Richard Bolton Tinsley

Richard Bolton Tinsley (born November 14, 1875 in Bootle near Liverpool , † March 7, 1944 in Dumfries ) was a British businessman and intelligence officer.

Life and activity

After a career in the British Navy, Tinsley settled in Rotterdam in 1909 , where he worked for the Cunard Line. In 1910 he became director of the Rotterdam branch of the Uranium Steamship Company. At the same time he ran a hotel for emigrants, most of whom went to the United States.

In March 1911, after disputes with the Dutch authorities, Tinsley was expelled from the country for a few months, but was allowed to return to Rotterdam through the mediation of the British Foreign Office, where he even received a letter of apology from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.

During the First World War, Tinsey took over the administrative management of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) representation in the Netherlands ( code name "T"). The company he managed in Rotterdam served as a facade company behind which the Dutch SIS headquarters was hidden. In the course of the war, Tinsley built up an extensive network of agents who provided him with information that could potentially be useful to British war interests, which he then put into context, evaluated and finally passed on to London. His most important partners in this work were the British consul in Rotterdam, Ernest Maxse, the British attachés Oppenheim and Oppenheimer as well as the officer Cummings, whereby Tinsley - despite his formally subordinate position - soon developed into the decisive personality of the SIS in the Netherlands: Due The effectiveness of the network (T-Service) he built, soon developed into the largest SIS network outside of Great Britain, to which more than 20% of all SIS foreign agents belonged during the war. A large part of the SIS agents who were smuggled into Belgium and the German Reich were managed by Tinsley and sent through the Netherlands to these countries. So his agents and a. to systematically monitor and document German rail traffic (material and troop transports, etc.) to Belgium (this part of his network, however, collapsed in 1916).

Other activities that fell into Tinsley's field of work were: The creation of a black list of Dutch companies that supplied goods to Germany. In order to be able to continue doing business with Great Britain, they were prompted to hire agents from Tinsley to give them the opportunity to travel to the German Reich on exploratory trips, disguised as business representatives of Dutch companies working with the German government; the identification of German spies posted to Great Britain; as well as the entertainment of representatives of the radical political left from Germany who were in the Netherlands, such as Carl Minster .

In May 1916, Tinsley was publicly exposed as a spy by an article in the newspaper De Telegraaf , but was able to continue his work - despite German pressure on the Dutch government (which Tinsley's activities had been known to since 1915 at the latest, but which it tolerated because he collected from him Information shared with the Dutch General Staff) - continue. Although he was considered an intriguer in intelligence circles and many people were arrested in the British War Department and the SIS, and although he got into sharp arguments with the French secret service in the Netherlands during the war - which, in his opinion, the Netherlands was British territory, during the French were responsible for Switzerland, tried to poach agents or tried to infiltrate and dismantle their entire service in the Netherlands - he remained a key figure in the SIS in the Netherlands until the end of the war.

Even after the war, Tinsley managed the SIS branch (station) in Rotterdam until 1923. Later he was a freight forwarder for the Royal Mail in Rotterdam.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Tinsley was reactivated as an SIS agent. In 1940 he fled to Great Britain in view of the German occupation of the Netherlands.

The National Socialist police officers classified Tinsley as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the occupying forces of the following special commandos SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

Tinsley died while on a business trip to Scotland.

literature

• Klinkert, Wim: Defending Neutrality: The Netherlands prepares for War, 1900-1925 , pp. 200-203.
• Ruis, Edwin: Spynest. British and German Espionage from Neutral Holland 1914-1918. Briscombe: 2016.

Web links

• RB Tinsley: A biographical note

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Tinsley in the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).