Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 46, Number 3, 2000, pp. 336-356.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame: British Ransom
Victims in the Mediterranean Periphery, 1860-81
MARTIN BLINKHORN∗
History, University of Lancaster
Between 1865 and 1881 there occurred in southern Europe and the Balkans several cases of
kidnapping in which British subjects were seized and held to ransom by brigands. Most ended
peacefully (though expensively) with the negotiation and handing over of a substantial ransom,
usually in gold, and the subsequent freeing of the hostage(s); one case, that of the so-called
‘Marathon murders’ of 1870 in Greece, ended in tragedy. Quite apart from the problems these
incidents created for the victims and their families, some kidnappings also raised important
questions for the governments involved, notably who was to blame for such incidents, who was
formally responsible for them, and — crucially — who was ultimately liable for the cost
involved? These questions and the responses of British governments to them, culminating in
1881 with the enunciation by Gladstone’s administration of a clear policy on such matters,
form the core of this article.
Epilogue as Prologue
As this article was nearing completion, the British newspaper The Guardian
reported that during 1999 there had been recorded, worldwide, 1,789 kidnappings
for ransom. Most of these had occurred in Latin America, notably Colombia where
the Marxist ELN (National Liberation Army) had carried out hundreds of
kidnappings in order to raise funds for its struggle. The other top ten “hot spots for
danger” (in descending order) were Mexico, the former Soviet Union, Brazil, the
Philippines, Nigeria, India, Ecuador, Venezuela and South Africa. One of the
Colombian victims was British, a Scottish oil worker, Alistair Taylor, whose
captivity was already (at 21 April 2000) well into its eighth month. The report
made reference to the “well-rehearsed set of procedures” operated by the Foreign
Office “when a British national is kidnapped abroad”:
The first step is to contact the government of the country concerned and insist that no action is
taken that could harm the hostage’s safety, a request that was ignored with disastrous results by
the Yemeni government in December 1998, when three British tourists and one Australian were
killed in a shoot-out between security forces and a gang of Islamic militant kidnappers.
British policy remains never to give in to ransom demands but the Foreign Office admits it
has no control over the actions of people and companies with abduction insurance. Diplomats are
∗
This article develops themes addressed in a paper given to the biennial conference of the
Australasian Association for European History, Perth, 1999, an edited version of which appears in the
published conference proceedings. It also incorporates ideas first explored in a paper given in 1998 to
the research seminar of the Department of Law, Lancaster University. I am extremely grateful to
Professor Sol Picciotto for his helpful comments on (and corrections to) that paper. Any surviving
errors or misconceptions on matters of international law are entirely mine.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
337
understood to be worried that the rise in demand for kidnap insurance may be exacerbating the
problem, as many kidnap gangs expect employees of multi-national companies to be covered.1
If the sheer volume of international kidnapping as the twentieth century ended was
unprecedented, and the advent of kidnapping insurance a new tactic in the game,
the phenomenon itself was by no reckoning new. During the 1920s and early
1930s, for example, the kidnapping of foreigners by Chinese bandit warlords was
almost commonplace.2 Earlier, during the first decade of the century, Macedonian
insurgent bands and the Moroccan brigand-turned-rebel Raisuli carried out several
well-publicised kidnappings of foreigners, British nationals prominent among
them.3 By this time the position of the Foreign Office and of British governments
faced with the kidnapping for ransom of Britons abroad was more or less clearly
established along the lines adumbrated above. How, during a still earlier wave of
international kidnappings, that position came to be established is one of the themes
of this article. Related to it are other questions, all the more pertinent in times
before the introduction of kidnapping insurance: who bore responsibility for such
actions and who was ultimately liable for the financial costs involved?
Lord Granville Investigates
In the summer of 1881, Lord Granville, foreign secretary in Gladstone’s second
administration, circulated British embassies, legations and consulates with a
demand for details of cases in which, since 1860, British subjects had been seized
and held to ransom by brigands. The responses enabled the Foreign Office to
produce, and Granville to lay before Parliament, a detailed table revealing that
during the previous two decades there had occurred fourteen such cases, eleven in
southern Europe (Spain, Italy, Greece and the Ottoman Balkans) and three in
Mexico. They ranged from small-scale cases involving a few hours’ detention and
a modest ransom to others in which captives had been held for months, some in
which the ransom paid represented hundreds of thousands of pounds at today’s
values, and two in which the lives of captives were lost.4
1
The Guardian (London), 21 April 2000, p. 6. The original report on which the Guardian article
was based was published by the insurance group Hiscox, and can be viewed via its website:
www.hiscox.co.uk.
2
There exist several published memoirs of such episodes, many involving missionaries. The most
colourful, not involving a missionary, is unquestionably “Tinko” Pawley, My Bandit Hosts (London:
S. Paul & Co. Ltd., 1933). Pawley’s memoir inspired an Evelyn Waugh short story, “Incident in
Azania”: see Evelyn Waugh (Ann Pasternak Slater ed.), Complete Short Stories and Selected
Drawings (London: David Campbell, 1998), pp. 87-102, and Pasternak Slater’s illustrated article
“White Mischief” in The Guardian Weekend Supplement, 26 September 1998, pp. 10-17.
3
A taste of the activities of Macedonian-Bulgarian bands and of Raisuli can be obtained from,
respectively, Laura Beth Sherman, Fires on the Mountain. The Macedonian Revolutionary Movement
and the Kidnapping of Ellen Stone (New York and Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1980) and
Walter Harris, Morocco That Was (London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1921, reprinted 1983),
especially pp. 179-264 of the 1983 edition. On the American dimension to the kidnappings of the
early 1900s, see Russell D. Buhite, Lives at Risk. Hostages and Victims in American Foreign Policy
(Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1995), pp. 57-86.
4
“Return respecting British Subjects captured by Brigands, 1860-81” (5 July 1881), House of
Commons Parliamentary Papers (1881), XCVIII, 243 (no. C.2990).
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
338
Martin Blinkhorn
Granville’s reason for undertaking this exercise was his, and the Treasury’s,
concern at the recent substantial commitment of public moneys to accelerate the
ransoming of British subjects held hostage by brigands in the Ottoman Balkans.
During 1880-81 successive British governments, one Conservative and the other
Liberal, had authorised the payment, through the British consulate-general at
Salonica, of ransoms totalling around £24,000 (perhaps half-a-million pounds
today). This had been deemed necessary in order to free, first an Anglo-Irish
adviser to the Ottoman gendarmerie, Colonel Henry Synge, and then a mining
engineer, Harry Suter, from captivity and the threat of death at the hands of ethnic
Greek brigands active in Macedonia (now northern Greece).5 Although Granville’s
“audit” actually showed that in the overall period 1860-81 government
involvement in the payment of ransoms had been the exception rather than the
rule, and before 1880 had resulted in no net loss to the Exchequer, official concern
was understandable. The Salonica consulate’s recent outlay represented almost
exactly a tenth of Britain’s annual consular service budget,6 and while in both
cases it was intended as merely an advance pending final payment from some other
quarter, there was good cause for concern as to whether such restitution would
ever be forthcoming. Neither freed hostage could afford to reimburse his
government, while any possibility of the Ottoman government’s making good the
sum was rendered dubious by the parlous state of the empire’s finances, the
sluggishness of its bureaucracy, and the ambivalence of its commitments. Behind
the immediate issue lay broader and more fundamental questions as to the whole
nature and location of responsibility and liability when the subject of one country,
while travelling or residing in another, fell into the hands of kidnappers.
Britons and Brigands
Although it is not explicit in any of the documentation surrounding the Granville
kidnapping “audit”, implicit is a suggestion that the period to which it refers, 186081, had been one in which encounters between Englishmen (for such they were
always termed) and foreign brigands or bandits had been unusually numerous and
costly. And so it seems was the case, since (as far as I have been able to discover),
in the forty-five years between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the starting date
of Granville’s survey, only one minor (because brief) instance of brigand
kidnapping involving British subjects occurred in southern Europe, plus one of
(double) murder at the hands of brigands.7 This period also coincided with the
5
P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice] F[oreign]O[ffice]/881/4222. Correspondence respecting the Capture of
Colonel Synge by Brigands in the District of Caraferia, Macedonia. 1880; PRO FO/881/4454.
Correspondence respecting the Capture of Mr H. Suter by Brigands at Isvor in Turkey. 1881.
6
PRO T[reasury]/1/12817/10883, “Consular Service Vote 1880-1”, 21 June 1880.
7
On the double murder in question, that of a Mr and Mrs Hunt, see Crawford Tait Ramage (Edith
Clay ed.), Ramage in South Italy. The Nooks and Byways of Italy: Wanderings in Search of its
Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions (Chicago: Longmans, 1987), pp. 5 and 203, and The
Times (London), 24 and 28 January 1825. The Times, 3 August 1844, tells of a Mr Starkey’s brief
captivity at the hands of Spanish brigands near Gibraltar. One other possible case must be mentioned.
At the age of seventy, the renowned playwright and librettist W.S. Gilbert claimed that in 1837, at the
age of two, he had been kidnapped and held to ransom (for £25) by Neapolitan brigands. The claim
has always been disputed and is now held by most informed commentators to have been (at best) an
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
339
effective suppression and disappearance of the Barbary corsairs, whose kidnapping
activities had of course plagued earlier generations since the sixteenth century.8
Why a rash of international kidnappings by Mediterranean and Balkan brigands
should have broken out during the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s is therefore a
challenging question in itself. Briefly, the answer would appear to be that these
two decades, or at least shorter periods within them, witnessed a coincidence of
two developments: an upsurge, temporary in most areas, in brigandage itself and a
heightened British presence throughout the region.
Following a decline in brigandage across much of the northern Mediterranean
rim during the 1850s, in the following decade the phenomenon revived in all the
areas concerned — southern Spain, southern Italy and Sicily, Greece, and the
European provinces of the Ottoman empire. The underlying condition of this
recrudescence was the political instability that characterised the period. A brief
summary of the southern European political context may accordingly be helpful at
this point.
Spain underwent a major revolution in 1868, the overthrow of the Bourbon
monarchy ushering in a six-year period of extreme political instability. During that
period, the country experienced an uncertain provisional period, an unsuccessful
new monarchy under an unhappy, imported Italian king, a chaotic one-year
republic with four different presidents, insurrections by reactionary Carlists in the
north and “cantonalists” (extreme radical decentralisers) in the south, and an
eventual military restoration of the monarchy at the end of 1874.9 One, though of
course only one, manifestation of the turbulent state in which the Spain of the late
1860s and early 1870s found itself was a reappearance of the brigandage for which
the country had once been notorious but which, especially following the
introduction of the Civil Guard in 1844, had seemed to be becoming a thing of the
past.10
Italy, of course, acquired its independent existence during this period, to be
precise in 1861, but for much of the 1860s the southern half of the new country,
the former Bourbon monarchy of Naples and Sicily, was home to numerous and
often large armed bands representing what the new Italian authorities labelled, and
exaggeration. See Jane Stedman, W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and his Theatre (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 2. Stedman in turn cites Leon E.A. Berman, “The Kidnapping of W.S.
Gilbert”, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association (May 1985), pp. 133-48 regarding
Gilbert’s “memory” of what had probably been no more than a street “snatch” of the infant. I am
indebted to my colleague Professor Jeffrey Richards for these references.
8
C.R. Pennell, “Dealing with Pirates: British, French and Moroccans 1834-1856”, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21, 1 (1994), pp. 54-83.
9
The best treatment of this period in English remains Alistair Hennessy, The Federal Republic in
Spain. Pi y Margall and the Federal Republican Movement, 1868-1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1962).
10
Such was certainly the impression gained by many foreign visitors. See, for example, the
unpublished diary of a Spanish tour undertaken in 1864 by a future British Prime Minister, Henry
Campbell-Bannerman: BL Add.Ms. 41248D, especially p. 15. On the Civil Guard see Enrique
Martínez Ruiz, Creación de la Guardia Civil (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976), pp. 297-307, and
Diego López Garrido, La Guardia Civil y los orígenes del Estado centralista (Madrid and Barcelona:
Editorial Crítica, 1982).
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
340
Martin Blinkhorn
implicitly dismissed, as brigantaggio. At first this reflected a widespread and
serious regional suspicion of, or downright hostility to, the new state, linked
(though not always as closely as northerners insisted was the case) with the papacy
and the overthrown Neapolitan Bourbons. By the mid-1860s, however, southern
brigantaggio had largely lost whatever political character and connections it had
earlier possessed, was inexorably retreating in the face of massive and determined
official repression, and had reverted to what might be termed “conventional”
brigand behaviour.11
In the tiny nation of Greece, independent since the late 1820s and a kingdom
since 1832, the decade of the 1860s saw a revolution (1862) roughly analogous to
that of Spain in 1868, a consequent change of monarchical dynasty (1863) and a
radically new constitution (1864), unsuccessful hostilities with the Ottoman
empire over Crete (1866-9), and a widespread breakdown of law and order as
brigandage spread across much of the countryside.12 As for the Ottoman empire
itself, in the 1870s it reached, with the war against Russia in 1877-8, a crucial
stage in a process of internal and territorial decline that had been a feature of
European international relations throughout the nineteenth century; most of its
European dominions, and especially those dominated ethnically by Greeks and
Bulgarians, were the theatre of operations for brigand bands of at least ostensibly
patriotic character.13
Against this background, the second relevant development was a marked
increase in British tourism, travelling, and economic enterprise in southern Europe,
offering brigands potentially lucrative prey at a time when the Foreign Office had
yet to develop a systematic policy of actively discouraging British nationals from
venturing into troubled districts. Of the episodes reported to Granville, three
involved tourists. William Moens, a London stockbroker, was seized by brigands
in May 1865 while returning with his wife and two (also English) companions
from an excursion to the site of Paestum, south of Naples; carried off into the
mountainous interior of Salerno province, he was held captive for three months.14
Late in the same year Lord John Hervey, brother of the Marquess of Bristol, and
two friends were shooting game in the western Greek region of Acharnania, having
landed there from their private yacht, when they were seized by brigands who held
the party’s youngest member, Henry Coore, hostage for a week.15 The victims,
11
John A. Davis, Conflict and Control. Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London:
Macmillan Education, 1988), pp. 66-90 and 159-86; John Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and
Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1890-1900 (New York: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 25-52.
12
John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause. Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece
1821-1912 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 39-104.
13
The best English-language source for the relationship of these processes with banditry is Karen
Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca NY: Cornell
University Press, 1994).
14
W.J.C. Moens, English Travellers and Italian Brigands. A Narrative of Capture and Captivity
(London: 1866), 2 volumes. On the actual capture, see volume 1, pp. 103 ff. The account of his
captor, Manzo, appears in his interrogation, Archivio di Stato di Salerno [ASSal.], Tribunali Civile e
Correzionale e Corte d’Assise di Salerno. Serie: Reati Politici e Brigantaggio [Trib.] B[usta] 57
F[ascicolo] 801, pp. 91-6. This file also contains the Carabinieri report of the episode, 16 May 1865.
15
The Times, 25 December 1865.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
341
three British and one Italian, of the sensational “Marathon murders” in the Greece
of 1870 were members of a party ambushed while returning by carriage to Athens
from an excursion to the site of Marathon.16
Most British kidnapping victims, however, were residents in southern Europe,
not visitors. Robert Rankin (Spain 1871), Arthur Haselden (Spain 1874), John
Forester Rose (Sicily 1876), and Harry Suter (Ottoman Macedonia 1881)
possessed economic interests in their respective countries of residence. Rankin
owned a saw-mill and a raisin-exporting business in the eastern Spanish coastal
town of Denia, where he had lived for twenty-five years and was well-respected as
a developer of the local infrastructure and a general benefactor.17 Haselden and his
brothers owned and managed several lead mines in the Sierra Morena north-east of
Córdoba, a legendary fastness of bandits.18 Rose belonged to a prosperous British
family resident in the town of Lercara Friddi, inland from Palermo, with interests
in sulphur mining, finance and the marsala trade.19 Suter, whose family included
several members of the British consular service, was a mining prospector in the
region of Cassandra south-east of Salonica.20 The position of the uncle and nephew
John and John Anthony Bonell, kidnapped in Spain near the border with Gibraltar
in May 1870, was admittedly rather different. Gibraltar merchants, shippers and
property-owners of Genoese descent, the Bonells as native Gibraltarians were
nevertheless not only British subjects but also, in their own minds at least,
“English” through and through.21 Colonel Henry Synge, as well as owning a farm
in the northern foothills of Mount Olympus, was adviser to the Ottoman
gendarmerie and thus represented another sub-species of the Englishman abroad,
the professional military expert.22
Whether visitors or residents, such foreigners were attractive targets for local
brigands. The tourist captives, travelling in style to view, sketch and photograph
16
Romilly Jenkins, The Dilessi Murders (London: Longmans 1961), provides the fullest account of
this episode in English. See also Crosby Stevens, Ransom and Murder in Greece. Lord Muncaster’s
Journal 1870 (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1989). The unpublished documentation on the case held in
the Public Record Office, some of it unused by Jenkins, is vast; much of it can be accessed via the
published Parliamentary Papers.
17
The Rankin kidnapping (a brief affair) is covered in correspondence between the Foreign Office
and the Madrid Legation: PRO FO/72/1264.
18
The Times, 13 July 1874. Haselden’s account in The Times is reproduced in H.J. Rose, Untrodden
Spain, and her Black Country (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1875), volume 2, pp. 86-92. Diplomatic and
consular correspondence relating to the case is contained chiefly in PRO FO/72/1369, PRO
FO/72/1382 and PRO FO/72/1387.
19
Raleigh Trevelyan, Principi sotto il vulcano (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1977), pp. 216-18.
20
“Correspondence respecting the Capture of Mr. H. Suter by Brigands at Istvor in Turkey”, House
of Commons Command Papers (1881), volume C.1015 (no. C.3031), Turkey, no.11, 1881: Mrs Suter
to Consul-General Blunt, Salonica, 10 April 1881 (inclosure 6 in no.8, Blunt to Lord Granville, 10
April 1881). For a list of Suter’s consular relatives, see PRO FO/78/3613, Blunt to Foreign Office,
no.49 enclosure 2, 15 April 1881.
21
“Minutes of the Proceedings of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Seizure,
Detention and Ransom of John Bonell and John Antonio Bonell”, PRO FO/72/1263, ff. 304-342,
especially f.308.
22
BL, Add.Ms. 39132. Layard Papers, volume CCII, ff 87-8, Layard to Lord Salisbury, 10 March
1880.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
342
Martin Blinkhorn
ruins or merely massacre Greek woodcock, advertised their wealth to the locals,
some of whom — hotel employees and guides included — provided brigands with
information.23 As for resident entrepreneurs, mineowners and the like, such figures
stood out in their respective communities and were consequently vulnerable to preplanned crime; all the captives in this category were seized while on regular workrelated journeys or leisure excursions. Their brigand captors took it for granted not
only that their victims were rich, which most though not all were, but also that they
would be able to raise large ransoms quickly, which only few could. In any case,
brigands further convinced themselves, the British government would if necessary
either pay to save the Queen’s subjects or, more probably, use its awesome power
to make their own rulers pay — a consummation particularly appealing to the
outlaw mind. This confidence was particularly strong in relation to British
employees of local governments such as Colonel Synge (and, looking forward to
the early twentieth century, Philip Wills [also in Ottoman Macedonia]24 and Sir
Harry “Caid” Maclean [in Morocco]).25 There was a painful irony here in the case
of Synge, who, when he fell into the hands of the brigand Niko, had not been paid
by his Ottoman employers for two months.26
Bloodthirsty Scoundrels and Disgraceful Outrages
Most of the kidnapping incidents recorded in Granville’s survey occurred, of
course, during a period when British international standing was just about at its
height. In 1850 the so-called Don Pacífico incident had seen the Greek coast
blockaded by the British fleet after the individual in question, a Portuguese Jew
from Gibraltar, resident in Greece, had been assaulted and his property sacked in
anti-Jewish riots; Palmerston’s response and the supposed principle of “civis
romanus sum” and its implications, are well known.27 Four years later (though for
different reasons) Anglo-French troops had actually occupied Piraeus.28 As for
rescuing captives, even if not strictly captives of brigands, in 1868 a full-scale
military expedition under General Robert Napier was dispatched from Britain to
23
The local authorities strongly suspected Moens’s hotel keeper in Salerno of complicity in the
kidnapping, and during a later phase of Manzo’s career had him kept under close surveillance. ASSal.
Prefettura: Gabinetto Brigantaggio, B63 F684, Prefect of Salerno to Inspector of Police, 3 August
1873. In the “Marathon” case the role of the Marathon party’s dragoman was to say the least suspect.
Even if these two individuals were actually innocent, their cases illustrate a general acceptance that
such things occurred.
24
P.L. Martin Wills, A Captive of the Bulgarian Brigands. An Englishman’s Terrible Experiences in
Macedonia (London: Ede, Allom & Townsend, 1906); The Times, 13 July and 10 October 1905, 25
May 1906; PRO FO/294/33, Monastir Consulate to Constantinople Embassy. See below, footnote 47
and p. 356.
25
Harris, Morocco That Was, pp. 213-15. The Foreign Office files in the Public Record Office
contain voluminous information on Maclean’s kidnapping. See especially PRO FO/174/295/9 and
PRO FO/174/295/14.
26
This was in common with all those foreigners employed to organise the Ottoman gendarmerie. BL
Add.Ms. 39155. Layard Papers, volume CCXXV, f.46, Layard to Salisbury, 21 February 1880.
27
For a recent summary of the episode, see K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation
1846-1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 164.
28
Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.
57.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
343
free a British diplomat, an official emissary, and a collection of British and
European missionaries and artisans, held captive for four years by Theodore, selfappointed Emperor of Abyssinia. The expedition was a sensational success: the
captives were freed, British casualties were minimal, Theodore’s army was
crushed, his fortress of Magdala was razed to the ground, the Emperor himself was
driven to suicide, and Napier returned home to a hero’s welcome and a peerage.29
Although by the mid-1860s the Palmerstonian assertiveness of the Don Pacífico
affair was already giving way, at least in Liberal circles, to the more high-minded,
less interventionist spirit of Gladstonian Liberalism, the shift was anything but
total. Palmerston himself died in 1865 (the year of the first European kidnappings
reported to Granville in 1881), while the Abyssinian crisis was still unfolding. His
successor, Lord John Russell, having shrunk from using force to free the
Abyssinian prisoners, it was left to a Tory government under Disraeli to unleash
against Theodore a demonstration of what Britain could, if pushed, do to weaker,
at any rate African, nations who withheld due respect from the Queen’s subjects.
In 1873-4 a similar fate, on a not dissimilar pretext, was meted out to the Ashanti
by the Gladstone administration in which Granville was by then foreign secretary.
British attitudes, both official and popular, towards lesser European powers
throughout the period embraced by Granville’s survey continued to be influenced
by a powerful sense of superiority, at its mildest patronising and at its worst
domineering. This was certainly true with respect to the southern European
countries in which international kidnapping incidents occurred. Civil servants
privately, politicians both privately and sometimes (as after “Marathon”) in public,
and the press were commonly critical of the periodically disturbed political and
social conditions existing in Mediterranean and Balkan Europe, and especially
scornful regarding the fragility or absence of public order of which they
considered brigandage a symptom.30 Condemnation of this “disgraceful” state of
affairs was nevertheless seldom accompanied by serious analysis. Brigands, in the
monotonous expostulatory language of the Victorian great and good, were simply
“rogues”, “scoundrels”, “bloodthirsty villains”, especially when guilty of
“outrages” against “Englishmen”. Brigandage as a social phenomenon was treated
less as a difficult problem with its own very complex causes, than as a kind of
national defect constituting evidence of a state’s ill-health and/or immaturity; it
was an “infestation”, a “plague”, a “scourge” of which any country suffering it
ought to feel ashamed.31 Where what Gladstone termed “organised disorder”
prevailed and Englishmen suffered as a result, then questions of responsibility and
liability were certain to arise.
29
Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile (London: The Reprint Society, 1962), pp. 203-72, remains the
best account of this insufficiently researched episode.
30
See, for example, The Times editorial that greeted the successful resolution of the Bonell
kidnapping in the Spain of 1870: The Times, 17 June 1870.
31
Examples of this vocabulary in, for example, newspaper editorials and Foreign Office
correspondence are quite simply so numerous as to make it difficult to know where to start in
illustrating the point. For typical examples, however, see the correspondence on the Synge and Suter
cases referred to in note 5 above.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
344
Martin Blinkhorn
British official relations with the countries of southern Europe were not,
however, uniform. Towards the long-established nation-state of Spain and, after
1861, the newly-created one of Italy, British governments maintained at least the
form of relations between equally sovereign states, refraining from open
intervention or interference in their domestic affairs. This did not, of course,
guarantee warm relations, especially where Spain was concerned. For every
Spanish regime and government, whatever its complexion, Britain’s tenure of
Gibraltar and the fortress’s role as a base for smuggling and a bolt-hole for Spanish
criminals and political refugees were perpetual sources of grievance.32 Relations
with Italy, a new kingdom whose leaders were from the outset sensitive to the
country’s potential great-power status, were generally easier but not without
moments of tension.33
Greece and the Ottoman empire were different matters. Along with France and
Russia, Britain was one of infant Greece’s three Protecting Powers, a role
interpreted by successive British governments and their representatives in Athens
to legitimise a degree of active interest in the country’s domestic affairs which, by
the 1860s, Greece’s political class was finding increasingly irksome.34 As for the
Ottoman empire, Britain’s unofficial status as upholder of the crumbling state’s
survival in the face both of indigenous national movements and the territorial
ambitions of Russia gave British governments and ambassadors powerful leverage
at Constantinople, and consuls in the more important provincial capitals such as
Salonica and Smyrna considerable freedom of action.35
Protecting the Englishman Abroad
In principle, the position of Victorian Englishmen or -women travelling or residing
abroad, and accordingly exposed to local crime, was relatively straightforward.
Like any citizen of Spain, Italy, Greece, the Ottoman empire or wherever, they
were entitled — if openly and legally present in the host country and obeying its
laws — to whatever protection that country’s policing system could provide;
should they nevertheless fall victim to any form of crime against their persons or
property, they were entitled to see those responsible pursued, apprehended,
prosecuted and punished in accordance with the country’s own criminal code and
legal system. What they had no right to expect, according to either local or
international law, was privileged treatment in general or, more specifically,
“official” compensation for financial loss suffered through (for example) theft,
32
C.J. Bartlett, “After Palmerston: Britain and the Iberian Peninsula, 1865-76”, English Historical
Review, February 1994, pp. 74-88; Gordon Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh (London: Murray, 1963),
pp. 317-47.
33
Anglo-Italian relations in this period lack a general account, though the work of my research
student, Owain Wright, should eventually rectify this deficit.
34
In The Dilessi Murders, pp. 99-117, Romilly Jenkins employs the concept of “ethnic truth” to
explain the acutely sensitive Greek response to the hellenophobic outcry provoked by the three
English deaths; as both he and Crosby Stevens in Ransom and Murder in Greece make plain, an
ethnically-driven approach to truth worked in both directions. Another of my research students,
Rodanthi Tzanelli, is in the process of shedding new and fascinating light on these matters.
35
Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh, pp. 351-463.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
345
armed robbery or extortion (of which kidnapping for ransom was a form). Such
compensation was, after all, unavailable in the nineteenth century not only to the
citizens of European countries but also to Britons at home and foreigners visiting
or resident in Britain. From their own government Britons abroad were due
“diplomatic protection” via the Foreign Office and the staff of local embassies and
consulates. In general this meant making representations, where appropriate, with
the host country’s authorities, though as we shall see things could sometimes go
much further. What they did not have any right to expect (however much they
might hope for it) was that their own government, whether by military or pecuniary
means, would exceed accepted forms and levels of diplomatic exhortation,
persuasion and pressure.
In the vast majority of instances, that was all that needed to be said. Pocketpicking, purse-snatching, even highway-robbery: these were far commoner
experiences for foreign visitors to, and residents in, southern Europe than
kidnapping ever was, and in the great majority of instances generated only lowlevel, consular business and few real diplomatic problems. At the other extreme,
even the straightforward murder of a British subject, while it certainly could
generate a fair volume of diplomatic correspondence and inspire questions in both
Houses, was seldom a particularly complicated business. This was partly because
once the deed was done it was done, but also because it often involved humble
individuals like common sailors; cases like that of Frederick Robert, a British mine
employee murdered in Spain in 1871, and which (largely owing to the persistence
of Henry Layard, the British Minister at Madrid) dragged on for over five years,
were very much the exception.36 Kidnapping for ransom was a different and, in
comparison, peculiarly problematical crime for a number of reasons.
First, as has already been mentioned, the British subjects involved in such
episodes were often wealthy, which in turn tended to mean they were wellconnected. Two of the victims of the “Marathon murders”, Frederick Vyner and
Edward Herbert, were members of influential aristocratic families and closely
related, respectively, to members of the incumbent and previous governments.
Lord Muncaster, freed by the Marathon party’s Greek brigands captors to arrange
the ransom, was an Irish peer. Lord John Hervey was brother to the Marquess of
Bristol. William Moens, Arthur Haselden and John Forester Rose, if less socially
elevated, had business associates and family members in England who could and
did put pressure on the Foreign Office to do whatever was necessary to protect
English lives and liberty.
Secondly, the sums of money demanded by brigands were often beyond the
means of the victims’ families and friends to raise at short notice, which invariably
raised the question of one or other government’s willingness, ability and obligation
at the very least to advance the cash involved. Either way, delicate diplomatic
36
The Robert case, which will be the subject of a separate article, is covered in two substantial
Foreign Office files: PRO FO/72/1488 and PRO FO/72/1489; for Layard’s unpublished personal
recollections, BL Add.Ms. 38933, Layard Papers, Volume III: “The Story of My Mission to Spain”
Venice, 1883, pp. 278-9 ff.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
346
Martin Blinkhorn
questions were prone to arise concerning ultimate liability for payment or
compensation.
Thirdly, by their very nature, kidnapping cases took time to reach their climax
and resolution: time that could see tempers fraying, confused signals flying
around, and the press of both the countries concerned stirring the flames of
patriotic indignation and sensitivity.
Finally, the fundamental priorities of the British government and the host
government were often different. In any kidnapping case, the British government’s
main concern was specific to that case. It naturally desired the safety and eventual
freedom of its own nationals, even if in the short term this meant foreign criminals
evading the law and enriching themselves; the physical suppression of brigandage,
while considered vital, must be interrupted as long as an English life was in peril.
Just as naturally the instinctive priority of the host government was the pursuit,
apprehension and punishment of the criminals, even at some risk to their victims’
lives. Cleaving to a principle which a century later would become generally
accepted (if still not always observed and ultimately contradicted by the
introduction of abduction insurance), southern European governments officially
forbade the payment and even the negotiation of ransoms on the grounds that such
dealings kept brigandage alive. In reality, the respective positions were seldom
assumed quite so starkly. Both sides wanted to have their cake and eat it, that is,
the captives’ freedom and the punishment of the criminals, and each was bound to
recognise the force of the other’s argument. Fortunately not only for British and
other foreign kidnap victims but also for the much greater number of local
hostages, the much trumpeted principle of “no ransoms” in particular was more
honoured in the breach than the observance. The different emphases were
nevertheless always present just below the surface, and in individual cases could
cause serious difficulties.
Dealing with “Dastardly Outrages”
What, then, actually happened at official level when British subjects, either going
about legitimate business or innocently taking recreation, found themselves seized
by wild-looking, sometimes exotically-clad armed men and (as the diplomatic
correspondence almost always has it) “carried off into the mountains” pending
their captors’ receipt of a large ransom in gold? Up to a point, the pattern was very
consistent. This being the age of the electric telegraph, a message, reporting
capture and uncertainty as to the current whereabouts of brigands and victim(s)
would be dispatched from the local consulate to the British embassy or legation in
the national capital, and forwarded thence to the Foreign Office; the foreign
secretary of the day would immediately respond by instructing the British
ambassador (or equivalent) to urge strenuous action on the Spanish (or Italian,
Greek or Ottoman) authorities, yet stressing negotiation rather than armed pursuit.
This last point, while certainly articulated during the Moens and Coore
kidnappings in 1865, was far more sharply defined following the “Marathon
murders”. Whatever other issues were involved in this complex, tragic and still
murky affair, one thing that was clear was that the four victims might not have
perished had the Greek army not moved in on the Arvanitaki band of brigands and
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
347
caused them to panic.37 Thereafter, every British response to a kidnapping was the
same: there should be no armed pursuit of the brigands until the captives were free.
One man who agreed, and on several occasions wrote to The Times saying so, was
William Moens, who insisted that his life had been several times imperilled by the
close pursuit of the Italian army during the three months of his captivity in the
spring and summer of 1865.38
What then followed, once contact with the brigands was established, was an
elaborate and sometimes protracted process of negotiation. In Spain and Italy,
British consuls and vice-consuls conscientiously kept themselves, and their
superiors in London, informed on the progress of the case, and in Spain at least
both they and London generally avoided anything that might look like direct
interference. During the Bonell kidnapping in 1870, that of Arthur Haselden four
years later, and the lesser case of Robert Rankin in between, diplomatic propriety
between Britain and Spain was almost wholly maintained, in the first of these
cases despite — or perhaps because of — the issues it raised concerning the SpainGibraltar border.39 Standing aside and leaving things to the locals, even when
official policy, could nevertheless sometimes be difficult. During William Moens’s
long captivity in 1865, impatient British officials in Italy and an equally impatient
Foreign Office pushed the Italian government, and in particular prime minister La
Marmara, to the limit, in relation both to Italian troop movements and to the
dispatch of a Royal Navy gunboat to carry Moens’s captors to refuge abroad. With
La Marmara’s unofficial, but decidedly grumpy, agreement the ship duly arrived
from Malta, only for the brigands to reject the deal. The British consul-general at
Naples, Walter Bonham, went so far in his direct dealings with the brigands as to
upset not only the Italian government but also his own superiors and political
masters.
In relation to the Ottoman authorities in 1880 and 1881, a perceptibly different
tone prevailed. The British ambassador to Constantinople, and to a lesser degree
the Consul-General at Salonica, possessed direct access to, and influence upon, the
Ottoman authorities that went well beyond anything possible for their counterparts
in Spain or Italy. In the Synge and Suter cases, successive ambassadors, Layard
(transferred from Madrid in 1877) and Goschen, and more particularly ConsulGeneral Blunt in Salonica used all the influence at their command to force the
reluctant Ottoman authorities to hold back the troops. On both occasions Blunt
helped to set up and participated directly in negotiations with the brigands, as well
as organising the ransom money via the Salonica branch of the Ottoman bank and
its movement on board a specially summoned Royal Navy gunboat.40 In doing so
37
Jenkins, The Dilessi Murders, pp. 64-74.
The Times, 28 April 1870, 4 May 1870, 11 July 1874.
39
For Anglo-Spanish dealings during the Bonell affair, see PRO FO/72/1262 and PRO FO/72/1263.
Layard summed up the propriety of these dealings, with particularly warm words for the Spanish
government, in BL Add.Ms.39121, Layard Papers, volume CXCI, Layard to Clarendon, 8 June 1870
and 9 June 1870.
40
PRO FO/881/4222. Correspondence respecting the Capture of Colonel Synge by Brigands in the
District of Caraferia, Macedonia. 1880; PRO FO/881/4454. Correspondence respecting the Capture
of Mr. H. Suter by Brigands at Isvor in Turkey. 1881.
38
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
348
Martin Blinkhorn
he attracted only praise from his superiors for conduct which, sixteen years earlier
in Italy, had earned Bonham critical words. And while in 1870 one Gladstone
administration had praised the Spanish authorities for their part in the happy
outcome of the Bonell affair and local British consuls for their discretion,41 in 1881
another attributed most of the success for Suter’s release to the efforts of Consul
Blunt while blaming the “the Turk” for the episode’s having occurred at all.42
The 1870 “Marathon murders” occurred in the one European country where
Britain actually had some (though not especially well-defined) officially
recognised interest in its domestic condition; some, indeed, would say that this was
why an episode that had looked as though it was heading towards a peaceful but
expensive conclusion ended in quadruple murder. Although the responsibility of
the British Minister at Athens, Erskine, continues to be debated, there seems little
doubt that his direct intervention in ransom negotiations helped muddy the waters,
and that he appeared to give his, and thereby his government’s, blessing to a
military manoeuvre that was to lead to the four murders near the village of
Dilessi.43 While the preferred approach of the Gladstone government may not have
been quite in line with Erskine’s, the former also contributed to the tragedy. Its
willingness to see the brigands receive not only the massive ransom of £25,000 but
also a pardon, and then be transported by the Royal Navy to the safety of nonGreek soil (in this case, probably the Ottoman north of what is Greece today, from
which they could without much difficulty have sneaked back into Greece), led it to
press the Greek government and the country’s young, Danish-born king, George I,
to break their own laws and their own constitution, introduced only recently with
Britain’s blessing. Although the tragedy had other, more home-grown ingredients
as well, it is difficult to conclude that direct British interference, with its
conflicting signals and legally dubious proposals, did not make a major
contribution to the episode’s gory and tragic outcome. Little wonder that just one
month later Layard, Britain’s Minister at Madrid, learning of the Bonells’
disappearance, having uttered the ritualistic expressions of horror, demands for
action, and requests for caution in the use of military or police pursuit,
unhesitatingly decided to leave things to the locals.
In all these cases save that of “Marathon”, ransoms were actually handed over
and the hostages duly released. Although the Greek “outrage” demonstrated how
wrong things could go, and while most negotiations went through difficult phases
that raised genuine and justified fears of tragedy, it was difficult to envisage any
other way of achieving the victims’ freedom. Even Italian governments, for all
their indignation over “illegal” actions that they considered amounted to “aiding
and abetting” the original crime, had little real choice, in the Moens and Rose
cases, but to let negotiations take place and ransoms be paid.
As indicated earlier, however, two linked questions still invariably arose: who
was ultimately liable for payment of a ransom and, more urgently, who — for the
41
BL Add.Ms. 38954. Layard Papers, volume XXIV, f.75. Edmund Hammond (permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office) to Layard, 20 June 1870.
42
PRO FO/881/4454, no.49, Granville to Blunt, 15 June 1881.
43
Jenkins, Dilessi Murders, pp. 35-44.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
349
answer might be a different one — would actually, physically, produce the cash
that would achieve the captive’s release?
Paying the Ransom and Bearing the Cost
At bottom, the answer to the first of the above questions was straightforward: in
almost all circumstances liability rested with the captives. In the criminal codes of
southern Europe, and with no significant national variations, kidnapping was a
discrete crime related to, and combining elements of, others such as blackmail,
extortion, armed robbery, and illegal imprisonment. While in some instances it
also involved the separate crimes of physical assault and criminal wounding, only
when, as with “Marathon”, it went badly (and “unnecessarily”) wrong was it
transformed into the very different crime of murder. When British subjects abroad
fell victim to (for example) theft, highway robbery, domestic burglary, physical
assault, or even “conventional” murder, no one (other than, admittedly, often they
and their families) would seriously have suggested that the host government was
directly liable for restitution or compensation. Why kidnapping for ransom should
be any different was anything but self-evident.
British statesmen and officials, moreover, if not always the press and public,
tended to be uncomfortably aware that Britain’s record on law and order was not
always such as to entitle Britons to preach to others. Layard, Minister at Madrid at
the time of the Bonell affair (and later Ambassador to Constantinople during the
Synge kidnapping),44 became acutely conscious during his stay in Spain that
Britain’s tolerance towards Gibraltar’s role as a smuggling entrepôt seriously
undermined its criticism of Spain’s brigand problem.45 Closer to home, and
whatever their views and pronouncements on southern Europe, reasonable
Englishmen had to admit that not all was orderly in either English cities on the
Irish countryside. The periodically disturbed state of Ireland in particularly helped
to restrain British official indignation concerning Mediterranean and Balkan
kidnapping. If nothing else, Irish “disorder” created a basis for comparative
reflection. As Lord Granville, pondering the Suter case in correspondence with
Gladstone in 1881, equitably reflected:
Could we make the Italians pay for the murder of, or a ransom extorted from an Englishman
travelling or residing at Palermo, or would we pay for a French farmer in Galway, whose ears were
cut off?46
If the second of these questions was the one that mattered, the first was neither
wholly rhetorical nor hypothetical, for Granville’s Conservative predecessors had
uttered no suggestion of Italian liability in 1876 when John Forester Rose had been
44
Nor was the Bonell affair Layard’s first brush with brigands and kidnapping. As parliamentary
under-secretary for foreign affairs in 1865 he had handled much of the “London end” of the Moens
and Coore kidnappings. Much earlier, as the adventurous young man who discovered Nineveh, he
had had more than one encounter with middle-eastern brigands. See Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh,
pp. 55-80.
45
Layard’s correspondence contains numerous illustrations of his preoccupation: for example BL
Add.Ms. 39121. Layard Papers, volume CXCI, Layard to Hammond, 2 July 1870.
46
BL Add.Ms. 44173, Gladstone papers, volume LXXXVIII, f.73, Granville to Gladstone, 23 April
1881.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
350
Martin Blinkhorn
seized by the Sicilian bandit Leone not far from Palermo. While Granville, it will
be noted, was content to regard extortion by ransom as a crime like any other for
purposes of responsibility and liability, others considered kidnapping, at least
when its origins lay in a particularly high level of brigand activity, to stand apart.
Whether it did or not, and notwithstanding the qualifications just discussed, the
temptation to try and hold foreign nations liable for the cost of ransom payments
was often too great to resist. I shall return to these questions later.
Debating questions of liability was in any case all very well, but actually raising
ransom money in the time available could be quite literally a matter of life or
death. How much time was available was sometimes unstated and unclear,
sometimes the subject of brigands’ menace-backed deadlines, but always a matter
for worry. Prisoners, or more precisely those working to free them, were expected
to produce large sums of money, usually in gold (brigands were very particular
about this), to which even if quite wealthy they might not have immediate access.
Fortunately, despite their frequent (and by no means empty) threats of severed
ears, noses and heads and cut throats,47 brigands were actually capable of
exhibiting considerable patience while the money-raising process took its course
— understandably when a large crock of gold lay at the end of the rainbow. In the
majority of cases, therefore, while captives often endured considerable suffering as
they were dragged across miles of inhospitable country, immured in caves,
exposed to harsh weather, fed on diets both meagre and rebarbative, and all the
time threatened with mutilation and death, ransoms were raised, and the ultimate
tragedy averted, through the efforts of (variously) the captives’ families, friends,
banks and business colleagues.
For some the challenge, both financial and logistical, proved relatively easy to
overcome. The wealthier members of the Marathon party, through the agency of
the freed Lord Muncaster, had no difficulty raising the enormous ransom of
£25,000 which, in the event, was never handed over. The freeing of first Moens
and then Coore in 1865 had also been relatively easy from a strictly financial point
of view; Moens’s brother-in-law travelled to Naples to arrange the ransom
(£5,100) through a local, British-owned financial house,48 while the money for
Coore’s ransom (£3,000) was collected from the British business community of
nearby Patras,49 later to be repaid by his family. Spanish friends of Arthur
47
The use of severed ears as “messages” was no myth, as other victims of the kidnappers of both
Moens and the Bonells discovered: ASSal. Trib. B52, ff.729, 742; B55, F775. F. Hernández Girbal,
Bandidos célebres españoles (en la Historia y en la Leyenda), Segunda y Última Serie (Madrid:
Ediciones Lira, 1977), pp. 23-88. In 1905 the Englishman Philip Wills suffered this fate himself.
PRO 294/33, V.C.296, no. 50, Consul Young (Monastir) to Constantinople Embassy, 5 October
1905, no. 50, ff. 101-3; the file also contains a medical certificate confirming the mutilation.
According to Wills, the ear was later “satisfactorily” sewn back. Wills, A Captive of the Bulgarian
Brigands, pp. 20-23.
48
The Times, 6 September 1865.
49
Ibid., 20 and 25 December 1865.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
351
Haselden raised his ransom (£6,000),50 while that for John Forester Rose (£1,600)
was collected by his family and their Sicily-based British business partners.51
Other cases, however, proved more complicated. The two Bonells, for example,
while certainly comfortably off, would (or so they successfully insisted) have had
to sell or mortgage property in order to raise over £5,500.52 Colonel Synge not
only, as we have seen, was suffering a painful salary deficit but also possessed
little in the way of liquid or liquifiable assets. His farm, purchased through the sale
of his British army commission, was all but worthless given the disturbed state of
the local countryside, and any idea that he could raise over £10,000 was plainly
absurd.53 Harry Suter, a mere employee faced with a ransom demand for over
£13,000, seems to have been if anything in an even worse position. It was in cases
such as these that the question inevitably arose of what was the responsibility — if
not necessarily liability — of the two governments involved.
When in May 1870 the two Bonells fell into the hands of “Don Antonio” and
his gang, there occurred two unusual reactions, both conceivably due to the highly
excited international atmosphere following the “Marathon” murders only a month
earlier. The chronology here is not absolutely clear, but it would seem, first, that
the Spanish government, unprecedentedly, promised its British counterpart that it
would indemnify the Bonells or whomsoever paid out the ransom to free them;54
second, the elder Bonell having been freed to obtain the ransom for his nephew,
that the Governor of Gibraltar, Sir Richard Airey, on his own responsibility
advanced the money from the Colonial Chest of the fortress and arranged its
carriage to Cádiz, where it was to be handed over to the brigands, under armed
protection in a naval gunboat.55 Although it proved a long and tortuous business,
the Spanish government — or to be more accurate a later Spanish government
under an entirely different regime, that of the shortlived First Republic in 1873 —
eventually made good the original undertaking; this after much British nagging and
50
PRO FO/72/1387, Memorandum respecting capture by brigands of Mr Haselden, near Linares in
Spain.
51
PRO FO/45/297, Consul Dennis (Palermo) to Foreign Office, 24 November 1876; Gazzetta di
Palermo, 27 November 1876; The Times, 27 November 1876; Nicolò Sangiorgio, Lercara Friddi.
Itinerari storici e tradizionali (Roccapalumba, Palermo: Società di storia Patria “F. Rusolino Fazio”,
1991), pp. 214-15.
52
“Minutes of the Proceedings of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Seizure,
Detention and Ransom of John Bonell and John Antonio Bonell”, PRO FO 72/1263, ff, pp. 304-342,
especially pp. 309-10.
53
On the question of Synge’s means, see BL Add.Ms. 39155. Layard Papers, vol. CCXXV, f34,
Blunt to Layard, 21 February 1880; PRO T/1/12817/13477, Lingen, minute of 23 July 1880; /15363,
Pauncefoote to Treasury, 24 August 1880; 15862, Pauncefoote to Treasury, 3 September 1880;
/15862, Statement of Service of Captain Henry Synge, late 52 Foot; and /18687, Synge to Granville,
7 October 1880.
54
BL Add.Ms.39121. Layard Papers, volume CXCI, Layard to Clarendon, 24 May 1870. Ten years
later, recalling this episode in his correspondence with Lord Salisbury regarding the Synge case,
Layard claimed — falsely — to have “compelled” the Spanish government to take this step. BL
Add.Ms. 39132. Layard Papers, volume CCII, ff.87-8, Layard to Salisbury, 10 March 1880.
55
“Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Seizure, Detention and Ransom of
John Bonell and John Antonio Bonell” (Gibraltar, 3 September 1870), PRO FO 72/1263, ff. 294-302;
El Porvenir (Seville), 19 June 1870.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
352
Martin Blinkhorn
persistent refusals on the Bonells’ part to bear any of the cost.56 When Arthur
Haselden was snatched by the brigand Paulino in July 1874, the (still, though not
for much longer, republican) Spanish government agreed to advance the ransom
money in order to expedite the victim’s release, but this time was careful to state
that questions of actual liability would have to be settled afterwards.57 Since
Haselden’s Spanish friends were able to raise the cash, however, the issue never
needed to be tested or further discussed.
Whether the transfer of Layard to Constantinople in 1877 had anything to do
with it remains unclear, but when Colonel Synge was seized by the brigand Niko
in 1880 the Ottoman government made an undertaking broadly similar to that of
Spain a decade earlier: that is, not to pay his enormous ransom but to repay it to
whomsoever did.58 Whereas the Spanish government in 1870 had taken its step on
its own initiative, however, here the Porte accepted liability under British pressure.
In any event, the expectation (though it can hardly have been confident) of Turkish
repayment enabled Disraeli’s government to authorise the Salonica consulate to
arrange a loan of “up to £15,000” with the Ottoman bank.59 Layard had made no
progress with recovering the money when Disraeli was replaced by Gladstone, and
he by Goschen, later in the year. When Harry Suter was kidnapped by a
confederation of ethnic Greek brigand bands in March 1881 a broadly similar
sequence of events occurred, with one important difference. This time the Porte
accepted no liability; Synge had after all been an Ottoman state employee while
Suter was a private citizen pursuing his own profit.60
The Synge and Suter kidnappings brought to the surface, and then to a climax,
issues of responsibility and liability that had been present, in a variety of forms,
throughout the series of kidnappings which, in southern Europe, had begun in
1865. One thing all ministers, both Conservative and Liberal, and all civil servants,
in both Foreign Office and Treasury, agreed upon was that kidnappings and the
ransoms they involved ought to inflict no lasting (and ideally no short-term) cost
upon the British Exchequer and taxpayer. Beyond that easily accepted principle,
things became more complicated, the central issue being whether any liability fell
upon the host government, unless for whatever reason it chose, like the Spanish
provisional government in 1870 or the Ottoman government in 1880, to volunteer.
When it came to observing and dealing with kidnapping cases from Whitehall,
no one accumulated more experience than Lord Granville. As colonial secretary in
Gladstone’s 1868-74 administration, Granville was a cabinet member at the time
56
PRO FO/72/1338, f.109, Layard to Foreign Office, 19 March 1873; PRO FO/72/1338, ff. 374-6,
Layard to Granville, 14 April 1873; Gibraltar Government Archive, Despatches from Gibraltar, 18711874, ff. 282-3, no.41, Governor Williams to Lord Kimberley, Colonial Secretary, 25 March 1873;
f.295, no.54, Williams to Kimberley, 15 April 1873.
57
PRO FO/72/1387, Lord Tenterden (permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office) to William J.
Webb, 12 July 1874. Webb was the Haseldens’ London solicitor.
58
BL Add.Ms. 39132. Layard Papers, volume CCII, ff 87-88, Layard to Salisbury, 10 March 1880.
Layard was quite explicit that he had “made” the Ottoman authorities accept liability.
59
PRO T/12817/3902, Lingen to Foreign Office, 26 February 1880;PRO T/12817/6700, Pauncefoote
(Foreign Office) to Treasury, 31 March 1880.
60
PRO FO/78/3613, Granville to Treasury, 23 August 1881 and (attached) response of Law Officers,
21 September 1881; Lord Dufferin to Assim Pasha, no. 188, 10 October 1881.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
353
of “Marathon”; bearing responsibility for Gibraltar, he was then closely involved
throughout the Bonell kidnapping and, as Lord Clarendon’s successor at the
Foreign Office from July 1870, that episode’s financial and diplomatic
aftershocks. A decade later, in April 1880, Granville resumed the foreign
secretaryship, in Gladstone’s second administration, shortly following Synge’s
release; within a year, and while still grappling with that case’s financial
repercussion, he found himself confronted with the seizure and captivity of Harry
Suter. Granville, as we have seen, subscribed to the straightforward position
adopted in the 1860s by Lord John Russell and maintained by his own immediate
predecessor at the Foreign Office, Clarendon: since the British government would
not wish to be held responsible for crimes committed against foreigners in Seven
Dials, Limehouse or rural Connaught, it should not expect foreign governments to
indemnify British victims of crime within their own territories — unless, perhaps,
like Colonel Synge, they were its own employees.
A divergent view, which surfaced occasionally in Foreign Office
correspondence and in less sophisticated form dominated Conservative circles and
much of the press, held that brigand “outrages” were different from other crimes
and cast a heavier burden of both responsibility and liability upon those
governments which “permitted” them to happen. While no society and no nation,
this argument ran, could be expected to be crime-free, brigandage went well
beyond the kind of “normal” crime against which foreign visitors and residents
could be expected to be on guard and to take reasonable precautions. Rather, the
existence of brigandage was proof of a state’s inability to maintain that basic level
of law and order which would enable it to guarantee the safety of reasonablybehaving foreigners within its borders.
Gladstone himself, while far from believing that governments grappling with
brigandage could or should always be held liable for brigands’ crimes against
foreigners, certainly was not immune to such thoughts in particular cases — and
especially where “the Turk” was involved. As he wrote to Granville in April 1881
during Suter’s captivity, “There is a certain standard of order which governments
are expected to, and if civilised able to maintain”. If “casualties” happening under
governments of this kind could not be held to “enter into the case”, it was a
different matter where, as in the Ottoman Balkans, there reigned the worst kinds of
“organised disorder”.61 At the time of “Marathon”, the philhellene Gladstone,
while setting his face firmly against the military intervention in Greece for which
Conservatives and much of the press clamoured, had nevertheless held the Greek
state liable, not admittedly for a ransom that of course was never paid, but for
indemnifying the modestly-situated Mrs Edward Lloyd for the death of her
husband. Although Gladstone himself had had misgivings, not least about the
amount involved, Lord Granville had kept up the pressure and in the end £10,000
61
BL Add.Ms. 44544. Gladstone Papers, volume CCCCLIX, f. 163, Gladstone to Granville, 28 April
1881.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
354
Martin Blinkhorn
in compensation had been voted by the Greek parliament.62 Now in 1881
Gladstone invoked the precedent of Mrs Lloyd to insist, contrary to the view of
Granville and the Treasury’s law officers, that Turkey was “a fortiori” liable for
reimbursing the British government not only the Synge ransom, to which the Porte
was committed but about which it was stubbornly stalling, but also that of Suter,
regarding which it accepted no obligation at all.63 If there was no other way of
extracting the two sums from Turkey, Gladstone favoured recovering them by
means of an ingenious (if not unchallengeably legal) deduction from Britain’s
annual payment in respect of Cyprus. Despite the misgivings of Granville and the
law officers, after considerable delay, and in the face of indignant protests from
the Porte, Gladstone had his way and the measure went ahead.64
Private payers of ransoms were less fortunate than either (financially at least)
Mrs Lloyd or the British Exchequer. When collecting ransom sums together,
captives (or more properly their families, friends and colleagues) commonly
hoped, and stated that they hoped, for recompense at the hands of one or other
government, the British or the foreign. In this they were whistling in the dark.
Particularly once money had been handed over and the captive(s) freed, no British
government was ever likely to accept liability for the financial consequences of a
crime committed abroad. Nor, where the ransom had been paid by private
individuals and no prior commitment to indemnify had been made, was a foreign
government likely to be any more sympathetic than it would have been had the
petitioners been its own subjects. Only where, as in the Bonell, Synge and Suter
cases, government confronted government were matters, as we have seen,
somewhat different.
The Granville Doctrine
During the course of the Synge and Suter affairs in 1880-81, and spanning the
intervening change from Derby’s Conservative government to Gladstone’s Liberal
administration, officials in both the Treasury and the Foreign Office had been
moving towards urging the adoption of a clear and firm position on Britain’s
attitude to hostage-taking and in particular the payment of ransoms.65 Gladstone’s
return to office reinforced official convictions that some such step was necessary.
Whatever their differences as to the rights, wrongs and practicalities of making
other governments pay, Granville, the Treasury and Gladstone himself all agreed
62
Lloyd was a lawyer of relatively modest means employed by the Athens-Piraeus Railway company.
Mrs Lloyd also received ex gratia payments totalling £3,000 from King George I of Greece and
London’s Greek community. Jenkins, Dilessi Murders, pp. 148-50.
63
BL Add.Ms. 44544. Gladstone Papers, volume CCCCLIX, f.162, Gladstone to Granville, 24 April
1881.
64
BL Add.Ms. 44544. Gladstone Papers, volume CCCCLIX, f.163, Gladstone to Granville, 28 April
1881. The origins of the idea are uncertain, but may lie during the Synge case with Layard. BL
Add.Ms. 39132. Layard Papers, volume CCII, ff. 87-8, Layard to Salisbury (personal and private), 10
March 1880; PRO FO/78/3613, no. 681, Dufferin to Granville, 14 December1883.
65
PRO T/1/12817/3902, Sir Ralph Lingen (permanent under-secretary at the Treasury) to Foreign
Office, 26 February 1880; PRO FO/78/3613, Dufferin (Constantinople) circular to Consuls
throughout the Ottoman Empire, no. 508, 24 June 1881. PRO FO/78/3613, draft to Treasury, 5 July
1881.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
Liability, Responsibility and Blame
355
that, in Granville’s words, “the Taxpayer ought not to be perpetually paying
ransoms for people who choose to reside in notoriously unsafe countries”.
Granville’s proposal for “a strong minute of the Treasury as to the future,
circulated by the F.O. and presented to Parliament” was greeted by the Prime
Minister with brusque scepticism. “I attach”, Gladstone sniffed, “no value to
Treasury minutes with protestations for the future, or to Foreign Office
expostulations …”. Since nevertheless there was little reason not to proceed with
Granville’s suggestion, which had the enthusiastic support of senior Treasury and
Foreign Office officials. Granville’s first step was the circular letter referred to
early in this paper, requesting data on kidnappings between 1860 and 1881. Armed
with the information thereby elicited, the foreign secretary then sent to embassies
and consulates in Spain, Italy, Greece, the Ottoman empire, Serbia and Romania an
instruction on the subject of ransoms, the wording of which had been employed
several times during preceding months in communications between the Foreign
Office and the Treasury. It stated that in future:
where British subjects are captured by brigands, when in no public character, but in pursuit of
their own pleasure or business, no advance whatever for the purpose of ransom should, under any
circumstances, be made from the British Exchequer.66
Underlying this now official position was the conviction that, had it been
established sooner, supposedly incautious Englishmen like Henry Synge and Harry
Suter might never have exposed themselves to the risk of capture. Whether or not
this conviction (scarcely, in its deterrent intent, in the best spirit of Empire) was
well founded, both men (and perhaps also the Bonells), if aware of the new official
line, must have wondered whether, if it had been in place earlier, they would have
lived to tell their tales of captivity.
The publication of Granville’s policy statement on ransom payment was
followed by an immediate and prolonged interruption in international kidnappings
involving British nationals.67 Since few Mediterranean brigands read The Times or
Hansard, this must be regarded either as reflecting success for the policy itself, in
persuading Britons abroad to behave more prudently, or, more probably, as linked
with what was now a steep and steady decline in Spanish, Italian and Greek
brigandage. Either way, because of this interruption a crucial question remained
for the present unanswered and indeed untested: namely, whether in future
kidnapping cases — for sooner or later, of course, others were sure to occur —
British governments would find it possible to stick to the “Granville doctrine” on
ransoms.
In the event, when kidnappings returned to the headlines in the early twentieth
century, once again in the Macedonian provinces of the Ottoman empire but also
in Morocco, the principles and policies developed in the two decades before 1881
66
The Times, 26 July 1881.
The only significant near-exception was the kidnapping by Albanian brigands in 1884 of Gjerasim
Qiriazi, a Greek-Albanian protestant employed by the British and Foreign Bible Society. Since
missionary work was not official business, and since Qiriazi was not in an case a British subject, the
British authorities took no interest in him. For a personal account of his experiences, see Gjerasim
Qiriazi, Captured by Brigands (Wrexham: Albanian Evangelical Trust, n.d.).
67
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.
356
Martin Blinkhorn
were, in all but one case, strictly observed.68 The significance of the one exception,
which arose in 1907, lies in its exposure of the Granville doctrine’s fragility when
a British life was clearly in danger and no immediate alternative was available to
the government’s stepping in with financial help. In March 1907 Robert Abbott, a
young member of a prominent British expatriate family of Salonica, was seized in
his own garden, abducted, and held hostage by what later turned out to be a mixed
Greek and Albanian band formed, it appears, for the express purpose of carrying
out the crime.69 Most of the case’s details need not concern us here; what does is
the decision of Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government, in full and openlyadmitted knowledge of the policy enunciated in 1881,70 to repeat the actions taken
a quarter of a century earlier, in the Synge and Suter cases, by those respectively of
Disraeli and Gladstone: namely, advancing the ransom through the bank account of
the Salonica consulate-general, in the hope of eventual repayment by either the
Abbott family or the Ottoman authorities. The reason for this flouting of the
Granville doctrine was simple enough: the certainty of the British consul-general
at Salonica that the young man would die if payment were forced to await either
his father’s mortgaging of his urban property (which, ironically, included the
British consulate building itself) or the Porte’s agreement to pay. 71 It was
nevertheless fortunate for Abbott, perhaps, that he was so obviously a respectable
British subject. The views on his release of the decidedly more raffish Philip
Wills, kidnapped in another region of Macedonia two years earlier, and whose left
ear had been sliced off by his captors while he waited in vain for the British
government to intervene, do not appear to have been recorded.72
68
The main cases concerned, in addition to the exception about to be discussed, were the
kidnappings in Morocco, by the super-brigand Raisuli, of Walter Harris, correspondent of The Times
(1903), Cromwell Oliver Varley, stepson of the also kidnapped American, Ion Perdicaris (1904); and
Sir Harry “Caid” Maclean, military adviser to the Sultan of Morocco (1907-8); and in Macedonia,
that of Philip Wills (1905). These, and all the cases mentioned here, will be discussed in the book,
Kidnapped!, on which I am currently working.
69
The kidnapping of Robert Abbott and the trial of (some of) his captors are covered in PRO
FO/421/232 and PRO FO/195/2263, /2264 & /2265; see in particular the following consular reports:
PRO FO/195/2264, ff.305-7, Consul Graves (Salonica) to Ambassador O’Conor (Constantinople), 25
March 1907; ibid., ff.411-16, Graves to O’Conor, 30 April 1907; ibid., ff.649-59, Graves to O’Conor,
10 December 1907. See also Sir Edward Grey’s statement to the House of Commons as reported in
Hansard, 2 May 1907, and reports in the Daily News (London), 23 and 26 March, 30 April 1907.
70
PRO FO/195/2263, f.304 [80 Sal.], O’Conor, minute accompanying copy (sent to Foreign Office 3
April 1907) of Graves to O’Conor, 25 March 1907.
71
PRO FO/195/2265, 52 Sal., O’Conor to Graves, 19 April 1907.
72
See above footnote 47.
© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.