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 CHAPTER XIV

BRITISH SUCCESS AT ROYSTON

of alleged spies were reported from Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, and other large towns. Most of the prisoners were, however, able to prove themselves naturalised British subjects; but several men in Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield were detained pending investigation and examination of correspondence found at their homes. In Manchester, where there are always a number of Germans, it is known that many slipped away on Sunday night after the publication of the news of the invasion. Several houses in Eccles and Patricroft, outside Manchester, a house in Brown Street in the City itself, one in Gough Street, Birmingham, and another in Sandon Place, Sheffield, were all searched, and from the reports received by Scotland Yard it was believed that certain important correspondence had been seized, correspondence which had betrayed a widespread system of German espionage in this country. Details were wanting, as the police authorities withheld the truth, for fear, it was supposed, of increasing the public alarm. At the house in Sheffield, where lived a young German who had come to England ostensibly as pupil at one of the large steelworks, an accumulation of newspaper cuttings was discovered, together with a quantity of topographical information concerning the country over which the enemy was now advancing from Goole.

In most of the larger Midland towns notices had been issued by the mayors deprecating hostility towards 221