Basil Thomson

Sir Basil Home Thomson,

In 1899, the United Kingdom and Germany signed an agreement formalising each country's rights and claims over Tonga and Samoa respectively. Given his inside knowledge of Tongan politics, Thomson was tasked with expediting the establishment of a British protectorate over Tonga, which was established on 18 May 1900 despite the objections of some native chiefs who wished to retain their traditional privileges.^[1]

Writing career

After three years at the Native Lands Office in Suva, Thomson resigned from colonial service, and returned to England in 1893, due in no small part to the deteriorating health of his wife. There he embarked on a career as a writer, drawing on his experiences in the South Sea Islands to produce South Sea Yarns (1894; written in Fiji),^[2] The Diversions of a Prime Minister (1894, about his government work in Tonga), and The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath (1898). Basil Thomson used his Fijian assistants to organise the first ever done census of Fijian marriage on Viti Levu. He found that the Fijians did not marry, as claimed in the specialised literature, their mother's brother's daughter, but married any girl and recalculated her kinship status after the marriage so as to address her by the term meaning mother's brother's daughter. ^{[citation needed]}

Prison governorship

In the mid-1890s, Thomson read for the

One who he interrogated was Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer later to be executed by the French as a spy. In 1916 she was taken off a ship sailing from Spain to the Netherlands at Falmouth as a suspicious person and brought to London where she was interrogated at length by Thomson. Eventually she claimed to be doing some work for French Intelligence. (A full transcript of this is in Britain's National Archives and Thomson himself refers to it in his 1922 book Queer People).

Thomson's work as Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard Involved a wide range of investigations. His natural conservatism was given full throttle against suffragettes, then against spies from Imperial Germany and its allies, then against

In 1919, while remaining Assistant Commissioner (Crime), he was appointed

In December 1925, Thomson was arrested in London's Hyde Park, and charged with "committing an act in violation of public decency" with a young woman, Miss Thelma de Lava. Thomson rejected the charges, insisting that he was engaged in conversation with the woman for the purposes of research for a book he was writing on London vice; found guilty of public indecency, he was fined £5 (equivalent to £303 in 2021).^[6] The story he gave the court (which his barrister, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, probably did not support) sounded totally peculiar. Thomson apparently lied (or told a half-truth) regarding his name, calling himself "Home Thomson" when he was arrested with Miss de Lava. "Home" was one of his middle names. However he was recognised by the police. He tried alternately to bluster and to offer a vague bribe to the constables. When he presented his version in the courtroom he said he was researching a book on the danger of left wing agitators in England and he was together with Miss de Lava waiting for the speech to begin. Had this been true, Thomson should have revealed in court who the orator was he was waiting for. He kept refusing, which, with the background of Miss de Lava as a prostitute, forfeited the credibility that Thomson thought would save him.

Family

He was the father of Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Home Seymer DSO, MC (1894–1967), born Vivian Home Thomson, whose name was legally changed to Vivian Home Seymer by royal licence on 3 November 1919.^[7][8]

Footnotes