The man stopped speaking.
‘Unless what?’ asked the engineer.
‘Unless you pay me five hundred pounds tonight. Of course, you can charge me for blackmailing if you wish, I am content to run my risk of your doing that.’
The risk to the engineer’s reputation, however, was too high and so he paid the money and withdrew the charge against his ‘drunken’ street hustler. As Maud explained, the whole thing had been a set-up from start to finish.
The scheme reminded me of something Robert Graves had written in The Long Weekend. The Great War, he argued, had prompted an equally great shift in British society. By 1918, there were still ‘two distinct Britains’, but these were no longer based rigidly on class; the camaraderie necessary to survive life in the trenches had all but eliminated that old order between men. Instead, Britain had polarized into ‘the Fighting Forces’ and ‘the Rest’ – and the Fighting Forces ‘had reduced morality to the single virtue of loyalty’. Even the seven deadly sins could be forgiven, he said, ‘so long as a man was courageous and a reasonably trustworthy comrade.’6
This new emphasis on gallantry and service to King and Country meant anyone hiding some failing in their war record would have been a ripe target for blackmail. As I discovered, even the suggestion that an officer hadn’t spent the entire war as a model of stoic heroism was enough to extract money from his family. In 1916, for example, The Times reported the case of a man who was found guilty of obtaining ten pounds by false pretences from the estate of an officer killed at Gallipoli. The crime, it transpired, was just one of a series of frauds on the families of fallen soldiers, ‘which he sometimes accompanied by innuendoes on their reputations which were nothing short of blackmail.’7
Others took a more hands-on approach. In 1924, during the trial of Edith Bassett, who was accused of blinding her lover in one eye with acid, it emerged that she had married dozens of young officers during the war as a means to blackmail their families. That scam had only ended in the summer of 1918 after one family employed private detectives to investigate her background, leading to her brief imprisonment for bigamy.8
But these were individual rogues. What about the Black Hundred and other gangs that Maud wrote about? Had they really existed? Beyond what I had read in fiction and seen in films, I realized I knew very little about blackmail. It was undeniably a convenient plot device and gave work to the furtive bass sections of Hollywood orchestras, but had it ever really been a viable career option that could keep a man in moustache oil and offer the opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues? It was time to return to London to find out.
I took a book by Basil Tozer to read on the train. For a man who was primarily a sports journalist, he was proving curiously helpful in my research: first writing about the methods of private detectives, then interviewing Maud in 1914 and now with his 1929 book, Confidence Crooks and Blackmailers: Their Ways and Methods. Still, the blurb looked promising: ‘This book will, if read carefully, enable even simpletons to avoid being duped by rogues.’ It was even delivered in large, simpleton-friendly print, so, by the time I arrived at Euston station, I was an expert on short cons and the blackmailing opportunities on offer in 1920s London.
Like Maud, Tozer portrayed blackmail as a team sport which required at least two players: one to dupe the victim and one to extort the money. The majority of his scenarios centred around sex in one form or another: his blackmailers posed as psychoanalysts to mine their wealthy clients’ sexual secrets or as police officers to patrol the shrubbery in London parks. And he seemed to know what he was talking about. When it came to the illicit nude dancing shows, or ‘fig-leaf performances’, staged purely to blackmail the audience, Tozer was oddly specific about their location: ‘If not Gooch Street [sic], then Maddox Street, W.1.’9
He also wrote about nursing homes in which patients were seduced by nurses and then caught in flagrante by the matron in scenes that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1920s Carry On Blackmailing. But Tozer’s cast didn’t just include buxom nurses and pyjama-clad men. ‘In the same way,’ he wrote, ‘well-to-do women patients have been blackmailed when of peculiar temperament and nursed by an exceptionally attractive nursing sister.’10
In the cafe of the British Library, I looked over Maud’s own accounts of blackmail cases. Disgraced officers aside, the majority also revolved around sex, although in her stories it was strictly heterosexual and mostly hidden deep in people’s pasts. There was the elderly Colonel George, for example, who had ‘fallen victim to the wiles of a woman far beneath him in social life’ whilst serving abroad as a young soldier;11 Lady V— who had written some indiscreet letters to an Austrian gigolo; and a ‘well known and respected gentleman’ who was spotted making regular visits to a woman ‘who was not too particular as to how she made her income.’12
It was clear that a significant number of these victims had either fallen prey to individual conmen or opportunistic amateurs. So what of the Black Hundred, that elite gang of continental blackmailers? For all Tozer’s undercover work in Maddox Street W1 and elsewhere, he hadn’t mentioned them – and when I moved on to the library’s newsroom, I struggled to locate them there, either.
There were the late Tsar’s Black Hundreds in Russia, originally founded to protect the monarchy but who quickly became anti-Semitic armed mobs, organizers of pogroms and torturers extraordinaire. But, following the October Revolution, surely they were far too busy facing Bolshevik firing squads to be scouring Britain for disgraced officers? The name had also been subsequently applied to Unionist gangs in Belfast who were evicting Catholics from their homes, but rain-sodden Ireland was hardly ‘continental’.13
Or was ‘Black Hundred’ a typo? The Black Hand, part of the New York Mafia, included blackmail amongst their activities. But, again, I could find no evidence of their work in Europe outside Sicily. Besides, Maud mentioned the Black Hundred again in Answers magazine later in 1919:
It is safe to say that ninety per cent of professional blackmailers carrying on operations in this country are foreigners, and most of them belong to the Continental gang known as the ‘Black Hundred’.14
She seemed adamant that they existed, and I soon had to admit that the idea wasn’t as far-fetched as it first seemed. I came across some very colourful gangs in the press, both continental and home-grown. In 1923, for example, the French police and Scotland Yard were on the trail of a pan-European band of conmen headed by a one-legged Australian and a Scot with a cauliflower ear.15 Another outfit seemed to have pre-empted the 1960s vogue for heist capers by a good forty years when, on one summer’s day in 1928, its members had fanned out across London armed with false letters of credit, which they used to extract £30,000 from various banks before escaping to Brussels by plane from the Croydon Aerodrome.16
There were also the London gangs slugging it out for control of the underworld: the Red Hands of Deptford, the Silver Hatchets in Islington, the Sabinis and Cortesis of Clerkenwell, the nightclub queen Mrs Meyrick and her confederates in Soho. These and dozens of other London gangs dabbled in blackmail on top of their usual thuggery and thieving, but it wasn’t their raison d’être. When it came to pure blackmail, there didn’t seem to be anyone operating on the scale that Maud described. I had brief yet high hopes of the League of the Crimson Triangle, a society devoted to ‘terminating and punishing the existing immorality in the United States of America and in the British Isles’, but that turned out to have only one member, a seventeen-year-old railway clerk from Lincoln who was trying his luck with a local businessman over the deflowering of a girl on the city’s West Common.17
Then, suddenly, there they were, the Black Hundred, hidden away on page eighteen of the Era in March 1919:
The piece described the ordeal of a woman named Florence Hargreaves, who had been kidnapped by the Black Hundred but managed to escape by leaping from the upper deck of a steamer into the sea before being rescued by a hydroplane which arrived just in the nick of time. It was thrilli
ng stuff. The only problem was that it was the plot of a film, The Million Dollar Mystery of the headline, which had premiered on 4 March at a cinema in Piccadilly.18 Suspiciously, this was just a month before Pearson’s Weekly ran Maud’s exposé of the activities of the crack European blackmailing gang that went by exactly the same name.
Still, Maud can’t have got all her ideas from the cinema; there had to be some truth in her tales of blackmail. By all accounts, it was a core part of a private detective’s work. On reading press reports of blackmail cases that had ended up in court, however, it soon became clear that another of her claims – that ninety per cent of professional blackmailers were foreigners – was also unlikely to be accurate. Britain didn’t need to import moustachioed villains from the continent. Her citizens were perfectly capable of extorting money from each other themselves.
Indeed, writing in 1908, Kate Easton had suggested that the most common threat came from within the home: ‘The blackmailing of their masters and mistresses by servants is practised to an extent that would open the eyes of a man in the street.’ In an age when even modest households relied on hired help to keep up with the daily chores, there was certainly little privacy to be had. But it wasn’t just maids and valets:
Cabmen have been known to make the lives of indiscreet lady passengers almost unendurable by their constant demands for ‘hush money,’ and hotel servants, who have recognised men and women visitors as being other than ‘Mr and Mrs Brown,’ as indicated on the register, have, from time to time, joined the growing ranks of this class of criminal.19
By the 1920s, however, it seemed to have descended into a free-for-all. Amongst the hundreds of examples I found, there were named individuals bled dry for visiting prostitutes, a barrister held to ransom over some letters written to him by a ‘Lady Clarence’, a former tax inspector blackmailed over his frauds on the Inland Revenue, and the widow of an army major ensnared after taking out an advertisement for companionship.20 None would have been out of place in Maud’s tales.
The blackmailers, too, were often colourful characters, happy to use a bit of drama to enhance their efforts. One, a telephone operator who overheard an incriminating conversation, sent his victim letters signed ‘B. Ware.’21 Another disguised himself as a clergyman to collect money from a businessman who had been compromised in Piccadilly by a young clerk.22 Others were simply inept. The ex-lover of a baronet, for example, made the rookie error of sending her threats and demands straight to his solicitor.23
As always, there were also corrupt private detectives using information gathered in the course of their work to make some extra money on the side. One, for example, had extracted thirty pounds from a young domestic servant under the threat of exposing her relationship with a man he was shadowing for a divorce investigation.24 Another tried to blackmail Lord Terrington in 1925 over ‘several items of interest’ that might harm the political career of his wife Vera Woodhouse, one of the first female Members of Parliament.25 There were even suggestions that some detective agencies had been set up purely for the purpose of blackmail.26
If caught, the penalties were severe, ranging from three years to life imprisonment, and the authorities took the crime very seriously: one judge in 1924 called it ‘one of the worst cancers of civilisation’, another ‘moral murder’.27 It was such a blight on society that even private detectives, who could earn good money from blackmail investigations, urged victims to go straight to the police. As Maud wrote in 1929:
If only people would take this advice and act upon it, then the handsome emoluments which many professional and amateur blackmailers are drawing to-day would be cut off at the base, and one of the most despicable types of crime of modern days would be a thing of the past, because it is on the fear of publicity that the blackmailer thrives.28
Kate Easton was of the same mind, but, as she pointed out in 1908, this fear of publicity worked both ways. Prosecution meant that the victims’ names would appear in the press, leading to gossip and speculation even if the finer details were suppressed. Nine times out of ten, she said, victims went straight to private detectives for the matter to be dealt with discreetly and efficiently.29 Even after 1925, when blackmail victims were finally awarded anonymity in the newspapers, there was widespread reluctance to press charges as cases were still discussed in open court with spectators in the gallery.
Besides, there were those who would never go to the police, whether or not they had to appear in court. Significantly absent from the witness box, for example, were those arguably most likely to be targeted by professional blackmailers: gay men. How could they go to the police when the root of their trouble – their sexual identity – was itself a crime? The press skirted around the issue. They might report on ‘effeminate’ male blackmailers, but the victims were invariably portrayed as naive and heterosexual dupes. In 1927, for example, the barrister Helena Normanton raised the subject in Good Housekeeping, saying, ‘Probably thousands of innocent men have paid blackmail under a threat of being accused of unnatural vice …’ but made no mention of those victims who actually were gay.30 Nobody did. Even Basil Tozer, for all his candour in writing about the nation’s sexual proclivities, made only oblique references to night-time ‘irregularities’ in Hyde Park.31
But they were out there and in trouble. Take the flamboyant Willy Clarkson, for example. In the permissive world of the theatre, his homosexuality was an open secret. There was even a public urinal named after him: ‘Clarkson’s Cottage’, situated around the corner from the Wardour Street wiggery, was a grim, solid grey iron building, but its West End location promised good times to be had. Indeed, the toilet’s international reputation was such that after the Second World War it was bought by a wealthy American as a folly for the grounds of his country mansion in New York state – allegedly on the basis of its architectural merit.32
But Willy was also a public figure whose livelihood and reputation, not to mention his prized royal warrant, could be destroyed should his personal life ever come under wider scrutiny. The tangled mess he created in protecting himself only came to light after his death in 1934, when various court cases regarding his estate suggested that not only was he acquainted with William Hobbs, one of the most infamous inter-war blackmailers (who had relieved the soon-to-be Maharajah of Kashmir of £150,000 in 1919), but over a thirty-year period had made a string of fraudulent insurance claims for fires at his shop. This secondary career as an arsonist was attributed by some to the need for hush money relating to his sexuality.33
So what did private detectives do when their clients wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go to the police? How did they make the problem go away?
The first step, of course, was to identify the blackmailer, a task often easier said than done. Kate Easton told of one case in which she and a female assistant had moved into a brothel near Soho Square for a few days for this purpose.34 Maud also hinted at a secret code used by blackmailers to identify one another, which she employed after trailing one suspect to a Parisian hotel. She knew he was a blackmailer; she just wasn’t sure that he was the right one:
The plan I adopted was to pretend I was, to use professional parlance, ‘in the same lay’ as himself … I have learnt at great risk and trouble something of the secret methods by which a professional blackmailer can often ascertain when he is in the company of a brother (or sister) practitioner. In a short while we were on terms of tolerable intimacy, and the man was fully convinced that I was in the same business …35
Over a champagne-laden dinner, he let slip enough details for her to know she was on the right track.
Having identified the criminal, the detective would next try to recover the evidence they held against the client. This was often in the form of letters. A common trick of female blackmailers was to get married men to send them a note confirming the date and time of an agreed tryst; others used personal correspondence stolen by household staff. The incriminating letters in Maud’s stories generally ended up in hotel rooms, which made them easy
to retrieve either through subterfuge or, as in one case she told in 1919, sheer bluff:
‘I am a detective,’ I said, ‘and I want you to give me back the letters Lady V— wrote you. I can give you a few seconds to make up your mind. I have two Scotland Yard men downstairs.’ I put my hand on the electric bell, and began to count.36
Another option was to buy the evidence, although, as one detective discovered, this could have unforeseen consequences. At the inquest into the death of a young woman called Madeleine Wiltshire in 1927, it was found that she had been involved with her husband Henry in blackmailing a number of men she had seduced for the purpose. An inquiry agent named Gerald Lewis, acting on behalf of a vicar who had been caught in their web, had been meeting the Wiltshires individually to persuade one of them to sell the correspondence. Henry refused, but Madeleine showed willing. When Lewis went to the handover, however, he found Henry in her place. Madeleine’s cyanide-infused body was later discovered in a rented room in Soho. The coroner was convinced that Henry had killed her, but there was insufficient evidence to send him to trial.37
If retrieving the evidence by fair means or foul didn’t work, the next move was to obtain evidence of other crimes that would see the blackmailer in prison for an unrelated offence. As Maud said:
The blackmailer is ever a blackguard; almost invariably other crimes can be laid against him. Nor is this surprising. A man so despicable that he will stoop to blackmail can never be conscience-stricken about mere theft, fraud, or forgery – and these other crimes frequently cause his undoing.38
She gave by way of example her case of the elderly colonel who she said was being blackmailed over an affair from his youth, describing how she had trailed the blackmailer to Paris and watched the house he shared with his confederates: ‘Instinctively I felt that I was about to find the weak spot in his armour.’ When the house was empty, she broke in and found equipment used to forge bank notes. The gang were arrested on that basis, and the blackmail stopped.39
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 14
