The problem is that the Lancaster was really impractical. A camera specialist at Bonhams auction house said:
It would have been very inconvenient to use as four very small catches had to be released in order to remove the glass screen and to fit a separate metal sensitised material holder for each exposure. As a result, the model sadly sold badly and is much rarer than the improved version which came on the market in 1890.6
Other hidden stills cameras were developed across the next 50 years.7
Most of the covert images taken between the 1890s and 1940s did not use a proper hidden stills camera like the Lancaster. Most of the photos being taken without the subject realising during that time used a long-lens camera – the photography was hidden by dint of being at a distance.
For example, in the 1870s the British state used long-lens stills cameras to gather pictures of suffragettes, women who had been imprisoned for demanding women’s voting rights. Because the police photographers were far away, the suffragettes did not realise their image was being captured. In 2003, Kew Gardens held an exhibit of those surveillance photographs. They appear almost paparazzi to modern eyes.8
Women seeking the right to vote are captured, in moments of rest, in those photos without their knowledge.
Today, the position is actually very similar to back then: secret filming is now being done both with ‘proper’ secret cameras (the modern heirs to the Lancaster) and also with the cameras in ordinary mobile or cellular telephones (just as ordinary cameras were being used back then).
Although there have been ‘proper’ hidden cameras since not long after the birth of photography, most covert recording has always used ordinary cameras that are perfectly visible but hidden far away or used such that no one sees them.
THE HIDDEN AUDIO RECORDER
Audio recorders lent themselves to disguise more easily than early stills cameras. Tape recorders changed from being large reel-to-reel devices into machines that were small enough to fit in a briefcase – and were then used to capture serious evidence of wrongdoing or antisocial behaviour.
The era of the true secret recording had begun.
The following example illustrates the reach of an audio recorder, hidden away, anywhere and in anything where it will fit. In 1976, two journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, snuck a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase into meetings with the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, just weeks after he had quit office.9
In remarkable tape recordings the former prime minister set out his fears that the British Secret Service believed he was a Communist spy. Decades later, declassified documents would prove Wilson largely right: there was a plot against him led by his own spies. Penrose wrote the following:
Unbeknown to Wilson, Courtiour and I secretly recorded many of our meetings with him, almost always conducted at his Georgian house at 5 Lord North Street, close to the House of Commons. The cumbersome machine was smuggled into his study in a briefcase carried by Courtiour. Over a period of nine months we accumulated hours of tape recordings. Those tapes have, since then, remained untouched in the loft of my Kent home and at Courtiour’s London home.10
There are other examples where audio recorders changed whole sectors in just the same ways that secret cameras are now opening up new hidden worlds.
In 1972, The Guardian newspaper in England used a disguised audio recorder to prove an ex-convict was being blackmailed by two police detectives in an effort to make him name other criminals. They had set him up – made it look as if he’d committed a crime they knew he’d had no part in:
DETECTIVE:But I don’t particularly want to lock you up, but I want someone.
MAN:So in exchange for me…
DETECTIVE:I want someone.11
Covert audio recording technology meant that journalists at the BBC, The Guardian and elsewhere could absolutely prove the wrongdoing by public officials in a way that previous generations would have struggled with just pen and paper based only on testimony.
THE FIRST SECRET FILMING: AUDIO, AND IMAGES AT A DISTANCE
Roger Courtiour was not just someone who recorded a former prime minister secretly with a hidden audio recorder; he was also one of the first people to do actual proper secret filming, using film cameras.
‘This was the early seventies’, he told me. ‘There were only maybe five or six places people sold drugs around London. We learned about one and I went in to buy drugs wearing an audio recorder while the team filmed me using a long lens on a camera, from a vehicle parked nearby.’
It sounds easy enough, but Roger remembers that it was actually anything but straightforward: ‘Of course being me, the audio recorder I was wearing didn’t work. I don’t think it switched on. We were [just] learning everything back then.’
We only see examples of secret filming that works, but often people fail because of technical problems. Today the same remains true. Members of the public doing their own secret filming need to do secret filming better in order to avoid being caught and in order to capture footage that proves the allegations they are making, just like back when journalists were learning the tricks of the trade.
Most of those lessons appear in later chapters, but one seems appropriate to discuss here because Roger talked about it when he reminisced about that first time he used secret filming. That lesson is that there are real limits to secret filming. There are many things that covert recorders cannot capture. Roger was filming drug deals, and at the time that seemed to him to be the end of the matter. He thought about it in pretty straightforward terms: ‘It was illegal, so of course it seemed like something we should film.’
Now he thinks more about the fact that his secret filming could only tackle certain targets. ‘Later I thought more about the fact that we were filming low-level people, not the people making the real money,’ he said. He could film anything at the street level with the new long-lens film cameras while wearing an audio recorder, but his cameras could never get at the bosses. Secret filming is very powerful, but there are always limits to what it can capture. As with most of the lessons in this book, that is just a fact that needs to be borne in mind and considered in each case of covert recording.
REAL UNDERCOVER TELEVISION
In the decades that followed, the camera crept ever closer to the action in television documentaries. Television recording started (as above in Roger Courtiour’s recollection) with audio recorders in someone’s pocket and giant film cameras some distance off. Then cameras just small enough to fit in a lady’s handbag or similar were developed. Finally, recorders – audio and picture – became small enough for operatives to wear in their clothes.
Early covert recording technology was terribly bulky and unwieldy. Undercover reporters working for me these days still worry they will be discovered even though their recorders are tiny, but when I started out just 15 years ago I had a quite bulky tourist-style video camera under my armpit. With some pretty clever modification, a cable could run off and take in video and audio from external microphones and a camera lens.
That modification, attaching a remote tiny lens, brought both image and sound right on top of the action. We could record wrongdoing while working just so long as no one spotted the giant recorder.
Those newly modified cameras were beyond the scope, expense and knowledge of most of the public at that time. The fact that we had these things and that most people could not get access to them meant that for a while the story of secret filming felt like it was