The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  It just all seemed so unlikely. But then, so had the disguise craze, and that had turned out to be true. Maybe disguising oneself wasn’t that difficult after all. I’d never really considered the mechanics of it. In fiction, heroes and villains tended to slope off one page only to reappear transformed on the next, but what about real life? How was it done?

  The best place to start, it seemed, was with Willy Clarkson, the ‘amusing, odd and fascinating little man’ who owned the theatrical outfitters that had featured alongside Maud in the Daily Mirror article.16 He was, without doubt, the best in the business and, due to a hunger for publicity that almost rivalled Maud’s, had left behind quite a body of material about the tricks of his trade.

  His list of theatrical clients read like a roll call of the best performers of the day: Sarah Bernhardt, Dame Nellie Melba, Enrico Caruso, Ellen Terry, Lily Langtry, Rudolph Valentino and so on. Other clients included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the royal family, two prime ministers and numerous members of the aristocracy. Detectives from Scotland Yard had used his services for decades, but he had also been the unwitting purveyor of wigs to Jack the Ripper and Maud’s erstwhile neighbour Dr Crippen.

  Willy had learned his trade in his father’s shop in Drury Lane, where Charles Dickens was a regular visitor. The author had immortalized Clarkson senior as the barber Poll Sweedlepipe in Martin Chuzzlewit. Even the family’s pet bullfinch had appeared in the novel and now lived on, albeit in stuffed form, on the top floor of Willy’s own Wardour Street shop.

  By all accounts, Willy was something of a hoarder. Sir John Gielgud recalled visiting Wardour Street as a young actor:

  Clarkson’s shop was rather spooky; poorly lit, with stained-glass windows on the steep stairs to the first floor, dusty and cluttered with suits of armour, weapons, play bills, masks – a positive Aladdin’s Cave of theatrical paraphernalia … Clarkson lurked in the recesses of the shop, but nearly always darted out when he heard the bell which rang as the front door was opened.17

  Somewhere amidst all the clutter, there must have been a dressing room where Willy and his staff worked their magic on the various customers who came to him for help with disguise. As Clarkson’s manager had explained to the Daily Mirror, this consisted mostly of ‘wigs, beards, moustaches and glasses, [although] not the “smoked” kind, which always makes you look at the wearer.’ The clergyman was the most popular disguise for men, he said, followed by the tramp, and then ‘someone who might be mistaken for a doctor or a barrister’. Despite the company’s record in aiding and abetting some of Britain’s finest murderers, he seemed unconcerned about the uses to which such disguises might be put: ‘the majority of our customers explain that they want to be disguised for the purposes of private theatricals.’18

  This was similar to the excuse that Maud said she used when buying a new wig: ‘In my wardrobe,’ she wrote in 1926, ‘I keep a flourishing stock of moustaches, beards and wigs; and I am positive that the wig-maker who creates a new “postiche” for me thinks I am one of the cleverest amateur actresses in London! In fact, he said to me one day: “My dear lady, you do get cast for a fine variety of parts, don’t you? What is it today? An elderly countrywoman with sparse grey hair? Yes – certainly; I can soon arrange that for you.”’19

  Was this wig-maker Willy Clarkson himself? Maybe. His shop was just a ten-minute stroll from Albion House, and he’d helped out lady detectives in the past. As one anonymous female sleuth had said in 1909, ‘Give me half an hour at Clarksons and you’ll not know me.’20 He was also famously bad with names, calling everyone a vague ‘darling’, and was used to dealing with strange requests with the utmost discretion.

  That said, little was considered strange at Clarkson’s. It was a place where inhibitions could be cast aside. One of the most common requests from female clients undertaking ‘private theatricals’ was to be transformed into a man. The staff had become quite expert at it, although, as the manager said, it was a difficult task: ‘You have to “pad” a lot to hide a woman’s figure.’

  Did this explain why Maud had seemed strangely plump to me when I had first seen a photograph of her in disguise? It wasn’t just strapping that was concealing her bust under that wool jacket; she’d essentially been upholstered. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that if she found long skirts a nuisance, running around in a padded suit didn’t sound particularly comfortable, either.

  Nor did all the bits and pieces that needed to be glued to a person to affect a disguise. The Daily Mirror journalist had tried out three of Clarkson’s most popular looks. The clergyman was simple and only took five minutes: ‘Clerical attire, a little tuft of greyish whisker on each cheek bone, blackened eyebrows, and a couple of lines on each side of the mouth …’ The tramp took fifteen, as it included the addition of nose paste, a kind of putty which had to be welded onto the face and then blended with greasepaint. Finally, he became a ‘typical Belgian’, which seemed to involve little more than a crepe beard and moustache and an alteration to the parting of his hair. I could almost hear Poirot’s little sniff of disgust.

  To test each disguise, the journalist popped out for a quick walk, and the Daily Mirror duly reported that ‘In none of his roles did he attract the slightest attention or curiosity on the part of people in the vicinity of Piccadilly.’ Going by the accompanying photographs, however, I could only assume that it had been a particularly foggy day.

  Yet there was some evidence that suggested a Clarkson’s disguise could stand up to pretty close scrutiny. In February 1910, the young Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen), her brother Adrian and the artist Duncan Grant had joined two other friends in an audacious hoax masterminded by the lifelong prankster Horace de Vere Cole. Their target was the Royal Navy’s new state-of-the-art battleship, HMS Dreadnought. Willy Clarkson had provided the disguises, transforming Virginia and her friends into Abyssinian princes with the help of dark greasepaint, elaborate robes, false beards and moustaches. The group then set off on the midday train to Dorset, where the Dreadnought was at anchor. As they made their way to the coast, an accomplice sent a telegram to the Commander of the Home Fleet:

  Prince Makalen and suite arrive 4.20 pm today Weymouth … Kindly arrange meet them on arrival. Regret short notice forgot wire …21

  The result of the ensuing scramble at Weymouth was a credit to the Royal Navy, who greeted the party with full pomp and ceremony. After the band had played the British and Abyssinian national anthems, the group were treated to a tour of the ship by officers in full dress uniform, with Adrian Stephen acting as ‘interpreter’, mixing passages from Ovid with a smattering of Swahili and Greek. When a rising breeze threatened to send their moustaches flying, the group beat a hasty retreat back to London, but no one suspected a hoax until Cole leaked the story to the newspapers a few days later.22

  The Dreadnought hoax highlighted an aspect of human psychology I had overlooked, namely that people see what they expect to see. The Royal Navy had been told to welcome a group of foreign dignitaries, and that was who they piped on board. Had I fallen into a similar trap and been led astray by the absurdity of Maud’s publicity photographs and more fantastical stories? Of course she hadn’t spent weeks living in London’s Chinatown disguised as one of its native inhabitants or hobnobbed in high society as ‘a titled Englishman’,23 but, as I looked more closely at some of the articles she had written, without mischief in mind, I realized that there might be at least some truth to her claims.

  In these more earnest moments, Maud could be surprisingly pragmatic about the use of disguise in detective work. In 1924, for example, she acknowledged that she worked as part of a team and if a case required a man to undertake some street surveillance she preferred to send an actual man to do the job.24 Being a woman, however, had its own advantages. ‘Generally, I start off as myself,’ she said in 1938, ‘because few wrong-doers suspect a middle-aged woman to be on their tracks.’25 Even in her younger days, she admitted that ‘most of my success as a detective is due to th
e fact that I do not look like one.’26

  That said, a simple costume could open many doors, whether they led to the scullery of a Mayfair mansion with the aid of a housemaid’s apron or into East End hovels via the navy serge cape and bicycle of a district nurse.27 As Maud discovered, the latter ran the risk of being hailed to help with childbirth and patching up broken bones,28 but, she said, a woman detective must be able to turn her hand to ‘anything and everything … She must be able to be Lady X for five minutes and Nurse So-and-so the next.’29

  The list of female roles Maud said she had undertaken herself was certainly wide ranging:

  actress, factory hand, flower girl, fortune teller, gold digger, gypsy, housemaid, millionairess, mother’s help, opium addict, parlourmaid, scrubwoman, secretary, shop girl, vamp, waitress

  One of her favourites was that of a journalist in search of copy, which gave her ‘a ready excuse for my presence in an unlikely spot at an unlikely hour.’30

  Even when there was a chance she might be recognized, the false moustaches usually stayed in the cupboard in favour of simpler methods. In 1914, she said, ‘Dressing one’s hair differently makes a great difference; darkening the eyebrows and lashes; a little rouge on the cheeks and lips, and there you are!’31 By 1938, she had simplified this even further: ‘Sometimes I alter the shape of my face merely by pushing a piece of orange peel beneath my upper lip.’32

  Maud wasn’t the only detective to use fruit in this way, as I discovered when I stumbled across Crook Pie, a book of essays on criminology from 1927. It was written by John Goodwin, who had been an Assistant Provost Marshal for the Military Police during the First World War and had subsequently undertaken work for the intelligence services, Scotland Yard and private inquiry agencies. Crook Pie contained a chapter on private detectives, as did his earlier book Sidelights on Criminal Matters. As the latter had a foreword by Sir Basil Thompson, Director of Intelligence at the Home Office and formerly head of the CID at Scotland Yard, I decided Goodwin was a source to be trusted.

  ‘During the whole time I was engaged in police and Secret Service work,’ he wrote, ‘I rarely saw a disguise used.’33 But, he said, it was a different matter when it came to private detectives, for one simple reason:

  Their method of working practically compels it at times, because, whereas when the official police are ‘shadowing’ a person several detectives work together, the private detective has to work alone. He thus runs a greater risk of being recognised by his quarry; and once he has been recognised he might as well go home.34

  He described various simple ways they disguised themselves, including Maud’s fruit-based method:

  A fig inserted in each cheek will ‘fatten’ a thin face, while a third pressed against the palate will even disguise the voice. A little pad of cotton wool on each shoulder will raise them and this will, in itself, make a world of difference, while a little lead shot placed in one boot or both will alter one’s gait or produce a definite limp …35

  None of the techniques Goodwin described required much preparation or elaborate costume, so where did this leave Maud’s insistence that she could pass well as a man and that she did so regularly?

  She certainly had good reason for doing so, not just for the anonymity it afforded or to gain access to male-dominated spaces, but for her personal safety. Being a woman rendered her ‘liable to annoyances of all kinds, from the bounder, the drunken man, and so on.’36 In male clothing, she explained, ‘I was more likely to be free from molestation.’37

  Did I believe her? She had the right build for it. As she said herself, her broad shoulders and large features lent themselves easily to male disguise.38 The key was being able to adopt the correct stance and an ‘easy, confident manner.’39

  These more sober statements on the matter suggested that – away from the camera, at least – Maud didn’t rely on the kind of disguise one could buy from Willy Clarkson. There was no nose paste or greasepaint involved; her approach was far more subtle, and it resulted from years of practice.

  ‘The ability to act and to impersonate other characters is absolutely necessary,’ she said, explaining that she could alter her face ‘quite easily by simply adopting another expression for the time being, and without using any sort of make-up whatsoever.’40 She also knew how to disguise her voice: ‘after considerable practice I think I am able to imitate the tones of the majority of women, and many men, sufficiently closely to pull off the business I want to.’41

  I could imagine her practising. Any woman bloody-minded enough to fight her way to the top of a male profession surely also had the willpower to spend hours in front of the mirror perfecting a manly gait or an arthritic shuffle or doing vocal exercises to extend the range of her voice. By her own accounts, her perseverance paid off. She mentioned one prospective client who refused to believe that she could transform her appearance sufficiently for the job in hand, so Maud arranged to meet her that evening at a restaurant:

  When I approached and greeted her in the entrance hall I had so changed my appearance that she became indignant and insisted I had mistaken her for someone else. When I assured her that there was no mistake she was still sceptical; then finally I told her who I was and she could scarcely believe her eyes. All through dinner she kept saying to me: ‘Well, I should never have believed it possible!’42

  Maybe Maud’s wig-maker wasn’t so far off the mark in thinking she was one of the cleverest amateur actresses in London. The only difference was that her stage was London. She even had a stage name – Maud West – and, through the pages of the popular press, she was writing her own reviews.

  A very clever actress, indeed.

  Somewhere waiting in the wings, however, was the woman I really wanted to meet: Edith Elliott. I’d had a small breakthrough in that regard. Whilst exploring the possibility that private detectives were used to track down absconders under the Cat and Mouse Act (I found no evidence either way), I’d come across an article from 1909 about the suffragette Laura Ainsworth, one of the movement’s earliest hunger-strikers. She was suing the Home Secretary for assault after being force-fed in prison and, although the details of her ordeal were gruesomely familiar, what really caught my eye was the name of her barrister: Mr George Elliott KC.43 Could this be one of Edith’s relatives? Her father, even?

  Further investigation showed that Mr Elliott was one of the most renowned and popular defence barristers of his time. Widespread obituaries after his death in 1916 listed various celebrated cases he had defended. His clients were ‘the cream of criminal classes’ and had included a number of very imaginative murderers. The Daily Mirror also published a photograph which showed him to have a round face and wide nose – just like Edith – and noted that he had once joked that ‘most of his clients had died violent deaths.’44 Could laughing in the face of moral complexity be a family trait?

  The Times said he was fifty-six when he died, so he was about the right age. Furthermore, he had left behind two sons and three daughters. Unfortunately, when I dug deeper, I found that he’d got married relatively late in life and his three daughters were all too young to be Maud. Still, there was always the possibility of unmentioned offspring from an earlier marriage, and he also had various brothers, uncles and cousins for me to check out. With a rare enthusiasm, I fired up my family-tree software and got to work.

  The Diamond Necklace

  BY MAUD WEST

  A few years ago I went down to a great country-house where there was a big gathering of many well-known men and women in society. A diamond necklace had been stolen from a lady; the matter had been kept very quiet and no one except the lady in question and the host and hostess knew anything about the affair.

  I was introduced as a guest, and, of course, no one in the house had the least idea that I was not one. My hostess was quite frank with me regarding the whole matter. She told me that she did not suspect any of the servants, and could only come to the conclusion that it was one of the guests, and she mentioned the name
of one and the reason for her suspicion. I asked for a list of the names of the guests, and saw among them the name of a certain gentleman upon whom my suspicions at once fastened; for I knew, though, of course, his hostess did not, that a similar offence had been brought home to him some years back. He was not, I may say, the person whom the lady of the house suspected.

  My suspicions were further confirmed when that night this gentleman told his hostess that he would have to depart the next day. I left directly after he did, for I determined to shadow him, and it was most important that I should not lose sight of him for a moment for the next couple of days.

  I had, of course, to disguise myself. In order to do this I walked to the railway-station, which was about a mile from the house. I carried a small handbag and effected my disguise in a disused cottage by the roadside. I reached the station a few minutes in advance of the gentleman I suspected, and went up to London in the same train with him. Three hours after arriving in London I succeeded in obtaining conclusive proof that he had stolen the necklace. I followed him to a pawnshop and on his leaving it, ascertained that he had pawned the diamond necklace for £200.