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that The Times had published letters from Florence Phillips and Bampfylde Fuller, the East London Observer spoke to its readers in a tone that was both considered and measured.
     
The East London German Colony is one which is an advantage and credit to possess. Its members have formed in varying degrees lifelong business and personal ties of mutual respect with the English natives, and we should regard it as more than deplorable if, by word, deed or implication any manifestation of personal sentiment against friends and neighbours, who hate and deplore the present war as much as anyone, should occur to wound their feelings . . . To the German Colony of East London we bear emphatic testimony of their virtues of sobriety, industry and honesty; that we should find the two great nations at deadly war is a bitter grief, but in the indignation of the moment one must not forget to behave oneself justly, and like a gentleman and a friend.
     
    The country’s pre-war liberal tradition that might have opposed such measures as alien registration was conspicuous by its absence, with little or no protest from the left. Instead, it was the radical right that made the running, accusing the government through Fleet Street newspapers of not doing enough to minimise the threat from Britain’s enemies. Public opinion, fearful of complacency, was won over by those championing tougher laws, and the relative tranquillity inside the House was to be disrupted by the irresistible force of popular will. McKenna’s and King’s calmer sentiments went the way of most things in war once the shooting started, and newspapers pressed for greater restrictions on enemy aliens.
    McKenna’s desire to ‘root out dangerous spies’ was hardly required. Before the war, the Germans had run an almost laughably ineffective espionage network through a British-born subject of German ancestry. His name was Karl Ernst and he owned a barber’s shop in London’s Caledonian Road through which all communication between Germany and its twenty-two spies was passed. Unfortunately for Ernst, he was known to the equally small number of officers who at that time formed Britain’s pre-war intelligence and, according to a former officer named Dunlop, his activities were closely monitored.
     
His job was merely to drop all letters received into the nearest letterbox. His salary was quite small, about £12 a year. All letters were opened, read and forwarded on with as little delay as possible. In this way the names and addresses of all German spies were compiled and arrangements were so complete that on the day of the declaration of war only one of the German agents escaped.
     
    Britain’s counter-espionage services burgeoned during the war and, on the whole, maintained the initiative over the numerically small number of spies sent to Britain. The fact that not one proven act of foreign sabotage took place on British soil underlines the extent to which Britain’s security had enemy espionage under restraint.
    Quick and efficient arrests of Germany’s pre-war spies contrasted with the charges of espionage levelled against others for whom the evidence was flimsy at best. On the first full day of war, the press reported charges against Germans or German sympathisers in coastal towns as far apart as Sheerness, Portsmouth, Falmouth, Penarth, Swansea and Barrow-in-Furness. Arrests were a precursor of what would develop into a frenzy of anti-German paranoia. Public fear of spies was inflamed by vocal backbench politicians and journalists working for daily newspapers and weekly journals. The power of the press to stoke ‘spy-fever’ pushed the government into introducing ever more stringent controls on enemy aliens, controls that seemed vastly disproportionate to the actual rather than the perceived threat. ‘It is extraordinary how many people were infested with “spy-fever”,’ wrote Dunlop. ‘Nobody who showed a naked light or used a typewriter which made a noise like