Feature: The curious case of the Glasgow Spy
13 November 2008. By Chris Beckett
Armgaard Karl Graves, referred to in press reports as ‘the Glasgow Spy’, was the first person to be convicted in Scotland under the Official Secrets Act (1911). On 23 July 1912, at the High Court of Judiciary, Edinburgh, Graves was found guilty of making or obtaining a telegraphic code for the purpose of communicating information relating to the British Navy and land fortifications. The code had been concealed within the pages of a Burroughs Wellcome & Co. diary, and the firm’s headed paper had been used to cloak communication with an accomplice in Brussels.
Graves went to considerable lengths to establish his identity as a doctor who had practised in Australia, and was now visiting England to undertake further training in Edinburgh and to conduct clinical experiments. His first port of call was not the Firth of Forth but the Wellcome Medical Museum in Wigmore Street, London. This was not the casual visit of a medical man with wide interests and time on his hands but a calculated move in establishing a consistent identity.
The Wellcome Foundation archive contains a revealing record of this visit on 14 February 1912. After showing an interest in various Burroughs Wellcome & Co. products (“he would like literature re all our newest products sent to his Edinburgh address,” it was noted), Graves reinforced his credibility by association: the Medical Officer of Southern Australia was presently staying in London, he explained, and should be contacted as a valuable source of business.
Graves’s final comment was to remark that he had not received a Burroughs Wellcome & Co. diary since 1909 and would greatly appreciate one (thereby pushing further back into time his fictive identity). In fact, the company had been carefully selected as a suitable source of cover for communication. Counterfeit Burroughs Wellcome & Co. envelopes and headed paper had been fabricated in advance of the mission and were used on occasion to convey coded information about Britain’s expanding naval capacity (construction of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Rosyth began in 1909), and to send payment to Graves in return.
The note of his attendance at the Wellcome Museum included an observation that could not pass unrecorded, in the midst of a national mood of contagious spy fever: Graves was German. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, Graves fleshed out his identity still further. He applied for a position as a locum, and his medical knowledge was sufficiently convincing to a Dr Leith, who interviewed him. But, as Leith was to tell the court, he did not like the German accent. “It is does not do in Leith?” quipped the Solicitor-General, to the local court’s amusement.
The strict application of Post Office procedure contributed to Graves’s undoing: he was refused collection of a letter addressed to James Stafford Esq. (one of Graves’s many aliases). The letter, which bore the name of Burroughs Wellcome & Co. imprinted on the envelope, was returned to its ostensible sender. At the company’s office in Snow Hill, London, the envelope was immediately recognised as counterfeit. When Inspector Edward Parker of the Yard, who was already on the case, called at Snow Hill on Saturday 13 April he was told, somewhat proprietarily, that the matter had been placed in the hands of the company solicitor, who was not available until Monday.
Parker left his card, and when he returned on Monday, he left a detailed receipt - an inventory - of everything: two letters in German and an inner envelope containing one five pound note and one ten-pound note. In the intervening period before Parker took away the items, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. had photographed all: the set of photographs sits today in the archive, along with Inspector Parker’s calling card, and several statements, letter translations and newspaper cuttings from the trial.
Graves was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. If his memoir is to be believed, the unsuccessful Glasgow Spy undertook subsequent work for the British Secret Service. His life remained colourful: in 1916, he was arrested in Washington on a charge of blackmail (the charges were eventually dropped), and in 1929 he was arrested in Los Angeles for grand theft.
Image: Press coverage of the Glasgow Spy trial, 1918; Wellcome Library
Chris Beckett is an Assistant Archivist of the Wellcome Foundation Archive, Wellcome Library, London. A longer version of this article appeared in
Wellcome History 38.