The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  In general, however, I suspected that most missing persons inquiries played out closer to home and with much less glamour. In 1921, the Illustrated Police News had reported that the number of missing people was on the rise, with the list of lost souls issued nightly by Scotland Yard being ‘more marked’ than ever. An anonymous private detective added, ‘Women form a large proportion of those who, as far as their own world is concerned, vanish utterly.’ Many of these, they said, were ‘young and obscure actresses’ who had been lured away on the promise of marriage, only to be abandoned. ‘The real mystery is the question of their ultimate fate. We have often been able to trace a girl up to the point of her disappearance, only to lose all clue to her further movements. We know that she does not leave the country, but no more.’6

  Over the coming years, commentators would not be short of suggestions as to what became of such women, the majority of theories revolving around three things guaranteed to induce moral panic in the inter-war period: nightclubs, drugs and foreigners.

  Nightclubs had their roots in the smarter London drinking dens of the war, whose owners had sidestepped the ban on serving alcohol without a meal after 10 p.m. by sending out a sorry sandwich or two with every bottle of champagne. Few cared about the catering, however, as under the tables toes were beginning to tap to a new rhythm that would soon erupt into a rambunctious blaze of joy and abandon, transforming the city’s nightlife for ever.

  Jazz had first arrived in Britain along with the American heiresses who had propped up the aristocracy in its hour of need. The alarm caused at the time by the ‘monkey cage’ dance floors at debutante balls was demonstrated by a letter written by an anonymous peeress to The Times in 1913. ‘May I ask the powerful aid of The Times in a matter of grave perplexity?’ it began, before its author unleashed her quivering pen on ‘the various horrors of American and South American negroid origin’ she had witnessed in the ballroom:

  My grandmother has often told me of the shock she experienced on first beholding the polka, but I wonder what she would have said had she been asked to introduce a well-brought-up girl of 18 to the scandalous travesties of dancing which are, for the first time in my recollection, bringing more young men to parties than are needed … I would only ask hostesses to let one know what houses to avoid by indicating in some way on their invitation cards whether the ‘Turkey Trot,’ the ‘Boston’ (the beginner of the evil), and the ‘Tango’ will be permitted.7

  Presumably this wasn’t the same anonymous peeress who, six years later, Maud reported, was being paid sixty pounds a night to shimmy across a West End dance floor, a fact that had emerged during a routine investigation into the woman’s finances. By then, the dance boom was in full swing. New enterprises were springing up all over the city, and a spot of ‘celebrity’ endorsement from cash-strapped society women could make all the difference to a club’s success. So could attractive youngsters, as Maud explained in 1919:

  Sometimes even girls of no social position, but who are exceptionally pretty, get paid to attend dances. I know of two girls, the daughters of a solicitor’s clerk, who were paid £5 5s a week each to attend the dances at rooms in a northern suburb; but they were of course, more than ordinarily pretty. Their presence was a good advertisement to the rooms, and brought a number of young men to them, which of course, was just what the management wanted.

  When Maud penned this article for Answers magazine, she struggled to find much dirt on the new ‘jazz rooms’. She said she was brought in occasionally by the management of such places to shadow individuals of dubious character. One of these, she claimed, turned out to be a Parisian jewel thief, but he was exposed before he could cause any trouble. She also told of a country vicar who had invested in one London enterprise and was collecting a hundred pounds a week in return until his sister hired Maud to put a stop to it.8 But that was as much scandal as she – or anyone else – could muster.

  As nightclub culture took hold, however, the stories became darker. Attention turned to the West End, where the clubs attracted everyone from chorus girls to members of the aristocracy and paid little heed to the usual boundaries of class or race. Their patrons applauded black musicians and mingled with Chinatown dandies, prompting dark mutterings about the pernicious influence of the ‘black devil’ and the ‘yellow peril’.

  Some clubs were permanent fixtures, such as the Silver Slipper, the Joker and the Manhattan. Many more sprang up and shut down in the blink of an eye. They were notorious for excess. If an activity could carry the word ‘illicit’, it was to be found in one of these clubs: illicit drinking, illicit gambling, illicit sex, illicit drugs. London’s mob bosses adopted them as part of their territory and fought over the rights to fleece their customers, but they also offered a conducive atmosphere for those with more modest criminal ambitions.

  One ruse Maud warned her readers about was that played by a new breed of gigolo-cum-blackmailer who would offer his services as a dancing partner to married women whose husbands, for whatever reason, preferred to stay at home:

  One of his most popular schemes is as follows: After securing by some means an introduction to a lady who is fond of dancing, he acts as her partner for some months and behaves in a perfectly normal manner. Having, more or less, obtained her confidence, under some pretext or other he takes her for a drive in a private car, which is probably hired one evening, and which breaks down in some lonely spot …9

  This would be conveniently situated near a country inn, where the blackmailer would treat the woman to supper whilst the car was being ‘repaired’. A few days later, an anonymous note would arrive, warning the woman that she had been spotted with a man in suspicious circumstances and, unless payment was forthcoming, her husband would be informed. When shown the note, her dancing partner would, of course, advise her to pay up – and so the blackmail cycle would begin.

  Female criminals, according to the newspapers, were just as dangerous, stalking West End clubs in search of young men they could lure away to a wallet-emptying card game or seduce for the purposes of blackmail or breach of promise.10 Maud had her own story about a run-in with one such woman, which she told a number of times. The woman, she said, had been blackmailing the younger son of a well-known London family, claiming that she had been ‘compromised’. It was a familiar situation, but when Maud visited one of the woman’s regular haunts and attempted to gain her confidence, she was rebuffed.

  ‘Evidently,’ Maud wrote, ‘she did not care for the society of women …’ So, after rummaging through her box of disguises, she returned to the nightclub as a man of seemingly unlimited wealth. The woman soon latched on to her as a potential new victim. Maud played along. ‘One night, after having had a lot to drink, I kissed her,’ she confessed in one version. ‘Being a detective has its dark side!’11

  Another version merely involved flirting, but both ended with Maud back at the woman’s flat, whipping off her wig and retrieving the evidence against her client. ‘The last glimpse I had of her,’ she recalled, ‘was that of a dejected figure seated on the bed, her furious glances in amusing contrast to the “vamping” I had to undergo in the taxi.’12

  That story, however, was nothing compared to some of the tales she told about her work rescuing young ‘dope fiends’ from their dealers and from themselves.

  ‘Some of the most pathetic stories I have ever heard of young lives being ruined were revealed to me while tracing drug traffickers,’ Maud wrote in 1931. ‘The methods of pests who deal in dope are many; the work of thwarting them frequently involves great personal risk; and the human wreckage which they leave behind is pitifully large.’13

  Until 1916, psychoactive drugs had been freely available in Britain. A shot of cocaine was often just what the dentist ordered, whilst over-the-counter medicines for coughs and other common ailments were laced with morphine and heroin. When the first soldiers had marched off to the front, many had in their pockets small packets of morphine and cocaine, bought by loved ones from their local pharmacy
. Before long, the high-end stores had started to sell more upmarket versions of these as luxury gifts: Harrods offered a cocaine kit complete with a syringe and spare needles, whilst jewellers created silver matchboxes containing tiny tubes of morphine.14

  As the war went on, concerns grew as to the effect this was having on the troops. The Times medical correspondent, writing in February 1916 about the rise in ‘cocainomaniacs’ in the army, described the drug as ‘more deadly than bullets’. He warned, ‘It will, for the hour, charm away all [the soldier’s] trouble, his fatigue, his anxiety; it will give him fictitious strength and vigour. But it will also, in the end, render him worthless as a soldier and a man.’15

  The authorities agreed. In the summer of 1916, the sale of any product containing cocaine and opium to soldiers was banned under Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) regulations. This would later be expanded to include all citizens and be enshrined in the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, which prohibited the sale without prescription of almost all psychoactive drugs.

  The first post-war drugs scandal, however, arrived just two weeks after the Armistice, with the death of the actress Billie Carleton in November 1918. Billie was starring in the patriotic play The Freedom of the Seas at the Theatre Royal at the time, her difficult reputation and long-standing opium habit having done nothing to prevent her becoming the West End’s youngest leading lady at the age of twenty-two. After the curtain fell on 27 November, she slipped into a dress of transparent black georgette and, fuelled by cocaine, attended the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall.

  It was a grand and emotional affair. The dancing lasted into the small hours and, afterwards, Billie invited a few friends back to her apartment at the Savoy. When she finally fell into bed, she took her usual dose of the barbiturate veronal to knock her out. The next afternoon, her maid became suspicious when the loud snoring coming from Billie’s room suddenly stopped. Billie was dead, the drugs scattered about the flat a clue to the cause.

  At the inquest, details of her lifestyle came to light: the decadent opium parties, the sugar daddies who kept her in luxury and her close friendship with the married costume designer Reggie de Veulle, who trailed rumours of homosexual blackmail and cross-dressing in his wake. Reggie had been the one to supply the drugs. He, in turn, had got them from a dealer in Chinatown.

  The perils of drugs were cemented in the public mind a few years later with the death of twenty-one-year-old Freda Kempton. Freda had been scraping a living as one of the hundreds of dancers who worked in West End nightclubs, teaching patrons the steps to new dances and keeping the dance floors buzzing with energetic displays of the latest moves. Such women were paid a tiny salary by each club, which they had to make up through tips and fees for dancing with wealthy men. In some of the seedier establishments, men were encouraged to ‘book out’ dancers for more private entertainment.16

  Accordingly, Freda spent her nights tumbling in and out of taxis between different venues, keeping going by regular boosts of ‘snow’. This was provided by Brilliant ‘Billy’ Chang, the so-called Dope King of London, who ran his drugs empire out of the Chinese restaurant he owned in Regent Street.

  But when Freda died of cocaine poisoning in March 1922 in her rented rooms in Bayswater, it wasn’t an accidental overdose. The autopsy showed she had over six grains of the drug in her stomach. One would have been enough to finish her off. At the inquest into her death, the jury returned a verdict of suicide. The coroner added that Freda had been depressed and short of money, and blamed in part the ‘precarious’ lifestyle she led as ‘one of those who tried to turn night into day.’ A charge of manslaughter against Billy Chang was mooted, but abandoned for lack of evidence.

  Freda’s tragic death became a defining landmark for those charting the moral degeneration of British society. Stories circulated of young women, estranged from their families and stripped of autonomy through drink and drugs, lost in a downward spiral of hedonistic destruction.

  In 1926, Maud related the case of an eighteen-year-old who had fallen under the influence of ‘a notorious and unscrupulous woman’ at a West End club: ‘… when I saw her she was in a pitiable state. She had been induced to part with about £300 under threat of betrayal to her parents. Her money gone, her self-respect vanished, she had become the plaything of the men who frequented the place.’17

  The toxic friendship seemed unbreakable, but she managed to extract the girl by inviting the pair to a fictitious opium party at her flat, where she exposed the unscrupulous woman’s true nature. The story ended with the older woman attacking Maud with a hat pin (‘And hat pins are dangerous weapons in the hands of an incensed woman’) and the young girl returning to her family only to die a few months later (‘her health was ruined’).18

  Some years later, Maud would also hint that an amnesiac she had retrieved from a farm in South Africa was Freda Kempton’s secret lover, driven mad by news of her death,19 and claim Billy Chang as an old acquaintance.20 But then, she claimed a lot of things. In one case, she said she had been given a free hand, with unlimited money, to stem the supply of cocaine to a young heiress, only to hit a seemingly insurmountable wall of her own making: ‘After one or two arrests had been made through my instrumentality, I found that the drug-dealers were becoming so cautious that any new purchasers were being looked on with suspicion.’21

  What to do? She consulted a friend in the medical profession who supposedly furnished her with ‘an almost innocuous preparation’, the effects of which mimicked the jitters of a genuine drug addict. ‘The success of this ruse was instantaneous,’ she reported. ‘… After taking the preparation I was offered cocaine three times within two hours, and I was able to go from den to den unchallenged, even welcomed.’

  After identifying a number of dealers, she had them shadowed and then handed over their details and a summary of their activities to the police. The biggest coup in the ‘wholesale and wholesome clean-up’ that followed, she said, was the arrest of one of the leading importers of cocaine, who was using a small East End sweet factory to receive his wares. The drugs, Maud said, had reached the sweet factory from the Continent ‘by a roundabout route’, first going to Africa, where they were secreted in shipments of ingredients, and then shipped on to Britain: ‘A code arrangement enabled the factory proprietor to locate the precious consignments amongst the bulk parcels.’ That proprietor, she added, ‘was a man of excellent repute. He was a churchwarden and a member of the local borough council, whom the breath of suspicion had never touched.’

  It was, of course, completely untrue. There was no evidence of any such raid: although the newspapers reported significant coups on the part of European police in catching drug smugglers, British victories seemed limited to the arrests of individual dealers. Maud was right about the way illegal drugs entered the country, but that information was available to anyone who took a morning paper.

  Work by the newly formed League of Nations and international customs authorities had established that most cocaine in Britain originated in Germany, Holland and Switzerland, where chemical factories processed raw materials from Asia and South America before shipping the finished product back whence it came. A small proportion of that was then smuggled back into Europe. In one raid on a drugs ring operating out of Berlin and Copenhagen, cocaine was found disguised as boot polish, shaving soap and sealing wax;22 in France, customs officials found two coffins crammed with the same.23 I could find no definitive evidence of how it arrived in Britain, although hearsay had it that drugs were hidden in artificial eyes, false teeth, table legs and walnut shells.24 A sweet factory, therefore, seemed a reasonable invention.

  But where did the truth lie? I doubted that Maud had ever been tasked by a wealthy client to shut down the international drugs trade single-handedly, as was her excuse for some of her less believable adventures in South America, but addiction was a fact of life and its effects would undoubtedly have fed into a fair number of cases that landed on Maud’s desk. To what extent might she, or her st
aff, have needed to ferret around in the underworld in the course of their work?

  It was a question, I suspected, that would never be answered. The evidence was scant to non-existent. The only verifiable instance I could find of a private detective being involved in a drug-related case came from 1926, when a detective had been hired to shadow the French actress Régine Flory, a highly strung cocaine and opium addict, on a visit to London. His task was to prevent her from coming to any harm. As this only came to light after Mlle Flory unexpectedly shot herself in the middle of a conversation with the managing director of the Drury Lane Theatre, I figured it was possible that other detectives were engaged on similar – and more successful – missions.25

  It was easier to establish the truth about the other popular scenario in which young women went missing. An example of this was a case Maud related to a journalist in 1938 in which the daughter of an upper-class family had fallen in love with a man from Chile. Her parents were against the match, so the couple had eloped. They were halfway across the Atlantic before one of Maud’s detectives, who had discreetly joined them on the journey, was able to creep into the man’s cabin to rifle through his papers:

  It turned out he had business relations with one of those houses in Valparaíso where, despite all the measures taken by the police, white girls were still being trafficked. Usually, the inexperienced young things don’t find a way out after the doors of such an establishment have closed behind them. This time, however, the set-up failed – a brief conversation between the detective and the captain was sufficient and the impostor was arrested by the police in Valparaíso, while the detective returned the young girl to her happy parents.26