The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  Chapter Two

  The Body in the Library

  Brilliant deduction may be all very well, but each detail must be logically checked and verified before the fact is accepted …

  Maud West, 19301

  It was good to be back in the British Library. As I settled into my usual corner of the Humanities Reading Room, with its rows of pale wooden desks and green leather chairs, I glanced around at my fellow readers. There was something immensely comforting about the sight of all those figures bent in concentration over their own private obsessions; it felt like coming home. The place hummed with possibility. Stored within the mysterious depths of the building were over 150 million items, from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook to yesterday’s Sun. If any lady detectives were lurking in the shadows of history, there was a good chance I would find them here.

  But first, whilst I waited for my books to arrive at the issue desk, I opened my laptop and brought up Wikipedia. On the train to London, I had remembered coming across an American female detective in a biography of Abraham Lincoln. She had little to do with my current quest, but I was curious to see what impact she’d had on the profession in America.

  Her name was Kate Warne, and the article described how she had marched into the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago in 1856 and talked her way into a job as the nation’s first female private investigator. Just twenty-three and recently widowed, she had cut her teeth on an embezzlement case before coming into her own during the Civil War by infiltrating secessionist tea parties and famously foiling an assassination plot on President Lincoln. There was also a photograph some believed to show her relaxing in a Union camp around 1862:

  Trousers again. A theme was beginning to emerge. It wasn’t one I had anticipated, but it made sense. In a world of rigidly defined gender roles, most of the power and excitement lay on the male side. History was scattered with stories of women who had passed themselves off as men to achieve their ambitions, whether it was to become a surgeon or run away to sea, so why not detectives?

  At the end of the war, however, Kate Warne had dusted down her frocks and carried on her work as a woman, running Pinkerton’s first all-woman detective bureau until her sudden death in January 1868. She was only thirty-five when she died, but her brief career had paved the way for women in all areas of investigation. Soon, even the police were exploring the idea of female crime fighters.

  But that was America. In Britain, things were much more conservative. I knew that when Maud West started out in 1905, the ranks of the British police were still firmly closed to women and would remain so until after the First World War, but were women already taking on private work?

  The books I had ordered weren’t much help. Despite promising titles – The Lady Investigates and The Edwardian Detective and so on – they all dealt with fictional sleuths. I also found two volumes of memoirs by a detective called Annette Kerner, who claimed to have been recruited into secret government operations in 1919 after running away from home to work as a singer in Switzerland. She eventually opened her own detective agency after the Second World War (at 231 Baker Street), but the stories she told of the intervening years were as crazy as Maud’s. On further investigation, it transpired that she had taken up her pen after being declared bankrupt following a fraud trial in 1952.2 I decided to give Ms Kerner a wide berth and retreated to the newsroom in search of solid fact.

  There, it only took a brief search of the tabloid databases to establish that London was positively teeming with female detectives around the time Maud West was in business. They appeared again and again, giving evidence in court and surprising the readers of the Daily Mail by being clever and smart:

  They were store detectives. Catching shoplifters wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was a start.

  Department stores had first appeared in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the first public spaces created with women in mind, designed to offer a refined and leisurely shopping experience away from the grime of the streets. Their vast, glittering halls, crammed with tempting goods, were an immediate hit with the affluent middle classes, but they also attracted less welcome visitors, as the managing director of Harrods told the Daily Express in 1913:

  There are few problems which confront the large storekeeper more difficult than the problem of the shop-thief, for it is necessary for retail firms not only to have a watch kept on their own property, but also to see that their customers are protected from pickpockets. Every large store has its detective department, thoroughly organised, working to such a way that mistakes are never made.3

  In order to blend in with the customers, the majority of store detectives were women, often former shop assistants who had stepped out from behind the drapery counter to do their bit in the fight against crime. And what a time it was for crime – the fashions of the day were practically designed for it. With a discreet slit in the seam of a dress, all manner of things could be squirrelled away. The newspapers were full of women who had been caught with astonishing amounts of loot beneath their skirts. One example was twenty-three-year-old Matilda Greenberg, whose suspiciously bulky appearance after a trip to Whiteley’s in 1904 was found to be caused by sixty-five yards of purloined satin, still on the roll.4

  But the store detectives didn’t just have to deal with individual thieves. Members of shoplifting gangs, such as the notorious Forty Elephants, would swoop in and cause a rumpus whilst their colleagues stuffed furs and trinkets into their special ‘grafter’s bloomers’, which were fitted with pockets and hooks. It was a high-stakes game. A habitual thief might expect to receive up to two years hard labour if convicted, so many came prepared for battle. As the head of Selfridges’ ‘secret service’, Matilda Mitchell (described by her interviewer as having ‘an altogether dominant face for a woman’) said in 1913:

  The professional shop-lifter of the lower class is not an easy person to arrest. I have even known them carry scissors to stab the arm with or pepper to throw in the eyes.5

  Things were looking up. If this was the level of excitement one could expect on a trip to the shops, maybe Maud’s tales of guns and car chases weren’t as improbable as they first seemed. I was curious to know how the detectives defended themselves. New York’s early policewomen were taught ju-jitsu. Was it the same for London’s store detectives? I had visions of shoplifters being hurled to the ground outside Selfridges, with hatpins flying and yards of silk floating down in cinematic slow motion. The closest I could find, however, was a photograph from 1927 showing a group of women in droopy knitwear learning how to make an arrest:

  The man in the picture, Charles Kersey, was a former police officer who ran a training academy for store detectives ‘up some rather dingy stairs’ in Baker Street (again). According to an article from 1933, he taught his students self-defence (‘And, with a blood curdling gesture, he indicates the best way of breaking the little finger …’), tutored them in how to give evidence and arranged visits to the police courts.6

  Appearing in court was a major part of the job. I found one of Kersey’s detectives testifying at Marylebone on behalf of three different stores on one single day in July 1919. Blanche Bolton had only been working as a detective for three weeks, but she’d been busy. For Marshall & Snelgrove in Oxford Street she described her ‘somewhat violent struggle’ with a woman who had lifted a customer’s handbag, and reported how she had watched a well-known Russian pianist steal a cloak. She then gave evidence against a young lady ‘of very good family’ from Maida Vale who had been charged with theft from both Debenham’s and Peter Robinson’s.7

  As many of the culprits were indistinguishable from the stores’ genuine customers, the job required tact and skill. Blanche Bolton had followed the pianist Madame Levinskaya around Marshall & Snelgrove for an hour and a half before making her move. Rugby tackling an innocent duchess could have serious consequences, as one anonymous store detective – possibly Blanche herself – told the Daily Mail one week later:

 
; The general public does not, I think, realise the difficulties. One single mistake could lose me my job and ruin my career. In other callings one may make blunders that are not irretrievable. A detective cannot.

  If I were to arrest a person for stealing and the case could not be proved I should probably let my employers in for heavy damages, and they would have no further use for my services.8

  Had the worst come to the worst, I thought it likely that she would have been able to find other work. Blanche Bolton’s sister, for example, was said to have exposed some fraudulent palmists alongside her usual store work.9 And, prior to joining Selfridges, Matilda Mitchell had worked undercover for the South-Western Railway Company and roamed the hills on horseback, tracking down unlicensed vets on behalf of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons.10

  Women were clearly doing some fascinating work outside the confines of department-store life, but these glimpses were only ever little asides that were rarely followed up. Store detectives were presented as plucky and admirable, but as soon as they took on private work an awkward silence seemed to descend, especially in the more upmarket newspapers. But why?

  All became clear over the next few days as I delved deeper into press reports and consulted academic journals. The general public may not have liked the idea of spies lurking amongst the corsetry in their favourite department stores, but they accepted that store detectives were there to fill a precise commercial need. The motives of the private detective, on the other hand, were much more questionable. As one leading barrister sniffed in The Times in 1905, it was ‘a calling that stank in the nostrils of every honest man’.11

  I recognized that tone of snooty contempt. It was the voice of the British establishment. Protecting the nation from rogue vets and nimble-fingered thieves was one thing, but grubbing around in a chap’s private life? That was ‘hideous’ and ‘so contemptible as to be almost outside the pale of humanity.’12

  Yet it was the establishment itself that had made the profession an indispensable part of British life. Its folly lay in the creation of one piece of legislation: the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. In a word? Divorce.

  Until 1857, the only way of obtaining a divorce was through a Private Act of Parliament, a process so expensive that on average only two such Acts were passed each year. Everyone else had to make do with a lifetime of domestic misery or pursue other options such as abandonment, bigamy or arsenic. The Matrimonial Causes Act took divorce out of Parliament and into the civil courts so that, in theory, anyone could rid themselves of a tiresome spouse in a completely above-board and legal way.

  It still wasn’t easy. The fees kept it out of the reach of many, but even those with money had an additional hurdle to overcome. No divorce would be granted without evidence of adultery, and female petitioners had to prove an additional cause such as rape, cruelty or incest. This had some unintended consequences. As the hearings were held in open court, with the galleries inevitably packed with members of the press, the nation suddenly had some very fruity reading material to enjoy over breakfast.

  Barely a year after the courts had started hearing cases under the new legislation, even the Lord Chancellor was having misgivings. He confided to his journal that ‘like Frankenstein, I am afraid of the monster I have called into existence.’ Queen Victoria agreed, describing the newspaper reports as on a par with ‘the worst French novels’.13

  Not only did the potential scandal of open court hearings give many would-be divorcees pause for thought (this deterrent being a deliberate aspect of the legislation), but it made it difficult to find people willing to testify. This was especially true of key witnesses whose livelihoods depended upon discretion, such as hotel managers and household staff. What was needed was an outside party willing to gather evidence and then take the stand in court. Enter the private detective.

  All the main detective agencies employed women to assist with inquiries. They could visit places where a man’s presence might be suspicious, to befriend landladies, eavesdrop on co-respondents or go undercover in factories and shops to investigate cases of pilfering and fraud. In 1894, the head of one of the largest detective agencies in London ran a special advertisement which appeared in the Sporting Times:14

  As it happened, Henry Slater wasn’t the pioneer he claimed to be, but then he wasn’t really Henry Slater either (or Captain Scott or any of the other aliases he used), as was revealed when he appeared before a magistrate on a conspiracy charge in 1904.15 He was a former legal clerk called George Tinsley, and the use of women detectives had been widespread for years. One case I found even predated the Matrimonial Causes Act. In 1854, Charles Frederick Field, a former inspector with the Metropolitan Police, was hired to gather evidence by a man suing his wife’s lover for damages in a ‘criminal conversation’ case.* Unable to gain access himself to the terraced house in Cheltenham where the trysts were thought to be taking place, Field installed a female employee as a cook in the adjacent house and gave her a special gimlet with which to bore a peephole in the adjoining wall.16

  All in all, it was a sordid business. But there was something about the freedom and excitement the work offered that seemed to attract a certain type of educated, middle-class woman. In 1892, the women’s journal Hearth and Home reported with dismay that it had received a number of letters enquiring about detective careers: ‘This reveals a very lamentable state of things. That there should be so many girls or women anxious to live upon the sins or misfortunes of their fellow-creatures is indeed a distressing situation.’ In a bid to deter its readers from pursuing such ‘objectionable’ employment, it had contacted a number of detective agencies and found that ‘the profession is overcrowded … one firm alone received eighteen hundred answers in response to a few advertisements for assistants.’17

  Hearth and Home also grudgingly reported that the pay for female detectives was between five and ten shillings a day – a reasonable wage if the work was regular. A lady detective speaking to Tit Bits magazine, however, suggested it was not. She explained that she was paid on results and ‘there are weeks which pass without our earning a sovereign.’18

  But these women were still satellites to the male world of sleuthing, still largely rummaging around in laundry baskets and reporting back to the men in charge. I wanted to find the real troublemakers, the women who answered to no man. Surely, in a profession that by its very nature attracted those with more maverick tendencies, some of them must have broken away to work on their own terms? That is, unless Maud West really was a one-off.

  Returning to The Times and other daily newspapers, I found that some women had indeed gone into business on their own. One of the most successful ventures was Moser’s Ladies Detective Agency, which had been set up in 1889 by Henry Slater’s greatest rival, the ex-Scotland Yard inspector Maurice Moser. This was an offshoot of Moser’s main business and he had installed at its head his mistress, Charlotte Antonia Williamson. After two sensational court cases with their respective spouses, during one of which Moser’s reputation was all but destroyed by Slater acting on behalf of Charlotte’s husband, the couple had split.19 But Charlotte continued as the head of the agency as ‘Antonia Moser’ before handing over the baton (and her name) to her daughter Margaret Williamson in 1908. The business struggled, however, and was eventually dissolved in 1916.20

  Other names, such as Margaret Cook and Grace Fielding, cropped up occasionally in news reports, but by the time the first full International Police and Detective Directory was published in 1922, only two out of the forty-five top detective agencies listed in Britain were run by women. One belonged to Maud West; the other to Kate Easton.

  Kate Easton was a good fifteen years older than Maud. She lived at Gray’s Inn, where there were solicitors and barristers galore to provide work, and had an office at the top of Shaftesbury Avenue. As far as I could tell, both women had set up their agencies in 1905, and each had a small army of male and female staff ready to do their bidding. For twenty years, their adverts battled it
out in the newspapers, jostling for the attention of readers in a ping-pong of superlatives and definite articles:

  Maud West – London’s Lady Detective

  Kate Easton – The Lady Detective

  Maud West – London’s Foremost Lady Detective

  Kate Easton – London’s Leading Woman in every Branch of Detective Work

  And so on.

  Maud won eventually, if only because Kate Easton retired in 1929. By then, of course, Maud had been sending photographs of herself to the press with the caption ‘London’s only lady detective’ for quite some time.

  Professional rivalry aside, both women had a lot to prove if they were to succeed. Detective work was a costly business and those who fell by the wayside appeared to do so mainly through bankruptcy. The work was well paid – for a week’s observation, Kate charged six guineas, with one typical investigation bringing in a total of £94, an amount many office clerks would have struggled to earn in a year21 – but a case could rack up substantial expenses with no guarantee of a successful outcome. Every detective had to deal with a quibbling client at some point. In 1912, for example, Kate Easton sued a woman who had hired her firm to watch an errant husband and then refused to pay on the grounds that someone had tipped him off that he was being followed.22

  The trick seemed to be keeping these non-paying customers to a minimum by maintaining a good reputation and the trust of a large pool of wealthy clients. Unfortunately, most of these clients were to be found in ‘good society’ – the very place where the detective’s work was publicly most reviled. All detectives, male or female, faced this dilemma, but Kate and Maud also had to face down the critics and naysayers who maintained that sleuthing was no job for a woman. Each had her own armour in this fierce battle for the hearts, minds and wallets of the British elite.