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cross-Channel ferry from the Hook of Holland to Tilbury. This was followed by the unravelling of Tinsley’s train-watching network, comprising over forty posts, and the arrest of ‘nearly all’ his agents. It appeared that his man in Maastricht, one Frankignoul, had over-centralised the organisation, consistently channelled its reports out along a single route (a tram which ran across the Belgian frontier) and also allowed his agents to know each other’s identities. Thus, after the Germans had intercepted a batch of reports, they were able to roll up most of the network, executing a group of eleven members at Hasselt on 16 December 1916. As early as August, however, the flow of information from Tinsley’s organisation had dried up and Kirke saw no sign of it reviving.10

Over the next six months the situation improved markedly, following the appointment of Captain Henry Landau to take charge of the military side of Tinsley’s operation. Just twenty-two years old when the war started, Landau had been born in South Africa to an Afrikaner mother and English father. Educated in South Africa, as well as at public school in England (Dulwich College), he was intellectually very able. He studied at Caius College, Cambridge, and graduated with first-class honours in Natural Sciences. An accomplished linguist – he had fluent Dutch, French and German – he went to France in August 1914 with a volunteer hospital unit, later gaining a commission in the Royal Artillery. When he was delayed on leave in London with measles, a female acquaintance recommended him to the Secret Service Bureau. Interviewed (according to Cumming’s diary) on 8 June 1916, Landau claimed in his 1934 memoirs that Cumming told him, ‘You are just the man we want,’ and said that he was to ‘join T in Rotterdam’, reorganise the train-watching service and be ‘in complete charge of the Military Section’. He was instructed to leave immediately and ‘at eight-thirty that evening I was on my way to Harwich’.11 The archives tell a slightly different story. A week after the interview, Landau wrote to Colonel Browning saying that his artillery unit was posting him back to France and asking if MI1(c) still wanted him. ‘I shall be very grateful indeed if you will do your best for me,’ he wrote. ‘I have told you already how very keen I am on the work.’ Three days later, having consulted Tinsley, Browning replied that ‘our people in Rotterdam have asked us to send you over on a month’s trial’. After some more administrative delays, and a possible further meeting with Cumming, Landau left for Rotterdam some time in July 1916.

Whatever the precise circumstances of his appointment, once Landau got to Rotterdam it turned out that he had a real gift for intelligence work. A postwar assessment recorded that he had been ‘employed during the war as 2nd in command to T[insley] in Rotterdam and was undoubtedly the brains of the institution’, before adding that he was ‘foreign in appearance’, could ‘mix in any class of society, but that some people take a great dislike to him owing to his somewhat furtive manner’. During the war itself this seems not to have been a handicap and, indeed, a certain degree of stealthiness may have been of assistance while Landau endeavoured to rebuild Tinsley’s organisation. Over the autumn and winter of 1916 he was able to repair some of the damage, so much so that in February 1917 Colonel Edgar Cox, head of MI3 in the War Office (responsible for the analysis of all German military information), told the Director of Military Intelligence that ‘information received through “C” during the past four months’ had been ‘invaluable’. He noted that, although comparing the value of material coming from the different systems in Belgium ‘was impossible owing to the fact that they dealt with different areas’, a ‘certain amount of information’ was ‘received only through “C”’, and that ‘Major Cameron’s train-watching reports would not have been complete without the corroboration of “C”’. As to the ‘form in which the reports were presented’, moreover, ‘“C’s” organisation was undoubtedly