Ace of Spies (2 page)

Although Reilly was a spark or catalyst for Fleming’s ‘Master Spy’ concept, Bond’s personality was a fictional cocktail, culled from a range of characters, including Fleming’s own.
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There are certainly threads of Reilly’s hard-edged personality to be found in the Bond who inhabits the pages of Fleming’s books. The literary Bond was visibly a much darker, more calculating and altogether more sinister character than his big screen counterpart, who has tended to dilute Fleming’s original concept over the years.

Like Fleming’s fictional creation, Reilly was multi-lingual with a fascination with the Far East, fond of fine living and a compulsive gambler. He also exercised a Bond-like fascination for women, his many love affairs standing comparison with the amorous adventures of 007. Unlike James Bond, though, Sidney Reilly was by no stretch of the imagination a conventionally handsome man. His appeal lay more in the elusive qualities of charm and charisma. He was, however, equally capable of being cold and menacing. In many ways, the closest modern fictional character to resemble Reilly is Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in
The Godfather
, a man of
controlled coldness and deadpan cal-culation. Like Corleone, the equally calculating Reilly had a powerful hold over women — or, at least, a particular kind of woman — which he never failed to exploit.

But who was Sidney Reilly and what were the forces that drove him? To lovers, friends and enemies alike, Reilly remained a mystery. In spite of the many books that have been written about him, often themselves making contrary claims, major questions still remain unanswered about his true identity, place of birth and the precise facts surrounding his disappearance and death. During his life Reilly laid an almost impenetrable fog of mystery and deception around his origins as he adopted and shed one identity after another. Those who entered this ruthlessly compartmentalised life knew only what Reilly himself had told them.

Over a century of falsehood and fantasy, both deliberate and intentional, has obscured the real Sidney Reilly. Reilly’s tendency to be something of a Walter Mitty character, telling tall tales of great espionage feats, has only added to the legend and muddied the water still further. To piece together an accurate picture of his extraordinary life it has been necessary to shed all preconceptions and to return to square one, starting from scratch in gathering together as many primary sources as possible.

The ability to draw on many classified, restricted and hitherto unpublished sources in Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, Poland, Ukraine and the United States has helped this task immeasurably. The descendants of a number of those who played key roles in Reilly’s story have also been tracked down and interviewed. Their help in particular has provided many of the missing pieces in the jigsaw of his life, and revealed for the first time how he was propelled at the age of only twenty-five into the life of an international adventurer.

Of Newhaven there is little to say, except that in rough weather the traveller from France is very glad to reach it, and on a fine day the traveller from England is happy to leave it behind.
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T
hese rather unflattering words were written by the travel writer E.V. Lucas in 1904. However, it is often in unremarkable places such as this that some of the most remarkable things happen. Indeed, some six years before Lucas wrote these words, Newhaven’s London & Paris Hotel was the unwitting host to an event that was to have far reaching repercussions, not only for a twenty-four-year-old heiress, but also for a man who was to become the epitome of the twentieth-century spy.

Incorporated into the design of Newhaven Harbour Station, the imposing three-storey stucco building was luxuriously furnished with thirty bedrooms and was everything the discerning Victorian traveller could possibly want or expect. It was here, at the quayside platform on the afternoon of Friday 11 March 1898, that a sixty-three-year-old invalid was helped down from the train into his wheelchair. Accompanied by his nurse, Anna Gibson, the Reverend Hugh Thomas
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proceeded to the reception desk to announce his arrival. He and the nurse had booked two rooms up to and
including Monday 14 March, when his twenty-four-year-old wife, Margaret, was due to arrive from London. The three would then take the 11.30 a.m. boat train to Paris en route to a holiday in Egypt.

Despite the trappings of her social status, Margaret may well have felt that a part of her life was somehow empty. It was almost certainly her need for attention and affection that ultimately led her to respond to the overtures of Sigmund Rosenblum, of the Ozone Preparations Company.
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Hugh Thomas and Sigmund Rosenblum first met in 1897. Thomas, a sufferer from Bright’s Disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys, was one of many who succumbed to the siren voice of the patent medicines popular at the time, peddled by companies such as Ozone Preparations Company as offering miracle cures. These companies’ claims were greater than those of conventional medicine, who only prescribed bed rest, a low protein diet, massive doses of Jalap, and blood letting – the attraction of patent medicines to sufferers such as Thomas was obvious.

Hugh Thomas and Sigmund Rosenblum met regularly throughout 1897 at the Manor House, Kingsbury, and at 6 Upper Westbourne Terrace, London. Indeed, it was at the Manor House, in the summer of 1897, that Thomas introduced Rosenblum to Margaret.
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It has been claimed that the Thomases first met Sigmund Rosenblum in Russia, during a tour of Europe they undertook in 1897.
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It has been claimed, too, that Margaret’s relationship with Rosenblum developed as he accompanied them from hotel to hotel on a melodramatic journey back to England.
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The facts, however, tell a very different story. Although a passport was not as necessary as it is today for foreign travel, to enter Russia, Hugh and Margaret Thomas would most certainly have required one. British passport records show, however, that the Thomases never at any time applied for, or were ever granted, passports for Russia.
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Furthermore, Thomas household records make no reference to any foreign trips or holidays undertaken in 1897, although in December of that year, plans were made for a holiday in Egypt the following March.

Whose idea this Egyptian holiday was we do not know. Whether these plans were made with a straightforward holiday in mind or something a good deal more sinister is very much dependent upon one’s interpretation of the evidence.
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What we do know, however, is that the planning, arrangements and bookings were made by Margaret, as Thomas Cook records show. Shortly before their departure, Margaret arranged an appointment for her husband and herself to visit a local solicitor. On Friday 4 March they made their way to 13 St Mary’s Square, Paddington, a short distance from their home. Before a clerk, Hugh Thomas appointed the Thomas family solicitor, Henry Lloyd Carter, and Margaret as his Executors. The Will itself declared the following:

I direct that my funeral and testamentary expenses and debts be paid. I give devise and bequeath to my said wife for her own absolute use and benefit all my real estate and the residue of my personal estate and all the property over which I have any power of disposition and whereas in the event of issue being born to me of my said wife Margaret such issue will under the Will of my late uncle, Hugh Thomas of Trevor Anglesey aforesaid become entitled to certain real estate and personal estate. Now I hereby declare that the gift devise and bequest to my said wife here in before contained shall include all real and personal estate which I may have power to dispose of as heir at law or next of kin of any such issue as aforesaid and I give devise and bequeath the same to my wife accordingly for her own absolute use and benefit.
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Margaret also made a Will, assigning Henry Lloyd Carter as Executor. On the morning of Friday 11 March, exactly one week after making the Will, Hugh Thomas and his nurse, Anna Gibson, left Upper Westbourne Terrace bound for Victoria Station. Arriving at Newhaven Harbour Station during the late afternoon, their trunks were put into storage and the hand luggage taken to their adjoining rooms. Little did Hugh Thomas know, as he retired to bed early, that he had less than twelve hours left to live.

Saturday 12 March was a cold and wet day and the Reverend Thomas and his nurse were confined to the hotel. He retired to bed shortly before 11.00 p.m. It was early the following morning that John Simmons knocked on the door of the Reverend Thomas’s room; being an invalid, he had ordered breakfast to be served in his room. Getting no reply to his knocking, Simmons used his key to open the door. Inside the room was dark and seemingly all was normal.

Having seen a good number of slumbering guests in the three years he had worked at the hotel, Simmons’ instinct quickly told him that something was not as it should be. He therefore rushed from the room to alert the hotel manager, Alfred Lewis.
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It took a further half-hour before Lewis telephoned the Newhaven police to report that the Reverend Hugh Thomas had been found dead in bed. This was probably because his first reaction was to summon the Reverend’s nurse and a doctor, who by chance was also staying at the hotel, having arrived late the previous evening. Dr T.W. Andrew examined the body of Hugh Thomas and spent some time talking with Anna Gibson, the nurse, before advising Lewis that the death was the result of heart failure.

Hugh Thomas’s body was taken to a Chapel of Rest, and it may well have surprised the undertaker that, on her arrival the next day, Margaret voiced her intention to have her husband taken back to his place of birth in Anglesey for burial, rather than to London. What might have surprised him even more was the speed at which Mrs Thomas wanted the arrangements made. Eight to ten days was not an unusual period of time from death to burial in 1898, yet Margaret wanted a funeral on Wednesday 16 March, which gave the undertaker a mere day and a half to carry out the necessary rituals, make a coffin and convey the body to its final resting place in Llansadwrn Church Yard.
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Not surprisingly, Hugh Thomas’s death caught the attention of the local press, much to the concern of Alfred Lewis, the hotel manager, who no doubt resented the unwelcome attention such a story brought to his hotel. It is interesting to note that one
journalist referred in his account to the fact that ‘a young medical man having been able to certify the cause of death, it was not deemed necessary to hold an inquest’.
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Six weeks later, probate of the Will of Hugh Thomas was granted to Margaret, who became the inheritor of £8,09412s (something in the region of half a million today). If Henry Lloyd Carter, Hugh Thomas’s solicitor and co-executor of the Will, had any doubts arising from the fact that the Reverend had expired within nine days of writing the Will, or indeed the fact that he was buried within three days of his sudden death, he did not say so publicly, and possibly did not say so privately either. Had he done so, and the authorities had conducted an investigation, what would they have discovered?

The police would, initially, have wanted to be sure about the cause of death. According to Dr Andrew, the cause of death was ‘Influenza Morbus Cordis Syncope’, which essentially means ‘influenza; a fainting of the heart’.
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It is as non-specific a diagnosis as is possible to record and most certainly one that would not be acceptable today. It could encompass virtually any heart condition, and taken literally and logically means quite simply that death occurred because the heart stopped beating!

The police would therefore have wanted to establish a more precise cause of death. They would have wanted to interview the Reverend Thomas’s own doctor about his general state of health, and most certainly Dr Andrew. It would have been at this point that what began as a routine enquiry would have turned into something more serious, for they would quickly have discovered that no such person as Dr T.W. Andrew MRCS actually existed.
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The Royal College of Surgeons, with whom Andrew claimed membership, would have confirmed that no one of that name was a member of the college. The General Medical Council would have consulted its register, which listed all doctors authorised to practice medicine in Great Britain. No T.W. Andrew MRCS would have been found there either. The police may well have contacted Dr Thomas Andrew LRCS, the only T. Andrew on the register.
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Hugh Thomas during his tenure as Vicar of Old Newton, Suffolk (c.1860).

They would have found that this sixty-one-year-old doctor from Doune in Perthshire had not crossed the border into England during the entire thirty-six years that he had been practising medicine. Besides which, it would have been very obvious that this elderly Scotsman could not possibly have been the ‘young medical man’ referred to by the
Sussex Express
or the man recalled by Louisa Lewis, the daughter of the hotel manager.
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