Coming back from crime

Having serious charges brought against him did not stop one Victorian detective from resuming his career after prison

For understandable reasons, Rhodolph Sydney Fry always chose to go by his middle name. The nearest he got to using his first name was to sign the 1911 census as R. Sydney Fry. Sydney was a Londoner born and bred; his father Charles Fry had a legal background, and worked variously for the Assize courts and for the Metropolitan Board of Works. Sydney was one of four boys, and was born in Islington in 1862. His mother, Adelaide, died when he was 16; his father would later marry a multi-lingual Austrian woman and relocate to Penzance with her.

Sydney remained in London, though, and, at 19 years old, Sydney married Ellen Pocock in Lambeth. The couple quickly had five children. The 1891 census records them as living in Battersea, with Sydney giving his occupation as a solicitor's clerk. However, he was actually a private detective.

Sydney was living in Battersea in 1891 (image © Nell Darby)

As with many other private detectives, Sydney's role was partly office based, and thus he had clerking duties as well as more exciting work shadowing clients. He did not work for himself, but for one of the famous late Victorian detectives - Maurice Moser. Moser was a former Met police detective who was based on Southampton Street, between Strand and Covent Garden. He was well known, published his memoirs of his police years, and had a reputation for feistiness that could also express itself in violence.

By August 1891, Sydney had been promoted to manager of Moser's detective agency. It is clear that Moser's staff resorted to underhand activities in order to get a result, and so it was perhaps unsurprising when, at Maidenhead Borough Police Court, Sydney Fry was charged with having tried to bribe an individual to give him information. The individual was 23-year-old Ernest Fear, a clerk at Maidenhead post office, and Sydney had tried to get him to disclose the contents of a telegraphic message to help him with a case. Fear had refused, and reported Sydney to the police.

The message was addressed to a Mrs Livesey at Skindle's Hotel in Maidenhead, and Fear was not the only person that Fry had tried to bribe in order to get access to the message's contents. He had first tried a 12-year-old messenger, Arthur Venables, before going onto attempt to bribe both Ernest Fear and another telegraph clerk, 25-year-old Peter Venn. He wanted to know, in particular, if the telegrams to Mrs Livesey were from her husband, and whether they were making an appointment. Both clerks had refused to pander to Fry, but Arthur Venables - who had taken another telegram to Mrs Livesey, and had brought back a reply from her - had been accosted by Fry, who had persuaded Venables to admit that he had come from Mrs Livesey's house.

Sydney was duly sent for trial at the Reading Quarter Sessions in October 1891. There, he was found guilty, although - perhaps due to his age and previous good reputation - the jury recommended him to mercy, and he received a sentence of just a month's hard labour in prison.

A conviction and prison sentence did not mean that Fry gave up on life as a private detective. Instead, by March 1895, he had established his own private detective agency - the Secret Service Agency - based at Chancery Lane. He advertised in the Daily Telegraph, stating that he had 'practical experience at home and the colonies.' It's clear that Sydney was a one-man operation, from his stress on taking a 'personal interest in all cases' and his availability for 'interviews at any hour'. Interestingly, he wrote in a less formal manner than a lot of detectives did in their adverts, telling his potential clients to 'save yourselves heaps of trouble' by employing him.

Fry's agency may not have been successful, as by 1901, he was working as a commercial clerk for Clark's College, a school established in 1880 by George Clark to train individuals to succeed in Civil Service examinations. Clark's headquarters was at 1-3 Chancery Lane - the road where the Secret Service Agency had also been based; it is possible that Fry was working at Clark's College while also trying to maintain a dual career as a private detective.

Sydney had moved his family from London to Southend-on-Sea by 1909. Southend was a popular place for detectives to live and retire to, but in Sydney's case, I know that Clark's College had an outpost in Southend, and it could be that he was asked to establish that, or simply work there. He continued to work for Clark's College as a clerk into the 1920s, and died in Southend in 1945, aged 83.