In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty that grew and shrank according to need. But there was no permanent, established capacity for espionage or counter-espionage, and no secret — or, as they came to be called, political — police.
By the time Melville died in 1917 there was M15 for counter-espionage, MI6 for espionage and the police Special Branch for conducting investigations and arrests. Melville, known within the intelligence establishment as M and in public as ‘the King’s detective’, was either formative or instrumental in the early work of all three. He was also a friend and admirer of Houdini and the case officer of Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’.
The impoverished baker’s son from Ireland joined the Metropolitan Police in 1872.
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