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Toby Jones as Verloc from the BBC’s The Secret Agent, at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Toby Jones as Verloc from the BBC’s The Secret Agent, at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/World Productions/Des Willie
Toby Jones as Verloc from the BBC’s The Secret Agent, at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/World Productions/Des Willie

The real story of the Secret Agent and the Greenwich Observatory bombing

This article is more than 7 years old

The bombing in Greenwich Park described in Conrad’s Secret Agent was inspired by real events. Was the Royal Observatory the intended target and, if so, why?

Those who have watched the recent adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent will have seen the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, feature in the plot involving a terrorist bombing. A tendency to note the resonance with today’s fears of an attack in London may have meant people have overlooked the historical event that inspired Conrad.

There was, indeed, a bomb explosion in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory on 15 February 1894. It is not clear whether or not the Observatory was the target but the only person to die, the man carrying the chemical explosives, was an anarchist who may well have seen this British Admiralty-run facility as an appropriate symbol to attack.

As the Observatory’s chief assistant, Herbert Hall Turner, succinctly put it in his journal, at quarter to five in the afternoon: “A dynamiter anarchist was blown up with his own bomb in Greenwich Park.”

Neither Turner nor the astronomer royal, William Christie, were present but two assistants, William Thackray and Henry Hollis, filed reports, now in the Observatory’s archive. It was reported that there had been a “sharp and clear detonation, followed by a noise like a shell going through the air.”

They saw a park warden and school boys running toward a crouched figure on “the zig-zag path below the Observatory”, which no longer exists. After the mortally injured, but conscious, man was moved to the nearby Seaman’s Hospital, Hollis, Thackray and the Observatory’s gate porter William McManus were involved in the grisly business of searching the area. They found only spattered blood and fragments of bone spread over an area of nearly 60 yards.

The police identified the dead man as Martial Bourdin, a 26-year-old Frenchman with links to the anarchist Club Autonomie. He had travelled to Greenwich from Westminster by tram, after walking from his lodging in Fitzroy Street with the explosives and a large amount of money. This suggests that he hoped to escape, perhaps to France, after the event.

The bomb obviously exploded too soon. Perhaps, as in Conrad’s novel, there was an unfortunate trip, although whether Bourdin was someone else’s dupe or himself the mastermind is not known. Was the Observatory even the intended target? Was he on his way somewhere else? Or would Greenwich Park have been sufficiently crowded on a Thursday afternoon for ordinary people to have been the intended victims?

Certainly, while the bomb was powerful enough to rip apart human flesh at close quarters, it would not have had much impact on a building or caused the kind of conflagration imagined in a recent artwork. The Secret Agent dramatisation was quite wrong in suggesting that the gates of the Observatory would have been open to visitors. Before it became a museum in the 1960s, there were high wooden gates and special permission was required to enter through the gatehouse. Lobbing a bomb over would have been unlikely to cause much damage, to staff or buildings.

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in an early 20th-century postcard. Note the closed gates.
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in an early 20th-century postcard. Note the closed gates. Photograph: Wikipedia

Conrad was convinced the Observatory was the target, although the novel suggests he could hardly fathom why, calling it “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that is impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.”

Given that the zig-zag path was not one of the main paths through the park, it seems likely that Bourdin was indeed intending to walk up to the Observatory. That the explosion blew off his left hand completely, as well as ripping open his stomach, suggests that he may have been getting ready to use the bomb.

It has been suggested by curator David Rooney that Bourdin’s target was something that was in fact quite accessible but potentially very symbolic. This was the 24-hour gate clock, which had been showing Greenwich Mean Time to the public since 1852. The significance of GMT, and perhaps of the clock, had been increased in 1880 when the British Government adopted it as national standard time: a clear example of government control over daily lives.

It was, of course, not the clock itself that defined Britain’s time. That was the job of the observers and human computers within the Observatory, using the telescope that defined the Greenwich Meridian, known as the Airy Transit Circle. This was deep within the Observatory complex and inaccessible to passers-by, even if they had understood its significance. The gate clock was merely a “slave”, connected by wires to the Observatory’s master clock, corrected regularly against astronomical observations. Beyond that, signals were sent by telegraph to clocks or time balls in Westminster, ports and elsewhere.

The Galvano-Magnetic 24-hour gate clock at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

Was Bourdin sufficiently aware of the Observatory’s role in defining and maintaining time for the nation for this to have been his target? Might he have known, too, that the Observatory was the place that helped define space: the site of Longitude 0?

In the 1880s there had been much discussion about international standardisation. Several conferences – including, most famously, the International Meridian Conference held in Washington in 1884 – had met to discuss whether there should be a common prime meridian from which all nations would measure both time and longitude. If so, should this be at Greenwich, another observatory, or elsewhere?

The recommendation of the 1884 delegates was that there should indeed be an internationally recognised meridian from which to calculate longitude and a universal day, and that it should be the one passing through the Royal Observatory’s transit instrument. They did not have the power to force this on their governments but, nevertheless, Greenwich’s symbolic standing was raised a notch higher in the public consciousness.

We will never know for sure. Bourdin, although conscious and able to speak for some time after his horrific injuries, did not divulge his intentions. We do know that another British observatory was a bomb target less than ten years later, when suffragettes caused “considerable damage” to the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, in May 1913, and Greenwich was to suffer bombing in the very different context of World War II.

The idea that Bourdin might have attempted to use his bomb to “stop time”, or at least to highlight Government control of people’s use of time, is certainly compelling.

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