The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 4
Kate Easton’s armour was pure bluestocking defiance: ‘I have always done a man’s work, and I always will,’ she declared in 1907. She explained that she had started out as a correspondence clerk for a large wholesaler, where she did a little ad hoc spying for her boss, before developing her sleuthing skills first for a solicitor and then for a male private detective, until she was finally able to open her own agency. She undertook the usual work of any private detective: ‘… blackmail, divorce, evidence, robbery, I undertake it all; I have touched everything except murder.’23
Her client list also notably included suffragettes, such as Edith Wheelwright from Bath, who had been knocked out with chloroform by a female assailant and robbed of a pearl and emerald ring (an incident which the newspapers hinted was part of a wider internecine warfare between the suffragists of the West Country).24
Kate was herself a suffragist and joined the ‘No Vote – No Census!’ boycott of the 1911 national headcount.25 On the night of Sunday 2 April, with Emily Davison famously hiding in a broom cupboard in the House of Commons and other suffragettes enjoying midnight picnics on Wimbledon Common and rambles around Trafalgar Square, Kate put her feet up at home and prepared to meet the enumerator with stony silence. He got nothing out of her, but she was well known enough at Gray’s Inn for him to record her name, single status and profession. He also had a stab at her age, putting it at forty-five, but all other details on the form were left blank. A note at the bottom read, ‘N.B. Information Refused by Miss Easton.’
The previous year, she had also been involved in the two hotly contested general elections of 1910, which saw the Liberals under Herbert Asquith cling on to power by just two seats in January and one seat in December. The secret ballot may have been in place for nearly forty years, but bribery and corruption were still rife, and undercover agents were commonly employed by parliamentary candidates to keep an eye on things. After the first election, Kate reported:
… old clothes were necessary, as we had to encounter more than one shower of Election eggs, of course intended for the opposite side; but in the country we have had the most excitement. For instance, in the north they are rather brutal, and two men in my employ had narrow escapes during the last General Election. They had to watch a certain Yorkshire village to see whether there was any ground for a charge of bribery. It was a mining village, and somehow the miners found out who they were. A crowd pursued them for two and a half miles along canal banks, and had they been caught, they would undoubtedly have been ducked, if not more relentlessly handled. Your Yorkshire miner is a bit of a tough, and his idea of fighting has no close similarity to the Queensberry rules.26
In her occasional forays into the press, Kate touched upon some of the unusual and dangerous situations in which she had found herself, such as renting a room in a brothel during a blackmail case, and getting herself admitted to an infectious diseases hospital.27 But, for the most part, she just carried on without a fuss.
Maud, on the other hand, clearly loved fuss. She said she didn’t (‘My job’s very dull, you know …’) but the mounting evidence from the tabloids suggested otherwise. She sought publicity at every turn, arranging stunts to generate headlines:
and circulating photographs of herself in disguise:28
It was all faintly ridiculous, but the more articles I found, the more I realized that Maud West was no dime-store detective. Looking beyond her tendency towards the absurd, there was a complexity to her that intrigued me. Her writing displayed a mix of world-weariness and empathy, of self-deprecation and borderline arrogance. And, whilst she showed a fabulous disregard for ethics when it suited her, I sensed a moral streak, too. There was also an air of genuine concern and passion for her work.
As a research subject, however, she was proving to be increasingly slippery. I’d even caught her in some outright lies. The first, of course, was that she was by no means London’s only lady detective – and then there were the rugs. In her story from 1931 about drugging a jilted lover to retrieve some missing love letters, she had described diving under a tiger-skin rug to escape, yet I found another story from 1926 which described almost identical circumstances, only the man was suspected of will fraud and the rug was made of bear skin:
The man must have been still too dopey to notice the strange antics of his rug, for I managed to get clear. The funny part, however, was that when I opened the door, with the rug still over me, I fell into the arms of my waiting assistant, who got the shock of his life. He thought his last hour had come!29
I’d also come across more than one account of how she had begun her career as a detective. Initially, the latest articles I’d found seemed to corroborate the version in the Perth Daily News, which described how a solicitor relation had asked Maud to help solve a simple hotel robbery.30 She expanded on this in the Sunday Dispatch:
Nearly all the male members of my family have been connected with the law, either as solicitors or barristers. A study of criminology must have been in my blood, and it was after pestering my people for some time that a solicitor uncle gave me my first enquiry job, which took me to Paris.31
It made sense. In divorce cases, at least, solicitors were often the ones to hire private detectives to gather evidence on behalf of their clients. On another occasion, she said, ‘I was introduced to the law fairly young … because my father was a barrister. He wanted me to take up that side of it, but then he saw I seemed to have the aptitude for detecting, so he started me on this strange career.’32
A picture of Maud as a restless young woman, bored with her lot and desperate for adventure, was beginning to take shape in my mind – that is, until I found an entirely different story in Pearson’s Weekly:
Some few years after leaving school I undertook a case in an unprofessional capacity for a friend. It was quite an unimportant and very simple one, and I only mention it because it decided me, as I had then to do something to earn my own living, to start as a detective on my own account.33
What had happened to her solicitor uncle or her encouraging father? And, if she came from such an illustrious family, why did she need a job? Was she cast out, forced to make her own living? Had there been some sort of scandal or tragedy? Whatever it was, Maud evidently couldn’t be trusted, even as a witness to her own life.
On the train back to Shropshire one evening, I mulled things over. If, as I believed, there was little truth to her stories individually, then what about her writing as a whole? After all, she had lived and worked in extraordinary times; she had witnessed women taking to the streets to demand the vote, the devastation of the First World War, the decline of the aristocracy, the tragedies and allure of the Jazz Age, and the gradual creep of Fascism. Throughout all this, Maud had spent her days dealing with people’s secret fears and anxieties. If nothing else, through her articles and interviews, she had left behind a social history – admittedly, a slightly unorthodox one – of their struggles to come to terms with this ever-changing world. Maybe, underneath all the lies and fabrications, there was a truth to be found after all.
Looking at things from this angle, the way forward became clear. I would trace this chronicle of human follies and frailties from its beginning in 1905 to wherever it might lead, and, at the same time, I’d keep digging and digging until the real Maud West made herself known. It was going to be hard going, but Maud would have approved – if not of my aim, then surely of my method:
Almost abnormal patience is required, for, on some occasions, months pass before the slightest progress is made. But the ‘operative’ as we call him (or her) must not lose keenness, and must bring the same energy to bear on the case all the time, however hopeless it may seem. Usually patience brings its own reward!34
Maud was right. Although, as it turned out, I wouldn’t have to wait long for my first reward.
The Lady with the Blue Spectacles
BY MAUD WEST
I remember one of my earliest clients was a lady who wanted me to find out all about another rather
well-known lady in society. My client, who wore a pair of dark-blue spectacles, told me that she wanted me to find out as much as I could in twenty-four hours about the lady in question, and if the information was satisfactory (she did not define, by the way, what was meant by satisfactory) she would pay me £5, only I was to let her have the information by noon the following day.
She then gave me her, or rather a, name and an address in Kensington, and if she did not hear from me by the first post, arranged to call on me again the following day at noon. When she left I looked up the address she had given me in the directory, and ascertained that it was a stationer’s shop. This led me to the conclusion I had already partly formed, that my client gave me a false name, and that the stationer’s shop was probably a place where she received letters.
Now I did not much care about taking up a case for a client who gave me a false name and address, and had I been busier, I would, on making certain my client had done so, have dropped the case, but not being busy I thought it would be good practice to find out as much as I could about this blue-spectacled lady. Accordingly I took a hansom (this was before the days of taxis) to the address in Kensington, and ascertained that it was, as I suspected, a stationer’s shop to which people could have letters addressed.
I was at the shop again the next morning at eight o’clock and waited about outside until about half-past nine when my client, who was wearing her blue spectacles, drove up to the door in a hansom. She had come to get the letter she hoped to receive from me (and which, of course, she didn’t get) and in a couple of minutes she came out again and drove away, and the next minute I was following her in another hansom.
She drove to a house in Dover Street, and a few minutes later I made the interesting discovery that my client was a society fortune-teller, and it did not require any great powers of inference to guess that the lady about whom she was in so great a hurry to find out something was probably coming to her that day to have her fortune told.
Having ascertained the identity of my blue-spectacled client I hurried back to my office and there awaited her arrival at noon. She turned up punctually at twelve o’clock, and I shall never forget the way she started out of her chair when I told her that I did not care much about hunting up ladies’ histories for fortune-tellers. She left my office, I think, with a much higher opinion of my ability as a detective than when she entered it.35
Chapter Three
Crooked House
I have, in the course of my work, become acquainted with the history and methods of all kinds of crooks and shady customers.
Maud West, 19191
Starting at the beginning was easier said than done. According to Maud, she had set up her agency in 1905, but the earliest evidence I could find was an advert from July 1909 on the front page of the Sunday Times.2 If this was indeed her first advertisement, she couldn’t have chosen more colourful company with which to announce her arrival on the scene. The lottery of alphabetical placement had squeezed her in between two jailbirds-in-waiting:
The first shouldn’t have been a crime, but it was. Even if the vague, detached gentleman failed to attract any ‘suggestions’ for his teatime doldrums, he could have been sailing very close to the wind as regards the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, under which even attempting to procure gay sex was punishable by up to two years’ hard labour; the maximum penalty for the act itself was life imprisonment. Still, under those circumstances, what better thrill than to go cruising for company on the front page of the nation’s most straight-laced paper?
The second may have been entirely innocent – a doctor who just couldn’t get enough of wheeling people around in bath chairs – but it was hard not to imagine more nefarious motives.
As for Maud’s own advert, I’d seen it before, but reading it again gave me an idea of a good place to start. If I wanted solid facts, what could be more solid than a building? Although Maud’s interviewers couldn’t decide whether her office had ‘the aspect of a woman’s boudoir rather than that of a detective bureau’ or was just ‘bright and ordinary’, one thing was certain: it was located in Albion House at 59 New Oxford Street.3
My first stop, Google Street View, was of little help. At the time the images were taken, Albion House was shrouded in tarpaulins. As for other photographs, it appeared that many people over the years had stood with their backs to it to get a good shot of the ornate shop front of its neighbour, the famous umbrella merchant James Smith & Sons (est. 1865), but no one had ever turned their lens on Albion House itself. So, I headed back to London to have a look.
The building stood on its own miniature block, moated by New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and two minor service roads. To the west was the umbrella shop, which backed on to a slim red-brick building overlooking a small square on Shaftesbury Avenue. To my surprise, I realized this was where Kate Easton had her office; I knew it was good to keep one’s enemies close, but this was literally within shouting distance. To the rear of Albion House was the Neo-Romanesque Bloomsbury Baptist Chapel, built in 1886, and the building to the east, though grubby and unkempt, also retained many of its original nineteenth-century features.
Amidst all this stood Albion House itself, or rather a building that called itself Albion House. It displayed all the post-war charm of a lump of concrete. I had a pretty good idea what had happened, and it didn’t take me long to confirm that, yes, at some point during the Blitz the Luftwaffe had dropped a high explosive bomb right on top of Maud’s office, leaving everything else in the vicinity intact.4
Over the next few weeks, I haunted various London archives and libraries, trying to find information about the original building. But, despite looking at all manner of photographs, books, maps and plans, nothing was forthcoming. In a particularly low moment, I found myself studying drainage blueprints which had been submitted to the local authority following changes in public health legislation in the 1930s. These gave me details of where Maud West went to the loo, including a tiny illustration of one of the very toilets, but little else.
The breakthrough came when I started to look further into the past. Albion House, it turned out, was built on the site of an old Unitarian chapel which had been demolished in 1896. Whilst the new building was being erected in 1899, the Building News had published an architect’s drawing of what it would eventually look like.5 And what a building it was.
The Luftwaffe had robbed New Oxford Street of one of its most impressive landmarks. It was built of red brick and Portland stone; red granite pilasters separated the large shop windows at street level, and the whole thing was topped with domed turrets:
At least one of the windows on the upper floors had been Maud’s office. But what about the others? According to advertisements I found from 1909, the ground floor held the London showroom of the Rover car company, which was offering its latest model, the 15 horsepower ‘Landaulette’, for £485.6 There was also a piano showroom and, as one travelled further up the building, a smattering of electrical and mechanical engineers, architects and surveyors. Being just around the corner from London’s theatreland, Albion House was also home to the Music Hall Ladies Guild, a charity which ministered to female artistes – and their children – who had fallen on hard times through ill health or bad reviews.
But mostly, it seemed, Albion House was crawling with sharks and charlatans. One suite, for example, housed Professor Horspool’s Vocal Academy, which was run by a retired vicar who, despite a noble motto – ‘Magna est veritas et prævalebit’ (great is the truth and it will prevail) – and a reference from the Countess of Cardigan, appeared to spend a great deal of his time defending himself against accusations of being an ‘impudent quack’.7 In another, McKinley Alexander & Sons flogged penny shares in American railroad companies which, the Financial Times reported, offered no better chance of a return than a public lottery.8
The smaller rooms housed the snake-oil salesmen. From one, Harriet Meta hawked her miracle wrinkle cure as endorsed by the non-existent Countess Radsch
of St James’s, whilst in another Don José Acuna promised ‘hair for the hairless’ to those purchasing his secret Spanish remedy. Dr Franckel’s Deafness Cure, which consisted of rubbing a black ointment called Ohrsorb Compound behind the ear, appeared to do nothing but raise eyebrows in the British Medical Journal.9 Also on offer were Gould’s Golden Pills (‘for health and wealth’) and the Isham Water Company’s ‘California Waters of Life.’10 In Room 57, Mr Munyon, ‘the Medical Millionaire’, was making his millions one penny at a time by mailing out homoeopathic cure-alls.11
Maud evidently kept interesting company, but I had a curious sense of déjà vu. Munyon the Medical Millionaire? The Music Hall Ladies Guild? Dr Franckel? I was sure I had come across these people before – and, as it turned out, I had. They had all featured in one of the most fabled episodes of British criminal history.
It all began on 2 February 1910, when the treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies Guild failed to attend their weekly meeting. She was American and, although then retired from the stage, had once enjoyed minor success as a music-hall singer both in New York and London under the name of Belle Elmore. Some might have found her brash, with her bleached hair and almost obsessive love of new frocks and jewellery, but her vivacious personality had won her many friends who, in turn, kept rumours of her various affairs away from her husband.
The husband, whom Belle called ‘Peter’, also worked at Albion House. Short and balding, with a bushy moustache and slightly bulging eyes that peered out from behind wire-rimmed spectacles, he was also well liked, although his mild-mannered demeanour was very different to that of his wife. Until recently, he had been Mr Munyon’s manager, but was now a partner in the Yale Tooth Specialists in Room 58. As a sideline, he also played the role of ‘Dr Franckel’, distributing Ohrsorb Compound to the deaf and gullible at three shillings a pop. He claimed to be a doctor, but the certificate on his wall was from a homoeopathic college in Michigan.