The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  ‘No girl should part with a farthing of her money to anyone offering her a partnership of any kind without the fullest and most complete investigation of the character, both of the business and the people who make the offer,’ Maud wrote.10

  The painful innocence of many young women was highlighted by another of Maud’s warnings: ‘Girls should be particularly careful about partnership offers in massage establishments.’ She explained that such businesses had enjoyed a resurgence since the end of the war and many women believed they were investing in reputable health parlours, no doubt happy to do their bit for the rehabilitation of the war-weary populace. By the time they discovered exactly what was involved, however, they were trapped. Any attempt to extract themselves, by legal action or otherwise, was met with the threat of their association with the sex trade being exposed. They either had to stick it out or walk away penniless. One girl, Maud said, having been cheated out of all her war savings in this way and unable to find another job, had killed herself.

  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the papers were full of examples of fraudsters taking advantage of the paucity of women’s education in business and financial matters. Some stalked war widows with pensions, others targeted the surplus women earning their own living for the first time. Bogus stockbrokers seemed particularly common, with one even managing to ply his trade from his sickbed at the Greenwich Infirmary by persuading one of his nurses to part with £857.11 Others created elaborate back stories. One man, for example, posed as a shipwreck victim awaiting $35,000 compensation from the Canadian Pacific Company to defraud over twenty women.12 Another duped a woman out of £3,000 by claiming not only to be the heir to a Scottish estate but also the owner of a valuable scientific patent for creating synthetic nitrogen.13

  These men were imaginative; I had to give them that. But the reach of their operations was nothing compared to that of what was arguably the most pernicious racket of the time. Maud had a story to tell about that, too. It was set during the war, and she had been approached by a client whose sister had repeatedly been writing large cheques to someone he could not identify. Nothing would induce his sister to reveal the reason and, although he didn’t think she was being blackmailed, there was patently something wrong. She was in a particularly vulnerable state, still in shock and struggling with the grief of losing her husband in the trenches. Could Maud find out what was going on?

  By shadowing the woman, Maud discovered that she had been meeting an unsavoury character who lived in a squalid East End street. ‘At one time he had been a bookmaker,’ she reported, ‘but his clientele having left to attend a little affair in Flanders, his crooked mind saw a chance to obtain an easy living by posing as a spiritualist and robbing war widows.’14

  It was a problem that would become all too common in the post-war years. Throughout the 1920s, millions of widows, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters would turn to spiritualism for answers as they tried to come to terms with the loss of male relatives so brutally cut down in their prime.

  Not all spiritualists were out to defraud, however. Many saw it as a science, no less venerable than that of electricity and radio waves. The leading proponents of spiritualism often came from rational, science-based backgrounds. The most famous, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a medical man by training. Another, Sir Oliver Lodge, was an eminent physicist who specialized in electromagnetism. Both had been involved in psychic research since the 1880s, and both had lost sons during the war.

  In 1916, Sir Oliver had published a book called Raymond, or Life and Death, which detailed the conversations he’d had with his recently deceased son across the great divide – and this, he said, was not so great as people feared. The book became an immediate bestseller, and in the tenth edition Lodge added an addendum in which he described the bonds between the fallen soldiers now in the paradise of ‘Summerland’ and those who mourned:

  There they find themselves still in touch with earth, not really separated from those left behind, still able actively to help and serve. There is nothing supine about the rest and joy into which they have entered. Under their young energy, strengthened by the love which rises towards them like a blessing, the traditional barrier between the two states is suffering violence, is being taken by force. A band of eager workers is constructing a bridge, is opening a way for us across the chasm; communication is already easier and more frequent than ever before; and in the long run we may feel assured that all this present suffering and bereavement will have a beneficent outcome from humanity.15

  The tender picture he painted of noble young men in Summerland fighting on for a better future was just what people needed to hear: that the slaughter had not been in vain and they, too, might receive a few personal words of solace floating down from paradise.

  From a legal point of view, however, those who delivered these messages, whether they held seances, gazed into crystal balls, read palms or used telepathy, were open to prosecution. If money had changed hands, this could be a simple charge of fraud, although both the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and the 1824 Vagrancy Act were also used to drive home the point that superstition had no place in an enlightened society.

  When it came to gathering evidence for such cases, female detectives came into their own. It was easy work. All the detective had to do was make an appointment, have her fortune told and then describe the inaccuracies of the reading in court. Rarely was the real reason of their visit suspected, although one was reportedly told in 1934, ‘I have a turbulent feeling about you. I feel uneasy inside, as though I had something to fear.’16

  One of the earliest examples I found came from 1904, when Amy Betts and Dorothy Hempest, along with their employer, the former Scotland Yard inspector Charles Richards, had visited three fortune tellers operating in the West End under the names of Yoga, Professor and Madame Keiro. The detectives had been hired, through solicitors, by the Daily Mail as part of an exposé of ‘Bond Street fortune tellers’.17 The owner of the Mail, Sir Alfred Harmsworth, had followed this up in court to see whether smart society palmists would be treated with the same severity by the law as their shabbier counterparts who, as the Morning Post put it, ‘extracted sixpences and shillings from servant girls.’18

  At the trial, Amy Betts was described as ‘an aristocratic looking lady in a big black hat’ who had been working as a store detective for the Army & Navy Stores.19 She gave an entertaining account of the reading she had received from Madame Keiro; Dorothy Hempest did the same for the Professor. Dorothy’s headgear was not mentioned, although a clue was given as to how much money these early assistant detectives had to spend on such things when the defence produced an apologetic letter about the case that Dorothy had sent to a friend who was a palmist. ‘I have been starving for months,’ she had written, ‘and then this case comes along. I did not start it. When I had instructions to go to these people I could not very well refuse.’ When cross-examined about the letter, she fainted.20

  I could find no evidence of Dorothy Hempest’s fate, but Amy Betts had carried on working for department stores and detective agencies for a number of years. She was back in court in 1916 to testify against another fortune teller, a ‘Professor Melini’, whose prosecution also seemed to be the result of a Daily Mail investigation.21

  The subject undoubtedly sold papers, which brought me back to the headline I had come across early on in my investigation: ‘Revolver Shot at Seance – Lady Detective to Shoot Spirit’.22 That had appeared in March 1926, in the midst, I discovered, of one of the regular scandals that had convulsed the world of psychic research in the inter-war years.

  That spring, a new anti-spiritualism movement had been launched: the grandly titled Catholic Crusade Against Spiritism. Supported by two archbishops, eight bishops and a cardinal, alongside prominent individuals from the lay population, its objections ranged from the theological to the social. One neurologist linked the practice of mediumship to an increase in the number of ‘lunacies’ over the past fifteen years, and alleged that spiritual
ists were placing advertisements in the papers seeking the care of patients who were mentally unsound (‘Permanency preferred’) in order to train them as mediums.23 (Was that, I wondered, what the strange doctor was up to in The Times next to Maud’s advert in 1909?)

  At the same time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a group of fellow spiritualists were trying to clean up their image by denouncing the celebrated ‘trumpet medium’ (and part-time burglar) Frederick Munnings, whose seances were enlivened by the use of a silver horn suspended in mid-air to amplify messages from the spirit world.24 Their letter in the journal of the London Spiritualist Alliance, Light, on 13 March did not deny Munnings’ ‘intermittent psychic powers’, but criticized the ‘cold-blooded and deliberate artifice’ he employed during his seances. This had recently been quite literally illuminated at a private house party: whilst Munnings was exuding ectoplasm in the darkened drawing room, a servant fixing a fuse below stairs had unwittingly caused a standard lamp to turn on at an inopportune moment. There, for all to see, was the apparatus that held the trumpet in place and allowed Munnings to manoeuvre it from his seat.25

  The press leapt upon both stories, printing details of how people like Munnings engineered their deceptions, along with expert opinions on how they might be unmasked. Many of the proposed tests required complex scientific instruments, but Maud had a better idea. As the Sunday Post reported:

  A revolver shot will ring out at a spiritualist seance shortly to be held in a part of London which for obvious reasons is not indicated. The firer will be Miss Maud West, London’s intrepid lady detective. She has been invited to attend the seance, the time and place of which are as yet unknown to her, in order to test in this dramatic fashion whether or not the ghostly figure is in reality a spirit.26

  Maud explained that she would not shoot to kill, ‘but my shot will be accurate enough to prove the point at issue. I can shoot straight. I have proved that on more than one occasion during many years of detective work in all parts of the world. I am glad to say that I have never fired with fatal effect, though this does not mean I have missed my aim.’ For good measure she added, ‘This experience will be the most remarkable in the whole of my career, and there can be few women who have packed more excitement and adventure into their lives.’

  As the article was accompanied by a photograph of Maud dressed as Charlie Chaplin and there were no follow-up reports, I could only assume – and hope – that it was a joke.

  How seriously Maud took the idea of clairvoyance as a whole was more difficult to gauge. I’d noticed that she referred to ‘bogus’ spiritualists, leaving open the possibility that there were genuine ones to be found. Did she share the views of Arthur Conan Doyle, who defended authentic psychic activity as fiercely as he denounced its fakery, or was she keeping her options open to ingratiate herself with her readers, a good proportion of whom would have been believers themselves?

  She recounted one instance when she had a visitor one morning whilst she was trying to piece together various clues in a missing-persons case. The woman was seeking Maud’s help, but there was little Maud could offer. The woman’s difficulties seemed to stem from the fact that she was ‘highly strung’ and suffering from ‘an inferiority complex’. She did, however, claim the gift of second sight. To humour her, Maud suggested that this might be put to good use:

  … I folded the papers lying under my hands relating to the case I had in hand, and asked her to convey to me the impressions they created in her mind.

  Closing her eyes, she appeared to relax. After a few minutes’ silence she began to describe a certain street, the details of which were so vivid that I conjured in my mind an impression of the East End of London. As I listened I sketched on paper a map of the street as I visualised it from her description. By some strange chance I immediately identified the map as corresponding to a certain locality in East India Dock-road. I was impressed, in spite of myself.27

  That afternoon, Maud headed to the docks. As the woman had said, one of the houses on that road was higher than the others. ‘It is almost incredibly true,’ Maud wrote, ‘that I picked up a trail of the missing girl at this house.’

  More often, however, detectives preferred to use only the trappings of spiritualism, rather than actual messages from beyond, to assist their work. Maud had claimed a significant victory by setting herself up as an itinerant fortune teller to test the honesty of the housemaids in ‘The Clairvoyante Case’, and she also related an instance in which two female detectives had used similar means when tracking down a runaway wife. They had established that the wife had a very close friend who lived on the Continent. One detective had travelled to Europe to befriend this woman, who spilled all sorts of details about the missing wife, including the address of the private hotel in England where she was staying as ‘Mrs Smith’. The other booked into the hotel and amused her fellow guests with tarot readings: ‘When Mrs Smith’s turn came she listened in amazement to secrets which only one woman knew – fresh from the agency’s card filing index system.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure how this would have helped restore Mrs Smith to her family – maybe something had got lost in the retelling – but the New York Tribune was convinced: ‘Quite obviously no man could have proceeded by this simple and direct route,’ it concluded. ‘Instead, acting on scientific principles, and proceeding by clews, he would have had to follow Mrs Smith from hotel to hotel, city to city, employing an army of watchers and spies who would have been constantly exposed to physical danger, heat and cold.’28

  The raw years following the war had also seen a resurgence in frauds relating to matters of the heart. In 1919, Maud issued a warning to her readers about bogus matrimonial agencies, which, she said, were enjoying a revival since demobilisation had begun.29 Usually operating by post, these swindlers would promise introductions in exchange for money – the going price being around £25 (£1,000 today) – and then play the role of suitor themselves. If a meeting was arranged, the bureau owner would go in person or send their wife or daughter.

  One example she gave was that of a German matrimonial agent whom she called ‘Eisner’, who targeted people who had dreams of marrying into money. The fees he charged were often ten times the going rate, an expense many were willing to pay to achieve a life free of financial woe. The men and women he matched, however, were generally equally poor: each was told that the other was keen to keep their fortune a secret to avoid gold-diggers. That particular tale had come to a typically Maud-like dramatic end with the help of an irate Portuguese client whom she accompanied to Eisner’s office:

  The Portuguese demanded his money back. Eisner affected to be very angry, and he requested the Portuguese to clear out of his office at once. Then the Portuguese rather startled me. He whipped out a revolver, and, pointing it at Eisner’s head, swore he would blow his brains out if he didn’t refund him his money at once … After that adventure Eisner closed down his business and cleared out of the country.30

  Maud said that few such cases came to court due to the victims’ desire for privacy. However, I did find some prosecutions for cases remarkably similar to those she described. When reminiscing about his career in the People in 1939, for example, the ex-Scotland Yard chief inspector William Gough confirmed that matrimonial agencies were often run by German immigrants. He gave the example of Jacob Kuppers, who had been arrested in 1911 for obtaining money by false pretences. Kuppers had written fake love letters to his clients and shared the task of attending face-to-face meetings with his wife.31

  Elsewhere, I found the case of a sixty-four-year-old Irishman who added a dash of extortion to his frauds on the lonely hearted. When he was arrested in 1925, the police found a box of 5,000 letters from women he had duped over the years. His modus operandi was to take out advertisements via matrimonial agencies, presenting himself as a wealthy widower in search of companionship. He would then invite women to stay at his home in North London and blackmail them over their lack of propriety.32

  Yet, whilst
women were the target of many of these financial swindles, they also had a particular game of their own they could play: ‘damage hunting’. This involved using the law to extract money from men who had been tricked into offering, and then withdrawing, proposals of marriage.

  Breach of promise to marry had been part of English contract law for centuries. As a legal remedy, it was open to either sex, but it had traditionally been used to compensate women for being left on the shelf after a lengthy engagement. By the 1920s, however, the concept was looking increasingly old-fashioned and out of step with the new freedoms women could enjoy.

  An anonymous lawyer, writing in Answers magazine in 1919, made it clear that the legal profession viewed most breach of promise cases as ‘vulgar’, ‘petty’ and a waste of court time. In one recent case, he said, 455 love letters, 152 postcards and 52 telegrams had been presented as evidence: ‘The reading of silly effusions brings giggles from the gallery, but the Bench is frankly bored and unsympathetic to all parties.’ Nor, he said, should a jury be expected to assess the value of a broken heart: ‘The contract to marry cannot be compared to a commercial bargain, so overlaid is it with sentiment and psychology.’33

  The barrister Helena Normanton, however, argued in 1928 that there were still circumstances in which breach of promise suits were appropriate: