of assassinations during the decade – French president Marie Carnot in 1894, the Spani sh prime minister Antonio del Castillo in 1897, Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, and King Umberto of Italy in 1900.
Tsar Nicholas II was so grateful for Melville’s tight security on a private tour of London’s criminal underworld, the Russian monarch gifted the Kerryman a gold Fabergé cigarette case. Quick to exploit any opportunity for professional advancement, when Harry Houdini performed at the Alhambra Theatre, Melville befriended the escapologist, later teaching Houdini’s lock-picking techniques to MI6 agents.
Always mindful of his roots, however, Melville returned to Kerry at regular intervals, where the Weekly Reporter Commercial Advertiser noted his prowess as ‘one of the best hurlers in South Dunkerron in his youth’. A prominent supporter of the London Gaelic Athletic Society, his home in Clapham was called Kenmare. In 1903, Melville put the international press in a spin by announcing his retirement at just 53. Amidst the barrage of stories following the news, he told the Daily Express: ‘I am still in London, quietly enjoying what, after 30 years of occasional excitement, I consider to be my well-earned retirement.’
THE truth was very different. The Kerry native would finish his glittering career with the Directorate of Military Operations, MI5 and MI6, as the nation’s chief intelligence gatherer while the storm clouds of World War I began to gather across Europe.
At the secret agency hidden at an anonymous address on Victoria Street, Melville would henceforth be known only as ‘M’.
‘Few men at this time were better known in London than I was,’ he wrote years later. ‘ Yet during the years I was at Victoria Street I never met any person going in or coming out who knew me.’
Among the rich cast of characters M would cultivate as espionage agents was one Sigmund Rosenblum, a Russian émigré married to a wealthy heiress. Crafting a new identity for his most promising protégé, Melville named him Sidney George Reilly, using his own wife’s maiden name. Over the next decade, Reilly became MI6’s main source of intelligence in the Far East and Russia.
At one point, he was part of the plan to infiltrate the Bolshevik hierarchy, along with Somerset Maugham, Arthur Ransome and Robert Bruce Lockhart. Lockhart would eventually document their adventures in his 1932 book, Memoirs Of A British Agent. His son Robin wrote the 1967 book, Ace Of Spies, on which the long-running TV series with Sam Neill was based.
‘Ian Fleming had worked in naval intelligence during World War II and became familiar with the early history of the British secret service, including the practice by which agents were referred to using the first letter of their surname,’ says Helen O’Carroll. ‘The connection between William Melville and M in the Bond films is not a big leap.’
Up until his death from kidney failure in 1918, Melville continued to shape the foundations of modern espionage, running an elite spy academy where degrees were awarded for covert surveillance, dead letter drops, lock- picking, and, of course, how to kill most effectively.
As a Kerryman at the very heart of the British Empire, he had surely come a very long way from his roots at Direenaclaurig Cross. ÷ Spectre opens in cinemas here on October 26