Paddington' Pollaky, Private Detective

by Bryan Kesselman

  This last advertisement is particularly moving because of the abducted child. One wonders if any of these lost people were ever found, or if any communicated with Pollaky to find out what information he had that was to their ‘advantage’. There is a wealth of stories here, each a sorrowful feast for the imagination if one so chooses.

  1882

  Busy man that he was, Pollaky’s advertisements now stated that, ‘Personal interviews can only be assured by previous appointment by letter or telegram’. He had become choosy with regard to the cases he would undertake, and shunned the chancer who might turn up at unwelcome times and possibly try to take advantage.

  The Wilson Affair

  The longest running series of advertisements which ever appeared in the ‘Agony Column’ was an extraordinary business which involved a certain Mr E.J. Wilson of Ennis, Ireland. Eventually, Mr Wilson decided to use the services of Pollaky’s inquiry office. But to begin at (or at least near) the beginning:

  The Times – Tuesday, 11 January 1859

  Mr. E.J. Wilson, Ennis, Ireland, Author of the Decimal System at Her Majesty’s Customs, and pronounced by the late S.G. Walford, Esq., Head Solicitor to Her Majesty’s Customs, London to be ‘extremely clever and equal to anything’. OFFERS his SERVICES to merchants and solicitors having important disputes with the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Customs.

  This fairly innocuous item, though it seems of dubious merit, being an offer by someone with inside knowledge, to help those in need of advice on how to escape being fined for smuggling, is but the tip of a mountain of advertisements placed in The Times ‘Agony Column’ by Mr Wilson. It has been estimated that he wrote over 400 messages in the personal column, more than anyone else in its history, and some of a deeply personal nature. They began in 1851, and tell a woeful tale which leaves us with another deep mystery, as the end has never been told.

  The messages began with no intimation as to what would happen: a simple message referring to the writer’s willingness to wear a particular set of new clothes. As we proceed through the months, Wilson’s messages become somewhat poetic in tone and a little obscure: ‘Thy star in conjunction with mine against the great globe itself!’ is the opening of the message of 7 July 1852. Others follow in the same fashion. A number of these messages seem to refer to the fortunes of his business importing goods and speculating in the City, and he was evidently having quite a hard time. And then, on 1 May 1854, the tone changes:

  MY DAUGHTER! O, my daughter! – E.J.W.

  In 1852 his daughter, Alice Jane Wilson, had been sent to a boarding school in Boxmoor, Hertfordshire. From reading the messages that follow this, it seems that she had been abducted and removed to a place where her father could not find her. Messages about his daughter, expressing great anguish, occur often, as do others about his failing business. It is possible that Alice had been removed by her mother whose name was apparently Alexis. The state of the relationship between the parents leaves little to the imagination if that is true.

  In 1859, she was still missing, and on 13 March he wrote:

  CAUTION. – All persons assisting in secreting my daughter, ALICE JANE WILSON, 10 years old, are liable to seven years’ imprisonment. – E.J.Wilson, Ennis, Ireland.

  A month later he offered a reward of £200. This seems to have had no effect. He must have been reunited with Alice at some point, for on 9 May the following appears:

  To B.C.Z. You don’t know their antecedents (rouge et noir). I have never seen any of my money from the day I nobly signed it away; and I did not see my child for five years, and yet I respected the laws of Humanity; and you see the return – I have lost my daughter a second time.

  The outpouring continued through the years. (It is also possible that the ‘Heart of Stone’ advertisements form part of the Wilson series.) He was still speculating large amounts of money, and things were not going well there either. In July 1859, he wrote that he had not heard from his daughter for eighteen months.

  Finally, in 1861, he went to Ignatius Pollaky to ask for his help. Initial communications with Pollaky used the codeword ‘Moribond’, and so we have come full circle. The Moribond messages left by Pollaky (see page 115) were communications with Wilson. They sent a number of messages to each other, each using cryptic language. Wilson’s messages end in 1869 or 1870. It is hard to be specific about which message is his last as he changed the name he used many times, using some fairly fanciful ones at times: ‘Flybynight’ and ‘Cheops’ are just two of a long list. What is certain is that even after eight or nine years of Pollaky’s off-and-on investigation of the matter, no one knows whether or not Wilson was ever reunited with his daughter.

  That Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories makes use of the ‘Agony Column’ is perhaps hardly surprising. Examples can be found in The Sign of Four, 1890 – Holmes places an advertisement to ascertain the whereabouts of a missing boatman and his steam launch, The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb, 1892 – Holmes is discovered, ‘reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe’, The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, 1892 – in which he states that he reads, ‘nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always instructive’, The Adventure of the Red Circle, 1911 – in which he comments upon reading various agony columns, ‘Dear me! […] what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual!’ and The Valley of Fear, 1914 – in which he decodes a mysterious cipher largely made up of a series of numbers.

  11

  An Interview with Pollaky

  The 1860s had been a busy time for Pollaky. He had become very well known, and his name was often used in conversation. In March 1867 he was even mentioned in Parliament when Mr Beresford Hope, member for Stoke-upon-Trent (as it was known in 1867), moved a resolution in favour of suspending the search of baggage of passengers arriving from France during the French Exhibition of 1867, since this practice, he felt, was due only to red tape and gave rise to resentment by Her Majesty’s subjects when they as passengers were searched for non-existent items for which customs duties did not exist. His long speech included his opinion that, ‘surveillance, if not of a very vexatious kind, was not objected to, and so [if] smuggling was carried on by passengers there would be no difficulty in detecting it by means of a police system, exercised, not by companies of Mr Pollaky’s inquiry officers, as the Treasury seemed to suppose, but by their own Customs officers.’ (Hansard, 8 March 1867.) After some discussion, with opinion against voiced by Benjamin Disraeli, who at that time was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and William Gladstone, Beresford Hope withdrew his proposal. Public duties carried out by private companies were controversial even then.

  By the early 1870s there were a number of private investigators working in London and advertising in The Times. These included Arthur Cleveland Montagu and Co., Legal and Confidential Agents, 11 Old Broad Street, who could be ‘consulted daily on home and foreign cases’, and Wendel Scherer of 11 Blomfield Terrace, Paddington, who with ‘24 years’ English and Foreign experience, can be daily consulted in all cases of importance’. Charles Frederick Field’s inquiry office had now moved from 20 Devereux Court to 33 Essex Street, Strand, and was now operated by C. Nicholls.

  On 27 September 1874, Charles Frederick Field died. His wife and at least one of his siblings had predeceased him, and in his will he divided his estate between his nieces and his friends. The following obituary appeared in the Cornwall Chronicle on Wednesday, 16 December 1874:

  Passing from births to deaths, the month has seen the last of a very interesting character, whose antecedents and connections with a great man lately gone from amongst us are of some public interest. Mr Charles Field, the immortal ‘‘Inspector Bucket,” of Bleak House, died in London the day after the despatch of my last letter. The famous detective was very intimate with Charles Dickens, to whom he was useful in giving information an
d by whom he was much liked and respected. The amusing sketch by ‘Phiz,’ in which Bucket is so well drawn nursing Mrs Bagnet’s children, one on each knee, will no doubt be fresh in every reader’s recollection, together with the professional skill shown by the inspector when, after making himself agreeable and partaking of the Bagnet hospitality, he coolly follows George Rouncewell out of the house and arrests him for the murder of Tulkinghorn. To recount all Field’s exploits would require a large book, but perhaps the best-known or them was the clever war in which he managed to sift the case of Dr Smyth, who in 1853, claimed to be the son of Sir Hugh Smyth, of Ashton Court, near Bristol. Field went to the residence of the claimant’s sister in a very quaint disguise, and soon ascertained to a certainty that the man was an impostor, and that his name was Tom Peorig. The inspector is described by Mr Sala [George Augustus Sala], who had frequently met him at Charles Dickens’s, as “a very worthy soul, straightforward and outspoken, and full of humorous anecdote.” He was buried in Brompton cemetery on the 8th.

  In 1888 a biographical article about Pollaky appeared in the press entitled ‘Mr Pollaky’. It came from a book published the previous year called A Novelist’s Note Book by David Christie Murray. The article was a shortened version of one which had appeared as early as 1875 in the Queensland Times, and it is the more complete, earlier version which will be discussed here.

  During the course of the interview Pollaky gave to Murray, he paid tribute to his old employer, mentor and friend Charles, Frederick Field.

  Queensland Times – Tuesday, 6 April 1875

  MR POLLAKY

  I think it not improbable that Mr Ignatius Pollaky is the holder of more secrets than ever burdened the secret breast of Mr Tulkinghorn. He is prince of detectives and king of spies. He knows terrible stories about all manner of people. [...] But Mr Pollaky has no aspect of secrecy. [...] You would take him for the most open, the most confiding, the frankest of men. [...] He has the Bismarckian art of telling you nothing while telling you everything.

  That the author writes as if in awe of the man shows not that this was necessarily his own belief, but that, perhaps, he knew what the public wanted to hear and what would make good copy.

  Pollaky could not have objected to the rather overblown description awarded him, it is, after all, the image that he himself had tried to cultivate for many years.

  Firstly, Murray goes on to describe a little of Pollaky’s home at 13 Paddington Green. The house was demolished in 2010, so we can only know how the house looked from Murray’s 1875 description, together with the 1884 notice of sale and the very few images that exist: all photographs were taken after 1950:

  His very house stands rather higher than its brethren in Paddington Green, and seems to lift its dominant shoulders as if it disdained to be or to hold a secret.

  In Mr Pollaky’s entrance-hall is an ancient picture on the possession of which he prides himself. It represents the banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Paradise. [...]

  The great private detective is at home and will see me. A moment after having ascertained this I discover that my informant is the great detective himself.

  Taking this at face value, it seems that ‘the great detective’ must have had a sense of humour:

  He is brisk in manner, and a little brusque, and very slightly foreign. He speaks capital English, and is not unwilling to let one discover that.

  This is surely the best description of the man that we have. And we at last find out about the quality of his spoken English – ‘capital’ and ‘slightly foreign’:

  He receives me [...] with some show of disfavour, because he wishes that I should see that he does not care to have his business advertised.

  Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he felt no need for advertisement, after all he was well enough known as it was. And busy, too. Perhaps it wasn’t just false modesty, but a natural shyness that he possessed, despite his need for a public face:

  When he places his visitor on a chair facing the light, his own face is in complete darkness. That, says Mr Pollaky lightly [...] is a mere accident of the construction of the room.

  In the next paragraphs, Murray quotes Pollaky on Pollaky at length, and we gain more than a glimpse of his personality:

  I have been pitched into a great deal, [...] I do not like it. Who does? But I do not care either. I have been called unpleasant names. Well, I admit my profession is not a nice one. But I console myself, I am a necessity. I would rather have been Mr Disraeli or the Bishop of London than a private detective [...] The very essence of my system is secrecy. My left hand does not know my right hand. I have no clerk about me, no writer. My men do not know each other. I do not suppose myself to know them. They do not come here. They are each known to me as number so-and-so. No. I employ no men from the detective force. They would not suit my work. [...] my men are small, insignificant, unnoticeable fellows; fellows who will walk with you, and about you, and up you, and down you, and you will not know that they are there.

  We have already discovered that he employed men to work for him, but his insistence that so much secrecy was kept between them seems quite extraordinary. It seems as if we are moving in the kind of territory we associate with James Bond. And yet, we know that these are only fleeting glimpses of the agents he employed, and that, aside from his surveillance of the Confederates, almost everything we know about his cases comes from newspaper reports. He seems to have attempted to be elusive, and yet in the public eye at one and the same time; a contradiction: a man of mystery who tried to keep out of the limelight while at the same time struggling for recognition and publicity.

  The interview continues:

  Mr Pollaky relishes this, and lights a cigar in brisk enjoyment of it. ‘I see queer things: I know queer things about eminent people. Men would laugh if they knew all I could tell them. But then I do not tell. It is my especial business not to tell. Of course people have attempted to bribe me. I have had a big bribe of jewels offered me in this room. But I am not to be bought. My clients know that, or they would not trust me.’

  Pollaky indicates a cabinet of indexed drawers to Murray, and states that by using the information held within he could make many thousands of pounds. Murray wrote that when Pollaky speaks warmly, ‘he loses his foreign manner’. Murray comments on this. ‘A perfect English accent might act, at a pinch, as a fairly good disguise for a foreigner who was known always to speak in his own person in a very, very slightly foreign way.’

  They go on to discuss Pollaky’s work for the Divorce Court. Neither he nor his men ever appeared in court, as he knew their evidence would be ‘regarded with suspicion’, as it would be supposed to be in his own interest to establish cases. He then begins to talk about specific cases, though mentioning no names, of course.

  A gentleman, ‘high in the legal profession’, asked him to watch his wife as he suspected her of being unfaithful. Pollaky’s men watched her, and it was proved that any suspicions were unfounded. But then the lady visited Pollaky and asked him to watch her husband. The husband was guilty only of having set Pollaky to watch his wife. Both confessed to each other what they had done, and they forgave each other.

  He was at pains to point out that he was not always out to establish cases where they did not exist. The next case mentioned had a different ending though. Set by an elderly nobleman to watch his young wife while he is away, what does Pollaky discover upon having her watched by his men?

  My lady walked out and took up a cab near the square. She drove to Knightsbridge Barracks, and there a swell with a blonde moustache stepped in. They went to the Star and Garter at Richmond. Nice little dinner. Came home to the lady’s house together. Swell left the house in the morning.

  Pollaky in this remarkable interview continues by discussing his early career in ‘that open-handed free-spoken way of his’:

  I am not the originator of this style of business in England [...] George Frederick Field – the chief of the detective force at Scotland-y
ard started it. He is dead now. His portrait is behind you.

  The portrait referred to was a photograph of Field. That Pollaky had it on display shows, perhaps, that they remained on good terms even after they became rivals for business:

  George Frederick Field and I [...] worked together for a long time. He was a very clever man, and knew his business well. In those days I was going everywhere, and knew every nook and corner in the empire. I was a private soldier then, and not a general. I am a general now, and I do my spiriting from this desk. For myself, I never go out now. All my work is done through my men.

  In 1875 Pollaky was 47; that he felt his days of doing the donkey work were past, and that he was willing and able to pay to let others do the staking-out that he evidently found so enervating, is an indication of how tedious this work was. Years of being the one who had to do the following, the waiting, and making of inquiries, combined with a growing feeling of insecurity, shown by the interesting sentence, ‘For myself, I never go out now’, already seem to be making his work more of a burden than a vocation. His next statement makes us realise how disillusioned he is with mankind in general, and the English in particular:

  You are right, I have contracted a low opinion of human virtue, especially in England. It is the fashion here to talk of the immorality of the French. Pooh! I know France well. I know Europe well. There is no nation as immoral as England. I had a clergyman here not long ago. If I gave you his name you would be surprised. He wanted to reform a girl, having already formed her for his own purposes. If you were to hear that man preach, you would say, ‘How holy this man is!’ I know better.