Their patsy was a local chimney sweep called Charles Bryant, who had worked for the Richards for six years. By all accounts, he was a happily married man. In court, the first insinuation came from one of the Richards’ neighbours, who claimed that Bryant’s cart was frequently parked outside the house in Grosvenor Road (‘We were very sorry for the horse … It was very cold standing there all day.’).14 In response, Bryant pointed out that he swept between fourteen and fifteen chimneys a day on top of other work, and didn’t have time for dalliances.
One of those chimneys, incidentally, was at Pearley in nearby Finchley Avenue, which made for an awkward moment when Harry appeared as a witness to describe what he had seen at the Richards’ house on 22 February 1916. He and his colleague Leslie Howard had been smuggled into the house through a window by Percy, after which they concealed themselves in the attic. According to Harry, Bryant arrived shortly after eleven. Incriminating snippets of conversation floated up the stairs, including the statement by Alice, ‘I told Percy to sling his b— hook.’ In the late afternoon, they crept downstairs and looked through a crack in the dining room door. There, Harry testified, they saw Alice sitting on a chair with Charles Bryant kneeling beside her, his arm draped around her neck. They were professing their devotion to one another in a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in a two-bit melodrama:
WOMAN: You are my own true darling, aren’t you, Charlie? Are you always true to me?
SWEEP: Of course I am, darling. Are you always true to me?
The judge, Sir Thomas Horridge, rarely hid his contempt for private detectives. On one occasion, he declared that ‘There is nobody in the world whose opinion I have so little respect for as a private detective’,15 so it was no surprise that after hearing from all parties in the Richards case, he said:
I am quite satisfied that this woman never committed adultery at all, and I am perfectly shocked at the lies of these two assistants of the woman who keeps a detective agency. They have come here and both of them lied to me about what took place on that occasion.16
He dismissed Percy’s petition and awarded costs and a decree nisi to Alice, along with custody of their daughter. Thanks to the sensational mix of an officer’s wife, a chimney sweep and unreliable testimony from private detectives, the judge’s comments were widely reported – no doubt much to everyone’s embarrassment.
Maud’s most high-profile case, however, came some years later, in 1933. It involved the Scottish baronet Lord Inverclyde and his second wife June, an actress. This was high society at its most glamorous and, from a research point of view, it was perfect: not only did the case attract extensive coverage in the press, but June had also written about the experience in her memoirs. Between the two, it was possible to build a comprehensive picture of how Maud and her team went about gathering evidence and what it was like to be on the receiving end of that attention and the public scrutiny at the subsequent trial.
Alan Inverclyde was the grandson of the founder of the Cunard shipping line, although he only took a nominal interest in the family business. He was an adventurer at heart, taking his steam yacht Sapphire to India and Malaya in the mid-1920s, and then the Beryl on an exhaustive tour of the crumbling ruins of the Mediterranean a few years later.
His wife was born June Tripp, but by the late 1920s she was famous enough to be known simply by her screen name, June. Her parents were both actors, and she had been on the stage since childhood. At the age of ten, she had danced alongside the Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova;17 as an adult, she split her time between the theatre and silent films. Her most famous role was as Daisy Bunting, the original Hitchcock blonde, hamming it up in a wig opposite Ivor Novello in Hitchcock’s first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, in 1927.
The pair had met in the summer of 1928 at a party on board the Beryl at Antibes, where Inverclyde was broodily licking his wounds after the break-up of his marriage to the young and glamorous Olive Sainsbury. By the following spring, they were married and living at Inverclyde’s family home, Castle Wemyss, on the shore of the Firth of Clyde.
It was clear from the start that it had been a mistake. Alan disliked June’s theatre friends and complained that she talked about being a chorus girl in front of the servants; June discovered that Alan’s broodiness was not due to a broken heart but an irredeemable part of his character.18 Barely a year after the wedding, June asked for a divorce: ‘I want my freedom to earn my own living again. Please. All you have to do is go away with a woman for a few days. Is this too much to ask?’
It was. Alan replied, ‘You will never have any reason to divorce me. I shall bide my time until I obtain grounds for divorcing you. And I do not think I shall have long to wait.’19
He did wait, however. For over two years. In the meantime, June left Castle Wemyss and attempted to get the marriage annulled. Her petition stated that Alan was incapable of consummating the marriage and, in the legal terminology of the time, that this incapacity was ‘incurable by art or skill.’20 This was dismissed. She asked for an allowance of £5,000 unconditional on her behaviour. Inverclyde refused. She next obtained a divorce in Reno, Nevada in order to marry the Hollywood director Lothar Mendes, but the wedding was called off when she realized she would still be guilty of bigamy under English law. She returned to Europe.
In 1932, Inverclyde made his move. He instructed his solicitor, who, in turn, instructed Maud to set her watchers on to June. They started in Paris. In her memoir The Glass Ladder, June recalled dodging Inverclyde’s detectives with her friend Pepé de Landa:
Like children ringing doorbells and running away, Pepé and I would get out of a taxi at the Vendôme entrance to the Ritz, scoot through the hotel and out of the Rue Cambon door. In separate vehicles we would drive to out-of-the-way inns in the country, meet for a quick aperitif, leave together, and go to one or another maison particulière in the Avenue de la Grand Armée, and, having been admitted, peer through a crack in the high carved door until two men in a familiar black Citroën had lit cigarettes and settled back for a long wait. Then we would sally forth, hailing a cruising taxi, and take a circuitous route to the Meurice, where I was stopping, and there say goodbye.21
After six days of this, she said, the black Citroën was gone. The co-respondent in the case would not be Pepé, however, but Tony Paanakker, whom she described as ‘a big, blond, exuberant Dutchman with a wealthy American wife, a house in Paris, and a burning desire to make his name as an impresario.’22 At the time, this desire was focused on June as the actress he wanted to play the lead in a new play, Ballerina.
When June returned to London to appear in Over the Page at the Alhambra theatre, Paanakker followed. Whilst the Ballerina script was being developed, she said, he would pick her up from her dressing room after the evening performance, ‘rush me into his green, foreign car and drive me to my flat, talking shop all the way.’ There, after supper, they would ‘light cigarettes, make drinks and settle down to read, discuss, and sometimes battle over the script.’23
Maud, however, had suspicions that there was more going on than business negotiations. Her staff were watching the pair’s every move. June was quite aware of this:
… if I were in a light enough mood I would pause beside a ratty-looking little man who stood beside a lamp-post reading a newspaper through dark glasses. ‘Good morning, Alphonse,’ I would smile … I could see his little eyes sliding towards me behind the glasses. He never answered me.
Perhaps that was because his name wasn’t Alphonse, as would become evident at the trial. But Maud hadn’t just posted a man under a street lamp. Every night, June wrote, ‘there was always the same nondescript dark car posted on the corner almost opposite my front door with two men in the front seat.’ If she was with Paanakker, it would remain there until he left. Otherwise, it would leave soon after she returned home.
June said that she was careful never to bring any actual lovers back to her flat for a nightcap, but was confident that her professional
relationship with Paanakker would not be misconstrued, especially as she had a butler and maid on hand who could attest to the innocence of their meetings.
When June received copies of Maud’s reports from her solicitor in the spring of 1933, however, she found a description of her passionately kissing Paanakker on her doorstep, after which he drove to a nearby garage to park his car, returned to the flat, and didn’t reappear until daylight. Yet, June said, Paanakker was in Berlin at the time, and the man had been her brother Suthie, who had borrowed Paanakker’s car to take her to the Café de Paris for a much-needed night out. When Suthie dropped her back home, she saw the detectives’ car parked in its usual place. As she claimed to have written in her diary: ‘The car was there again and suddenly my nerves gave way. I was awful, blubbering like an infant. S garaged P’s car and I talked all night. Last memory: poor S nodding on the chaise-longue. Must apologise.’24
She also said that the house butler who served her set of flats was approached in a local pub by one of Maud’s team, plied with beer and promised payment if he would testify against her. ‘Another sleuth,’ she wrote, ‘paid court to one of the housemaids, perhaps with the same objective, but to quote the girl, “I wasn’t ’aving any.”’
The trial began on Tuesday, 14 November 1933 at Parliament House in Edinburgh. It was scheduled to last four days but spilled over into the following week. The public gallery was packed throughout. Maud was there, along with her team of detectives, ready to give evidence against June.
The first day opened with Baron Inverclyde’s testimony, followed by that of the Parisian detective Charles Courtois, Harry and his colleague Henry Howard Stephens. On the Wednesday, Maud gave evidence herself alongside three more of her assistants and two garage attendants they had located in the course of their inquiries. The assistants were named as James Black, Mrs Langford and Cecil Elliott. I hadn’t come across any of them before. Presumably, Cecil was one of Harry’s many relatives from Hackney, interesting in itself, but what about the others? I made a note to check them out, along with Harry’s co-conspirator in the Richards case, and Stephens and Courtois.
The Thursday and Friday were given over to June’s defence, which, in her words, was delivered in front of ‘row upon row of sensation-seekers’.25 This was confirmed by the Edinburgh Evening News, which added that the crowd consisted mainly of women who ‘assembled in force in the main corridor’ when the court adjourned for lunch. There were so many hoping to gain access to the afternoon proceedings that the court police struggled to keep them under control. The scene, the paper reported, ‘was one of the most extraordinary witnessed in Parliament House for many a day.’26
After testimony from her maid, her brother Suthie, her dresser at the Alhambra, the former steward of her block of flats and her solicitor, June was called to give evidence. Paanakker had declined to appear, claiming he was ‘broke’ and couldn’t afford the journey from Paris.27 As June made her way to the courtroom, she heard a young barrister call out to another, ‘Let’s go and watch the little Inverclyde being crucified!’28
It was unquestionably a long and painful ordeal. She was in the witness box for three and a half hours on the Friday morning and then cross-examined by Inverclyde’s barrister for most of the afternoon. The closing speeches had to be postponed until the following week.
Many regional and national newspapers had sent special correspondents to cover the case. As they were prohibited from publishing any evidence from the ongoing trial under the Judicial Proceedings Act of 1926, their reports were initially limited to the basic details of the allegations and a list of each day’s witnesses. The Act didn’t, however, apply to judges’ summaries, and the judge in the Inverclyde case, Lord Fleming, was particularly thorough in this respect. As soon as he delivered his verdict on 22 December, papers throughout the country produced pages of special reports.
There was widespread criticism of Paanakker’s failure to attend the trial, leaving June to defend the case alone. No one believed his pleas of poverty. Maud had established that he had a flat in Piccadilly, often stayed at the Berkeley Hotel and his home in Paris was in one of the best residential districts. Furthermore, he usually travelled by air and dined at the most exclusive restaurants.
It also appeared that he had duped June as to how much he could help her career. They had met on a theatrical train from Manchester to London in the spring of 1932 and soon afterwards June had signed a contract authorizing him to negotiate film deals on her behalf. But, as emerged at the trial, his day job was as president of a French company dealing in Stetson hats and he had no contacts in the movie industry. Inverclyde’s barristers had suggested that this contract, and the plans for Ballerina, ‘were merely a “blind” to ingratiate himself with the defender and give him the opportunity of enjoying her society.’29
And enjoy it he did. Maud and her employees had followed Paanakker and June for seven often wet and miserable weeks in the autumn of 1932. They worked around the clock, with a minimum of two detectives on duty at all times, sometimes as many as five. When shadowing June from the theatre at night, it seemed they worked in a team of four, ready to follow on foot or by car as necessary. When watching the flat, they might stay outside from midnight to eight or nine o’clock in the morning. During the seven weeks, they witnessed the pair leave the theatre together on sixteen occasions, dine at a restaurant seven times and return to June’s flat in Hertford Street eleven times. On five occasions, Paanakker spent ‘practically the whole night’ there. They noted that he had a key to the building.
Although there was some excitement when Paanakker and June had a row after June learned that she would not, after all, be cast in Ballerina, I was beginning to understand what Maud meant when she said shadowing was a tiresome business. Seven weeks of constant observation seemed excessive. But, as Lord Fleming explained, June’s defence that on certain occasions the detectives had mistaken one of her neighbours for her, or her brother Suthie for Paanakker, or that Paanakker had left her flat at a reasonable hour without the detectives noticing ‘would have been a fatal criticism if the observations had been confined to one night …’30
As always, there was a question mark over the fact that private detectives had been used at all. Harry had slipped up and claimed to have witnessed something on a night his colleagues said he was not on duty, which gave Lord Fleming ‘some anxiety’ about the amount of collaboration that went into the detectives’ reports.31 As he said:
It is obvious that a vitally important point in this case is whether the evidence of the detectives, generally speaking, can be relied on. It is a trite saying that such evidence must be carefully scrutinised. On the other hand, it must be recognised that to lay down a rule that such evidence has to be disregarded would amount to a denial of justice in many cases.32
On balance, he decided Harry’s blunder was not a vital matter, and even went so far as to say, ‘I was favourably impressed with the way in which all the detectives gave their evidence.’33
Maud’s team had done well. Inverclyde was granted his divorce, but none of the parties emerged from the courtroom unscathed. Inverclyde had shown himself to be vindictive in the way he pursued the matter, and June came across as a fame-obsessed strumpet. As for Paanakker, it was generally agreed that he was the true villain of the piece. In his absence, he was ordered to pay the expenses of both parties.
June, however, carried on like the trooper she was. On the evening of the verdict, she told the press that she did not intend to appeal: ‘You can write “finis” to it,’ she said before stepping onto the stage as Cinderella at the Palace Theatre, Manchester. It was her very first pantomime, and she received a standing ovation accompanied by shouts of ‘Good old June!’ from the back of the circle.34 Four years later, she married an American millionaire and moved to Beverly Hills.
The Richards and Inverclyde cases had given me hope that I might find out more about the team Maud employed. It was unusual to have so many detectives named in cou
rt reports; usually, they were just anonymous figures tacked onto the end of news items with the words ‘An inquiry agent also gave evidence.’ But here I had six new names to investigate. Unfortunately, Mrs Langford seemed determined to stay in the shadows; likewise Henry Howard Stephens and Charles Courtois, and all I could establish about Leslie Howard was that he was unlikely to be the famous actor of the same name. I did find a James Black working as a constable in the Metropolitan Police in 1927, so it was possible that he, like so many other policemen, had moved into detective work after retirement.35
Cecil Elliott, however, was a different matter. I was sure he belonged to Harry’s extended family somehow, so I pored through census data and vital registers, ordered birth certificates and generated mounds of notes and family trees. Most of it ended up in the bin, but what was left was astonishing.
Cecil was related to Harry, although in a more direct way than I had anticipated. He was Harry and Edith’s son. Their daughter Evelyn may have been a relatively late-life baby, but she wasn’t an only child. Cecil had been born on 7 March 1902, a respectable nine months and thirteen days after Edith and Harry got married. But that was just the beginning. There was also another daughter, Vera, born in 1904, then a son, Denis, in 1907; two more boys followed – Keith and Neville in 1908 and 1910 respectively – and that was all until Evelyn arrived in 1913.36
Six children. I’d been impressed that Maud had managed to raise one child whilst carrying on her work, but six? Just the thought was exhausting. In 1905, when she claimed to have started working as a detective full-time, she would have had two toddlers waiting for her at home. By the time her first ‘Maud West’ advertisements appeared in 1909, Cecil would have been seven, Vera five, Denis a terrible two and Keith a wobbly and curious ten months. And, as I had already noted, when her staff was depleted during the First World War and Harry’s health disintegrated, Evelyn would have been at peak tantrum age.
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 22
