Hero & Spy Catcher
When Theodore Veale made his last dash into No Man’s Land to save an injured officer in July 1916 only one officer thought to give him covering fire. By chance, the man firing bravely at German positions was one Hugh Duff, also of Dartmouth.
But before this heroic act and others that were to win him a Military Cross, Duff was a successful solicitor and businessman in South Devon. It was in this other life that he did his first good service for his country’s good: he caught a German spy.
In 1911 Duff was, in addition to his role as an up-and-coming solicitor, managing director of Dartmouth’s Palladium Cinema, in Hanover Street (later to be renamed Anzac Street following the heroics of antipodean soldiers at Gallipoli).
By chance that year he encountered a young German called Max Schultz who would visit the cinema when his yacht Egret was, seemingly innocently, moored in the river Dart below the newly gleaming façade of the Britannia Royal Naval College.
But Duff’s foray into the world of secret agents and espionage really started some months later when he was working near Plymouth. There, he met the thin, moody German with a ‘Doctorate of Philosophy’ (he claimed) again. Schultz had moored Egret in the Yealm, seemingly completely by chance.
But this is where the German’s behaviour went from cordial to decidedly suspicious.
Schultz began to ask questions about Naval construction, troop deployments and military policy in Plymouth and Dartmouth where he knew Duff had connections.
Duff, who was a highly regarded solicitor, was not slow to ask the obvious question: why do you want to know?
Schultz’s answer was strange in the extreme: he claimed to be a correspondent for a German newspaper that was ‘extremely interested’ in the developments in the British Army and Navy. Bizarrely he then went on to say the German Government sponsored the ‘newspaper’. His insistence that any information Duff gave him must be ‘accurate and from official sources’ did nothing to allay Duff’s suspicions that his new ‘friend’ was a spy.
Schultz’s questions were being posed at a very sensitive time; the Germans’ were blockading French concerns in Africa and threatening military action unless they were given a larger share of trading rights – which were mostly held by Britain.
International relations were, to put it mildly, in a heightened state of tension.
In this atmosphere, a German man had started asking questions of the greatest sensitivity with a minimum of tact.
In addition, Britain was building two massive new Super Dreadnoughts (armoured ships) in response to Germany’s rapid construction of an impressive naval fleet. The two ships were being finished in Plymouth and Portsmouth which Schultz also casually mentioned he had visited before heading down to the South West.
Duff went straight to the authorities who advised him to make up military facts to give to Schultz and to maintain good relations with him.
Schultz was delighted and told Duff, as he handed him £50 for information, that he was now the ‘Naval and Military Correspondent for the South Coast to the Continental Correspondence Depot’. But Schultz did not leave it at that – he pressed Duff for information on the reaction to the international crisis, the movement of troops and the status of the two new Super Dreadnoughts.
Throughout the summer Duff fed Schultz a huge amount of invented facts, keeping the police informed of every meeting and every movement the German made.
On August 17 1911, the Police arrested Schultz on a Plymouth street.
He was found to be a Lieutenant in the German Army and on Egret were found correspondence from someone who named themselves ‘uncle’, complaining that the information provided by Duff was not accurate and that Schultz must work harder to find accurate information.
Schultz protested his innocence and even sent a letter from prison to his ‘uncle’ pleading for him to send assurances to the British authorities that he was, in fact, the newspaper correspondent he claimed. No replies were received.
When Schultz went before a judge on August 28 it was Duff who acted as prosecutor. The German man was sentenced to 21 months in prison.
In 1914 Duff signed up to fight with the Devonshire regiment in Flanders Fields and in 1916 played his part in Theodore Veale’s dramatic moment in history.
Following the war, Duff was seemingly badly affected by the scenes of suffering he had witnessed. He didn’t return to his successful practice in Devon but travelled to West Africa to be a peace magistrate. He died there in 1920 of typhoid fever, barely into his thirties.
By Phil Scoble
First Published in By The Dart October 2015 Issue
