S8 Ep20: The Lion And The Fox with Alexander Rose

[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast listener discretion is advised Lock your doors close the blinds change your passwords. This is secrets and spies Secrets and spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage terrorism geopolitics and intrigue

[00:00:34] This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr On today's podcast I'm joined by author Alexander Rose and we discuss his excellent book The Lion And The Fox Which takes a look at two American Civil War era spies one Union and one

[00:00:50] Confederates who have both been dispatched in neutral Britain with a vital mission I hope you find this episode interesting the opinions expressed by guests on secrets and spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast I

[00:01:20] Alexander welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me on. It's great to have you on just for the benefit of the audience Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? I was born in New York and then I went to school

[00:01:32] In Australia, and then I went to university in England and then I worked in England for a long time So you can perhaps told by the way, I speak kind of funny And I worked in Canada for a couple years and then I kind of 15 years ago

[00:01:45] I think I circumnavigated the anglospheric world and ended up back exactly where I'd started back in in New York So that's what that's where I am now Journalists, I just kind of got out of the journal trade and went into that other great money-making business writing history books

[00:02:05] When you've done well, I mean one of your books has turned into a TV drama wasn't it? Yeah, that was that was my second book. That was that was Washington spies the story of America's aspiring

[00:02:15] Which is a story I just sort of came across and I thought it was such a great idea. It was a cool idea and You know, he didn't didn't really do anything when it came out And then I think six or seven years after it came out

[00:02:28] I got a call from out of the blue from a you know Something, you know big-time Hollywood producer and said hey, we're you know, can I make your book into a TV show?

[00:02:37] and so I said sure, you know just send me a check and off you go and You know that it this will went ahead came a show on AMC called turn

[00:02:47] Washington spies and some for four seasons and at the beginning I was a I was a kind of consultant You know, I was in the writers room for the first time, you know in LA and coming up with ideas not all of which were used and

[00:03:02] You know after that I joined the writers room and I became a you know So I wrote three episodes I think for seasons two three and four so it was great Huge great learning experiences a lot of fun brilliant brilliant. Well, I except well today

[00:03:14] we're gonna talk about your new book which is a really interesting an excellent book called the lion and the fox and that looks at The efforts of the kind of Confederate forces to secretly build a Navy during the US Civil War

[00:03:24] So before we start getting into the the details the book I suppose what is it? This sort of draws you to this sort of topic of the civil war because you've obviously got a big interest in this and how did You go about researching this book?

[00:03:35] But this was an idea that I you know, I heard about this was a long time ago This was I mean, this was probably just just after I wrote Washington spies which is around 2006 and I was kind of casting around for more ideas and

[00:03:49] You know like most writers do you have a you know, a kind of a file of ideas 98% of which are diabolically terrible ideas that never Never go anywhere and I put the I wrote this down

[00:04:02] I wrote down it was a couple of lines in the document put in the file and You know I heard about these two guys in Liverpool He's a Confederate spy and a Union spy and they were fighting over or struggling to build a Confederate fleet

[00:04:16] The problem is is that whenever I looked into it it got it just seemed Incredibly complicated. I mean it was just hundreds of ship names and overlapping dates and you know Hundreds of letters going back and forth. It was just sort of I couldn't I couldn't break it

[00:04:31] I couldn't work out the structure and the story of this thing so, you know I put it aside and I wrote a couple of other books on other subjects like about the competition or the struggle for mastery

[00:04:43] between Zeppelin airships and airplanes in the 20s and 30s and a technological history of certain types of weaponry and all that kind of stuff and You know, I kept on coming back to this idea though

[00:04:54] It was what I I had an idea of how I was gonna do it I knew it was gonna be I don't know if you remember From Mad magazine that old comic strip called spy versus spy

[00:05:03] There's about these two these two hapless spies one black one white and they would try and sort of Tom and Jerry each other using increasingly Sort of Heath Robinson esque apparatus to try and outwit each other and I saw I knew

[00:05:18] That was how it was gonna work, but I couldn't work out the structure It's just too complex And so we'd end up with is a some 900 page tome that nobody would read

[00:05:26] It was only a couple years ago that I went back to it after having been on turn So I learned a thing or two about Drama and making a story work and move along quickly and it fine. I finally worked out the structure

[00:05:41] It was a three phase structure and it was rather useful Alliteratively, it was you know, the runners the Raiders and the Rams once I had that Then Everything kind of found the place in the story just sang so that that's basically how it came around

[00:05:56] so this is a combination of a book that essentially started and it 12 15 years ago and You know, which I finally got back to just two or three years ago. So that that's the story of the book

[00:06:08] How did you kind of go about researching this topic because it is quite, you know, it's very detailed and it's quite historic So what kind of archives and things did you have to kind of dig into to kind of find some of this stuff?

[00:06:18] Yeah, well, I I spend a lot of time right because I what I'm doing this kind of intelligence history You really have to go to the archives. I mean you there's no other way to do it and you know, you see a lot of means be charitable

[00:06:31] Sensationalistic intelligence history. Let's put it that way which seems to be mostly supposition and a bit of magical thinking and a lot of anachronism Which I've always stayed away from I prefer to do it What's an all and you know tell the real story of what actually happened?

[00:06:47] With the Culperin who were the stars of Washington spies that worked out well because they had about a hundred and fifty letters that have Been preserved in the Washington papers in the Library of Congress. So, you know, you had that skeleton there a spine

[00:06:59] With this one. I was very lucky in that Thomas Dudley and I'm sure we'll talk about him later Who was the Union Consul in Liverpool during the Civil War? He you know being a consul he every week and

[00:07:12] He would write a report or his masters at the State Department in Washington And it would go he would send it to the embassy or minister, you know, the minister and or ambassador in London

[00:07:23] Charles Francis Adams and it would get eventually passed on to Washington and these were very very full letters You know many some of which were 10 or 15 pages Some of them were two pages But it was essentially a week or even three times a week

[00:07:36] Contending colossal amounts of detail on what he was actually doing in Liverpool, especially as regarding his antagonist and They were all lodged in a kind of a very large collection of files at the National Archives in outside of Washington called sort of

[00:07:52] Dispatches from Liverpool consul was part of a State Department series kind of thing I mean, you know I don't want to tell a lie, but I have no idea how many people have actually

[00:08:03] Actually looked at this stuff because there were thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of paper which had been microfilmed and as everyone knows Microfilm is the bane of every historians existence because it's just so horrible to work with

[00:08:18] But I was lucky in that. I just just before the kovat shutdowns happen and not knocked out all the archives But I got the National Archives to digitize them all from the microfilm so I've got the I've got these colossal

[00:08:32] Collections of Dudley's letters. So that was like his side as for Bullock's side the Bullock was the his Confederate rival You know as you as one found during the Washington spy You know spies are not generally in the habit of keeping incriminating letters and it's information around

[00:08:49] He was much more secretive in a way But he did write a lot of you know, very very lengthy letters Not as many as Dudley did but very very detailed letters to Mallory who is the secretary of the Confederate Navy in in Richmond during the war

[00:09:06] which contained huge amount of details on what what he was doing his kind of his monthly or quarterly reports essentially and there were other bits and pieces like the you know, there were receipts and there were newspaper articles there were

[00:09:21] All sorts of all that kind of correspond his own correspondence So but between the two of them, there's a lot of a lot of stuff to go through That's the importance of having a structure. You've got it. Otherwise you just get completely tangled up in this stuff

[00:09:32] So that's how that's essentially how it works. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you Well now I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there who are probably Aspiring authors themselves and it's such a fascinating area. So thank you for that We're gonna kick off into your book

[00:09:45] But I suppose before we start that it would be quite good to just get a very broad guide to the US Civil War and Why the Confederates wanted to build a Navy and kind of what their options were to achieve those goals

[00:09:57] Well, that's a very big question. It is What the Civil War was about so I think my Wikipedia might be your friend on that one the Focusing on the why the Confederates wanted a Navy the first thing is is

[00:10:14] We conventionally think of the Civil War as a land war You know the blue and the gray and Gettysburg and Lee versus Grant which is exactly what I didn't want to do for this book It's done a billion times

[00:10:27] But the naval aspect hasn't really been covered very much It always gets it's like the sort of the Cinderella of the whole thing but yet it was actually you know one of the most important aspects of it because the naval the naval aspect allowed the land war to

[00:10:42] Continue for as long as it did Without the naval aspect without the the cotton and the gun running in though and the weapons and so forth that were being Smuggled across the Atlantic through the Union blockade of southern ports there

[00:10:57] It's very unlikely the South could have continued it to fight as long as it did It would have shut down at least a couple of years earlier So that's one reason why it's important for the Confederates to get a Navy at the beginning of the war

[00:11:09] I mean the Confederate Navy Consisted of precisely one blue water ship. So it really wasn't very impressive It had a couple of hundred officers who would do it come over from the US Navy and resigned their commissions

[00:11:22] But it was literally they had more men than ships by far so Bullock James Bullock the Confederate fellow is kind of recruited by Mallory the Confederate Navy secretary to go to Britain to acquire by commission However, he does it a Navy a

[00:11:42] Confederate Navy that whose purpose is to at first Break the Union blockade through smuggling guns and cotton break that Union blockade Second to build commerce Raiders that later became the famous CSS Alabama in the CSS Florida which would Target northern or Union merchant vessels and sink them

[00:12:07] To cause Lincoln a huge amount of economic pain and the third stage was that he was supposed to build a couple of advanced ironclads Which were called the Laird Rams

[00:12:19] Lairds because Lairds was the biggest with huge shipyard in Liverpool and the Rams because they well they rammed stuff They were iron ironclads that a very modern gunnery It was not modern weapons platform that also had one of those old, you know sort of ancient

[00:12:36] Style metal prowls at the beginning and it would just their job was to ram Union frigates The Union fighting ships and just sort of drawn them out out at sea It was a very simple plan

[00:12:50] But once the whole point was to keep the Confederate war effort going while at the same time Proving to the British who were the world's hyper power at the time that the Confederate Confederacy was a going concern That they should stick with it and at the same time

[00:13:05] You know that it would feed the war sinews. So there would be a lot of What I call Dixie's white gold cotton Would come flowing eastwards across the Atlantic into Liverpool where they had essentially the world's largest cotton futures market and cotton market cotton exchange

[00:13:23] In exchange for that they would that would raise money and that could be used to purchase weaponry in Britain and also France that could be shipped back to the under equipped under armed Confederate army so that that's essentially how it worked

[00:13:36] So that again, that's why the Confederates wanted me was very important that they get one and Britain at that time You know was neutral during the the Civil War and there was a real fear well There was a real fear from the Union

[00:13:48] That the the Eunice said that the Confederates might draw Britain in and bring Britain on their side wasn't there? If Britain was as I said the world's hyperpower at the beginning of the war

[00:13:59] The Confederates assumed that Britain would kind of put a thumb on the scale for them Maybe if they were really lucky and they played their cards. Well, there would be a kind of an Anglo Confederate Union or Alliance against the Union Lincoln Lincoln's north

[00:14:14] one reason there are numerous reasons for this one of which was is that you know Britain was the world's leading free trader and The Confederates were free traders they were very old in the from the 18th century sort of slaving links between especially Liverpool and the south

[00:14:32] Which later got converted into cotton when when the British sort of abolished the slave trade? And so, you know, these were generations old kinship networks. And also there was a kind of romantic attachment you know, it's like the

[00:14:45] Lucky, you know like they killed Cavaliers type of a really ridiculous stereotypes about plantation life You know southern southern Cavalier types all all of whom were sort of aristocratic

[00:14:56] Virginian types who were acceptable and sort of high society and so on despite the tobacco spittoons that followed them everywhere and It was not it. So again, it was not a stupid idea It's a very real idea and in Britain. I mean if you went around in 1861 and

[00:15:14] Did a poll you would find that the great majority of the population were pro-confederacy I mean there were you know, at least a hundred hundred fifty MPs who were actively pro-confederacy There were many many members of the House of Lords were very pro-confederacy

[00:15:29] It was actually quite hard to find a big Union man in Britain at the time Lincoln was not liked He had tariffs which was thought to hurt Britain and you know, the United States was not a friend of Britain at all

[00:15:43] And they came close to war a couple of times, you know, remember, you know quite often because it's sort of a tetchy relationship So at the beginning of the war, but at the same time Britain doesn't also want to encourage rebels

[00:15:55] You know like the southerners because if you encourage one set of rebels in the south to break away from a legitimate government Well, you know, why can't they do the same among British possessions in say? The West Indies Caribbean or around the world, I mean

[00:16:14] It's what is the thing about what's good for the goose is good for the gander kind of thing So there was a few like hmm. Maybe this isn't such a great idea We shouldn't be putting all our eggs with these guys. So it was a very confused system

[00:16:28] And so Lord Russell, you know, again, there were other other arguments for instance that the southerners again were plucky rebels Okay, it's one interpretation It was another interpretation said these kids they were just spoiled kids

[00:16:40] Who were just broken away and taking their toys home because they didn't get what they wanted from Washington You know why and and there was another argument of this is just a this Union the South North fight

[00:16:51] I mean, you know, what what the hell is this all about? Complicated issues. This is just another conventional fight between two countries like just like we have in Europe all the time So Lord Russell the Foreign Secretary

[00:17:05] Kind of this like shrugged his shoulders gave up and he basically says at the beginning like for God's sake Let's just keep out of it I mean He actually sort of writes that until you know a winner

[00:17:14] Begins to emerge and then they can side with them. So the British reactions are very very complex towards the Americans for they honestly They thought it was one of their sort of colonial cousins Yet another one of their inexplicable Sort of fights over what nobody was quite sure

[00:17:34] So the compromise solution was the compromise solution that really pleased no one South or North Which was I think the intent of it which was a neutrality proclamation say

[00:17:46] Britain would just stay out of this and you know and wait but at the same time be friendly towards both sides What that meant was is that the Confederates would earnestly try and draw the Brits onto their side and

[00:18:00] The Union diplomats had just as much interest trying to make sure that the British stayed neutral There's British neutrality kind of helped the north which was a stronger power Domestically anyway, so again, it's a lot of within this whole Confederate Navy Scenario, there's there's a much bigger

[00:18:19] Sort of grand strategy being played out you say which is all so the Navy was part of this So whoever can swing them the British back and forth gets to win the big game That was a very long answer to a very short question. No, no, it's good

[00:18:31] That's good Because I think it provides a great kind of context to the world that we're in So, um, why was captain James Bullock selected by the Confederates for this mission? It's a great question there. You have to remember they didn't there was no Secret Service's as we

[00:18:48] Conventionally know nowadays in the 20 21st century didn't really exist Bullock was chosen because You know in a word he was clean and what I mean by that was he was from he was from Georgia

[00:19:01] He came from an old slaveholding, you know affluent merchant family. He himself never owned any slaves He left, you know He left the South his family In his early teens and I think he went to boarding school in Connecticut in the north and so on

[00:19:16] so you really didn't have that much connection with the South and He spent most of his he but nearly all of his career in the United States Navy being promoted You know captaining bigger and bigger ships

[00:19:27] He resigns and he goes and goes to make some money as a you know You're looking for a private steamship company with the letters going up and down the East Coast like New York Havana kind of thing He lived in New York. He was a southerner, but

[00:19:41] You know, he didn't have any in as he said he didn't have any interests or property in the South You know his family's based in New York. He's also very discreet bullet. He never talks about

[00:19:52] Politics at all. He was kind of a black box what he what his real views were on certain things now we in the book I kind of explicated exactly what he was thinking underneath it all so he wasn't known to the Union as a some sort of mad

[00:20:07] You know foam specked Confederate nutcase He you know, he was a very legitimate You know businessman and steamship captain of the North But there was a couple of other pluses he had during his time as a steamship captain

[00:20:23] He'd spent time in the dock in shipyards and dockyards commissioning ships designing ships learning a lot about steamship technology which is a new technology at the time to replace snail which made him very rare and

[00:20:34] You know if you're going to go commission a Navy in a foreign country You need a guy who knows his way around shipbuilding contracts, which are extraordinarily Complex things so he was off the Union radar, which is really and he was also very trustworthy very discreet

[00:20:50] scrupulously honest when it came to finances and Could operate by himself and he was mature enough and he was also a gentleman. I was another thing seven gentlemen

[00:20:59] This is 19th century Britain, you know, you've been someone who knows how to use a knife and fork properly kind of thing So that's what he was. I mean in Bullock in terms of character was it was a very good

[00:21:12] Agent in that he was he was very charming. He was very polite. He was very manipulative Very ironic kind of designedly aristocratic So you have a certain there's a certain temper to him

[00:21:26] That in that endeared him and made him a sort of a perfect agent for this kind of job and that's why he was chosen Fantastic. There was an interesting kind of legal situation in the UK at that time in regards to sort of local businesses and individuals

[00:21:39] So directly helping the Confederates with their plans. Can you talk to us a little bit about that legal situation? Yeah, the legal situation is interesting It was all based on apart from the neutrality act was based on something called the foreign enlistment act

[00:21:54] Which was an act which was an act that nobody had ever heard of until the Civil War and it was it was an act That was I think passed by got the dates correct. It's sort of around 1819 So about half a century before and it was really

[00:22:09] originally drafted to stop British volunteers from fighting in as mercenaries essentially in South America against the Spanish and so on but that's what it was really for and it had never been come to court

[00:22:21] You know any any kind of cases related to breaking the foreign enlistment act and it had you know A land version of soldiers and it also had at the end a kind of a bit on

[00:22:32] Ships, it was kind of an ad on but again, nobody had paid any attention to this thing But suddenly it becomes of vast importance when Bullock is over in Liverpool building ships And recruiting crews and so forth because will he break the terms?

[00:22:49] Or the law of the foreign enlistment act if he does he's busted he gets thrown out of the country that Confederacy You know is is thrown to the wolves and Britain might ally with the Union because they're so annoyed at what's going on here

[00:23:02] So Bullock has to tread very carefully not to trigger any of the any of the parts of the the foreign enlistment act And what he does is when he gets that he reads it. He's probably actually read it

[00:23:15] In half a century and he finds a loophole in it that you could almost literally Sailor a fleet through and he finds it was just a couple of words that were emitted From the shipbuilding section and that allows him to go to shipyards in Liverpool

[00:23:32] Which is the mightiest port city on earth and built more ships in Liverpool in a year than they did mean entire rest of the world combined and he can go to the biggest shipyards like Laird's and a few others and

[00:23:43] Get them to build ships for the Confederate Navy But he has to use a lot of subterfuge to get it through and he has to have a lot of cover stories They have to be civilian ships

[00:23:53] They can't be armed or equipped or outfitted as warships in any way that has to be a hands-off They'd have they have to be owned by some kind of false front Italian company of some kind

[00:24:04] But if he can get those ships out to sea out into the high seas well away from her majesty's You know jurisdiction and You can use a separate ship

[00:24:15] Carrying weapons which were not illegal to buy and that then they rendezvous off say the Azores or somewhere like that You can kind of outfit an ostensibly civilian trading ship intended owned by an Italian company into a Confederate warship

[00:24:30] Completely legally you say just by evading these getting heading for that loophole so that's what that's what's so interesting about the foreign enlistment act that the Bullock always has to tread very very carefully and his antagonist

[00:24:44] Dudley realizes this and spends a lot of the war as related in the book trying to catch and Trip up a Bullock that into breaking that law because once that happens then You can take him to court and you can shut down the operation

[00:24:59] Now related that's all the shipyard but related to that As I said before Britain was a very pro-confederate place and the most Pro-confederate place in the entire country was Liverpool. Yeah, well, it goes over there

[00:25:14] 1861 and he says, you know, he's walking around town down to Liverpool saying there's more Confederate flags and bunting here than there is in downtown Richmond, I mean everybody every trader was was was it was a Confederate ally

[00:25:28] There were a couple of radical dissenter types abolitionists around but they were They were tiny numbers tiny numbers All of the business elites all the industrial leads all the shipbuilding elites all of the trading elites all the princes there

[00:25:42] Were all to a man pro-confederate. So Bullock has this huge you can call this huge network of Confederate friendly businesses and Do it using that and who are all kind of in on the game of trying to sneak past the Foreign Enlistment Act

[00:26:00] So he creates this gigantic web of these companies of these companies that are working with him to evade these laws Hmm and supply the Confederacy and it's Dudley's job to try and break that. It's a little bit like that

[00:26:13] You know, there's conspiracy board you see TV shows and there's always the guy the wild-eyed fanatic with the red threads and the And the newspaper clippings that's essentially what Dudley does yeah except in this case there actually was a conspiracy

[00:26:27] And it's all outlined in those letters. I mentioned to you before in the reports You just had at one point II have I think I have a picture in the book

[00:26:35] He compiles a list of 240 companies in Liverpool alone who are part of this network of evading the law It's really quite fascinating how he he just did it essentially by himself and a couple of agents Detectives it's really amazing a bit of

[00:26:50] Intelligence analysis and gathering really pretty extraordinary. Yeah, definitely Well, can you talk to us about Thomas Dudley? What kind of man he was and sort of what motivated him and why he was sent to Liverpool Thomas Dudley?

[00:27:03] Was the son of a sort of very modest Quaker farmer in New Jersey His father died when he was young Thomas works on his mother's widowed mother's farm Puts himself through a law school and You know apprentices himself to a local attorney

[00:27:21] So he's basically a local lawyer in Trenton or Newark, New Jersey again all by the by but the interesting thing about Dudley Was aside from the fact that he had no discernible sense of humor whatsoever

[00:27:32] Is that and in a magnificent beard is that he he was I mean really early on I mean since he was a boy. He was a rigid abolitionist I mean there was no gain saying it there was no compromise that he was willing to make

[00:27:49] Slavery had to go by hook or by crook and he would do you would actually, you know, you know Put principle in the practice. He would dress himself up and what he considered to be

[00:27:57] Sort of a slave trader out there which consists of a kind of a wide-brimmed hat and a whip and a couple of pistols And he would go across the Mason Dixon line into the south and he would purchase Slaves or he would buy backs

[00:28:11] Blacks would be being almost kidnapped from the north sold down to the sort of the death plantation Copper plantations down south in Mississippi and Alabama never heard from again He would buy them and take them back to you know back across the Mason Dixon line

[00:28:25] Which is a very dangerous line of work. Yes that he was informed by this kind of Quaker rectitude and You know later on in the 1850s. He gets involved in Republican politics, you know as an abolitionist and at the 1860

[00:28:39] Convention he pulls and he's kind of in the New Jersey delegation for the convention. He does a lot of Backstairs wire pulling it's quite deft and he plays it

[00:28:49] He kind of plays a kind of a role in getting the New Jersey delegation to vote for Lincoln as the nominee Which they weren't intended to do in return for this signal service a couple of months later Lincoln newly installed in the White House

[00:29:03] Says Thomas you've been so helpful, you know, here's your reward, you know I guess these things go, you know You can either be minister or ambassador to Japan or you can become consul to Liverpool

[00:29:15] Which do you want and you know minister to Japan is it quite a you know senior? Diplomatic posting whereas a consul even today is essentially about rubber stamping and it's you're a sort of a secondary city and you lack the diplomatic power and

[00:29:31] prestige of being an ambassador, but Dudley had been Miraculously survived a horrible almost drowning His ship his ferry sank in the middle of a freezing river And he'd been considered dead and then he was sort of brought alive

[00:29:47] He regarded as a kind of a miracle and proved to him that he had a divine mission to complete But it also persuaded it like for instance the abolition of slavery

[00:29:56] The other part of it was that he needed to be close to good doctors because his health never quite recovered from it and He thought well in Japan is very distant and I'll have to be there for many many years

[00:30:05] But if I just do a consulship, you know, the usual stint there is about a year year or two Maybe I'll just go to Liverpool, you know The good doctors collect the bauble come back home get back to my legal practice

[00:30:16] What he didn't realize was that he by accepting this he just inadvertently Stepped into the most what would it just become the most intelligent the most important intelligence posting in the world this bullet was there and

[00:30:30] So that's how this this competition this rivalry between them begins and Dudley's sort of struggled to get actual Intelligence in those early days and so he was advised to hire a private investigator called Matthew McGuire

[00:30:43] Can you talk to us a little bit about Matthew McGuire and how he helped Dudley? Oh, yeah McGuire There's not that much information about McGuire What you have to remember is that when Dudley first came to Liverpool and as I said, Liverpool was

[00:30:56] Confederacy central, I mean within days of Dudley arriving He was confronted by this delegation from what was known as the American Chamber of Commerce, which didn't consist of Americans It was local businessmen

[00:31:08] from the Chamber of Commerce who had American trading connections with the South and they said about 15 guys along to give him a lecture about why well, they expected him to stay in line and we're gonna ally with the Confederacy and

[00:31:21] Dudley brow beats them and starts telling them that this war will be prosecuted No matter how much blood is spilt and we will destroy you and we will destroy Southernism and we will crush and eradicate slavery So he sends them off with this flea in their ear

[00:31:35] But they realize that they've got a someone they don't really want to tangle with these like this madman you live a public and console there He's not that he's not the usual sort of get along, you know

[00:31:46] Go along to get along type of console that goes to a lot of sort of boozy dinners and shakes a lot of hands And you know that kind of thing which is the traditional role for this stuff, but Dudley's at sea

[00:31:55] He really he has no idea what he's just stepped into and as far as you can see is that Bullock is running this town He's got friends everywhere He's got spies everywhere. He knows everything that's going on, you know

[00:32:06] He is just outwitting and out foxing Dudley at every turn So Dudley finds a detective a guy called Matthew McGuire who was an Irishman came over I think he'd been in the Yorkshire police for a while as an inspector and

[00:32:23] Had lately retired and gone become a private investigator, you know his most most of his jobs consist of spying on husbands having affairs or You know or what? You know one business partner trying to rip off another and he frames him or he's at one point

[00:32:40] He sets off to Australia and takes back a you know, an absconding debtor and brings him back to face justice So yeah, and he was this redheaded rather Irishman rather fond of his tipple and Bullock always thinks he's a clown

[00:32:54] But it turns out that he's actually very very good at what he does and he's the guy who knows Liverpool backwards and he knows every portside tavern. He knows how the place works

[00:33:05] He knows where the bodies are buried and there are a lot of bodies being buried at I mean, he's basically Dudley's sort of Virgil leading him into into the inferno and showing him how this place works And so McGuire is a very important figure

[00:33:20] Over the over the course of this but he's a really quite an interesting character McGuire Yeah, you mentioned it just now but I mean Liverpool was a horrifically violent place at the time

[00:33:29] I think the I remember correctly it was something like 500 murders a year or something quite massive like that Yeah, it was a much smaller Liverpool was a boomtown. It was just 30 40 years earlier

[00:33:40] it had been you know, I mean a fairly quiet port but it exploded with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of shipyards and Cotton and and all that kind of stuff. There's very very powerful industries

[00:33:53] You know, there were very very wealthy people there. There were great merchant princes They were very powerful MPs of politicians from there. There was also a you know, a colossal underworld as well

[00:34:04] Many of them many people were, you know kind of Irish immigrants that were coming over there. There were Catholic versus Protestant fights They were innumerable gang fights going on there It was you know was and there were sailors from it was a fascinating place

[00:34:17] There's sailors from all from all around the world in Liverpool So of course where there were sailors they were also Obviously brothels and they were gambling joints and boozers and in those days

[00:34:27] You didn't have to have a license to open a boozer. You could just basically open one in your In your house if you wanted to I mean there were hundreds and hundreds of pubs in downtown

[00:34:38] Liverpool central Liverpool all of which are catering to the marine trade. There were blackmailers extortionists quite a place and Of course Dudley who's from some nice parts of New Jersey's was horrified by what he sees when he gets there

[00:34:54] But but yeah, but it was an extra also an extremely violent place Mostly was fueled by the alcohol which was at the time, you know

[00:35:01] The gin and the you know, the rock that Jim and Jim and all that because it was essentially the 19th century equivalent of opioids It was also very dense. I mean completely with tens thousands of people jammed into a square mile or so

[00:35:14] Living in basements and some dungeons almost in back alleys and stuff like that. But yes, it was extremely violent place I mean, there were as you say hundreds and hundreds of murders. I think about the same as Miss Chicago today

[00:35:27] But very few guns were used and it was you know Chicago is obviously much bigger than the people and those are just the murders the authorities knew about me daughters when else there was

[00:35:36] Indeed, so Dudley did finally get wind of of the plans up going on on the 24th of January in 1862 Dudley makes his first mention of a ship called or it is is that right or it is can you talk to us about this?

[00:35:51] And its significance. Yeah, the orders it was That became known as the Orito Which was which was the he got the name slightly wrong or McGuire did or something? Essentially the that was the first indication he had that Bullock was building a commerce radar

[00:36:08] That would become the Florida. He doesn't know anything about it He's trying to get McGuire to go investigate the shop the shipyards and the docks and so forth But everyone is everyone's kind of storm. I mean this it's it's very difficult to get the information

[00:36:20] You can't be a detective just asking questions and people like that No, but at the same time Dudley is trying to lure, you know find information He's trying to pay informants and that kind of thing

[00:36:33] And it's really interesting actually if you go to the Dudley papers, which are in California It'd be Huntington Museum You can actually see the receipts that McGuire is putting in You know

[00:36:42] and you can see who he's paying and how much they're being paid and you can see the list of Informants all this kind of thing and the information that they're that they're supplying some of which is rubbish since a lot of it is gold but basically

[00:36:53] This is the first time that Dudley is going to really face off against Bullock and Bullock remember his is running this town like it's his own fiefdom and the Orito was named the Orito because it was owned by You know, obviously a non-existent Sicilian firm

[00:37:10] And it's named after a river in Sicily and it was all you know, it's like front after front after front So Dudley has his suspicions, but he doesn't know exactly he can't prove anything

[00:37:20] That's a very different problem. And that's what he has to start grappling with but that's essentially what happens there That's that's the first round which Dudley by release a huge spoiler Dudley loses in a terribly humiliating way Yeah, indeed and then obviously it leads to later on

[00:37:36] He finds out there's a second ship that gets commissioned the 290 which is made by the shipmakers Lairds Well before we go into that second ship I suppose keep talk to us a little bit about sort of how Bullock went about getting the Orieto

[00:37:49] Commissioned and how it was built and how he kind of managed to circumvent the law and sort of keep Dudley in the dark Yeah, it's a kind of complicated process Bullock would remember Bullock was not a commissioned Confederate officer, which was key

[00:38:02] He was a was a civilian who happened to be originally from the south You know, he had entree through various other connections to various to gun makers, you know And guns on the dealers and so on to some of the shipyards

[00:38:17] Especially in particular the you know, Lairds brothers, which was the biggest and most advanced shipyard in the world I think in the in the Jules Verne book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea the iron plates of Is it the Nautilus or Professor Ajax?

[00:38:33] It says they're actually made by Lairds because I mean why wouldn't you go to Lairds? They're the best in the world for iron ships and they so Lairds was a very advanced place

[00:38:42] They did they make very few wooden ships. They specialized in iron, but they were very friendly with the south very very pally and You know very sympathetic to them

[00:38:53] So when you know a southern gentleman turns up and offers them a lot of money, you're an easy pay plan right To build a ship that is completely civilian when there are no guns on board. There's no storage for weapons There's nothing it is a

[00:39:11] ostensibly a merchant ship well, it's gonna be along the lines of You know, what does that ask me? No questions I'll tell you no lies as long as they don't ask who this ship is

[00:39:24] Actually for intended for then they're not breaking the law is if they are not knowingly Building a ship for a competent nation then they're in the clear So it's imperative that Bullock and the Lairds keep to this story He's and and so he'd and again

[00:39:42] He stays away from the docks as much as he from the shipyard as much as he can or do what any kind of? Connections and so on but it's all there. And so that's how these that's how this ship works

[00:39:52] I mean, that's it in general and you get it Bullet creates a you know, fictitious entities who own it there. There are owners there that the customs house records are Altered people are paid off You know

[00:40:03] The people working on the guys working on the ship are told not to say anything or shoot their mouths off to any nosy detectives or union types in

[00:40:12] Tabas's on so it's a you know, it's a kind of an interesting or it's a very interesting, you know way that bullet gets around But that's that's how he operates. He's very very wily

[00:40:20] Yeah, and as you mentioned he managed to sort of outwit Dudley what happened to the ship Once it left the UK What would happen was was that the this civilian ship which would pass all examinations by the by the you know?

[00:40:35] the customs and excise people whose job was to see whether it was transporting weapons and and or you know, You know kind of a warship in disguise or anything, you know, he would just leave it would leave it would leave with a civilian

[00:40:49] Liverpool crew a bunch of guys recruited, you know, and they would be told that they were going on a voyage to Sicily or wherever And you know, you know as they after they left the harbour the plan would change and this happened all the time

[00:41:05] This wasn't this was actually quite common and at the time that you know, there was nothing in the bad weather in Sicily They're actually going the other way. This would happen

[00:41:13] You know and what they would do is they would they would rendezvous in say the Azores or somewhere like that some pre-determined point Where they would meet a tender an old folder that nobody would pay any attention to carrying from say London armaments cannons shells

[00:41:31] cannonballs all that kind of stuff and they would rendezvous there and once they were there a Confederate crew and a Confederate off of Confederate Navy officers would again come to meet them and

[00:41:44] armaments would be transferred to the civilian ship and they would be outfitted and equipped and all that kind of stuff and outside of anyone's jurisdiction And then the British sailors the Liverpool sailors would be asked do you want to join?

[00:41:59] You know for fun and adventure and a lot of money you could sign on to this ship And if they wanted to great and a lot of them did but anyone who wanted to go home Would be taken back on the next ship

[00:42:11] you know that the tender because they couldn't have any information of any kind of kidnapping or Forced recruitment because then you're you are gonna be breaking the part of this and that But as far as it if they're volunteers on the high seas, there's nothing stopping them

[00:42:25] There's no there's no breaking anything but what you would end up with As soon as the tender had left with the guns on board and a new crew full of Confederate officers

[00:42:33] The you know, the new guys would would raise a Confederate flag and it'd be commissioned into the Confederate Navy So voila Magically this this merchant trading ship would become a Confederate

[00:42:43] Commerce Raider of heavily armed very fast very modern Commerce Raider that would then wreak destruction on dozens of Union ships That's how it all happened. It was all at least by Bullock's lights all completely legal Indeed. Well as you mentioned the ship got away from Dudley

[00:43:00] But later on he started to build a list of the most of prominent Participants in the Confederates shipbuilding plans Can you talk to us about sort of people who were helping Bullock get these ships made and financed and all that sort of picture?

[00:43:14] I mentioned before the lads, but there were many other arms dealers cotton Cotton dealers, you know from that Bullock's contact is his dark money man in Liverpool that called Charles Prelude was arranging in order to kind of launder the money

[00:43:31] I guess you you could say but there was as obvious there were various financiers and so on You know the Liverpool great and the good and they had out they had their own club It's called the Southern Club and they would serve turtle soup there

[00:43:44] And we know the name of the butler or the steward there and so on they would go there Whereas of course the likes of Dudley would be instantly blackballed from members membership of this thing, you know, so there was this great network of friends and contacts there and

[00:43:59] You know many of the many of the the local politicians many of the judges You know, they were all very pro-southern at one point. I think Dudley's trying to get a trial held in Liverpool of

[00:44:11] Dudley and his friends and you know, he's advised in London. You're out of your mind. Yes You can't you go to front of a Liverpool jury. Those guys are walking free There's not a chance you're gonna to convict or indict

[00:44:25] So that that's where that's where this this great network comes in the shadow network of Confederate sort of allies comes in they are also raising money through subscriptions and so forth and they're buying Cotton bonds that were being offered by the South which were quite risky bonds

[00:44:42] And you know This would raise money that money would then get funneled and mixed into cotton money and so on and that would be used That would be kind of earmarked Into Bullock's coffers to buy these ships

[00:44:56] And and you know pay for cruise and all that kind of stuff So it was all a there's only a huge sort of shell game of money moving around which is very difficult to penetrate But Dudley does manage it takes him a long time

[00:45:07] But then he again penetrating it and and then breaking it are two different things. Yeah. No indeed indeed Well, that was that was his biggest problems that getting the sufficient proof and did he have to adapt his methods over time? To kind of gather that proof well

[00:45:21] that's that's what the title of the books about the lion and the fox which comes from the the phrase of the quote from Petrarch Which is where the lion's skin won't fit you must patch it out with the foxes

[00:45:36] The lion here is Dudley valiant and gallant and forthright against slavery and the Fox is Bullock What Dudley does at the beginning he goes in there and he's sort of mr

[00:45:50] Dudley do right and he thinks that no virtue in and of itself will help him win this fight and he takes a little while He realizes and no You're just a sucker. And so the lion has to learn some of the Fox's tricks

[00:46:03] so eventually Dudley becomes the Fox and he outwits and Out manipulates Bullock and takes him down and that that's how that that happens. So yes, Dudley did change his tactics

[00:46:15] He starts off as this naive innocent and he becomes a real competitor for Bullock the gloves come off this sort of thing Well, thank you so much for that Alex, I was being really great and if listeners want to find out more about

[00:46:28] Bullock and Dudley and they're kind of cat and mouse game or the sort of lion versus the Fox They should definitely get a copy of your book So I suppose where can listeners to find out more about you your book and your other work as well

[00:46:40] Well, I have a website at Alex Rose comm Which has pages about my books and so on another place to you can find me I run a substack newsletter about ye olde world cases of historical espionage

[00:46:55] You know old spies sometimes medieval sometimes Renaissance sometimes in like, you know 19th-century spies so they can subscribe to that. That's called Spionage that's on substack. I'm also kind of on Twitter so people can I you know, I keep things updated there

[00:47:09] So, you know a couple places you can find me. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I've really enjoyed that Thank you. Thanks for having me on. It's been great. Thanks for listening. This is secrets and spies