The forgotten William Le Queux - 13 May 1988

On the lid of my piano directly looking up at me as I picked out this week a couple of the old Irving Berlin waltzes there are three dragons – a large, puffing father dragon, I presume, flanked on his flanks by two child dragons.

They are the principal decoration of a long oblong box, a gold lacquered box on which the three gold dragons stand out sharply against medallions of black. The box is what used to be called a cigarette box, an artefact of an earlier civilisation by now almost as quaint as a hitching post or a codpiece. It stays there, empty, because it’s decorative and because it was a present from a man I’d interviewed, which in itself is a very rare bonus for an interviewer.

About 20 years ago, when U Thant, the very gentle man from Burma was coming to the end of his term as secretary general of the United Nations, I had the privilege of doing a television interview with him not, by the way, for broadcast. It was a film that would go, and went, into the archives of the UN. I’ve forgotten everything about it except one very slight, very off-hand, exchange which to me was astounding and to the onlooking crew quite incomprehensible.

The other morning after I’d read about the death, I suppose it’s true, of Kim Philby who is being called ‘the master spy of the century", I was reaching for the lush chords of Blue Skies and saw the gold box and the dragons as if for the first time. I remembered that odd, that astonishing, passing remark of U Thant.

We’d been talking about his early life in Burma. He’d gone to high school, then to the University of Rangoon, then became a schoolteacher, then a headmaster and so on. Before that, as a schoolboy what did he amuse himself with? He was not much of a games player. What did he read at home? He was apologetic to the point of shyness. He read, he said, history mostly. How about fiction? "I’m afraid," he said, "I was the only boy in the class who did not read Charles Garvice" and then, in a whisper, "and William Le Queux".

We chuckled, the crew looked stupid. Afterwards the producer, an enormously well-informed member of the secretariat said, “For the sake of the script we have to know about those names – Charles what? William what?" I wonder how many people listening to me now have ever heard of Charles Garvice. I’ll bet nobody much under 80, yet when I was a boy he was a novelist better known to most of the British population than Thomas Hardy or HG Wells.

I can find no mention of him in any encyclopaedia, almanac or any other book of reference. He wrote a great many slim novels palpitating with romance – what my headmaster called with a snort “housemaid’s literature” of a sort which would be quite different today. It would be infinitely more steamy, raunchy, feisty or however else you’d care to describe popular paperback erotic trash.

In the 1910s and on into the '20s no such popular literature existed or at least was offered for sale. Charles Garvice was the poor man’s – the poor girl’s – Charles Morgan. Perhaps that’s another name that has slid silently away into the oblivion that patiently but surely awaits all journalists, however famous in their time. Charles Morgan in the '30s was the dramatic critic of The Times – the London Times – but he also wrote a novel or two that received prizes and were thought of, particularly in France, as being fine examples of very high-toned contemporary English literature.

His most famous work was something called The Fountain. When it appeared here the wicked book critic of The New Yorker wrote, as I can never forget, this bland sentence, “To the casual reader the heroes of Mr Morgan’s novels appear to be committing adultery. They’re actually in pursuit of the Holy Grail.”

Well, in a more florid but no less genteel way that would be true also of the heroes of Charles Garvice. Even as schoolboys, schoolgirls, we superior beings mocked at Garvice and never read him, but about, I should think, 20% of the population did.

The incredible thing about U Thant’s remark was that it came from a Burmese. Way off there, a million miles from our life, was a brown schoolboy ashamed to reflect that he was the only boy in the class who did not read Charles Garvice - some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England. The remark, as I recall, greatly affected my subsequent conversation questions.

From then on, I assumed that U Thant had been brought up a child of the British Empire and there, under the burning sun, had learned to recite in school the poet’s picture of an English autumn, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. My assumption turned out to be correct.

When the interview was over and we retired to his apartment on the 38th floor of the UN building, I asked him again about William Le Queux. “That too,” he said, though of course he knew what William Le Queux was all about, then with a deprecating laugh, spies and cloaks and daggers and so forth.

So, well the gold lacquered box on the piano would never have flashed its message to me the other morning if the death of Philby had not triggered the name of William Le Queux. Ask any retired diplomat today – British, French, American – and I’m sure that if they’ve ever heard the name of Le Queux they would chuckle over it because his stuff was early spy melodrama of the most lurid, preposterous sort, a good deal less credible than the incredible exploits of James Bond, yet I discovered this only a few months ago.

This obsessed potboiler was responsible, as much as any single figure, for the creation, the development, of Britain’s first civilian intelligence agency. He is in Phillip Knightley’s classic history of spying, The Second Oldest Profession, the unwitting creator of what turned later into MI5 and 6, SIS and – by osmosis or imitation – the CIA.

Le Queux had a French father, an English mother, was educated in both countries and in his youth learned also to talk Italian and Spanish. He was born in 1864. He was, for a good stretch, a journalist, a foreign editor and a war correspondent. He certainly roamed all over Europe over the turn of the century and on into the years before the First World War.

Apart from his public persona as a journalist he developed a mystery man image. He became obsessed with spying which he saw as rampant in central urope, especially in Germany and German agents in Britain. All the espionage he dug into and elaborated in his popular novels was dedicated to one end – the invasion and conquest of Britain. This became a mania with him years before the Germans began to alarm Whitehall by building a formidable navy.

He bombarded the Foreign Office and the War Office with hair-raising reports, very confidential, outlining plans he said he’d picked up from the under-director of the Kaiser’s spy bureau. Le Queux saw, in his lively imagination, a huge and intricate network of German spies in England.

His stuff, his reports were so alarming, his prose so purple, his imagination so aflame, that he was dismissed in Whitehall as a crackpot, a maniac with a mission. He went so far as to send to the Foreign Office the transcript of a secret two-hour speech the Kaiser had delivered to his army and navy chiefs. There is no other record of this speech apart from Le Queux's record of it.

He followed this up with a long list of British traitors he said he’d had from a German spy. “I was aghast,” he wrote “at the sight of it”. It included officials of the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Admiralty, War Office and on and on. Nobody, rightly, would listen to him except an old and famous soldier, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, a hero of the Boer War and then in his 70s. He helped Le Queux write a fanciful version of a German invasion of Britain, foreseen as coming in 1910.

It was published in the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe’s first mass-circulation paper. The Prime Minister and many members of Parliament condemned it as sensational rubbish but it tickled and roused the paper’s readers and, in book form, sold over a million copies in many languages. In 1909 a second book, Spies of the Kaiser, did even better and finally infected the British public with the fever of Le Queux's imagination.

The same year a sub-committee of the committee of Imperial Defence held a secret meeting to try and lance the boil. It heard from a colonel who was close to Le Queux and he repeated much of Le Queux’s fiction, that were 5,000 German agents scattered throughout plotted districts the length and breadth of Britain.

Well, the sub-committee began by finding no independent evidence of any spies, they thought there might be two, say five. Eventually, through the colonel’s forced-feeding of Le Queux’s gaudy statistics they came to believe a great deal and set up a secret service bureau that would work independent of the Cabinet departments, so much on its own that later, during the First War, Lloyd George as Prime Minister never wanted to meet any of them.

It was a remote, dirty business not suitable for statesmen to know about but it grew and flourished underground, having direct contact only with the service chiefs. It was possible, even throughout the First War, for distinguished Cabinet members to know next to nothing about it – the SIS, which in time bred Kim Philby and more recently The Sandbaggers.

In a recent – here recent – episode of The Sandbaggers, Burnside the SIS Director, says, “There are no James Bond types in this service”. Kim Philby’s own physical manoeuvres may not have been as theatrical, but he was responsible for the deaths of very many British agents and for adventures as secret and murderous as anything dreamed up by William Le Queux, the improbable founding father of modern espionage.

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