The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder by Andrew Rose

Author:Andrew Rose [Rose, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Europe, True Crime, General, Royalty, Biography & Autobiography, Great Britain, History
ISBN: 9781250041333
Google: ZPXtPqtvu88C
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

17

The Real Deal

The Prison Commissioners sought information from the Metropolitan Police about the proposed teacher of English. ‘Mrs Barton appears to have been employed at Scotland Yard’, wrote the Secretary of the Prison Commissioners, presumably on the basis of information provided by Major Bald, ‘Can you say if she is a reliable person please.’

No trace of Mrs Barton was found in criminal records. An approach was then made by Scotland Yard staff to Special Branch, whose report had been shown to Superintendent Parker, in overall charge of the murder enquiry, within two days of the shooting.

Norman Kendal, a Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, dealt with the request. Kendal, then aged 43, was already a high flyer at Scotland Yard. Educated (like Lord Stamfordham) at Rossall School, a minor public school in the north of England, and Oriel College, Oxford, he practised as a barrister before war service, in which he was severely injured.353 Kendal’s endorsement to the police file reveals that a ‘Miss Baker’ had come into the frame, probably because her name had been given as a character reference. ‘Miss Baker’, minuted Kendal firmly, ‘is highly respectable & unless you have something agst her I propose to say that we have nothing agst Mrs Barton’. On 20 August, Kendal wrote to the Prison Commissioners, informing them that ‘We have no objection to Mrs Barton and know nothing of her’, adding a highly significant endorsement, which forges another link in the chain of circumstance surrounding the agreement to protect the name of the Prince. ‘Colonel Thompson of the N.V.A.,’ wrote Kendal, ‘tells me that she is an old subscriber and quite respectable.’

The NVA, the ‘National Vigilance Association’, was founded in 1885, at the prompting of several earnest social reformers, including the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead and the Victorian feminist Josephine Butler. Its aim was ‘the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of criminal vice and public morality’. Shocked by the extent of prostitution, often involving very young girls, and by the Contagious Diseases Act of 1869, which authorised the humiliating medical examination of women merely suspected of prostitution, the NVA successfully pressed for legislative change. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of that year reformed the law on female prostitution. Unfortunately, thanks to the ‘Labouchère Amendment’, tagged on to the original Bill, all adult male homosexual behaviour was criminalised, ‘in public or in private’, creating a notorious ‘Blackmailers’ Charter’, which endured until the reform of 1967.354

Like many well-intentioned attempts at changing the human condition, the NVA was not content to campaign on its original remit of helping women in the ‘unfortunate class’. From the 1900s, the association began to attack what it perceived to be ‘pornography’, a widely defined category which included the novels of Émile Zola, duly banned by the Home Secretary in 1906.

By 1923, Miss Annie Baker (the referee noted by Norman Kendal in his Special Branch memorandum) was Secretary and Director of the NVA, with Colonel Thompson as her assistant. Col Thompson

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