How a case of ‘spying’ in Rusper became the first MI5 investigation
The small village was the focus of Britain’s first secret service undercover operation after a ‘lady of high social standing’ revealed her suspicions to a friend of hers, a high-ranking officer in the Army
It is January 1910 and a ‘lady of high social standing in Surrey and Sussex… actuated by patriotic motives’ is meeting with a friend of hers, a highranking officer in the British Army, and has a conversation that will soon lead to the small village of Rusper becoming the focus of Britain’s first secret service undercover operation.
In 1909, the Admiralty and the War Office formed the joint Secret Service Bureau, later renamed MI5, to counter the activities of the Imperial German government. Major General Vernon Kell became the first head, codename of ‘K’.
When the unnamed ‘lady of high social standing’ made her report to her officer friend, Kell dispatched his assistant William Melville, codenamed ‘M’, to Rusper to investigate further.
The lady in question had visited Rusper Post Office and found two German men – named in the records only as ‘Herr A’ and ‘Herr B’ – having a discussion with the sub-postmaster about a foreign money order.
Things were clearly getting lost in translation and the lady, a skilled linguist, offered to render assistance. In so doing, she saw the order was made out to a German-Polish name, that the sender was also a Pole and that it had been sent from a town in southern France. Her suspicions were further aroused when she later learned the two men were living in the village but had ‘no visible occupation’.
Melville ascertained that Herr A arrived in November 1909 and immediately applied for rooms at ‘Mr X’s’, most likely The Star Inn, professing to have travelled from Monte Carlo and to have been recommended to Mr X by a Polish baroness. Mr X, probably George Fripp, the landlord, declared that he had never heard of the baroness before.
Nothing else of interest occurred until January 1910, when Herr B arrived from Nice and took up lodgings at The Star Inn, also on the apparent recommendation of the mysterious baroness. Both men pretended to be strangers to each other but seemed to be familiar with the other man’s business and personal affairs. When Melville arrived, Herr A was reported to have become ‘visibly disturbed… and cross-questioned the landlord very severely’ about the new arrival, and was particularly anxious to know if he understood any foreign language.
During Melville’s stay in Rusper, Herr A was regularly in receipt of registered letters from Germany and Herr B maintained a continuous correspondence with the mystery Polish baroness. However, shortly after Melville arrived, the men got into an argument, which both Kell and Melville believed was a ‘put up job’, and refused to speak to one another during the remainder of his stay.
Nonetheless, it was learned that the two men were regularly motoring between Rusper and various locations on the south coast and seemed to be keeping a record of the times and distances travelled. Furthermore, the men were known to have also visited key local landmarks and high ground, all of which ‘would be of the greatest value to an invading force advancing… between Dover and Portsmouth’.
It was also alleged that the men were gaining an ‘intimate acquaintance’ with the railway lines between the south coast and the major junctions at Guildford, Dorking and Tunbridge.
A similar case was being investigated at Frant and it was also theorised that a German cavalry officer who had taken up lodgings at East Horsley vicarage may have a connection to both cases. He was apparently on an educational visit to learn English but already had a ‘perfect’ grasp of the language.
Despite a lack of any actual evidence of spying, and suspicions being made mostly on paranoia than on any solid facts, Kell confidently concluded the investigations at Rusper and Frant had ‘justified’ the infant bureau’s existence and the bureau should be the sole body for investigating reports of spy activity.
Furthermore, Kell concluded the Rusper and Frant cases had provided ‘strong… evidence to the existence… of an organised system of a German espionage’. These conclusions were despite the fact ‘there are a good many links missing in the chain of circumstances’, but this was quantified with the statement ‘it does not require a very great stretch of imagination to insert connecting links of one’s own forging, thus producing a pretty strong chain of evidence, all emanating from… Germany, and ending in the same objective – the spying out of the land’.
Eddy Greenfield is a writer and historian, the author of A-Z of Horsham (Amberley Publishing, 2019) and Secret Arundel (Amberley Publishing, 2020). His next book, Battle of Britain: West Sussex is due for release by Pen and Sword in 2021.
It does not require a very great stretch of imagination to insert connecting links... thus producing a pretty strong chain MAJOR GENERAL KELL head of the Secret Service