Nothing For Something: The Violet Charlesworth Story
Mark Bridgeman
(Whittles Publishing, £19.99)
Violet Charlesworth was hiding out in Oban when the net finally closed in. Lodging in a small hotel under the name Margaret MacLeod, she was confronted by the tenacious reporter Frank Dilnot, but strenuously denied that she was the same woman who was believed to have drowned off the Welsh coast a fortnight earlier, even when shown a photograph of herself. When her sister Lillian arrived, and the pair shut themselves in a room for two hours to discuss their next move, they emerged still insisting that they were not related and had never met before.
But it was over. The press pack were fighting their way to Oban through the worst snowstorm in living memory and one of the greatest crime sprees of the early 1900s had ground to a halt.
If you’re not familiar with the story of Violet Charlesworth, it’s an amazing and audacious tale, and top marks to Mark Bridgeman for rescuing it from obscurity.
His starting point is Violet’s heroically inept attempt at faking her own death in a car accident in January 1909, assisted by her chauffer Albert Watts and sister Lillian, a ruse so poorly executed that any true-crime buff would see through it straight away – though not the Edwardian police, who failed to piece the glaringly obvious clues together and confidently proclaimed her to be dead.
Promising that she would be able to pay off all her debts when she came of age, she conned people out of large amounts of money they would never see again. Businesses up and down the country provided the charming and persuasive “heiress” with goods and services on credit, and Violet embarked on a spending spree so extensive that there isn’t enough space here even to summarise it.
But alongside all the shops, jewellers, hotels, stockbrokers and car dealerships she ripped off were some particularly heartless, personal cons. She led along the Welsh doctor Edward Hughes Jones with promises of marriage while relieving him of thousands of pounds. And, most heinously of all, persuaded the widowed Martha Smith to hand over her life savings, even pressuring the old lady to check her drawers for any change she might have missed.
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A disastrous foray into the stock market foreshadowed the collapse of her house of cards, and as her 25th birthday approached she hatched a plan to slip away and live under a new identity.
Bridgeman’s exhaustive research has resulted in a finely detailed account of Violet’s exploits and quirks, including her fixation on a mostly imaginary Scottish heritage, which led her to adopt the Gordon tartan, acquire a house in Ross-shire and contemplate retiring to a farmstead in Mull under an assumed name. And his forensic documentation extends beyond her arrest and trial to Violet’s second, far more successful, disappearing act.
He also gives us an enlightening glimpse into a deferential Edwardian Britain where the wealthy and high-born could enjoy almost limitless credit, delaying indefinitely payment for goods, services and accommodation safe in the knowledge that civil charges were unlikely ever to be brought against them.
This is the “something for nothing” culture that Violet exploited, and Bridgeman’s fascinating book brings out all the human drama of this extraordinary woman’s life while illuminating how a con artist like her could flourish for years without being brought to account.
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