These losses convinced Crawford that a complete change of method must be adopted if faith was to be kept with the Ulster Volunteers, who were implicitly trusting their leaders to provide them with weapons to enable them to make good the Covenant. More than a year before this time he had told the special Committee dealing with arms, to which he was immediately responsible, that, in his judgment, the only way of dealing effectively with the problem was not by getting small quantities smuggled from time to time by various devices and through disguised ordinary trade channels, but by bringing off a grand _coup_, as if running a blockade in time of war. He had crossed the Channel on purpose to submit this view to Sir Edward Carson and Captain Craig early in 1912, but at that time nothing was done to give effect to it.
But the seizure of so large a number as six thousand rifles at a time when the political situation looked like moving towards a crisis in the near future, made necessary a bolder attempt to procure the necessary arms. When General Sir George Richardson took command of the U.V.F. in July 1913 he placed Captain (afterwards Lieut.-Colonel) Wilfrid Bliss Spender on his staff, and soon afterwards appointed him A.Q.M.G. of the Forces. Captain Spender's duties comprised the supply of equipment, arms, and ammunition, the organisation of transport, and the supervision of communications. He was now requested to confer with Major Fred Crawford with a view to preparing a scheme for procuring arms and ammunition, to be submitted to a special sub-committee appointed to deal with this matter, of which Captain James Craig was chairman. Spender gave his attention mainly to the difficulties that would attend the landing and distribution of arms if they reached Ulster in safety; Crawford said he could undertake to purchase and bring them from a foreign port. Crawford's proposed _modus operandi_ may be given in his own words:
"I would immediately go to Hamburg and see B.S. [the Hebrew dealer in firearms with whom he had been in communication for some six or seven years, and whom he had found perfectly honest, and not at all grasping], and consult him as to what he had to offer. I would purchase 25,000 to 30,000 rifles, modern weapons if possible, and not the Italian Vetteli rifles we had been getting, all to take the same ammunition and fitted with bayonets. I would purchase a suitable steamer of 600 tons in some foreign port and load her up with the arms, and either bring her in direct or transfer the cargo to a local steamer in some estuary or bay on the Scottish coast. I felt confident, though I knew the difficulties in front of me, that I could carry it through all right."[86]