A fatal investigation into sex work

One Victorian private detective decided to personally investigate prostitution - with perhaps inevitable results

A later Victorian prostitute

A quick post today, based on a rather unusual story I’ve just read in my old copy of Frederick Oughton’s Ten Guineas A Day: A Portrait of the Private Detective (1961).

In it, Oughton describes a private detective named Leslie Rhodes, who had started his career as a patrolman for the firm Jefferson and Jarrett - they ‘guarded valuables’ but also ‘attended the balls and banquets where they kept an eye on the servants’. (p.37)

Rhodes earned 10 shillings in this job, but eventually became the firm’s manager. Unlike other detectives, who recognised the value of women in their offices and out in the field, Rhodes had a great dislike of the female sex, and refused to employ them unless as a ‘common informer’. However, in 1864, he was asked to investigate local prostitution, and decided to do so ‘personally’, by asking the local prostitutes for services, whilst disguised as an ex-soldier. Some job for a man who said he didn’t like women.

Unsurprisingly, within a month, he had been admitted to a London hospital ‘with an assortment of venereal diseases’. (p.38) For six months, Rhodes was incarcerated in a common ward, being treated, and by the time he was able to return to the office, he found that it had been burgled. There was no furniture left, and the windows had been smashed. Rhodes - sexually satisfied, but now with his career ruined, ‘crawled out into the street and threw himself in the Thames.’ (p.38)