Abstract
In 1870, the imperial French government of Napoleon III declared war on Prussia and her allies, but the Germans quickly annihilated the French army, invaded France, captured the emperor himself, and eventually conquered Paris. On 28 January 1871, French General de Valdan signed an armistice.1 Eleven days later, a British officer, Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney, submitted the outline of a short story entitled The Battle of Dorking to Blackwood’s Magazine where it was published soon afterwards.2 Chesney’s tale describes a successful German invasion of England, culminating in the rout and defeat of the British army at Dorking. Through the character of a veteran recalling the disaster for his grandchildren fifty years after the event, Chesney presented an invasion whose ‘coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind’.3 His message was straightforward. A false sense of security and lack of preparedness had caused British failure. The story, subsequently reprinted in more accessible book form, adopted the moral imperative of shaking the British people from national indolence.4
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Notes
Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 441.
Sir George T. Chesney, The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Ignatius F. Clarke, ‘The Battle of Dorking, 1871–1914’, Victorian Studies, 8 (June 1965), pp. 316f.
On Le Queux, see Norman St. Barbe Sladen, The Real Le Queux: The Official Biography of William Le Queux (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1938).
William Tufnell Le Queux, The Great War in England in 1897 (London: Tower Publishing, 1894).
William Tufnell Le Queux, England’s Peril: A Story of the Secret Service (London: F.V. White, 1899).
Andrew Boyle, The Riddle of Erskine Childers (London: Hutchinson, 1977), p. 134
Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903; London: Penguin, 1995).
Maldwin Drummond, The Riddle (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 181.
Thomas Fergusson, British Military Intelligence, 1870–1914: The Development of a Modem Intelligence Organization (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1984), p. 211.
John Gooch, The Prospect of War: Studies in British Defence Policy 1847–1942 (London: Frank Cass, 1981), p. 10.
John P. Mackintosh, ‘The Role of the Committee of Imperial Defence before 1914’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962), p. 494.
Nicholas Hiley, ‘Decoding German Spies: British Spy Fiction 1908–1918’, in Wesley K. Wark (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 58f. Predictably, this investigation led to nothing.
Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of Two World Wars (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972), p. 22.
Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 43.
Peter Padfield, The Great Naval Race: The Anglo-German Rivalry 1900–1914 (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), p. 256.
David James, Lord Roberts: A Biography (London: Hollis & Carter, 1954), p. 424.
R.J.Q. Adams, ‘The National Service League and Mandatory Service in Edwardian Britain’, Armed Forces and Society, 12 (1985), p. 62.
R.J.Q. Adams, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 34.
Howard Weinroth, ‘Left-Wing Opposition to Naval Armaments in Britain before 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, 6 (1971), p. 99.
W. Michael Ryan, ‘The Invasion Controversy of 1906–1908: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles à Court Repington and British Perceptions of the German Menace’, Military Affairs, 44 (1980), p. 10.
Edward Spiers, Haldane: An Army Reformer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980), p. 169.
Ruddock F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 382.
Andrew Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896–1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 136–8, 158.
Stephen E. Koss, Haldane: Scapegoat for Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 65.
For a discussion of the play, and its political context, see Nicholas Hiley, ‘The Play, the Parody, the Censor and the Film’, Intelligence and National Security, 6, 1 (1991), pp. 218–28.
John Gooch, The Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy c. 1900–1916 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 285.
Nicholas Hiley, ‘The Failure of British Counter-Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914’, The Historical Journal, 28, 4 (December 1985), pp. 835f.
Sladen, Le Queux, pp. 182f.; William Le Queux, Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (London: E. Nash & Grayson, 1923), p. 237.
Jean Graham Hall and F. Douglas Martin, Haldane: Statesman, Lawyer; Philosopher (Chichester: Barry Rose Law, 1996), p. 241.
PRO, CAB 16/8, ‘Conclusions of the subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence’, p. 4: ‘By means of this Bureau our Naval and Military Attachés and Government officials would not only be freed from the necessity of dealing with spies, but direct evidence could not be obtained that we were having any dealings with them.’ See also Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 123–34. Basil Thomson, the head of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, denounced humanitarians as ‘subhuman’.
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (5 vols, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927–1929), 1, p. 52.
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© 2004 Thomas Boghardt
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Boghardt, T. (2004). The Origins of British Counter-Espionage. In: Spies of the Kaiser. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508422_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508422_3
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