Sleeping with the enemy
Richard Rogers' spell as a private detective saw him engaged in some very unethical behaviour - but this was just the tip of the iceberg.
As regular readers of this substack will have learned by now, I am fascinated by private detectives from history – both their work and personal lives. It can often be frustrating not being able to assemble a detailed picture of their lives, but occasionally, you can find yourself peeling away the layers of outer respectability to reveal a complex, not entirely law-abiding life.
When I was researching the subject of today’s article, Richard Rogers, I easily discovered that he was a private detective who epitomised the concerns of lawmakers and police about how anyone could become a private eye, and how some were not law-abiding, or at least, skirted the fringes of ethical behaviour. But when I tried to construct his life and genealogy, as I usually do with the private detectives in my files, I found that he had a long history of dubious behaviour.
Richard Rogers, as seen in the Daily Herald of 15 December 1937 (via British Newspaper Archive)
Richard Lyndsey (or Lindsay) Rogers was born in North London in 1898 – his family variously gave Wood Green and Bowes Park as his birthplace. His father was a Kent-born warehouseman; his mother from Cambridgeshire. They had six children, born in Islington and Wood Green, and the older sons worked as clerks for the local vestry, council, or insurance companies. Richard had various jobs – more of which later.
He made the papers in December 1937, when he was named as the co-respondent in a divorce case. So far, so straightforward. Thomas Ridd, a shipping clerk of Greenford in Middlesex, had petitioned for divorce from his Belgian wife Marie Philomene Irma Ridd, on the grounds of her adultery with Rogers. However, it then emerged that in July 1931, Thomas Ridd had actually employed Rogers as a private detective, it was stated – ostensibly to watch Marie in Belgium, and to get evidence of adultery. However, it seemed that Rogers and Marie fell in love, with Marie willingly committing adultery with the private detective. Rogers then terminated his agreement with Thomas Ridd, saying that his “evidence against Mrs Ridd was not good”. He then returned to Zeebrugge to make “violent love” to Marie.
Marie Ridd, who fell in love with the private detective (Daily Herald, 15 December 1937, via British Newspaper Archive)
Marie was willing to admit her love for Rogers, and to get a divorce because of this; but Rogers had not been honest with her. In court, it emerged that Thomas Ridd had employed Rogers specifically to sleep with his wife – to ‘trick’ her into falling in love with him in order for Ridd to get his divorce. The unprofessional Richard Rogers was willing to do this in order to get paid, and he, of course, got sex as a result as well. The judge in the divorce case regarded Thomas Ridd as having connived to find evidence against his wife, with Rogers as his agent, and dismissed the divorce petition.
Looking back through old newspapers, it becomes clear that Rogers had few scruples. Prior to being a private detective, he had been a company secretary. As such, in 1935, he had appeared at the Old Bailey charged with conspiring to defraud an elderly widow named Harriet Eyre-Williams (1846-1939) out of nearly £34,000. Two other – Lily Amelia Burton, also known as Mrs Bamberger, and company director Major Thomas Smith Impey (1880-1949) were also charged. They were all convicted and sent to prison – Impey for five years, Burton for four, and Rogers for a year. All appealed their convictions; Burton’s appeal was dismissed and the two men were refused leave to appeal.
So Rogers had been a fraudster prior to his honeytrap of Marie Ridd. But who was the woman he was convicted of, the woman who had two names and who received the longest prison sentence? Croydon-born Lily Amelia Taylor, her original name, was a fascinating woman. The daughter of an evangelical Baptist minister, she claimed to have been born in 1896, but married her first husband, Frederick William Jenkins, in 1906, when she was actually 18. She swiftly started an affair with Harry Theodore Bamberger, and Jenkins petitioned for divorce on the grounds of her adultery in 1908. Shortly after the divorce was granted, in 1910, she married Harry.
Lily Burton, as seen in the Daily Mirror of 17 September 1935 (via British Newspaper Archive)
Lily started using an alias – Thelma Dorothy Bamberger – until her husband changed his and her name to Anglicised Burton. She also used another name – Ella Williamson. Under the latter name, she rented a flat at Twyford Mansions in London, and used it as a base to steal money from others. On one occasion, she was charged with a Spanish friend with theft, but the two women were discharged.
She then started an affair with a man named Robert Wemyss Symonds, while her husband was away fighting in the war. Between 1915 and 1918 they lived together. Lily was more in love than Symonds was, and she filed for divorce from Harry Burton in September 1915, alleging that he had deserted her. She gained her divorce, but the King’s Proctor was suspicious of her case, and after investigating, found that she had lied in court.
She had claiming that her husband had been guilty of misconduct, denied having an affair, and stated that she had never been in a police court when she had been at Marylebone police court when she was accused of theft. The King’s Proctor duly rescinded her divorce. Lily was then charged with perjury, appearing initially at Bow Street police court. At the Old Bailey in September 1920, Lily was convicted of ‘perjury in the Divorce Court’, and sentenced to nine months in prison.
She was released in 1921, and in 1923, still legally married, Lily met Richard Rogers. They lived together on and off, and travelled to America in 1927, taking Lily’s mother Helen with them. In around 1929, according to Lily, their relationship ended. In 1931, she again petitioned to end her marriage to Harry Burton, and this time, the judge – against his better judgement by the sound of it – said he had to trust her evidence, and granted her a divorce.
It seems likely that Lily had lied again when she tried to get her divorce in 1931, for she certainly still had some sort of relationship with Richard Rogers. The two, joined by Thomas Smith Impey, carried out their plan to confuse Harriet Eyre-Williams and obtain her money over a long period of time: the fraud started when Lily met Rogers. In 1923, and continued until May 1935. They were convicted in September 1935.
While Lily was still in prison, and two years after his involvement in the Ridd divorce case, January 1939, Rogers appeared in court again. Now living in Ware, Hertfordshire, and working as a clerk, he pleaded guilty to driving a car without a road fund licence. This was possibly the more mundane of the offences he had committed over his first forty or so years, and he avoided prison, being fined ten shillings.
I’m still to find out what both Rogers and his one-time accomplice Lily Burton did beyond 1940, but one thing is certainly clear: life was never boring when around one of these individuals.
