As a crime historian, I love investigating historical cold cases, as they can offer a real insight into our ancestors’ lives, and the history of crime, as well as enabling me to play detective in working out what might have really happened in a case. In this article, I’m looking at a court case that shows how there are two sides to a story, and that the initial account should not always be believed.
Slander and suspicion
Late Victorian London was home to many private detectives and detective agencies, all eager to be commissioned to find evidence of misdeeds, from adultery to fraud. However, when a client was unhappy with the work done on their behalf by a detective, they might refuse to pay them. This is what had happened when, in 1896, private detective Antonia Moser sued Cordelia Warde Lamond at the High Court, for work carried out by her detective agency. In court, Miss Lamond denied employing the agency, but then said that if she had, no work had been done, and that if work had been done, the agency’s charges were “excessive and unreasonable”. Miss Lamond was covering all bases with her defence.
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Antonia Moser stated that she had been employed to find out who had been making slanderous comments about her client. She charged a daily fee for each of her agency’s detectives to work on the case, plus expenses, and a higher amount for her partner and fellow detective, Maurice Moser, to investigate – inexplicably – from Cairo.
Miss Lamond thought the work was too costly, and much of it unnecessary. The case was sent to the Official Referees Court, but there is no record in the press of what was decided. However, other cases involving Miss Lamond do provide clues as to what was going on. Cordelia was 40 at the time of the Moser case, and had inherited her family’s fortune. For several years, she had been living in a series of London hotels; after staying at the Hotel Cecil for eight months, in July 1897, she assaulted a porter following instances of erratic behaviour, and multiple attempts to evict her.
An ethical conundrum
A year later, in 1898, Cordelia Lamond was the subject of a Commission and Inquisition of Lunacy held at Chancery, after her relatives alleged she was squandering her fortune in useless litigation. The case had originally been brought two years earlier – around the same time that Antonia Moser had sued her – but Cordelia had refused to attend court and was arrested for contempt. When she finally appeared, “Miss Lamond declared that she was not Miss Lamond”. The jury found otherwise, also returning a unanimous verdict that she was of unsound mind, incapable of managing her own affairs. Records suggest that Cordelia spent the rest of her life in private asylums.
The press had concerns about the private detective industry, and the Lamond case suggested that the Moser agency was unethical in its dealings with her. Antonia Moser charged Cordelia a lot of money ostensibly to prove slander; yet her client may only have been suffering from delusions of being talked about. If it was clear that she had a mental illness, and that the Mosers went along with her allegations simply to make money off her, this would reinforce press concerns about private eyes.
Antonia Moser was a staunch suffragist, though, and it is hard to square her views about women’s equality with someone who was willing to take advantage of another woman. Perhaps Cordelia simply appeared to be a slightly eccentric client, who insisted the Mosers carry out her commission; but work was work, and ethics were possibly hard to maintain when a private detective’s bills needed to be paid.
Dr Nell Darby is a crime historian and writer, and the presenter of the CBS Reality series Murder by the Sea. Her latest book is Sister Sleuths: Female Detectives in Britain (Pen & Sword History, 2021)
This article first appeared in the October 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed