Sex scandals and the church continue to come to light even today. These ways of behaviour were nothing new, even then; nowadays we would call this grooming.
The interview concludes with Pollaky showing photographs of his foreign agents – rather belying the previous statement that his men are unknown even to him. All but one are, ‘foreign-looking men in uniform’. Pollaky says of them that they are generally army men:
I have people everywhere. I have cabmen in my employ. I have omnibus conductors. I have men in the clubs. I have waiters. I have people everywhere in England and abroad.
One of his agents is a sweet-looking girl of about 20 years. Murray looks at her portrait which is:
… very delicate and refined. It is one of those feminine faces which at once appeals to and touches the manly heart. ‘One of the finest little adventuresses now in Europe,’ says Mr Pollaky.
As we have proceeded through Pollaky’s life, correspondence and cases, one aspect is present by implication and occasionally by name, but never properly dealt with in one place. Who were Pollaky’s agents? There are mentions during the Confederate correspondence of the surveillance he established, but only three of his agents are mentioned by name in that corresondence.
Ed Brennan, G. Grub and James I. Thomson all supplied him with information, and the letters they wrote still exist. Grub on 7 October 1861 had watched the postman deliver letters to 58 Jermyn Street, and noted the various recipients, and the places of origin of each letter, and the comings and goings of visitors to that address; Brennan, on 10 October had discovered the whereabouts of the Fingal in Greenock, Scotland; Thomson on 15 October had written to Pollaky at 20 Devereux Court from 19 George Street, Euston Square (not to be confused with George Street, Mansion House where Pollaky later had an office), detailing his watching of a number of warehouses, and also the fee (4 shillings a day including expenses) that he required for his services.
In a letter to Sir Richard Mayne from early 1862, Pollaky mentions his office clerk. But a clerk is not an agent, employee though he may be.
On 29 November 1867, Pollaky advertised in The Times that, ‘Subpœnas on Mr W. Bates, an officer of this establishment who has been absent on a special mission to India can now be duly served, he having returned on the 25th inst.’ and in February 1869, the same ‘private detective’ William Bates from Pollaky’s private inquiry office gave testimony in a court case in Worcester, as reported in the Worcestershire Chronicle.
On 11 December 1870, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper reported on a divorce case – Jex-Blake v. Jex-Blake. Mrs Jex-Blake asked for a divorce on the grounds that her husband was both unfaithful and cruel, and that he had transmitted to her ‘a loathsome disease’. During the course of this case, at the end of which Mrs Jex-Blake was granted her divorce, evidence was given of the defendant’s adultery by William Sherrers, described as ‘foreign agent at Mr Pollaky’s inquiry office’.
On 23 January 1873, the Western Mail reported that one Thomas Carter, lace maker and trade unionist, appeared at the Nottingham police court charged with using threatening and abusive language to a non-unionist co-worker. ‘The only witness for the complainant was Charles Worlege, a detective, from Pollaky’s Private Detective Office, who had been employed at Mr Booth’s lace factory as a labourer, but virtually as a spy, to associate with and ascertain the doings of the workmen when they were expected to go on strike’. The magistrate in this case refused to accept the evidence of, ‘such a witness’.
What can we make of Pollaky’s boast that he had agents, ‘everywhere in England and abroad’? Did his network really stretch that far? If so, should there not be further hints at least in the correspondence of others?
An example of the slipperiness of Pollaky’s agents can be found in a case which came to trial at the Old Bailey on 6 August 1881. Though the case itself seems to be of little importance to Pollaky’s business, it does include some interesting details. Testimony was given by one Henry Burrage, a commission agent of Hanwell, aged 34. Burrage, whose evidence amounted to his having pretended to be a fence, while in reality communicating the fact of stolen goods to the police, included the following information:
My name is Matthew Henry Burridge Burnside, and I have many other names; I might change my name before I get home tonight – to give you the whole of my names I hope you have got a double sheet of foolscap paper – I have been in the House of Detention, the same as some of your clients have – I was innocent –
Under cross-examination he added:
I have passed by the names of Smith, Brown, Bailey, Blake, Jones, and it is impossible to say how many more – Purdon is one – I do not remember Perry – I have not received money from any source during the last four months – I had money at home, and my credit was good – I acted as agent for Mr Cowley between September and April last, under the name of Purdon, and was acting at the same time as agent for Mr Lacey under the name of Burnside – I received money on behalf of Mr Cowley, and have paid him some, and I should not reckon there is 1l. between us – I received 24s. from Matthews for Mr Cowley; I have not paid him the whole of it; there is a difference between us, and I have not paid it. I also received money on behalf of Mr Macey, and have not paid in all the amount – as late as April last I received money from Mr Coupal, and have not paid it, and do not intend to – it was about 10 guineas – I was in the employ of Pollaky Brothers many years ago in the name of Burnside – I did not abscond with 200l.; I don’t know how much it was, it is 17 years ago – I don’t know whether my friends paid it, and I think the less Mr Pollaky says about it the better –
In this last case there are details of some of the aliases used by one of Pollaky’s agents. He is, though, traceable, as he appears in census forms in 1871 and 1881. Matthew Henry Burnside was living in 1881 with his wife Annie and their six children at 14 Half Acre, Hanwell. His occupation is listed as ‘Ships Clerk’. Ten years earlier, he was living with his wife and son in Lambeth, and described as a ‘Ship’s Cook (out of employ)’.
The list of known agents is as follows: Ed Brennan, G. Grub, James I. Thomson, William Bates, William Sherrers, Charles Worlege, Matthew Henry [Burridge or Burrage] Burnside. Aside from the last named, we shall probably never know who these agents were, nor, when they gave a name, whether that name was genuine, and there is little doubt that the spellings of at least two of the surnames (Sherrers and Worlege) as given in newspaper reports are wrong.
Pollaky had spent a considerable amount of time in the second half of the 1850s attempting to make himself indispensable to certain important political figures: Lords Derby, Palmerston and Lytton. That in 1861 he accepted a commission from Sanford to spy on Confederate movements in Great Britain might be seen as something of a come-down, for had his previous efforts been successful, he would have been receiving requests for his services from the British government. After Sanford, he turned to the Metropolitan Police, but there was no persuading Sir Richard Mayne of his usefulness. Pushing himself before the public Pollaky became something of a paradox – a private detective who wished for publicity while keeping facts of his cases secret; a man who craved acceptance, but whose methods for gaining the good opinion of those whose acquaintance he valued were inevitably doomed to failure. An outsider at a time when good pedigree was considered vital, it is, perhaps, hardly surprising that he was mocked and derided in certain quarters.
Number 13 Paddington Green had been in uninterrupted occupation by the Pollakys since 1872, though Pollaky had his office there from 1863. On 10 December 1881 the Reverend Dr William Stainer (1828–98), brother of composer John Stainer, advertised his need to acquire a fourth premises to house another of his Homes for Deaf Children, specifying the Edgware Road district. A few months later, Pollaky had decided to retire, and 13 Paddington Green was acquired for the purpose. Pollaky moved his family to Brighton in the middle of 1882, his last advertisement in The Times as a private investigator appeared on Friday 19 May that year. Stainer rented the house at P
addington Green from him, and a new home for deaf children opened with about twenty boarders aged 5 to 9, with four live-in members of staff. By the beginning of January 1883 Stainer already owed £531 in back rent. Afraid that his debt would increase still further, and relying on charitable donations to which he himself contributed, Stainer began advertising in The Times in November 1883 for, ‘CONTRIBUTIONS towards the expense of fitting up the fourth home recently opened on Paddington-green’. Pollaky, not receiving any rent, put the house up for sale in January 1884. Money for Stainer’s home must have been forthcoming, for in 1885 he was still there having managed to acquire the freehold of the property, presumably mortgaged. He now named it ‘Stainer House’, and in 1892 announced that he hoped to secure the premises as a permanent place for a college for teachers of the deaf. The Stainer Homes did not long survive William Stainer’s death in 1898 as they were poorly managed, and were condemned by a School Board report in May that year. This resulted in the children being moved out, and by 1901, the home at Paddington Green had closed, the sole occupant being a night watchman named Samuel Smith. In 1911 the house appears in the census as No. 12a Paddington Green and has a number of households living within, though the premises seem to be owned by J.P. Barradell & Co., wine coopers and bottle merchants who had acquired most of the houses in that row.
It is worth comparing the description, given earlier, of Pollaky at home with the description of the house in the advertisement for its sale which appeared in The Times on 14 January 1884:
No. 13, PADDINGTON-GREEN (postal district, W.). – To be SOLD. by Private Contract, this commanding and valuable FREEHOLD HOUSE, southern aspect, standing in open and healthy position, facing Paddington-green, close to two Metropolitan Railway Stations; omnibuses passing the Green every few minutes to City and the Zoological-garden; also within easy walking distance of Hyde-park and Kensington-gardens. This house (with front garden about 92 feet, planted with 12 almond trees, and large back garden about 102 feet, protected by good brick wall; wire fenced about 12 feet high; also summer-house with cemented floor) contains 19 good rooms, including bath room with hot and cold water service, and three water-closets; lofty drawing room, costly decorated with arched statuary marble chimney-piece of exquisite workmanship, three large French windows (plate-glass), opening on to balcony provided with permanent fire escape; dining room leading by iron steps into back garden. Would be a suitable residence for a medical practitioner, solicitor, school, or private hotel. The sanitary arrangements are of the most approved system. The house has been in uninterrupted occupation of the owner since 1872. Price of house and freehold, £2,500, part of which could remain on mortgage at four per cent, and fixtures and planned furniture at valuation. Apply to the owner, Mr Pollaky, 13 Paddington-green, W.
Given the facts of the following reports, Paddington was not the loveliest of areas even in Pollaky’s day. On 3 July 1865, a question was asked in the House of Commons regarding the, ‘nuisance to health arising from the foul state of the Grand Junction Canal Basin, and of the wharves adjoining, in the parish of Paddington’. A feeling for the area around Paddington of the period may be gained from the following information taken from contemporary accounts made by or on behalf of the Paddington Vestry, which was responsible for carrying out public works and agreeing local planning permissions.
The Paddington Sanitary Report for the year 1870–71 by Dr William Hardwicke stated that Paddington ranked as ‘thickly-populated’, (the population in April 1871 was 96,784 – how he would have ranked London’s East End one can only imagine!) He felt that, even with over 7,000 horses in the area and the demands made on available air, there would not be any danger to public health, provided that ‘the excreta of so many horses [which] adds also to the sources by which atmospheric air is often tainted’, was ‘promptly removed’. There had been 386 deaths that year from infectious diseases, one third of which had been due to scarlet fever, which had been epidemic in London for nearly two years. Pauline Pollaky had been a victim of this epidemic. Among other diseases causing deaths that year he lists diarrhoea, which the following year would be the cause of death of baby William Pollaky.
Hardwicke also highlights other concerns:
Poultry keeping increases to a great extent in London, and frequent complaints are made to me that fowls should be done away with as a nuisance. It ought to be more generally known that I cannot proceed against the owners of domestic animals for the noises they make. It exceeds my province to interfere with fowls, pigeons, and dogs if kept in a cleanly state. Cock-crowing at 1 a.m., the barking of dogs, the cooing of pigeons near your chamber window, or any other nuisance arising from noise, by which the sleep of nervous people is disturbed, is a serious annoyance, and probably ought, as in the manner of street music, to be under control by law: but I cannot treat them as Sanitary nuisances.
Under the heading, ‘Urinals and Urinal nuisances’ he writes, ‘it should be obligatory upon the publican whose licences were renewed that an efficient urinal should be provided’, pointing out at the same time that there were only five public urinals in the parish: ‘at least ten more are required’. He did make a point of stating, ‘that W.C. accommodation for females as well as males […] could easily be provided’.
Hardwicke felt that many houses in the area were unfit for human habitation. While these do not include those in the immediate vicinity of Paddington Green, these were just round the corner.
In another report on the health of Paddington published in May 1870 Dr Hardwicke mentions that the rich districts as well as the poor had been affected by the scarlatina epidemic, and quotes Horace: ‘Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turres’. (‘Pale Death, with impartial step, knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings.’) In his health report of July, Dr Hardwicke includes a register of complaints made of unsanitary conditions in the area, including: defects of drainage, dirty premises, water closets and urinals, frying of fish, bad meat, overcrowding, bad ventilation, smoke, dirty and noisy animals, manure, garbage and dung, and decaying and putrid substances.
By 1956 the house was not looking quite as charming as the sale notice describes it. Nos 11–13 were all very dilapidated. They were demolished in 2010 despite the findings of the Paddington Green Conservation Area Audit of 2003 which stated that ‘the east side of Paddington Green boasts a fine collection of Regency and Victorian buildings which form an important backdrop to the green’. By 2010, Nos 11–12 had been rebuilt. The internal walls on the ground floor of No. 13 had been demolished and the front bricked up. Rooms on other floors had been subdivided. Internal photographs show the house to have been in a very sorry state.
12
Dickens, Lewis Carroll, W.S. Gilbert,
and Others
What was it that made the press, novelists and playwrights write about Pollaky and not so much about other private detectives? True, Field and Whicher had both been immortalised in one form or another by Dickens and Collins, but that was as policemen, not private investigators. That Pollaky’s advertisements were so strangely wonderful as to excite comment is beyond doubt. That the fact of him being foreign, and from a less well-known part of Europe may have lent an exotic and almost mystic touch to the general perception of the man, though he himself was really quite ordinary underneath.
In 1868, the Theatre Royal, Holborn, (which was destroyed by a fire in 1880) included in its advertisements for that season’s productions, ‘a New and Original Burlesque Extravaganza founded on a famous opera, and entitled Lucretia Borgia, M.D.’ The writer was H.J. Byron and the music was composed by J.T. Haines. (The opera it burlesqued was by Donizetti.) The characters included one Rustighello, described as ‘the “Pollaky” of the period’. This is just one example of the use of his name without any sobriquet preceding it. Surely Gilbert was the first to make use of the term ‘Paddington Pollaky’ in what would become, among fans of the Savoy Operas, almost the only way that Pollaky’s name would be kept alive during
the twentieth century: even his obituary in The Times used PADDINGTON POLLAKY as its title.
In this brief extract from Lucretia Borgia MD, the Dook (Duke) reads Rustigello’s latest circular:
The Dook: (reads) To jealous wives,
Suspicious husbands, and the world at large.
Inspector Rustigello’s reg’lar charge
Is his expences, and a small per centage;
Heart-broken parties will see the advantage
Of trying one who’s secret, sharp, and steady.
What’s this! ‘N.B. – Divorces always ready.’
Henry James Byron (1835–84) was a predecessor of W.S. Gilbert in the burlesque-creating line, and gave Gilbert an early chance by collaborating with him in 1867 on a version of Robinson Crusoe. His writing skills do not, however, bear comparison with Gilbert’s, as may be deduced from the above quotation.
As early as 1863, Pollaky was well known enough to be featured as a subject in an essay by an important author. On 20 June that year there appeared in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal, All The Year Round, an article in the series entitled ‘Small-Beer Chronicles’. (It can be found in Appendix 1.) Dickens writes in no very flattering terms of Pollaky and what he later describes in the article as the ‘Pollaky System’. He wonders if the men he now sees ‘[...] standing about at the corners of streets [...] generally seedy in their attire, and in the habit of sucking small pieces of straw or chewing the stalks of leaves to while away the time – are [...] the agents of Pollaky and Co.’
Paddington' Pollaky, Private Detective Page 22