Monthly Meetings

We meet at 2 pm on the fourth Tuesday of the month at the Congregational Church, Kilwardby St, Ashby.
There is normally a guest speaker or, in December, musical entertainment.
This is followed by tea, coffee and biscuits and a chance to meet and talk with other members.

Tea Rota and Reporting Groups

23rd June – Martin Lloyd – ‘Passports, Assassins, Traitors and Spies’

Martin worked for HM Immigration Service for 24 years. He now writes books, appears on TV and radio and gives talks to groups such as u3as. Today his talk was about passports, assassins, traitors and spies and the influence three people had on the way passports are treated and issued around the world. Amazingly Martin spoke without slides or photos and without any form of script or notes for 50 minutes whilst rattling off endless facts, dates times and names.

His first tale was of Italian Felice Orsini and English radicals in his attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris. He believed that Napoleon was blocking the unification of Italy, which Orsini supported, because a unit of the French army was stationed in the Papal States protecting the Pope, and the papal states divided the would-be Italy into two halves, North and South. Orsini needed a passport to enter France but one didn’t need to be a national of that country to get one. You applied to the consulate of that country to buy one but the French knew he was a radical and so would not issue him one. He therefore bought a British passport. To get it one had to personally know the Foreign Secretary or have someone vouch for you. Orsini got his passport under a false name and hence was able to travel to Paris. His bombing attempt failed to kill or injure Napoleon but 8 others were killed and over a hundred injured. One of his accomplices was caught almost immediately and he confessed, giving the names of the others. Orsini was arrested and executed. But it didn’t end there. British passports, like Orsini’s, didn’t contain any details of what the holder looked like and so it was easy to use a forged or fake passport. The French fury over the British allowing Orsini to travel on a British passport which had been signed off by the then Foreign Secretary who was now the PM Lord Palmerston, caused Palmerston’s resignation and collapse of the government. All future passports would include details of the person for whom it was issued.

The second tale started with Germany declaring war on Russia in 1914. Hundreds of Americans in Berlin demanded their passports be endorsed with an exit visa by the German Foreign Ministry to allow them to leave. One such American was Charles A Inglis who was advised that his passport had been collected the previous day by someone from the United States embassy. This was evidently not the truth.

In August an American named Charles Inglis registered at a hotel in Edinburgh. His travels took him all over the UK and on to Ireland where he was arrested. He was searched and a notebook was found listing details of British naval movements and addresses in Norway where letters had been sent. These letters contained other letters to be sent on to Germany and had been opened and read by the British Authorities. The man arrested as Charles Inglis was actually a German called Carl Lody who was charged with espionage and executed.

This led to countries around the world realising that passports should have photos of the holder, a design which lasts to this day.

The third concerned the arrest and trial of William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw. He was famous for making radio propaganda broadcasts from Germany to England claiming that we were losing the war. He was captured after the war ended in 1945 and stood trial for treason. However his father had been born in Ireland, then part of the UK, but he emigrated to the USA with his wife and took up US citizenship. William was born in the USA but travelled to England where he fraudulently obtained a British passport and later travelled to Germany where his Nazi sympathies lay. He then took on German citizenship. At his trial it was argued that he could not be acting treasonably as he wasn’t British but the judge ruled that because he had travelled under a British passport, he was availing himself of its protection which he had abused. This made his acts treasonable. He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

A very detailed and interesting talk given by someone with an inside knowledge of the Passport Office and its history.