On Sunday June 5th 2016, I paid a visit to the Tomintoul bothy where ‘Monocled Mutineer’, Percy Toplis spent his last few days alive. It was almost 96 years to the day that he died in a volley of bullets on a single track road near Carlisle. The bothy lies on the A939 road from Tomintoul to Ballater, within a few miles of the Lecht Ski Centre in the Scottish Highlands. It would be the start of an extraordinary journey.
The newspaper lying on the windowsill of the bothy said it all really: ‘Enchanting Secret Behind …’ Behind what? We may never know. Whether it was a deliberate move to preserve the spirit of a beautifully enduring mystery, or the fear of terminating some dream or hope that continues to sit loaded in my imagination like the pistol used in Percy’s getaway, I never did unfold the paper to reveal how the headline concluded. It probably sits there now, a taunting reminder of all we may never know about Toplis and the Mutiny in Etaples that this wily, cocky brigand may or may not have played a part in.
Facts are scarce when it comes to Percy. He first entered the public consciousness in 1920 when for a brief spell he was the most wanted war deserter in England, tried and found guilty in absentia for the murder of taxi-driver, Sidney Spicer before being ambushed and gunned-down in Cumbria. 50 years later he was resurrected — this time as the hero of Bill Allison and John Fairley’s book, The Monocled Mutineer which painted a harsh and uncompromising picture of the riots that took place at the Etaples Training Ground in September 1917. He was and remains part-media creation, a patchwork of ideals and projections, a man fashioned from the slag of other men’s aspirations, a hero among unheroes, a cautionary tale derived from a less than cautious history.
Anarchist? Activist? Spy? Violent criminal? I stroked my fingers over the moisture that a cooler, airish morning had left on the bothy window and signed it ‘Percy’. Within moments it had collapsed into a spiny, drooling scrawl. Against the bright green meadow outside, the word’s watery contrails took on a grim and faintly eerie dimension. I wiped my hand across it. The signature wasn’t in good taste, and I now felt slightly embarrassed. If I’d done the same thing in the steamy bathroom mirror back at home I knew the words would return the next time someone took a shower. As much as I had no interest in preserving whatever tasteless words I had teased on the glass, the basic shape of the words would remain. Some things were clearly not meant to be forgotten, however troubling or uncomfortable.
When the BBC’s The Monocled Mutineer arrived on our TV screens in the mid-1980s, most of the working class population in Britain were holding out for a hero, someone with the nous and the bottle to stand up for the common man. Rioting was breaking out in prisons nationwide and justice was being demanded over the Westlands affair. We’d just had the Broadlands, Brixton and Handsworth Riots, and if the Miners’ Strikes weren’t bad enough, we also had to endure Diego Maradona ‘handing’ a late winner to Argentina and putting England out of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
I remembered a school friend telling me how his father had watched the game in a Drill Hall in Chesterfield. Two hundred or so colliery workers and their friends had mustered for a final rally before the last day of production was due to take place at one of the few remaining pits in Whitwell. The game took place on the Sunday and by Friday the men were out of a job. Several jokes went round the town shortly after that. If Margaret Thatcher’s final wish was to be cremated it was unfortunate that there would be no one left to mine the coal that would be needed to fire the furnace. And when she did die it would be the first time ever that the 21 gun salute was fired into the coffin.
Unhappy is the land that needs a hero
Some years later I learned that the Drill Hall used by the miners had also been used by the 1st and 7th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters shortly before they left for the Somme. The men of Chesterfield sat alongside their Nottingham comrades waiting for the push that came in the Summer of 1916. 181 of the men who enlisted that day never came back. Not even the burly arm of Peter Shilton bursting from the goal-frame could have saved them that day, just as he wasn’t able to save the men of Whitwell during a similar Summer bloodbath some seventy years later. Percy had been born in Chesterfield before moving to Nottingham, and Shilton had enlisted under Clough at Nottingham Forest during those few short glorious years the team had triumphed over Europe. I tried to tease some meaning from these relatively harmless coincidences and curiosities, but the universe, god or whatever deeper purpose was shaping these random patterns must have been absent that day. They’d probably grabbed a bike and made off to the Lakes along with the last of the straws that I was grasping.
As I looked back the bothy window I saw that the various watery contrails around the letters were now colliding. It was difficult to get any real meaning from it now. For many years, Chesterfield was a town in mourning. We joked that the miners should have been wearing black until someone pointed out that miners always wore black on account of the coal-dust, so nobody would ever have noticed. It occurred to me that this couldn’t have been more just; no one noticed the miners when they were there, so nobody was going to notice them now they were gone. As someone wisecracked, maybe the miners hadn’t really lost their jobs that day but had simply melted into the coal seam on that last day of production.
When Bleasdale’s Monocled Mutineer finally premiered on August 31st that same Summer, the common man was poaching a fanfare that came some seventy years too late. As always, Private Percy Toplis just happened to be in the right place at the right time to lap up the credit. Like a ghost he came back to haunt the tight-lipped Tory Establishment and jam the circuit of England’s all too debilitating class-system at a time when us rough, unruly Northerners had willed it the most. What was that line in the play by Brecht? Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero? No. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.
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Technically this is not a bothy, which is just as well really, as Toplis, on the evidence currently available at least, is not a hero, and there is no firm evidence to suggest he even took part in the mutiny that handed him such fame and notoriety at the eleventh-hour. This particular boy from the blackstuff arrived on the colliery surface with a coal tub that wasn’t his own; a cuckoo in a nest of hornets.
There is some indication he was in or around Etaples at the time that some of the riots took place. We have Edwin Woodhall’s memoirs to thank for that. Woodhall, a Special Branch detective with an ear for a good story, was tasked with rounding up military deserters in the aftermath of the 1917 mutiny and Percy Toplis was among the more violent and ‘ferocious’ of those he sought. Woodhall talks about his pursuit of Toplis in Detective and Secret Service Days (March 1929), and it is clear that he regarded Toplis as a dangerous and resourceful man. In 1915 Woodhall had joined the counter-espionage department of the Intelligence section of the Secret Police based at Boulogne. In September 1917, just as the mutiny was in full swing, Woodhall was transferred from Military Intelligence to the Military Foot Police at Etaples.
Although he never states explicitly that Toplis was wanted in connection with the mutiny, Woodhall places him amongst the hundreds of ‘delinquents’ and ‘absentees’ in the caves and chalk dug-outs around Etaples the men had blithely dubbed ‘sanctuary’. After one ‘particularly exhaustive hunt’ Woodhall runs the deserter to ground in a cafe in Rang-de-Fleur. But any triumph is short-lived. Toplis is brought back to the compound but with the help of another prisoner makes a daring bid for freedom by tunnelling under the sand. In an account that has the improbable daring-do of a ‘Boy’s Own’ caper, Woodhall paints an absorbing yet fanciful picture of the scallywag eluding capture before any court martial and any subsequent execution can take place:
“(Toplis) was brought back to the prison compound for enquiry and identification. Unfortunately, during the night, he with another notorious character, who had the death sentence against him, tunnelled down under the sand of the barbed-wire compound … and broke out. I found one of the prisoners in an exhausted state near Berck Plage … but my real man had got away.” — Detective and Secret Service Days, Edwin T. Woodhall, 1929
But the accounts provided by Woodhall are not without their problems. If one was to believe everything he claims in his books, Woodhall would have been responsible for solving everything from the Jack the Ripper mystery to the assassination of Sir Curzon Whylie. There’s little question the detective was in Etaples at the time the mutiny takes place and operating in the capacity he describes (his war record corroborates this) but he’s also an accomplished storyteller. The detective may have been all of five foot seven, but on his tales he stood significantly taller. That said, if Woodhall had been lying about Toplis, you think he would have at least had the imagination to place him among the riots. Although described in no uncertain terms as thief, murderer, womanizer and deserter in the camps around Etaples at the time of the unrest, Toplis isn’t once placed at the scene of the riots. Instead he is described as being among the hundreds of men who had absconded in one way or another and taken refuge in the forest, dunes and caves around Le Touquet and Berck-Plage to avoid the fighting. In order to survive these men robbed civilians and army hostels.
According to some military historians, if Percy had stuck with his existing regiment he would have been on his way to India, whose troopship, the RMS Orontes, was about to set sail that month. The Orontes, a troopship-come-passenger liner, subsequently found fame in Scarborough’s Peasholm Park as a 20 foot replica boat. Amongst a diminutive fleet of battleships and dreadnoughts, the liner floated around nervously, taking regular evasive action. Another of those taking regular evasive action was Percy.
Woodhall describes Toplis as a ‘deserter’. If we were to take the detective’s account at face value then Percy wasn’t with his regiment. We don’t know where Percy was because his service records are not available. According to military historian Paul Reed, either the records haven’t survived or are still with the MOD. Dennis Brook’s history of RMS Orontes, Occasional Troopship of the Great War, throws up another conundrum: by August 1917 the liner appears to have been back in commercial service and no longer in use as a troopship. Unless Toplis was masquerading as an Australian dairy trader, it was hard to see how he could have been on that same boat in September:
“It would appear a quarrel took place one night between a “Tommy” and a Lance Corporal of the Military Police. The subject was one of the W.A.A.Cs. The row occurred through jealousy and terminated fatally, the “Tommy” being shot — I believe accidently — in the struggle. Immediately the news flew around the camp, and the troops rose en masse.” — Detective and Secret Service Days, Edwin T. Woodhall, 1929
There could be a perfectly straightforward reason why Woodhall doesn’t mention the role played by Percy in the Mutiny: the British Government did not officially acknowledge the Etaples Mutiny until 1978. Prior to this there was no official confirmation it had ever taken place. The riots, and the role played by the deserters in those riots, were brushed swiftly under the carpet. Those who weren’t executed by a firing squad were dispatched immediately to the front where many would have died. There would be major offensives in Flanders and Ypres in November that year and major casualties could almost certainly be relied on. If you could rely on the plucky British Tommy for anything, it was their silence.
A report in the Manchester Guardian dated February 13th 1930 pulls few punches in exposing the hubris and determination of the British authorities to suppress ‘the truth’ about what happened. The article begins with a fairly astonishing quote from R.H Mottram and Eric Partridge’s Three Personal Records of War, published just ten weeks before:
“The culmination of this period was that occurrence, chiefly disgraceful to writers about the war who appear in a conspiracy to conceal it, the Mutiny in Etaples. All countries engaged in the war had periods of widespread mutiny, a fact which should be noted and recorded, not hushed up … with the British it occurred … over some rumoured disagreement with the Police. I never knew the truth and perhaps no one knows it.” — Three Personal Records of The War, Scholartis Press, 1929
According to the witness account that follows, written from the perspective of a junior officer watching events as they unfold, the riots fell into two distinct phases: the “dispute” between the men and the Red Caps that led to the accidental shooting of Corporal Wood, and the change in tone and pace that occurred next morning, when a more organised mob of rioters, made-up chiefly of the “riffraff” who had settled around the outskirts of the camp, pushed back the troops controlling access to Le Touquet:
“Meanwhile a smaller mob came to the railway bridge over the river. The young officer in charge ordered the mutineers to go back or be fired upon. Some hesitated but the ringleader took no notice of the command and approached the youngster with a threat about the river being handy for drowning such puppies.” — Manchester Guardian, February 13th 1930
The ringleader was Jesse Robert Short, a serial deserter and former convict subsequently court-martialled and ‘put to death’ by firing squad in Boulogne on October 4th. He was thirty-one years of age. Significantly, perhaps, the junior officer backs up Edwin T. Woodhall’s claims that a further number of arrests had been made but that “many of the men “happened” to escape into the darkness.” Was one of those men mentioned by the junior officer, Private Percy Toplis? The junior officer is clear about one thing; there was the “justly indignant fighting soldiers” responsible for the initial slew of events and there was the “camp riffraff” on the other.
he Guardian’s report provoked a short-lived barrage of letters; many of them printed in Scotland, repeating much the same sequence of events. The riots started on the night of September 9th and continued for some four days. According to one former soldier writing in to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the riots were far worse than the Guardian report had portrayed and “might have had disastrous effects on the war had not the officers in charge taken the correct course” (Aberdeen Press & Journal, 17th February 1930). A letter mailed into New Zealand’s Otago Daily Times in March 1922, some eight years earlier, made similar allegations about a cover-up:
“Sir, – Although I have nothing but commendation for Colonel Stewart’s excellent book on the New Zealand Division, I cannot help expressing my surprise that certain important happenings in 1917 have not been recorded, especially as matters of far less importance have found a place in the book. For instance on page 53 mention is made of a deserter going over to the enemy. The lapse of this soldier is insignificant when compared with the mutiny in which 40,000 or 50,000 men were involved, composed chiefly of the New Zealanders.” — A.B Newland Snr Letter to the Otago Daily Times, March 6th 1922
The letter had been composed by Archibald Benjamin Newland Snr of Roxburgh. Newland had been a volunteer with the Church Army, whose casually-staffed canteen stood adjacent to the tea-room run by Lady Angela Forbes. The letter’s reference to a “copy of army orders sentencing Corporal —— of the Northumberland Regiment to be shot” not only proves Newland’s account to be authentic, it also suggests privileged access to the records of the camp’s Brigadier General. The Church Army Hut at Etaples at this time was under the day-to-day management of Ada Dorothy Blacklock, step-daughter of Baron Henry Horne, at this time serving as Lieutenant General of the First Army. Whether the letter was composed with the collusion of Lady Forbes or Dorothy Blacklock is likely to remain a mystery, but it does make one thing abundantly clear; the demands of the mutineers were satisfied in full:
“There was only one way to put a speedy end to this appalling state of affairs, and that course was happily adopted. Al the demands of the men were granted – the removal of the A.P.M (assistant provost marshal) and the “red caps” from Etaples, the cancelling of the out-of-bounds orders, a modification of the “bull ring” torture … and last, but by no means least, the assurance that no man was to be court-martialled for taking part in the mutiny. Numbers of men were court-martialled and shot at various times for inciting others to insubordination, so that it was not at all likely that the men would come to terms without this assurance.” — A.B Newland Snr Letter to the Otago Daily Times, March 6th 1922
Lady Forbes’ own memoirs, Memories and Base Details had been published the previous year and whilst her own account of the incident differs greatly in terms of detail, it is interesting to note that there are some curious verbal parallels between the two. With the exception of the letter published by the Otago Daily Times in 1922 and the Manchester Guardian report of February 1930, the British Public was to know absolutely nothing about the disturbances at Etaples for another 60 years. It’s easy to see why William Allison and John Fairley, authors of the 1978 book, The Monocled Mutineer, were able to place Britain’s most wanted man at the scene of the Mutiny in France. Percy achieved no shortage of notoriety for donning the garb of an Officer and regularly sported the monocle worn by the alleged ringleader. The only explanation that Woodhall provides for the interest that Special Branch took in this ‘military Ismael’ is that Percy was responsible for a ‘particularly brutal assault on an old French Peasant’ that took place within miles of the camp at Etaples.
As you might expect, Woodhall makes no mention of any ‘mutiny’, but even experts are not convinced that any formal ‘mutiny’ as such took place. The series of volatile incidents taking place between August and September 1917 appear to have more in common with industrial action and labour strikes than any serious attempt to overthrow military authority. Conditions at the camp were pitiful, troops regularly having to endure gruelling and degrading treatment at the hands of the non-commissioned officers putting them through their paces. A small contingent of those rioting demanded improvements to camp conditions and amongst the chaos and pandemonium certain threats were being served:
The saying “like master like man” was more than true in this case, for ever since Strachan had been A.P.M. the red caps in Etaples had become thoroughly offensive individuals, and no greater contrast could have been found than in the manners of the police in Boulogne and Abbeville, and of those in Etaples …
Then came the first real excitement in the camp! Trouble over the police had been simmering for some time … I ran out to see what had happened, and found myself being swept down the hill to the new siding in the midst of an angry mob. It was nothing less than a man hunt that I was indulging in! — Lady Angela Forbes, Memories and Base Details, 1921, Hutchinson & Co
Woodhall mentions the simmering tensions over a fatal shooting of a young Corporal with the Gordon Highlanders by a Red Cap, and of a potential riot being averted, but he makes no mention of an actual ‘mutiny’. It’s completely downplayed, if not totally misrepresented in his memoirs. That Special Branch singled out Private Percy Toplis based on a single assault on an old French Peasant and a handful of petty crimes seems pretty implausible, but then it’s equally implausible that someone as cold-blooded and as habitually absent as Toplis would ever give a damn about the welfare and happiness of the troops. Toplis was forever reinventing himself. He would desert the army under one name and re-enlist under another. He’d talk with one accent and then, when need and circumstances arose, would just as casually switch to another.
According to his family, Percy had shown promise as an actor as a child, taking part in local theatre with newly founded, Mansfield Ops, but it was nothing to match this performance. Some accounts of the riots had Toplis serving the demands for better conditions. Was this just another role he was playing? Was he looking to add a more worthy philanthropic layer to his ruthless and multi-tiered objectives? Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elusive anti-hero Jay Gatsby, Toplis’s attempts to add drama and a touch of stagecraft to his adventures revealed, to me at least, the lengths the rootless and dispossessed will sometimes go to, to produce any kind of personal narrative; it’s an identity Toplis craves. Uprooted and estranged from birth Percy was placing himself at the centre of his own evolving story: reconstructing his past, redrafting current circumstances and slowly bringing to birth an imagined future.
When Private Percy Toplis arrived back in his hometown of Blackwell wearing a uniform and a gold-rimmed monocle he sold his story to Nottingham Evening Post. A hero’s welcome and champagne reception at the Miner’s Welfare followed, Percy regaling the crowd with his fanciful ‘Captain’s’ exploits. It was a move that can’t have sat well with the embittered hardline Socialists sharing his rations and swapping cigarettes in the ‘conchie’ sanctuaries around Etaples. By dressing as a British Army Officer, was Percy somehow withdrawing his opposition to the deeply repressive system that brought them all to France? He wasn’t the only soldier in the war posing as an officer, but he had branded those idle chevrons on his arm that little bit deeper than most. It was impudent and unruly, yes but it didn’t so much destroy the rules as distort them. It was part rejection, part homage, part surrender, part triumph. I wasn’t the first to have thought it, far from it, but if power was inherent in the very clothes on our back, could the things we wore ever be a place of revolution? We were tied in an ever tightening theoretical knot. The dashing young Captain, DCM we saw staring back at us in the photo wasn’t the face of freedom but of membership, not rejection but aspiration.
The American essayist, Lionel Trilling was to call this ‘the socialisation of the anti-social, the acculturation of the anti-cultural and the legitimisation of the subversive’ but it all came down to one thing in the end; when it came to being dominated we were screwed. The revolutionary was locked in a destructive cycle that ultimately restored the dynamics of power by virtue of parody and simulation; damned if we did and damned if we didn’t. One thing was certain however; successful storytelling was at the heart of all revolutionary dramas and Percy (with Woodhall’s help) was writing one hell of a story. As with Gatsby this young and resourceful deserter was so full of artifice and artificiality that it’s really very difficult to know how much of what he showed was real. On this occasion, it really was a fine line between being nothing absolutely and absolutely nothing.
You only have to look at the success of Isis to see that within extremist and revolutionary narratives there is enormous stock to be had in absolutes. Power is redistributed in strong, iconic images; its objective has to be clear, its future somehow inevitable and visually it must be compelling. To those at the extremities, the real has neither the clarity nor authenticity to challenge the status quo. If the fall of the Twin Towers in September 2001 proved anything it was that revolution had to be ‘unreal’. The steel girders may have weakened, the foundations may have shook, and the walls may have collapsed but it was the foundations of Western reality that were truly undermined that day. That Toplis wasn’t real made him all the more dangerous in my book.
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Anybody who has visited the bothy will know that it is pretty unevenly split between the bright and substantial ‘hospitality’ room and the cramped and darkened ‘side-room’. Whilst shutters have been crudely applied to the windows of both rooms, a small skylight transforms the former. The atmosphere here is one of orderliness and practicality. The floor is cleanly swept, the improvised furnishings are arranged neatly and a utilitarian calm and purpose prevails. Not so the darkened ante-room. The levity of the sun hadn’t pierced those shutters for years and it was only the feeble flash of my smart-phone that revealed the freakish scrawl of worshipful signatures that plastered the room from floor to ceiling. Not being able to see it in its entirety leant it a mystery and persuasiveness far greater than the sum of its parts. A scruffy, flaccid sofa sat on one side, and several other unspecified furnishings that may have been boxes collapsed about my feet as I stumbled around in the dark. Was this the room that Toplis had slept in? Was it here that we had tethered his ghost?
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Read Part II – Tinker, Toplis, Soldier … Spy?
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Timeline
1896 – Percy Toplis born in Sanforth Street, Chesterfield (neighbouring the new Proact Stadium)
1909 – Toplis leaves school and becomes blacksmith at Blackwell Colliery.
1912 – Percy is sentenced to two years in Lincoln Prison for statutory rape.
1914 (July) – Outbreak of World War One.
1914 – Released from Lincoln Prison and joins the Royal Army Medical Corps
1916 (April) – Easter Rebellion in Ireland
1916 (December) – Russian mystic Rasputin killed on the orders of British Intelligence for being a suspected German collaborator.
1917 (March) – Russian Revolution. Bolshevik (Communist) unseats Tsarist government.
1917 (April) – Germany provides safe passage for Communist leader Lenin to return to Russia.
1917 (April) – A series of French Mutinies takes place. First Russian Brigade implicated as revolution fever sweeps Europe.
1917 (August/September) – The Etaples Mutiny.
1917 (September) Percy’s regiment deployed to India (Percy’s whereabouts uncertain)
1917 (September/November) – Intelligence and Special Branch Officer, Edwin Woodfall seconded to Military Police and tasked with rounding up deserters from a camp near Etaples. Claims Toplis is among them in his memoirs.
1917 (October) – Communist leader Lenin comes to power in Russia.
1918 (December) – Still a deserter, Percy Toplis is sentenced to six months hard-labour for fraud. The Judge acknowledges that he deserted the army in June but no warrant is issued by the Army for his detainment or arrest. Toplis was impersonating an officer at the time the offence was committed. He was charged with obtaining a gold wristlet watch using a bogus cheque. The press articles say Percy is 30 years of age.
1918 (October 1918-January 1919) – German Revolution. Naval mutinies in Kiel lead to civilian unrest throughout Germany. Kurt Eisner, leader of the Independent Socialist Party, declares Germany a Socialist Republic.
1918 (November 11) – End of World War One.
1919 (January) – The Battle of George Square in Glasgow. 60,000 workers riot. English troops deployed. Communist ringleaders imprisoned.
1919 – Coal Miner’s Strike (Britain)
1919 (May/June) – Toplis freed from prison.
1919 – Irish Repulican, Éamon de Valera, sentenced to life imprisonment for the Easter Rebellion escapes from Lincoln Prison.
1920 – Still a deserter Toplis re-enlists in the Royal Army Service Corps at Bulford where he becomes involved in the black market sale of Army petrol.
1920 (January) – Decorated Etaples Nurse, Florence Nightingale Shore murdered on train travelling between London and Hastings
1920 (April) – Deserts from Army and makes his way to Inverness and the North East of Scotland. Wanted in connection with the death of taxi driver George Spicer.
1920 (May) – Toplis is found guilty of the murder in Absentia
1920 (May/June) – Hides out at a Gamekeeper’s Lodge (the Toplis Bothy) near Tomintoul in Moray, North East Scotland.
1920 (June 1st) – Spotted at bothy. Wounds constable and local farmer in violent getaway. Flees the bothy on a bicycle.
1920 (June 5th) – Catches train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, before heading to Carlisle Army Barracks.
1920 (June 6th) – Spotted walking along a road in Penrith. Shot dead by a small posse of Police and local civilians.
1927 (January) – Body of Harry Fallows, the man who drove with Toplis to Swansea after the death of taxi driver Spicer, is found dead in cave in Derbyshire, in an apparent double suicide with his girlfriend, Miss Marjorie Coe Stewart. They had drunk Lysol, a common suicide method at that time. The girl, who was just 17 at the time, worked as a fabric designer at the Mayne Fabric Company in Salford, Manchester.
other Toplis links:
https://www.monocledmutineer.co.uk/category/percy-toplis
Main Sources:
Detective and Secret Service Days, Edwin T. Woodhall, 1929
Spies of the Great War, Edwin T. Woodhall, 1929
Memories and Base Details, Lady Angela Forbes, 1921
Queer People, Basil Thomson, 1922
The Monocled Mutineer, John Fairley & William Allison, 1978
The Man is a Menace: MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence, Scott Lyall, Scottish Studies Review, 2007
Nottingham Journal & Express, June 1920
Leeds Mercury, June 1920
Highland News, June 1920
Lanarkshire Post, June 1920
Illustrated Police News, May 1912
Gloucester Journal, June 1920
Dundee Courier Angus, May & June 1920
Cheltenham Chronicle, May & June 1920
Aberdeen Press and Journal Aberdeenshire, May & June 1920
The Bonnot Gang, Richard Parry
The Quest For Charles Rennie Mackintosh, John Cairney, 2004
Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, Hugh MacDiarmid, Duncan Glen – 1970
The Nightingale Shore Murder, Rosemary Cook, 2011
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, Christopher Andrew, 2009
MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Keith Jeffery, 2010
Hugh MacDiarmid: The Man and His Work, Nancy K. Gish, 1984
The Social and Economic Conditions Leading to the Blaina and Abertillery Riots, E.B McLeod, 1973
The Blaina Riots, Martyn Thomas 1935
1902-1925: RMS Orontes, an occasional troopship of the Great War, Dennis Brook
Mutiny at Etaples, Julian Putkowski, Shot at Dawn website