The idea of innocent white women being duped by swarthy foreigners into a life of ‘white slavery’ in South American brothels had been a common trope for many years. Enforced prostitution undoubtedly existed: the first international treaty to tackle the problem had been ratified in 1904, the second in 1910, and the League of Nations had taken on the issue in 1921 (changing the term from ‘white slavery’ to ‘traffic in women and children’ to remove the element of race). But Western fears about the scale and nature of the situation, fed as they were by xenophobia and fear of ‘the other’, remained disproportionate.
In Britain in 1913, Teresa Billington-Greig of the Women’s Freedom League had decided to investigate the disturbing stories that had led to the passing of the controversial Criminal Law Amendment (White Slave Traffic) Act the previous year. There had been widespread claims of girls being trapped or seduced, bundled into cars, drugged and taken to ‘flats and houses of ill-fame, there outraged and beaten, and finally transported abroad to foreign brothels under the control of large vice syndicates.’27
Despite thorough and persistent questioning, however, she had found no evidence for any of the stories that had informed the legislation, and suggested that the ‘ridiculous scandal-mongering’ detracted from the very real necessity of addressing the social and welfare issues surrounding prostitution. She also took issue with the depiction of women as ‘impotent and imbecilic weaklings’ that these stories promoted, asking why there had been no reports of the men involved being ‘brained with fenders, or injured with chairs, pictures or other articles of furniture; why doors are not barricaded, windows smashed, and the night rent with screams.’28
Hers, however, was a rare voice of reason. The idea of white slavery touched upon so many issues – the politics of sex work, immigration, ‘moral hygiene’, women’s emancipation and so on – that there was always someone ready to fuel the fire with fresh stories to serve their own ends.
Margaret Damer Dawson, to give one example, claimed to have been inspired to set up the WPS during the First World War following the attempted abduction of two female Belgian refugees under her care – a convenient excuse for one seeking to disguise more naked ambitions.29 Tales of white slavery also proved a useful tool for those seeking to ‘protect’ the virtue of young women, a task that was getting increasingly difficult as more and more women chose to live life on their own terms.
But as an explanation for the reported rise in missing women? As Teresa Billington-Greig, who herself had run away from stifling family expectations at seventeen, put it: ‘… there are hundreds of feasible reasons why girls and women should desire to leave their homes, and dozens that will explain why, having left home, they may desire to remain undiscovered.’30
Maud knew this. Not only had she also supposedly run away at nineteen, but she had years of professional experience dealing with the difficulties and disappointments of family life. In all probability, the bulk of her missing persons work would have involved locating those who had chosen to disappear – both male and female – with the occasional spot of heir hunting on the side. But where was the drama in that?
Meanwhile, I had a missing-persons case of my own that was proving surprisingly taxing. The man in question was dead, but how – or where or when – he came to be that way was a mystery. All I had to go on were four words:
Robert Barber (deceased), sailor. This, according to Edith and Harry’s marriage certificate, was Edith’s father. Not a barrister, then – not even a solicitor or a solicitor’s clerk – but one of the great mass of men who kept the British Empire afloat through their sweaty and rum-sodden devotion to life on the ocean wave. At least, that’s what Edith told the vicar, and who would lie to a man of the cloth?
The ceremony had taken place on a quiet Thursday in May 1901 at St Saviour’s Church in Forest Hill, south-east London. Edith said she was a twenty-year-old spinster who’d been working as a drapery assistant. Harry, twenty-one, gave his occupation as ‘manager’.31 But there was something a bit cloak-and-dagger about the whole affair, something a bit off.
The couple were staying in rented rooms for a start, and they hadn’t been there seven weeks earlier when the census was taken. The two witnesses were a local laundress, possibly plucked off the street for the occasion, and the son of a scaffold builder from Hackney, presumably a friend of Harry’s. None of the family members who would typically act as witnesses were anywhere to be seen; not Harry’s parents, nor any of his eight siblings. Robert Barber (deceased) couldn’t have been expected to attend, but Edith must have had other relatives. A mother, at least. Where were they?
An internet search revealed that there was indeed a sailor called Robert Barber who had produced a daughter called Edith Maria – and, according to the General Register Office, he was the only man by that name to have done so in Britain for many years. Furthermore, he came from Deptford in the clanking heart of London’s docklands, just three miles from Forest Hill where Edith and Harry had made their vows.
It all looked very promising, apart from a few details. The first was that Robert Barber’s daughter had been born in November 1884, which would have made her sixteen, not twenty, when she got married.32 Knowing Maud’s ambivalent relationship with the truth, that wasn’t necessarily a problem. Nor was the fact that Robert Barber was very much alive and kicking in 1901: claiming otherwise would have helped to ease Edith’s way to the altar without the parental consent required by anyone under twenty-one. Of more concern was that, when she stood at that altar, Edith Maria Barber was dead and had been for some time. She’d been lowered into a tiny grave in May 1887 after succumbing to measles and pneumonia at the age of two.33
I’d have thought I had the wrong man, were it not for my next discovery: Edith and Harry had been in Deptford on the evening of the census just before their wedding. They weren’t staying with the Robert Barber I’d found, but they were with his elderly parents – Robert Barber senior and his wife Mary – three streets away. Edith was listed as their granddaughter; Harry as a visitor.
What was Maud up to now? The public records were clear: there was only one child called Edith Maria Barber who had a father named Robert, and she was dead. Yet there she was, tucking into supper with Robert’s parents in 1901. There is almost always a simple answer to genealogical conundrums, but none of the theories I could come up with qualified as simple.
Had reports of the two-year-old’s death been mistaken? A clerical error, perhaps, or a medical one? But there was a death certificate and a burial record, which meant either inconceivable incompetence on the part of the authorities or that little Edith had somehow gasped back to life and clawed her way out of the grave. Besides, there was no sign of her in the 1891 census or anywhere else between her death in 1887 and reappearance in 1901.
Maybe Maud had used her family’s wealth to bribe this poor, bereaved family to pretend she was one of their own? She’d admitted that she had run away to get married in secret; had she left out the part where she had done so using a false identity? But why bother? The neurotic, gonorrhoea-ridden Harry Elliott wasn’t that much of a catch. No, it had to be something more serious, something about her past that she was keen to sweep under the carpet even then. A criminal record, perhaps? I thought of the sassy diamond thief I’d come across early in my research. What had become of that Maud West after she left prison? What if Maud had been using her real name all along?
It was a delicious proposition, but also utterly absurd. Of course it wasn’t the answer; Maud wasn’t living out the plot of a Wilkie Collins novel. Still, she was hiding something, I was sure of it. But what – and why?
An Unusual Pastime
AS RELATED BY
THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
Detective work, like newspaper work, will not wait upon convenience. What must be done must often be done instantly … If the telephone rings and she must catch the boat train leaving for a Channel steamer for India or one of the great American liners, Miss West is ready for
an immediate start.
She received instructions from a firm of solicitors in London one day, acting on behalf of a young American woman who wished her husband kept under observation, she related. He was very wealthy, but apparently he had ‘a bee in his bonnet and wanted to do things he shouldn’t.’
The trail began in Paris, city of strange romances … She disguised best of all as a man, and with different facial make-up each time she dogged him all over the French capital. Then he made for London and the woman shadower followed him across. He carried with him one particular bag of odd shape, and when he got to Dover he entered a hotel and left this part of his luggage, saying he would call for it on his return journey to France.
Maud West was determined to get that bag. From Dover to London is about a hundred miles. She got into the train to London, and halfway on the journey she got out and sent a wire from the station telegraph office to the Dover hotel. She said she wished the bag sent to a particular address in London immediately and she signed the American’s name to the message.
Not long after her, the bag arrived. She took possession of it and went to the man’s wife for permission to open it. This was given and the grip was opened.
‘Great heavens!’ the wife exclaimed. ‘What’s he up to now?’
The bag contained an imposing array of surgeon’s knives and implements.
‘Oh, dear; oh, dear,’ she cried. ‘Don’t lose sight of him! Follow him wherever he goes.’
The bag was returned to Dover with appropriate explanations. In due course the husband collected it and made for New York. The woman detective booked a berth on the same ship, and during the voyage she spent her time shadowing the eccentric passenger about the decks. Whenever he went to his stateroom she kept watch in the alleyway, like a thief in the night. He met her several times, but never knew it was the same person.
One day she would be an elderly woman, another she would appear as a heavily moustached man. So the comedy went on until New York was reached. She trailed her man across town to the East side and she saw him enter a tumble-down building. She followed and listened at the door.
‘Well,’ said the visitor, ‘got everything ready?’
‘Yes,’ a man’s voice replied. ‘I paid fifty dollars for a body that was fished from the river. It’s downstairs in my laboratory.’
The woman detective drew closer to the door.
‘Good for you, Doc,’ said the other. ‘Say, I brought my implements. I bought them in Paris, at the Pasteur Clinic.’
The woman detective waited only a little while longer until her suspicions were confirmed. As she had gathered, the strange American’s eccentricity had turned to medical surgery, and he had entered into a compact with this doctor of shady reputation to assist in the dissection of a human body. The detective went and cabled the wife, received a reply giving instructions, and the result was that the would-be amateur surgeon found himself in the hands of an alienist and later removed to a private mental home.34
Chapter Eleven
Partners in Crime
I love detective novels.
They are so entirely unlike
the real thing …
Maud West, 19311
On Monday, 6 March 1922, news broke of a brutal murder that had taken place over the weekend in Berkshire. The setting was a lonely inn at Gallows Tree Common, a place as bleak and isolated as it sounded. The victim, the Crown and Anchor’s fifty-two-year-old landlady Sarah Blake, had been found lying in a pool of blood that Saturday morning. Two dirty glasses had been left on a dresser, signs of a shared tipple preceding the frenzied attack that left her with over sixty bruises and stab wounds. On Sunday evening, working by the light of an oil lamp, the Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury established that although her skull had been fractured four times, it was the four-inch gash on the back of her neck that killed her.
The murderer had locked the door to the inn when he left and tossed the key into the garden, and a bloodied knife with a single strand of hair was found in a hedge nearby. The motive, however, was unclear. Mrs Blake, a widow, had no enemies and nearly £500 lay untouched in her private quarters. Rumours abounded of a strange cyclist with a Roman nose, excitable manner and stutter who had been spotted in the vicinity asking for refreshments. It was too much for the local police to handle, so Scotland Yard had been brought in.2
A few days later, Maud was also at the scene. She wasn’t there in any official capacity, just rubbernecking on behalf of the readers of Lloyd’s Sunday News, a commission that probably looked better on paper than it did in reality.3 There was little to see. Scotland Yard had been and gone. The body was in the mortuary, the inn locked up, and the only person Maud could find to talk to was the taxi driver who had driven her the seven miles from the railway station at Henley-on-Thames – and he’d barely been able to find the inn, let alone add any local insight. Besides, murder wasn’t really her game. Nor, it seemed, was country life (‘I saw few signs of civilisation’), but work was work, so Maud gamely stomped around in the mud for a while, then got back in the taxi and went home. There, she used the information already published in the press to string out a 500-word opinion on the case.
Forget about the mysterious stuttering cyclist, she said. He’s a red herring. This was the work of a local; a stranger would have taken the latch-key with him to dispose of far away, not thrown it down on the path. The motive was robbery – Sarah Blake had told a number of people about her savings – but the intruder had been startled by something (‘the sound of a mouse running across the floor would be sufficient’) and panicked. He was obviously an amateur; a professional would have stopped well short of sixty blows before he made his escape.
As it happened, she was right on all fronts, except for the mouse. In due course, the bloodied knife was traced back to its owner, a skinny, fifteen-year-old farmhand called Jack Hewett who had testified at the inquest as the last person to have seen Sarah Blake alive. He confessed to the murder, explaining that he’d heard about the money she kept at the inn but had startled himself by his own capacity for violence. Beyond that, his only defence was the cinema: ‘I wish I had never seen the pictures,’ he allegedly said to a police sergeant. ‘They are the cause of this.’4
Still, I wondered what Scotland Yard had thought of Maud sticking her oar in mid-investigation. In fact, what did the police think of Maud in general?
On the face of it, detective work in London – both public and private – was one big old boys’ network. Many inquiry agencies were run by retired Scotland Yard detectives, who in turn employed other ex-officers on their staff. They retained their titles and plastered them all over their letterheads as a sign that they were the real deal:5
Informal visits to and from the Yard, cosy out-of-hours chats, a swift pint after work: such things kept this network alive. So where did this leave Maud and Kate and all the other women who tried their hand in this testosterone-heavy profession? Shut out in the cold? Not necessarily. When Kate Easton was asked in 1907 about her relationship with Scotland Yard, she replied, ‘They are very good to me. I employ on my own staff more than one pensioned police officer.’6 This, no doubt, made it easier for her to develop relationships with those still working as policemen.
Maud, too, found the police helpful, as she explained in 1914:
Do I find much jealousy or hindrance on the part of the regular police force or the C.I.D. Department? Oh no! Not at all. On the contrary, they are always very good to me, but in return I am always careful never to bring up a police officer as a witness, or drag his name into a case.7
Based on all the crime novels I had read, I’d expected more animosity. But Maud and Kate, like all private detectives, were sitting on a wealth of information that could prove useful to the police, and vice versa. In real life, a good reciprocal relationship made everyone’s work easier. Besides, most of the time they were pursuing different aims. As Maud pointed out in 1930, ‘The main difference between a private detective and a Ya
rd man mainly consists of the fact that the latter, because of the nature of a case, will always try to make arrests … whereas this is usually the last thing we want to do.’8
If anything, the services provided by private detective agencies were useful for taking the pressure off the authorities when official resources had been exhausted. The Policewoman’s Review said of Maud in 1931 that ‘In certain cases where relatives, etc., have not been satisfied with the evidence the police have collected, she has been called in to supply more, and she cannot speak too highly of the willing help which the police have always afforded her.’9 I’d also found evidence of Scotland Yard and private detectives working cases concurrently. When Viscount Tredegar’s daughter, the Hon. Gwyneth Morgan, disappeared in December 1924, for example, it was an inquiry agent who was summoned to identify her body when it was fished out of the Thames by the police five months later.10
The key to the relationship was discretion. This was especially important, I discovered, when it came to London’s lady detectives. By the 1920s it was fine for Maud to say that she helped the police with criminal matters, even that she had been instrumental in securing a few arrests, but that hadn’t always been the case. The relationship between female detectives and Scotland Yard had once been a matter of utmost secrecy – even, some might say, of paranoia.
The official version of women’s involvement in the police was that it had started in the First World War, with the WPS and the WPV slugging it out over the morals of young women. The work they did during those difficult years convinced Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Nevil Macready that the ‘lady in blue’ was needed on the streets of London. In November 1918, he started sending women out on the beat for the first time. Clothed by Harrods and fuelled with pride, these women were striding into the pages of history, but they weren’t the first women to work for Scotland Yard.
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 19
