The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

Father: ________

  There were two Edith Maria Barbers – and this one, who would grow up to become Maud West, was illegitimate.43 The birth hadn’t been registered for five weeks, so there had been time for the father to step forward, but no one had. The same thing happened six years later when Alice, evidently Edith’s sister, was born.44

  To be caught out once was one thing, but twice? That smacked of the kind of wilful abandon that, decades later, policewomen would be hired to crack down on. Maybe Mary Ann was a modern woman who wanted children but not a man; maybe she didn’t want children but liked the way they were made; maybe she’d had a couple of run-ins with over-entitled employers. There was, however, another possibility. It was well known that the common-law wives of London mariners often supplemented their incomes by attending to the needs of sex-starved sailors when their own menfolk were away at sea.45 There was no evidence of a common-law husband in Mary Ann’s case, but Deptford offered plenty of opportunities for a quick and lucrative fumble in the dark alleys and rowdy taverns that littered the cramped, dockside streets.

  As such, the chances of identifying Edith’s father were slim to non-existent – the likelihood was that she didn’t know herself – but the reality remained that, in Victorian eyes, she had arrived into the world stained with sin, doomed to spend her life marked by a stigma that was not of her making. In the eyes of the law, she had no father, so who could blame her for making one up, whether that was the sailor who would give her legitimacy at the altar or the solicitor/barrister with all his attendant relatives, who would provide the intellectual and social cachet she required to succeed as a detective?

  The Fatal Letter

  BY MAUD WEST

  One December evening I was about to leave my office. I was, in fact, closing the door behind me when a grey-haired, silk-hatted gentleman ran from the lift almost into my arms.

  ‘Can I do something?’ I asked.

  ‘I want Miss West,’ he said. ‘And at once. There is not a moment to be lost!’

  ‘I am Miss West,’ I said. ‘Come in, but remember,’ I added with a smile, ‘more haste, less speed.’

  Seated in my office he made me acquainted with these rather startling facts:

  He was a solicitor, and acted for a well-known city gentleman, for whose wife he also did certain business. About a month before, the gentleman had informed him that he suspected his wife of carrying on an affaire with another man, and had instructed the solicitor to obtain the necessary evidence of misconduct, and, when this was secured, to write him at once in order that divorce proceedings might be immediately taken.

  In the meantime, the gentleman, after giving some excuse to his wife to cover his absence, had left his home and was living just outside London.

  The solicitor had obtained the necessary evidence, and had written, on this very day, a letter to the husband setting out in detail exactly what his wife had been doing, and making suggestions for the best means of obtaining definite evidence of the misconduct.

  Strangely enough, on the same day, it had become necessary for the solicitor to write to the wife with regard to certain securities which he was negotiating for her, and, at six o’clock that evening, to his horror the lawyer had discovered that the letter written to the husband had been sealed up in the envelope addressed to the wife and posted! Delivery of this letter would mean that the wife would know exactly what was happening and could take steps to cover her tracks and stop the necessary evidence being secured.

  ‘Delivery of that letter must be stopped somehow,’ said the solicitor, wiping the perspiration from his brow. ‘I don’t care how you do it but it must be done. I will pay anything if you can stop that letter from reaching the hands of Mrs—’

  I promised nothing, but I informed him that I would do my utmost. It seemed hopeless in the short time at my disposal, but I said that I thought there was a chance.

  He went off despairingly; then, sitting at my desk, I tried to formulate some plan by which I might achieve my object.

  Eventually I got an idea. I sat down at the telephone and summoned every operative that I had in London.

  An hour afterwards twelve of them met me in my office, and I instructed them that somehow, within the next two hours, they must obtain for me the names and addresses of three servants employed in the wife’s house, and also the names and addresses of their mothers or fathers or nearest relative.

  At nine o’clock that night one of my men rang up. He had been successful in obtaining the name and address of the parlourmaid, and also that of her mother, who lived at Ealing. Twenty minutes later I was on my way to Ealing, and one hour later, after a banknote had changed hands, the parlourmaid’s mother had sent a wire to her daughter saying that she must return home immediately without fail.

  At ten o’clock the parlourmaid arrived, who, after another conversation, agreed to my request.

  Next morning, at 7.30, I presented myself at the wife’s house armed with a letter from the parlourmaid, informing the housekeeper that she could not return for a few days owing to her mother’s severe illness, but was sending a deputy, who was, of course, myself.

  I can be very ingratiating when I choose, and after I had arrived I immediately got on the right side of the housekeeper, and then proceeded to tell her that I believed that I had worked for her mistress (the wife) years before in Shropshire. The housekeeper argued that this could not be so, and after some talk she agreed that I might take up Mrs—’s early morning tea and letters, so that I could see if I was right!

  I had hoped that I should have the opportunity of removing the letter – which bore the name of the firm of solicitors on the back of the envelope – on my way upstairs, but, unfortunately, the housekeeper accompanied me to show me Mrs—’s room. As she opened the bedroom door for me – for I was carrying the tray – I saw my one chance. There was a fire burning in the bedroom.

  I put down the tray on a table, said good morning to Mrs—, who was awake, drew the curtains, and then, taking up the pile of letters walked towards the bed. As I passed the fireplace I slipped, and shoved the top letter – the fatal letter – into the fire. The thousand to one chance had come off!

  And I think that the first-class ‘telling off’ which I got from Mrs—, and secondly from the housekeeper, and the burn – the mark of which I still have on my arm – were well worthwhile when I remember the sigh of relief of the solicitor when I was able to telephone him that the ‘fatal letter’ had been burned – unread.46

  Chapter Twelve

  The Wrong Man

  To know how to watch, to know how to wait – these are the corner-stones of our work.

  Maud West, 19261

  Maud might have enjoyed a long and successful marriage, but her business was largely dependent on the failure of others to do the same. For all the blackmail, missing people and scam artists, a good part of her work would always be divorce investigations. Much of this work would have come via family solicitors, but some of her advertising efforts were clearly designed to attract the unhappily married direct to her door, as her details appeared in theatre programmes and hotel brochures – the kind of places one might find oneself either on an outing with a tedious spouse or dallying with a more exciting prospect.2

  Although Maud actively pursued divorce clients, she didn’t take the subject lightly. As she wrote in 1930:

  Each case of divorce is a tragedy. Behind the formalities of the law lies a human story; human suffering and doubt, and possibly much loneliness in someone’s future life.3

  The article was called ‘Who is to blame in divorce?’ Having witnessed the fallout from so many broken relationships, she was in a good position to offer an opinion on the matter. Although wary of being too simplistic, she nevertheless placed most of the blame on the shoulders of men:

  Sometimes I am amazed at man! He will, for the most obscure reasons, prefer the light attractions of some will-o-the-wisp of love against the deep and constant devotion of a charming and trustful wife.r />
  Yet she also believed that men were often biologically incapable of resisting the impulse to stray. Man bore, she said, a heavy cross:

  A cross which consists of an indefinable weakness in his sex make-up; a failing which, in a great majority of cases absolutely prevents him from treading the narrow path where happiness lies.

  As for women? ‘An infinitesimal minority’ struck her ‘as being persons from whom any man would seek to escape’, but the majority of her criticism was aimed at those who failed to take into account their husbands’ propensity for will-o-the-wisps:

  These women, often egotistical and selfish, fail as wives, for they have not learned the rule of adapting the home life to the needs of a man and of making him reliant and dependent upon them – as wives, as homemakers – for happiness.

  Considering her own situation, it was a curious attitude to take, but she was adamant that such women deserved everything they got when their husbands turned to ‘a more feminine and sympathetic type’ for the comforts lacking at home. She reserved further scorn for women who pushed gender equality too far. This, she said, could give their husbands ‘a repressed complex against women generally’ leading to resentment and hostility.

  In 1919, she had sent a dispatch from the front line of the sex war to prove her point. Under the heading ‘Why Sex Hate Is Growing’, she described instances in which female clients’ infuriation and frustration over gender inequality had spilled over into uncontrolled rage aimed at their bemused and confused husbands. One had nursed mounting resentment week after week as her husband hosted Sunday evening gatherings for his male friends, until one evening she rushed into the room to hurl abuse and a good number of ornaments at the group. Her husband agreed to a separation, but she told Maud she wanted more: ‘… cannot I do anything to get rid of the beast altogether? It drives me mad to think that I am tied to him. I don’t want to be any man’s property!’4

  Maud also reported a lecture she had heard whilst on kleptomania watch at a private house. The speaker was a furious French ‘advocate of the sex war’ who felt that the granting of votes to women was no more than a placatory measure by the patriarchy:

  ‘We women are like hungry wolves following a travelling sleigh on the snow!’ she shrieked. ‘The people in the sleigh fling out whatever food they have to stay the onrush of the wolves, but that only keeps the wolves off for a time. When there is nothing more to fling to them they overwhelm the travellers, and that is what we shall do. We shall overwhelm the men and they shall occupy in the future social structures of the world an even lower place than they have given us, their slaves.’

  Maud was not impressed.

  Perhaps she preferred her feminism more grounded in reality. After all, her job involved problem solving, seeking solutions, and working with what was in front of her – and what she must have seen was that, although a great shift in women’s lives was afoot, the ones who benefited most were those who could afford to take risks. The economic and social reality for the majority of married women was that they relied on male breadwinners to provide for them and their children. As such, it was best not to rock the boat too much.

  That didn’t mean that she was against divorce. ‘There can be no question, in my mind,’ she wrote, ‘that divorce is a good thing … [It] is usually the only remedy which enables some unhappy people to hope.’5

  She must have welcomed, therefore, the two pieces of legislation passed during the 1920s that made divorce more accessible to those unhappy folk. The first was the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, which allowed women to pursue divorce on the basis of their husband’s adultery alone. No longer were they required to prove additional causes such as rape or domestic violence. Due to the trauma of testifying about such matters (if they were true) or the bother of fabricating them (if they were blessedly absent), there had always been fewer women than men petitioning for divorce. In 1924, however, the figure hit fifty per cent for the first time and continued to gradually rise until it reached a peak of sixty per cent in 1927 and 1928. From that point on, with a few exceptional years mostly during the Second World War, wives would remain the most common party to instigate divorce proceedings.6

  The second change in the law came with the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926, which attempted to curtail the prurience of the press by prohibiting the publication of evidence from any divorce trial or other marital dispute, other than the basic details of the petition and the judge’s summary.

  It was still a flawed system. As the writer and parliamentarian A. P. Herbert said in his satirical novel Holy Deadlock in 1934:

  If you violently knock your wife about every night the ordinary person will conclude that you have not much affection for her; but the law requires you to prove it by sleeping with another woman … It would be the same if you were certified a lunatic: or became a habitual and besotted drunkard: or were sentenced for embezzlement … or were found guilty of murder … Such trifles mean nothing to the divorce laws of this Christian country. Adultery, misconduct, intimacy or nothing – that’s the rule.7

  One solicitor pointed out in the Sphere in 1932 that this absurd situation was unique to Britain: ‘Disease, habitual drunkenness, and cruelty are considered good and sufficient reasons for divorce in other countries.’8 But Britain was peculiarly hung up on sex and couldn’t bring itself to entirely abandon its ancient ecclesiastical ideas about divorce (‘Thou shalt break the Seventh Commandment’)9 in favour of something more fitting to modern lives. Many, such as A. P. Herbert, were campaigning for further reform, but, for the time being, the rules were set and everyone had to abide by them.

  Some people tried to play the system, by spending an awkward night at a hotel with a friend of the opposite sex before directing their spouse’s solicitor towards the establishment’s visitor book, for example. But, unless handled carefully, this could lead to charges of collusion or perjury. It was much easier to hire a professional who knew how to gain, or manufacture, evidence that would satisfy the courts whilst avoiding any legal pitfalls. Private detectives not only knew how to spin innocent situations into scenes of debauchery, but, as John Goodwin reported, also had co-respondents on their books ready to go: ‘Should a husband wish to give his wife the usual evidence, the detective will undertake to “find the lady.” She (bless her!) is a professional co-respondent and her alias is “a woman unknown.”’10

  Maud was aggrieved by such slurs on her profession. ‘So long as private detectives are engaged in bringing criminals to justice they are regarded as public servants,’ she wrote. ‘The moment their inquiries relate to divorce or other matrimonial troubles there is a tendency in some quarters to label them as despicable hirelings.’ The job of the private detective, she said, was to establish the facts and nothing more:

  He is not ‘paid to get evidence.’ His investigations often prove happily the innocence rather than the guilt of the suspected party. Personally I always find pleasure in removing any unwarranted suspicions which might threaten to break up family life. At the same time, though it is no part of my duty to act as a censor of morals, I am still frail enough to find satisfaction in bringing to justice either men or women who aggravate their matrimonial offence by calculated cruelty.11

  How this insistence on truthfulness worked in practice was hard to see. Although a few of her clients may have been thrilled to discover their partners were models of fidelity, most surely had their minds set on divorce and merely needed a detective to provide the evidence required by the courts.

  Gathering such evidence, Maud said, was ‘particularly arduous and exacting’: not only did it involve persistent shadowing, which I was beginning to realize was her least favourite part of the job, but such surveillance was frequently unproductive. Tellingly, she didn’t say what she did when shadowing failed to provide results.

  Occasionally, matters resolved themselves in unexpected ways. In 1937, The Times reported a case in which a detective named Richard Rogers, having failed to get ev
idence against a woman in her native Belgium, returned to London and withdrew from the case. He immediately returned to Zeebrugge, introduced himself to the wife and ‘made violent love to her’. It was the beginning of a torrid affair. In the end, a fresh set of detectives was hired and Rogers was named as the co-defendant in the divorce case for which he had initially been hired.12

  Most detectives, however, preferred to retain their fees and looked for more reliable ways of getting results. One such method came to light in 1905, when one of Henry Slater’s lady detectives had befriended the stubbornly faithful wife of a prospective divorce client in order to persuade her to loosen her morals. The pair had travelled to Lausanne together, where the detective had introduced the wife to a young Italian medical student and positively pushed them towards a dirty weekend in Paris.13

  Another option was to stitch up a random acquaintance, as happened in the case of Percy and Alice Richards, which reached court in November 1919. The two detectives involved were given a severe dressing down by the judge for their underhand behaviour. Both worked for Maud, and one was her husband. For all her fine words, it seemed that Maud wasn’t entirely innocent of the more grubby tactics employed in divorce inquiries.

  Percy and Alice Richards lived in a large semi-detached house in Grosvenor Road, Church End, just around the corner from the Elliott family home. They had been married since 1906 and had one daughter. Percy had spent most of his career as a commercial traveller, but now, at forty, he had a desk job at the Admiralty, having recently received a commission in the Royal Naval Reserve.

  The marriage had been a happy one for the first two years. But, reading between the lines of their testimony in court, it had quickly slid into an uncomfortable mix of resentment and indifference. Percy had abandoned Alice briefly in 1910. He had only been away for three weeks, but during that time had enjoyed an affair at an Eastbourne hotel with a wealthy widow. Alice had forgiven him, but Percy still craved freedom. He eventually left for good at the beginning of 1916. To get a divorce, however, which Alice did not want, Percy needed evidence of his wife’s adultery. This he found – or manufactured – with the help of his local lady detective.