Mr Francombe and the missing children

One Edwardian detective had a rather high opinion of his skills - not one based in reality...

George Stafford Francombe was, for many years, an employee of London solicitor Arthur Newton. A solicitor’s clerk who preferred to describe himself as Newton’s manager, Francombe was something of an entrepreneur, who in middle age would try various means of earning money. During the Edwardian era, he established himself as a private detective specialising in tracking down missing children – not those who might have met a violent end, but those who had been ‘kidnapped’ by a warring parent either during or after a divorce case.

Francombe was from a fairly working-class family that ostensibly seemed to be just an ordinary Somerset one; but as was often the case, there are signs that they were more peripatetic and interesting than one might imagine. His father, James, was an engine erector from Bristol, and his mother Caroline was a laundress from Dudley. Their first four daughters had been born in Spain, suggesting that the family had been living there between at least 1858 and 1864. They had then returned to Britain, and had settled in Wales, with three more daughters and a son being born in Newport between 1868 and 1872. A final child, George, was born in Cardiff in early 1875, but the family had settled in Axbridge, Somerset, by the time he was baptised at the age of two. His brother, Walter, died at the age of four, leaving George the only boy in a large family dominated by girls.

After James Francombe died in 1881, Caroline relocated initially to Marylebone with three of her children. The 1901 census records Florence (one of the Spanish-born children) as working as a dressmaker; Amelia was not working; but George was now established as a law clerk. George himself said that he worked for Arthur Newton and Co for 15 years, and the dates suggest that he had started working for the company by 1893 at the latest – so presumably, this is where he was working at the time of the 1901 census. He married Ethel Pacey the following year, while still working as a clerk. However, in 1908, he appears to have taken the plunge and left to establish himself as a private detective, renting offices at Belfast Chambers on London’s Regent Street.

This decision may have been made as a result of becoming a father – his son Standley George Francombe was born at Brixton in December 1907 – or other family problems at this time. The Shoreditch Register of Lunatics names George’s wife, Ethel, as having had a third attack of ‘madness’ in April 1908 that had lasted a month and led to a suicide attempt; she was incarcerated in the Long Grove asylum indefinitely as a result. George still had to deal with the authorities in her case, however; although she had originally been deemed to be legally settled in Shoreditch, it was later argued that her place of settlement should be her husband’s in Elstree – and an order of removal was granted. Ethel was deemed to have ‘recovered’ that October.

As a law clerk, George had worked on various cases for Arthur Newton – divorce cases, breaches of promise, blackmail and financial matters. He now highlighted his experience in these types of cases, although there was certainly some hyperbole involved. One might think, from his press adverts, that he had been working on these cases on his own. He also claimed that he now had offices staffed by a number of ‘expert assistants’, all busy conducting research on confidential investigations – in reality, as a new detective, he was likely to be working on his own. He knew the value of publicity, though, and within months of establishing himself was advertising his services as an ‘expert investigator’.

One of the ways in which private detectives could get their names (and images) out to the public – and be remembered – was by selling stories to the press. Many papers included interviews with detectives, or a form of memoir where they would highlight their most exciting cases. Despite his relative lack of experience, George Stafford Francombe managed to write a long article for Reynolds’s Newspaper in October 1908 with the gripping headline ‘Why Children Are Stolen From Their Parents’, and the inclusion of a flattering photograph of himself.

This article set out to establish Francombe as specialising in tracking down children where one parent had vanished with them following a divorce or custody case. Yet there were some peculiar arguments employed by Francombe in the piece, such as stating that couples who lived in sin together were likely to try and steal a child to make them appear like an ordinary married couple to neighbours and friends. Francombe saw women as more likely to try and steal a child to make her situation look more ‘moral’, ignoring the number of couples who lived together outside of marriage quite happily, or who simply had their own children and told other people that they were married. Stealing children seems to have been a bit of an extreme thing to do for little reason.

One case that Francombe claimed to have worked on was one where a woman had won both a divorce and custody of her two young daughters. Their father felt that they were not being ‘trained’ to ‘eventually be able to fill their proper position’ and successfully fought for custody to be given to his mother-in-law – at which point, his ex-wife made off with the girls to South Africa. Francombe said he had been employed by the father to track his daughters down, and did so – but had to ‘take the children away from the mother by force’. Once back in England, the father did not reassure his no doubt traumatised daughters, but simply sent them to a ‘college up north’, which Francombe appears to have approved of. One of the few positive things about this strange article is the note underneath it making clear that ‘it must be understood that the opinions expressed by writers on this page are not necessarily those of the editor’.

A Lyons’ Corner House elsewhere in London (IWM/public domain)

Perhaps understandably, Francombe’s new career was not to last long. At some point, he returned to live with his mother and the couple of sisters who had remained unmarried – they were now living in Elstree, Hertfordshire. This return home, with tail between legs, followed a criminal conviction in January 1909. He had been charged at the Marlborough Street police court with stealing a coat and gloves from the Lyons café in New Bond Street, and with subsequently assaulting two detective sergeants who had been trying to arrest him at his home.

Unfortunately for George, he had tried to show off to the police about his status, demanding to see their warrant cards, and boasting, “I have not worked 15 years for Mr Arthur Newton without knowing something.” Even after being persuaded that the police knew he was a thief, George – who, it seems to have been accepted, was drunk at the time - insisted he couldn’t understand how they had found him out – and then kicked each detective in the face.

Then, when war broke out in 1914, George took advantage of the situation to set up his own Naturalisation Society in Soho’s Wardour Street, where he employed a clerk and a lady typist to deal with naturalisation applications from individuals. Unfortunately for his clients, he doesn’t seem to have checked that all of them resulted in timely registrations, causing some issues for those who had gone to him relying on him to get their paperwork done. After this, George fades from the scene; he certainly had high opinions of himself and his skillset, but the evidence suggests he wasn’t quite the genius detective he thought he was.