Charles Deville Wells never became another Thomas Edison, a Blériot or a Brunel. As his defence attorney, Edward Abinger, rightly said, Wells was born too late to make any fundamental contribution to the technology of steam engines or electrical devices.
On the other hand, some of his inventions were years ahead of their time. It was in 1889 that he persuaded Miss Budd to invest in the small ‘motor for domestic and general use’ to drive coffee grinders, boot polishers and knife cleaners. Nowadays we take for granted motorised gadgets of the kind that Wells foresaw: toothbrushes, blenders, fans, hedge-cutters, to name just a few.
The musical skipping rope, for which he sold the patent for £50, proved to be a popular toy. It was mass produced and has sold in substantial numbers around the world for many decades. Versions of it are still available today.
His idea of packaging mustard in tubes took almost fifty years to become a reality. It finally appeared in Britain in 1934, when Colman’s Mustard™ introduced it as ‘Pic-Nic Mustard’. Every time we open a packet by pulling a little tab and tearing the wrapper along the dotted line, we are using another Charles Wells invention of the mid-1880s. And, finally, our modern armies rely heavily on technology to watch the enemy’s movements – Wells’ 1885 patent for ‘Obtaining Photographic Birds-eye Views’ used kites or rockets to do the job that is now performed by spy satellites and drones.
It has to be said, though, that his most effective invention by far was the process he developed in Paris for separating people from their money. Almost a decade later, a near identical scheme in America offered 50 per cent interest every forty-five days. The promoter was one Charles Ponzi, whose name is synonymous with get rich quick schemes of this sort – an honour which Charles Wells no doubt felt he deserved himself.
None of Wells’ inventions can be said to have made the world a better place, but I for one would love to have witnessed the talking clock, the life-saving torpedo or the combined chandelier and fire extinguishing grenade! I wonder what Charles Wells would be doing if he were alive today. Would he be selling investors a quarter-share in an energy efficient motor car? Or operating some complicated internet scam? Or would he have chosen a career in the financial sector, promoting dodgy insurance plans, rigging the exchange rate, or selling worthless bonds? We can but guess …
Without doubt, Wells left a lasting impression on everyone he met. Members of the police force who came into contact with him often found that the association started them on the road to future success. Walter Dinnie was promoted to detective chief inspector within two years of arresting Wells at Le Havre, and in 1901 he was the driving force behind the new fingerprint department at Scotland Yard. Two years later he became Commissioner of Police in New Zealand, where at first his career flourished. But with his hatred of everything connected with gambling, he vigorously clamped down on even the most harmless games of chance. He voiced the opinion that gamblers, many of whom were arrested during his tenure, should not even be entitled to a trial by jury. As a consequence, he was publicly reviled and was finally dismissed under a cloud.
Alfred Crutchett, who had helped to bring Wells to book in 1912, eventually became head of CID at Scotland Yard. He retired just as news of Wells’ death was announced, and although the timing was coincidental, to many it seemed as if Crutchett could at last relax in the knowledge that Monte Carlo Wells no longer posed a threat to the public. The Wells case cropped up in an interview when Crutchett looked back on his thirty-year career. ‘Wells was a really wonderful man, possessed of many gifts,’ he reminisced, adding that Wells would undoubtedly have succeeded in life if he had stayed on the right side of the law.
Crutchett’s place as head of CID was taken by none other than his colleague, George Nicholls. Both men had built enormously successful careers in the police force, particularly after their work on the Wells case. Nicholls was made a Member of the British Empire in 1932 and was appointed chief constable of Scotland Yard’s CID later that year. He retired in 1934.
Wells’ fame rubbed off on to other people who had only the slightest acquaintance with him. In 1923 Cecil Kiddell, a 36-year-old tugboat skipper, tragically died during an operation for appendicitis. He had served with distinction in the Royal Navy in the First World War, and he left a widow and an infant daughter. But it was his brief connection with Wells that he was chiefly remembered for. Kiddell had been the young deckhand on board the Excelsior, and a local paper reported his death under the heading:
MATE TO MONTE CARLO WELLS:
FALMOUTH TUG OFFICER’S DEATH.
For all his faults, Wells was admired by many of the people he met. Some appear to have been entranced, or even mesmerised, by him. This was certainly the case with the individuals he defrauded. But he cast a spell on others, too. Edward Abinger, who defended Wells at his trial for the patent frauds, wrote:
I should say that he was not only one of the most successful gamblers of all time, but also a man of a highly fascinating personality. Like the Ancient Mariner immortalised by Coleridge, he would hold his victims with his glittering eye and to their wondering ears a tale unfold. He could –
‘Dip into the future, as far as human eye could see, See the vision of the world, and all the wonder there would be …’
Ernest Nicholls, a former officer in the City of London Police (not to be confused with George Nicholls of Scotland Yard), described Wells as ‘the most picturesque, the most interesting and certainly the most intriguing figure … As a high-class crook he has had no equal.’
Prison Governor Basil Home Thomson devoted an entire chapter to Charles Wells in his autobiography. He, too, testified to Wells’ enthusiastic, beguiling manner:
‘Monte Carlo Wells,’ who was in my charge at Dartmoor, was an example of the man who sins through sheer optimism … Granted that many poor people suffered in their pockets from him; granted that he may have defrauded the widow and orphan by his specious promises: it is the motive that I would have judged him by, and his motives were always dictated by a pure-souled optimism. He intended to make all their fortunes – and his own … If when I met him he had been a free man and I had had money to invest … he would have defrauded even me, who have a fairly wide acquaintance among fraudulent company promoters: so great is the power of the man who believes in himself! … he remained a memory of the pleasantest and the most unselfish of all the rascals that passed through my hands.
Most of Wells’ victims were well-to-do people who could afford to lose some of their wealth. And none of his crimes involved physical violence. He obtained other people’s money by advertising, by letter and by telegram. Not that these factors in any way excuse his actions. ‘White-collar crime’ (as we now know it) can have just as severe an effect on the victim as any other offence. But with his reputation for being ‘exceptionally reserved’, it suited his purposes to commit crime by remote control, as it were, rather than by direct confrontation. And the fact that he did not deal with the dupes in person made it even easier for him to behave in a cold and dispassionate manner towards them.
So what did become of his victims?
Miss Phillimore, who lost far more than probably anyone else, resumed her career as a writer with scarcely a pause following her dealings with Charles Wells. She went on to publish several further books, including an 1898 study of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. She never married, and she died in 1929.
The Honourable William Cosby Trench seems to have recovered surprisingly quickly from his brush with financial disaster. In September 1893, just a few months after Wells was convicted for fraud, Trench married Frances Shawe-Taylor. They had four children. His experiences with Wells seem to have instilled in him a lifelong interest in legal matters. He became a Justice of the Peace and, in 1905, was appointed high sheriff of County Limerick. He lived to the age of 75.
Wells’ smaller creditors were, in general, less able to get over their losses. William Charles Gamble King, an accountant by profession, had invested £50 in one of Wells’ inventions. When none of the promised returns were forthcoming he was unable to pay his own debts and went bust. Frank Jupp, who had supplied the magnificent outfits for the crew of the Palais Royal, was bankrupted by his creditors and was still slowly paying off his debts some thirty years later.
Wells’ own associates do not appear to have enjoyed particularly charmed lives, either. Aristides Vergis and Charles Wells never saw each other again following Wells’ incarceration in 1893. Vergis died while Wells was still in prison.
Henry Baker Vaughan, who had copied thousands of circulars, came to a particularly tragic end. His association with Wells seems to have cast a shadow over his subsequent career, and at one time the former legal clerk took a job as a dock labourer. Finally he managed to secure a position as bookkeeper to a moneylender. But in 1906 the sum of £3 appeared to be missing from the office, and suspicion fell on him once again. The 49-year-old clerk was suspended while a close scrutiny of the ledgers was carried out. In a state of depression, he took a fatal dose of arsenic on Hampstead Heath just before Christmas. Vaughan’s family had increased in size since his involvement with Wells, and he left a widow and eight children. An examination of the accounts later revealed that the money had not been missing after all.
Wells’ partners in the Fishing and Trawling Syndicate fared little better. After his release from prison, the Reverend Vyvyan Henry Moyle was found begging in the streets: the police charged him with vagrancy and he was sent to an institution so that he should not starve. He died shortly afterwards, in 1908.
Alfred Emanuel, the former journalist, publisher, financial pundit and conman, is recorded in the 1911 census as a ‘manufacturing chemist’ specialising in the production of a proprietary hair restorer – but that’s only half the story. A newspaper report of 1914 headed ‘TRADING ON THE DEAD’ explains how he adopted the practice of searching the ‘Deaths’ columns in newspapers. He then wrote to the executors enclosing a bill for hair stimulants which he falsely claimed to have supplied to the deceased person prior to their death. In this way he gained a regular income for himself until the day when he invoiced for recent purchases by a man who had already been dead for five years. He received a six-month jail sentence.
Wells’ pride and joy, the Palais Royal, was sold to Henry Scown, a Plymouth scrap metal dealer, but was reprieved before being broken up. The ship was converted back into a cargo vessel and was – in the words of the official record – ‘sold to foreigners’, finishing up in the hands of a Turkish ship owner. On 30 October 1908 she collided with another vessel off Seraglio Point, Istanbul, and sank, thus ending a chequered career which had lasted for more than forty years.
The impressive business premises at 154–156 Great Portland Street, where Wells had operated his patents scam, were demolished around 1929 and, together with the adjoining property, were replaced by Yalding House. This building was for many years in the ownership of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and housed the studios of BBC Radio 1 between 1996 and 2012.
Fred Gilbert’s song about Charles Wells enjoyed quite remarkable longevity. For at least half a century everyone from a toddler to a centenarian knew the words, and could whistle or hum the jaunty melody. Between 1904 and 1930, Charles Coborn released no fewer than five separate recordings of it, either on its own or as part of a medley. He toured the country’s music halls constantly, and kept the number in his act year in, year out. If the unthinkable happened and he had omitted it, the audience would not have allowed him to escape until they had heard their perennial favourite. Coborn once claimed – rather wearily, it must be said – that he had sung it about a quarter of a million times. He continued to recite it almost until his death at the age of 93.1 Today, a century and a quarter after it was written, the song is still given an occasional airing. No album of music hall favourites would be complete without it, and it has been used in a variety of motion pictures – from The Railway Children to Lawrence of Arabia – to conjure up a bygone era.
As we have seen, Charles Wells’ daughter, Marie Antoinette Florence Charlotte de Ville-Wells, had married Joseph Vayre in 1896. Vayre later became a playwright, then an impresario. Eventually, under the pen-name Charles Vayre, he embarked on a successful and prolific career as an author of popular fiction. Nearly all of his novels were collaborations with other writers, including over twenty books with Robert Florigni as his co-author. His themes included romance, adventure … and crime.
Vayre died on 29 January 1941 at the home he shared with Marie Antoinette at St Tronc, Marseille. Marie Antoinette died on 1 April 1944. The couple had no children, and consequently Charles Wells has no surviving descendants today.
Charles Wells’ sister, Anna Maria, died aged 72 at the Carmelite Convent in Morlaix in 1903. The youngest sister, Florence, is also believed to have spent her life in a convent. Emily Jane, the eldest sibling, had several children, however, and many of her descendants now live in Britain and Australia.
The fate of Jeannette remains a mystery. I think that after Charles died she probably returned to France, perhaps re-joining her sister Léonie, who seems to have been the only member of the family who was privy to Jeannette’s secret life of crime.
Only five days before Wells died, £1,100 had been forwarded to the creditors in France as their half-share of the income from the annuities. Thus it is evident that, until that point, officials in Paris had been receiving regular confirmation that Wells was still alive, as arranged between the French and British governments. I suspect that, on reaching Paris, Jeannette notified Monsieur Desbleumortier, the administrator, that Charles had died. This would explain why news of his death came not from London, but from Paris, creating the false impression that he had died in France.
Jeannette’s last surviving sibling, a brother named Léon, died in 1959. His descendants have been unable to discover what became of Jeannette.
That other renowned bank-breaker, Arthur de Courcy-Bower, died in early January 1926. He had been living in reduced circumstances in a small flat in London. The Times printed a brief mention of his death – something they had omitted to do for Charles Wells. The article misleadingly asserted that it was Bower who was known as ‘the man who broke the bank’.
Bower was, incidentally, buried in the same cemetery as Charles Deville Wells. In fact, the two Monte Carlo bank-breakers lie not 50 yards apart.
As one gambler might have said to another, ‘What are the odds against that?’
______________
1 Coborn sang the song in the 1934 film Say It With Flowers and this performance can currently be viewed on YouTube.