Explosive History of Spy and Inventor

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Notes

1 The two coauthors are a perfect match for writing the biography of Frank Brock. Harry Smee is a descendant of Brock. He has access to family documents and worked at the Brock family company in the 1980s—Brock’s Fireworks. Henry Macrory is an established author, specialized in writing family histories.

2 Indeed, as soon as the reader starts reading the book, they begin to wonder how scholarly studies would omit covering the life of such an important person in British and world history. He was a game-changing spy; the missions he undertook were of great success, shifting the course of World War I, and before the authors took the task at hand his story had yet to be written. Yet this feeling of wondering still lingers even after reading Gunpowder & Glory.

3 While even the Germans were not sure if these war machines could be mass-produced, and the zeppelins already induced fear among the British public.

4 It is not clear who entrusted him with the covert mission or provided him with a credible back story and his passport. The authors guess that it was either the Secret Service Bureau or Naval Intelligence.

5 The then director of Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS).

6 The authors rather describe Frank’s missions as “very secret,” which only Churchill and Seuter knew about.

7 Despite the authors’ endeavors to present Frank Brock as a crucial agent of British military intelligence services.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arda Akıncı

Arda Akıncı is a Ph.D. Candidate at the European University Institute’s Department of History and Civilization in Florence, Italy. He works on intelligence services, surveillance, and state espionage in the late Ottoman Empire. His doctoral project focuses on the development and transformation of Ottoman intelligence activities and its transnational character during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). The author can be contacted at [email protected].