In previous articles in this series I sketched the personality of Sir Basil Thomson, who was head of Scotland Yard in 1916 and the main interrogator of Roger Casement.  He was a man of remarkably wide professional experience and much intellectual curiosity.  He was also a gifted writer.

   Intellectually, Thomson was committed to defending the global power of capitalist and imperialist Great Britain (though already by the early 1890s he was worried about the Empire becoming over-extended).  He wanted to be, and he actually did become, a pillar of the English political and social system.  At the same time, he was one of the many Englishmen who were temperamentally ‘un-Victorian’, though not wanting to be seen as rebellious. 

   He came up against this problem as a writer: how could he circumvent the official cult of decency, so as to communicate all the spicy details about native society that he had learned as a colonial official in Fiji?  Most of this information was conveyed by an aristocratic Fijian woman whom he calls Lady Asenath.  She was a key witness at a Commission set up to enquire into the causes of a decline in the Fijian population, and she had much to say about the practices of native midwives and about native sexual customs.  (After a session with her, one of the Commissioners made a Victorian gentleman’s comment:  “Half of what she told us should be recorded in Latin!”  To which another replied:  “No, in Sanskrit!”)

   Lady Asenath was a fearless and free-spoken pagan, and the young colonial official admired her on a human level, without losing his sense of cultural superiority.  But how to transmit her knowledge to an English readership?  Thomson made a first attempt which was published in 1898, The Indiscretions Of Lady Asenath.  Though it contains some interesting materials, on the whole this book is a failure:  too much of it is on the level of schoolboy sniggering and hinting. 

   The author didn’t yet have the tricks of the trade. Ten years later he had acquired them, and they are on show in his substantial tome, The Fijians: A Study Of The Decay Of Custom (1908).

Uncensored Fiji

   The first essential thing is to claim the scientist’s or learned man’s  licence of free expression.  This is signalled already in Thomson’s title:  he is a serious ethnographer, and as such he may, of course, describe things that cannot normally be presented in printed matter.  Better still, some of his material falls into the category of medicine.  One of the members of the commission on Fijian population decline was a doctor, and he helped Thomson with the sections on midwifery.  With a judicious lacing of medical language, it was therefore possible to report all the intimate details, revealed by Lady Asenath, of how the Fijian midwives did their work.

   Since the 18th century at least, some of Europe’s learned pornography has been the work of doctors. (See Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians.)  In due course, some ethnographers began to plough a parallel furrow.  Thomson is careful not to be seen as self-indulgent, and it is only from certain tones in his language that one realises he is actually killing two birds with one stone:  while presenting ethnographic information, in the relevant sections of his book he is also trying his hand at erotic writing.

   Ethnography allows him to tell how the young Lady Asenath famously humiliated a voyeur.  But he throws in a small chunk of Latin (lest anyone might doubt that this was learned stuff):  in puris naturalibus, meaning ‘quite naked’:

   “Slightly clad as they are, Fijian women are as particular about absolute nudity as their European sisters.  A Mbau girl of rank who was bathing in the river discovered a young mountaineer spying on her from behind a clump of reeds.  Instead of concealing herself, as her instinct prompted her, she allowed him to see that he was observed and came out of the water before him in puris naturalibus.  Having passed him proudly by, she dressed herself leisurely and returned home to announce what she had done.  The man never held his head up again in that village, for he caught the meaning of the action—that he was of no more account to her than a pig who had strayed down to the bathing place.  To the Fijian mind no explanation was necessary” (The Fijians, p240).

   The following two passages are written entirely in Latin.  I give an English translation here:

   “Among certain tribes who inhabit the mountain regions, chief Vaturemba says, sexual intercourse is not done in the usual manner, except by older men.  (Instead) the man, kneeling down, lifts the woman’s legs and drags her until her buttocks are lying on his thighs, and intercourse is done in this position.  In a law case where an older man was accused of violating a virgin, the girl’s testimony was not clear regarding whether the accused had a genuine intention of deflowering her or not. The chief who was the judge asked, ‘Did he lift your legs?’  And when the girl said no, ‘Therefore, although he had a lecherous intention, he did not wish to deflower you’, said the judge” (p238).

   “The people of Vitilevu believe that no woman can become pregnant from one act of intercourse, and that a ruptured hymen can be repaired by the application of certain pounded herbs.  Hence virgins who are solicited to have intercourse more easily succumb” (p239).

  Thompson says furthermore, in the approved style of the learned pornographer:  “I must touch lightly on certain horrible forms of sexual exaltation provoked by carnage…”.  A Latin sub-clause is sufficient here, to describe how warriors who wish to violate the bodies of slaughtered girls prepare the corpses for what they wish to do (p240).

Thomson And Thelma

In December 1925 (four years after he had been dismissed as Director of Intelligence by Lloyd George, and when he was currently engaged full-time in writing), Sir Basil Thomson was charged with committing an act of public indecency in Hyde Park with a young woman named Thelma de Lava.  He was sixty-three;  according to one account I have seen, she was seventeen.  It appears that Thomson when arrested first made a clumsy effort to obscure his identity, and then an equally ham-fisted attempt to persuade the policemen to let him go and forget about it all.

   The two accused were supposed to appear together in court, but neither turned up on the appointed day.  (Thomson claimed afterwards he had gone to the wrong courthouse.)  Eventually they appeared separately on different days:  first Thelma, who pleaded guilty and was fined forty shillings. Thomson, on the other hand, pleaded not guilty. He said he was seeking information on vice in Hyde Park; this was part of his research for a book he was planning on the vice trade in London. 

   Testimonials to his character were given in court, including by his former colleague and close collaborator in the circulation of typescripts of ‘Casement’’s Black Diaries,  Sir Reginald Hall of Naval Intelligence.  (In fact, the preparation of Casement’s prosecution was mentioned in court as one of Thomson’s prime achievements.)  None of that impressed the judge, who found him guilty and fined him five pounds. 

   This story of a one-time top cop, in fact a celebrity cop, being nabbed while misbehaving in Hyde Park with a girl who might have been his granddaughter, was hilarious.  The press (including Time from across the ocean), the public, and the courtroom audiences, enjoyed themselves pitilessly.  Funniest of all when was Thomson’s appeal was heard a month later, and he claimed to have been set up by his enemies. 

   As a matter of fact, he probably was set up, by old rivals and foes in the police whom he had still been tormenting in his recently published books!  Some parts of the story are hard to explain otherwise.  In particular, why did his companion Thelma become so extremely affectionate at the very moment when a couple of bobbies were passing by? 

Unfortunately, the victim could name no names of his persecutors and did not have a single scrap of evidence!  To cap it all, Thelma turned up to confirm the prosecution’s story!  (I owe some of these details to an article by Mark David Kaufman of the United States Air Force Academy, published in James Joyce Quarterly Nos. 3-4, Spring-Summer 2020.)

   Because of the circumstances, everything Thomson said about the Hyde Park affair has been ridiculed.  Nevertheless, when he claimed to be doing research for a book on the London vice trade, I believe he was telling the truth.  Such a project made perfect sense.  The book would have fit very well into a series on crime/police matters, of which he had published at least four already.

    Thomson would have done his research thoroughly, maybe not always within the pedantic limits of the law.  He would have wanted the fullest information about services, prices, locations and conditions, and the general culture and vocabulary of the trade.  But of course he was the wrong kind of expert after his conviction for indecency!  The project had to be abandoned.  An interesting, possibly cross-genre book has been lost to the literature on 1920s London, no doubt about that .  .  .

   While Thomson continued to write for newspapers and journals, his career was over as a writer of ambitious non-fiction works on crime.  He was reduced to writing detective novels, for which he had little talent . I read about a third of one of them and gave up.

J. Arthur Maundy Gregory 

As far as I know, whenever he referred in writing to homosexual practices, Thomson expressed revulsion and detestation.  Privately, he may have been less judgmental and more curious.  He had one particular close friend and collaborator, J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, who would have been well qualified to satisfy his curiosity.

   According to his latest biographer, Andrew Cook, Maundy Gregory had “a passion for the work of Baron Corvo, the pseudonym of Frederick Rolfe. Rolfe had been a writer of cult novels and homosexual erotica”.  Gregory paid the huge price of £150 for a particular set of Rolfe’s letters.  “These were like Casement’s diaries in being mainly slavering descriptions of boys, but more literary and set in Venice”  (Cash for Honours: the Story of Maundy Gregory (Stroud 2008), pp146,147).

   This purchase was made in the late 1920s, when Gregory was aged about fifty.  One would assume that his tastes had developed much earlier, and that he was acquainted with a range of literary materials on the given theme.  Even as a student, he was known for haunting off-beat bookshops (Cook, p8).  During his time in London, the ‘dirty bookshop’ trade was on Charing Cross Road, near the Oxford Street end (where it had moved after the demolition of the famous Holywell Street in 1902);  for two years, 1910-12, Gregory had an office round the corner, in Oxford Street itself.

   In the vast and varied stock of Charing Cross Road there was surely something a bit less literary than Rolfe, a bit more blunt and explicit but on similar lines, something that could have served as a model for ‘Casement’’s Black Diaries.  And it’s odds-on that Gregory would have found it.

   When one seeks an equivalent of Maundy Gregory in our own times, the first name that springs to mind is Jeffrey Epstein.  Gregory was a man in the Epstein class.  The style was different, and the services that Gregory typically provided were more specialised.  But he knew an extraordinary number of prominent people and, on special occasions—like the evening before the Epsom Derby,—many of them might be found together at a dinner in the Ambassador Club, which he owned. 

   The pre-Derby dinner in 1931 featured two Dukes and several Marquises, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Viscount Craigavon;  Generals, Admirals, editors of daily newspapers, industrialists, bankers, people from the arts, policemen . . .  “More politicians, more Lords, more millionaires, philanthropists and opinion-formers than you could shake a stick at” (Cook, p167).

   At different times Gregory edited and published two magazines for snobs (Mayfair and the Whitehall Gazette), where suitable people could have flattering articles written about themselves if they paid for it! 

Before World War I he set up a detective agency to check on the identity, history and connections of hotel guests, for the benefit of hotel-keepers.  Unofficially, during the War, this agency became an extra branch of British Intelligence.  But none of these activities were what made Maundy Gregory famous.  He won fame as a salesman of titles.

   Political parties had a crying need for money, especially (though not only) Lloyd George’s party.  The simplest way to get money was to sell a place on the Honours List.  Prices varied.  In 1917 Lloyd George created the Order of the British Empire (OBE), apparently as a basic money-spinner;  by 1919 there were 22,000 holders.  An OBE could be got for a mere £100, but the big traditional titles were much more expensive.

   A knighthood, which was non-hereditary, cost £10,000.  A hereditary baronetcy could be got for £40,000.  Above that level were the peerages, which entitled those who held them to sit in the House of Lords.  A peerage might go for £80,000 or more.  Normally, only lower-level peers (meaning barons and viscounts, not earls, marquises or dukes) could buy their way in, but Lloyd George made opportunities at those levels . “Quite a few of the seventy three baronies Lloyd George created are suspect, as are some of the Lloyd George viscountcies” (Tom Cullen, Maundy Gregory, Purveyor of Honours (London 1974), p28).

   Lloyd George once privately remarked that politics had to be financed in one way or another, and he thought that doing it by selling titles was more desirable than having the American system, where the parties depended on contributions from the great Trusts.  In return, the Trusts would expect to have an influence on policy, whereas someone who demanded a say in policy on the grounds that he had bought a baronetcy could be told to go to Hell.  One might think that Lloyd George had a point! 

But respectable England, whipped up by the moralising press, believed that the honours trade was foul and filthy, and in 1925 the Government felt obliged to pass a law that made it illegal. 

   Even before the Honours Act, it was unsafe for party leaders and managers to involve themselves directly in such transactions.  They needed middlemen to do the advertising and selling.  Maundy Gregory was not the only such intermediary, but he was the most accomplished.

“Maundy Gregory’s niche in the Valhalla of con-men is unique.  He was not the first Englishman to sell royal honours, but he was by all odds the most successful—he sold more knighthoods and baronetcies than any other, and he got away with it for a long period of time”  (Cullen, p9).

But, even if he was a charming rogue and in some ways a con-man born, one must say that as an honours trader he usually gave value for money.  Or anyhow, his clients usually got the honours they paid for. He was part of the English political furniture. 

However, in the late 1920s the Conservative Party in particular began to worry about the huge extent of his transactions and the reckoning that might have to be paid in the end.

   The Conservatives planted a spy in Gregory’s office. They attempted to ruin his business by ensuring that honours were never given to anyone on his list.  Finally, in 1933, Gregory was charged with attempting to sell a knighthood to a Navy officer, in what Andrew Cook not unreasonably thinks was a sting.  Gregory, who knew that the prosecution had well-supported evidence, eventually pleaded guilty and was given a two-month prison sentence.  (He was the only man ever prosecuted in Britain for selling honours, which is probably still a flourishing trade.)

   The last part of the story is not the least astonishing. On the day of his release, in the early morning, Gregory was met at the prison by a Conservative party agent, who took him that same day to Newhaven and accompanied him on the ferry to France.  For the remaining eight years of his life he lived mainly in Paris, with a generous pension from Conservative Party special funds, on condition that he stay in France and keep quiet.  (Life in England, were he to choose that instead, was guaranteed to be horrendous, probably including more prison.)

   And so England banished its champion fixer to France, to save trouble for everyone. His exile, though, would be lived in comfort; money had been found for that.

Gregory In Wartime Intelligence

Andrew Cook’s biography of Gregory is a rather slovenly job, with many blunders, not least when he writes about Casement.  However, it includes some valuable information, especially about Gregory’s activities during World War I.  Previous writers often said that Gregory claimed to have worked in Wartime Intelligence, but that his claim was not otherwise supported.  (Richard Davenport-Hines, for example, writing the Gregory entry in the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography, very demonstratively gives the topic a single sentence: “Gregory claimed that after Mayfair folded he was engaged in espionage”.)

   Drawing on files that were declassified shortly before he wrote, Cook shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gregory during the War was involved with all three of the main Intelligence branches:  Scotland Yard, Naval Intelligence, and MI5. 

In particular, he was working closely with Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard, from 1914.  Thomson exerted himself in June 1916 to find £150 to pay Gregory for Intelligence-related work. Again, in 1917 Thomson did all he could to find Gregory some sort of position in one of the non-police Intelligence branches, so that he could avoid being conscripted.  This was unsuccessful, and Gregory apparently did a year in the Irish Guards, stationed at Caterham.

   After his demobilisation in February 1919, he found his feet very quickly.  Within six months he was installed in posh offices near the Houses of Parliament and ready to launch his second magazine for snobs, the Whitehall Gazette (which was also fiercely anti-Bolshevik, in line with the current obsessions of Basil Thomson).  It seems probable that Thomson wrote for it from the beginning, under a pseudonym—he certainly wrote for it post-1921, when he was no longer in the police (Cook, p94).

Gregory’s connection with Thomson therefore survived the latter’s retirement from the police, and it also survived the Hyde Park incident.  Late in 1932 Thomson was in the south of France, attempting to negotiate an expensive transaction of some kind—involving an artwork? a manuscript?— on Gregory’s behalf (Cook, p200).

The Mysterious Mr. Germain

But let’s return to the year 1916.  On June 22, 1916 Basil Thomson wrote to the head of MI5 asking for a contribution of £50, to help reimburse Maundy Gregory for expenses occurred in Intelligence-related activities since the beginning of the World War.  Scotland Yard and the Admiralty were also prepared to contribute £50 each.  Someone in MI5 grumbled that paying these amateur snoopers wasn’t worth it, but eventually they too coughed up, so Gregory got £150.

   For what? 

   In 1916! In June 1916!!  There’s something that leaps out at us. To do him justice, it leaped out at Andrew Cook:  

“What expensive work had Gregory completed in June of 1916? Could it have had anything to do with the trial of Sir Roger Casement?” (p38).

   Cook observes that the police appear to have told “a pack of lies” (p43) about how ‘Casement’s Black Diaries were discovered.  Basil Thomson gave five different published accounts of this, and a Scotland Yard subordinate of his, Inspector Parker, provided a sixth. 

Parker, in his Metropolitan Police report, focused on a mysterious “Mr Germain of 50 Ebury Street, Pimlico, SW”. 

   Casement had allegedly given his things to this Mr. Germain for safe keeping.  In May 1914 he handed over some boxes containing the Black Diaries.  Subsequently the diaries “were brought to New Scotland Yard by Mr Germain on the 25th April 1916”  (Cook p42, citing The National Archive MEPO 2/10672).

   So who was this Mr. Germain?  He cannot be found in street directories, which is odd.  “One does not normally leave incriminating documents for years on end in the care of a person who often moves house”, Cook remarks drily.  (For that matter, one would not normally leave documents as damaging as the Black Diaries in the care of anyone at all, not even of someone who was fully fixed and rooted!!  And especially not if one was about to consort with the enemy in wartime!!!)

   Anyhow, Mr. Germain is a problem.  Did he exist?  If he did exist, what was his real name?  Or was he merely a blind, “to conceal inferences that the British had been interested in Casement’s activities quite early in the war?” (p43).

   For my own part, I am inclined to think (perhaps others have suggested this already?) that Mr. Germain was one of Scotland Yard’s little jokes.  He was Mr. German—with an ‘i’ in the middle, perhaps representing Ireland!

   Incidentally, this is not the only dubious document dating from July 1916 supplied by this Inspector Parker, who may well have been producing official documentation on the Casement affair under Basil Thomson’s explicit direction.  In another document he claims to have taken “a diary and ledger” of Casement’s to Sir Ernest Blackwell, who wanted to show it to a Congo missionary— though what Blackwell himself said was that what he had to show was “many pages of closely typed matter”.  (See Jeff Dudgeon’s letter in the May issue of Irish Political Review, and Jack Lane’s reply.)

What was Maundy Gregory Paid For?

Anyhow, Andrew Cook speculates that Mr. Germain may have been a blind, used by the police.  His role may have been to divert attention away from certain activities of Maundy Gregory, and from the real story of the finding of the Casement diaries:

   “Gregory could have had something to do with the retrieval of the diaries.  He had a contact at the Victoria end of Ebury Street—Mr Goring of the eponymous hotel…  If Gregory had been prompted to snoop in Ebury Street by the police it seems unlikely he would have missed the advantage to himself in taking the diaries into his personal custody.  Would he have parted with them for £150?” (pp42-3).

   Now, I can believe that Basil Thomson was capable of much unorthodox conduct.  But to imagine that Thomson would have employed Gregory, who was not even a member of the police force, to do furtive ‘snooping’ on the former lodgings of a man known to be working with the Germans, rather than raid that premises with full police authority;  would have winked at Gregory taking that man’s diaries into his personal possession;  and would have whipped around the other two major Intelligence branches for money to pay the diaries’ possessor to surrender them to the police—these notions are ludicrous!  They are so utterly ridiculous, one might wonder how the author of an interesting book that has much to do with police matters comes to publish them under his name.

   There’s a simple explanation. Cook is avoiding a much more obvious and reasonable possibility, which he doesn’t want to have to consider seriously.  It is the possibility that the work for which Maundy Gregory received £150 from the Intelligence services was the forging of the Black Diaries.

   “Were the diaries forged—by Maundy Gregory… or anyone else?” (p41).  Cook does at least ask the question.  But, having asked it, he immediately tries to close it down, citing Peter Singleton-Gates and Brian Inglis and what he supposes to be “the overwhelming consensus” that the diaries were genuine.

He does bring up some interesting and relevant matters, but he fails to get a proper hold on them. 

   An example is what he has to say about Basil Thomson’s five different accounts of how the Black Diaries were discovered: 

“In every case the discovery happens so soon after the arrest that there is no time for forgery” Cook remarks (p43). 

But, while this is true technically, in one particular case it happens to be totally incredible.  “Some months earlier”, Thomson says in Queer People (1922), p90, “when we first had evidence of Casement’s treachery, his London lodgings had been visited and his locked trunks removed to New Scotland Yard”. 

   Sure enough, in the next sentence, one is given to understand that in all this time the locked trunks had not been opened, and the arrested Casement was asked politely whether he had the keys!  

But this is putting a large strain on the reader’s credulity.  It would be more reasonable to believe that the police seized Casement’s locked trunks in late 1914, and not just seized them but opened them, and found diaries. 

   Diaries of what kind?  If they were the Black Diaries, the police kept a most remarkable hush about this until well into 1916.  But, if they were diaries similar to Casement’s Berlin diaries, or the Amazon diary of his that does not have graphic sex content, then there was plenty of time to conceive the idea of forgery and to plan it.

   “We had been expecting Casement’s arrival for many weeks” (before his arrest), Thomson says in Queer People (p88).  In fact, his arrival at some point, without definite timing, must have been thought a strong likelihood for many months.  There was time to study his diaries and gather other usable materials about him.  (We know that the Admiralty was gathering such materials in 1915.) 

   If a forgery was gestating, then in whose mind, or minds?  The Intelligence branches had a great deal of talent during World War I, and probably there will always be rival candidates.  To me, everything suggests that Basil Thomson must have been the mastermind. 

But there’s much to be said for a combination of Thomson’s vision and Maundy Gregory’s specialist knowledge and skills.

                                           * * *

My argument here is entirely independent of the story told by Donald McCormick in Murder By Perfection.  McCormick worked for British Intelligence in the last years of World War II, and maybe afterwards.  He knew that world of professional liars and forgers, and also investigators (spies) who seek to discover concealed truths.  It’s a world where it isn’t easy to know who is what, or who is being what.

   Afterwards McCormick became a popular historian, writing books about famous crimes, unexplained deaths etc. A History Of The British Secret Service, which he wrote as ‘Richard Deacon’, is a wonderfully readable survey of that topic.  But McCormick/Deacon has been accused of fabricating large parts of his histories, and this accusation has been directed particularly against Murder By Perfection. 

McCormick claims, or suggests, that Maundy Gregory committed two perfect murders.  One of them does not concern me here.  The second alleged murder was of a man called Victor Grayson, formerly a radical socialist politician who was briefly an MP, afterwards a World War I pro-war propagandist and soldier, and for a couple of years after the War a mysterious reclusive writer.  In September 1920 or thereabouts, aged thirty nine, he disappeared. He was never verifiably seen again.

   According to McCormick, Victor Grayson had threatened to expose Maundy Gregory on two counts:  firstly, he was a salesman of British honours;  secondly, he had forged the diaries of Roger Casement.  Gregory, then, may have murdered him to shut him up.

   Andrew Cook and others have argued that this is pure fiction and fabrication. I will look at the matter in a future article.

John Minahane