John Wallinger

During the First World War he was engaged in combating the Hindu–German Conspiracy. During this period he employed the novelist W. Somerset Maugham as an intelligence agent in Geneva. Wallinger is perhaps best known as the principal inspiration for the character of "R.", the fictional British spymaster who employs Ashenden in Maugham's stories.

Early life Wallinger was born on 25 October 1869 at Poona, British India. His father was William H. Arnold Wallinger, a British official in the Indian Civil Service with the Imperial Forestry Service. In 1896, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Ahmadabad as an inspector.

During the First World War he was given the temporary rank of Major in the British Army, his commission listed as "Special List (General Staff Officer)". Wallinger was attached to general headquarters in France, where he operated in a counter-intelligence capacity against the Berlin Committee and the Hindu–German Conspiracy. In August 1916, Wallinger returned to intelligence work in India. After the war in 1919 he was posted to Egypt, and the following year he was appointed deputy inspector-general of the Indian Imperial Police. After the war, on 3 June 1925, he was awarded a KBE. In 1926 he was offered the role of deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but instead chose to retire to Brighton on the south coast of England, where he died on 7 January 1931. Wallinger was the literary prototype of the spymaster of a number of Maugham's short stories, and was notably portrayed as the spymaster "R." in the Ashenden stories Maugham wrote following the war.

Inspired by Maugham's stories, the character of "R." based on Wallinger was played by Charles Carson in the 1936 Alfred Hitchcock espionage thriller Secret Agent.