31 May 2023
By William O’Chee
William O’Chee continues the story from yesterday of Alfred Roy Sparkes, the schoolboy rower and putative schoolboy spy.
In April 1914, Roy Sparkes embarked with a group of other cadets under the command of Captain Alexander Rushall for a military tour of Europe which was expected to take several months. They had enjoyed a grand time over the summer and had visited Rome, Naples, Milan, Venice, Berne, Lucerne, Paris and Brussels, although they had been barred from entering Germany. By July they were in England, but events were overtaking them, as England, France, Germany and Russia all mobilised for war.
Despite their grandiose title, Rushall’s small contingent of Australian Mounted Training Corps – at times called the Australian Mounted Cadets – was an unofficial militia group and privately funded. The parents of each of the boys paid £150 towards the cost of the trip, which was no small sum.
As war loomed, Rushall seized the opportunity to offer the services of his troop for the war in France, but they were too young, and this was refused. They therefore did what all good cadets would do, and burned the Kaiser in effigy, as was reported in the press.
A fellow cadet, James Hendy, attended Geelong College from 1908 until 1913. Some years later, in February 1932, The Geelong Advertiser described the events of the day:
In London on the night of the declaration of war, the cadets, with the verve usually attributed to young Australians, led throngs of people singing patriotic songs in Trafalgar Square and afterwards were in the forefront of a crowd which went to Buckingham Palace and called the King and Queen and members of the Royal family, who acknowledged the plaudits.
Whether filled with patriotic zeal, or other motives, Rushall was not happy to just burn the Kaiser’s effigy when war was to be had. He was also a consummate networker. Through his connections in the Freemasons, he persuaded the Ulster Unionist MP, Mr Hugh Barrie, to put a Question on Notice to the Secretary of State for the Colonies as to “…whether the services of the members of the Australian cadet company now visiting this country have been offered to the Government, and have they been accepted?”
The Rt. Hon. Lewis Harcourt MP replied:
Captain Rushall, the officer in charge of the contingent of Australian Mounted Cadets at present in this country, has offered his services and those of the contingent to His Majesty’s Government for the remaining period of their stay in England. This generous offer has been communicated to the War Office, and I am at present in communication with the Department with a view to the employment of this efficient body upon some useful and congenial duty.
At the time, Britain was seized with rumours of German spies, secret German gun platforms in the heart of the Home Counties, and secret German Zeppelin bases. Preposterous though it now seems, the Zeppelin menace was taken seriously, and German airships were being reported all over the country.
Since they were cadets, the task of finding “some useful and congenial duty” for them landed on the desk of Major-General Frederick Heath-Caldwell, who was then the Director of Military Training. He dispatched them to the Northeast of England in search of the Zeppelins.
Rushall and his cadets sped there with all haste, and after meeting with the Chief Constable of Preston Police, Rushall sent a report to the General on the 15 October 1914, stating reports “… contain very clear evidence of the presence of aircraft in this and surrounding district of Westmoreland….”
The Geelong Advertiser takes up the story:
They were engaged by the War Office to do secret service work in the north of England, one of their tasks being to search for supposed petrol bases for Zeppelins. On one occasion they heard that there was a spy at Arnecliffe (in the Yorkshire Dales), and with the object of setting him by the heels they trudged miles over the snow, only to find when they arrived that he had gone.…
This went on for some months, during which the cadets were given the British army pay of 1s 9d per day, but no Zeppelin bases were discovered, and eventually passage was found for them to return to Australia.
In his paper, “Constructing the Enemy Within: Rumours of Secret Gun Platforms and Zeppelin Bases in Britain, August- October 1914”, military historian Dr Brett Holman observes that in reality, “no hostile aircraft flew over British territory before 24 December 1914, when a lone German seaplane dropped a single bomb on Dover; the first Zeppelin raid did not occur until 19 January 1915, when three naval airships attacked Norfolk.”
As the boys were given military pay, the question remains, were they engaged by British Intelligence? Based on the words of Sparkes and Hendy, they clearly believed they were doing secret service work, although whether that came from Rushall or from on high, is unclear.
The facts lie in an examination of British Intelligence as it was at the time. At the beginning of the war, there was no Directorate of Military Intelligence, so intelligence and security operations were part of the Directorate of Military Operations. Each of its branches was given an M.O. designation. M.O. 5 subsumed the old Secret Service Bureau and was given all secret service work.
Within this, M.O. 5(g) under then Major Vernon Kell undertook all the investigative tasks, and was responsible for counter-espionage, aliens, and control of civilian overseas traffic. In August 1914, its staff comprised nine army officers, three civilians, four clerks and three police. They were responsible, inter alia, for the 42,000 German and Austro-Hungarian males then in the United Kingdom, with the focus on espionage and suspected persons.
Searching for enemy air bases and the like was known as field security and was the responsibility of the military police and other army units in each command, which is why Rushall had been encouraged to report to the General Officer Commanding for Western District, General Sir William Henry Mackinnon, and not to M.O. 5(g).
That is why McKinnon did not see searching for secret Zeppelin bases as a secret service task, but a field security one. In addition to Rushall’s cadets, he used reservists from the Cumberland and Westmorland Yeomanry and the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry to conduct the searches.
The most conclusive evidence must come from the attitude of Sir Vernon Kell himself. Dr Holman notes that in September 1914, with rumours of a secret German airship base in Ireland, an unofficial request from the Admiralty that ‘the South of Ireland [be] searched for secret aeroplane depots’ was headed off by Kell.
At a time when his service was desperately short of staff, Kell realised that there were no secret Zeppelin bases, and that searching for them was a distraction from the real task of finding and arresting German spies, which his people did remarkably well.
Were Rushall’s cadets working for Kell’s organisation? Undoubtedly not. The cadets were clearly unaware of this, but probably would not have cared. They saw themselves as serving their nation and the Empire, which in effect they were. Upon return to Australia, they each enlisted in the AIF as they became old enough.
James Hendy enlisted in February 1916, and served in the Headquarters of the 10th Infantry Brigade in France, and survived the war. His fellow cadet from Geelong College, Robert Buchanan, had enlisted in June 1915 and served in the Field Artillery. He was awarded a Military Medal for bravery under fire at Passchendaele. He also survived the war.
Sparkes enlisted in September 1915, when he was 18 years old, and served in the Field Artillery in France. He returned to Australia in 1919 and took over his family business. He died in 1954.