Free Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden Page B

and productive.
    The government believed German spies or sympathisers would attack key state infrastructure, with docks, power stations, waterworks, railway tracks and bridges principal targets. With this in mind, soldiers patrolled railway lines and station platforms while Special Constables, civilians appointed part-time to the force, guarded anywhere else deemed vulnerable. ‘Probably, this ceaseless vigilance of the Specials, regular policemen, and soldier sentries frustrated the organised plans of the enemy’s agents,’ wrote a former Special in a history of the London Special Constabulary published in 1920. Or perhaps there were no plans for attack, certainly not organised ones. The Metropolitan Police received nearly 9,000 reports of suspected espionage in the first month of the war, but in fewer than a hundred cases was anyone detained let alone charged. Despite public fears, there was not a single substantiated case of enemy sabotage during the war.
    In London, Dorothy Peel noted just how far spy mania gripped the public’s imagination.
     
It was suggested that enamelled iron advertisements for ‘Maggi soup,’ which were attached to hoardings in Belgium, were unscrewed by German officers in order that they might read the information about local resources which was painted in German on the back by spies who had preceded them. True or not, this story was generally accepted, and screwdriver parties were formed in the London suburbs for the examination of the back of enamelled advertisements.
     
    Inevitably, the finger of suspicion came to rest on those who did not appear to fit parochial standards of familiarity. The Reverend Andrew Clark, living near Braintree in Essex, recorded in his daily diary the anxious triviality that was part and parcel of local life. In September, an elderly woman with a German accent was arrested in Little Waltham as she was selling lace. She was jailed for a night while her claims to be a doctor’s wife were investigated before being substantiated. Four weeks later, overzealous civilians detained an official working for the Ordnance Survey as he toured the countryside. When a Special Constable arrested this unfortunate man, he finally threw up his work, seeking out the protection of a local Justice of the Peace. Other outsiders, such as members of the Royal Commission on Ancient Sites and Monuments paying ‘visits of enquiry’ to outlying farms, were met with grave suspicion in Braintree, while a tramp was picked up during a ‘spy hunt’ as he rested by a haystack. Finally, in December, a ‘foreign-looking’ local was the target of an elderly lady’s half-brick, thrown in the belief that he too was a spy. ‘She missed him,’ wrote Clark, ‘but fetched the policeman a fair “crack” on the side of the head.’
    Public anxieties were visited upon towns and villages up and down the country. It was at times almost funny – almost, but not really, for the repercussions were serious. Britain’s German community was marginalised at almost every level. When representatives from London’s golf clubs discussed what to do with German and Austrian members, it was hoped that such ‘aliens’ would take the hint that they were not wanted and withdraw without recourse to formal expulsions. In entertainment, a meeting was concluded of senior British musicians, including the musical adviser to the London County Council. While it was agreed that it might be difficult to ignore German music, German musicians were ripe for boycotting. ‘For many years foreign musicians had usurped the positions which really belonged to Englishmen, and taken the bread out of the mouths of the rank and file of British musicians,’ they agreed. And so it was thought only fair (expedient) that the war could be used (as an excuse) to restore an imagined status quo, with theatres and restaurants encouraged to employ only home-grown talent.
    German music was removed from concert programmes, often from fear