The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  I could find no dirt on Denis. He appeared to have led a scandal-free life. He’d joined the Merchant Navy in his teens – I found him returning from Rio on board a Royal Mail ship in 1925 – but also occasionally helped out with divorce investigations. In 1931, for example, he’d worked alongside Harry on a case in Gloucester,28 and the following year secured the evidence Vera needed to divorce her first husband.29

  Keith’s story, however, was more of a shock.

  It began in 1922, when Australia launched a charm offensive on Britain to support its plan to tempt 6,000 boys between the ages of fifteen and nineteen to start a new life Down Under, the aim being to replace those killed in the war.30 This was an extension of the Dreadnought Scheme, so named because it had originally used money donated by the Australian people to build a British warship to patrol their seas, a plan which had been superseded by the formation of a dedicated Australian navy in 1911. The funds were used instead to supply and train British boys to work on Australian farms.

  The official 1922 pamphlet promised a Boys’ Own adventure, a country life of rounding up cattle on horseback, hunting kangaroos and bears, and playing cricket in the sunshine. Yes, life in the bush could be tough, it said, but ‘it will make a man of you.’31 All a boy needed was a willing heart, the signature of a parent or guardian and a contribution towards his passage to Australia.

  The newspapers were also full of the wonders awaiting such recruits. ‘What a world of adventure and desire is conjured up by the name Australia!’ gushed the Elliotts’ local paper. ‘To the boy, it opens up scenes wherein Capt. Cook, Aborigines, and Ned Kelly, the bush ranger, hold sway.’32 In July 1923, the Hendon & Finchley Times also printed a letter written by a local boy who had emigrated with the Dreadnought Scheme the previous year:

  I feel absolutely like a farmer now, and everything is going along as it should … it does not seem long before I shall be my own boss and go out with all my strength and will power to face the world on my own … For it is Fortune that I set out to make and I will not return until I have achieved the same.33

  Less than a month later, and just two days shy of his fifteenth birthday, Keith Elliott packed his bags and, with Edith and Harry’s blessing, set sail for Sydney on the SS Euripides.

  His adventure started well, with a six-week journey via Tenerife and Cape Town in the company of forty-two like-minded boys. When the ship docked on 10 October, they were taken to a training farm just outside Sydney to learn how to ride horses, plough fields, dress sheep and milk cows. It was a tough three months – the conditions were deliberately spartan to prepare the boys for their first posting – but the novelty made up for it.

  In March 1924, Keith was billeted with a twenty-nine-year-old farmer called Malcolm McLeod and his wife Dot, in Coolac, New South Wales (population 150). In the lottery of farm placements, he’d struck lucky. The work was relatively light, and he had his own bedroom. McLeod was, by all accounts, a kind and fair man, and an excellent farmer who would go on to become ‘the top sheep man’ in Australia.34 Even Coolac itself, despite its small size, offered everything a Dreadnought Boy could hope for. When not working on the farm, Keith could swim in the nearby Murrumbidgee River or head into the bush to shoot parrots and other wildlife.35 The town even managed to muster enough men to field a football team against neighbouring settlements on Sunday afternoons. Keith seemed ‘bright and happy’ and ‘apparently contented with his lot.’36

  But, underneath his sunny exterior, all was not well. He confided as much in Malcolm McLeod and asked for a pay rise. Was he thinking of returning home? If so, he was out of luck. His wages were automatically banked for safekeeping and the pocket money he received would barely get him to Sydney, let alone London.

  On Easter Sunday, six months after Keith arrived in Australia, the morning started as usual. Keith lit the fire and milked the cows. Dot McLeod was away, so Malcolm swept out the house and prepared some lunch for Keith before leaving to visit his mother; Keith said he planned to join in the Sunday football game. When Malcolm returned at ten o’clock that evening, however, he found the back door jammed shut. Entering the house by the front, he went to the kitchen and discovered Keith’s lifeless body slumped in front of the door, a Winchester rifle at his feet. He had shot himself through the heart.37

  The End of His Tether

  BY MAUD WEST

  Some years ago I brought to justice a young girl who had cleverly forged a will. My chief assistant and myself had practically forgotten the case when late one evening, while motoring in an open two-seater through a narrow lane in Buckinghamshire, we were suddenly brought up by being ‘roped’. As I tried to pull up, the car skidded and, running into a bank, overturned. Hastily picking myself up – I was luckily unhurt – I noticed eight men who had been holding a metal rope dashing towards us.

  Crying to my assistant to ‘run for it,’ I set off as fast as I could go down the road. The pursuit, as it happens, was only half-hearted, and breathlessly we sought refuge in a small inn. The landlord, having listened sympathetically to our story, at once called to our aid a friend who had a fast car in the garage. Arming ourselves, we set out in search of our unknown attackers.

  All the tyres of my car, we soon discovered, had been slashed. The assailants had flown. For more than two hours we searched the countryside and finally, some 10 miles from the inn, we passed three men whom I recognised in the moonlight. A little further along the road we pulled into a hedge, extinguished our lights, and got out.

  Carefully and silently we picked our way along until we heard a steady crunch, crunch on the gravel as the three men drew nearer. At a given signal we stopped and waited. Then the innkeeper’s voice boomed through the night: ‘Stop, you three. Put your hands up.’ There was a sudden silence. Three pairs of hands slowly rose above three startled faces.

  It was now my turn to speak, and keeping them covered I asked why they had roped my car. For a moment the three refused to talk. Then, realising they had no chance of escape, one of them broke the silence. He said he was the brother of the girl I had been responsible for sending to prison, and he had been awaiting his chance to have his revenge on me.

  The other men who had helped him proved to be innocent of the real cause of the attack. They said they had been misled by the brother and treated the affair as a joke. It was not until they saw my car overturn after crashing into the bank that they became frightened, and five of them bolted.

  By this time more assistance arrived, and after talking to the three men I decided to let the two go and took the brother along with us. On the way back to the village the man implored me not to take action against him. He was so obviously repentant that I decided to let him go after he had signed a full statement.

  I have never had any further trouble from him. On the contrary, he took the trouble to ascertain the cost of my car repairs and sent me a packet containing the exact amount in treasury notes and a further apology!38

  Chapter Fourteen

  Look to the Lady

  It is by … putting my work before myself and before everything that I gained any success I may have made as a woman detective.

  Maud West, 19281

  I’d been secretly hoping for a corpse, but not like this. Not so real, not so damning. Brian had said no one ever spoke of Keith. It can’t have been the stigma of a suicide in the family, although enough people felt that way. What if everyone thinks we’re mad? No, the Elliotts knew better. They must have come across enough distress and mental illness in their work to understand. A more personal shame, then. A deep wound. That nauseating mix of grief and regret. Did they even have somewhere to grieve? What happened to the body? I could find no grave.

  They had a further blow to come. At the inquest into Keith’s death, it emerged that one of the last things he had done on that Easter Sunday was write to his mother. The inquest documents had long been destroyed, so I would never see a copy of the letter that had been passed around for the court’s inspection, but whateve
r it said – I love you? I hate you? Help me? – would have been devastating to receive. I imagined the envelope dropping onto the doormat one morning, months after the fact. Edith would live with the pain of knowing her son had died alone and homesick for the rest of her life.

  Good, a small part of me whispered. He was just a boy, barely fifteen! Maybe he’d been a bit of a handful, even delinquent – who knew? – but a one-way ticket to the other side of the world? How could she?

  I knew I was being unfair. I didn’t have all the facts, and it was a different world. Besides, if I was going to blame Edith, I’d have to blame Harry, too, and Cecil and Vera and all the other supposedly responsible adults who could have stopped Keith boarding the SS Euripides. No, my anger was coming from somewhere else altogether. Frustration? Exhaustion? Maud was undeniably hard work, but she’d always managed to be funny, too. Not this time. This story had no punchline.

  The floodgates opened. Was she even one of the good guys? It wasn’t a question I’d allowed myself to ask before, although it was always there lurking in the back of my mind. She’d worked in one of the most despised and underhand professions going, but because she was my lady detective I’d imbued her with a moral superiority that allowed her to transcend all that. I’d wanted her to be good. But what kind of person would stitch up their own chimney sweep for an easy win in the divorce courts, or turn a blind eye, perhaps even provide encouragement, as her offspring indulged in a little career-enhancing identity theft? She wrote about how many lives she had restored, but how many had she ruined?

  I knew I should be dispassionate; aim for an impartial appraisal of her life and career. But I didn’t want to be dispassionate. I wanted to thump her. Not just for Keith and all the others who had fallen by the wayside as she ploughed through life, but because I’d begun to suspect that I had spent months enjoying the company of a woman who wasn’t particularly nice.

  For weeks, I couldn’t look at her. I was tired of her games. I avoided my office, where her photographs were pinned to the walls, and changed the subject when friends asked after her. But something she’d said in 1926 was stuck to my fridge:

  … a detective who gives up hope, when things become too hard, had better stop working right away – as a detective, anyhow. Something nice and soft, with an armchair and a novel as soothing background, would be far more suitable!2

  Of course she was right, damn her. I had to carry on. I’d come so far, and there was still so much unexplained. Somehow, I needed to find a way back to the state of open-minded curiosity with which I had begun. Ironically, she’d given me an idea about how that could be achieved: armchairs and novels. The one person who could lift me out of my fug was inextricably linked to both in my mind: Dorothy L. Sayers.

  What was the name of the club where she’d given that talk on murder?

  The Efficiency Club had been formed in the summer of 1919 by Viscountess Rhondda, the equal-rights campaigner and formidable director of numerous manufacturing and shipping companies. At a public meeting that November, the vast Central Hall at Westminster was packed as she explained her vision for the club. It would have four key aims, she said: to promote greater efficiency and cooperation amongst established business and professional women; to encourage leadership and self-reliance amongst all women workers; to form a link between professional and business women for their mutual advantage; and, finally, to work towards the admission of women to British Chambers of Commerce.3

  The membership included representatives from many large-scale employers of women, such as Selfridges and Lyons’ Corner Houses, as well as doctors, dentists, aviators, lawyers, headmistresses, editors, saddlers, builders, artists, musicians, engineers and, of course, at least one private detective. It claimed to be the first organization of its kind in the world.

  As for the name, ‘efficiency’ had been a buzzword in Britain for some time. It underpinned a broad spectrum of ideas that ranged from ‘mental hygiene’ systems such as Pelmanism to the horrific doctrine of eugenics, each with the aim of instilling order in a chaotic world. The first business efficiency clubs had been formed in 1916 to discuss how the new scientific approach to war being applied by the military might be used to rebuild the economy once the conflict was over.4 But, whilst these male-dominated clubs focused on implementing efficiency measures with official names such as the Sheldon Method or the Bedaux System, the women in London took a broader approach.

  Once a month, they held informal members’ nights to share tips on day-to-day business practices – writing effective letters, training staff and so on – and debate issues such as how trade unionism could benefit women.5 Networking was also encouraged at frequent dinners, musical evenings and social nights. Every fortnight, the club organized a public lecture on a loosely efficiency-based theme. This could be anything from the nationalization of coal mines to the perils of vanity.6 Gladys Burlton, the director of education at Selfridges, for example, lectured on the psychology of efficiency; the ‘Lady Icarus’ Mary Heath, fresh from her triumph in becoming the first pilot to fly solo from Cape Town to London, spoke on developments in civil aviation.7 One of the very first lectures was entitled ‘Science as Applied to the Home’,8 which proved to be a recurring theme: an organized and efficient household, Viscountess Rhondda argued, was the first step towards a woman being able to combine both marriage and a career.9 Maud’s own contribution came in November 1931, when she delivered a lecture, sadly unreported, on ‘Where A Woman Scores’.10

  The club also attracted high-profile guest speakers, not all of whom took the subject seriously. In 1920, for example, Sir Robert Baden-Powell gave a talk on ‘How to Track a Wife’ in which he asserted that 43 per cent of women trod on the inside of one foot and the outside of the other. According to rules he had learned from trackers in the African desert, this meant that they were ‘emotional and impulsive’. There was much laughter. Presumably, the women of the Efficiency Club counted themselves in the other 57 per cent.11

  In November 1930, Dorothy L. Sayers also decided to have fun with her lecture, ‘Efficiency in Murder’. Maud was in the chair that evening as Sayers put forward her argument that the most efficient murderer was George Smith of the Brides in the Bath case. It was an excellent choice. Smith’s method was so effective that he had managed to dispatch three victims who were relaxing in the bath without leaving any trace of violence or struggle. At Smith’s trial in 1915, various theories were put forward as to how this might be achieved, but the theory which carried the most weight was that of the Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who argued, based on meticulous forensic analysis, that the trick was to stand at the end of the bath, grab the victim firmly by the ankles and yank upwards, thereby causing a sudden rush of water into the nose and mouth. The victim would immediately lose consciousness through shock, and drown.12

  Sayers concluded her talk with an idea to increase efficiency in murder by combining the training of future killers with the dispatching of those careless enough to be caught: a university course, in which students could practise their techniques on convicted felons.13 As one journalist reported, ‘Although Miss Sayers described the lecture as a leg pull, her audience listened to the tale of perfection in atrocity with a sang froid that made one very dubious about the ultra-efficient woman.’ That composure wasn’t to last. At the end of the talk, a voice rang out: ‘May I ask a question? Is this an open meeting?’

  Maud hesitated a fraction too long.

  The voice belonged to Mrs Harvey James, a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform and a vociferous opponent of capital punishment. She didn’t wait for permission to continue. The lecture, she said, demonstrated a ‘revolting cynicism and seventeenth-century savagery’. Had Miss Sayers not considered the psychological effect of her treatment of such an appalling subject? Did Miss Sayers perhaps regard ‘state murder’ with the same levity? The audience erupted into a chorus of ‘ironical cheers and loud booing’. Maud made vain attempts to restore order, but Mrs James rem
ained glued to her soapbox for several minutes.14

  Sayers, however, took it all in her stride. Writing to her cousin a few days later, she said:

  I was lecturing to a club in London the other day on ‘Efficiency in Murder’ – a nice little ironical talk about how to dispose of corpses and so on – and at the end a hysterical female arose in wrath and said I was ‘revolting,’ and made said protests in the name of the Howard League for Penal Reform! I am sorry to say that everybody laughed unkindly at her, and I got quite a nice little advertisement. Such is life.15

  She made no comment about the chairwoman.

  Occasional failures in crowd control aside, the Efficiency Club gave women the opportunity to shine, and its formation had been timely, coinciding as it did with the surprise passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act and the opportunities that opened up for ambitious women. As regards the fourth aim of the club, by 1926 the London Chamber of Commerce had nearly fifty female members. The Daily Sketch reported that the traditional membership was viewing this tendency of women ‘to force their way into the commercial circles of London’ with a certain amount of dismay, but they were resigned to the inevitable. As one ‘bachelor member’ said of his fellow businessmen, ‘[they] philosophically attribute it to Kismet. Besides, what could they do?’16

  He had a point. Many had been complaining about women in the workplace ever since the first soldiers returned from the front to reclaim their jobs after the First World War, but their petitions and threats of strike action had little effect due to the provisions of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. Of course, that didn’t stop some from continuing to rail loudly against the unfairness of it all and heap vitriol on prominent female figures.