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ABSTRACT
Espionage depends on the gathering, sifting, reporting, and selling of information. In Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, information about a German plot to invade Britain has implications for statehood and military strategy. This novel responds to the changing culture of information and reconnaissance captured by Robert Baden-Powell’s Reconnaissance and Scouting, David Henderson’s The Art of Reconnaissance, and military manuals that give advice on collecting information about enemy positions and armaments. Drawing on the resources of reconnaissance and espionage, Childers urges the British government to develop a North Sea defence policy while preparing citizens to defend themselves against invasion.
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Notes
1. Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, 13. Subsequent references to this novel appear parenthetically in the text.
2. Purdon, Modernist Informatics, 2.
3. Official Secrets Act 1889, articles 1 (1) (a) i-ii.
4. Ibid., article 2.2.a.
5. Boyle, The Riddle of Erskine Childers, 66.
6. Purdon, Modernist Informatics, 6.
7. Ibid., 68.
8. Henderson, The Art of Reconnaissance, 1.
9. Ibid., 153.
10. le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 120.
11. Piper, Dangerous Waters, 72.
12. Ibid., 106.
13. Since 2001, there has been a shift away from interpreting spy thrillers according to their form or conventions to explicating their political and historical meanings. For example, Erin Carlston interprets spy narratives as ‘densely imbricated sites of contestation about the meanings of citizenship and the nation’. Phyllis Lassner similarly sees a convergence of spies and refugees in terms of ‘the political and historical implications of belonging, national and ideological loyalty’. Conor McCarthy argues that the state ‘acts outside the law in the interests of power’ through its secret services. Carlston, Double Agents, 5; Lassner, Espionage and Exile, 9; McCarthy, Outlaws and Spies, 107.
14. Goodman, British Spy Fiction, 170.
15. Buckton, Espionage in British Fiction, xii.
16. Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire, 24.
17. Buckton, Espionage in British Fiction, 34.
18. Trotter, ‘The Politics of Adventure’, 40.
19. Baden-Powell, My Adventures as a Spy, 131.
20. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 20.
21. Ibid., 283.
22. Baden-Powell, My Adventures, 29. Baden-Powell may have participated in some espionage activities in Sicily, Dalmatia, and Algeria. He had a tendency, however, to embroider the truth, and his published accounts of these missions diverge from his diaries. Jeal, Baden-Powell, 148–54.
23. Baden-Powell, My Adventures, 12.
24. Ibid., 9.
25. Simmel, ‘The Adventurer’, 193.
26. Bywater and Ferraby, Strange Intelligence, 148.
27. Reconnaissance, 7.
28. Henderson, Art, 145
29. Baden-Powell, Reconnaissance and Scouting, 6.
30. Ibid., 13.
31. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 72.
32. Ibid., 63.
33. Mockler-Ferryman, Military Sketching, 144–5.
34. Childers, In the Ranks of the C.I.V., 87
35. Ibid., 102.
36. Ibid., 74.
37. Ibid., 274.
38. Ibid., 273.
39. Ibid., 93.
40. Ibid., 120.
41. Piper, Dangerous Waters, 72.
42. Childers, In the Ranks, 77.
43. Ibid., 223.
44. Ibid., 108.
45. Trotter, ‘Introduction’, xii.
46. Ibid., xv.
47. Piper, Dangerous Waters, 159.
48. Baden-Powell, My Adventures, 61.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Allan Hepburn
Allan Hepburn is James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University. He is the author of three monographs and fifty essays. He has edited eight books, the most recent of which are Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature and Friendship and the Novel. He co-edits the Oxford Mid-Century Studies series at Oxford University Press, as well as the MacLennan Poetry series at McGill-Queen’s University Press.