Paddington' Pollaky, Private Detective

by Bryan Kesselman

  This letter to Palmerston is held together with another (PP/GC/SM/47). The second letter is from Robert Vernon Smith, Liberal Member of Parliament. He gives further details of Mangles’ dealings with this mysterious anonymous person. Mangles had written (says Vernon Smith) to all the Governors of the East India Company about ‘our “Secret” friend’, and they had given him £70. They had the ‘impression that the man did not know all the languages which he professed to know’. He had told them that while at Jassy he had tried to open all the drawers in the room of his contact there, while that person was out of the room, ‘but found unfortunately that none of his keys would fit them!’

  While the individual concerned is not mentioned by name, it seems not inconceivable that it was Pollaky himself who was ‘Our Friend’. It places him in Romania, if not Bucharest, and the reference to his claim that he spoke a number of languages certainly sounds like Pollaky. Furthermore, the reference to the Berbers sounds like the Egyptian connection as mentioned by Pollaky. The year 1857 was a troubled one for the East India Company, perhaps marking the beginning of the end of colonialism. It was the year that saw the beginning of the Indian Mutiny, and the year that Palmerston proposed placing the government of India under the British Crown, thus removing rule from the East India Company.

  Brief Biographies of those Involved in these Affairs

  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), first became Prime Minister at the age of 71. He served two terms, 1855–58, and 1859–65. In October 1857 he announced that the East India Company’s government of India would be ended, and introduced a bill transferring administration of India to the Crown the following year. Letters to his wife often began, ‘My dearest Emily’, but were signed more formally, ‘Palmerston’. He died at the age of 81 while he was still Prime Minister.

  Ross Donnelly Mangles (1801–77) was Member of Parliament for Guildford from 1841 to 1857. In that year he became Chairman of the East India Company, a position whose incumbent changed annually. He seems though to have been connected with the company before that, having written an article as early as 1830 entitled A brief vindication of the Honourable East India Company’s government of Bengal, from the attacks of Messrs. Rickards & Crawfurd.

  The East India Company (founded in 1600 to trade with India and other parts of Asia and originally called the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies’) to all intents and purposes ruled India from 1757 using its own private armies to exercise control. The company had managed the mail route from Suez, Egypt to Bombay, however, in 1852 one of its ships had got into difficulties and the mail it was carrying was lost. In 1854, they discontinued that service. The company continued its activities for another fifteen years after Palmerston’s Government of India Act of 1858 and was finally wound up in 1873.

  Adolphus Frederick Williamson (1831–89), nicknamed ‘Dolly’, was, by the time he was 19, a police constable in the Metropolitan Police. At 29, he was a police sergeant, and by 1862, the year of his marriage, he was Inspector of Detective Police. He was promoted to Superintendent in 1869 and made Head of the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. By 1881 he was Chief Superintendent, and eventually became Chief Constable of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), reporting directly to the Chief Commissioner of Police. He was in office during the period of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888.

  Williamson died in 1889, aged 57. Arthur Griffiths, writing of him in 1901 (in Mysteries of Police and Crime), gave the following description: ‘Few but the initiated recognised the redoubtable detective in this quiet, unpretending, middle-aged man, who walked leisurely along Whitehall, balancing a hat that was a little large for him loosely on his head, and often with a sprig of a leaf or flower between his lips.’ An enthusiastic gardener, he was well known for growing flowers.

  Williamson’s name reappears a few times in these pages. His obituary in the Standard of 12 December 1889, ended by regretting the low pay of the police, and implied that it was more profitable for a detective officer to become a private investigator.

  Horatio Waddington (1799–1867) became Permanent Under-Secretary to the Home Office in 1840 and resigned his post shortly before his death owing to ill health. In 1815 aged 16, he published a poem called Wallace, and in 1819 translated a scene from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus into Latin. In 1860, after the murder at Road had been discovered, it was Waddington who, by the direction of the Home Secretary Sir G.C. Lewis, wrote to Sir Richard Mayne requesting that ‘an intelligent officer of the Metropolitan Police’ should be sent to investigate, resulting in Whicher being sent to Road.

  Waddington gave evidence to the Select Committee on Transportation to Australia in 1856, saying that transportation was, ‘a bad punishment in itself, failing to deter criminals at home, or reform them abroad’. He sat on the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1864–66, which produced its conclusions in a report of over 700 pages. He contributed much to the discussion, including the following remarks: ‘There is another argument against Capital Punishment which has great weight with many people, namely, the possibility of executing an innocent man. Have you ever considered whether the possibility of that is of such weight as to have any effect upon your opinion? – I cannot say that it is impossible.’

  It may seem that Waddington was against capital punishment, however, he then went on to say, ‘It is commonly said that it is better that nine guilty persons should get off, than that one innocent person should suffer. That is true perhaps, but it is not true to say that it is better that 999 guilty persons should get off, than that one innocent person should suffer.’ Many would now disagree with this last statement. Waddington too makes further appearances later in this book.

  The conclusion of the Commission was that capital punishment should be retained for cases of murder and used at the discretion of the judge.

  Private investigators were considered to be conducting a very shady sort of business. It is hardly surprising that most people were suspicious of anyone asking for personal information about themselves or their neighbours. Furthermore, the official police resented both interference in their work and the implication that by the very existence of private investigators, the police’s own competence was called into question. On 3 March 1864, Hansard, the official report of proceedings of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, included a report on a debate which took place in the House of Commons in which concern was expressed about the activities of private investigators. John Roebuck MP had received a letter from Captain Bicknell, the Chief Constable of Lincolnshire, complaining of the number of letters the Lincolnshire police were receiving from private inquiry offices regarding the character, respectability and wealth of a number of people. Bicknell’s letter went on to point out that these inquiries, of which most people were completely unaware could injure the prospects of the subjects, and that their names might be listed by the inquiring companies in their ‘register of persons deemed unworthy of credit’.

  4

  Marriage One

  On 20 May 1856 Ignatius Paul Pollaky married Julia Susanne Devonald at St James Church, Paddington and rented furnished rooms at 20 Devonshire Place, a street which contained a number of lodging houses. Julia was the daughter of Erasmus Lloyd Devonald, a surgeon of 71 Great Titchfield Street and 6 Howley Place, London, and Anne Devonald née Nicholas. Anne Devonald was 55 when her daughter married, but Julia’s father had died in 1852 aged 58. The houses were only two miles apart. The residence at 6 Howley Place was a large one, in a smart road.

  Erasmus Devonald and Anne Nicholas were married in 1817. He was from Moylgrove, 5 miles west of Cardigan, Wales. They had ten children, six of whom survived infancy. Julia, the youngest, was born in 1831. Devonald, whose practice was based at the Titchfield Road address, had been described in the Medical Directory as ‘in practice prior to 1815’. As he was born in 1794, that would mean he began practice aged 20. He contributed articles to medical journals and books including The Physical an
d Moral Condition of the Children and Young Persons Employed in Mines and Manufactories published in 1843.

  His views on conditions of employment and the health of the young extended to girls involved in millinery and dress-making:

  Mr Devonald, surgeon, Great Titchfield Street, states that he has known several who have married, and whom he has attended for years: ‘Their health and strength are gone; they are completely disorganised; has known numbers of young healthy women who in this way have been reduced to a permanent state of debility. Many of them die, especially from consumption. Many of them, after their health has been ruined, are compelled to give up the business.’

  Devonald also contibuted to The London Medical and Surgical Journal of 1833, in which he wrote a long article entitled ‘Observations on the Pathology and Treatment of Cholera’. Headed ‘Mr Devonald’s Successful Treatment of Cholera’, he recommends his own method in glowing terms, writing that he has had several cases under his care, and that he has developed a treatment, ‘the result of which has been so successful that I feel myself duty bound to publish it’. After mentioning, ‘the fatal effect of stimulating medicines’, and the symptoms of the disease, he continues describing his cure. The system, he writes, ‘cannot be relieved in the first instance by the mouth, owing to the irritation of the stomach’.

  He continues with an alternative:

  Let us try further to assist nature, by replacing if possible, part of the lost nourishment; to effect this, inject about half a pint of beef tea, made with all spices, up the rectum, as often as the bowels are open; you will not only find part of the beef tea absorbed, but the evacuations will gradually decrease, and after several repetitions entirely stopped; the pulse you will find also gradually rise; after this desirable object is effected, I usually have recourse to calomel to restore the secretions, followed by castor oil.

  He goes on to describe some particular cases where he has used this treatment, the patients being, ‘restored to [...] former health’.

  This was not the first time this treatment had been suggested. On 13 October 1832, F. Kelly, a surgeon of Liverpool had a letter published in The Lancet detailing his own use of this method.

  As late as 8 October 1853 The Lancet had an article recommending this method of treatment. Indeed this seems on the whole to have been recommended in medical journals throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. In 1880, John Harvey Kellogg, inventor (with his brother Will Keith Kellogg) of Corn Flakes, advocated the use of this method in his book The Home Hand-Book of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine (Vol. 2), not for cholera specifically, but for gastritis.

  Julia Devonald was 25 when she married Pollaky. He was 28 and is described on their marriage certificate, most unhelpfully, as a ‘Gentleman’. By the time of their marriage, the Devonald family seem to have given up the Great Titchfield address, and were all living at 6 Howley Place, Paddington. She, though pale, weak, and the baby of the family, was at 25 independent-minded, and may have resisted any attempts by her family to give up thoughts of marriage with a foreigner who had no prospects. They may have found him odd. She probably found him fascinating.

  Not being one to idle about, Pollaky was soon busy and may even have briefly visited America later that year.

  The Pollaky’s were not to be married for long, as on 3 October 1859, Julia died. Cause of death was diagnosed as phthisis (consumption, or in modern terms tuberculosis). She died at 6 Howley Place, her parental home. Her eldest sibling Jane Augusta was recorded on the death certificate as being present. There is no record of where her husband was at the time. Was he away, and she staying with her mother and sisters – she had returned to her family, perhaps, for the comfort and support they could give her while her husband was at work.

  Julia is described on her death certificate as, ‘Wife of Ignatius Pollaky, Newspaper Correspondent’. Pollaky’s work as a newspaper correspondent is discussed in Chapter 12.

  5

  Pollaky Alone

  After Julia’s death, Pollaky, bereft, continued with his work, corresponding with Palmerston a month later. He found other living quarters; the rooms he shared with his late wife had become unbearable to him. He was an energetic and passionate man, and Julia had been the love of his life, until fragile and ill she had been snatched from him to a place from which there is no return. And so, the 1861 census, taken 7 April, finds him living at 10 Devonshire Place, only a few doors away, where he is described as a lodger; presumably he was now renting a single room. Many of the inhabitants of Devonshire Place were professional or trades people and included a schoolmaster, clerks, a builder, and a harrier. William Bromley at No. 22 was an ‘Historical Painter’.

  Pollaky was now thirty-two. The others at 10 Devonshire Place were his landlady, Elizabeth Hughes, a widow, fifty-two or fifty-four years old, her daughter Mary Ann, twenty and unmarried, and Sarah Gregory, servant, twenty-one. Mary Ann is described on the census as a Governess, her mother as a Lodge House Keeper.

  In 1841 Elizabeth and Francis Hughes (Mary Ann’s parents) had been living at 36 Stafford Place, Westminster with their baby daughter who had been born early that year. But, despite the census record, they were, in fact, only married on 2 September 1842 when their daughter was about 19 months old. Elizabeth had at first assumed Francis’s surname for propriety’s sake. By 1843, they had moved to Devonshire Place. Francis Hughes died in April 1843 at the age of 37, and is described on his burial record as a ‘Gentleman’. In his will, made shortly before his death, he refers to his wife as, ‘Elizabeth Sells now living with me’, and to Mary Ann as, ‘my daughter by the said Elizabeth Sells’. He left his estate in trust for his daughter and her children should she have any, stipulating that no control could be given to any husband she might have in the future, while making provision for her mother to live in the house and enjoy any rent she might receive, as long as she remained, ‘sole and unmarried’. In the 1851 census, Elizabeth is listed as a ‘Lodging House Keeper’ with a servant and a lodger who was a banker’s clerk. That census indicates that she had been a widow for the past eight years.

  One imagines that life for the newly widowed Pollaky was fairly lonely, but business was brisk, and he was earning well. There were other compensations, particularly in the comforting form of his landlady’s daughter, Mary Ann, and on 2 June 1861 they were married at the church of St Mary Magdalene in Richmond, Surrey where she may have been living that year – for although she appears on the census with her mother at Devonshire Place, this does not mean that she lived there all the time. She had been a governess, possibly in Richmond. Pollaky’s address on the marriage register is recorded as Devereux Court, Temple – he was staying in Field’s premises at No. 20. The wedding was announced in The Times:

  The Times –Tuesday, 4 June 1861

  MARRIAGES [...]

  POLLAKY – HUGHES. – On the 2d inst., at the parish church, St Mary’s Richmond, Surrey, by the Rev. William Bashall, Ignatius Paul Pollaky, of 20 Devereux-court, Temple, son of Joseph Francois Pollaky, of Old Castle Hill, in Pressburg, Hungary, to Mary Ann Colombe Hughes, only daughter of the late Francis Hughes, of Maida-hill.

  (Mary Ann’s third name ‘Colombe’ appears only in this announcement.)

  How did his new mother-in-law feel about her daughter’s marriage to this unusual man? A widower, 33 years old, with an exotic accent, smartly turned out perhaps, a hard worker, but foreign nonetheless. His change of address from Devonshire Place to Devereux Court must have been for one of three reasons.

  1. He wanted a different address from Mary Ann for the sake of propriety – unlikely since she gave her address on the marriage certificate as Richmond.

  2. It was more convenient for him to be living at or near his place of work – possible.

  3. He had had a falling out with his soon-to-be mother-in-law, who may have objected to his marrying her daughter.

  This is surely the most likely explanation. Had Mary Ann, perhaps, also felt the need to move out of her mother�
�s house because her life had been made unbearable by her mother’s objections and nagging?

  Pollaky had been single for one year and eight months when he remarried. Was it a love match? The marriage lasted until his death almost 57 years later.

  By 1862, the new Mr and Mrs Pollaky were living at 18 Maida Hill; Pollaky had in January that year set up his own Inquiry Office at 14 George Street, Mansion House. In the meantime, he was engaged on a number of projects, of which, perhaps, the most fascinating is his involvement in the American Civil War.

  6

  Confederate Correspondence

  Between 12 to 14 April 1861, soldiers of the Confederate States of America attacked and captured Fort Sumter, South Carolina, which had been controlled by the Union Army. This was an attempt to force Abraham Lincoln, newly inaugurated President of the United States and his government to accept the secession of the Southern States. The Confederacy would soon consist of eleven states, all in favour of slavery, whereas Lincoln had already expressed his intention to abolish it. So began the American Civil War.