‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Charles Wells and one of his victims, sketched at the Old Bailey.
Charles Deville Wells appeared on 9 March 1893 before a judge and a jury at the Old Bailey – or Central Criminal Court, to give it its proper title. According to a contemporary account, ‘His trial excited an enormous amount of interest. A crowd assembled in front of the Old Bailey, and the court was packed with people drawn thither merely by a desire to see the notorious adventurer.’
A string of witnesses would give evidence over the next few days, but Charles Wells himself would not be one of them: court procedure at that time dictated that the accused could not be questioned or cross-examined.1
Wells sat in the dock, ‘dapper, quick, and alert in his manner, incessantly watchful and clever’. The judge, 75-year-old Henry Hawkins, opened the proceedings, and the barrister for the prosecution, Charles Gill, outlined the case against Wells, repeating essentially the same arguments he had used at the preliminary hearings. As he did so, Wells’ lawyer, Abinger, listened and absent-mindedly doodled on a piece of blotting paper.
‘I didn’t brief you and pay you a substantial sum of money to amuse yourself by sketching,’ said Wells. ‘Kindly attend to what Mr. Gill is saying.’
‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Charles Wells and one of his victims, sketched at the Old Bailey.
Miss Phillimore.
The court usher stood just in front of the dock with his back to Wells. Occasionally Wells dashed off handwritten notes to Abinger. Wells then tickled the usher’s bald head with the feathered end of his quill pen to attract his attention, and the usher would in turn pass the note to Abinger.
As first witness, Miss Phillimore had to relive her ordeal again. Abinger recalled, ‘The poor lady was dreadfully nervous and, of course, she did not want it blazoned forth that she had been a victim of a specious adventurer.’ It took a considerable time for her to recount all of her dealings with Wells, and many of the letters and telegrams which had passed between them were read out in court. The dismay in her voice still echoes down the years as she describes the outcome of these transactions:
I never received a farthing. All the £18,860 that I parted with was lost … When I got his letters describing the kind of business he was carrying on, and the different departments, I believed it was a genuine description of his business. I believed I was helping an honest, clever inventor to promote an invention which would be of general benefit to the world.
‘And to some extent to yourself in particular,’ Judge Hawkins interjected. ‘Was this your first speculation?’
‘Yes – my first and last.’
One by one, Wells’ clients told their story again. Edward Abinger asked the Honourable William Cosby Trench whether Wells had informed him that the Palais Royal would be used to entertain financiers, company promoters, government officials and judges.
‘He didn’t include judges,’ Trench replied.
‘I should think not,’ retorted the judge.
The Reverend Blake said he initially believed Wells was an honest man; Dr White, too, had considered him ‘honest, but poor’. Henry Baker Vaughan, the clerk who had copied thousands of letters, spoke of an occasion when Wells was expecting a client to visit him at the office. Wells had given him a magazine to copy out – presumably for no other purpose than to further the impression that a business was being carried on.
Edward Towers, one of the four principal clerks at the Patent Office, testified that any invention could be registered in outline form for £1. His establishment would grant a provisional patent ‘for making eggs out of sawdust, if you showed a way of doing it’.
‘You take the patentee’s sovereign and he takes his chance?’ the judge said.
The next witness was Alfred Edward Green, a 30-year-old Australian. He was the manager of the London & South-Western Bank at 34 Sloane Square, where Wells had an account. He read out a long and rather confusing list of deposits, withdrawals and transfers. He then said, intriguingly, ‘I should say we remitted more money to Monte Carlo than we received back.’
Abinger pounced on him at this point: was it a statement of fact or simply Green’s impression?
The witness became indignant, and snapped back, ‘I did not state it as my decided opinion – I will not contradict what I have said.’
Captain Smith and Second Engineer Alexander Ferguson both reiterated their previous evidence that Wells had shown no sign of personal extravagance.
’Wells of Monte Carlo once more bared his bald scalp at the Old Bailey,’ a newspaperman scribbled in his notebook on Monday, 13 March. The court had already heard three days’ worth of prosecution evidence: now it was time for Abinger to try to convince the jury of his client’s innocence. Hermann Eschen was the first defence witness. The young German’s testimony was both detailed and compelling. There had been as many as four engineers working on Wells’ inventions at any one time, and the departments at 154–156 Great Portland Street really had existed. When Wells was in town he was always busy, always at work:
He came at all times of the night. He would sometimes fetch me out of bed if he wanted something done all at once. He would make a little sketch, and I did it there and then. I should describe him as a hard-working man, and nobody could do otherwise.
This was exactly what Wells and his defence lawyers wanted to hear. Wells ‘fairly danced up and down the dock in his excitement all the time the German was giving his evidence’. According to Mr Wells’ explanation, he said, the fuel-saving engine ‘must be valuable – it must work, it cannot do otherwise’. As for the steam engine he had made for Flyer, he added, ‘in my opinion this is a feasible invention for saving coal’. Using diagrams and models, Eschen proceeded to describe the workings of one of Wells’ fuel-saving inventions, although his strong accent, combined with the technical nature of the subject matter, left most of the listeners in a daze:
Here comes a triple crank shaft about three inch and another with three inch so as the middle one is acted with the piston and by working him down the power is gained … so as you get so much more power as with the double size of engine.
‘Quite so,’ said Abinger. [Laughter.]
Eschen explained how, from Wells’ drawings, he had constructed models for arc lamps, a hot-air engine and electric railway signals – but not for the ‘inflammable balloon’. [Laughter.]
‘Then I will take it generally that you made models for many useful inventions?’ said Abinger.
‘Including the musical skipping-rope,’ said the judge, to renewed laughter.
Abinger had one of the musical skipping ropes with him, and – taking this opportunity to show that Wells really had invented something – asked if he might demonstrate it to the court. ‘You can do anything you like,’ replied the judge with a deep sigh.
The prosecution now attempted to discredit Eschen by suggesting that he had offered a £5 bribe to some unnamed person to find out whether there was a warrant out for Wells. He had then allegedly written to Wells in Plymouth to warn him. It was also insinuated that he had advised Wells to go to Lisbon as he could not be extradited from there. However, Eschen succeeded in fending off these questions. It was Vergis, apparently, who had given the £5 bribe. Under further questioning, Eschen admitted that he was on ‘very friendly terms’ with his employer, which may have led the jury to suppose that he had deliberately portrayed Wells in a favourable light. But his testimony seems, in the main, to have cast real doubt on the validity of the prosecution’s case.
It appears that Vergis himself was due to be called for the defence. As other witnesses took the stand, they were asked whether they had seen him in court. Apparently there had been a brief sighting of him in the morning but he had disappeared again, no doubt fearful that he would be asked some awkward questions about the £5 bribe, and that the questioning would uncover his unsavoury past, including his recent fraud conviction. He could not be found anywhere in the building, and thus never testified.
A whisper went around the Old Bailey that a very important witness – from overseas, it was rumoured – was scheduled to appear. As he could not be found either, the hearing was adjourned until the morning.
On the next day, Tuesday, 14 March, the judge was asked how long the trial was likely to go on. ‘This case may last for ever,’ he groaned. The spectators laughed. ‘I may be dead before it is over,’ he added to further laughter. He went on to complain about the enormous volume of papers which had been put in evidence by the lawyers. ‘There has been so much confusion in the whole case that it has been with great labour that I have been able to separate the documents, and I find that there is … a hundredweight of letters and documents which are absolutely useless to the case.’ A small sample of charges against the prisoner would have sufficed, he said, not the twenty-three which had been brought.
The day’s session got under way with evidence from Eschen’s landlord, George Langford, a man in his late seventies, originally from Manchester. He confirmed that Wells had called on Eschen:
He came on business with drawings in his hand, perhaps a dozen times a day, from 1887 up to 1891. Wells came frequently at all hours, early in the morning and late at night. I have heard him come to give orders for work, in the morning, I suppose.
Walter Gibbs – an electrician who had installed the lighting on the Palais Royal – had attended one of the trials of the fuel-saving device on the River Thames, and had taken the Isabella to Gravesend and back. The fuel consumption had been ‘very small’.
‘Where is the Isabella now?’ Gill enquired.
‘In the hands of the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy,’ Abinger replied.
‘Are they cruising about?’ the judge quipped. ‘Are they all at sea?’ Now even His Lordship was playing for laughs.
At last, the mystery witness from overseas appeared – Charles Wells’ brother-in-law, Henry Jartoux. Speaking through an interpreter, he explained that his sister, Marie Thérèse de Ville-Wells, had asked him to go to the hearing in London to testify on behalf of her husband. He had known Wells for about twenty-five years, he said, and in that time Wells had been an engineer in Marseille working for large shipping companies. He had also been employed at Count Branicki’s sugar processing plant in Ukraine; at the Spanish lead mine; and at Nice, where he had invented a machine for purifying oils. When questioned about his brother-in-law’s aliases, Jartoux said that in France he had always been known as Wells – Jartoux never knew him by any other name.
Summing up the case for the defence, Abinger said that if a man claimed to be conducting a valuable business and it was not valuable, that was not a criminal offence. Wells had suggested that at his premises there were departments which did not really exist. That was not criminal: something of the sort went on in all businesses, and was no worse than a barrister smoking his pipe in his chambers and keeping a solicitor waiting half an hour in order to give the impression that he was busy.
‘I hope that sort of thing does not go on now,’ the judge declared. [Laughter.]
Abinger said that Miss Phillimore and the others had parted with their money in the hope of making vast profits, but Wells’ only failing was that he had been born a century too late. If only he had lived a hundred years earlier he would undoubtedly have been the inventor of the steam engine or the electric motor: but because of this cruel trick of fortune he had had to confine himself to ‘such small devices as musical skipping-ropes and sardine openers’.
He suggested that Wells’ difficulties had begun when he broke the bank. From that moment on, Abinger contended, his client had become a gambler and everything else was forgotten, including his inventions. He was now known everywhere, ‘even on the street organ’, as the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Sensing that this oration had by no means won over the jury, Abinger then tried to distract them in the hope that they might disregard the evidence they had heard during the trial:
The prisoner is a man of a wonderful brain. He has won forty thousand pounds in five days, and anyone in possession of this very simple system of his can make eight thousand pounds a day as long as they like. … And now … I am going to tell you what this system is! … Now, gentlemen of the jury … this is the system!
Abinger paused for effect. Complete silence descended on the courtroom, as all eyes and ears focussed on him. After a few seconds he continued:
No, gentlemen of the jury, I will not tell you this system. If I were to do so, you may desert your wives and families, my learned friends might sell their wigs and gowns, and even my lord who adorns the Bench might suddenly desert it to make a vast sum of money. No gentlemen … I will not tell you.
Abinger had hoped that this theatrical gesture might at least help to reduce Wells’ sentence. But instead it would rebound on him, as he was about to discover. The court adjourned for lunch. Abinger saw Judge Hawkins, still in his scarlet robes, beckoning him with an imperious forefinger. ‘Do you know that system?’
‘No, Judge.’
’I thought not,’ said Hawkins with a look of disgust on his face.
When the hearing resumed, the prosecuting counsel, Charles Gill, acknowledged that Wells had a gift for invention. It was a pity that his fertile brain had not been applied to some genuine scientific discovery instead of being used to deceive and defraud people, he said. He reminded the jury that Wells & Co. was a fake company, and that the ‘shares’ he had sent to several investors were worthless. Wells’ threat to Miss Phillimore and Trench that they would be ruined unless they stumped up more money amounted to blackmail.
The judge said that William Trench was still a young man who – he hoped – would become older and wiser. He had no knowledge of machines and would have been better off if he had stayed in Ireland. [Laughter.] His Lordship referred to the weakness, credulity and carelessness of the victims. Nevertheless, Wells was not justified in trading on these faults.
The jury took only one minute to find Charles Wells guilty. The judge sentenced him to eight years’ penal servitude, adding that it had been a ‘very cruel, very wide scheme’.
’It was easy to see, from the expression of his face, that the sentence took him aback,’ an onlooker observed. ‘He looked wildly round the Court and wanted to speak, but the Judge would not hear him.’2 Abinger wrote in his memoirs:
I had been hoping to get the prisoner off with a light sentence, but I am very much afraid that the Judge had not got over his disappointment. … It was a sadly disillusioned man who went to Dartmoor3 to serve his punishment, and I don’t suppose anyone will blame me for saying that I felt very sorry for him.
Far from condemning him, the London Daily News expressed grudging admiration for Wells, describing him as ‘a great advertiser. In one year he gave as many as three hundred and fifty orders to Messrs. Willing. They showed imagination of a high order.’ The newspapers had not yet caught on to the fact that Charles was the son of a widely praised poet but, with admirable insight, the commentator added, ‘If poetry paid, Mr. Wells might have made his fortune in epics. There was something quite epical in his cast of character, and in his scheme of life. He knew nothing of half measures, in his promises, or in his demands.’ The piece concluded, ‘He had a note of greatness in the extreme simplicity of his methods. For years and years he kept afloat by devices that most men would have trembled to use before the bumpkins of a country fair.’
Other newspapers, though, condemned him as ‘one of the most accomplished scoundrels of his time. Gifted apparently with a fair share of inventive genius, he applied it to the most wicked purposes.’ His victims came in for a share of the criticism, too. The same article referred to them as ‘guileless simpletons who become the dupes of swindlers’. Some commentators felt that the victims’ shortcomings went further than naivety:
Suppose Mr. Wells could have fulfilled his promises and given in hard cash £100,000 in four months and a large yearly income in return for the modest investment of £1,500, would it have been moral to accept such terms? Gains such as these could not be honestly made, and the person who was tempted by them must have let his cupidity get the better of his judgment. It is the old vice of over-haste after riches. … It is idle to sympathise with such. Theirs has been no honest investment, but a bit of greedy gambling, and they deserve all the trouble that falls on them.
The Times suggested that Wells had contributed to his own downfall. ‘It is true that the breaking of the bank at Monte Carlo was the beginning of the end for Mr Wells. It lifted him into notoriety – a thing which every judicious swindler ought to avoid.’ But his gambling exploits and the bogus patents were not really separate facets of his life. In his mind, they had been two inter-twined threads within the same plot.
The guilty verdict in Charles Wells’ trial seemed to have little adverse effect on his public image. On the contrary, his transformation from man to myth simply gained momentum, especially among the masses. Readers of the popular press were reassured to learn that, like Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and other icons, he only robbed the rich.
The class divide was a major talking point in that era. Socialism had become a powerful political force, thanks in part to the writings of Dickens and Marx. Yet the ‘man in the street’ had few rights or privileges and was not even entitled to vote. This is not to say that many people would have approved of Wells’ behaviour – the majority certainly would not. But for the public generally, the upper classes were considered fair game. People such as Miss Phillimore, whose family owned a large slice of London, or Trench, who lived in a fairy tale castle in Ireland, could afford to lose a few thousand pounds and be none the worse off for it.
People were more concerned with the mystery of Wells’ true identity and his past. ‘What has he been about since the age of one-and-twenty?’ The Times asked. ‘Was he ever an honest and hardworking member of society?’ He was said to be British, yet his speech and mannerisms suggested otherwise. The New York Herald claimed he was really Emanuel Edgar Albo de Bernales, a newspaper editor. The real Bernales sued the Herald and won. British journalists indulged in similar guessing games. ‘“Monte Carlo Wells” was educated as a solicitor, and practised for a short time in Tenby [Wales], but he left hurriedly,’ one mistakenly claimed. Finally an enterprising newshound discovered the truth:
It appears that the convict Wells, ‘the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo,’ is a son of the late Charles Jeremiah Wells, the author of Joseph and his Brethren … a work of consummate genius … Wells, of Monte Carlo, appears to have inherited some of his late father’s imagination, but unfortunately he turned his gifts to swindling instead of to literature.
The public demand for information about him never flagged. A man named James Anderson Peddie, who wrote about sports and gambling, produced a pamphlet called All about Monte Carlo: Extraordinary Career of Charles Wells, the Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, and sold copies for 1d each. It was a curious publication, cobbled together from articles which had appeared in the daily newspapers and in Truth. The same author later published a more substantial booklet about Wells. He claimed to have been given access to Wells’ diary, and quoted what he said were extracts from it:
Saturday—My luck continues, netted £1,500. This is even better than the patent business.
Sunday—Took yacht to Genoa …
Wednesday—A climax arose at last. When I had netted about £16,000 the table was shut up for the night; it was covered with a green cloth and I had broken the bank.
Claims against Wells at his 1893 bankruptcy. While the amounts owed to Miss Phillimore and William Trench are much larger than the total due to the rest of the creditors put together, there were doubtless many other victims who did not want the world to know that they had been duped and so did not claim.
In reality, it is most unlikely that Peddie had ever met Wells, and even more improbable that Wells would have kept a written record of his exploits, and then shared it with a stranger. But the interest in Charles Wells was such that people paid a shilling a time for this second booklet, many believing it to be a genuine autobiographical work by Wells. No fact about him was too trivial to be quoted and requoted. While Wells was temporarily held at Holloway Prison, a reporter discovered that he was one of a number of inmates who enjoyed the privilege of ordering their meals from outside the jail. The journalist went to the Holloway Castle Tavern where these dishes were prepared, and revealed that Wells’ favourite choices were ‘sole, soup, and fowl’.
Wells was later transferred to Wormwood Scrubbs Prison.4 On 22 May – a public holiday – crowds of people congregated around the prison walls and sang ‘such music-hall songs as appear applicable to the case of the better known among the prisoners. Monte Carlo Wells is one of the prisoners, and they, of course, sang “The Man that Broke the Bank”.’ The writer condemned their behaviour as ‘cruel fun’, but Wells probably revelled in the adulation.
On 13 July 1893 – some four months after being convicted on the fraud charges – he was brought from prison to the bankruptcy court in order to give an account of his finances. First, a list was read out of all the claims against him, which amounted to more than £30,000 (£3 million).
Miss Phillimore and the Hon. William Trench accounted for most of this sum – roughly £29,000 between the two of them. Other claimants included former clients Frederick John Goad (£25), Miss Budd (£30) and Mrs Forrester (£45). The tailor who had made the uniforms for the crew of Palais Royal, and who had first petitioned for Wells’ bankruptcy, was owed £191. The smallest claim was that of Henry Baker Vaughan, Wells’ long-suffering clerk, who was due £8 10s in unpaid wages.
During the preceding criminal trial Wells had been given no opportunity to tell his side of the story: in the civil court, however, he could speak on his own behalf, and made the most of it. He was in fine fettle and seemed to have a ready answer to every question that was put to him.
One of the Registrars in Bankruptcy for the London District, Mr Herbert James Hope, presided over the hearing. Most of the detailed questioning, however, was carried out by his colleague, the Assistant Official Receiver – whose name, confusingly, was Mr Pope. And thus the double act of Messrs Hope and Pope set about the task of unravelling Charles Wells’ complex finances.
They began with the fundamental question of Wells’ identity. Although everyone else seemed to know exactly who he was, since the information had been in all the newspapers, the legal system had evidently not yet caught up with the facts. His real name, he told them, was Charles Deville Wells, but when he had arrived in Plymouth in 1885 he had ‘altered it to Charles Hill Wells, to prevent confusion, there being several Wells in that town’. In truth, Wells was a singularly uncommon name in that part of the country, and in any case his real middle name, Deville, was much more distinctive than Hill. He had first used the ‘Hill Wells’ alias (if it can be called that) when he was interviewed by The Times and the Telegraph at Monte Carlo in November 1891. His obvious intention at the time had been to avoid being identified as the fraudulent patent engineer.
The examination soon turned to the Palais Royal. The Official Receiver in Bankruptcy asked him, ‘Have you not expended about £20,000 on the ornamentation of the yacht?’ If he expected Wells to deny this, the answer must have come as a surprise.
’I have spent about £22,000 on her altogether,’ Wells said with pride.
‘From what source did you obtain so large a sum of money?’
‘From the profits from my transactions at Monte Carlo.’
‘Will you undertake to swear that no part of it was money entrusted to you by different persons for investment in your inventions?’
Again, the answer was unexpected. Wells said he could make no such statement. He had spent about £5,000 of the funds obtained from his investors. He was asked about his speculations at Monte Carlo, but he denied that he had gambled. It had taken him six years to develop what he called an infallible system for gambling. He had won a total of £60,000 (£6 million) at Monte Carlo, of which his share was £20,000 (£2 million). The reason for the heavy loss on his last visit was that his family had been with him, and had prevented him from operating his system in the usual way. What he did was not gambling. He had sat at the tables for eleven hours at a stretch, and he called that absolute hard work. This last remark prompted laughter.
The Assistant Official Receiver, Mr Pope, appeared to have an abnormal interest in the specifics of Wells’ ‘system’ and began to quiz him about it. ‘Could your system be reduced to writing?’
‘I think so,’ Wells replied.
But then the registrar interjected, ‘We cannot very well go into that.’
With an air of disappointment, Pope said, ‘I ask, sir, because it might be a valuable asset.’ [Laughter.]
When asked about the source of his capital, Wells said that his backer was a Miss Lizzie Ritchie, and that he now owed her some money (although her name does not appear in the list of creditors. We have, however, encountered her before, as she was his co-applicant for the musical skipping rope patent). He told the Official Receiver that Miss Ritchie had married someone – a Polish gentleman, he believed. As far as he was aware she was living in Poland and he was no longer in touch with her.
Next he was questioned about his letter to Jeannette, written from a prison cell in Le Havre. He denied having concealed anything in a secret drawer in his desk. When asked about his relatives, he said he had ‘lost sight of’ all his family.
The Yorkshire Evening Post reported that Monte Carlo Wells ‘suffers no harm in temperament from the enforced seclusion of Wormwood Scrubbs … He was most affable to everybody who wanted to know anything. He seemed to comport himself as a man should in whose hands tens of thousands of pounds had been trifles.’
When he was further interrogated about money which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared, he explained that he had entrusted a very substantial sum to a man named Thibaud, whom he met in a French café. He did not know where this individual lived, but perhaps if they were to ask the head waiter of the café he might be able to enlighten them. This explanation met with considerable mirth.
With an air of exasperation, a lawyer representing the trustee in bankruptcy challenged him, saying, ‘Do you really mean to say that you trusted a man you did not even know the address of with £30,000?’
‘Miss Phillimore never saw me, and she sent me a lot of money,’ Wells replied. To quote one of the popular newspapers, ‘The laughter which followed was a hearty appreciation of the happy retort’.
‘You say that M. Thibaud owes you £30,000, so that if we can get hold of him …’
‘Then we shall be all right,’ said Wells cheerily. ‘I believe him to be an honest man, although he should have come and helped me when I was in trouble.’
Wells had won this round of the contest and he knew it. Emboldened by the good-natured laughter, he told the enquiry that people had been given the wrong impression. Even Captain Smith who was ‘so opposed to him’ admitted that Wells was more moderate than himself:
[Wells] … went about shabbily dressed, and cooked for himself at Great Portland Street. He had worked incessantly at his inventions, and was not what people took him for. He would be successful one day and would pay everybody. He was now doing his best to behave himself well, and although these were not the happiest days he had passed, they were very quiet, and he was well satisfied.
The examination came to an end, and Wells was taken back to his cell. But he still had another trick up his sleeve. At Buckingham Palace, a letter addressed to Her Majesty Queen Victoria was received, requesting a royal pardon for Charles Wells. The letter purported to come from Vienna and was signed … Lizzie Ritchie:
To her most gracious Majesty the Queen.
I humbly pray your most gracious Majesty to pardon my writing, as I am one of your most gracious Majesty’s faithful subjects in great grief and sorrow … I am the niece of Mr. Charles Wells, who was sentenced to prison last March. … I am a poor orphan girl, without sisters, brothers, without any one in the world but my dear uncle, and the sorrow of knowing where he is, is killing me. … This is my last hope; for the sake of God! help my poor old uncle.
The letter continues in similar fashion for several pages. The queen’s private secretary forwarded it to the Home Office, where officials decided that it merited no further action. As mentioned, no credible trace of Lizzie Ritchie has been found and it seems probable that Wells got one of his friends to write this grovelling letter, and arranged for it to be sent from Vienna, where he is known to have had contacts.5
During his stay at Wormwood Scrubs, Wells was put to work sewing mailbags, and on Sundays he sang in the prison’s Roman Catholic choir. This state of affairs lasted only until October, when the authorities transferred him to Portland Prison in Dorset. Now the hardest part of his jail sentence was about to begin.
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1 It was not until five years later, in 1898, that the accused would first be allowed to testify on oath. (Williams, p.12–3.)
2 Although the accused could not testify during the trial itself, judges could at their discretion allow prisoners an opportunity to speak after sentence had been passed – but Wells was not invited to do so. (Williams, p.71.)
3 In fact it was Portland Prison.
4 Now usually spelled ‘Scrubs’ with one ‘b’.
5 The Austrian address on the letter is a genuine one, but – for what it is worth – the document is written on a sheet of paper of a size common in Britain at the time, though not used on the Continent.
