The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  One outfit guilty of direct and personal attacks on members of the Efficiency Club was the League of Womanhood, which believed motherhood was the ‘best and highest walk of life’.17 As the Leeds Mercury commented, however, ‘like all leagues to put women in the place which according to man they should occupy, the League of Womanhood has a man for its organiser.’18 In this case, it was Captain Alfred Henderson-Livesey, a former officer in the Household Cavalry, who had devoted himself to reclaiming public life as an exclusively male sphere.

  He’d even written a book on the subject. Sex and Public Life was, naturally, dedicated to his mother, and had a bright yellow binding to match the bile within. The main thrust of his argument was that professional women were not real women but genetically abnormal ‘sexual intermediates’ whose second-rate achievements were of interest purely because of their sex. As such, they must be stopped from corrupting the nation’s true womenfolk before the whole ‘virile race’ descended into debauched halfwittery. His views were extreme, with clear fascist undertones, but they gave some idea of the atmosphere in which Maud and her fellow businesswomen sometimes had to operate.

  Fortunately, the business world itself was, for the most part, supportive of their achievements. The Publicity Club of London, for example, had been set up in 1913 for men in the advertising industry but had welcomed female members since 1919. In 1921, it also started holding ladies’ nights with guest speakers chosen from the growing number of professional women who excelled in their fields.19 This departure was, in the words of the Vote, the paper of the Women’s Freedom League, ‘probably the most novel ever made in business circles.’20

  The first of these evenings took place at the Hotel Cecil in May 1921. The audience almost filled the hotel’s Victoria Hall, which seated 350 diners, to hear the ‘concourse of women experts’ the club had gathered. This panel included Leila Lewis, press agent to various Hollywood stars including Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, the barrister Helena Normanton, the illustrator Gladys Peto, a fashion editor, a prima donna, a socialite, two journalists, the wife of ‘the Navvy Poet’ Patrick MacGill – and Maud.21

  This odd mix of women was invited to convey a female view of advertising practices, which they did with candour, making comments that wouldn’t have been out of place in the twenty-first century. Helena Normanton, for example, read out a blacklist of products whose adverts were ‘of the kind which disfigure beautiful landscapes and irritate railway travellers.’ Another panellist complained that dress advertisements focused almost entirely on lithe models at the expense of women with ‘gentle undulations in their figures.’22

  Curiously, although Maud received a mention in practically all the newspaper reports about the event, not one recorded what she said. Eventually, in the Publicity Club archives, buried amongst detailed notes on the other speakers’ opinions, I found one small, damning sentence:

  There was also a short speech by Miss Maud West, the lady detective, who had not been advertised to speak.23

  Oh, dear. Had she clambered on to the podium, determined to have her say? Or was she a last-minute addition to the panel but proved to be a regrettable choice? Either way, it was a shame that there was no record of her speech, considering her own bold and somewhat cavalier approach to publicity.

  I had found a record of one of her public speaking engagements, however. It occurred later in her career when she travelled to Birmingham to address a joint meeting of the city’s Rotary Club and Soroptimists in 1937. By that point, she had been a member of the Soroptimists for some years.

  The organization had originated in California in 1921 and was the female equivalent of the international Rotary movement. Its name came from the Latin soror (sister) and optima (best). The central London branch, to which Maud belonged, had formed three years later, merging with another club set up by Lady Rhondda and Lady Astor after their official request to join the Rotary movement was rejected.24

  A list of the branch’s early members gave more insight into the kind of people within Maud’s network: it included the actresses Gwen Berryman and Sybil Thorndike, George Bernard Shaw’s secretary and confidante Blanche Patch, the former suffragette ‘General’ Flora Drummond and Mary Allen of the Women’s Police Service.25 I’d also discovered that she must have known Lilian Wyles, a key figure in police history who had been one of Scotland Yard’s first female recruits and progressed to the rank of chief inspector, as they both lived in Great Russell Mansions.

  The Soroptimist meetings took place over lunch or dinner once a fortnight and included a guest speaker, who was often a member from another branch.26 It was in this role that Maud found herself addressing the meeting in Birmingham whilst a reporter from the Birmingham Gazette jotted down a précis of her talk.

  There was little in the report that I hadn’t come across before. This in itself was surprising. The occasion wasn’t – or shouldn’t have been – an opportunity for a comic turn. Yet, after emphasizing that the job was very often ‘just hard work, with long hours of waiting and watching’, she proceeded to tell versions of some of the more colourful adventures she’d written about over the years: her visit to the cocaine factory; her youthful sprint for the tram whilst disguised as an old lady in Paris; how she’d hired an actress to cause a scene in a restaurant to drive a wedge between a gigolo and his young prey.27

  Had I got her wrong? She knew the limits of people’s credulity – her everyday work demanded it – so why tell these tales in person, in public? Could they be based in truth, after all? Or was she so wedded to her public persona that she couldn’t let the mask drop, even in front of a serious audience?

  As I thought about it, I realized there was another possibility. In light of her involvement in women’s networks, did she present these tales as encouragement to other women to be bold and unafraid of adventure? Was it not so much ‘Look at me!’ as ‘Look at you! Look what you could do!’? The truth, as ever, was probably somewhere in the middle, but she was certainly beginning to redeem herself.

  Something Brian had said came back to me: he thought his grandmother had been the first female mayor of Holborn. It had taken ten seconds on the internet to establish that she hadn’t. That distinction went to another Edith – Edith Pooley – in 1955, so I’d dismissed it as another of Maud’s inventions. But now, as I began to appreciate Maud as a businesswoman, I wondered if Brian been almost right.

  I phoned Tudor Allen, the stalwart at the Camden archives centre where the civic records for Holborn were kept. Was an Edith Elliott ever associated with Holborn Borough Council in any way? Not as mayor, but in another capacity? A few days later, he got back to me. Yes, there had been a councillor by that name in the 1930s, but all he could find was that she was a married woman and lived at 8, Great Russell Mansions. That was enough for me. A few days later, I was back on the train to London.

  I hadn’t pegged Maud as a committee type – just reading the council minutes required a great deal of caffeine and willpower – but there she was between 1934 and 1937, sitting through endless reports, motions and divisions. She had stood in the local elections of November 1934 in the Central St Giles ward. There were only two types of candidate in Holborn that year: Labour and Municipal Reform, or, as the official council return put it, ‘Socialist’ and ‘Anti-Socialist’. Maud was one of the latter.

  The Municipal Reform Party, established in 1906, was essentially the Conservative Party in disguise, renamed and repackaged to appeal to a broader section of the electorate. A poster held at the Museum of London summed up its purpose:

  The 35,000 residents of Holborn, it seemed, were especially protective of their hard-earned cash. Elsewhere in London that year, Labour and other progressive candidates sailed to victory and beat down the long reign of the right, but Holborn saw all but one of its forty-two seats go to Municipal Reformers. Maud wasn’t there on sufferance, though. She’d had plenty of competition in her ward from other Municipal Reformers and had stormed to the top of the polls, a clear winner.
28

  The full council met twice a week in the domed chamber of the Town Hall on High Holborn, just five minutes’ walk from both Albion House and Maud’s flat opposite the British Museum. She threw herself into council business, sitting on six additional committees dealing with everything from public toilets and street musicians to tuberculosis care and strategic planning. She was also co-opted onto the committee of the Holborn Housing Trust, helping to oversee the development of social housing for the poorest residents of the borough.29 When the nation celebrated King George V’s silver jubilee in May 1935, she worked behind the scenes to ensure that Holborn could hold its head high when it came to flags, bunting and children’s tea parties. That summer, she also attended the annual conference of the National Association for the Prevention of Infant Mortality along with one of the borough’s health visitors.30

  How did she fit it all in? After the first year, it seemed she didn’t. Her attendance at full council meetings dropped off in 1936 – she’d be absent for weeks at a time – and she resigned from all council committees apart from two. The first, Maternity and Child Welfare, assessed applications for the subsidized home help, convalescent homes and dentures that new mothers could access in the days before the National Health Service, and oversaw the provision of minor-ailment clinics and other services for children.

  The Public Health Committee offered slightly more excitement. Yes, there were the drainage works, rat infestations, vaccinations and public mortuary expenses to supervise, but these were interspersed with small flurries of intrigue: killer cans of tomato purée stalking the shelves of local grocery shops; a poisoning case in a laundry caused by the ink used for marking blankets.31

  But Maud wasn’t there for the drama. Her motives, I suspected, ran much deeper. It wasn’t hard to see a correlation between the issues she prioritized – child welfare, public health, social housing – and the comforts lacking in her own childhood.

  Maud’s early years were still frustratingly elusive. I’d located her sister Nellie’s birth certificate, which showed that she, too, was illegitimate, arriving in February 1898 when Mary Ann was thirty-nine and ostensibly working as a mangle-woman. But, beyond that, I’d drawn a complete blank.32

  The most curious thing was that there was no sign of any of the girls in any census taken during their childhoods. Their mother was a constant presence in Staunton Street, along with her parents. Edith had been born there in September 1880, but she had vanished by the time of the 1881 census the following April. She was still missing in 1891, as was four-year-old Alice. Both girls were back in Deptford in 1901 when they were twenty and fourteen respectively, but by that time three-year-old Nellie had disappeared.

  There were many places they could have been – with relatives or neighbours, in a workhouse or children’s home – but they weren’t. A search for the older girls, for two siblings of the right age called Edith and Alice with any nickname, any surname – even just initials – in any institution, school or private home anywhere in the United Kingdom in the 1880s or 1890s yielded no results. Had they been adopted and lived out their childhoods under other identities? But, if so, why return to Deptford and revert to their birth names later?

  Perhaps they were abroad? Sending illegitimate offspring overseas would be an unusual move for a working-class family from Deptford, but it was something that the wealthier classes – the aristocracy, along with lesser beings such as, say, barristers and solicitors – had been doing for some time. To them, the Continent was a great carpet under which all manner of indiscretions could be swept. There were ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ expat communities dotted all over Europe, with France in particular being full of black sheep, indiscreet mistresses and misbegotten children. Adverts for ‘A Continental Education’ could be found in all the main papers, alongside those offering homes (for a fee) for unwanted wards and other inconvenient progeny.

  Had Edith’s father been a lawyer, after all? I played with the possibility, checking out all the lawyers with whom I knew she had connections, whether through her work or personal affairs. Where had they been around the time Edith was conceived? But they were all too old, too young or too elsewhere. Besides, if the girls had been spirited away one by one as they popped out of the womb, why leave Mary Ann behind with her parents, working a series of drudge jobs?

  No, the most likely explanation was that Edith, Alice and Nellie had been in Deptford all along and, on the night of the various censuses, Mary Ann or her parents had hidden them away when the enumerator came to call to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.

  If, by this, they were hoping to give the girls a better start in life, it worked. According to her marriage certificate, Edith had landed a job as a sales assistant in a drapery store. It was a competitive field, requiring poise and good arithmetic skills, as well as the self-discipline to avoid any infractions of the rules and regulations employers imposed on women in shop work. Although preferable to many of the alternatives, it was by no means an easy job. Each slip could mean a fine docked from her meagre wages, and the hours could stretch from seven in the morning to eleven at night, six days a week.

  But before that, when Edith first left school? Presumably this would have been at some point between the ages of ten (the minimum leaving age) and twelve (if she hadn’t attained the government-prescribed educational standard earlier). She would have been too young for shop work, but she could have gone into domestic service, worked in a laundry or joined her schoolmates as a ‘gut girl’ – a Deptford speciality – slaughtering imported livestock at the Foreign Cattle Market. Or, I wondered, had she left a clue in something she told the Sunday Post in 1927?

  The paper had asked a variety of celebrities about their thwarted ambitions and childhood dreams. The matinee idol Carl Brisson explained that he’d wanted to be a polar explorer; the batsman Jack Hobbs that he’d only ever wanted to play county cricket; and the novelist Winifred Graham that she had dreams of being a trapeze artist. Maud replied:

  When I was a girl my ambition in life was to be a milliner. At the age of twelve I started making hats, and used to think how grand it would be to sell them to other people from a business address. But my ambition in this way was never realised.33

  She’d gone on to trot out her usual story about her relatives pushing her towards a career as a detective, but maybe the rest was true. She’d made it sound like a hobby, but hat factories and sweatshops used child labour, and all that experience with ribbons and trims could have helped her to secure the more refined job as a drapery assistant.

  All of this was only speculation, of course. Between what seemed like a concerted effort to keep the Barber girls away from officialdom and a lack of surviving evidence, the finer details of Maud’s biggest secret were safe.

  The events after 1901 were easier to establish. Newly married and with her first child on the way, Edith was trying to make a new life for herself away from Deptford. But, as I discovered, an ongoing crisis at Staunton Street constantly called her back. The sickness that had caused Mary Ann to take to her bed on the night of the census hadn’t been a passing ailment. When the diagnosis came in early 1902, it was a devastating blow: carcinoma mammae. Breast cancer.34 Alice, at fifteen, was old enough to work and to help out at home, but four-year-old Nellie needed supervision and their grandparents were getting frail.

  In the summer of 1903, Mary Ann took a turn for the worse. A secondary tumour at the base of her skull put pressure on her brain and the cancer spread to her liver. She died on 27 October 1903 at home in Staunton Street, with Edith, then four months pregnant with Vera, by her side.

  What Edith did next showed that she had ambitions even then and, perhaps, had already gained some experience of how private detectives could dig up dirt from public records. When she went to register her mother’s death, she repeated the lie she had told the vicar at her wedding and said Mary Ann was the widow of Robert Barber, a merchant seaman.35

  Edith was left in charge of her sisters. Alice soon
got married and started her own family with Geoffrey Palmer in Ilford,36 but young Nellie joined Harry and Edith as they bounced around London, trying to keep a roof over the heads of their growing brood.37

  Seven children.

  A few short weeks ago, I had found Maud selfish and intolerable. Now, I decided, she was bloody amazing.

  Such a Dull Job!

  Or, Fifteen Minutes with a London Woman Detective

  INTERVIEW WITH MAUD WEST,

  DAILY MAIL ATLANTIC EDITION, 17 JUNE 1931

  When I called upon her at her New Oxford Street offices, Miss Maud West was not clad in a dressing-gown, sitting in a deep armchair and playing with a violin, with a hypodermic syringe of cocaine at her elbow. Nothing of the sort.

  ‘Come along in,’ she said briskly, from the other side of a frosted-glass panelled door. ‘Sit down and tell me what you want, and excuse my looking for a number in the telephone directory.’

  The office I entered was bright and ordinary. I sat and watched her forefinger sleuthing down the fugitive number.

  ‘What do you deduce about me at first glance?’ I asked.

  ‘Smith, W., Smith, W., Smith, W.,’ she muttered. ‘I’m looking for someone called Smith, who has a Fulham number,’ she explained distractedly, ‘and I don’t know his initials.’ Then she looked up. ‘Deduce? Oh, that’s not the sort of thing I do. My job’s very dull, you know, just inquiries and so on. Very dull indeed, though I couldn’t live without it now, after 25 years of it.’

  ‘Have you never had any excitement?’ I asked.

  ‘Smith, William, Smith, William,’ said Miss West. ‘No, I don’t think so – or only once when two men who were drinking in a public house saw through the disguise one of the men on my staff was wearing. I was outside in a taxi, getting some information from a woman who was mixed up in the case – a criminal one – when out ran my man. He had a tumbler of whisky thrown in his face, and the suspects were after him. When they saw me with the woman, one of them pulled out an automatic pistol and levelled it at me. Luckily the taxi-driver grabbed his wrist and hung on to him, while my man wrestled with the second suspect. A policeman soon arrived, and I gave the criminals in charge. But that might have been a difficult situation.’