From divorce to insurrection

The observational skills of one London man enabled him to have a long career as a private detective - but also proved useful in other arenas

My research started with a divorce. When Mrs Mary Adela Sparke, a 32-year-old woman, petitioned for a divorce from her husband, she decided to employ a private detective to help prove that her spouse had been committing adultery.

Mrs Sparke, who was known as Ada, had been married only eight years at the time. Her husband, Major John Francis Astley Sparke, was known as Frank. He was a major in the Oxfordshire Militia, and rather prone to violence. In fact, pretty much as soon as the couple married - in her hometown of Bromborough, on the Wirral, in 1870 - he started displaying this violence towards his wife, regularly threatening her and swearing at her in front of their servants. After their daughter, Agnes Violet L'Estrange Sparke, was born in 1874, he was violent in her presence too; his violence was usually fueled by drink. Ada left her husband, and sent him a letter via her solicitor pointing out her concerns. She hid her address from him, fearing that if he knew it, he would come and take their child away from her.

In response, Frank wrote back, acknowledging his behaviour, but also making clear that his main concern was with their daughter. If Ada loved their child, she wouldn't keep her from her father:

"Just think, if you take her away from me, she will have no father, and I shall have no child. She will grow up without knowing me, and the thing I love best in the world will be naught. I would rather you shot me..."

Frank promised to reform, but Ada refused to return home. She instigated divorce proceedings on the grounds of cruelty and adultery, refusing to discontinue them even after one of Frank's friends, a solicitor, offered her £1,000 a year if she did. After a couple of months, Frank countersued for divorce, accusing Ada of committing adultery with a family friend, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Napier Sturt of the Grenadier Guards.

In court, Frank angrily said that Ada had told Sturt secrets about their marriage, including about his violence. Ada scornfully retorted that the only reason Sturt knew about Frank's behaviour was because he had been at the Sparke home once when Frank had become abusive - he had directly witnessed his behaviour and so Ada had not needed to tell him anything. Frank had no more evidence of any affair, and decided it was 'useless' to carry on his petition for a divorce.

However, Ada had more evidence. The cruelty her husband had treated her with was deemed to be incontrovertible, but what about the allegations of adultery? She had commissioned William Desborough, a London private detective, to spy on her husband. He had seen him leave the Raleigh Club in the capital, after a meal, and then visit various houses in Pimlico 'in company with women of bad character, where he had remained for some hours'. The image painted of Frank Sparke in court was overwhelmingly negative, and Ada got both her divorce and custody of her daughter.

Of course, it turned out that Frank was right all along about Ada's relationship with Charles Sturt. The couple married shortly after Ada gained her divorce, and they settled in Folkestone with little Agnes Sparke. Charles Sturt died after only six years of marriage, aged 54; Frank Sparke outlived him by just two years.

But what of the private detective Ada Sparke had commissioned? I decided to investigate. William Desborough was an experienced private detective, who had been professionally involved in many divorce cases over the years. Born in 1814 in Westminster, he started his career as a hairdresser. However, after the death of his first wife, Margaret, in 1851 and his remarriage to Mary Stanley in 1854, he appears to have relocated to Lambeth.

Before he left Westminster, he started to combine his hairdressing work with private detective work (both jobs involved listening to people’s secrets). He then stopped hairdressing, and by 1856, was renting an office at 10 Buckingham Street, off the Strand, for his private detective work. Never scared of hard work, at the same time, he was running a photographic studio at 143 Strand, under the company name Dubourg & Veluti.** Sadly, his initial efforts were unsuccessful and he became insolvent.

He now started again, solely as a private detective. Initially, he undertook work for a Mr Smith, who was based at Ironmonger Lane in the City of London.*

In 1863, Smith commissioned him to shadow a woman named Ellen Howard, who was claiming an Irish peerage and estates on behalf of her child. She claimed to have given birth to a son, who would be the child of the recently deceased 4th Earl of Wicklow. Desborough followed Ellen for weeks, noting that she appeared to be pregnant. He duly made a report to this effect. However, after making his report, he saw her again while out walking, and noticed that her appearance was altered - she no longer seemed pregnant. He believed that she must have either miscarried or given birth, as Ellen's appearance was so changed. He was duly brought to court to detail this, and to present his report. Records show that Ellen’s claim was unsuccessful, and the peerage was passed to the original claimant - the 4th Earl of Wicklow’s nephew, Charles Francis Arnold.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Desborough was also indirectly involved in a case far away from his native London. The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in October 1865 had resulted in the death of George William Gordon. Gordon was a former slave, his biological father a slave-owner, his mother one of his father's slaves. He had become a successful businessman and politician, but was blamed for his role in the insurrection. He was duly court-martialled, convicted of treason and hanged.

George William Gordon

The brutality of Gordon's death caused ructions both in Jamaica and the UK, with prosecutions being brought by those opposed to John Eyre, the governor of Jamaica, and his violent response to the rebellion. Two men, in particular, were examined in relation to the death: Lieutenant Brand and Brigadier-General Alexander Nelson. Brand had presided over the tribunal that had convicted Gordon - after he had been tried on ‘inadmissable' evidence. Nelson had been ordered to hunt down the rebels in Jamaica. William Desborough was cited as a witness in a subsequent court case, appearing in court to tell of his 'acquaintance' with Brand, and how he had regularly seen him 'going in and out of Lane's Hotel, St Alban's Place, Regent Street'.

In 1874, William and his wife Mary may have been imprisoned - a couple of this name were accused of conspiring with a solicitor's clerk to prevent a woman from giving evidence in a case brought by the Society for the Protection of Women. They were held on remand for some time, before pleading guilty. The solicitor's clerk was deemed to have instigated the conspiracy, and was fined; the Desboroughs were called on to enter into their own recognisances.

William Desborough appears to have died sometime around 1879, although I can't find a record of his death. His widow, Mary, continued to live in south London until at least 1911. He had at least two sons by his first wife, and he and Margaret had four more. Both their sons became teachers and had families, but their daughters were less lucky - one died aged two, and the other aged 28. What I find interesting about William Desborough is not only the change from hairdressing to private detection, prompted by the death of his first wife, Margaret, is that he appears in the press in relation to such a varied range of cases.

Divorces were, as was often the case, his bread and butter, but he also got to work on other matters. His professional skill in observing others also bore fruit in enabling him to act as witness in cases he had not been engaged on as a private detective: he noticed things, and reported them. However, the possibility that he and Mary were imprisoned shows that he was flawed: not only did he agree to stop someone giving evidence, but he also encouraged his wife to help him.

There’s certainly more to know about Mr Desborough, and I’ll post an update when I’ve done a bit more digging.

*Although Mr Smith may have been another private detective, he is more likely to have been one of the solicitors working in the area at the time; there were several firms of solicitors based on Ironmonger Lane.

**One photographic history website states that Dubourg & Veluti was the studio of Augustus William Dubourg and George Veluti, and then states that Dubourg’s name was ‘also, wrongly [given elsewhere as] “Desborough”’. Elsewhere, it acknowledges the name Desborough but then adds ‘[sic = Dubourg]’. The notice of Desborough’s insolvency in The Times of 11 November 1856 clearly states that he was running the Dubourg & Veluti studio, and so the use of his name was neither a mistake nor a misspelling of Dubourg; both men existed.