The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  The most obvious target for these services was the military man abroad. He had served Maud well in the past, and now his numbers were growing by the day. Furthermore, life in the trenches, surrounded by mud and the stench of rotting feet, gave him plenty of time to wonder about the temptations on offer to his wife or girlfriend in the topsy-turvy world back home.

  Kate Easton apparently had the same idea and had taken out adverts in the Army and Navy Gazette.21 Maud, however, adopted a more targeted approach. Her adverts appeared in a more niche publication, the Sportsman’s Gazette. It was a smart place to advertise if one wanted to attract the attention of the nation’s wealthiest soldiers – and it also introduced me to a formidable woman called Emma Cunliffe-Owen, who had wheeled herself into the hearts of thousands of men by taking on the War Office from the comfort of her bath chair.

  In the first eighteen months of the war, before the Military Service Act brought in conscription starting in March 1916, the British Army was heavily reliant on voluntary recruits. After the initial flurry began to dwindle, it was suggested that men might be more willing to join up if they could serve alongside men they knew. The Earl of Derby started things off in Liverpool on 28 August 1914, saying in a stirring speech, ‘This should be a battalion of pals, a battalion in which friends from the same office will fight shoulder to shoulder for the honour of Britain and the credit of Liverpool.’ Within days, he had raised four such ‘pals’ battalions, and soon groups of men were enlisting all over the country. They came not only from local communities, such as the Accrington Pals and Grimsby Chums, but also through shared professions and interests, forming whole battalions of stockbrokers, miners, artists and bankers.

  Watching some of these new recruits drilling in Hyde Park near her home was the fifty-one-year-old Emma Cunliffe-Owen. Although largely confined to a bath chair due to rheumatoid arthritis, she had once been a keen sportswoman and thought the War Office had missed a trick by imposing an upper age limit of thirty-eight: her wide circle of ageing, sporty friends could do just as well on the parade ground.

  She had never been one to be constrained by rules. Even her entry into the world had been unorthodox, occurring as it did in the Kensington Museum where her father was the director. When she was nineteen, she had married her barrister cousin Edward and had four children. By the First World War, however, the pair were amicably separated and Emma was enjoying a relationship with a surgeon nine years her junior.

  In this spirit of living life on her own terms, she wired the War Office to request permission to raise a special battalion of men up to the age of forty-five, signing the telegram with the gender-neutral ‘E. Cunliffe Owen’. With Lord Kitchener’s go-ahead, she called her new endeavour the Sportsman’s Battalion, hired a large room at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand and began recruiting in earnest.

  Her advertisements made clear the type of man she was looking for: ‘Only those used to shooting, hunting, riding and outdoor sport, who are thoroughly sound and physically fit, need apply …’22 Some specifically stated ‘upper and middle class only’.23 As chief recruiting officer, Mrs Cunliffe-Owen personally interviewed each applicant herself. She also ensured her men were well cared for. One recruit noted that ‘the toothbrushes especially were the best in the army.’24

  This approach was enormously successful. Within weeks, she had raised one battalion of 1,300 soldiers and was soon recruiting for another. The Sportsmen were a formidable bunch, standing literally head and shoulders above the average army recruit; even the lowest ranks were filled with well-fed public- and grammar-school boys and varsity men. As well as the general hunting-shooting-fishing brigade, there were explorers, golfers, boxers and cricketers (including Matilda Mitchell’s new husband, the Surrey batsman Tom Hayward), a Wimbledon umpire and an Olympic archery champion.

  As the war went on, the original class and age restrictions were relaxed for those with the right attitude, from the chauffeur who enlisted alongside his aristocratic employer to the sixty-four-year-old big-game hunter and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Selous. Eventually, as one recruit recalled, ‘Practically every grade of life was represented, from the peer to the peasant …’25

  Still, in terms of a concentration of wealthy soldiers, Maud couldn’t have found a better market for her services. The subscribers to the Sportsman’s Gazette included not only current members of the battalions and those who had been transferred elsewhere but their friends and families. In terms of reaching society’s finest, it was arguably more effective than a full-page spread in The Times.

  It was an entertaining read, too. Alongside biographies of famous recruits, sporting banter and spoof letters, there were adverts for Burberry and Aquascutum, luxury hotels and, for those missing the peaks of the Himalayas, mango chutney. From May 1915, taking up a quarter of a page in each issue, was Maud’s contribution:26

  It was a far cry from her usual two-line adverts in regional and national newspapers and was shameless in its emotional manipulation. By its very presence, it planted the suggestion that all might not be well at home, whilst the text promised a soothing maternal touch, so absent in the trenches, and a deft and discreet service to put things right. It may as well have read, There, there. Let Nanny sort it out.

  When the copy of Harry Elliot’s war record arrived from the National Archives, I discovered that Maud had a fair amount of coddling to do at home, too. The document outlined how Harry had been called up in June 1918, just days after his thirty-ninth birthday.27 In his initial medical examination, he was classed as A2, or fit for service with further training. Had he left it there, his secret would have been safe. But he decided to appeal and, in doing so, managed to leave behind a historical record of his most intimate problems. This was not his intention. He only wanted the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal to understand how very unsuitable he was for military service:

  I have pain under my heart, & have suffered from neuritos [sic] so badly that I have been unable to sleep. The impediment in my speech is sometimes so bad that I am unable to speak.

  Nor did he have high hopes for the future, adding forlornly, ‘The Pearl Assurance Co. will not grant me a full insurance on my life.’

  In a supporting (if not very supportive) letter, his local doctor suggested that there was little wrong with Harry’s heart and pointed out that his patient was ‘highly neurotic as seen in the stammering, blushing, etc.’ Dr Moran did, however, list everything physically amiss, namely:

  (1) Varicocele of left testicle

  (2) Hernia (inguinal) left side

  (3) Hypermetropic Astigmatism

  (4) Stricture of Urethra

  Translation: Harry Elliott was a hypochondriac bundle of nerves with a dodgy testicle, a hernia in his groin, psychosomatic aches and pains, poor eyesight and had difficulty peeing. The latter, the doctor helpfully explained, was ‘a complication after gonorrhoea 21 years ago.’

  I grabbed my calculator. That would have been in 1897, when Harry was about eighteen. If he was indeed Edith’s only husband, the one she had secretly wed when she was nineteen, they would have run away to get married not long afterwards. So when she wrote that her new husband ‘was not at all strong’, that was no lie. No wonder she didn’t elucidate. Furthermore, the trouble had apparently continued: Dr Moran mentioned that he had treated Harry during a relapse in 1917 that had caused a severe haemorrhage and had got his patient ‘greatly down’.

  The British Army, however, was unmoved. They had become adept at sniffing out malingerers, and they counted the stammering and blushing Harry Elliott amongst that number. After granting him a second medical examination in August, the appeals board upgraded his fitness ranking from A2 to A1 and packed him off for basic training. By that time, however, the war was all but over and, with no army service or pension records to suggest otherwise, it seemed that he returned home to Edith after the Armistice was declared in November in more or less the same pitiful condition as when he left.

  The partnership intr
igued me. How did they meet? Given the evidence so far, Harry Elliott was hardly a prime catch, so how did he end up with a go-getting lawyer’s daughter like Edith? When I started digging into his background, it only added to the mystery.

  According to census reports, Harry and his eight siblings grew up in Hoxton in the East End. Their father was a carpenter. When the social reformer Charles Booth drew up his meticulous, colour-coded Descriptive Map of London Poverty in 1889, the colour he chose for Harry’s street was light blue. This wasn’t the worst of Booth’s categories – there was also dark blue before one descended into the living hell of black – but it still wasn’t somewhere to hang about. ‘Rough’, ‘criminal’ and ‘vicious’ were just some of the words Booth and his team of researchers used to describe the area.28

  Even Harry himself had brief experience of life behind bars. In the summer of 1893, when he was fourteen and working as an errand boy for a chemist in the City, he was caught filching coins to fund a trip to the seaside along with his eleven-year-old brother Alfred and a fourteen-year-old friend. It was Alfred who got caught with his hand in the till, and it didn’t take him long to confess to the whole scheme. All three boys were subsequently arrested, hauled into court and sentenced to a week in prison. They only escaped the ‘good whipping’ the judge said they deserved because ‘unfortunately two of them were over age.’29

  All in all, Harry’s historical record was a sparse but sorry catalogue of indignity and embarrassment. Still, the juvenile crime, the venereal disease, the nervous tics, the class difference – apparently none of this mattered to Edith. As far as I could tell, she loved Harry Elliott and that was that.

  A Lady’s Folly

  BY MAUD WEST

  A well-known lady in society, whom I shall call Lady Alice – she was the daughter of a Peer – during the war, took up work as a V.A.D. nurse in a hospital. One of her patients was a corporal in an infantry regiment; the two fell deeply in love with one another.

  The corporal, before the war, had been a clerk in a city office, and the difference between himself and his nurse as regards rank and wealth would have made it difficult if not impossible for the lady to have obtained her family’s consent to a marriage between them. They decided to get married secretly; as soon as the corporal was able to leave hospital he married his titled nurse at a registry office; there was no honeymoon; the evening of the day of the marriage the corporal returned to France, and a few weeks later he was killed in action. Nobody knew or even suspected that the titled lady who had been the corporal’s nurse was his widow; everybody thought her to be a single girl.

  Shortly after the Armistice she became engaged to a gentleman in the Diplomatic Service. After the announcement of the engagement had appeared in the papers the blackmailer got to work immediately. A notice appeared in several of the London papers to the effect that if ‘Alice—’ would come to the Charing Cross Post-office at noon any day during the week she would hear something about her husband; the initial letters of the husband’s Christian and surname were given.

  Lady Alice saw the notice and she at once came to the conclusion that it was intended for her. She went to the Charing Cross Post-office, where she met one of the men in the blackmailing gang who were working this particular business. I must explain that Lady Alice had not divulged even to the man to whom she was engaged the fact that she was a widow. She was terribly and most foolishly afraid of this fact becoming known, and she was precisely the type of person who falls very readily a victim to the professional blackmailer. She paid five thousand pounds in blackmail; if the blackmailing gang had not been too greedy they might have got off safely with their money; but they tried to get another five thousand pounds out of their victim, and this made her desperate, for she could not have found the money except with very great difficulty.

  Then she came to me; there was only one thing to be done. Lady Alice had an appointment the following day to meet one of the blackmailers at Charing Cross. I went in her place. From the description Lady Alice had given me of the blackmailer I was sure I would recognise him; in any case I had an idea that I had come across this gentleman before in the course of my work on the continent. He was a short, thick-set individual, with a dark moustache and a fat, pale face. We arrived at the meeting place almost simultaneously, and I recognised the man at once.

  I went up to him immediately and told him that Lady Alice was unable to come, and that I had come in her place. He looked extremely nervous and very suspicious.

  ‘Well,’ he inquired, ‘what have you to say?’

  I did not waste time. ‘Not very much,’ I replied. ‘I am a detective and I want back that five thousand pounds that you got from Lady Alice; no, don’t go away. If you stir I shall have you given into charge of the police at once.’

  We were standing by the kerb at a crossing. He looked very wicked and rather frightened; to tell the truth, I thought he would be sure to make a bolt from me, and if he had I might have been placed in a difficulty, for as a matter of fact I was to a great extent bluffing when I threatened that I would give him in charge of the police. My plan was what we call a ‘try-on,’ but it succeeded. The man didn’t stir.

  ‘Lady Alice,’ I went on, ‘behaved like a fool. You see she has told the man she is going to marry about her former marriage, so there is no use in her paying you thousands of pounds to keep the matter dark, is there?’

  I proved to him who I was and convinced him that he was as near to prison as perhaps he’d ever been. Then the man offered to give me back two thousand pounds.

  ‘No use,’ I said.

  Finally he offered to give me back four thousand pounds. If I didn’t take that I might do as I liked. I believe it was all the money he could give back; most probably his confederates had taken the other thousand pounds. Anyway I thought it better to take the money. We went into a teashop and he paid me the money then and there in notes whilst we were sitting at the table. It is nearly always the case that a person blackmailed for the first time gets frightened and usually pays.30

  Chapter Eight

  The Secret Adversary

  The ways of the blackmailer are manifold. Like the tentacles of an octopus his fingers stretch out in all directions seeking fresh victims.

  Maud West, 19291

  In 1918, Maud’s list of services – divorce shadowings, secret inquiries, etc. – began to include an extra word: blackmail. As a crime, it was nothing new. Blackmail had emerged in its modern form in England during the late eighteenth century, when criminals first sensed the opportunities that lay in the disconnect between private sexual behaviour and what society and the law deemed acceptable. Initially, they targeted gay men, sodomy at the time being punishable by death, but expanded their operations in the hyper-moral Victorian age to include adulterers. By the time Maud was in business, anyone with a secret, sexual or otherwise, was fair game.

  Private detectives had been dealing with blackmailers for years, as had Maud, although they only made an entrance in her pre-war stories after she had defeated their schemes, by which time they were boiling with anger and bent on revenge. Their primary purpose seemed to be to give her the opportunity to deliver some of her best lines:

  ‘I am fortunate in finding you alone, Miss West …’

  I picked up a loaded revolver from my writing table. ‘Oh, not quite alone,’ I answered, with a laugh.2

  But now she was on a crusade. After the social and sexual upheavals of the First World War, blackmail was entering its heyday, and she started to write articles in which the crimes and methods of these ‘parasites’ were at the fore.3 The majority of blackmailers operating in post-war Britain, she said, were members of foreign gangs who, acting on information gathered by local agents, would swoop in and out of the country to torment their victims.4 In 1919, she had one particular gang in her sights:

  Since the signing of the Armistice the elite of the Continental blackmailers, known as the Black Hundred, have been extremely active. During the four years
of war there were few cases of blackmail in this country of any importance or even on the Continent. But the cessation of hostilities opened up new fields of enterprise which the professional blackmailers have been quick to exploit.5

  She claimed that members of the Black Hundred had been gathering details of court martials held during the war and using them to blackmail the soldiers concerned, once they had returned to civvy street.

  One example she gave involved a young engineer who had enlisted in the early days of the war and served through to the end, being wounded three times in the process. ‘His army record was of the highest kind,’ Maud wrote. But on one occasion at the Somme, he was court-martialled for leaving a front-line trench without permission: ‘It was a terribly hot day, and he went out of the trench to fetch some water for a comrade who was suffering from heat stroke and badly in want of a drink.’ He had been sentenced to ten years penal servitude, although this was later remitted.

  Shortly after the Armistice, the engineer returned to his home town to rebuild his life. He was walking home one evening when, according to Maud, ‘he was roughly hustled by a man of the working class; the man seemed to be the worse for drink. He began abusing the engineer, and then to threaten him …’ Exasperated, the engineer eventually marched him to the police station. As he was leaving, a well-dressed man approached and asked to speak to him for a few minutes. The conversation quickly took a menacing turn:

  ‘You have just given a man in charge of the police for being drunk and molesting you,’ said the man.

  ‘I have,’ replied the engineer.

  ‘Well,’ replied the other, ‘when that man is charged at the police court tomorrow he will tell the story of how you were court-martialled in France for cowardice, and how you narrowly escaped being shot for the offence; the story will get into the papers unless—’