The Vigilance Detectives
The first English network of communist espionage reporting to Moscow came into existence because of a commotion in a Pimlico side-street in 1909 some eight years before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Wolverhampton, Chatham, Hornsey and Bristol – not Cambridge colleges – spawned the earliest Soviet spy ring. Renegade policemen worked for Moscow first. The covert activities of these policemen and their journalist associates, and the way that MI5 handled them, is fundamental to understanding secret service priorities and techniques in the seventy years before the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The uprising of the Metropolitan Police
One night in the year of the foundation of the British secret services two patrolling constables detained two rowdy men who were ringing doorbells in Pimlico. The miscreants were taken to the local police station, where they were identified as neighbours who had been locked out by their irate wives after carousing too late at the pub. The Metropolitan Police inspector on duty that night at Pimlico, John Syme, sent the men home without charge. The rumpus ought to have ended there. Instead, it led to rebellion inside the Metropolitan Police, demonstrations, strikes and the first organized network of Englishmen spying for the Bolsheviks.
After Syme had rebuked the constables for being officious, they made counter-complaints against him. A tortuous disciplinary procedure ended with his demotion to the rank of sergeant. When he protested, he was suspended from duty for insubordination. In 1910 he was dismissed for declaring that he would take his grievances outside the force to his MP. Sir Edward Henry, the fingerprint pioneer who was Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, threatened resignation in 1911 when Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary, seemed inclined to reinstate Syme. In June that year Syme was arrested after sending a letter to Churchill which threatened murder. He was put under police watch lest he offer violence to King George V. He and his wife Nellie were evicted from their police flat. He protested at the Palace of Westminster. There were terms of imprisonment. Twice he went on hunger-strike. He was sent to Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum. Scotland Yard’s determination to crush a man who had, under stress, threatened violence is comprehensible: a barman shot and wounded Sir Edward Henry in 1912 after his application for a licence to drive a motor-bus had been rejected at Scotland Yard.
Jack Hayes, a Liverpool MP and former London policeman, using the language of racism and sportsmanship that connoted manliness to his generation, told the House of Commons in 1923: ‘Inspector Syme, one of the whitest men who ever wore a police uniform, a man who has undergone untold suffering, was really playing the game as an inspector of the Metropolitan Police.’ Three years after Syme’s death in 1945, his misfortunes were again debated in parliament. ‘I remember him away back in the years before the first world war – tall, fine, handsome he was, and … very clean in his character,’ said the communist MP Willie Gallacher. ‘Injustice wore down that strong body and practically destroyed the mind and soul of that fine man.’1
Syme’s treatment was seen as a travesty by many London policemen, who projected a workplace association to resist victimization and favouritism. The authorities responded in 1913 by forbidding policemen from union membership, under penalty of dismissal. Money became a pressing issue, too. Although policemen considered themselves to be a class above the urban labouring poor, they were paid at similar levels. From the declaration of war in 1914 to the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, the cost of living in London rose by 76 per cent but police pay by only 20 per cent. Policemen resented losing prestige to munitions workers earning three times as much. They fainted on duty from hunger.
These pressures led to the formation of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), which declared a strike in August 1918. Almost all of the 12,000 Metropolitan Police withdrew from duty. So, too, did the 1,200 men of the City of London force guarding the capital’s financial institutions. These police ‘revolters’ were, thought Hensley Henson, the politically minded bishop, ‘a very ominous sign of social disintegration’. The wartime coalition government, which feared that police disaffection would spread to the army, sent a detachment of Guards to protect Scotland Yard from the mutineers. Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, conceded most of the strikers’ demands on pay, pensions and war bonuses, and was understood by negotiators to have given an oral promise of union recognition. Sir Edward Henry, who had underestimated NUPPO’s support, was replaced as Chief Commissioner by General Sir Nevil Macready. Hayes and other policemen were soon riled by Macready’s declared intention to raise the force’s discipline to the standard of a Guards regiment.2
Hayes left the Metropolitan Police on his election as general secretary of NUPPO in March 1919. Born in 1889, he was one of the seven children of a police inspector at Wolverhampton, and had been educated in the town. At the age of thirteen he became a clerk with the Wolverhampton Corrugated Iron Company. By attending evening classes he learnt shorthand, book-keeping, accountancy and French. In 1909 he joined the Metropolitan Police, in which he reached the rank of sergeant within four years. He was an imposing man whose elaborate waxed moustache suggested vanity. The success of the 1918 strike imbued him with over-confidence. On the Sunday nearest to May Day in 1919 NUPPO assembled the largest crowd seen in Trafalgar Square for years. In addition to thousands of Metropolitan policemen, who marched along Whitehall bearing banners with defiant slogans, they were supported by crowds of colonial soldiers and by some sailors. The most insistent protesters were policemen who had recently been demobilized from regiments on the Western Front and found reversion to military drilling to be an intolerable prospect. Hayes denounced Macready to the demonstrators: ‘being an army officer, the Chief Commissioner was introducing a system not of discipline, but of tyranny, brutality and Prussianism’.3
The Police Act of 1919, which came into force in August, granted higher wages, but made it illegal (with a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment) for policemen to join a trade union concerned with pay, pensions and conditions of service. The government-subsidized Police Federation was formed. NUPPO responded by calling a national strike which flopped everywhere except Merseyside. There the strike endured for three weeks, during which troops made bayonet charges to quell looting in rough districts. When the Merseyside strike collapsed, every striking policeman there was dismissed with total loss of pension rights. Lloyd George said that ‘all England’ should feel indebted to Liverpool’s resilient municipal leadership. He saw Merseyside’s police strike ‘as perhaps the turning point in the Labour movement, deflecting it from Bolshevist and Direct Actionist courses to legitimate Trade Unionism. Had Liverpool been wrongly handled, and had the strikers scored a success, the whole country might very soon have been on fire.’4
All NUPPO activists in London were dismissed. Several of them, including its former general secretary James Marston, took jobs with the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS), the Soviet government’s commercial agency which opened in London in 1920 and acted as a front for espionage and subversion. Historians of British communism imply that these men were Special Branch plants, and mock ‘the wave of Bolshevism coursing through Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police at this time’, as if the recent victimization, strikes, demonstrations and dismissals were not sufficient causes of radicalization. Special Branch did have two informants planted inside ARCOS, Karl Korbs and Peter Miller, while MI5 had its own double agent embedded there, Anatoli Timokhin. None of them had been Metropolitan policemen.5
After the collapse of NUPPO, Hayes started the Vigilance Detective Agency, which was based at Clapton Common, where he lived. A festering shared grievance is a powerful unifier of men. Vigilance was manned by a rump of NUPPO loyalists, notably Walter Dale and Arthur Lakey. Dale became Vigilance’s
