The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  Nowhere was this more evident than in the area around Waterloo Station, or ‘Whoreterloo’ as it became known.4 There, hordes of girls followed soldiers fresh off the trains from France, promising good times under the railway arches and in pay-by-the-hour boarding houses. The police were used to dealing with prostitution in the area, which had been a red-light district for decades, but this was different. Many of these newcomers were very young, and nor were they asking for payment.

  Such ‘khaki fever’ wasn’t just restricted to London. Similar reports came in from all over the country, wherever army camps and civilians collided. Despite much hand-wringing and moral panic, at first no one quite knew what to do about it. In the background, however, two competing factions of middle-class women were mustering, each sensing an opportunity to further their own aims.

  In one corner was Louise Creighton, widow of the former Bishop of London, and the National Union of Women Workers, seeking to uphold moral and social purity through their Voluntary Women Patrols (VWP). In the other was Margaret Damer Dawson and a group of ex-militant suffragettes, whose more feminist agenda was to ease women into permanent police work via their military-inspired Women Police Volunteers (WPV). Damer Dawson would soon break away from the WPV to create a third group, the Women Police Service (WPS). Between them, they trained thousands of volunteers, who spread out in towns and cities and put an end to any amorous activity they encountered either through direct intervention or, more simply, by their libido-crushing presence.

  The first official recognition that women could be effective law enforcers, however, came in August 1915 when Edith Smith, a thirty-five-year-old former midwife and WPS volunteer, was sworn in as Britain’s first female police constable. Her remit was to address the problems of promiscuity surrounding the army camp at Belton Park in Lincolnshire on behalf of the Grantham police, a task she undertook with rigorous efficiency over the next three years. Despite the reservations of the Home Office, other police forces soon followed suit and hired WPS volunteers to do similar work, most notably in munitions factories.

  Few, however, were given the powers of arrest that Constable Smith enjoyed and, as their numbers increased, a debate broke out regarding their suitability for the work. Were they capable of dealing with drunken servicemen? Was it decent for them to give evidence in court about homosexual acts they had witnessed in Hyde Park?5

  In 1916, the Daily Express contacted Maud for her views on the qualities women could bring to Scotland Yard if they were ever let through the doors. She said that a ‘clever woman’ would have the essentials of ‘keen intuition and tact’, but added that few who applied to her proved fit for the work. It demanded such a range of personal attributes – ‘very robust health, a quick intellect, sympathy, tact, and a large amount of self-reliance’ – that they were rarely found in one person. The desirability of foreign-language skills and some knowledge of the law drained the pool of suitable candidates even further.6

  In time, Maud would have more to say on the topic of women in the police, but during the war her hands were full with her own wartime work, so the debate raged on without her. Establishing precisely what that work involved, however, proved trickier than expected.

  In April 1918, the London Evening News ran a two-part exposé of gambling in the West End, which it described as ‘the most fattening of war trades’ and ‘a cleverly organised robbery business’. Chemin de fer – a form of baccarat – was the game of choice, but that was all London’s backstreet saloons had in common with the smart baize tables of Nice or Monte Carlo. Here, with the blinds drawn and harsh electric lights glaring overhead, distinctions between night and day became meaningless, encouraging the clientele to play on past the point of exhaustion. Drinks might be spiked with drugs to excite, calm or incapacitate depending on the fortunes of the house, whilst resident card sharps ensured that even the most clear-headed gambler had ‘less chance than if he or she went on to the stage to upset the professional illusionist.’7

  At particular risk were young officers, often fresh out of school and brimming with a fateful combination of bravado and naivety. To make matters worse, The Times reported, many of the touts who lured these young men off the streets were working hand in glove with unscrupulous moneylenders, whose printed circulars paid particular attention to ‘young men with expectations’.8

  Maud’s own experience of the wartime gambling scene came about, she said, when friends of two such victims approached her to identify and expose the ‘vultures’ who were running a number of clubs in the backstreets of Piccadilly. To achieve this, she turned to her box of disguises to blend in with the gambling crowd. After sleeping during the day, she would emerge into the night as a man called ‘Jimmy’ or slink forth as a gold-digging temptress, moving from club to club, gathering evidence as she went:

  Time and time again I tricked youngsters befuddled with drink at critical moments. Many of them must have wondered the following day when their minds had cleared of their orgy of drinking what had become of their companion and the ‘fair charmer’ of the previous evening.

  She was keen to point out, however, that it was not an enjoyable task:

  At this period I learned more of the vileness with which human nature can be associated than I had ever before experienced. Only constant alertness enabled me to get out of some of the most horrible and difficult situations unscathed … the men one met in such places were unlikely to have much pity if they discovered my identity.

  For protection, she wore some rather unusual accessories:

  I never doubted the efficiency of a small but very useful revolver, or a certain dress ornament which contained a tiny but spiteful stiletto. Furthermore I always carried on a bangle two detachable beads composed of a soluble narcotic. With these I could promptly dope the drink of any too embarrassing suitor. On one occasion only did I find it necessary to lose one of my bangle beads. My armoury, I am glad to say, was never in action.9

  She soon discovered that many of the touts employed to introduce young soldiers to these clubs were members of the armed forces themselves – some of high rank – who had desk jobs in London. ‘Familiar with army routine and customs, and naturally quick in judgement,’ she wrote, ‘these uniformed pests were able, by the use of a few appropriate phrases, to secure their acceptance as “Hail fellows, well met.”’

  Her method of identifying these men was simple. She took note of any military men in the clubs ‘whose spending capacity was suspiciously unlimited’ and then arranged for them to be trailed. Once she had gathered enough information, she sent the evidence to the military authorities and ‘the whole crowd suddenly found themselves drafted for active services.’ The civilians who ran the dens, she said, received long terms of imprisonment.

  I didn’t believe a word of it. Deadly jewellery? Vamping it up around teenage boys? A smooth-talking alter ego called Jimmy? Maud may have had some experience of wartime gambling dens, but surely not like this.

  Her next wartime story got off to a better start, with a statement that was undoubtedly true:

  My staff at this time had been reduced, some being on active service and others carrying out duties of national importance.10

  Many businesses struggled during the war as experienced and valued staff signed up to fight. Private inquiry agencies, however, suffered a double blow. As a major employer of retired police officers, they also had to contend with many of their remaining staff being recalled to former duties on the beat. So few detectives were left, in fact, that the newly formed British Detectives Association was forced to suspend its meetings.11 As she had not been invited to join this male enclave, presumably Maud was unconcerned about this particular development, but she was finding the strain of increased work ‘almost intolerable’.

  ‘To avoid a breakdown,’ she continued, ‘I went to the east coast to recuperate.’ It seemed a strange choice of destination, considering the German bombardments of Scarborough and Great Yarmouth, but a spa guide from the time assured
me that it was just the place for a little rest and relaxation. Cromer, for example, had an excellent climate – ‘bracing, dry, and invigorating’ – and the serene landscape of ‘cliff, moor and wooded dell’ was a balm to frazzled minds.12

  Unfortunately, her plans for a quiet seaside holiday never materialized. She’d barely had time to unpack her bathing suit before she was approached by ‘a certain authority’ to undertake a secret commission: ‘My job was to track down, if possible, the cause for certain leakages of information connected with war operations.’

  For the first few days and nights, she kept close watch on various buildings in the town before selecting one – ‘a well-known mental home’ – for closer examination. With the help of her new government friends, she was soon admitted as a patient suffering from the strain of war work. ‘After being there a few days,’ she wrote, ‘I noticed that the doctor in charge was certainly not the type of man who should have nervous cases under his care.’ He happened to be foreign, but it was his angry outbursts and fits of irritability which were of most concern to Maud. These, she observed, occurred only when patients were upstairs: ‘I was forced to the conclusion that something up there was causing him anxiety.’ The very top floor was out of bounds, so naturally she made a beeline for it at the first opportunity:

  Creeping upstairs in the early hours of the morning and going to the door of the room facing the sea-front, I brought out a special key. With a feeling of satisfaction I felt the levers of the lock slip back. Cautiously opening the door, I found the room in comparative darkness, but the friendly light of the moon revealed all I wanted to see. There, on a long bench, was an ingeniously camouflaged and completely equipped wireless transmitter and receiving set.

  She tiptoed out of the building to report her discovery and stayed to watch as the doctor and his chief assistant were bundled quietly into a car and whisked away into custody.

  This wasn’t the only tale Maud told of her encounters with enemy agents. There was the Chelsea artist, of course, but also a case in which she exposed a network of German spies posing as commercial travellers for a Dutch import firm. The firm had contacted Maud to undertake a week’s surveillance on each of its twenty salesmen. It was a suspiciously large commission, so Maud had contacted a colleague in Holland to make inquiries. She received in return a report on the true nature of the export firm, and decided to play ‘a little game’ of her own:

  The gentleman who had interviewed me on behalf of the firm was no doubt laughing up his sleeve at the gullibility of an English woman detective who was obliging him by reporting on his spies … So I called in my secretary and dictated a series of reports on the different agents, which showed them to have been indulging in the most fatuous activities, after which I was able to leave the whole thing in the hands of the right people to deal with …13

  It didn’t take me long to establish that these tales were all complete fiction. Firstly, there was the small matter of the Official Secrets Act, which would have prohibited the publication of any genuine account of such work. More damning, however, was the evidence I found in various declassified MI5 files held at the National Archives.14 The enemy agents described therein were an eclectic bunch, and although a number had indeed masqueraded as travelling salesmen hawking all manner of non-existent goods, from cigars to Peruvian sardines, not one ran a psychiatric hospital or went around seducing naval officers.

  Furthermore, the files revealed that due to counter-espionage measures put in place before the war, there were very few spies to be found in Britain at all: only thirty-one were captured on British soil between 1914 and 1917. Maud claimed to have caught twenty-three. It seemed unlikely that she had personally outwitted three-quarters of Britain’s known spy population without a mention in the history books, but I thought it wise to check the accompanying list of payments to secret service staff and informants, anyway. She wasn’t there.

  To give Maud her due, there may have been a shortage of real spies, but imaginary ones were to be found in abundance. As soon as war was declared, the ever-present distrust of ‘the other’ had gone into overdrive and curtains twitched across the land as patriotic souls scrutinized the behaviour of their neighbours. Fanning the flames of this ‘spy mania’ were the likes of William Le Queux, a writer with a long history of xenophobic scaremongering.

  Sitting in his country pile in Devon, Le Queux was determined that the people should know exactly what they were up against. ‘I am no alarmist,’ he wrote in the introduction to German Spies in England. ‘This is no work of fiction, but of solid and serious fact.’15 He claimed to be an expert on German espionage due to years of research for the invasion fantasy novels that had made him famous and even had the ‘displeasure’ of including a number of enemy agents on his Christmas card list. He told of gun emplacements disguised as tennis courts, hidden wireless stations signalling to German submarines, and foreign-born governesses, porters, prostitutes and businessmen all conspiring to bring Britain down through their ‘dastardly work’. It was such a hit that his publishers could barely keep up with demand.

  Pitted against Le Queux and his fellow doom-mongers were more rational minds. The journalist Sidney Felstead, for example, was given access to secret-service files at the end of the war to produce a factual account of how Britain dealt with its unwelcome visitors.16 It was hoped that Spies At Bay would put an end to the myths once and for all, but the sober reality of intelligence gathering and postal censorship could never compete in the popular mind with tales of widespread peril. The idea of the enemy within was so firmly embedded, in fact, that Maud could still provoke a quiet thrill over a decade later when she recounted her wartime adventures to the readers of the Sunday Dispatch.

  So that was that – or so I thought. I had packed away all my papers relating to Maud’s wartime adventures when my father called. He wasn’t unfamiliar with the world of intelligence, having done time at GCHQ, and was now studying First World War history with the Open University during his retirement. Some time previously, he had leapt upon a curious article I had found during my first trawl of British newspapers and asked if he could investigate.

  The article had appeared in Scotland’s largest Sunday newspaper in August 1917 and concerned a pamphlet ostensibly written by the German steel magnate August von Thyssen (motto: ‘If I rest, I rust’). The Post Sunday Special (soon to be rebranded as the Sunday Post) had printed the pamphlet in full, along with an explanation of its provenance:

  … the pamphlet was suppressed [in Germany], and Herr Thyssen was fined for writing it. A copy of the pamphlet came into the hands of a client of the well-known lady detective, Miss Maud West. Some little time ago the former was at Cassel, where the pamphlet was printed. He saw a copy of it at the house of a friend, who allowed him to make a translation …17

  The pamphlet explained how German industrialists had not only been blackmailed by the Kaiser into contributing to war funds under threat of business ruin but had been promised mining rights in Australia and Canada once the war was won. It was a startling allegation, but didn’t seem to have been picked up by any historians. My father hadn’t known what to make of it, so had boldly consulted the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, a leading expert on the politics of the First World War. On reading the text, Sir Christopher Clark’s immediate response was that it was not from Germany at all. The contents were so inaccurate as to be laughable and the diction and tone were wrong. Instead, it appeared to be a ‘not especially sophisticated’ propaganda exercise. In other words, it was fake news, which had fallen somehow into Maud’s hands and from there into a newspaper published in Dundee, one of the biggest hotspots for anti-war agitation. Five months later, it was read out in the US Senate.18

  I couldn’t imagine she’d written it herself. Despite being laughable, it was an elaborate argument designed to bolster anti-German sentiment by highlighting Germany’s turpitude and the threat to Britain’s current and former overseas territories, and that hardly came within her p
urview. Was her ‘client’ perhaps John Buchan, then head of the Department of Information, or his colleague Charles Masterman, who had set up its predecessor, the War Propaganda Bureau? Or did she have contacts elsewhere? It was a small world, after all, with a myriad of connections between the nascent intelligence services, Scotland Yard and private detective agencies.

  Such covert favours, if they existed, wouldn’t have taken up much of Maud’s time, however, so the question remained as to the exact nature of her war work. If she hadn’t been haunting illicit gambling dens or catching spies, what had she been up to?

  Her peacetime work must have carried on to some extent, although much had changed. Many country houses had been put over to hospitals and convalescent homes, thereby shutting down the weekend playground of high-bred thieves and swindlers, and the WSPU had decided to step down their campaign of direct action after having one last go at the paintings in the National Gallery in August 1914. Even the Parisian Apaches had swapped their dainty shoes for hobnailed boots and headed off to the biggest scrap of all time, much to the relief of the French police.

  But people were still falling in and out of love and I suspected that Maud was just plodding on with the basics of detective work: divorce investigations. There was certainly plenty of work to be had in this area, with all the new opportunities for infidelity, not to mention the number of hasty, ill-conceived marriages, and the dearth of male detectives. The annual number of divorces in England and Wales nearly doubled between 1914 and 1918.19 By the end of 1920, it was over five times as high, as were the number of prosecutions for bigamy.20