DR. VIVIAN.
Another man of the same stamp, calling himself Dr. Vivian, of New York, burst upon the world of Birmingham, about 1884 as a man of vast wealth, which he spent with a most lavish hand. He stopped at the best hotel in the town, the Queen’s, and got into society. One day, at a flower-show, he was introduced to a Miss W., to whom he at once paid his addresses, and made such rapid progress in her good graces that they were married by special licence a week or two later. The wedding was of the most splendid description; the happy bridegroom had presented his wife with quantities of valuable jewellery, and he was so well satisfied with the arrangements at the church that he gave the officiating clergyman a fee of £500. After a magnificent wedding breakfast at the Queen’s Hotel, the newly married couple proceeded to London, and were next heard of at the Langham, living in the most expensive style. The bridegroom spent large sums among the London tradesmen, and, strange to say, invariably paid cash. All this time a man who had much the appearance of Dr. Vivian was greatly wanted by the police; the person in question had been down in Warwickshire a few months previous to the arrival of Dr. Vivian at Birmingham. This person was strongly suspected of a theft at an hotel at Whitchurch. A visitor at the hotel had been robbed one night of a certain sum in cash and a number of very valuable old coins. Now the police became satisfied that Dr. Vivian and the man wanted for this theft were one and the same person, and the authorities of Scotland Yard took the decided step of arresting him. They went farther, and had the audacity to declare that the so-called Dr. Vivian was one James Barnet, otherwise George Percy, otherwise George Guelph, a notorious convict, only recently released after a term of ten years’ penal servitude.
When arrested, Vivian, as we will still call him, was found to be in possession of a large amount of money, much more than could have come from the hotel robbery at Whitchurch; he had a roll of notes to the value of some two thousand pounds, and a great deal of gold. The impression was that a part of this was the proceeds of another hotel robbery from a bookmaker at Manchester. The notes, however, when examined, were found to be all of one date, some ten or twelve years back, antecedent to his last conviction, and it seemed most improbable that he could have come upon these in the ordinary way of robbery. It was far more likely that they were forged notes (although this was never proved) which had been “planted” safely somewhere while he was at large, and that on his release he had drawn upon the deposit. At the same time there had been some serious thefts at the Langham Hotel during the prisoner’s honeymoon residence, and there is very little doubt that Vivian, alias Barnet, was an accomplished hotel thief. Many curious facts came out while he was in custody. He was identified as a man who had wandered from hotel to hotel in the Midlands, changing his appearance continually, but not enough to defy detection. He carried with him a large wardrobe as his stock-in-trade, and was seldom seen in the same suit of clothes two days together. He had had several narrow escapes, and before his final escapade had been arrested in Derby by a detective, who was pretty certain that he had “passed through his hands.” The accumulated evidence against him was strong, and when put upon his trial for the particular theft at the Whitchurch hotel, he was found guilty and sentenced to another ten years’ seclusion.
MOCK CLERGYMEN.
The convict swindler when at large has many lines of operation, and a favourite one is the assumption of the clerical character. This is generally done by criminals who at one time or another have been in holy orders, and have been unfrocked for their misdeeds. Dr. Berrington was a notable instance of this. Although he was repeatedly convicted of performing clerical functions, for which he was altogether disqualified, he kept up the game to the last. In one of his short periods of freedom he had the effrontery to take the duties of a country rector, and, as such, accepted an invitation to dine at a neighbouring squire’s. Strange to say, the carriage which he hired from the livery stables of the nearest town was driven by a man who, like himself, was a licence-holder, and who had last seen his clerical fare when they were both inmates of Dartmoor prison. Berrington had no doubt been in the Church at one time, and was a ripe scholar. The story goes that during one of his imprisonments he was amusing himself in the school hour with a Hebrew grammar. “What! Do you know Hebrew?” said a visitor to the gaol who was passing through the ward. “Yes,” replied Berrington, “and I daresay a great deal better than you do.”
There was another reverend gentleman, who was an ordained priest in the Church of England, and had once held an Irish living worth £400 a year, but had lost every shilling he was worth on the turf. One day, when seized with the old gambling mania, he made an improper use of a friend’s cheque-book. He was staying at this friend’s house, and forged his name, having found the cheque-book accessible. He was soon afterwards arrested on Manchester racecourse, and, after trial, sentenced to transportation for life.
In December, 1886, another clerical impostor caused some noise, and there is some reason to suppose from his own story that he had actually been ordained a priest in the Church of Rome. This rests on his own statement, no doubt, made when on his trial in Dublin for obtaining money under false pretences, the latest of a long series of similar offences. At that time he rejoiced in several aliases, Keatinge being the commonest, but he was also known as Moreton, with many variations of Christian names. His offence was that he had received frequent help from the Priests’ Protection Society, on the pretence that he had left the Church of Rome and that his abjuration of the old faith had left him in great distress. The society on these grounds had made him an allowance, and he had often preached and performed clerical duty in Dublin churches. He was charged with having falsely represented himself to be a clergyman in holy orders, but his own story was very precise and circumstantial. Keatinge made out that he had studied at Stonyhurst and then at St. Michael’s College, Brussels; thence he went to Rome, was admitted to orders, and for some time held the post of Latin translator and general secretary to Cardinal Pecci of Perugia, afterwards Pope Leo XIII. After that, he said, he became chaplain and secretary to Cardinal d’Andrea, and was soon afterwards given the degree of Doctor of Divinity and made a Monsignore. He declared that he had become involved in the political struggle between Cardinal d’Andrea and Cardinal Antonelli, and was imprisoned with the former in the latter Cardinal’s palace. From that time forth Dr. Keatinge was the victim of constant persecution, but at last escaped from Rome, by the assistance of a lady, who afterwards became his wife, when he had seceded from the Roman Church. After that he appears to have lapsed into a life of vagabondage and questionable adventure. He suffered many convictions, mostly for false pretences, and the Dublin affair relegated him once more to gaol.
HARRY BENSON.
One of the most daring and successful of modern swindlers was Harry Benson, who came into especial prominence in connection with the Goncourt frauds and the disloyalty of certain London detectives. His was a brief and strangely romantic career of crime; he was not much more than forty when it terminated with his death, yet he had netted vast sums by his ingenious frauds, and had long lived a life of cultured ease, respected and outwardly most respectable. He came of very decent folk; his father was a prosperous merchant, established in Paris, with offices in the Faubourg St. Honoré, and a person of undeniably good repute. Young Benson was well and carefully educated: he spoke several languages with ease and correctness; he was a good musician, was well read, had charming manners, a suave and polished address. But from the earliest days his moral sense was perverted; he could not and would not run straight. Benson belonged by nature to the criminal class, and if we are to believe Lombroso and the Italian school, he was a born criminal. All his tastes and predilections were towards fraud and foul play.
Young Benson seems to have first made his appearance in Brussels in 1870-71, when he was prominent among the French refugees who left France at the time of the Franco-German war. He had assumed the name and title of the Comte de Montague, pretending to be the son of a General de Montague, an old Bonapartist. He lived in fine style, had carriages and horses, a sumptuous appartement, gave many entertainments, and was generally a very popular personage, much esteemed for his great courtliness and his pleasant, insinuating address. Nothing is known of the sources of his wealth at this period, but his first trouble with the law came of a nefarious attempt to add to them. One day the Comte de Montague called at the Mansion House, in London, and besought the Lord Mayor’s charitable aid for the town of Châteaudun, which had suffered much from the ravages of the war. Money was being very freely subscribed to relieve French distress at the time, and the Comte had no difficulty in obtaining a grant of a thousand pounds for Châteaudun. This he at once proceeded to apply to his own needs, for the Comte was no other than Benson. His imposture was presently discovered, and he paid a second visit to the Mansion House, but this time as a prisoner. The escapade ended in a sentence of a year’s imprisonment, during which he appears to have set his cell on fire and burned himself badly. He was ever afterwards lame, and obliged to use crutches; an unmistakable addition to his signalement which would have seriously handicapped any less audacious offender.