The Amazing Mrs Livesey
Page 1
By the same author
Love, Sweat and Tears
Back of Beyond
First published in 2016
Copyright © Freda Marnie Nicholls 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Dedicated to Frank George Bolan
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 Miss Swindells
2 Mrs Carter
3 Mrs Taylor
4 Mrs Smith
5 Mrs Ward
6 Mrs Lee
7 Mrs Spurgess
8 Mrs Giblett
9 Mrs Hourn
10 Mrs Anderson
11 Mrs Baker
12 Mrs Thompson & Gloria Grey
13 Mrs Gardiner
14 The Drapery Affair & Nurse Florence Anderson
15 Miss Hordern
16 Mrs Ann Derson
17 Miss Turner
18 Lady Betty Balfour
19 Miss Harvey
20 Mrs Coradine
21 Mrs Livesey
22 The Falcon Cliff Hotel
23 Ivydene
24 Fortune Taken to Australia
25 Mr Beech & The Wedding of the Century
26 Police Want to Question Heiress
27 Society Woman Arrested!
28 Mrs Livesey Missing
29 Mrs Percy
30 Up on the Big Screen
31 Thousands Wait to See Mrs Livesey
32 Going for Broke
33 Mrs Livesey Again Missing
34 Where Did All the Money Go?
35 Going After the Lawyers
36 The Crocodile-Skin Case
37 Mrs Livesey Explains
38 Mrs Nan Glover
39 Mrs Ethel Nelson
Aftermath
Picture Section
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
My name is Luita Aichinger, and I am the granddaughter of Florence Elizabeth Ethel Livesey, or ‘The Amazing Mrs Livesey’ as she became known in newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s.
Unfortunately I never met my grandmother, but I feel I have a reasonably good insight into her life, as my father, Frank, left me a number of precious audiotapes, describing his journey throughout these years, with and without her. It was a journey of heartache, sorrow and an unlikely upbringing.
My father passed away in 2005, at the age of 82. He always said he would not have traded his life for quids, and lived by the saying ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, a song we played at his funeral at his request. We had many talks around the kitchen table over the years, him sitting there with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, telling me about his younger years and his younger brother, Basil. My father’s chats always intrigued me.
My father lost contact with his brother Basil. It was only about ten years before my father died that they found each other again, two old men by then—how sad, I thought, that these two brothers had lost so much of their time together. My father had a tough exterior, but beneath it all was a man who had felt hurt and rejected by a mother who was absent from his life at a time when a young boy was in need of a mother’s love.
Dad led an adventurous life, with my mother by his side and eight children at foot, me being number five. He managed to teach himself the art of signwriting, and passed down his trade to three of my brothers and his grandsons, who to this day are still signwriters. My father told me I had a beautiful hand, and persuaded me to take up this art, and at nineteen I came second in the state as an accomplished ticketwriter.
For many years my father held an understandable degree of bitterness towards his mother Ethel, stating he never wanted to see her again. But, years later he needed to find his birth certificate to find out more about himself, something he tried to do right up until he died. Sadly, his death certificate is only half complete; his birth details were unknown.
My sister June and I first became interested in finding out more about our family after June visited a dentist over eighteen years ago. He told June she had particularly dark gums and asked about her family history, but she had no answer to give him on our father’s side. So she started to delve a little deeper into dad’s past, writing to the Department for Child Welfare in South Australia.
My own research into my grandmother’s activities started not long after, when the Child Welfare Department replied to June’s letter. An astonishingly large amount of paperwork followed, which June handed over to me.
In 2011, my research took me to the State Library of New South Wales, where I punched my grandmother’s name into their search engine, and spent most of the day printing out a trail of newspaper clippings, all on the ‘Amazing Mrs Livesey’. I was absolutely astounded, and excited, to finally start putting some answers together. My daughter Jessica also found a video of my grandmother speaking of her innocence on a British Pathé newsreel. I was so excited to hear her speak—this was my father’s mother, at last.
In 2013, when I caught up with an old friend, author Freda Nicholls, I told her what I’d learnt about my grandmother, and mentioned that we still couldn’t find my father’s birth certificate. Freda became as caught up as I was in researching this remarkable woman, and two long years later, she finally found dad’s birth certificate, uncovering along the way many other incredible facts.
Ethel Livesey’s crime sheet is hard to defend, given the number of cases made against her, and an unbelievable list of aliases she invented for herself over a 30-year period. But this all has to be taken into context. The world in the 1930s was in the midst of a global Depression, and many people, including my grandmother, resorted to desperate measures in order to make ends meet. Being a single mother with two young boys would have compounded this. My grandmother made some bad choices in men throughout her life, and I can’t justify her leaving her children while she lived the high life, but I was not in her shoes at the time, so I cannot judge.
Her life seemed to be one that was deceitful, as she fed off other people’s generosity and trustfulness. How could anyone do this and have a conscience? I will never know the answer.
Our family line continues in Australia through her two sons and their descendants, and I am grateful that I had a father who loved and cared for all of his children, and for the life and adventures he gave us. Thankfully the saying ‘The apples don’t fall far from the tree’ didn’t apply here.
Luita Aichinger
My mother was quite a woman.
The day after Ethel got out of going to gaol, she sat us down, my brother Basil and me, and told us a few things. She would have been in her late forties about then, and was looking knackered after mont
hs of scrutiny by the cops, the media and the courts.
Over a couple of hot, dry, stifling summer days in 1946, we sat in my brother’s house in Adelaide while his wife fussed over us; both Basil and me had plenty of questions for our mother. She told us her version of events, trying to justify herself I reckon, but you never knew whether to believe her or not. She never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Years later I decided to do a bit of digging, not like you can on computers like now. I wrote letters, lots of letters. I had to find out about my family, and I needed to find my birth certificate. I found all sorts of weird and wonderful things about her instead, facts she wouldn’t have been able to dispute even if she was still here.
This is her story.
1
MISS SWINDELLS
Florence Elizabeth Ethel Swindells was born in Manchester on 24 September 1897, that much is true.
The Swindells were originally farmers from Lancashire, but it was two brothers, Francis and Martin, who in the early 1800s branched out into milling cotton. They must have been a game lot, and tough. The family story goes that Francis ran away from home and his very strict father when he was about sixteen. He made it down to London and went into service, as they called it back then, as a groom to a gentleman.
Late one night Francis was sitting up next to the coachman taking his master’s family home over Hounslow Heath, a hangout of bandits and footpads (robbers on foot), when two highwaymen bailed them up.
Francis grabbed the reins from the terrified coachman, ducking the highwaymen’s fire, and drove the horses furiously through the night, eventually getting the relieved family safely back home. His master rewarded him with a wad of cash, and not long afterwards he married his sweetheart Mary, a servant in the same household. They moved up to Manchester to raise a family, where his brother Martin joined them.
Manchester back then was known as ‘Cottonopolis’, on account of its massive textile industry, and Francis and Martin got in on the act, building seven large cotton mills over the years. By the time they were middle aged they were extremely well off, and at the height of the Industrial Revolution even bought and restored a 16th-century three-storey manor house.
It wasn’t from these Swindells that Ethel was apparently descended. Rather, Francis and his brother Martin supposedly had an illegitimate cousin James—who they employed as a cotton spinner, and then a cotton buyer. He must have been pretty good at it because the job was handed down to his son, and then his grandson, Frank Swindells—Ethel’s father. Frank’s family never owned a mill, but he was certainly involved with the business and held plenty of coin, just not in the same league as Francis and Martin’s families.
The Swindells brothers were apparently good-looking as well as rich. When they built Clough Mill, their first cotton mill, the local papers said they were two of the finest-looking men to ever come to the town, but maybe that was the money talking. The press often remarked on the striking good looks and engaging personalities of the Swindells family, something that was certainly carried down to Ethel.
Tall for a girl back then, standing nearly five foot seven, Ethel had long brown hair and big blue eyes that held your attention even when you didn’t want them to. Her mother Elizabeth was a stickler for manners and made sure Ethel spoke the Queen’s English, rather than picking up the broad accent of the town, and she always insisted her girls were well ‘turned out’, looking their best. Ethel always loved to look her best, wearing the most expensive clothes and jewellery she could get her hands on.
She was the only child in her family for eleven years, until her little sister Mabel came along. Her father had always doted on her, and she adored him, but suddenly she was no longer the centre of attention, and had to share his affection. How could she be her father’s special girl when there was another?
Her father would often take her to the theatre, opera and vaudeville shows in the busy Manchester town centre, to get her out of her mother’s hair, and Ethel loved the excitement, the fantasy. But it was the first silent film she remembered seeing at the Oxford Picture House on a cold winter’s evening in 1911 that she would talk about the most. Watching that short black-and-white film on Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, she was spellbound, taken into a whole other world. Her vivid imagination ran riot: that was her up there on screen with Scott, facing danger, triumphing over extremes, all to the accompaniment of loud, dramatic music pumped out on an upright piano.
As more movies were released and more picture houses opened, Ethel would sneak out whenever she could. A trip to the movies didn’t come cheap, so she funded her trips with change she’d purloin from her father’s pockets or mother’s purse, but it was never enough. She learnt to sneak in, attaching herself to a group of people, often starting a casual conversation with one of them as they made their way into the theatre. That way she could often avoid the ticket collector and usher, sitting just separate from the group, alone in the dark, imagining herself up there with the main movie star.
Her parents sent Ethel to an exclusive girls’ school, but she didn’t focus much on her education. Instead she would egg her friends into all sorts of scrapes or take on dares—swimming the big water canals that ran beside the mills, or meeting boys from the nearby Manchester Grammar School. Anything for a bit of attention. Ethel completed the school work, but she was going to be a movie star up there on the big screen—she was going to have a life of adventure and live the high life, the papers would write about how much money she had, what clothes she wore and how fabulous she was; she would be famous.
It was probably about this time that Ethel learnt the power of a name. The Swindells held plenty of status and power in the town, and she took advantage of her surname to get what she wanted, or to get out of trouble.
And there was plenty of trouble ahead. It was 1914, and the fun-loving Ethel was turning seventeen.
2
MRS CARTER
Ethel was three months short of eighteen when she married Alexander ‘Alec’ Carter, against her father’s wishes.
She lied about her age at the registry office, left school and home, and moved to the town of Eccles to the north of Manchester, where her new husband was working as a stationer with his father.
The Great War had started in August the previous year, and Ethel later recalled big parties in the street, and how the boys from the Manchester Grammar School talked of nothing else except fighting for King and Country, with large numbers of boys and men signing up. They thought the war would last no more than a few months—that it would all be over by Christmas—and they were keen to be a part of it. But after a few months, the reality of war began filtering back, together with the lists of dead and wounded. The Manchester Regiment, where most of the local boys had ended up, were pinned down by the Turks at Gallipoli, and then the lists of the dead appeared in the papers, and included names of boys Ethel knew. Some of the young men had married their sweethearts just weeks or even days before heading off to war, never to return.
Alec was five years older than Ethel. It isn’t really clear how they met, or why Ethel married him. Perhaps she was after a sense of security, but then she always did seem to like older men.
Alec didn’t immediately enlist, as he was classed ‘unfit for active service’ when he first applied to join up with his father at the beginning of the war. By 1916, however, men were falling like flies, and the War Office began calling up those who had been rejected at the start. They were also having trouble getting labour to build roads, unload ships and carry supplies around the Western Front, so a Labour Corps was established, and this was where they sent Alec. He was trained as a gunner, to operate and load the howitzer heavy field guns, and was then sent to the Western Front in June 1916, leaving Ethel, four months pregnant, with his family.
Alec’s father was recruited a few months later, so Ethel was then left with her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, Doris and Gladys. None of the Carter women liked her, and she didn�
��t think much of them either. Gladys was the same age as Ethel, and Doris two years older, and both of the daughters went off each morning and worked in their father’s shop with their mother, keeping the shop going, leaving the pregnant young Ethel at home alone.
Ethel, like her mother-in-law, received money—a pension from the Ministry of Pensions in the War Office—which could be accessed once a week at the post office via a ‘ring paper’. From October 1914, ring papers were issued to the wives and children of soldiers and sailors sent off on active duty. The names of dependants were given to the War Office by each serviceman; a numbered ring paper was then issued to the dependant, with wives receiving a bit over six pounds a week. Instead of having to wait a month for money to survive on from the serviceman’s wage, all they had to do was go to the nominated post office, hand over the numbered ring paper that showed their name, this was checked off an enormous ledger, the ring paper holder would then sign in that same ledger and receive the money.
But Ethel was bored and lonely. Stuck in Eccles, she kept herself amused by going to the shops and spending her husband’s money—it kept her happy as her belly grew. Rather than hand the money to her mother-in-law to help with living expenses, Ethel spent all of it on clothes, shoes and going to the movies, which led to some pretty heated disagreements. So Ethel moved back into her father’s home, where she wasn’t questioned about her spending habits—her father even gave her more money to spend.
She did her best to ignore the fact there was a war on—but that wasn’t to last long. In early November 1916 a letter arrived from the War Office: Alec was missing in action, presumed dead.
Ethel’s world crumbled. Fearing the worst, her head filled with dramatic images of Alec’s body left lying out on a battlefield; she took to her bed and refused to leave. Her mother tried to coax her to eat for the sake of the baby, but all Ethel could do was cry, falling into an exhausted sleep each night.
Frank Alexander Carter was born on 26 November 1916, but Ethel couldn’t even look at her newborn baby. Her parents decided to take baby Frank away and care for him in another part of the house, thinking their daughter would recover and love her baby when she was better.