Dora the Detective

One 1920s widow took up work as a private detective - and she was not an ordinary woman

I'm starting today's article not with Dora the Detective, but with Henry Hugo Meyer, a highly educated and ambitious man from Hanover in Germany. Hugo, as he was known, initially came over from Germany to Scotland, where he worked as a mercantile and foreign correspondence clerk. He was multilingual, speaking fluent Dutch, Hungarian, English, and other languages as well as his native German.

With these impressive language skills, he then moved to London, where for a couple of decades, he worked as an interpreter in the criminal justice system. There are many articles in the press about him from about 1904, detailing how he interpreted criminals' and witnesses' statements at the London Sessions court in Newington Causeway.

However, as the 1920s dawned, Hugo Meyer decided to leave his interpreting work behind and start his own detective agency. He had many contacts in the police and law fields, and so had every chance of success. Establishing an office at 6 Old Queen Street in Westminster, he duly placed adverts in the London and national press disguised as editorial pieces singing his praises. He was 'Britain's most accomplished detective' (having only been a detective for a matter of weeks), and 'the possessor of more secrets concerning the lives of other people than almost any other...'.

A house on Old Queen Street, where Meyer’s detective agency was based, and where Dora Ford worked (cc - Spudgun67)

Hugo took on a team of staff to work alongside him as private detectives, and one of these was Dora Ford. Dora was 37 years old, but had already been widowed for a decade. With two children to support, she was keen to work for a living. She was also a perfect candidate for Hugo. Women were seen to be great detectives: their communication skills and ability to be at home in various social contexts meant that they could get suspected persons to confide in them. They could also inveigle their way into households by working as servants, and thus spy on or listen in on those the detective agency had been asked to investigate.

And Dora also had good life experience, making her unflappable, courageous, and perhaps even a bit intimidating to others. She also had a gift for disguise and invention. In the 1921 census, she states that she was 'born at sea'; she was actually born in the less glamorous surroundings of Teddington, Middlesex. The daughter of carpenter William Edgar Cousins and his wife Lucy Amelia (nee Radford), she had grown up in a close family, spending time growing up with her paternal grandparents, William and Mary, who lived locally, and also with her maternal grandparents, Walter and Mary.

As a young woman, Dora Cousins formed a romantic relationship with Frederick Alfred Ford, a man nearly 30 years Dora’s senior, and already a husband and father. Frederick clearly had a liking for intelligent and forthright women. In 1877, he had married Florence Fenwick Miller, a successful journalist and feminist. Florence retained her maiden name professionally, and both her daughters - Irene and Helen - had Miller as a second name.

Florence Fenwick Miller

Frederick's marriage to Florence was not successful, and they separated. I'm not sure whether they actually divorced (I can find no record of one at The National Archives), and there is no record of a second marriage for Frederick in the UK. But Frederick happily embarked on this new relationship, while Florence Fenwick Miller moved to Hove with daughter Irene. Irene - who dropped the name Ford - would follow in her mother’s suffragist footsteps. She become a suffragette, enduring several periods of imprisonment while also writing numerous articles for publications such as The Referee and John Bull. The latter referred to her as 'our esteemed suffragist friend'.

Dora was not phased by the rather intimidating Florence, but settled down as Frederick's de facto or real wife, and had two children by him: a daughter named Dallas Lucy Ford, and a son, Frederick Cecil Cousins Ford. Frederick was born and his birth registered in Richmond, but Dora wasn't as consistent with her daughter's birth; in 1921, she claimed Dallas was born in Rome, but ten years earlier, she gave Dallas's place of birth as the less exotic Brixton Hill in south London. She also consistently knocked five years off her own age.

When Dora's children were aged five and eight, their father died. Dallas later described her father as an inventor; earlier censuses describe him as a stockbroker's clerk and a company director. Frederick Ford does not appear to have left his widow much money, but the 1911 census found her living with her children in Hammersmith, where she described herself as being of private means.

However, by 1921, Dora was working as a private detective, employed by Hugo Meyer and based at his Old Queen Street office. Her home was in London, where she lived with Dallas, who became a school teacher, and Frederick.

We know that Dora was a private detective for at least five years: she had become one by 1921, and she was still working as one in 1928, when a press report details her work on a particular job (more of which next week). She then appears to have become a journalist. She travelled between the UK and Canada during this period, having married a Russian-born man in 1924, and eventually starting a new life in Canada with her second husband, and joined by her son. Daughter Dallas remained in the UK, where she married and became a mother, but died in her early 40s. Her mother outlived her by 22 years, dying in British Columbia in 1967.

A surviving photo of Dora shows her to be a rather stout, stylish lady with an open, enquiring face. She looks like a lady who would be inquisitive, sociable, and able to portray a variety of characters. In short, she looks like she would have been the perfect lady detective. One rather admires Frederick Ford's choice of wives, too, for both Dora, and her predecessor Florence, were modern and ambitious women.