Spying on Blackpool's adulterers
Even the managers of the Blackpool Tower Café needed a private detective's help
It was 1910, and Jane Parr was at the end of her tether. Married for 25 years, she and her husband Charles ran the Blackpool Tower Café together, and had had six children. Now aged 47, she should have been starting to relax in life – but appearances can be deceptive.
Jane had had a difficult quarter century. Her son Claud had died; her daughter, Eveline, had been married only two years, but her husband had walked out on her, and refused to come back. Eveline was now in the process of petitioning for him to return and reinstate her conjugal rights – a process that would fail and end in divorce.1 More pertinently, Jane also claimed to have been subject to domestic abuse starting within two years of her own marriage.
Born on the Welsh border, Jane Westall had been brought up in Devon, where she had met grocer Charles Parr. They married in Devonport register office in 1885, and their children – one girl, followed by five boys – had all been born in the county. In 1900, when their youngest son Donald was just two years old, the family relocated up to Lancashire, where the couple took on their jobs at the Tower Café.
By this time, Jane had been subject to multiple verbal and physical assaults, and suspected her husband of having committed adultery with more than one woman. Things did not improve once they moved to Blackpool. In June 1909, Charles had tried to strangle her as they worked at the café, and a year later, he had committed adultery with Bessie Whittaker in a disused lane between the Lea Road and Salwick railway stations. Jane had had enough, and ten days after this latest act of adultery, she petitioned for divorce.
Jane knew that her husband had had sex with Miss Whittaker in the lane because she had employed a private detective to spy on them. The detective she chose was John Anyon, who followed Charles Parr around, and frequently spotted him entertaining Bessie Whittaker at Blackpool’s prime spots, including the Palace and the Grand Theatre. It was Anyon who followed Charles to Lea Road station on 13 June 1909 and saw Bessie get off a train and greet Charles on the platform. He then watched as the couple went for a stroll along the canal bank, arm in arm.
So who was John Anyon, private detective? In the 1911 census, he was listed as a boarder in the house of Walter Robinson in Blackpool. He was said to be 39 at that time, and his birthplace was given as Grimsby. He was boarding at the Robinsons without his wife, although he was listed as married, so it seems likely that he was in Blackpool for work. His work for Jane Parr had finished, but he might have been in demand by Blackpool’s husbands and wives, searching for evidence of adultery, and needed to stay over in the town.
The details in the 1911 census were given by the head of household, Walter Robinson, and therefore they may not have been correct. I can’t locate a John Anyon of the right age born in Grimsby. However, a case from eight years later, in 1919, records a private detective named ‘William John Anyon’, who had been resident in Blackpool for some years, according to a piece in the Lancashire Evening Post. This William Anyon had been asked to help in a couple’s divorce, but this time, it was as a friend who had known the couple – William and Mary Ann McClorry – for a long time.
Anyon gave evidence that he saw Mary Ann as a drunk, and had ‘seen her often in Blackpool’ with a man named Fred Hacker, who William McClorry believed his wife to be having an affair with. When Anyon had asked Mary Ann about her husband’s divorce petition, she had said, “How long is the divorce going to be? It is true that I lived with Hacker, and intend to live with him.” She made the divorce easier for her husband, and for the private detective, by her honesty.
In 1924, a final reference to ‘John Anyon, a private detective’ was published in response to a case heard at Manchester Assizes. In this case, a Blackpool woman, Mary Messenger, was granted a decree nisi and custody of her child, following her husband Oliver’s desertion of her the year before. She had employed Anyon to track her spouse down, and he gave evidence that he found Oliver staying at a Blackpool hotel with a married woman named Braby.
In all three of these cases, the private detective gave evidence: twice for the wife, and once for the husband. In the case of the Parrs, Charles married his lover, Bessie Whittaker, in 1911, and they stayed together for the rest of his life. I’ve not, however, been able to find out what happened to longsuffering Jane after the divorce. In the McClorry case, Mary Ann had been having an affair with an old friend – both she and Fred Hacker were from the Gloucestershire village of Coalpit Heath and had known each other since they were little. However, although the McClorrys divorced, and William married Lily Sanderson shortly afterwards, Mary Ann did not marry Fred; it appears that he and his wife Emily did not divorce, and so the couple simply cohabited together - in St Helen’s, Lancashire - instead.
And meanwhile, what happened to the private detective? Newspaper reports show that Anyon was working in the field in Blackpool from a number of years. He did not just deal with shadowing those suspected of adultery; he also took on legal and bailiff-type work, requisitioning property and possessions in response to orders from his clients. He had to be firm and stand his position, which resulted in him being charged with assault and threatening language on at least one occasion (the charges were dismissed, as it was seen that he had been doing his job, and Anyon in court sounded very calm and understanding of why an upset householder would blame him for their financial situation).
If Anyon was the Ulverston-born John Edward Anyon, then it may have been a personal tragedy that led him to become a private detective in the Edwardian era. He had married Agnes Lawrenson, a porter’s daughter, in 1899. The couple had a daughter, Beatrice, the following year, but she died at around six months old, in the winter of 1900. Within six months, the 24-year-old Agnes Anyon would also be dead. In 1905, John Anyon remarried, this time to Sarah Jane Hodgson, the second marriage also resulting in a daughter, Mabel. Both marriage and daughter survived.
John Edward spent most of his life living in Fleetwood, a short distance from Blackpool, where his father and siblings also seem to have remained living. By 1939, John Anyon was working back in the shipbuilding trade, and he lived peacefully in Fleetwood until his death in 1953. Significantly, as previously noted, Anyon was described as ‘William John Anyon’ in one press report. Although the press frequently made mistakes with names, John Edward Anyon had had an older brother named William John, who had died aged 2. Perhaps the private detective occasionally used a slight pseudonym that also honoured his dead brother.
Photo © Nell Darby
Eveline would marry another two times; on 3 May 1911, she married solicitor Arnold Telford Mason (1885-1968). A press story of her marriage stated that Jane Parr (‘Mrs Parr of Blackpool’) had ‘supported’ her daughter at the ceremony, and that Jane was descended both from Sir John Hawkins ‘of Armada fame’, and the Royal Academician Westall ‘who instructed the late Queen Victoria in the art of painting’. Mason left the law to write, and headed the publishing company W Westall & Co (Westall was Eveline’s middle name and Jane Parr’s maiden name, so this may have been a family firm). In 1916, he published The Book of Artemas, dedicated to ‘Eve’ - his wife, Eveline - but it was only in 1919 that the press discovered that Artemas himself was Arnold (ARnold TElford MASon). By 1918, Arnold was in a relationship with another woman, by whom he had a son, and the 1921 census records them living together in London. They married in the capital later that year. In 1924, Eveline married her third husband, Clarence Castle. This was information found out while trying to see what had happened to Jane Parr, but beyond this reference to her, and to her living in Monton, Eccles, Greater Manchester, at the time of her divorce, I have been unable to locate her any later.