Beguile. Bamboozle. Begone.

Introduction

Victorian Bournemouth (135) explores female itinerant swindlers who invaded resorts and spas in pursuit of easy money. Women skilled in this art attracted the attention of newspaper editors during the 1870s. Reaction to such thieves appears to have varied according to social background. Bournemouth’s place on their circuits provides a dubious measure of the town’s appeal.

Victorian Bournemouth (135): tricky ladies at work

‘Miss Anderson’

‘In all her actions, manners, and style of address she was the “gentlewoman” of the old school, all suavity, consideration, and politeness’. So ran a description of ‘Miss Anderson’, one of her many identities. She stood trial in Weymouth, apprehended there during winter 1871-72, following an itinerant swindling tour that took her to many established towns, including Bournemouth. An older person, she would refer to wealthy relatives who provided for her. As a rule, based in lodgings taken on future payment, she acquired goods on approval from local traders beguiled by the charm of privilege. Having cashed out the goods, through associates or pawnbrokers, she departed for her next hunting ground. Over time, the police had connected the dots comprising outraged local traders spread across the country. Evidence collected from many sources, personal and published, supported by new technology in the form of a photograph brought her conviction. 

Other huntresses

In early 1874, Joseph Hawkes, a Bournemouth resident, sent up a warning by writing to the local paper. He wanted to advise the town’s French visitors against falling prey to sob stories woven by a ‘Swiss beggar’ seeking fares to repatriate her husband and three children via Le Havre. Joseph had almost become prey. A year later, the police apprehended a Mrs ‘Graham’ or ‘Brown’ and two teenage daughters at Chichester. They had cut a swathe through traders in the Isle of Wight, Weymouth, and Bournemouth. She spun a tale of soon joining a husband working for the Indian administration. This grounded her reason for acquiring so many goods on approval before departure. After taking her, the police found her daughters ‘regaling themselves with chops at a confectioner’s’. One girl wore several looted items for all to see. Perhaps many more huntresses had visited Bournemouth than reached the courts.

Victorian Bournemouth (135): community reactions

Press

Editors perhaps welcomed hearing about huntresses on the prowl. Interviews with victimised tradesman, thrashing in the wake, brought readers within touch of these creatures. Such women offered the press an opportunity to combine salaciousness with morality. They drew detailed physical pictures of the women, even publishing an illustration of ‘Miss Anderson’. Readers of the Aldershot Military Gazette learned about a ‘bewitching blonde, with a smile sweet enough to melt the heart of a Shylock’. The paper described female swindlers as ‘generally irresistible to the sterner sex, they travel on their “winning ways”, and deceive the landlord before he knows it, and when they are justly punished, which is very seldom, fall back on the plea that their “sex protects them”.’ Once again posing as a gentlewoman, the blonde had raided several shops before vanishing from the hotel, bill unpaid. She left behind a sealed package containing four bricks.

Public

Reactions amongst the public depended on an individual’s experience with such adventurers. If only an observer or reader, then the swindlers’ stunts provided entertainment. One lady had sent to her hotel a series of black-edged letters in support of her identity as a recent but wealthy widow. The abandoned bricks indicated panache and style to soften the hard edge of systematic property theft. Ravaged tradesmen, however, took concerted recourse, eschewing vigilantism for police support. Anger and financial loss overcame hesitations about allowing their public identification as hapless victims. Outrage might draw together competitors into common cause. One lady swindler, unmasked at Ely, ‘when proceeding to the railway station to take her departure, had as an escort scores of people shouting and hissing, and evincing other tokens of popular displeasure’. Thus, the traditional form of public displeasure, charivari or rough music, transferred from adulterous women to female swindlers.

Victorian Bournemouth (135): assessment

Gentle crime

To great extent, at this period, whereas women might exert influence through personal networks, they wielded structural or ‘official’ power within society or commerce by exception. Thus, itinerant female swindlers attracted interest because they exerted ‘official’ power by breaking rules. Many women who appeared in court arrived through drunkenness. They bolstered the cliché that alcohol ruined working people. If gentility should produce female criminals, then this turned the world upside down. Such women kicked away commercial and social cornerstones. They employed (assumed) gentility to secure possession of goods by abusing the credit system. The newspaper reports contain the implication that the former ranked as a more serious crime than the latter. Thus, middling traders, striving for respectability that put them within reach of gentility, would have experienced an acute sense of betrayal. Beguiling blondes and winning smiles aside, such a crime attacked their entire belief system.

Double sided reputation

Speakers at debates about incorporation during the 1880s lavished pride on Bournemouth. They quoted growth trends in population and rateable values of property. The town’s prosperity depended on applying investment capital towards building property as venues for affluent tourists. Association with like people provided an essential part of living the affluent life. Thus, Bournemouth, as did other watering places, created temporary concentrations of privileged people. Their presence boosted local commerce to a level that attracted the attention of such hunters as ‘Miss Henderson’. During this period references to appropriate policing levels occurred from time to time. Apart from riots associated with November 5th, Bournemouth always seemed to have insufficient police. The issue when raised almost always concerned finance or the source of funds, but the Commission perhaps feared to admit in public that their resort’s affluent reputation had a darker side. Yet, the female swindlers showed that Bournemouth had ‘arrived’. 

Takeaway

Victorian Bournemouth (135) has explored the practice whereby itinerant female criminals employed two types of deception. They deceived in both commercial and social ways. Their targeting of Bournemouth’s traders, boosted by the resort’s affluent visitors, provided a sense of credibility about the town’s inclusion amongst the top watering places.

References

For references and engagement, please get in touch. Main primary sources: here and here (subscriptions needed). See also here. Thanks to British Newspaper Archive for use of the picture.