The South London hat detective

Lilian Priddy was a private detective working for a London department store during the Second World War

Lilian May Priddy was a modern girl. Born in 1911 in Camberwell, her family were not well-to-do, but she had options open to her that her female ancestors had not. She was brought up in south London by her father Charles, a railway porter, and her mother Ada, a housewife. Her brothers became warehousemen and drivers, and her younger sister Florence was a typist.

The Millinery Shop, by Edgar Degas

Lilian, though, became a store detective. She was working for Bon Marché in Brixton by 1933, and by the end of the decade was working both there and at Quin & Axtens, a department store on the Brixton Road - also owned by Bon Marché. She got on well there, and had good friends, among whom was Caroline Davis, a fellow detective five years Lilian’s senior, who at one point was lodging with the Priddy family.

In 1940, Lilian was patrolling the store, as unobtrusively as possible, when she saw two women acting rather suspiciously. These were Ada Amelia Wadmore, a 38-year-old married woman, and Florence Iddiols, 24. They were local women, Ada being from Brixton and Florence from Herne Hill.

The former Bon Marché building in Brixton (image by Ewan Munro on Flickr)

The two women were wandering round departments, rather aimlessly, until they reached millinery. Then, Ada Wadmore picked up a hat, scrunched it up into her hand, and then passed it to Florence. Florence then surreptitiously put it into a bag - not realising that Lilian had actually spotted the whole sequence of events. As both women left the department store, Lilian stopped them, and asked them to return.

Ada immediately told the detective “We did not mean to do it!” and Florence asked to pay for the hat - it was on sale for 6s 11d. Lilian refused this offer, and the case proceeded to court. There, it was felt that Ada Wadmore was the instigator of the theft, and that Florence Iddiols was trying to shield her. Ada was fined 30 shillings, while Florence was placed on bail. There is no record of what happened to Florence, apart from the fact that police intended to make further inquiries about her. However, she was younger than Wadmore, and was a poor woman who worked as a hop-picker in the Kent fields during the summers. She may well have been let off, viewed with some sympathy, unlike Ada Wadmore.

Lilian continued to work as a store detective for the next 20 years, in the late 1940s and 1950s being described as ‘security officer’ for Arding and Hobbs, the Battersea department store. She only married in 1964, and died 12 years later in Surrey.