The patent application for a combined walking stick and shopping trolley, written and drawn by Charles Wells.
The prison at Portland could be seen from afar – a grim, grey building perched high on a clifftop. Even the hardest, toughest criminals flinched at the sight of its stone ramparts. Prisoners were brought to Portland by rail, shackled together to prevent them from escaping. For the last 3 miles of the journey they were carried in a kind of omnibus up the winding road and through the towering gates of the jail into a ‘heart-breaking, soul-enslaving, brain destroying, hell upon earth’.
Here they were stripped of every ounce of dignity or privacy. For the first nine months, men were held in solitary confinement. Each had a small cell like a corrugated iron kennel, with a wooden stool, a small table and a hammock. Some wings of the jail were not heated. For the slightest misdemeanour – such as smiling or looking at the sky – they could be rebuked by brutal warders. At night, ‘every sound, every groan, every sigh, every prayer’ could be heard as clearly as if it came from the prisoner’s own lips.
The men were routinely searched up to four times daily. Once a month the cell was subjected to a particularly detailed inspection, in the course of which any letters found were read by the warders. At regular intervals the prisoners were subjected to an undignified strip search. They stood in a row, stark naked. A prison officer would first look inside the man’s mouth. Then the inmate had to bend forward so that his fingertips touched the floor, while an officer performed a degrading inspection of the man’s rectum. By the end of this process the prisoners were invariably shivering with the cold and trembling with humiliation.
Every morning just after 5.00 a.m., each detainee had to show all of his bedding to a warder, holding up each article in turn while the slops were collected by another prisoner detailed to the duty. Breakfast consisted of 10 ounces of bread and a pint of cocoa. The cell door was locked until 7.00 a.m., when the captives attended a twenty-minute service in the chapel. They then worked until 11.00 a.m. when ‘dinner’ was served. The least popular meal consisted of 1lb of suet pudding, 1lb of potatoes and 6oz of bread. They worked again from 1.00 p.m. until 4.45 p.m. and supper was served at 5.00, consisting of a pint of gruel and 6oz of bread. At 6.30 slops were again collected and the men were in bed by 8.00 p.m. at the latest.
After nine months the convicts were allowed to ‘associate’ with the other inmates, though numerous petty restrictions were still enforced. The men were given laborious tasks to perform and, initially, Wells was sent to the quarries to break up stones.
He wrote to his solicitor in August 1894, begging him to track down Monsieur Thibaud, who owed him extremely large sums of money, he said, with which he could settle all of his debts:
My greatest wish is that my creditors should be paid in full as soon as possible and my greatest ambition is that I may some day do so myself, if they are not paid before I get my liberty, and I feel convinced and have not the slightest doubt that I will do so some day, though a thing I could do with rapidity and ease now, or within a short delay, may be much more difficult in years to come. It is already 20 months since my arrest. Time passes!
If you cannot answer me give instructions to Mr. Vergis, who may write to me on the 6th of November, the date when I shall be allowed to receive my next letter. I am quite well and taking care of myself for the sake of my creditors, so as to work for them when my time is up, sooner or later.
Yours truly, CHARLES WELLS.
One of Wells’ fellow detainees was Jabez Balfour, a disgraced Member of Parliament and property magnate, who had also been sentenced on charges of fraud. News leaked out of the jail that Balfour had found it difficult to adjust to prison life and had slumped into a depression. It was reported that Wells, on the other hand, had made the most of his time behind bars and was in good spirits. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a man who was generally considered to be a loner, he appears to have experienced a sense of camaraderie in prison that he had never known before. A news report states:
[His] affable manner speedily installed him in the good graces of the prison officials, while his financial exploits made him a king among convicts. … The behaviour of Wells in prison was excellent. Only once was he punished, and this was for a generous fault. He gave a ten-ounce loaf of bread to another prisoner, and for this offence suffered two days’ solitary confinement. … He seems to have heaps of friends …
After Wells had been transferred to less arduous work, a journalist who had been granted access to the prison spotted him at the workbench:
At one end of the tailor’s shop, where rows upon rows of silent workers plied the needle, I saw Mr. Wells, of Monte Carlo, engaged in the peaceful and by no means arduous pursuit of bookbinding. Although I was present in court when he received his sentence of penal servitude, I altogether failed at first to recognise in the drab form bending over one of the volumes of the convicts’ library the man of address and fashion who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. His hands, however, are still as white and delicate as ever.
While Charles Wells quietly served his sentence, the world outside was undergoing rapid change. In London many of the worst Victorian slums were being cleared. Tower Bridge had been opened in 1894 and its appearance transformed the London skyline forever. A handful of motor cars – many imported from France – mingled with the horse-drawn traffic on British roads.1 Increased personal wealth enabled people of ordinary means to buy bicycles, and a craze for cycling swept the country. The Lumière brothers had brought their picture show to Britain in 1896.
Inventions of the 1880s and 1890s, such as cameras, telephones and phonographs – all of which had seemed futuristic at the time – were becoming household objects, and these were all developments in which Wells might have played a prominent role, had he chosen a different path in life. As far as technical progress was concerned, he missed a number of epoch-making events while he was in jail. But the occasion that mattered the most was surely his daughter’s wedding. On the morning of 8 October 1896 Marie Antoinette de Ville-Wells, now 29 years old, married Joseph Charles Vayre, a 23-year-old Parisian actor.
Vayre came from a highly respectable family, and his father was a government official. In contrast, the occupation and present whereabouts of Charles Deville Wells were a source of embarrassment for Marie Antoinette and her mother, who were naturally reluctant for it to be known that the bride’s father was a fraudster currently languishing in Portland Prison. Bending the truth somewhat, they arranged that the marriage register would record him for posterity as ‘Louis Charles de Ville-Wells, engineer, residing in London’.
In spite of all Charles’ faults, his wife and daughter evidently still deeply cared about him and were concerned about his plight. Some two years after marrying Marie Antoinette, Joseph Vayre wrote to the British Home Secretary pleading for the early release of his father-in-law. In excellent English, he writes that Charles Wells should never have been put on trial in the first place, arguing that there was a fault in the extradition process. But the Home Office rejected his petition.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Charles enjoyed prison life – but he definitely made the best of a bad job. On Sundays he played the organ in the Roman Catholic chapel. When the time for his release was almost due, he rounded off the service by playing The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, followed by Home, Sweet Home, to the astonishment and delight of the other prisoners. In March 1899, having earned two years’ remission from his original eight-year sentence, he left the jail. He returned to London by train, and his journey could only be described as triumphal, ‘persons coming forward at each stopping place to shake hands and to congratulate “Monte” on his release from durance’.
In London, Wells held court at a luxurious hotel. He told journalists that he had used his time in jail to devise an infallible ‘martingale’2 – a gambling system which would make winning ‘a certainty’. The procedure required £6,000 capital to make it work, but – if the newspaper reports are to be believed – Wells told them that he still had £20,000 left from past times, which he could access in three months’ time. He intended to buy another yacht and make his way to Monte Carlo to try out the new system.
’He is by no means destitute,’ it was reported, ‘as his residence at a West End hotel clearly indicates.’ However, it is more likely that the newspaper had paid for the hotel suite in return for Wells granting them an interview:
He has improved greatly in appearance since his imprisonment. Owing to the rich living in which he indulged immediately after breaking the bank he became very corpulent and unhealthy looking. He was also round shouldered and of ungainly appearance. The physical exercise he was made to undergo while in prison has made him perfectly upright, while the diet has reduced his obesity … and he now looks barely over forty years of age.
The same report mentions ‘a young niece, upon whom he is entirely dependent, and who was very faithful to him during his imprisonment’. When Charles was convicted six years earlier, Jeannette was left to support herself. She took a succession of relatively menial jobs, working for a time as a cook and later as a kennel maid. But she seemed to possess an innate aptitude for sniffing out money and, around 1898, obtained a job as a lady’s maid to a beautiful, rich, young socialite – Zalma Bradley Lee – and soon became her confidante and friend.
The exotic sounding Zalma Bradley Lee started out in life as the not so exotic sounding Daisy Pallen. She was born in St Louis, Mississippi, and was roughly the same age as Jeannette. Her father had been an eminent surgeon and university professor, and on his death in 1890 she inherited his fortune.
As a ‘tall brunette’ with a ‘striking figure’ and a passion for horses and dogs, she had caught the eye of one of her father’s close friends, David Bradley Lee, a wealthy bachelor from New York City who was no less than thirty-seven years older than she was. In 1895 the couple secretly married in London.
She took this opportunity to change her first name as well as her surname, and now styled herself ‘Zalma’ Bradley Lee. The couple separated after a short time: he went back to New York, while she lived – and partied – in the capitals of Europe. She became front-page news in America when, on hearing that her husband was dying, she refused to leave ‘the divertissements of London’ to be at his side. By the time she finally did go to New York he had passed away, and his sisters (both of whom had married into extraordinarily rich aristocratic families in Europe) had buried him before she arrived. A legal battle ensued amid sensational headlines such as, ‘WIDOW FIGHTS FOR LEE’S BODY’.
While it was too late for Zalma to do anything about her husband’s remains, there was still time aplenty to get her hands on his fortune. Her sisters-in-law tried everything imaginable to prevent Zalma gaining a share of his estate but Zalma exploited an obscure legal loophole, and was awarded a settlement of $1 million (worth about £25 million today) to add to her already sizeable fortune.
With, perhaps, some financial backing from Zalma, Jeannette next became the owner of the Terminus Tea Gardens – a café-restaurant at the railway station in the rapidly expanding London suburb of Uxbridge – and supported herself until Charles was released from prison (Plate 8).
Almost immediately after gaining his freedom, Charles applied for a discharge from his 1893 bankruptcy. Observers who attended the hearing on 25 April noticed that he had dyed his hair. His face was pale, he wore sombre black, and with his left hand he carefully noted the registrar’s comments.3 His total debts had amounted to £35,000, while his assets were a mere £88. The Palais Royal had been sold, ‘after much trouble’, for only £4,500 (though Wells had originally valued it at £20,000). He had failed to account satisfactorily for his deficiency; he had given ‘undue preference’ to a creditor – Aristides Vergis – by paying him in full; and he had raised some – if not all – of the money by false pretences. His application to be released from bankruptcy was therefore refused.
If he really had hoped to borrow £6,000 and return to Monte Carlo, he would have to abandon the plan: all the time he was an undischarged bankrupt it would be impossible for him to raise money, open a bank account or run a business.
After only two-and-a-half weeks at liberty, he left for Paris, and was not heard of again in Britain for several years.
Many people enjoy a brief moment of fame, only to be forgotten soon afterwards. But Charles Deville Wells was still talked about and remembered long after having broken the bank. If a child asked for some expensive present, the father might say, ‘Who do you think I am – the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo?’ A defendant in a court case, on receiving a particularly harsh sentence, was heard to exclaim, ‘Great Wells of Monte Carlo!’ In Somerset, a farmer with a sense of fun named his pedigree bull, ‘Monte Carlo of Wells’. And music hall audiences still hadn’t grown tired of that familiar song about him.
For all his fame, Charles Wells did not quite merit a listing of his own in the hallowed pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica – but he was included as a sort of footnote to the entry on his semi-famous father, Charles Jeremiah Wells, the poet.
Around the turn of the century, his namesake – the novelist H. G. Wells – moved to a splendid mansion on the Kent coast at Sandgate, built specially for him beside a kind of cliff lift which carried fare-paying holidaymakers up and down the hill. To boost trade, the owners of this mechanical marvel started a rumour that the house belonged to ‘Monte Carlo Wells’ and that passengers would pass close to the sumptuous home of the bank-breaker, perhaps even catching a glimpse of the man himself. H. G. Wells noted in his autobiography that, as a consequence of this, when he walked around the district every errand boy and street urchin burst into song or whistled ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank’.
By coincidence, Fred Gilbert, who had written the song, lay dying only half a mile from H. G. Wells’ home. He had contracted tuberculosis in the late 1890s, and, to escape the polluted air of London, moved to Honeysuckle Cottage in Sandgate, where he died in 1903. Though he had been responsible for one of the most popular songs of all time, his worldly wealth at the time of his passing amounted to just £8.
When Charles and Jeannette first arrived back in France, they lived at first in the Paris suburb of Sannois, and then in the Rue Godot de Mauroy, a swanky street near the Opéra Garnier. By 1901 they had moved to Maisons-Laffitte, an expensive suburb 10 miles from central Paris. This area had long been a major equestrian centre, and a world famous racecourse was situated there. Zalma Bradley Lee, Jeannette’s former employer, had bought a vast château in the district, with extensive grounds and a stable full of racehorses. Jeannette, Charles and Zalma were on friendly terms and spent an appreciable amount of time together, and Jeannette finally became a governess to Zalma’s young daughter, Loyala.
Fin de siècle Paris was a very different city from the one Charles had known when he last lived here in the mid-1880s. The Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, had already gained symbolic status. And in 1900 another Great Exhibition reflected the very latest technological developments, which could not fail to reawaken Charles Wells’ passion for inventions.
Herr Rudolf Diesel exhibited an engine which ran on peanut oil – an example of the recent ascendancy of the internal combustion engine over steam power. Herr Otto (whom Wells had so admired) and Herr Benz were also represented. Electric lighting was now a practical proposition, not just for royal palaces and the casino, but for well-to-do homes as well. A power station – dubbed the ‘Palace of Electricity’ – had been specially constructed to serve the exhibition. The current it produced was enough to light a spectacular display of 5,000 electric lamps, while it also provided power to the exposition’s numerous art deco buildings. These were exciting times for an engineer like Charles.
To distance himself from his criminal past, he assumed the name ‘Charles Deville’ and declared himself to be a ‘metallurgical engineer’ and inventor. In 1901 he registered French Patent No. 295133 for a method which he claimed could augment electrical currents, thus providing remarkable financial economies (this sounds suspiciously like an electrical version of the energy-saving steam engine). Other discoveries which he claimed to have made included the ‘accurate representation of mines’ and ‘aerial advertising’.
In May 1902, he registered seven separate inventions at the Patent Office in Namur, Belgium. In this instance, the applications were submitted in the name of ‘Charles Deville’ acting as the agent of ‘Jeanne Pairis’ of 27 Passage de l’Opéra, Paris – an address in close proximity to his earlier premises in the Avenue de l’Opéra.
The patent application for a combined walking stick and shopping trolley, written and drawn by Charles Wells.
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163401 |
A combined walking stick and luggage trolley. |
163402 |
A bottle which cannot be re-filled without leaving traces. |
163403 |
An illuminated light switch. |
163404 |
A speaking clock. |
163405 |
A floating marine anchor, submersible to any required depth. |
163406 |
Envelopes to contain sticking plasters. |
163410 |
Paper with one side for writing on, and blotting paper on the reverse. |
The patent system in Belgium was evidently less formal than in Britain: the applications are in Charles’ own handwriting, with sketches also penned by him. Overall the effect is whimsical, as is the quirky nature of some of the inventions themselves. Here, for example, is part of his description of the speaking clock:
The clock rings the hours and then sets in motion the phonograph, which will announce the time, recite some sales-patter, or sing a song, etc. … The phonograph may be located in the base or in another part of the clock, and may even be driven by the same spring as the clock, or separately by means of springs, weights, electricity, etc. But, if the phonograph is situated at some distance, or if there are several phonographs connected to a single clock, it is necessary to have recourse to electricity, compressed air, or some other means of connection, for setting them in motion at the required moment in their respective locations.
The scheme evokes memories of his patent scam of old. Some individual – one of his investors, no doubt – took legal action against him, probably in a civil court. Then the police in Belgium or France – possibly both – began to take an interest in his affairs, and opened a dossier on him. However, there is no record of any criminal proceedings: like the British police ten years earlier, the authorities seem to have been slow to respond to complaints.
Before any official action was taken, Charles and Jeannette left France once more, and settled in the peaceful coastal village of Ahakista, in the south of Ireland. The setting was idyllic, the pace of life serene. Perhaps, at last, they had found the tranquil place of their dreams, a home for the rest of their lives. They assumed the aliases of ‘William and Lily Davenport’, and stayed initially with a man named Sullivan, the owner of Sea View Cottage. Charles recruited a local man, Daniel Burke, to help him build a cottage on some land he had acquired – a further sign that he and Jeannette intended to settle here permanently. He also purchased a small yacht and two other boats and, with Burke’s assistance, used them for fishing.
Charles and Jeannette moved into their newly completed cottage in July 1903, but it was not long before he grew restless again. The following month he told Burke that he was going to Canada for a few months. But in fact he returned to France instead, and assumed a new identity as ‘Louis Servatel’, stating that he was born in 1848 at St Pierre in the French colony of Martinique.
He set up a company in November 1903, the Omnium Général de France (General Combine of France), with a nominal capital of 7.5 million francs. It appears that this entity would run subsidiary companies in various engineering and mining sectors. ‘Louis Servatel’ was at the same time director of the holding company and chairman of the board for the rest of the group. It goes without saying that the whole organisation was just a vast swindle, and many investors lost their money.
‘Servatel’ vanished as soon as the police started to investigate. When they tried to check his identity they came up against a brick wall, because as recently as 1902 the town of St Pierre, where he claimed to have been born, had been obliterated by a massive volcanic eruption. Virtually the whole population had been killed, and all records of births, deaths and marriages had been destroyed. ‘Servatel’ had artfully chosen an identity which he knew could not possibly be verified.
In March 1905 he was sentenced in his absence to three years in prison and a fine of 3,000fr. for violations of company law, fraud and misuse of funds. Meanwhile, though, he had reverted to his alter ego of ‘William Davenport’ and was back in Ireland with Jeannette, enjoying the scenery, the boating and the fishing.
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1 In July 1895, a French-manufactured Panhard & Levassor automobile driven by the Hon. Evelyn Ellis made what is reputed to have been the first motor car journey in Britain.
2 See Appendix A.
3 This is the only known reference to him being left-handed. It was then widely believed that there was a direct link between left-handedness and criminality. This connection is now discredited.