A matter of a name

How can you prove who someone was, when there might be more than one detective with a similar name, and that name might not even be their real one?

In my new book, Britain's Greatest Private Detective, numerous private detectives appear. Although the subject of the book is Henry Slater, one particularly private detective of late Victorian and Edwardian London, many other sleuths appear: as colleagues of Slater's, or as enemies. In some cases, both.

One of the detectives mentioned is a Mr Longley, who ran a rival detective agency to Slater's. Some aggrieved former colleagues of Slater's later took on employment at Longley's; one even gave Longley's business address as his home address when arrested by the police for deeds undertaken while at his former employer's. What I was unable to find, however, was the real identity of Mr Longley himself - and I wondered whether he was actually one of Slater's former colleagues, using a pseudonym. It was common for detectives to adopt a fake name - Slater himself did - and in some cases, I've been unable to find out the individual's real name.

Matters get even more confused when you see different detectives operating under similar names (even Henry Slater based his pseudonym on a former employer's - Henry Salter - deliberately attempting to confuse people as to who was who). So today, I'm looking at a private detective named Mr Langley: could he have been the mysterious Mr Longley, or was he a completely different individual?

An advert for Longley’s agency, in the provincial press, from 1903

I know that William Langley was from Woolwich in south London, born in 1852. His father, Robert, was a postman who later became a farmer in Tonbridge; William, was the second youngest child of Robert and his wife Hannah.

In 1872, William married Mary Ann Neale at Maidstone, and the couple had four children as they moved around London, from Ilford to Islington, Camberwell to Blackwall. In 1881, William was working as a railway porter and living in Southwark. Then he moved to west London, where he was running a pub in 1891. He is missing from the 1901 census, although his wife and daughters are both living with his eldest son, William Percival, in Islington. There was a clear theatrical bent in this family, as his son made a career as a songwriter, while both his daughters were music hall performers prior to their marriages.

WIlliam Langley then pops up again in Islington in 1911, by which point he is working as a private detective. It was not a particularly lucrative job for him, as wife Mary Ann was working as a dressmaker - she is not previously recorded as having a job while married, although, of course, she may have had spells of working outside of census time, or had simply not been recorded as having worked by a census enumerator previously. However, it is likely that she was working because she had to - because her husband's income was not sufficient.

Partly because of this lack of income, I am not convinced that William Langley is the same Mr Longley who was running a private detective agency in the late 1890s and early Edwardian era. Longley was able to rent offices in Holborn and employ numerous other detectives; Langley, I suspect, was a one-man band either working solely for himself, or undertaking work for other detectives on a day rate. He was likely to have specialised in collecting debts, and in later life - certainly from 1916 to 1921 - he was working as a bailiff. On one occasion, he went to remove the goods from one debtor, who promptly tried to shoot him. By 1921, he was a self-employed bailiff, and he died later that decade at home in Southwark.