Borthwick & Mason: A family affair?

Who were the two 19th century private detectives who ran detective agencies in London and Glasgow, and could they have been keeping it in the family?

In 1884, the Evening Standard published an advert from someone calling themselves 'Otto K'. The mysterious Otto claimed to be in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was searching for his lost child. He stated that he had been successful in engaging the services of Mr Mason, private detective, and was asking interested parties to correspond directly with Mr Mason, as Otto K was in Germany with one of Mr Mason's agents.

With Victorian newspaper adverts, however, you can't take everything to be 100% truthful. Otto K, in this case, was likely to have been Mr Mason himself, the advert being a publicity advert for Mason's Private Detective Bureau, whose office address was helpfully given in full: "The Private Detective Bureau, 30 Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, London W".

Grosvenor Square

To us, Grosvenor Square appears an incredibly well-to-do address in central London, but the area around it wasn't always so posh. In 1881, this part of Duke Street, although near Hyde Park and Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, was rather more humble, home to a range of artisans. In 1881, two separate families were living at 30 Duke Street, with one of them having three lodgers there as well. The first family were the Corti family; husband William was a bootmaker. They shared the building with the Darnevil family; father Frederick was a whip-stick mounter. Two of the lodgers were waistcoat makers; neighbours included milliners, tailor's cutters, watchmakers, a boarding house keeper and a bootmaker's clerk.

These were homes, rather than offices, suggesting that when Mason moved in, he was operating his 'bureau' from his living room. This means he was not a major operator in the private detective world, and could not afford separate offices. Instead, he would have shared his address with skilled workmen drawn from around the world (in 1881, residents were from Germany and Ireland, as well as the Midlands, south-west and east of England).

Mason's first name is not given in the 1884 advert, and nor is there any other reference to him. Given that he is not at the address in either 1881 or 1891 censuses, how can we find out who he was? A clue lies in a private detective agency hundreds of miles from Grosvenor Square - in Glasgow.

Seven years prior to Mr Mason's advert, another advert had appeared - this time, in the Dundee Evening Telegraph. It was an advert for the Glasgow Mercantile and Debts Recovery Agency, based at 34 Candleriggs in the city. It specialised in collecting debts on behalf of local merchants, and only charged commission if they recovered money. This debt recovery business was just part of a larger business, though, and this business stated its name at the bottom of the ad: Borthwick, Mason & Co's Private Detective Agency.

I believe that the Mason who co-owned this Glasgow agency was the same man who popped up in London in the following decade. The dates fit, for Mason shortly afterwards left the agency, leaving William Borthwick to continue to run it on his own. From 1878, it was Borthwick's agency, and he continued to run it from 34 Candleriggs, also opening a branch in Greenock in May 1878 ('references from Nobility, Gentry, and Working-Classes').

There are several William Borthwicks in the Glasgow censuses, but private detective Borthwick certainly had some success in business. In April 1878, he was employed to investigate alleged thefts carried out by two men employed as conductors on the Glasgow omnibuses. His investigation involved marking money to see if the two men - Roderick Donald and James Weir - stole it. They did, and he duly reported back to their employer, Mr Blair, who operated Blair's omnibus company in the city. Both men pleaded guilty of theft on the Glasgow Southern Police Court, and were sent to jail for ten days.

In another case the same year, Borthwick managed to stop an elopement between a 19-year-old woman and her private tutor, having been engaged by the woman's concerned father. William Borthwick moved his office from Candleriggs to West Regent Street by May 1879. However, there is no mention of him as a private detective after 1879, nor any mention of Mason as a private detective - either in England or Scotland - after 1884.

It's not possible to say exactly who these two men, both Victorian private detectives and briefly in partnership together, were. My current hypothesis is that Borthwick was an Edinburgh-born former soldier and warehouseman, and that Mason could have been his son-in-law. There is a news story from the summer of 1878 regarding two court cases. In one, a woman had been assaulted in her home; in another, this woman and another had been assaulted by another man.

The woman was a Barbara Mason, nee Borthwick, the wife of a printer named William Mason; the other female accused was a Wilhelmina Borthwick, described as the daughter of 'William Borthwick, detective' of Gourock. These were two feisty women, who were seen as having 'provoked' the second attack. I'd like to think that they were the daughters of my private detective Borthwick. The former soldier I've found - who had served in India, where his three eldest children were born - both lived in Glasgow at the time the private detective office was active, and had daughters called Barbara and Wilhelmina.

William Mason, Barbara's husband (who in later censuses stated that he was born in England, although he was actually born in Glasgow of Scottish parents), could well have been in partnership with his father-in-law at some point, before setting up as a printer, then relocating to London to try his hand at running his own private detective agency. He was back in Scotland a few years later, where he became a school board officer. Meanwhile, William Borthwick may have retired to Gourock, on the West coast; he is absent from the census after 1871 and may well have died by the 1880s.

However, I cannot prove that these are the right men, merely that they were in the right place at the right time, had the right names and a proved relationship. My research into these two private detectives will continue.