Dilke (45 page)

The investigations of an enquiry agent succeeded in producing the information that Mrs. Harrison, apart from her activities at 9, Hill Street (where, it was said, both she and
Mrs. Crawford used to be taken by Mr. Hugh Hammersley and the Honble. A. Grosvenor of Moor Park, Rickmansworth), had rooms during her husband's period in hospital at 27, Chester Street. There both she and Mrs. Crawford were visited by several of the students from St. George's, “including Freddy Warner.”

Rather harder evidence was forthcoming later when Dilke obtained possession of some letters from Warner to Mrs. Harrison. They were dated between March and May, 1882. There was a mystery about how the letters had been obtained, and there is a note in the papers saying: “Dilke cannot state the circumstances under which a large collection of Mrs. Harrison's letters came into his hands, but two persons are implicated in the larceny.”
¹²
He made no attempt to conceal that he had them, however. He first showed them to Steaven-son, who expressed the view that they were of great importance, so much so that had they been in the hands of the Queen's Proctor at the time of Mrs. Crawford's cross-examinations they would have been sufficient to win his case. Through solicitors Dilke then informed Mrs. Crawford that the letters were in his possession and asked her to meet him. She refused at first, but when he had sent her one of the letters she agreed to come. They met in Sir George Lewis's office, with Humbert also present. But the interview was ineffective. Mrs. Crawford said “she could do nothing and that I must do what I must.”

Two of the letters pointed only to a liaison between Warner and Mrs. Harrison, but a third was in the following terms:

“My dear Nell: I found your letter . . . awaiting me . . . to-day and it kept me in roars of laughter. It was so characteristic of you in your supreme moment of bliss. Just as I was leaving I got your card asking me to tea to-morrow, which I shall be most happy to do, provided no one else besides yourself and Nia will be there. . . . With very much love to you pet and Nia.”
^[9]
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The letters were clearly much more damaging to Mrs. Harrison than to Mrs. Crawford, but they tended strongly to contradict the latter's assertion that her acquaintanceship with Warner was of the slightest nature; and their suggestion of a curious, tri-partite relationship between Warner and the two sisters, together with other similar hints in the Hill Street evidence and the Chester Street report, was thought, perhaps rightly, to be of great significance, and to offer a possible explanation of Mrs. Crawford's “invention” of the sensational Fanny story.

There was also some further information relating to Robert Priestley, Mrs. Crawford's brother-in-law. This was contained in a letter from Mrs. Rogerson to Lady Dilke, dated September 22nd, 1886. The letter itself has a note of conviction, although Mrs. Rogerson cannot in general be regarded as a reliable witness of the truth, or indeed of anything else.

“I cannot for a moment go back from what I said that Mrs. Crawford had told me of repeated adulteries with Mr. Priestley,” it ran. “She told me with the fullest particulars. She said that it had been so constantly
before
and in
August, 1884
, up till he went to Scotland or somewhere north.
A week later
he wrote he was engaged to her sister.
^[10]
She also mentioned a Mr. Warner but quite casually. I feel I must now say this because she has denied having told me. of it. As I never knew there were such men till
she
told me, I can hardly be even confused. It was from herself and
no one else
I heard of these adulteries at first.”
¹⁴

Mrs. Harrison also referred to the liaison between Mrs. Crawford and Priestley as something which was beyond dispute. She said that Mrs. Ashton Dilke was aware of the relationship with Priestley, but not of that with Warner. There were also a few snippets of information suggesting that at Edinburgh in the autumn of 1881 Mrs. Crawford had another lover—perhaps her first—called Captain Ernest Graham. The initials “E.G.” had appeared in her diary for
these months in the same way as the others already noted. In addition there was mention of another gentleman referred to simply as “Fleming,” who appeared later in the period under review. But these suggestions were not supported by evidence. They complete the subsequently obtained information relating to Mrs. Crawford's conduct.

The next group of evidence related to 65, Warren Street, and Anna Dessouslavy. This began with a series of statements from a variety of apparently impeccable sources testifying to the relationship of the Dessouslavy family to the Dilke family being as Sir Charles had stated it in his evidence, to the pension paid to Anna being a perfectly open arrangement, and to the Dessouslavys being thought to be a family of excellent character. These statements were not of major importance, as the judge in his summing-up, even if not the public, had been prepared to concede at least the first two points to Dilke.

Next came a further series of statements from those intimately connected with Warren Street which were designed to show that the house could not have been used for immoral purposes. These were taken by McArthur and Howel Thomas from Mrs. Goudge, the landlady, from Mr. Collins, the beadle at Trinity Church, St. Marylebone, who had lodged there with his wife, and from Mr. and Mrs. Williams, who had also lodged in the house. Moreover, they all swore that the description of the interior of the house, supported by a plan, which Mrs. Crawford had given in the witness-box and which had so impressed the court, was wrong in every respect. She was wrong as to the position of the staircase (which was remarkable as it ran from the back of the house to the front), she was wrong as to the position of the door leading into the bedroom, and she was wrong as to the shape of the bedroom and the position in it of the window. A surveyor's plan of the house was then made, which confirmed the accuracy of these witnesses and the inaccuracy of Mrs. Crawford.

Mrs. Goudge made one other statement which was thought to be of importance. She said that some time before the trial began (she did not specify which trial), two ladies whom she
had seen wandering up and down the street on several previous occasions called and asked if Mrs. Dessouslavy lived there. The suggestion was that the two ladies were Mrs. Crawford and Mrs. Ashton Dilke, looking for the house with more difficulty and by a somewhat different method from that which Mrs. Crawford had described in her evidence. It was also pointed out in the papers, as was indeed confirmed by the author on a visit to Warren Street, that had Mrs. Crawford looked for the house, as she told the court, in the belief that it was one of two which were taller than their neighbours, she would indeed have found difficulty in identifying it; it is in fact one of a group of five which are all taller than the others in the street.

The Dilke investigators also reverted to the problem of Giuliano, whose production by Phillimore had failed so signally either to confuse the Hilliers or to impress the court. There was a statement by Chesson testifying that Giuliano, with his hat on, did in fact look remarkably like Dilke. There was not perhaps very much to this, and there may have been more value in the investigators' refutation of the judge's strongly made dialectical point that, when it was suggested by Sir Walter Phillimore that it was Giuliano and not Dilke who had been to the house under the circumstances described by the Hilliers, Sir Walter was apparently abandoning his attempt to defend Mrs. Dessouslavy's reputation to the court. Giuliano was shown by the new evidence to be a man of accepted respectability, well known to the other inhabitants of the house as a friend of Mrs. Dessouslavy's. His wife was also a close friend of Anna's and he used frequently to meet her in the latter's rooms. McArthur and Howel Thomas also took statements from Mrs. Hillier and Miss Hillier, who had been such important witnesses at the second trial. They both said that they regretted the certainty which they had then displayed about the man who frequently visited the house being Sir Charles Dilke. They were now extremely doubtful about his identity.

All this, so far as it went, was clearly in Dilke's favour, but one other subsequent development in regard to Mrs. Dessouslavy,
had it been known, must have told the other way. On July 29th, 1890, she wrote to Dilke, in French, what appeared to be a letter of half-apology. She wrote that, as a result of delusions, she had been saying things about him to which “
il ne faut pas attacher trop d'importance
.” The only clue to the nature of these remarks comes from a note which Dilke attached to Mrs. Dessouslavy's letter.

“Anna went cracky (
sic
) (she has been so since her cross-examination but got much worse),” he wrote, “and at last wrote to me that I had seduced her sister, was the father of her son, and (had) induced her to give false evidence.” He added, a little inconsequently: “The son was born in wedlock, the sister has been all along in place, and I have hardly ever set eyes on the one she means (Eliza, I think it is).”
¹⁵

The only subsequent record of Mrs. Dessouslavy was in 1907 when she was writing to Dilke with complete friendliness and apparent sanity.

The next section of evidence related to Fanny Stock. First there was the signed statement which Humbert had taken from her in April, 1886.
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In this statement she denied the charge made against her. “I certainly never saw Mrs. Crawford at Sloane Street or any other lady, I did not even see Sir Charles Dilke. I never heard of Mrs. Crawford until the commencement of this case and I should not know her if I saw her.” She insisted, however, that she was frightened to go into the witness-box and said that her husband was also most anxious that she should not do so. That was why they had disappeared for several months. She gave an account of the places where she had been in service which was complete except for the fifteen months before she went to Warren Street.

About this period she was firmly reticent: “I decline to say where I was between March, 1883, and July, 1884—it has nothing whatever to do with this case.
¹⁶

After this statement was taken the Stocks disappeared again, and sought on this occasion to cover their traces by assuming a false name. By the beginning of 1887 they had been tracked down by detectives employed by Dilke's solicitor. Chesson then went to see Fanny and wrote this account of his interview:

“On Tuesday, January 28th, 1887, Lady Dilke and I visited Fanny Stock (alias Archer) at Foot's Cray. We questioned her on the subject of her disappearance during the year 1883-4. Her story was as follows: when residing at 16, Curzon Street, as housemaid to Mrs. Charles Roundell she made the acquaintance of a man who visited at the house, and at his insistence she left her situation and went into lodgings somewhere, as it would seem, in the suburbs of London. She entered the service of a lady of his acquaintance, and passed a certain number of hours daily with her in doing needlework, and taking charge of her clothes. Both parties were married, but the lady's husband was away; and she and her paramour met, from time to time, at Fanny's lodgings. The lady lived about ten minutes' walk from Fanny's lodgings; and it would take about an hour to walk from Sloane Street to the place in question. She refused to give the name of either of the parties concerned in the intrigue. . . . She declared that she had never had relations of any kind with Sir C. Dilke, and could hardly say that she knew him; that she never saw Mrs. Crawford in her life; and that she met Anna Dessouslavy by pure accident when she went to Shoolbred's to buy a cloak. She was not in want, but was glad to take service with her, because having left Mrs. Roundell's for more than a year, she was without a character and would have found it difficult to get a place.”
¹⁷

A fairly implausible story it sounded, and so indeed it
proved to be. Some time later Dilke's detectives discovered that the address at which Fanny had lodged was 14, Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square. Her landlady there, Mrs. Anne Thorpe, made a declaration, supported by her husband, that from February, 1883, to July, 1884, Fanny Gray had occupied a bed-sitting room in her house. During that time, Mrs. Thorpe stated, Fanny “conducted herself with the greatest propriety.” She received no visitors, but she often spent nights away, returning in the morning. She apparently did no work; she occasionally went out walking for a short time in the afternoons; but “the greater part of her time (was) spent in reading the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Sir Walter Scott.”
¹⁸

Enquiries were also conducted at Haslemere, where the Roundells had another house and where, rather than in Curzon Street, Fanny had passed most of her year in their service. These enquiries yielded the information that Fanny was believed to have become involved there with an artist, and to have left with him. His name, it was thought, was George Williams.

At this stage the investigators went back to Fanny. At the end of 1890 she made a sworn declaration—which she had not in 1887—admitting that what she had then told Chesson had been a fabrication. She stated that while at Haslemere she had become engaged to the artist and that he had taken the room for her in Grafton Street and had paid her £1 a week. She would not give his name and she would not state the circumstances in which the engagement had been broken off. Her husband stated that he fully believed her story and had the best of reasons for knowing that she was a woman of good character. At this stage the “Archers” seem to have assumed, correctly, that their part in the drama was over; they reverted to their real name and passed into obscurity.

The fact that Fanny had previously told a false story inevitably throws doubt upon her second version as well. Against this must be set the somewhat greater plausibility of the second story together with the fact that its skeleton came first from other sources and was merely confirmed by Fanny
herself. Nevertheless a substantial element of mystery remains, one which existed in Dilke's mind as much as in anyone else's. “I have my doubts as to the story as to the meeting of Fanny and Anna,” he wrote cryptically but inelegantly to Chesson; but we have no means of knowing what these particular doubts were or why they existed.