Paddington' Pollaky, Private Detective
Page 19
The Franco-Prussian War began on July 1870 and lasted until May 1871. As is the case today the supplying of arms to one side or another was a controversial issue. There had been rumours that armaments were being supplied to the French by a Birmingham-based company. Philip Henry Muntz (1811–88), Liberal Member of Parliament who had been Mayor of Birmingham in 1839 wrote to The Times stating that no rifles had been sent out of that town. Many were sceptical. Shortly afterwards, according to the Engineer (16 September 1870), ‘Mr Pollaky, of private inquiry celebrity, advertised for information upon the subject and in a few days wrote to the Times refuting Mr Muntz, and stating that on the 6th inst. 227 cases, containing 4540 Sniders [rifles] were despatched to Havre.’ The newspapers were highly exercised by this, as the following articles show:
The Standard – Wednesday, 7 September 1870
The ingenious Mr. POLLAKY, of Private Inquiry Office fame, whose announcements regarding missing young ladies of sixteen with fair tresses and alpaca frocks, absconding clerks of short stature with villainous countenances and singular moles, and other interesting individuals who are ‘wanted’, are so familiar to the public, has come out with an advertisement of a decidedly novel kind. On behalf of some person or persons unknown, or on his own behalf, he has offered fifty pounds reward for information as to certain rifles or ‘other contraband of war’, said to ‘have been purchased in this country for immediate exportation in neutral bottoms on behalf of one of the belligerents’, &c. The ‘strictest secrecy’ to be observed regarding the informant, and the reward only to ‘stand good for 21 days after this date’. Is the ‘active and intelligent’ POLLAKY instructed by some private patriotic individual, or some more than ordinarily weak member of the British Government; or is it by the astute BISMARCK, in search of a casus beli or a grievance against England? Has it struck Mr POLLAKY or his mysterious and not over wise, if English, patron, that if any person were in a position to earn this reward it could lead to nothing under the present state of the British law? It is for German cruisers to seize arms if they can find them on the high seas.
Amidst the active correspondence which took place about this subject, the following article appeared relaying in no uncertain terms its criticism of Pollaky with heaviest sarcasm the writer could muster, feeling that Pollaky’s letters were written purely to advertise, or puff, his business:
The Northern Echo – Monday, 12 September 1870
Paddington-green is twice famous. It was once the home of one POLLY PERKINS, who was ‘as beautiful as a butterfly – as proud as a queen’. Now it is the haunt of one ‘POLLAKY’, the prince of private detectives. The famous ‘green’, which now has no verdure, and where metaphorical greenness is unknown, is the headquarters of inquisitiveness. Mr POLLAKY – or plain ‘POLLAKY’, as he signs himself, as if he were a Lord or a Bishop – undertakes for a consideration to investigate the private affairs of the domestic circle, or to worm out the secrets of the State, and to impart them to the inquisitive persons who employ him. Has your fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter run off with a penniless young scamp? – you go to Paddington-green and POLLAKY will tell you where the birds have made their nest. Has your spouse eloped? – POLLAKY will get you to pounce upon the villain who has decoyed her, and will prepare the evidence that will enable you to rid yourself of the faithless one. Has your cashier deranged your accounts and levanted with your cash-box? – POLLAKY will direct you where to seek him. Does a Birmingham manufacturer seek to involve the nation in the Continental war by supplying the belligerents with rifles and other warlike munitions? – POLLAKY, of Paddington-green will tell you the precise number of cases that have been sent, and the precise number each case contained. POLLAKY is the Old Boguey of every one who has anything to conceal, the bosom friend of every one who is inquisitive and can afford to pay. The utmost reliance can be placed upon POLLAKY’S discretion. He informs his client that ‘the strictest secrecy will be ensured’. Once, and once only has POLLAKY been known to divulge a secret imparted to him. Mr Muntz wrote to the Times to say he could not hear of any 40,000 rifles having been sent from Birmingham; whereupon POLLAKY, with a professional pride which overcame both his patriotism and the rules of his profession, rushed into print to show that POLLAKY was not so easily to be bamboozled as the hon. member for Birmingham. ‘I also made inquiries’, he wrote, ‘and find that 227 cases, containing 4,540 Sniders (each rifle fitted with bayonet), have been received at Southampton Docks from Birmingham, which said rifles were dispatched by steamer Fannie, for Havre, on the night of the 6th inst’. But it will be observed that the name of the Birmingham manufacturer was not imparted to the public. POLLAKY prudently conceals that important part of the nefarious transaction, perhaps until he has traced the remaining 35,460 rifles which have yet to be accounted for. In the meantime the public may be excused if they regard the statement that a certain number of rifles have been sent from some unknown person in Birmingham to an unknown shipper at Southampton, as a ‘bold advertisement’ of POLLAKY’S Inquiry Office.
London Daily News – Wednesday, 14 September 1870
TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS
SIR. – Will Mr. Pollaky explain for whom are the field pieces and siege guns intended that are made at Sir W. Armstrong’s Works, and shipped to Rotterdam, thence re-shipped into barges and delivered at Cologne? – I am, &c., FAIRPLAY. Sept. 13.
The Southern Reporter – Thursday, 22 September 1870
THE ALLEGED EXPORT OF ARMS TO FRANCE.
Mr Pollaky, the private detective, continues to advertise himself by giving asserted particulars respecting the export of arms to France; and some people are beginning to believe that he is employed by the Prussian Government to make discoveries and publish them.
This last item has a ring of truth about it, for it may have been as a result of Pollaky’s investigation into this affair, that on 4 September 1871 he was awarded the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross) Second Class of the Saxe-Ernestine House Order, a German Ducal award founded in 1833 by Duke Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Duke Bernhard II of Saxe-Meiningen. The award was given as a ‘special mark of Princely goodwill’, and the cost was paid for out of the Ducal private fund. He was very proud of this award, and often referred to it in later years. In 1897, the Minister of State for Gotha, Karl Friedrich von Strenge, tried to find out whether Pollaky and two other recipients of the award were still alive. The British minister in Coburg, Alexander Condie Stephen, could find no information on Pollaky, who had retired long before and was living in Brighton. The records are held in the Gotha State Archives.
And if you look carefully at Faustin Betbeder’s illustration of Pollaky (see plate No. 1), you will notice that he is pictured wearing the medal on his left lapel.
1871
Pollaky’s advertisements were so interesting to the public that some were expanded into little short stories so that readers could link them together and discover the outcome. The following case tells an old story:
Teesdale Mercury – Wednesday, 8 November 1871
LIGHT ON THE RAMSGATE MYSTERY.
Some sensation was created last week at Ramsgate by the mysterious disappearance of a gentleman named Esdale, who was supposed to be drowned. [...] Mr Esdale, who, it seems, had been married only 18 months, went to Ramsgate and put up at the Granville Hotel. [...] In the course of the evening he left the hotel to take a stroll, but he never returned. The next morning Mr Esdale’s clothes were found scattered about the beach saturated with sea-water, but the owner of them was nowhere to be found.
Thus the exposition. But many doubted that Esdale had drowned. The report continues:
The following advertisements appeared in a morning paper: –
‘Mary to Willie. – For God’s sake let me see you. Write at any rate. The way is smooth to return.’
‘Willie. – I for one do not believe you are drowned, notwithstanding your sea-water saturated clothes have been found scattered on the beach. You had better
return at once, to save your friends trouble and expense. – Pollaky.’
‘Mysteriously disappeared from Ramsgate, since the evening of Monday, the 16th inst., a young gentleman, 23 years of age, 5 ft. 11in. in height, athletic figure, of fair complexion, dark brown hair, parted in the middle, slight brown whiskers and moustache, thin face, one front tooth in the lower jaw missing. – Information to Mr Pollaky, Private Inquiry office, No. 13 Paddington-green.’
In consequence of these advertisements, and inquiries that were made, it was ascertained that Mr Esdale was not dead, but that he had returned to London the same night, and had since taken his passage in the Golden Fleece to the Cape of Good Hope under an assumed name.
From the most unattractive picture painted in the description of ‘Willie’ Esdale, one might suppose that his wife would be glad to see the back of him. This case of a fake suicide may refer to William Esdale, listed on the 1871 census as a timber merchant who lived with his wife Mary in Golders Green, London, He was in fact 22 and she was 20. However, if it was indeed this particular couple, she appears to have taken him back and had four children by him. William Crowder Esdaile, as his name was properly spelled, was born in 1849 in Shoreditch, London. He appears to have married Mary Dobell while she was still a minor, and to have lied on his application for a wedding licence by falsely swearing that her father had given his consent. Their marriage was announced in the British Medical Journal on 14 May 1870. They emigrated to Australia in about 1878, and after her death, he remarried and had two more children. He died in 1926 in New Zealand.
We seem to be in the realms of comedy. In 1847 John Madison Morton’s farce, Box and Cox, was given its first performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London. In 1866 this was turned into a comic opera, Cox and Box, with music by Arthur Sullivan and words by F.C. Burnand; it features at one point one of the protagonists explaining how he managed to avoid getting married by faking his own suicide by drowning. Burnand’s lyric is better known than Morton’s dialogue. Here is Morton’s version:
Box: I left my home early one morning, with one suit of clothes on my back, and another tied up in a bundle, under my arm – I arrived on the cliffs – opened my bundle – deposited the suit of clothes on the very verge of the precipice – took one look down into the yawning gulph beneath me, and walked off in the opposite direction.
And here is Burnand’s (as set by Sullivan):
Box: Listen: I solemnly walked to the cliff.
And singing a sort of a dulcet dirge,
Put down my bundle upon the verge,
Heard the wild seagulls mournful cry,
Look’d all around, there was nobody nigh,
None but I on the cliff so high,
And all save the sea was bare and dry,
And I took one look on the wave below,
And I raised my hands in an agony throe,
And I stood on the edge of the rock so steep,
And I gaz’d like a maniac on the deep …
I cried: ‘Farewell, farewell to earth,
Farewell, farewell to the land of my birth,
Farewell, farewell to my only love,
To the sea below, and the sky above.’
With a glance at the sea of wild despair,
I cried, ‘I come.’ My bundle lay there.
At the edge, where the coastguard’s way was chalk’d,
Then away
In the opposite way I walk’d.
(The saucy French farce Frisette 1846 by Labiche and Lefranc on which Morton based Box and Cox does not have an equivalent scene.)
So well known was the ‘Agony Column’ that there was even a song about it. Published by ‘S. Brainardes Sons of New York’ after 1871 (before then the firm was simply called ‘S. Brainard’), in their Second Series of Comic and Humorous Songs, ‘The Agony Column’ or ‘Little Di’, was written by W. Burnot, and composed, to a polka rhythm, by T. Roberts. The first verse had the following lyrics:
One day not far from Regent Street,
Where cabs and buses whirl,
I saw beneath a horse’s feet
A fascinating girl.
To save her life I risk’d my own,
What mortal could do less,
She thank’d me warmly but refused
To give me her address.
SPOKEN after first verse.
I persuaded her but she would only consent to advertise in one of the papers making an appointment with me she said she would head it with her name Little Di – I asked her whether she would put it in the Agony Column of –
CHORUS
The Standard or the Telegraph, the Echo or the Times,
Observer, Reynolds, Judy, Punch, or Bow Bells, or the Chimes,
The Hornet, Lloyds, or Figaro, or one of the Reviews,
The Globe or Sun, Dispatch or Fun, or Illustrated News.
(Sheet music for this song can be found in Appendix 2.)
1872
The Times – Friday, 8 March 1872
CARDINALS-HAT. – Will meet you at the place appointed on Tuesday next; and will there and then pay the REWARD. – POLLAKY, private inquiry office, 13, Paddington-green.
The Times – Friday, 29 March 1872
Ανδρϖποθαγων Νησων. – Shall be happy to see you any day next week. 1 to 2 p.m. – POLLAKY, private inquiry office, No.13, Paddington-green.
[Ανδρϖποθαγων Νησων = Andropothagon Islands]
The Times – Wednesday, 17 April 1872
P.P. – Consider Hedgehog’s terrible position, and the parents’ anguish, and forward your present ADDRESS to Mr Pollaky, Private Inquiry-office, 13, Paddington-green, W.
The Times – Thursday, 25 April 1872
P.P. – Hedgehog’s position becomes daily more embarrassing. Where is your conscience? – POLLAKY.
The Times – Thursday, 16 May 1872
E.M. – In a German capital has arrived a young English lady, apparently between 18 and 19 years of age, destitute and without friends. She is tall, very slight, and good-looking, having short, dark hair and Spanish eyes, small face, bad teeth. Her linen is very fine and marked E.M. According to her statement, she was secretly married in April, 1870, at an hotel in Battersea. The circumstance that her head has been recently shaved, and her incoherent expressions, lead to the supposition that she has escaped the care of friends in this country, for which reason this advertisement. INFORMATION will be gratefully received by Mr Pollaky, 13, Paddington-green.
On Saturday, 5 October 1872 the Examiner, discussing the trade in obscene materials, suggests that the Society for the Suppression of Vice employ Pollaky to, ‘catch and convict dealers in obscene prints at so much per head’. The article suggests that the London centre of this trade is in Old Bond Street.
Fun found further sources of amusement in the ‘Heart of Stone’ and missing person advertisements in 1872:
Fun – Saturday, 9 November 1872
A Girl of Metal.
The immortal POLLAKY wants to hear of a girl who stole – let us say, did steel – away from home: – MYSTERIOUSLY LEFT her HOME, on Sunday last, a YOUNG LADY, 21 years of age, 5ft. 2, golden hair, clear steel blue eyes, and remarkably fair complexion. It should have been stated whether she had also an iron constitution and if – being further mentioned that she is in widow’s attire – she had a heart of lead. The tin will probably be forthcoming for those who find her, for POLLAKY is no common ‘copper’, but knows how to employ his pen and his zinc in description.
Fun was a satirical weekly magazine published between 1861 and 1901. Contributors included W.S. Gilbert. Its humour was not usually as acid as the Tomahawk. The heavy-handed humour in this last piece lays too much stress on the pun steal/steel, and then tries to fit in as many types of metal as possible.
The Ladies was a very short-lived journal that wrote of ‘court, fashion, and society. It was founded in March 1872 and its last issue was the following January:
The Ladies – Saturday, 30 November 1872
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MR POLLAKY, the private inquiry agent and detective, announces that he is looking out for a missing young gentleman possessed of very strange and dangerous characteristics: and we hope he will soon be found, for terrible things may occur if he is at large for a considerable time. He has escaped from a Maison de Santé at Paris; and is described as being ‘most intellectually gifted, but in his paroxysms has no moral perception whatever, his vanity then becomes excessive, and his irresponsible acts criminal’. As he is young, good looking, fond of uttering high sounding names, and speaks French admirably, this intellectual person who has no moral perception whatever, is a kind of Mephistopheles, and may perpetuate a fearful amount of mischief unless restrained. Intellect without conscience is the Satanic attribute, and we never heard of a human being who so nearly approached the ideal as this young gentleman who has escaped from the French asylum. Very likely Mr Pollaky will have competitors in the search, for, no doubt, there are some lines of business where this peculiar combination of qualities might be found useful.
1873
Evidence that Pollaky’s name was now conjured when the occasion called, comes from a letter of 1873 written by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Lucy Madox Brown who would marry his brother William Michel Rossetti the following year. As Assistant Secretary in the Excise Division of the Inland Revenue Office, he had been engaged on some investigation connected with his work. The poet wrote to Lucy of ‘William’s débût as the Pollaky of official life’.