ABSTRACT
While the intelligence and security organisations were slowly evolving in the last decades of the nineteenth Century, other parts of the War Office and Admiralty were periodically returning to the problem of how to respond to the presence of the Press in theatres of operations, and to the threat of espionage, in particular by the French. Clauses in the 1803 Act of Parliament passed to address the latter during the Napoleonic War had gradually been repealed since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In late 1887, at a time of a perceived increase in the French threat, and after some alleged breaches of security, the Admiralty initiated a new Act, and with the War Office attempted to stiffen the Treasury draft of a new ‘Breach of Official Trust Bill’. This proposed severely penalising various aspects of espionage, and leaks by public servants. 43
