How would you describe The Cleveland Street Scandal in 3 words?

Sex, power, cover-up / abuse of power.

What inspired you to cover this particular story?

It was a scandal that I was vaguely aware of, but I didn’t know much about it – we never covered this in history lessons at school in the 1980’s! It was the fact that Inspector Abberline, whom I knew was a key figure in the Jack the Ripper investigation in London’s East End in 1888 – the year before the Cleveland Street scandal – was put in charge of the inquiry which first intrigued me. The connection with Abberline didn’t seem to be widely known outside of Jack the Ripper researchers, known as ‘Ripperologists’. Then I discovered that no book had been written about the scandal for almost fifty years, so I was sure that I could find out more and add detail and cover the Abberline angle in more depth. But as research continued, I realised how much it was a story about the terrible mistreatment of gay men, the way that the Establishment closes ranks and abuses power to protect itself, and a massive cover-up which included the involvement of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.

As someone outside the LGBTQ community, how did you approach writing this book?

When I realised that it was in many ways an LGBTQ story, I did pause for a moment and wondered if I could take it on as a book project. Not being gay myself – although I have several gay friends – could I do it justice? But then I realised that the story itself was so powerful that I just had to accurately try to bring that story to life and tell it honestly, so that those unaware of this incredible incident in British history – and I suspect that there are many people who have never heard about it before – could become aware of it. The Cleveland Street scandal also set the template for Oscar Wilde’s prosecution for gross indecency six years later in 1895 (which I cover at the end of the book and show the links to the Cleveland Street prosecutions), and most people know about that. I wanted to raise awareness of how badly gay men were treated legally in the Victorian period and beyond: right up to 1967 in England and Wales, Scotland in 1981 and Northern Ireland in 1982. And at least 50,000 gay men who were demonised and prosecuted because of their natural sexual inclination – including Wilde – weren’t pardoned until 2020! So, I felt a strong sense of responsibility in presenting this story to a wider public, including of course those in the LBGTQ community who had little knowledge of it, and I hope that I did a reasonable job.

You refer to the late-Victorian gay scene in London as ‘a thriving subculture’. What can you tell us about it?

It was going on, in London anyway, and more openly than you might think, given that it was socially taboo as well as illegal. Since at least mid-Georgian times in the late eighteenth century, gay men had met in what were called ‘Molly houses’, but which really referred to places where they met – not always privately, and sometimes in pubs and coffee-houses. There was some male prostitution of course, but many of these meetings would have just been between gay men who mixed together, although passwords and codes were often used to communicate. Assignations and pick-ups would also take place in London’s large parks, but from the mid-eighteenth century the very centre of London began to really develop. The term ‘West End’ came into usage in the very early nineteenth century, and this offered new methods of meeting ‘Mollys’ or rent boys. As I detail in the book, the modern West End as we know it today – Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly Circus – was largely built from the 1850s onwards, and so by the time of the scandal in 1889 was largely in place. Lit by streetlamps, these thoroughfares were much safer than parks for well-heeled men to meet rent boys (and there were hundreds if not several thousands of them operating in London by that time). Pick-ups often took place as rent boys hovered in front of shop windows hoping to the catch the eye of a potential client. From there, it was off to private rooms or organised brothels such as at No.19 Cleveland Street. The gay subculture was thriving, and early gay slang known as Polari was already in use by the late 1880s.

The treatment of gay men and the deep prejudice you describe can feel very shocking today. Did anything especially shock you about it?

Gay men were persecuted, and made to feel inhuman, in a psychiatric, social and legal sense. And public opinion was very largely homophobic in late Victorian Britain (in rural areas unsurprisingly more so than in the cities) outside of the gay subculture which operated under the surface. As the saying goes, it takes a long time for minds to change. It is shocking through our much more liberated prism of over 135 years later. What shocked me most though was how the law was applied differently to those of low social standing – the rent boys or ordinary gay men, and those of social standing. The Cleveland Street scandal is a clear and documented example of how aristocrats were allowed to escape prosecution, while those of low station had to face the law. It’s the tale of discriminatory and simply unfair legislation coupled with massive class inequality, where those at the top of the hierarchy – in this case close to Queen Victoria’s Royal family – were protected as the Establishment closed ranks to protect itself.

There are many colourful characters on both sides of the law, and from across the class divide. Did anyone especially stand out for you?

This true story does have a ready-made cast of colourful and quirky characters. Ones that particularly stood out for me, for a variety of different reasons, were the crooked lawyer, Arthur Newton; the irascible Earl of Euston; the slippery pimp Charles Hammond and his sidekick, George Veck, who posed as a priest; the politician, journalist and theatre-owner Henry Labouchère; and the veteran and brazen rent boy Jack Saul.

This was the final case for Detective Inspector Abberline, the man who mishandled the Jack the Ripper case. How significant was his role in the Cleveland Street Scandal?

Abberline was very significant to the scandal, as he led the investigation into it. He was a methodical and earnest policeman, with many commendations, and did his utmost to uphold the law. But he was hampered in his investigation by higher authorities, and became very frustrated by this, as did his overall boss, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner James Munro. And it must be said that the police in this case wanted the law to be applied fairly. As I relay in the book from files in the archives and other sources, these officers (along with some members of the justice system) wanted everybody to face justice if they had broken the law, regardless of social standing. But pressure from the Prince of Wales’s fixers and a government compliant to that pressure made this very difficult.

Has researching this scandal changed your view of authority?

I’ve been researching history and crime for some time now, so to be honest I already had a jaded, sceptical (hopefully not totally cynical!) view of authority. The old saying, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’, which was incidentally coined by the historian and politician Lord Acton just two years before the Cleveland Street scandal, holds a great deal of truth. The levers of power in society control how we all live, and we are at the mercy of them. All that we can do is be vigilant and try to keep checks on that power. In a Western democracy we are very lucky to largely have free speech, but we still have to be aware that machinations are going on and levers are constantly being pulled behind closed doors. There’s nothing wrong with authority in itself, it’s just how it’s administered.

What conclusions, if any, do you think might be drawn between the cover-up at Cleveland Street and similar scandals today?

My conclusion is that when those with a lot or the most to lose have power, they will do anything to protect themselves and their position. In the Cleveland Street scandal, the very structure of society and those at the very top of the hierarchy, which held it together top-down, was for a few months in real jeopardy – namely the Royal family and the aristocracy. This could happen again, in a different way, and we must be watchful for those closing of ranks, which leads to injustice, abuse of power, and the suffering of those with little or no power. Whether it’s on a nationally governmental or local political level, within a corporation or company, or within a community, scandals will always happen, and cover-ups may also occur or be attempted.

What thoughts would you like readers to take away from the book?

The old adage is that we can learn from history. Details change as societies progress and structures are altered, but the same general patterns emerge repeatedly. I hope that this book puts a spotlight on the mistreatment of gay men and the abuse of power and privilege by the Establishment in the late Victorian period. We really can learn from what went before, and I certainly did while researching and writing this book. But there is a comical and farcical side to the book alongside the serious one, and I hope that readers are also entertained by it!

The post Ask the author: Neil Root on The Cleveland Street Scandal appeared first on The History Press.

A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders marks ten years of writing about historic crime. Although I had always held an unfocused interest in the subject, my first book in the genre, A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders (2016), was specifically a memoir of my late father, a senior police officer. It told the story of his last case, a notorious serial killer inquiry of the 1980s that I had grown up watching with fascination. The book was my tribute to him and an opportunity to understand who he was in his working life. I then spent three years investigating an extraordinary case which remains partly unsolved, which became A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay (2022) – a story as strange as it is pitiful and one which unexpectedly became a media sensation again, over half a century on, while the book was being written.

When it came to thinking about a third book, I thought about all those people I had encountered over the past decade while researching these tragedies, those with a professional or a personal connection to crime—the police officers, the witnesses, the victims’ friends and families. I thought about that question I ask every police officer I interview: “How do you cope with the things you have to confront on a daily basis?” The reply was almost always the same. “You find ways to cope with things, to compartmentalise them. But inevitably, some cases stay with you…”

This book tells five of the stories that have, in turn, stayed with me. The intrigue and bewilderment that they each generate however, was not in itself enough to justify revisiting them. As well as a desire for remembrance, I was struck by the revelatory nature of each of them, what truths they held about our understanding of such crimes, the causes and effects, and what they tell us about the society that we live in—how it has changed or how it still needs to change.

As always, this means researching the stories from a factual but also an emotional perspective, discovering the legacies as well as the circumstances of those tragedies. Once sentence has been passed and the police and the press have moved on, what remains? Do those whose lives have been disfigured ever manage to restore some sense of normality? What effects do such crimes have on the disbelieving families of the perpetrators? And what becomes of a killer, during his incarceration and then after his release? Are there ever optimistic stories of reform, or understandings of why these people each chose to take a human life? The answers proved to be surprising.

The title A Deafening Silence established itself quickly, referring to both the long-term effect of losing a loved one to murder, and the unanswerable question of why such crimes occur. Sadly, unlike the intricate and elaborate plots of crime fiction, real-life murder is usually not only for no good reason but for no reason at all. Stupidity is as much an explanation as cruelty.

Two of the stories in the book take place over the Christmas period. I wrote that a crime committed at Christmas underlines the callousness of those who visit such acts upon the world. At a time for kindness, for families, for children, still devils walk among us, impervious to the season’s fashion for compassion and felicity. But specifically, one of the murders took place on 29th December 1968. That was also the date on which, a year later, Muriel McKay was kidnapped from her London home – the case that I had written about in my previous book, A Desperate Business. And even stranger was the realisation that on 29th December 1985, 19 year-old Alison Day had been murdered by John Duffy and David Mulcahy – the last case that my father investigated and the one which my first book, A Dangerous Place, was centred around.

This is coincidence, but meaningful coincidence. The holiday season is for most of us a well-earned step back from our daily routines, a chance to comfort ourselves, enjoy a little indulgence and sentimentality. But for some, it seems, during such times, unable to find joy or satisfaction in festivity, the devil makes work for their temporarily idle hands.

In the troubled, frightening world that we occupy today, Christmas is approaching again. The fairy lights are twinkling, and our high streets and pubs are becoming prettier and a little more wondrous. We need Christmas. We need distraction from all that there is to trouble us in the world. But perhaps in the same way that there is a tradition of ghost stories at Christmas, tales to make a virtue of the dark nights and the feelings of reflection and loss that inevitably come with the close of the year, we reach for stories of murder to remind ourselves, in our sweetest and safest moments, that this world is as dangerous as it is delightful.

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In the audience was Donald Trump, then a real estate mogul with an odd haircut and political ambitions, but a few rows behind and to the right was a big man in an expensive black suit who leapt to his feet cheering every time Gołota landed a punch. Andrzej Kolikowski aka ‘Pershing’ was the best known gangster in Poland and had come to Atlantic City to escape the violence tearing the underworld apart back home. He would be dead in two weeks.

Kolikowski made his name as part of the Pruszków Mafia, the biggest organised crime family in post-communist Poland. The gang began in 1990 when some thuggish career criminals who’d been in and out of prison under communism teamed up with a younger generation eager to make money in the brave new world of democracy. Within a few years they controlled Warsaw. By the end of the decade they controlled Poland. Pershing fronted the gang, young intelligensia Jarosław Maringe dealt the drugs, a huge thug called ‘Masa’ kept everyone in line, and the ruthless Janusz Prasol aka ‘Parasol’ spent the money on vodka and girls.

Millions of dollars flowed through their hands: enough to buy pardons from President Lech Wałęsa, holidays in Thailand, and fleets of luxury cars. Every day the newspapers reported another murder, another gang war, another case dropped when the victim refused to press charges. They seemed untouchable.

Some Poles hated the gangsters for brute-forcing their way into prosperity with protection rackets and drug deals and robberies; others respected them as men who took what they wanted with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a vodka shot in the other. Not even a gang war with rivals across the river that turned Warsaw into a ‘miniature-Vietnam’, in the words of one crook, could knock them from the top spot. That only happened when the gang turned on each other as the new millennium approached and unleashed a wave of back-stabbing and murder.

Pershing would be the most prominent victim. After four years in prison he had come out determined to ditch Pruszków and go his own way as head of a rival gang. After a slow start, the money began pouring in when fellow Pruszków defector Masa suggested getting into the slot-machine racket. Poles had discovered gambling after the long, grey years of communism and the sector was growing every day. It wasn’t difficult for a hardman like Pershing to intimidate the slot-machine firms into paying $500 protection money per machine every week. And there were thousands of machines across Poland.

The money was glorious until Pershing’s old comrades in the Pruszków Mafia decided to muscle in on the racket. A shaky truce held through most of 1999 but then tempers flared, bullets flew, and bodies started hitting the floor as open warfare broke out in the Polish underworld. After a psychic told Pershing that death would find him in Warsaw, the superstitious gang boss jetted off to Atlantic City to watch Andrzej Gołota take on heavyweight challenger Michael Grant and wait for things to cool down back home.
Gołota did well in the early rounds until a ferocious comeback by Grant put him on the defensive. In round 10 a stunned Gołota told the referee he couldn’t continue and it was all over, with Pershing losing the $70,000 he’d bet on a Polish victory.

Perhaps the bad luck followed him home. On Sunday 5 December 1999 the 45-year-old gangster was standing by a silver Mercedes S500 in the car park of a Polish ski resort, far away from Warsaw, when two men walked out of the afternoon gloom with guns. They shot him down in the snow. The Pruszków Mafia had won the final round.

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Unlike the Ripper, the Torso Killer hunted his victims from the River Thames. His mobility on the water was a crucial factor in his ability to elude justice. The Metropolitan Police were not only unable to identify this serial killer, they also failed to name three of his four known victims. Chelsea prostitute Elizabeth Jackson was the only identified victim, pregnant and in her early twenties with bright sandy hair. The other women were also dismembered and their body parts scattered in the River Thames and occasionally inland, meaning that investigators were unable to pinpoint the murder locations.

Yet the identification of Jackson from vaccination marks on her arm and a scar on her wrist marked a police breakthrough. Jackson’s former partner, the violent and abusive John ‘Jack’ Faircloth, became their prime suspect in the summer of 1889. A millstone dresser by trade, he was itinerant, and in the weeks before her death embarked upon a circuitous journey which ended in Devon. Arrested there by an enterprising sergeant, he was escorted by a Scotland Yard detective back to London. Faircloth was questioned in detail both by police and at the inquest into Jackson’s death. However, it was proved beyond doubt that he had been out of London for a full ten days before her murder. As two of Jackson’s friends had seen her en route to Battersea a matter of hours before she was killed, Faircloth was released from custody.

In September 1889, a fourth murder brought no new developments. It resembled the second murder in the series, as a woman’s torso was deposited at a secluded inland spot. Sensationally, that railway arch in Whitechapel’s Pinchin Street was within walking distance of a Ripper murder location and the headquarters of the Ripper investigation at Leman Street police station. My great-great grandfather Harry Garrett was based there from 1888 to 1896, inspiring my interest in the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ including those by the Ripper and Torso Killer.

Other researchers have tended to re-examine Ripper suspects in the line-up of men who could have been the Torso Killer. Although the latter’s crimes were also sexually motivated, his modus operandi was entirely different. To find a new, credible suspect, I used several techniques. I did my own criminal profiling and searched for men convicted of violence against women in the late 1880s, in London.

As detailed in my book Arm of Eve, I found many men who were far from fitting the Torso Killer’s profile although their trades and activities might have some relevance to the case. These included Ripper suspects such as Portuguese cattlemen, slaughterers and butchers; a myriad of river workers and barge builders; inquest witnesses who discovered body parts, in particular builders and carpenters; employees at metal foundries and factories including distillers, oil refiners and colourmen (paint dealers); labourers and travelling tradesmen; itinerant stone-masons and mill-workers like John Faircloth; Faircloth’s brother Samuel, who lived in the East End; homicidal squaddies; random doctors and medical students; two men who nearly drowned a woman in Battersea Park’s lake in 1888; and a disgruntled former soldier and groom at a horse depot based in Battersea.

Yet through my research, I discovered a known criminal who knew the Thames like the back of his hand. James Crick is my prime suspect, a waterman and lighterman who carried both passengers and goods on the River Thames. Taken to court for violence against his wife, he was later prosecuted in two cases of attempted murder and rape. The final case against Crick resulted in a sentence of fifteen years imprisonment with hard labour, coinciding with the end of the Torso Murders.

I have spent years examining Crick as a suspect and analysing his distinctive methodology in accosting, assaulting, and moving his victims on the water in order to illuminate aspects of the Torso Murders. If the Torso Killer were James Crick, his series covered four kills and two known rapes. As suspects go, Crick is previously undiscovered and arguably the best yet. One hundred and thirty-five years later, it is likely that no better will be found.

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Simon Farquhar, author of the critically-acclaimed A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay, has been bound up in the case for many years. He reflects on recent events, and on the fascinating new evidence he unearthed – which may still hold the truth.

In the early evening of Monday 29th December 1969, Muriel McKay, wife of Alick McKay, deputy chairman of the News of the World, was abducted from her Wimbledon home. She was never seen again. Over the next forty days, her kidnappers terrorised the family with impossible demands for a million-pound ransom. Muriel became not only the first victim of kidnap-for-ransom in Britain since the Middle Ages but a pawn in a vicious press circulation war. The case culminated in life sentences for Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein and one of the first convictions for murder without a body.

My book A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay, was the result of three years’ research, during which time I spoke to almost every surviving witness, gained access to previously closed files, uncovered information never previously shared with the police or the public, and came face to face with Nizamodeen Hosein. The book was as much about correcting myths and misinformation as it was about presenting the facts. Sadly, the recent press campaigns have shown a blatant disregard for facts. The consequences of this are not only exasperating. They are sinister.

Nizamodeen Hosein made his “confession” in December 2021, to a lawyer engaged by members of the McKay family, claiming, conveniently, that Muriel died of a heart-attack during her captivity and was buried by him a few feet from the farmhouse. Despite the press reporting this without challenge, every other detail in his account of Muriel’s abduction and death was easily disprovable, so there was little reason to give this any credence at all. However, blind faith and an understandably large amount of wishful thinking led the family to appeal to the Metropolitan Police for a new search of the farmland in question. In the spring of 2022, that search was conducted. It produced nothing.

Interviewing Nizamodeen for the book was an eerie and exasperating experience. Several things quickly became clear. One was that he had no remorse, no empathy and no interest in his crime or in restorative justice. He was also deeply manipulative, incapable of telling the truth and most of the time incomprehensible. Whether his confusion is an act of deliberate obfuscation, a symptom of his self-destructive and squalid lifestyle or a manifestation of the same mental illness which caused his brother to spend the later years of his incarceration in a high security hospital, I cannot say.

Despite the police’s justifiable scepticism, a final unsuccessful search of Rooks Farm has now taken place. Watching from a distance, one cannot help feeling that, wilfully or not, Nizamodeen has won this charade. He has had his revenge on the police by wasting a colossal amount of manpower, time, resources and public money. He has strung out the McKay family with false hopes and deceptions, just as he did half a century ago. He has also successfully manipulated much of the world’s media. The coverage of the case preceding the search, orchestrated to pressure the police into action, was mostly severely lacking in fact-checking or balance, and many of Nizamodeen’s claims about his role in the crime and the circumstances of Muriel’s death are now being passed off as established fact. A nonsensical account of a horrific crime, one in which he has cast himself as a virtually blameless bystander pleading for forgiveness and atonement, is in danger of becoming the accepted truth when in fact there is no truth to any part of it.

Whether or not Nizamodeen remembers where Muriel is buried, it is clear that he does not care. If she had died of natural causes, he could simply have led the police to her in 1970 and secured a charge of manslaughter. Desperate explanations for why this did not happen now include baseless conspiracy theories about a third man being involved in the crime, theories which fulfil a desperate desire to give the story weightier villains rather than to comprehend that two men as pathetic as the Hoseins could have by themselves caused so much carnage and suffering.

When I was researching A Desperate Business, I had a fantastical ambition that I would find that missing clue, that piece of paper that had slipped through the cracks and which now neatly delivered the answer to one of the greatest mysteries in British criminal history. To my amazement, I did find an overlooked piece of paper. Whether what was written on it is that answer, sadly, we shall probably never know.

Two years into Arthur Hosein’s life sentence, he briefed a new solicitor, in another doomed attempt at appealing his conviction. The solicitor then wrote to the Court of Appeal. In that letter, the solicitor reveals that his client has told him where Muriel is buried – and names the location. That letter is the only piece of paper, of all the thousands of pages of paperwork on the case, in which a possible burial place is named, except for those emanating from cranks, attention-seekers and psychics. This alone makes the claim interesting. However, the only evidence is circumstantial and a conclusive search of the area would be impossible.

There remains another possibility. At some point in the mid-1970s, information came to light suggesting that the Hoseins had buried Muriel in the trench that was being dug at the time near Rooks Farm to lay the North Sea Gas pipeline. Work there had been suspended over the New Year period of 1969-70 due to the perishing weather conditions. Where this information came from, we will never know. Uncharacteristically ingenious of the Hoseins though it sounds, the Home Office took it seriously enough to inform Alick McKay that they were prepared to fund a search of a small stretch of that pipeline. However, having already endured so much anguish, Alick declined the offer, reportedly saying, “If she is there, please just leave her in peace now”.

Both of these possibilities are explored in the book. Both are, to my mind, more plausible than anything that might be uttered by Nizamodeen Hosein. But at the end of this long and ultimately fruitless resurrection of a family’s suffering, I see that Alick McKay’s words all those years ago were born not just of desperate self-protection but of wisdom. Finding Muriel’s body would allow her a dignified burial, but it would no more deliver closure than it does to any family who lose a loved one in such a way. For most of those families, a body is recovered. The one thing that never comes with that recovery, however, is closure.

The post Muriel McKay: A Conclusion appeared first on The History Press.

Judging by press accounts, the robbers were a kind of ‘Robin Hood’ gang. The first arrest took place less than 48 after the crime was committed. By the time of the trial the defendants were being described variously as ‘florist’, ‘antique dealer’, ‘painter and decorator’, and so on. In truth, virtually every member of the gang was a hardened, violent robber. But many of public preferred seemed to hold on to the ‘Robin Hood’ version of events.

Following the dolling out of prison sentences of extreme length (up to 30 years), the robbers played a part in numerous fantastic accounts providing various and conflicting backstories. One such account asserts that the robbery was planned by Nazis! Another that it was all the brainchild of a mysterious criminal mastermind who lived as a recluse. It seems the public embraced each new backstory… until the next came along. But by far the most longstanding lie is provided in the published account of one of the robbers, Bruce Reynolds, in which he claims to have been the mastermind.

In addition, it is generally accepted that the Great Train Robbery was a one off, and that train robberies had never taken place before it. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, it was only the scale and audacity of the Great Train Robbery that made it unique.

By 1961, after several years of escalating mail robberies, it was obvious to all, including the national press, that a particular gang was enjoying outstanding success attacking trains across the south of England. They became known as ‘The South Coast Raiders’ (and also, ‘The Red Light Gang’).

The South Coast Raiders stole high-value mails from the old British Rail Southern Region (which included trains travelling from Waterloo, Charing Cross, Victoria, London Bridge, Cannon Street and Blackfriars to stations across Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall). And the gang remained undetected right up to the time they merged with other experienced and hardened criminals and committed the crime of the century.

Many might claim to be reasonably well informed about the most audacious crime of the twentieth century, but how many know about the fundamental part played by the South Coast Raiders? Or the rehearsal that went so horribly wrong? Or about the corrupt officials?

My efforts to provide a more accurate and wider picture of the robbery were aided by the active involvement of Tom Wisbey, a former Great Train Robber (and member of the South Coast Raiders), and my own extensive experience of dealing with those involved in the theft of high value mails. Great Train Robbery Confidential was published by The History Press in 2019. It is I believe the most accurate account in print, but it does not provide a description of the characters involved, or the working practices of the gangs, nor does it depict the culture they were a part of.

All the evidence-gathering I did for Great Train Robbery Confidential, including those interviews with Tom Wisbey, were intended at the time to be the foundation for a novel. This was the only way it seemed possible, both to Tom and I, that a greater truth could be told.

The Great Train Robbery and The South Coast Raiders will be released on Amazon in late August/early September 2023.

The post The crime of the Century: The truth behind the Great Train Robbery appeared first on The History Press.

Women like Victorian sleuth Antonia Moser, Annette Kerner, the ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’ of Baker Street, and Kate Easton, ‘London’s Leading Woman.’

Author of Private Inquiries, Caitlin Davies takes us on a walking tour through London, featuring real-life locations from the book, and telling us about some of the real-life female sleuths who lived and worked in the capital.

No. 37 and 38 the Strand, WC2N 5HY

In 1905, ‘Detective Expert’ Antonia Moser became one of the first women in Britain to open her own detective agency, offering ‘Consultations free. Prompt, secret, and reliable’.

Continue east along the Strand, Southampton Street is a few minutes’ walk away on the left.

31 Southampton Street, WC2E 7HG

Antonia initially became a private detective in 1888, when she applied for a job at Moser’s Detective Agency, run by ex-CID inspector Maurice Moser. The couple soon became lovers and business partners.

Continue along the Strand until it turns into Fleet Street, just under a mile.

119 Fleet Street, EC4A 2BH

Elizabeth Joyes, a police searcher, lived at a City of London police station here in the 1850s, when she was sent undercover to catch a railway thief. The culprit was furious to be apprehended by a ‘woman special detector’.

Head north towards Holborn, about half a mile.

317 High Holborn, WC1V 7BN

In 1909, Antonia Moser opened another kind of detective office, the Women’s Business and Legal Agency. She advertised her services in the suffragette newspaper The Vote and was still working as an investigator in 1914.

Cross to the other side of High Holborn.

10 Warwick-Court, WC1R 5DH

Kate Easton, ‘London’s Leading Woman Detective’, ran her agency just a stone’s throw from Antonia’s offices. But unlike her rival, Kate carried a gun.

Head west towards Tottenham Court Road, around half a mile.

241 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H 8EH

Kate Easton originally opened an agency here in 1905, following her involvement in a scandalous divorce case at the High Court of Justice in Ireland. She would continue in detective work until World War One.

Cross onto New Oxford Street.

Albion House, No. 59 New Oxford Street, WC1A 1EU

Maud West, London’s most famous female sleuth in the 1920s, was based around the corner from Kate Easton. She opened her agency here in 1909 – ‘Are you worried? If so, consult me!? – and only retired in the late 1930s.

Head northwest towards Regent’s Park, nearly two miles.

221b Baker Street, NW1 6XE

Sherlock Holmes’ fictional address and home to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which is actually situated at 237–41 Baker Street.

No. 231 Baker Street, NW1 6XE

Annette Kerner, the self-styled Mrs Sherlock Holmes, opened her Mayfair Detective Agency here in September 1946. She was the first British female sleuth to publish a memoir. Today her old office is home to the London Beatles Store.

Walk south and cross over the Marylebone Road.

No. 130 Baker Street, W1U 6UA

In 1927, ex-Met police officer Charles Kersey launched a College for Feminine Undergraduates of Crime Investigation. Students included shop assistants, secretaries, clerks, hotel managers and ‘ladies of title and wealth’. They learned ju-jutsu, shadowing, how to handle shoplifters, and the ‘death grip’.

Head southeast towards Leicester Square, a mile and a half.

No. 120 Wardour Street, W1F 0TY

Annette Kerner lived here as a child and according to her memoir, her wealthy relatives once owned half the street. She allegedly started her career at the age of 17, when she was recruited by Special Branch as an ‘espionage agent’ in Switzerland.

End the walk by heading south towards Charing Cross, just under a mile.

10 Northumberland St, WC2N 5DB

The Sherlock Holmes pub, originally a small hotel which featured in The Adventure of the Nobel Bachelor. Upstairs is a recreation of Sherlock’s Baker Street flat, put together for the Festival of Britain in 1951. As yet, there is nothing to mark the existence of Sherlock’s real-life female counterparts, nor the trailblazing women who followed in their footsteps.

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My own three years of research proved as perplexing as it was enlightening. As I pored over official documents and newspaper reports, I remained troubled by one question: Why was Andrija Artuković allowed to live openly as a war criminal in a country that prided itself on defeating the Nazi enemy? How could the United States, relishing its new role as the world’s leader of democracy, embrace a former enemy? While other war criminals went to great lengths to disguise their true identities, Artuković outed himself and claimed political asylum.

Far from hiding in plain sight, Artuković did not hide at all. His legal battle to stay in the US was well documented in newspaper stories, FBI and CIA files, and even the Congress of the United States. Who was he and what was unique about him? Andrija Artuković was a senior cabinet minister in Ante Pavelić’s Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state created in 1941. Both Pavelić and Artuković had spent most of their adult lives fighting for the dream of a Croatian homeland, first as university students and later as leaders of the Ustaša, terrorists funded by Mussolini. Within six weeks of Hitler declaring his “special joy and satisfaction” that Croatians finally had independence, he called Pavelić and Artuković to a meeting. The Croatians were pleased to report progress on the construction of concentration camps and the implementation of racial laws.

Over the next four years, Artuković played crucial roles in Pavelić’s cabinet. As Interior Minister, Artuković oversaw the construction of 26 concentration camps, including the only camps in Europe solely for children. As Justice Minister, he enforced racial laws, boasting that he solved ‘the Jewish problem’ more swiftly than Hitler. As Religion Minister, Artuković led forced conversions of Serbs in a policy expressed succinctly in ‘thirds‘: Kill one third of Croatia’s Serb population, expel one third and convert one third to Roman Catholicism. He earned the nickname ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ for his role in a reign of terror so bloodthirsty that even the Nazis were horrified. Mere months after the Ustaša gained power, the German military attaché in Zagreb, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, warned in a telegram to the German High Command that the Ustaša ‘have gone raging mad with hatred’.

Witnesses would later testify that Artuković personally ordered specific murders. In one case, he avenged a political prisoner and in another, he ordered the roundup of villagers who were locked in a barn and incinerated. By the time the genocide ended in 1945, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. It is impossible to determine the exact number. But Yugoslavia claimed the Ustaša had murdered 700,000 Serbs and another 70,000 Jews and Roma.

When the war ended, Artuković and his family escaped along ratlines with the help of Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović, a Roman Catholic priest who used his connections with the Vatican to spirit Ustaša out of Europe. Draganović took the Artukovićs’ applications to the Delegate General of the Franciscans of Switzerland, who in turn presented them to the Irish immigration minister. Artuković, at the age of 45, was given a new identity as Alois Anich, passing himself off as a university professor hoping to engage in ‘philological and historical studies’ in Dublin. His 24-year-old wife, Ana, and their two daughters also took the name of Anich, with the children’s names changed from Visnja and Zorica to Katherina and Aurea. The Irish government accepted their applications and on 15 July 1947 the family arrived in Dublin. Their son, Radoslav, was born the following year and the family left promptly for America.

The Artuković family entered the United States under false names on 16 July 1948, claiming to be tourists who would leave before their six-month visa expired. But my research turned up documents that prove the family had no intention of leaving the USA. From the day they arrived, they began building a new life, confident in the support of wealthy family members, Roman Catholic communities, and politicians.

The family landed in California at a pivotal time in US history. Thanks to its contribution to the Allied victory, the US and President Harry Truman especially, basked in the new role of world leader. Truman introduced the Displaced Persons Act and the Refugee Relief Act, which brought in more than 600,000 immigrants from several European countries from 1948 to 1953.

In the spring of 1949, Andrija Artuković applied to have his family declared Displaced Persons. ‘I am stateless,’ he declared. In his interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he maintained he was a political refugee forced to use a false name to get out of Europe. Artuković made much of his strong Catholic faith and his opposition, as a Catholic, to communism. The immigration officer quickly realized that Artuković had served a prominent role in ‘one of the Axis-dominated governments set up after the Germans overran the area’. He rejected his application and turned the file over to the FBI on 3 May 1949.

As I examined the file, which would eventually grow to two volumes and more than 1,000 pages, I wondered why the immigration officer’s rejection did not spell the end for Artuković’s stay in the US. If his past had been considered a secret, there could be no doubt about his activities after the FBI investigated on 31 January 1951. The FBI cited government sources and informants’ reports to detail allegations and evidence, including the suspicion that Artuković ‘was deeply involved in the Marseilles assassination‘ of King Alexander I in 1934, for which he was arrested and later released. The FBI report also noted Artuković was one of Pavelić’s ‘most active collaborators in the work of terrorism organized by Italy against Yugoslavia’. Another government informant stated Artuković had been ‘head of the Croatian gestapo’.

The significance of another detail in that first FBI report eluded me at first. It was a character reference provided by the former secretary to Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb. The former secretary, Reverend Stephen Lacković, had also immigrated to the US and was a parish priest near Buffalo, New York. Lacković attested to his personal knowledge of Artuković and of his record of being ‘very active in carrying out the wishes of Archbishop Stepinac’.

Lacković and Artuković recognized the impact of dropping Stepinac’s name. The political clout of Catholics around the world had been galvanized by Stepinac’s arrest and imprisonment in Yugoslavia on charges that he actively supported the Ustaša genoocide. Stepinac became a cause celebre, living proof of how atheist communists would persecute Catholics.

To this day, Stepinac’s role in Croatia during the Pavelić regime remains controversial. But when Artuković cited his support in 1951, it sent a powerful signal he was one ‘of the good guys’, fighting on the right side against the Red Menace. This theme would play out for the next four decades, starting with Artuković’s arrest on murder charges 8 May 1951, two years after the FBI began investigating him. A photo in a Los Angeles newspaper showed a smiling Artuković being led away in handcuffs, his broad grin ridiculing the charges against him.

The public would seemingly come to agree, informed by newspaper coverage that ranged from advocacy, to bland acceptance, to outage. Advocacy came mostly from the Catholic press, which once claimed Artuković was ‘as innocent as a newborn babe’. On the other end of the spectrum, economist Milton Friedman in his syndicated column referred to Artuković as the ‘Heinrich Himmler of Croatia’. A local journalist welcomed into the Artuković home admitted his attempt to reconcile conflicting narratives ‘was like trying to put together the pieces of a shattered chandelier’. When Yugoslavia demanded Artuković’s extradition to stand trial, Artuković hired some of the most expensive lawyers in Washington. Their legal wrangling revolved around a law preventing the US from extraditing a person who could be persecuted for ‘political’ crimes.

In the Cold War era, this proved to be Artuković’s trump card. His portrayal as a fighter against communism played out favourably in the press, with the public, and even with some politicians. His powerful supporters included legislators who used their positions to protect him. Over the course of Artuković’s life in California, his congressmen in both Washington and Sacramento introduced eight private members’ bills to keep him in the country. One such politician was federal Republican Representative James Utt, a virulent anti-communist. He developed a habit of introducing private members’ bills supporting Artuković, usually just before the session ended. If the bill was before the House, Artuković was safe to remain in the country.

During my research, I interviewed historians to answer the question of why Artuković was allowed to live openly and freely, despite garnering thousands of newspaper stories that made it clear he was a war criminal. The answer turned out to be quite simple: It was the Cold War. The United States, the American public and the Roman Catholic church all believed that communism was the greater enemy. And since Americans had never been involved in significant combat in Croatia during the Second War, they couldn’t see why they should care.

But after the Cold War ended, attitudes shifted. The law was changed. And in February 1986, Artuković was extradited to Yugoslavia to stand trial. He was convicted of ordering four massacres and sentenced to death. However, because of frail health, he was spared the firing squad. He died at the age of 88 in a Zagreb prison hospital on 18 January 1988.

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What inspired you to write about this topic?

I’d written a book about the history of Holloway Prison (Bad Girls: The Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison, John Murray, 2019), and one of the women I came across was Zoe Progl, who was Britain’s ‘No.1 Woman Burglar’ in the early 1960s. She made a daring escape from the infamous prison in 1964, but after her re-capture she promised to give up her life of crime and go straight. I couldn’t find any more mentions of her in the press, and so I assumed she’d retired from being a burglar.

Then quite by chance I met her daughter, and she told me the truth about her mother. She also explained that her mum had been proud of her career as a professional crook, and her title as ‘woman of the underworld’. That made me wonder why she hadn’t been treated seriously as a criminal, why do we know so much about her male contemporaries like the Krays and nothing about Zoe Progl? Then I wondered about other women who’d also been ignored and written out of criminal history, I was sure they were out there somewhere, but would I be able to find them?

What kind of research did you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

I probably spent about a year on research but even when I’d started writing, I had to keep stopping to research more. Professional female crooks are so hard to track, they had a habit of hiding their identities – some used literally dozens of aliases – so I trawled newspaper reports from the 1600s onwards, made freedom of information requests to access criminal records, and ordered a lot of birth, death, and marriage certificates.

I went to places associated with all the women – such as the 17th century site of Moll Cutpurse’s warehouse for stolen goods – and tried to follow in their footsteps. I also tracked down modern day relatives to see if they would agree to talk to me. That was tricky, contacting someone out of the blue and asking if they knew that someone in their family had been a professional crook…

Was there anything especially surprising that you found in your research?

I hadn’t known just how vilified professional female crooks were, the misogyny aimed at them was breathtaking. They came to represent everything that was ‘bad’ about women – and they did everything a woman was not supposed to do. I was also surprised at how much fun the women had while breaking the law. No wonder they’d been excluded from most histories of crime.

In term of individuals, I got a surprise when, in the very last stages of writing the book, I finally established the true identity of Diamond Dolly, a jewel thief of the 1920s. She was always portrayed as a glamorous American quick-change artist, and her mugshot wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

What types of non-fiction book do you tend to gravitate towards reading?

If it’s for work, then any book that fits my topic. If it’s for pleasure then any book that tells a good story, in an accessible, accurate, non-judgemental way. I was amazed at how much rubbish has been written about women in books about crime, even the basic facts were wrong!

What is your favourite chapter in the book? Why?

I fell in love with quite a few of the Queens, especially Elsie Carey who appears in Chapter 8. She led a shop-breaking gang in the 1930s. Elsie had such nerve and charisma, and the stories her niece told me were a revelation. The woman I admired the most was probably Chris Tchaikovsky who appears in Chapter 17. She led a fraud gang in the 1970s and turned her life around by forming the charity Women in Prison. I think what attracted me to all the women was their lack of fear.

You state that ‘the queens of the underworld shouldn’t be glorified’ or even looked upon as crusading feminists. How do you feel we should process their crimes and what gap do you feel your book fills in social history?

They shouldn’t be glorified because they committed crime, people were robbed, threatened, exploited, and occasionally violently assaulted. But this doesn’t mean the women shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s important to know why they chose crime, what they did, and why they enjoyed it. I’m hoping other people will research ‘queens of the underworld’ in their own areas – I had to restrict myself mainly to those based in London – and that one day we will see fully rounded female characters portrayed as professional crooks in popular culture.

The Queens are important figures in the social history of women, criminology, and the justice system. Women have always been held up to different standards from men, and this influenced what they were arrested for, how they were treated while on trial, and how they were portrayed in the media. For centuries women were explicitly punished for transgressing the feminine role; and incarcerated in order to become domesticated.

Did you notice any patterns in these women’s lives during your research? Were there any findings that genuinely shocked you?

The women operated in such different times, committed different sorts of crimes and had very different backgrounds, and yet their similarities, right from the 17th century to today, were striking. They all described themselves – or were described – as rebels from an early age, who deliberately rejected the feminine role. They didn’t want to be meek and mild or do what girls were meant to do.

They were often first arrested as teenagers, usually for minor thefts such as stealing chocolate or a jumper. Then they joined a criminal gang, stumbled across an ‘underworld’ den, cafe? or bar, or fell in love with a criminal man. Most tried legitimate work, in low-paid jobs where they were mistreated and demeaned, and then they discovered they were good at crime. They liked the thrill, adrenaline, and ‘buzz’, crime gave them money, authority, power, and respect.

As for findings that shocked me, the worst was when I ordered the birth certificate for Queenie Day, known to Scotland Yard as the ‘Terror of Soho’. Queenie grew up in the early 1900s, she was mixed-race, lesbian, and convicted of prostitution more than once. She had to fight to survive. In 1918, she was arrested for the first time (under an alias), after breaking into a house and stealing £50 worth of silver goods. The press reported she was 14, but then I received her birth certificate and realised she had been just 10 years old when she was convicted and sent to a reformatory on the other side of the country for 3 years.

You point out that male crooks are recorded everywhere and are also lionised in books and films. Has working on this book made you look at female, or even male criminality, differently?

I already knew that the vast majority of women in prison have always committed petty crimes, often to support a family or partner, and I knew they were discriminated against within the ‘justice’ system. But I hadn’t known what a long tradition there was of women who deliberately set out to flout the law.

Every age has had its share of notorious female crooks, it’s fascinating – and depressing – to see how quickly these women were forgotten. As a society, even today we’re still very uncomfortable with women who break the rules, the media prefer women to be victims or ‘psychopaths’, and I’ve been surprised at how many times I’ve been asked to justify why I wanted to write about the Queens in the first place.

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In October, 1747 the Hawkhurst Gang, Britain’s most feared smugglers, broke open the customs house in Poole, Dorset, emptying it of its tons of tea. The tea originally belonged to a gang of Chichester smugglers, who had lost it to a customs seizure the month before. They didn’t have the guns or chutzpah to rob a customs house, so they hired a smuggling gang that did: the paramilitary Hawkhurst Gang.

The raid was a spectacular, if unsubtle, success. Both gangs rode into town the next morning to adoring crowds, which included a young shoemaker, Daniel Chater. Chater knew one of the Chichester smugglers, who greeted him and handed him a small bag of tea from the raid. He wasn’t involved in either gang, but his familiarity was enough to alert the authorities investigating the raid. Customs officer William Galley took Chater to see the Surveyor General for Sussex for questioning, carrying a letter explaining their purpose.

The pair got turned around on their way, and stopped for a drink at the White Hart pub, which, unknown to them, was the Chichester smugglers’ hangout. The pub landlady suspected them to be informants, secretly putting out the call to the gang. They couldn’t see the smugglers trickling into the pub, as the landlady plied the informant and lawman with drinks. The alcohol eventually got to Galley and Chater, who passed out in the back of the pub. While they were sleeping it off, the letter in Galley’s pocket confirmed the smugglers’ suspicions.

The gang wasn’t actually sure what to do with them. They couldn’t just let them go, Chater’s information could send some of the gang to the gallows. They considered holding the pair hostage or selling them to the French prison galleys, but that seemed too good for a snitch and his handler. No, the smugglers would make an example of them.

They beat the customs man and his informant, then dragged the drunk bruised men out to their fate, leaving nothing but a threat to shoot anyone in the pub who reported what they saw. The gang murdered them slowly over the course of several days, a cruelty born out of hesitation as much as viciousness. Galley and Chater’s improvised, public kidnapping had meant that there were plenty of witnesses. The smugglers wanted to make sure they were all responsible for the killing; the blood on their collective hands would prevent them from betraying each other.

Galley was beaten to death and buried, probably still alive, in a shallow grave. Chater lingered in agony for days. Someone in the gang proposed that they tie a string to a gun, so they could all pull the trigger at once. But the days of wittering and spasmodic, brutal torture ended with Chater dropped to the bottom of a lonesome well and pelted with stones until he finally expired, savagery exceeding even the smugglers’ violent reputation.

Suspicion of foul play was immediate with the discovery of Galley’s bloody coat near the road. The government quickly offered a reward for any information, but the smugglers’ omerta meant that it would be months before everyone’s worst fears were confirmed. An anonymous tipster revealed the location of the bodies, and implicated William Steele, alias Hardware, in the murders. Steele, clearly understanding the trouble he was in, turned King’s evidence.

Steele’s testimony went straight to the very top of the British political world, including the Prime Minister. The south-east coast of Britain had been infested with violent smuggling gangs for decades, but the terrible, protracted violence of the murders had focused the political elite on the problem more than dry accounts of lost revenues ever could. Smuggling wasn’t just a loss on a ledger anymore, it was a man buried alive and a young, bloodied body at the bottom of a well.

But one man would take the horror of Steele’s testimony and turn it to action, the Duke of Richmond, a powerful Sussex landowner and general who had been fighting Jacobite rebels in North England a few years earlier. He knew war and its violent terrors, but there was a new horror right on his doorstep. He would crush the smugglers like the government had crushed the Jacobites.

Richmond was not only going to hunt down the murderers, he would also put whatever Sussex smuggler he could find in a noose. What started with the murders turned into a purge of the whole Sussex smuggling community. Smugglers were arrested, tried and hanged for whatever charge Richmond and his men could prove, be that smuggling, robbery, or murder.

The campaign would not end smuggling in the Southeast, but it ended the Hawkhurst Gang’s reign of terror in Kent and Sussex. Richmond, under the pseudonym ‘The Gentleman of Chichester’ would publish an account of the murders and the subsequent trials. The account, called A Full and Genuine History of the Inhuman Murders of William Galley and Daniel Chater would go through multiple editions and remain in print at least until the 1830s. Galley and Chater were murdered in the heart of Sussex’s gangland during one of the most violent periods of the 18th century. Their deaths would help end a very violent chapter in British history.

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