Churchills other bodyguards
Churchill’s Other Bodyguards
Mike Waldren QPM
VIP Protection has always been a serious consideration for the police service. There is anecdotal evidence that the first police officers to protect royalty were two Bow Street Runners named MacKenna and Sayers who were assigned to the court of King George III. They apparently accompanied the monarch wherever he went and one was always in attendance day and night.
The Runners continued their function for the sovereign until the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 made it ‘lawful for [the Met Commissioners, Colonel Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne] to administer to any Constable belonging to the Metropolitan Police Force an Oath to execute the Office of Constable within the Royal Palaces of her Majesty [Queen Victoria] and Ten Miles thereof; and every Constable who shall be so sworn shall have the Powers and Privileges of a Constable within the said Royal Palaces and Ten Miles thereof’.
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As well as undertaking normal policing duty in the 1.88 square miles of Westminster and Whitehall, ‘A’ Division became responsible for providing security at all the royal palaces including Buckingham Palace (in 1837 Queen Victoria became the first monarch to use Buckingham Palace as a residence), St James’s Palace, Kensington Palace, the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament – although major parts of it had been destroyed in a fire in 1834, parliamentary business was still being conducted there using undamaged or temporarily repaired parts of the structure) and Windsor Castle. An inspector (superintendent by the turn of the century) from ‘A’ Division became known as the ‘Head of the Police of the Royal Household’ and a ‘Royal Theatre Protection Patrol’ made up of ‘A’ Division officers was established for when Queen Victoria decided to have a night out on the town. For many years the division was referred to sardonically by the rest of the Met as ‘The Royal A’.
In the early years when the officers needed to be armed they would have carried cutlasses or muzzle-loaded single-barrelled pistols (flintlock at first and percussion later) but from 1868 onwards they would have been issued with Adams .450 calibre percussion revolvers (see Early Police Firearms – The 1860s). In 1884 these were replaced by Webley .450 calibre gate-load revolvers (see Armed Burglars – The 1880s) and in 1911 the revolvers were replaced by the .32 calibre Webley & Scott ‘MP’ model self-loading pistols (see Siege of Sidney Street – 1911).
Some ‘A’ Division officers were also detailed to undertake the personal protection of ministers as early as the end of 1882 and Home Office authority for the purchase of twelve revolvers for them was granted on 1 December.
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The approved weapon was also a Webley .450 calibre gate-load revolver but it had a shortened barrel so that it could be more easily concealed in a coat pocket and was known as the ‘Webley Bulldog’.
The Fenian ‘dynamite campaign’ which started on 15 March 1883 lasted two years and initially Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officers were drafted in to provide armed security at government and other buildings.
According to ‘Scotland Yard and The Metropolitan Police’ by John Moylan (1929): ‘When the dynamite outrages began in London, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were thought to be more competent for the protection of public buildings and the persons of Cabinet ministers than London’s own police, and in their green uniforms and rifles they were seen for a time on sentry-go in the Whitehall neighbourhood’. Obviously the RIC officers could not stay indefinitely and in due course they were replaced by armed ‘A’ Division officers while the task of protecting ‘the persons of Cabinet ministers’ was transferred (along with the ‘Bulldog’ revolvers) to the ‘Special Irish Branch’. Formed in 1883 from Met officers of mainly Irish ancestry and with a nucleus of RIC officers this branch, in addition to providing personal protection, investigated the Fenian attacks to the exclusion of all else. When the terrorist campaign was over the word ‘Irish’ was dropped and the branch became formally established as the ‘Special Branch’ at the end of 1886. Although the RIC officers had long since returned home, the practice of appointing personal protection officers for Cabinet ministers from within its ranks continued and Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in June 1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 saw the Special Branch involved in providing personal protection to royalty as well.
Caution must be exercised before attributing modern ‘bodyguard’ methods to the personal protection officers of those days. The term used at the time to explain their duty was that they provided ‘protective surveillance’. In other words, although they were there to protect their principal, they were expected to keep their distance and the less they were actually seen the better. In the main, protection was left to the armed uniform officers at residences and public buildings and personal protection was only provided when the principal was out on official public duties. Also, the numbers engaged on personal protection could have been no more than a handful because there were only fifteen officers in Special Branch in 1903 and in addition to protection it had what were described as ‘other important and strictly confidential duties in the general interests of the whole nation’. This mainly involved keeping a watchful eye on assorted anarchist groups, the growing suffragette movement and revolutionary exiles from Russia such as Vladimir Uljanov (Lenin) and Leib Bronstein (Trotsky).
On 18 February 1909 the head of the Special Branch, Superintendent Patrick Quinn, called ‘attention to a case of ten revolvers [the other two had probably become unserviceable over the years and been scrapped] which are the only ones available for the use of Officers of Special Branch, when engaged on protection or other dangerous duties. They are of an obsolete pattern called “The British Bull Dog”, and were supplied some thirty or more years ago for the use of officers engaged in connection with the Fenian movement. There is no record of the actual purchase, but they were probably paid for out of some special fund’. He went on to explain that he had taken advice from the gunsmith, Robert Churchill (no relation to Winston Churchill), who was frequently consulted by Scotland Yard on firearms matters at the time, and he had been told that the weapons were out of date, were quite worthless and were ‘a positive danger in a melee, except at very close quarters’.
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Robert Churchill had advised Quinn that the ‘Colt automatic pocket pistol’ was a suitable replacement and, although there is no way of knowing for certain at this distance in time, this was probably the Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless pistol in .32 calibre.
Rather than wait for a response through the usual bureaucratic channels, a week later Quinn took his problem direct to the Met Commissioner, Sir Edward Henry. On 27 February Quinn reported that the Commissioner ‘has authorised the purchase of 2 Colt’s Automatic Pocket Pistols at £3-3-0 [£3.15p] each, and to be charged on my account (form 292) when submitted for the protection of His Majesty the King’. The file was marked on 21 July 1909 that the cost was charged to the ‘expenses incurred by Superintendent Quinn and Inspector Riley while protecting H.M. The King at Biarritz and other foreign places on the continent’.
The numbers on personal protection would gradually increase over the next twenty years but, curiously, there is no mention of these two weapons in a return of firearms held by the Met in 1926 which shows that Special Branch had 92 of the (by then) force issue .32 Webley and Scott ‘MP’ model self-loading pistols for its (by then) establishment strength of 136 officers.
Quinn had been a sergeant in the Met when he applied to join the original ‘Special Irish Branch’ and he had made his way up through the ranks before being promoted to superintendent and head of the branch in 1903. He would later (in 1919) receive a knighthood and as much as anything else it was probably his services as a protection officer to King Edward VII that earned him this (for a police superintendent) unique honour.
Perhaps the most well-known protection officer is Walter Henry Thompson, mainly because of the thirteen-part television documentary made in 2005 about his experiences entitled ‘Churchill’s Bodyguard’. Police Constable 549 ‘D’ Thompson applied for duty in Special Branch in 1913 and from 1917 to 1920 he was assigned as a protection officer to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. Early in 1921 he was assigned to Winston Churchill and although he retired as an Inspector in 1936, Churchill asked for him back in 1939. Thompson re-joined the Met and after being reissued with a .32 calibre Webley & Scott self-loading pistol he stayed with Churchill for the duration of World War II.
The 1926 return also shows that ‘A’ Division had 161 Webley and Scott pistols for its 786 officers. Not surprisingly this was the largest holding of pistols of any division in the Met, despite its having one of the smallest geographical areas to cover, and in addition it had twelve old 1884 issue Webley .450 calibre gate-load revolvers that had been withdrawn in 1912 as being obsolete but had then been reissued on 7 August 1914 as a ‘temporary measure’ at the start of World War I (they would be finally withdrawn in December 1926). Under normal circumstances the weapons were shared with an officer on a protection post handing over the weapon and ammunition to the officer who relieved him but occasionally ‘special duties’ came up and the guns would then have become a personal issue for the duration of the duty and this brings us to two of Churchill’s other bodyguards – Constables Smith and Brook.
In 1921 Churchill became Secretary of State for the Colonies and he was a signatory to the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty which saw the creation of the Irish Free State as an autonomous dominion within the British Commonwealth, with Northern Ireland exercising its option to opt out (in December 1922) and remain within the United Kingdom. Hostility to the provisions of the treaty was such that there were outbreaks of murder and intimidation by opposing pro- and anti-treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) factions all over the south of Ireland and Churchill was seen by the anti-treaty militants as being the main obstacle to the creation a totally independent and united Ireland.
Churchill made no secret of his views, saying in a speech in the House of Commons on 12 April 1922 that: ‘Whatever happens in Ireland, however many years of misfortune there may be in Ireland, whatever trouble, the Treaty defines what we think should be the relations between the two countries, and we are prepared, and will be prepared, to hand over to any responsible body of Irishmen capable of governing the country the full powers which the Treaty confers. Further than that, in no circumstances will we go, and if a republic is set up, that is a form of government in Ireland which the British Empire can in no circumstances whatever tolerate or agree to’. Two days later about 200 well armed IRA militants took over several official buildings in Dublin including the main court building known as the ‘Four Courts’, believing that if the British Army could be induced to respond with force then this would reunite the two factions of the IRA against ‘the common enemy’ and the treaty would be effectively scrapped.
On 22 June the security adviser to Northern Ireland, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, was assassinated by two gunmen in London. On 26 June Churchill told the House of Commons that: ‘The presence in Dublin, in violent occupation of the Four Courts, of a band of men styling themselves the Headquarters of the Republican Executive, is a gross breach and defiance of the Treaty. From this nest of anarchy and treason, not only to the British Crown, but to the Irish people, murderous outrages are stimulated and encouraged, not only in the 26 Counties, not only in the territory of the Northern Government, but even, it seems most probable, here across the Channel in Great Britain. ... The time has come when it is not unfair, not premature, and not impatient for us to make to this strengthened Irish Government and new Irish Parliament a request, in express terms, that this sort of thing must come to an end. If it does not come to an end, if either from weakness, from want of courage, or for some other even less creditable reasons, it is not brought to an end and a very speedy end, then it is my duty to say, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, that we shall regard the Treaty as having been formally violated [and] ... we shall resume full liberty of action in any direction that may seem proper and to any extent that may be necessary to safeguard the interests and the rights that are entrusted to our care’. The implied threat that if the Irish Free State did nothing to deal with the militants then Great Britain certainly would was obvious and two days later Free State forces began shelling the ‘Four Courts’ using borrowed British Army artillery starting what has become known as the ‘Irish Civil War’.
All this made Churchill a prime terrorist target and Special Branch asked for assistance with his protection. Two additional armed ‘A’ Division officers were assigned to the Colonial Office (part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and another two officers, Police Constables 711 ‘A’ Reginald Smith and 682 ‘A’ Brook, were assigned to Churchill personally to act in plain clothes from 9 o’clock in the morning of Wednesday 28 June 1922.
The selection of Smith and Brook had not been made at random. Smith possessed one highly desirable attribute – a motorcycle with a sidecar. The original request seems to have been for an armed motorcycle escort but Superintendent Abbott in A3 Branch (a Scotland Yard department responsible amongst other things for organising ‘aid’ from one part of the Met to another) thought that ‘it was impossible for a cyclist riding a solo machine to effectively carry out the duty’ and so Smith’s privately owned vehicle was pressed into service. Brook also had a valuable qualification but in his case it was a lot less tangible – he was described as being ‘an expert rifle shot’, although understanding quite how this was determined is problematic because the Met did not have rifles at the time and even the opportunity for the two officers to actually train with the pistols they were carrying would only have been a very recent innovation.
Since April 1885 all officers in the ‘exterior divisions’ of the Met who carried a firearm had to take part in an annual ‘Firing Practice’. Only six rounds were fired and the distance to, and the size of, the target was left unspecified.
This was at a time when the force instructions allowed officers in the suburbs of London to carry a firearm at night at their own request (see Armed Burglars – The 1880s) and there seems to have been a clear distinction made between them and officers in the inner London divisions such as ‘A’ who could be posted to a protection post and ordered to carry a gun whether they wanted it or not. In fact, there was no mention at all in force orders of any policy relating to officers in the inner London divisions or at Scotland Yard (including Special Branch) as to when they could be issued with a firearm. As far as protection duty is concerned, it seems to have been taken as read that firearms were necessary and so no instructions were needed. Even so, it is hard to understand why these officers were excluded from the annual practice.
In 1902 in became policy that all new recruits to the Met had to be given instruction in how to load and unload the force issue handgun (they didn’t get a chance to actually fire it) and this continued until 1936. The Chief Inspector (Superintendent from 1914 onwards) in charge of the ‘Preparatory Class’ had a supply of revolvers (pistols from 1911 onwards) for that purpose. Also in 1902, the target distance for the annual practice was set at thirty paces but no target size was specified and once again it was only for officers who were in the ‘exterior divisions’.
However, attempts were made to correct this anomaly on 15 December 1914 after which it was intended that all officers who could be called upon to carry a firearm, whether they were in an inner division, an ‘exterior’ division or posted to Scotland Yard, would take part in the annual practice. The amount of ammunition expended was increased to twenty-four rounds and the target distance was reduced to twenty yards. For the first time, eight of the twenty-four rounds were for a ‘proficiency test’ with the required ‘Standard of Efficiency’ being four hits out of the eight within a fifteen inch ring.
Unfortunately it was a bad time to introduce a new system because it had to be suspended almost immediately due to wartime ammunition shortages. It was restarted on 11 May 1920 and in the case of Smith and Brook (and Thompson as well of course) this would have been their first opportunity for official training of any kind before they were assigned to Churchill.
It is highly unlikely that the required standard was rigidly enforced. Some officers would have been unable to pass the test despite their still being needed for protection duty and when another revised system of pistol practice was introduced in Confidential Memorandum No. 13 on 24 July 1933 (and reproduced in force orders in July 1936), as well as increasing the ammunition expenditure to thirty-two rounds and reducing the target size to twelve inches, it became official policy that: ‘It is not absolutely essential for all the selected officers to pass the proficiency test, so long as each proves clearly that he is capable of handling a pistol’, thereby officially approving what had probably been common practice up until then anyway.
Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that Brook was a member of a divisional shooting club and that it was in this milieu that his shooting skills were noted. Since September 1914 the Commissioner had provided ‘Miniature Cartridge Ranges’ in several police stations and section houses around the Met at which officers could use rifles (either privately owned or purchased by a club for general use by its members) and, ‘where the conditions are suitable’, the officially supplied (in 1911) .22 calibre single-shot training versions of the force issue pistols as well. A ‘miniature cartridge’ was ‘rim fire or central fire, with a projectile of any calibre not exceeding .23 of one inch or 6mm, and, in the case of bottle-shaped cartridges, the shells may not exceed .297 of one inch [to allow for the use of a Morris tube converter in a rifle such as the Martini Henry .577/450]. The powder charge may not exceed 7 grains of black powder, or its equivalent in any other explosive. The projectile must be of lead, not cased with other metal, and not exceeding 50 grains avoirdupois in weight’.
The intention was to improve shooting standards by getting officers to adopt shooting as a recreational sport and the force even bulk purchased the ammunition required. This was then sold on at cost price plus ‘departmental charges’ to the Metropolitan Police Shooting League (MPSL), an umbrella organisation to which all divisional clubs belonged. In the end, individual officers had to pay for the ammunition themselves but it was still considerably cheaper than it would have been ‘outside’.
This would have seemed a perfectly natural development in 1914. Similar arrangements for similar reasons were already in place for many members of the armed forces after what was considered by senior army officers to be the poor standard of marksmanship displayed by British soldiers during the Boer Wars (1880 – 1881 and particularly 1899 – 1902). In addition, the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs (SMRC) had been founded in 1903 with a national hero, Field Marshal Earl Roberts, as its first president. Roberts was a strong advocate of the mass training of civilians in rifle shooting and members of the public were actively encouraged to join a club, the argument being that it was their patriotic duty to be ready and able to answer their country’s next call. The society would become the National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) in 1947.
Shooting clubs affiliated to the SMRC were set up in many of the larger police forces in the early 1900s (chief officer ranks in the police were dominated by retired army officers and so they would have encouraged the idea) and the clubs played an important part in police training for many years. For example the MPSL drew up the ‘Pistols Booklet’ which set out how the ‘Firing Course’ was to be conducted in the Met in 1933. In June 1997 Austin Mitchell MP, speaking in the House of Commons in a debate about another Firearms Bill which would complete the ban on the private ownership of handguns in the wake of the Dunblane shooting the previous year, said that: ‘We should not ignore the effect of the Bill on the police. The Bill will have an impact on the proficiency of police firearms squads. ... Officers have supplemented their official training by joining gun clubs, at their own expense, and buying weapons. They have become more proficient, versatile and skilled and, therefore, much safer in their possession of weapons. That will stop and will be a severe setback for the squads’. There had, of course, been major improvements in official police training by then and the need for the clubs was considerably less than it had been nearly a century earlier. This was just as well because the argument in favour of some kind of exemption for police pistol clubs was not accepted and they were forced to shut down.
The Met probably didn’t provide ranges out of a sense of patriotism. As was the case in the armed forces, it is more likely to have been a clever way of getting some of its personnel to pay for their own training. From 1914 until 1934 it was even a requirement that before officers could undertake the annual practice they must first have fired the official .22 calibre single-shot training pistols, although there is considerable doubt as to whether this was as mandatory as the force orders seem to imply. The 1926 return shows that ‘A’ Division only had three .22 calibre pistols and that Special Branch had none, which would have made compliance rather difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, in 1934 the .22 pistols throughout the force were considered obsolete and they were given free of charge to any of the divisional shooting clubs that wanted them. Even so, some officers would undoubtedly have excelled at the sport they were being encouraged to take up and this may have been behind the observation that Brook was ‘an expert rifle shot’.
As far as Smith and Brook are concerned, all went well for the first week with the two officers returning to ordinary duty on 4 July 1922 after Thompson (now a sergeant) had been told by Churchill that: ‘he would not require the services of the motor-cyclist and the officer on the sidecar as he has been given the use of an armoured Rolls-Royce motor’. The vehicle then seems to have been required by someone else because the two officers resumed their special duty on Sunday 9 July and again all went well, this time for nearly two weeks. Unfortunately, on Saturday 22 July disaster struck.
Churchill was on route by car to London at about 11.10 in the morning (there is nothing in the reports to indicate whether or not his driver was complying with the national 20 mph maximum speed limit which had been introduced in 1903 and which would remain in force until 1930) when his vehicle overtook a lorry as it was travelling toward Ripley north-east of Guildford. Smith tried to follow but he then found himself on the wrong side of the road with a car travelling in the opposite direction coming straight at him. The two vehicles collided and although this caused minor damage to the car and to Smith, Brook sustained compound fractures to both legs and left arm. The motorcycle and its sidecar also came out of it very badly. The frame and wheels were buckled, the tyres were torn off and the sidecar was completely smashed.
Churchill’s car did not stop but a passing motorist offered to help and a St John’s Ambulance took Brook to the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford from where Smith sent a telegram informing Brook’s mother of the accident. He also telephoned Churchill, who had by now reached his London home at 2 Sussex Square near Hyde Park, to tell him what had happened. Churchill told Thompson who in turn reported the accident to Special Branch Superintendent McBrien adding that ‘when it was noticed that the motor-cycle and side-car was [sic] not following, it was concluded that they either missed the way or had a puncture’.
‘A’ Division was asked to supply another two officers but at 10.35 that night Special Branch received a telegram explaining that all the available resources had been used up and that there were no spare armed officers left. A search of the rest of the Met by Abbott the following day resulted in two armed constables from the ‘Brixton’ or ‘W’ Division (which at the time covered the 57.85 square miles all the way from Brixton in inner London to the outer boundary of the Met at Epson in Surrey thereby making it an ‘exterior’ division) being temporarily assigned instead from Monday 24 July. Their names are not recorded but Abbott arranged for them to be provided with a Bean motorcar for the duration of the duty. The 11.9 horsepower Bean had been introduced to great critical acclaim at the 1919 London Motor Show and it was a considerable upgrade from a motorcycle combination.
Smith’s motorcycle and the bits that were left of the sidecar were collected from Ripley and taken to the Met’s transport workshop at Barnes but when it came to getting the vehicle repaired there was a problem. Smith only had the vehicle insured for private use and on 31 July he reported that: ‘... as I was using the machine for “business” my insurance company ... [has] repudiated my claim, so I respectfully ask if my combination could be replaced or repaired at Barnes where the machine now lies’. The cost of repairs was estimated at £57 11s 8d (£57.58½) and the driver of the other vehicle also put in a claim for £28 17s 6d (£28.87½) of which £20 was for loss of a day’s business. The report went all the way up to the Deputy Commissioner, Sir James Olive, and after a bit of pressure the insurance company agreed ‘as an act of grace’ to share the cost of the machine’s repair but incredibly, although Olive was Acting Commissioner at the time, even he did not have the authority to agree that the Met should pay the remainder.
On 29 August Olive wrote to the Under Secretary of State at the Home Office, Sir John Anderson (later Viscount Waverly) to ask: ‘in view of the circumstances, that the [Home Secretary – Edward Shortt] may be pleased to sanction the payment from the Police Fund of the remaining portion of the cost of repairs, and also such an amount as may be necessary to meet the third party claim’. This was agreed on 8 September and the Home Office was told on 15 September that the sum of £1 9s (£1.45) had also been paid to the St John’s Ambulance Brigade ‘for the hire of an ambulance to convey Constable Brook to Guildford Hospital’.
Churchill left his post at the Colonial Office a month later and he lost his parliamentary seat in the November 1922 general election. He was allowed to retain the services of Thompson but his additional personal protection was withdrawn and the officers returned to ordinary duty. As far as is known, Brook made a full recovery and Smith had his machine was restored to full working order. Its index number was XA 7576.
Note:
According to ‘The British Police’ by Martin Stallion and David Wall published by The Police History Society (1999) there were 170 forces in England, 19 in Wales and 59 in Scotland in 1922. Were there any developments to do with police firearms in your force/area or its predecessors during this period of history? If so please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren