The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  On the day of the meeting, his secretary Ethel delivered a letter to the Guild committee, explaining that Belle had been called away to America following a death in the family. It said she would be away for a few months and, as such, was resigning as treasurer.

  At first, her colleagues thought nothing of it, appointed a new treasurer, and got on with their business. But, as time went by, they became increasingly suspicious of Belle’s uncharacteristic silence – and of her husband’s evasive excuses.

  When, at the end of March, a notice appeared in the stage magazine the Era, announcing Belle’s death from pneumonia, the Music Hall Ladies Guild swept into action. They wrote to Belle’s stepson in California, in whose arms she had supposedly died, and learned that he had not even seen her, let alone been present at her death.12 Meanwhile, their spies reported that Ethel had been spotted wearing items of Belle’s clothing and jewellery.

  The police were initially unwilling to help due to lack of evidence of any crime, but after three months of attention from the ladies of the Guild, Scotland Yard eventually dispatched Chief Inspector Walter Dew to Albion House. There, he interviewed Belle’s husband, before visiting the couple’s home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway, where he found Ethel in residence. The relationship was unorthodox, coming so soon after Belle’s death, but Dew was satisfied that everything was in order. And that would have been that, had the husband not panicked.

  On 9 July, he sent a letter to his dental assistant asking him to wind up his affairs. The same day, he bought a wig, shaved off his moustache and hotfooted it out of the country with Ethel in tow, disguised as his son. The letter was signed ‘H. H. Crippen.’

  Inspector Dew immediately ordered further investigations, which ended with the gory discovery of a headless corpse buried in quicklime under the cellar floor at 39 Hilldrop Crescent.

  What happened next became something of a legend: photographs of the fugitives had been circulated to the press, and the captain of the cargo ship SS Montrose, en route to Canada, recognized Crippen and Ethel as two of his passengers who had boarded at Antwerp. In a first for criminal history, he alerted Scotland Yard by ship-to-shore telegraph, which led to one of the slowest high-speed chases on record: by catching a faster boat, Inspector Dew was able to greet Dr Crippen and Ethel le Neve when the Montrose arrived in Quebec on 31 July.

  The trial took place at the Old Bailey that October. After five days of testimony, the jury found Dr Crippen guilty of the murder of Belle Elmore, aka Cora Crippen, and he was subsequently hanged at Pentonville Prison. In a separate trial, Ethel le Neve was acquitted of being an accessory after the fact. Inspector Dew bathed in the glory of the title ‘The Man Who Caught Crippen’.

  But where was Maud West in all this? One of the most infamous crimes of the twentieth century had unfolded right under her nose and, as far as I could tell, she never mentioned it. Surely the Maud who dressed up as Charlie Chaplin and threatened to shoot ghosts wouldn’t have missed this opportunity for publicity? According to the surviving police notebooks at Kew, she hadn’t been interviewed as a potential witness, but even being a bystander would have been enough. ‘The Cellar Murder’ was plastered all over the papers for months, and the press were desperate for new angles. What was wrong with her? Was she piqued that no one had thought to consult her? Or – and I savoured the thought as it bubbled up – was she silent for another reason?

  It was a long shot, but after hours of scrolling through articles about the case, I stumbled across an almost throwaway comment by Adeline Harrison, one of the members of the Ladies Guild:

  [The Guild] placed the matter in the hands, first, of a private detective, and then of Scotland Yard.13

  As far as I knew, this had never been mentioned before or since. Admittedly, the Guild might have approached one of the more established London agencies, or Pinkerton’s if they were trying to trace their friend in California, or even, heaven forbid, Kate Easton. But Maud was right on their doorstep. She must have known the parties involved, at least by sight, and she wouldn’t have needed much of an excuse to go snooping around the building.

  Had Maud West, ‘the female Sherlock Holmes’, failed to spot one of Britain’s most infamous murder cases evolving right in front of her? In her defence, she was still relatively inexperienced at the time. Even Inspector Dew, with his twenty-eight years as a policeman (and twelve of those at the Yard), had almost let it go due to lack of evidence. It was only when they found the body that the case took off, and I couldn’t imagine that Maud, even in her prime, would have gone on a midnight shovelling expedition in a private cellar on nothing more than a hunch. But, still, if she had been consulted, no wonder she kept quiet. ‘The Woman Who Failed To Catch Crippen’ probably wasn’t the kind of headline she was after.

  Whatever the extent of her involvement in the Crippen affair, Maud did admit to some mistakes during her early years as a detective. One of these occurred after a firm of solicitors asked her to follow a suspected blackmailer and report back on his activities. It would have been a straightforward task, had the man not twigged and, in turn, hired his own detective to tail Maud.

  Late one afternoon, having spent the day trying to shake off her shadow, Maud stopped for a cup of tea, ‘feeling very fatigued, depressed, and irritated.’ Shortly afterwards, the other detective entered the cafe, but, instead of taking a table at a discreet distance, he sat down opposite her:

  At first he did not take the least notice of me, but after a few minutes, looking straight at me, he said: ‘Miss West, I am getting tired of this. If you will come to my flat I will give you all the information you want. Mr A. (that was his client) is a real bad lot, and I don’t mind if I give him away.’

  She knew she ought to decline the invitation, but nonetheless decided to ‘see what this particular move in the game meant.’ It was, of course, a trap:

  We reached the flat in a few minutes … Directly I entered he turned and left the room; I heard the lock go ‘click’ and rushed to the door and rattled and shook the handle; I then turned back into the room and was crossing over to the window to see what my chances of escape that way were, when I saw an envelope directed to myself on the table.

  I opened it and found the following lines scribbled on a half-sheet of notepaper: ‘Very sorry, but I had to get rid of you for a couple of hours; will be back at eight; there is no use in your trying to get away.’

  When the detective returned, Maud knew immediately that something was wrong:

  He looked as white as a sheet and was very agitated. The first thing he did on entering the room was to take a drink of brandy, then he turned to me, and said: ‘You needn’t trouble yourself any more, Miss West, about the case: A. is dead.’14

  What the detective had been up to remained a mystery. Maud said he refused to give any further details, but she did later read in an evening paper that Mr A had shot himself at his hotel. She also discovered that he was wanted in New York for an unspecified crime, and that he was due to be arrested that very afternoon on an extradition warrant.

  Clearly, she should never have gone to the flat. But, I wondered, had she also made a slip – deliberate or otherwise – when recounting these events? Although I had concluded that Maud’s stories couldn’t be word-for-word true due to issues of client confidentiality, I hadn’t completely abandoned the hope that there might be some hidden clue that would enable me to identify some of the participants.

  Maud once said, ‘I have often done things that were most troublesome and sometimes tricky on the slenderest chance of picking up a useful bit of information.’15 The same could be said for my own work, and there was a challenge in this particular tale that I couldn’t resist: she said that news of Mr A’s suicide had appeared in the evening paper. Perhaps this was true. After all, Maud could never have imagined that one day someone might be able to trace Mr A by searching the newspapers at the click of a mouse.

  It soon became apparent, however, that shooting oneself in a hotel of an afte
rnoon was a surprisingly common pursuit in Edwardian London. All manner of people were at it – Hungarian counts, jilted lovers, bankrupt tycoons, provincial tourists – but none matched the man in Maud’s story. The closest I could find was a strange case from March 1909, in which a distinguished-looking man wearing a frock coat, silk hat and lavender gloves took a suite at the Savoy under the alias of ‘Dr George B. Pullman’ of Chicago. He subsequently arranged for a diamond merchant from the Burlington Arcade to bring a large quantity of jewellery to the hotel so that his ‘wife’ could choose a piece. When the jeweller’s assistant caught him trying to make off with the diamonds down the hotel corridor, ‘Dr Pullman’ inexplicably drew a razor from his pocket and cut his own throat. His true identity was never revealed, but a letter from Switzerland, found amongst his belongings, suggested that ‘Dr Pullman’ had been implicating the writer in ‘unpleasant things’.16 Could this be Maud’s blackmailer, trying to raise funds for a last-ditch escape from the New York police? Probably not, but it was tantalizingly close.

  Somewhat heartened, I decided to take a closer look at another of Maud’s stories from her early career, which also happened to involve a mysterious ‘Mr A’. This one was a former curate at a West End church who ‘had left it not in the best odour’ and had recently returned to London after a spell abroad. Maud said she had encountered him after being approached by a wealthy picture dealer whose daughter ‘had become very peculiar in her manner and general behaviour …’ and seemed to be keeping some great secret.

  After establishing that the young woman was a regular visitor to the former curate’s flat near the Edgware Road, Maud started to keep watch. She noticed that, every afternoon, a small stream of well-dressed women would go inside and stay for nearly three hours. So, the next day she put on her best clothes and knocked on the door:

  I sent in an assumed name, and was shown into a small, scantily furnished room. Presently a young gentleman with a marked American accent and wearing a well-cut black suit came to tell me that the Rev. Mr. A. was engaged at the present moment in ‘worship’ but that he would see me in about fifteen minutes if I cared to wait.

  ‘But cannot I join in the worship!’ I exclaimed. ‘That is what I have come here for.’

  The young man glanced at her expensive attire and jewels, popped out of the room, and returned with a request to follow him. Even Maud was unprepared for what happened next:

  I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. At one end of the room was a tall, very handsome man with a long beard, dressed in a scarlet robe and wearing a scarlet cap. He held a flaming torch in one hand. Round about him were about a dozen ladies, each of whom wore a sort of scarlet cape over their shoulders. The walls of the room were, I noticed, papered in blue-black ornamented with different figures in scarlet.

  I was motioned by the young man to join the kneeling group of ladies, and did so. The Rev. Mr. A. took no notice of my entrance, but continued his prayer or address or whatever it was, for he spoke in some language that I did not understand. Suddenly the torch he was holding flamed up and then died down and went out. The Rev. Mr. A. said something, clapped his hands, and everyone got up and sat down on chairs; one of the congregation I saw was my client’s daughter.

  This charade, Maud discovered, was a lucrative one. In just a few weeks, the Rev. Mr A had managed to extract £150 from the young woman. He was subsequently visited by the picture dealer and persuaded ‘to take himself and his orgies elsewhere.’17

  The story had seemed so rich in detail that I’d had high hopes of finding a hidden clue. But, on further inspection, I saw that it was futile. Flaming torches? Scarlet robes? Orgies? Not the Roman kind, but still. There was little I could do with any of that. Furthermore, as the Rev. Mr A had been discreetly and conveniently shooed out of town, there would be nothing about the affair in the papers. I supposed there might be a dressmaker’s diary lying forgotten in an attic somewhere with details of an order for a dozen scarlet capes and a little hat, but, until that turned up, there was no way of tracing him.

  The characters in Maud’s stories may have been stubbornly elusive, but in the process of trawling through the newspapers for matching cases, I had come across one of Maud’s genuine, flesh-and-blood clients. He wasn’t a particularly satisfied one, and she never wrote about him herself, but there was no doubt that he had existed. What’s more, his story opened up another aspect of Maud’s early career that she had omitted to mention.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton O’Dell Braddell was a senior medical officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed in the Punjab. I found the details of his dealings with Maud in various reports about the case of ‘Maud West & Co. v Braddell’, which came before the King’s Bench Division of the High Court in November 1911. The suit concerned a bill of sixty-two pounds, which the colonel had refused to pay.

  Braddell’s first contact with Maud had been sent by cable from Rawalpindi on 21 November 1910. The message read:

  Meet ship Scindia, 25th. Watch Mrs Braddell. Writing.

  As promised, a letter followed, which explained, ‘I am taking proceedings for divorce against her, and pending this I am advised to pay her expenses home and allow her so much. I only want to find out where she goes on landing, and if she goes to London the kind of life she leads.’18

  One of Maud’s staff, William Cheney, who had been working on a case in Lancashire at the time, was sent to Liverpool to meet the SS Scindia. When it docked, he found that Mrs Braddell had disembarked at Marseilles. She had, however, left some luggage on board to be forwarded to her father’s address in Nottingham. Accordingly, another assistant – a Miss Magnen – was dispatched to track her down. The quibble over the bill seemed to arise from a dispute as to whether Miss Magnen had stayed in Nottingham for five days or twenty-two.

  There was nothing surprising about the case, as such. It was a standard divorce investigation, and I already knew from researching Kate Easton that some clients refused to pay. What was odd, however, was that William Cheney was acting as a witness for the defence and siding with the colonel. In his testimony, he confirmed that he had indeed gone to Liverpool but that ‘The alleged reports from him were false. Miss Magnen was not employed four weeks on this work – not [even] a week.’

  Even stranger was the fact that, although Cheney worked for Maud West, he didn’t work for ‘Maud West & Co’. This appeared to be a completely different outfit. ‘Maud West & Co.’ was based in Regent Street and headed by a man called George Stafford Howell.

  What was going on? Even the judge was confused. Stafford Howell, floundering under cross-examination, explained that ‘There had been a dissolution of partnership of the plaintiff firm and a number of books and documents had been taken away, which he could not obtain.’

  So Maud had once had a business partner, and the venture had evidently ended acrimoniously. The documents, I suspected, had not been ‘taken away’ but rather retained at Albion House when Maud booted him out, which must have occurred sometime between 21 November 1910, when Colonel Braddell’s telegram arrived, and the court case exactly one year later.

  As to why he was using the name ‘Maud West & Co.’, Stafford Howell simply said that ‘some people liked to employ a female detective and the name was attractive.’19 The judge was not impressed. He ruled that the account ‘was a lie from beginning to end’ and ordered Colonel Braddell to pay just twelve pounds for the actual work that had been done.

  I couldn’t find any mention of this partnership in any official records, but however it came about – and however it ended – Maud was plainly better off out of it. George Stafford Howell was a chancer. He admitted to the judge that he dropped the ‘Howell’ from his name when it suited him, and his business enterprises all seemed doomed to failure. ‘Maud West & Co.’ soon floundered, and he was forever in court, suing a respected East Riding farmer over a gambling debt, suing his home removals firm over a dented dish and some scratched wallpaper, and also being sued himself when he attem
pted to trade off the name of the famous Monte Carlo restaurant Ciro’s when promoting his new tea shop in Piccadilly (‘Ciro’s now in London’, read his advertisements).20

  William Cheney, on the other hand, was clearly an asset to Maud. He had his weaknesses (in his youth, it appeared he had done time in prison for theft), but he also had a fine pedigree when it came to sleuthing.21 His recently deceased father Thomas Cheney, a former officer in the Metropolitan Police, had been one of the most respected private detectives of his time. Looking through reports of his court appearances, it seemed that Thomas had been very much on the side of the establishment. In 1872, for example, he had helped a former police colleague identify a vicar from Clerkenwell who had been charged with ‘frequenting places of public convenience for an unlawful purpose.’22 Other reports in the press connected him to cases of fraud and jewel thefts, whilst his divorce work included a number of high-profile proceedings, such as that in 1907 between the British-born Baroness von Eckhardstein and her German diplomat husband.23 In a strange coincidence, he had also once appeared as a witness alongside Dr Crippen, after one of Mr Munyon’s employees was charged with theft in 1898.24

  What a small world it was. I was finding links everywhere, which gave me hope that I would be able to find out more about Maud’s own background. Her family was full of solicitors and barristers, she’d said that much, but where exactly had she come from, and how did she fit into this curiously interconnected world?