The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  He was not prosecuted, but I believe he had to leave the country.45

  Chapter Five

  The Shadow in the House

  It is of the greatest importance that a client should know, when engaging a private detective, that confidence is being reposed in the right person.

  Maud West, 19151

  Suffragettes were cropping up a lot in my research – first with Kate Easton, then the disguise craze and now George Elliott KC – so it was hardly surprising that Maud, too, had tales to tell. She first mentioned the subject on the record on 23 May 1913, barely a month after the Cat and Mouse Act received royal assent and just weeks before Emily Davison was trampled beneath the hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. ‘I have had practically all my staff employed at big social functions during the last six weeks,’ she told a journalist. ‘Hostesses have shown me letters they have received threatening damage to their property, and without a doubt there is a very bad “scare” in Mayfair and Belgravia.’2

  The nation had been feeling the effects of campaigns against the government by the WSPU and the Women’s Freedom League for some time, but with a new suffrage bill before the House of Commons the WSPU had recently entered a new phase of guerrilla warfare aimed at the population at large. This campaign, Emmeline Pankhurst stated, ‘would stop short only at attacks upon human life.’3 Her army of women set fire to postboxes, destroyed golf courses, poured purple dye into a water reservoir, severed telephone lines and smashed windows, all the while leaving a string of notes in their wake with the simple message:

  VOTES FOR WOMEN

  Maud had experience of these notes herself. At one evening reception at a peer’s home, she said, a picture had been badly damaged: ‘The canvas was cut with a blunt knife, and “Votes for Women” was written on a piece of paper found on the floor.’ At another party, a rare piece of tapestry was slashed beyond repair. The WSPU would explain this tactic the following year after an attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, by suggesting that it gave the painting ‘a human and historic interest’ and ‘new value as a national treasure.’4

  As for Maud’s own vandals, suspicion was everywhere. Some said they were militants who snuck into parties uninvited, although Maud thought it more likely that they were normal guests ‘strongly in sympathy with the suffragettes.’ Or was it the staff? ‘At an entertainment a few days ago,’ she said, ‘I was instructed to keep a special watch on two of the maids, whose sympathy with the suffragettes had been more ardently than discreetly expressed.’5

  That summer, Maud also mentioned that she had been asked to keep an eye on townhouses whilst their owners retreated to the countryside.6 This was understandable. The WSPU had developed quite a taste for empty buildings. That July, for example, the Sunlight Soap baronet Sir William Lever would return from a visit to Knowsley Hall, where Lord Derby was entertaining the King and Queen, to find his home near Bolton razed to the ground. A small portmanteau containing a note and suffragette literature was found nearby.7

  I suspected, however, that Maud offloaded the work of house-sitting onto her staff. When it came to looking after her upper-class clients, surely there was far more fun to be had by joining them at their weekend parties in the country? That was, after all, the stuff of classic detective fiction: a country house, a sleuth, a gathering of strangers. Who knew what could happen?

  The answer, as it turned out, was very little that would make it into a crime novel. Maud claimed to have found all manner of things in country houses, from stashes of stolen jewels to a factory for printing banknotes,8 but there were no bloody corpses and the only locked room I’d found so far was the one containing the great detective herself whilst her rival tracked down the suicidal ‘Mr A’. The country-house setting did, however, offer her the opportunity to give her literary talents full rein:

  It was night. I waited in the shadow of some trees, through which the moon shone and made eerie outlines. I heard a twig crack. I held my breath. Next moment I got a terrible shock. Someone had come behind me, and before I realised what was happening a figure of a man dived upon me and pinned me down. I struggled free, drew my automatic, and fired, wounding the man in the leg.9

  The man was a burglar who was subsequently carried into the house for more traditional justice to prevail. Or so she said. In one of her less melodramatic moods, she admitted that the work was usually more mundane:

  I may have to watch a lady who has been suspected of stealing some of her hostess’s valuables, or I may be commissioned to find out if one of the party is cheating at cards, or I may have to obtain evidence to be used in a divorce case or action for slander.

  That private detectives were regularly employed by large estates was confirmed by an anonymous retired valet writing in Pearson’s Weekly in 1912. ‘It may seem a rather shabby and mean sort of thing for a gentleman to employ detectives in the guise of servants to spy on his guests,’ he wrote, ‘but it is sometimes necessary.’10

  One example the valet gave came from his time in service with a Member of Parliament, who enjoyed hosting long weekend parties for the political elite at his country residence, an enjoyment that was dimmed somewhat when things started to go missing: first a diamond ring and then a carved ivory statuette. Two detectives were drafted in to act as footmen at the next gathering. Nothing happened over the weekend, but as the guests were preparing to leave on the Monday morning the detectives saw one of the guests, a well-connected political agent, take a valuable snuff box from one of the drawing rooms. After being summoned to the library, the valet said, ‘The guest tried to bluff the matter out, but after a bit of “plain” talk from the master, he admitted having taken it, and also confessed that his wife had stolen the ring and the ivory statuette.’ The pair soon left the country.

  Maud had her own snuffbox story, which I found making its way around the European press in the summer of 1913. She was often asked, she said, to keep an eye on guests who were known kleptomaniacs. One was a wealthy woman who only ever stole snuffboxes and when she was invited to the party of a friend who had a particularly fine collection of old French specimens, her hostess took the precaution of hiring Maud to keep an eye on her. There were no fancy uniforms or gatherings in the library for Maud, however. She simply positioned herself outside the room containing the boxes all evening and when the woman tried to enter she engaged her in a long and tedious chat. The woman was eager to escape. ‘But I didn’t relent,’ Maud wrote, ‘so she fled the room containing the temptations empty-handed.’11

  Kleptomania had first been identified as a psychological disorder in the early nineteenth century, but over time – perhaps in response to department stores’ experiences with shoplifting – it had transformed into a ‘disease’ that mainly affected upper-class women. Theories about its cause ranged from sexual repression to congenital criminality, although not everyone was convinced it existed at all. In 1907, one unnamed lady detective declared, ‘Kleptomania is nonsense.’ The true source of such thieving, she said, was to be found in high society’s fondness for drink, drugs, and, above all, ostentatious materialism:

  Society women, frenzied with the desire to outdo one another, will resort to tricks of dishonesty to which a servant would never stoop. The very superiority of culture and intelligence will impel an educated woman to venture upon a daring scheme that a poor servant would not have the brains or courage to plot much less to execute.12

  I suspected that Matilda Mitchell and her store detectives would have had something to say about the capabilities of the lower orders when it came to cunning schemes, but whether it was genuine kleptomania or plain old larceny, protecting property kept private detectives busy. Any big social gathering, Maud said, would attract thieves, but summer garden parties were the ideal target: ‘When all the guests are outdoors, the thief enters the house on the pretext of wanting to take a look inside, and ideally pilfers small yet valuable items.’13

  Each year, she said, she went to one particular ga
rden party with a dozen assistants dressed as maids who helped with serving tea whilst keeping an eye on nimble-fingered guests. These thieves, she said, were either ‘typically shady characters’ that had somehow wormed their way into well-to-do circles or ‘themselves aristocrats who are in dire financial straits and can think of no alternative to stealing.’14

  The aristocracy was undoubtedly beginning to feel the pinch. Increased taxation, reforms to the House of Lords and falling land prices were just some of the things nibbling away at their lives of leisured luxury: during the twentieth century, around 1,500 stately homes would be demolished due to lack of funds for their upkeep. But Maud suggested that the financial difficulties which prompted aristocratic guests to sneak their hosts’ knick-knacks off to the pawnshop didn’t arise from leaking roofs or the need to shore up the north tower. ‘In most cases,’ she said, ‘it is gambling debts that drive them to such a desperate position.’15

  High-stakes gambling had long been a favoured pastime of the upper classes. By 1910, the games of choice were poker, baccarat and bridge, although, as Lady Wolseley said in 1911, ‘there have been so many bridge scandals that one is not surprised to find the game going out of fashion.’16

  I imagined such scandals taking place after dinner, all port and cigars and manly bravado, but the evidence suggested that many of the culprits were women. As one private detective explained in 1908, ‘It is no uncommon thing for ladies to go to afternoon tea nowadays in order to play bridge, at which large sums of money are won and lost.’17

  He described how the hostess of one such regular gathering had approached his firm, convinced something was amiss after she lost nearly £3,000. ‘Here, then,’ he said, ‘was a case in which a woman detective, if any, alone could be used.’ Accordingly, he sent one of his female employees, herself a keen bridge player, to join the party. Over the course of several afternoons, she identified the cheat. ‘Needless to say,’ he concluded, ‘the money was returned and the guilty woman’s company barred in a good many houses after that.’

  Such work also kept Maud – and her dressmaker – busy. One of the perks of being a lady detective, it seemed, was having a large collection of evening wear on hand for when one had to pose as the friend of a client. ‘My dress bills for this purpose amount to a good sum in a year,’ she said, ‘and I have to constantly renew my wardrobe, for I must take a care to appear but seldom in the same frock or gown.’18

  She recalled one occasion on which she had to rummage through that wardrobe at short notice:

  I simply received a telephone message in the morning from Mrs— to say that she wanted me to come to her house that evening at seven o’clock and to stay to dinner. When I got to the house my client informed me that she wanted me to watch a certain Mr— when he was playing cards after dinner.

  … After dinner the party adjourned to the drawing-room and began to play poker. I did not join the game, and neither did my hostess. To make a long story short, I watched the game for nearly four hours before I discovered the gentleman in an actual act of cheating. What he did was to slip some cards from the bottom and middle of the pack to the top when taking up the cards to deal, and being a finished card-manipulator, he could do this so quickly that no one who was not watching him very closely could possibly detect him.19

  When confronted by his hostess, the man confessed to having cheated on eight other occasions and promised to refund the £1,100 he had swindled from various members of the party during the previous month.

  Not all card sharps went so willingly. Society was still bristling with the echoes of the famous Baccarat Case of 1891 in which Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, had been dragged into a slander action that arose out of an accusation of cheating. Of the cheat himself, the Scottish baronet Sir William Gordon-Cumming, The Times intoned, ‘He has committed a mortal offence. Society can know him no more.’20 Sir William was dismissed from the army, forced to resign from his London clubs, and spent the remaining thirty-nine years of his life as a social outcast.

  Social ostracism was apparently the penalty for offending the moral codes of high society. Maud, the retired valet and the anonymous private detectives had all mentioned it. The upper classes may have been largely responsible for creating the laws and institutions that kept the wider populace in check, but when it came to their own affairs, it seemed that they preferred to deal with matters in-house. Whether it was pilfering snuffboxes, cheating at cards or something worse, the sentence was social death. Well-born wrongdoers were banished, if not to the colonies, then to the Continent, which in many eyes was just as bad. As Maud herself wrote:

  [Society scandals] never or rarely see the light of the Law Courts; they simply end in the disappearance of some of the chief figures in them from the social world. Occasionally you may catch a reflection of some of these society dramas in some such announcement in the press that Lord— or Mrs.— has sold or let his – or her – house in town and intends living abroad for the next few years.21

  On checking the newspapers, there were indeed suspiciously few reports of toff-on-toff crimes. Some of the other scandals I came across, however, shed a little more light on the breadth of work undertaken by private detectives in high society.

  In 1906, for example, Lady Gwendolen Cecil, daughter of the third Marquess of Salisbury, employed a private detective to gather evidence for a libel case against a woman who had been distributing pamphlets which claimed that Lady Gwendolen had secretly given birth to an illegitimate daughter some years previously. The woman, a former organist at the Cecil family estate, alleged that the father was the estate chaplain and that she had been coerced into raising the child as her own.22 Her claims were demolished in court.

  Another brief scandal erupted in 1912 when it was discovered that badges for admission to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, highly sought after and non-transferable due to the vetting process, were being sold on. Viscount Churchill, who was in charge of the Royal Enclosure, hired a female detective to befriend the society lady thought to be responsible. After a few meetings, telegrams and a pleasant drive to Ascot, the detective successfully acquired a badge and spent the day in the Royal Enclosure – ‘where, I hope,’ Churchill’s barrister said when the matter came to court, ‘she enjoyed herself.’ The lady running the racket was merely served with an injunction and her anonymity, in the press at least, was preserved.23

  In general, however, the upper classes managed to keep a tight lid on their affairs. They were aided in this not just by private detectives but also by the press. Although anything that emerged in court was considered fair game, the newspapers usually steered clear of the private lives of the elite in exchange for glamorous yet benign snippets for the society pages. There were also England’s strict libel laws to contend with, so when gossip did appear, for example in the higher-class weeklies such as the Bystander, it was phrased in such a way as to be impenetrable to those not already in the know.

  Such gentlemen’s agreements had served all parties well for years, but in January 1911 a letter in The Times suggested that this was about to change. It came from an anonymous ‘householder’ whose butler, on placing an advertisement for a new position, had received the following reply from an American journalist calling herself Harriet:

  Noting your advertisement in the Morning Post I shall be pleased to hear from you if you have half an hour to spare once or twice a week and would care to turn it into cash by writing me a long, gossipy letter about the well-known people in English Society who stay in the houses where you are employed. I pay liberally and settle each month for the letters received the previous one.24

  ‘Harriet’ suggested that the butler could ‘double or treble’ his salary in this way, and included a list of society names of particular interest to her. A postscript enquired whether he had any friends amongst the staff of leading London clubs or hotels. A few days later, a West End physician claimed to have received a similar letter asking for ‘racy stories’ about his patients, ‘advance rumours of
any cause célèbre, divorce, &c.’ and details of ‘the financial shifts and difficulties of any well-known people.’25 Another was sent to the eighteen-year-old daughter of a peer with a special request for information ‘à propos of the rumoured intention of King George and Queen Mary to discourage the reception of American nouveaux riches in English Society.’26

  The impertinence of these requests hit a nerve. The letters page of The Times was aflame. Was ‘Harriet’ a hoax? Some thought so; others clearly believed every word. A butler from Park Lane weighed in to complain about the besmirching of his profession; another correspondent tried to steer the debate towards the upper classes’ ‘perfectly sickening’ habit of posing for press photographs, whilst the secretary of the Secret Commissions and Bribery Prevention League sought information about similar journalists so that they might be prosecuted for the attempted corruption of the humble British servant.27 The American newspaperman and literary agent Albert Curtis Brown made a valiant attempt to defend his stateside colleagues, only to be shot down by an English journalist who pointed out that Brown himself had traded in unsubstantiated gossip about the royal family on a number of occasions.

  The most interesting response, however, came from an anonymous correspondent who wasn’t convinced that ‘Harriet’ worked for the press at all. He quoted her desire for information about ‘financial shifts and difficulties’ and said:

  I cannot help thinking that the last few words contain the pith of the whole matter, and that the information obtained in this way is placed at the service of the well-organized systems of spying and sneaking called private inquiry agents whose subscribers are West-end money-lenders and others who find it profitable to make themselves acquainted with the private affairs of people of some social and professional standing … This must be better business than selling information to American papers.28