Talk:Basil Thomson

Untitled

The August 2012 edition of 'The Journal of the Whitechapel Society' carries an article by Thomas Toughill which reveals that Basil Thomson and his elder brother, Wilfred, were at New College, Oxford at the same time as Montague John Druitt, the man identified by Basil and Sir Melville Macnaghten, his predecessor as Head of CID at Scotland Yard, as their prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Erdbeben (talk • contribs) 19:37, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

In fiction

Perhaps worth noting (though maybe not in the article itself) is that Thomson is a fairly prominent character in Ken Follett's fiction novel The Man from St. Petersburg. It's set in 1914, and Thomson appears as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, attempting to catch a Russian anarchist seeking to disrupt the Anglo-Russian alliance. (The novel incorrectly states that Thomson had been Prime Minister of Tonga, rather than assistant to the Prime Minister.) Aridd (talk) 14:25, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Detective Novels

It should perhaps be noted that in addition to the works on Tonga mentioned in the article Thomson also wrote a number of detective novels, most notably the eight books of the Inspector Richardson series. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exbeardy (talk • contribs) 12:47, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

True - and one of the later ones involved faking up the identity of a dead body. This inspired intelligence officer Ian Fleming to contrive ‘Operation Mincemeat’, a plan to mislead the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. All in the wiki article on ‘Mincemeat’.

Dorothy Sayers praised an early one. Info on his detective novels definitely needed in the article.2A00:23C5:E097:5D00:51AA:E5A8:5686:A791 (talk) 19:36, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Ian Fleming didn't actually work on Mincemeat, and Lt-Cdr Ewen Montagu, who did, along with Flt-Lt Charles Cholmondeley (in the Admiralty's basement Room 13, one floor down from Fleming's Room 39), later said he didn't recall seeing Fleming's famous Trout memo, in which the idea of planting fake documents on a corpse, derived from Thomson's novel The Mystery of the Milliner's Hat, was mooted. Montagu claimed that Mincemeat was an original idea by Cholmondeley (who was RAF, not Navy, but was secretary of the MI5-led Twenty Committee -- also called the XX or Double-Cross Committee, and chaired by Oxford don John Masterman, who had also written a detective novel) and sat in Room 13 for Mincemeat. Not everyone believes Montagu's denials -- intelligence people do like to make stuff up -- and it's odd that the article omits Thomson's detective novels, which sound pretty awful but clearly made an impression at the time, have been reprinted in recent years and certainly influenced Fleming and may have influenced Mincemeat. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Incorrect dates for leaving the island?

In the Writing section, it says that he left the islands and returned to the UK in 1893 but then below it it says he wrote a book while in Fiji in 1894. Also earlier in the colonial services section, it says that he was instrumental in Tonga being taken over by the British due to his speaking the language and knowledge of the area, but most if not all this activity occured in the years around 1896 to 1897, so it does not make sense that he returned to the UK 1893 and then be so involved in local politics for the next six years, on the other side of the world. Although, it does also say he wrote a book about his work on Tonga in 1894... so maybe he was no longer invovled? The article is not clear about where he was when and when his involvement in local affairs ended and how much he was still involved after he returned to the UK in the politics of Tonga - did he return to the UK and cease all involvement? David Butler-Groome (talk) 09:20, 8 November 2025 (UTC)