Fraudsters and Charlatans (16 page)

Bogle arrived in London in June 1840. He took lodgings in Bridge Street, Westminster, and commenced an action against
The Times
for libel. On 22 June the solicitor Samuel Fyson, at Bogle's instruction, wrote a letter to John Joseph Lawson,
The Times
's printer, advising him that he had been instructed to commence an action for ‘a libel so utterly destructive of all reputation, that before admitting it to a place in your journal, you were bound to satisfy yourself that it did not implicate a perfectly innocent individual'.
¹⁷
The case was taken up by
The Times
's solicitor Alexander Dobie. If Bogle was hoping for an apology and compensation, he was to be disappointed.
The Times
stood by its correspondent and allowed the action to proceed. Fifteen separate applications were made to examine witnesses on the Continent, of which Bogle, who probably did not want his actions exposed in open court, opposed all but two. His opposition was eventually overruled, but had meanwhile led to considerable delay.

On 30 June and 3 July Bogle wrote to Kerrich, who, now sadly disillusioned with his erstwhile partner, did not reply. The exact contents of these communications were never reported but it appears that Bogle begged Kerrich to come to England and give evidence in his favour. He also expressed some concern about the items left by Graham's family in Kerrich's charge, which he wanted forwarded to him. Kerrich, realising that they could be of some importance, called on a man named Roster to assist him in examining the articles. They met in Kerrich's office, where Roster happened to see a letter of credit of Glyn and Co. lying on the table and exclaimed: ‘I have seen that before, in Mr Graham's hands.'

‘That', said Mr Kerrich, ‘is impossible, as it has never been out of mine. Examine the signature closely, as you labour under a mistake.'

Roster examined the letter carefully. This was a genuine letter of Glyn's with the bank's signature in the handwriting of Mr Mills. ‘No,' he said, ‘it is not exactly the one I have seen, though very similar to it.'

Kerrich then took Robert Nicholson's letter from his tin box and showed it to Roster, who immediately recognised it. ‘That is the one I have seen before now in Mr Graham's hands, tracing it in a machine invented by him which took off facsimiles of drawings or writings of any kind.'

‘Did you ever see this machine at work?' asked Kerrich.

‘Yes,' said Roster, ‘once in particular, I perfectly recollect being with Mr Graham when he showed me a paper exactly similar to the one now in my hand, having the signature in the front or face of it, and he requested me to try the copying of the signature in the machine, as his own hand trembled that morning, and he had only the power of possessing the paper for a short time.'
¹⁸
Roster then described the machine to Kerrich, adding that while at the time he could not understand why Graham was tracing the signature, having heard about the recent forgeries he was satisfied that his object was anything but a proper one. The two men then entered the bank's store-room, where Roster was at once able to identify Graham's tracing machine and show Kerrich how it worked. He then recalled that Graham had given him a piece of paper to demonstrate how accurately anything could be copied by the machine. A few days later he returned to the bank and showed Kerrich the paper, which had on one side a picture copied from an original in the public gallery of Florence and on the other two facsimiles of Glyn and Co.'s signature in the handwriting of Mr Hallifax. Kerrich, recalling Bogle's borrowing of Robert Nicholson's letter of credit, was now left in no doubt as to how the forgery had occurred.

In August Dobie travelled to the Continent, bearing a letter from Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston to the British Ambassador Lord Granville asking him to provide all the assistance he required. In Florence, Dobie visited Kerrich and Co., had a copy of the tracing machine made, which he later produced in court, and gave notice to the firm that they were not to part with any items of Graham's in their possession. Dobie visited the defrauded bankers all over Europe and returned in December confident that he had sufficient evidence to plead justification, the perfect defence for an accusation of libel being that the story was true.

Bogle was asked to produce the papers he had taken with him from Florence, but failed to do so. Given the incriminating nature of the later items it is probable that the earlier letters were destroyed. In August 1841 the libel case of
Bogle
v.
Lawson
was heard at the Surrey summer assizes in Croydon. Mr Thesiger, for Allan Bogle, advised the jury that their verdict would decide ‘whether the plaintiff is hereafter to hold up his head in society . . . or . . . struggle through a miserable and shameful existence'.
¹⁹

The facts of the conspiracy itself as presented to the court were beyond doubt, but in his summing-up to the jury Mr Justice Tindal advised that they should consider their verdict without the statement of Perry and the letters of de Bourbel and Graham, which referred to Bogle. If they felt that, ‘though there was suspicion attaching to Bogle, yet that the evidence did not amount to proof that he was a conspirator, then the verdict must be for the plaintiff'.
²⁰
If they did find for him, then it was up to them to decide what damages would be ‘a fair and reasonable compensation'.
²¹

The jury retired for only half an hour and returned with a verdict for Allan Bogle, awarding him damages of one farthing. As this was announced, an audible titter ran through the court. Despite the best efforts of Mr Thesiger, Bogle was ordered to pay his own costs.

The total cost of the action to
The Times
was about £5,000, and on 1 October 1841 a group of bankers met at the Mansion House to discuss how to thank the newspaper for the exposure of the fraud. A fund was commenced to defray the paper's legal costs, and this eventually reached £2,700.
The Times
, however, declined to accept the money and instead used it to create scholarships for boys to attend Oxford and Cambridge universities. Part of the money was used to create commemorative plaques, one over the main entrance to the paper's premises in Printing House Square and one at the Royal Exchange.

In a Belgian court on 19 February 1841 Perry and Angelina Pipe were found guilty of fraud and were sentenced to be branded and to serve fifteen and twelve years in prison respectively, with hard labour. Frederick Pipe, having passed through Naples and Algiers, is said to have returned to England by way of Marseilles, but was not heard of thereafter.

On 31 May 1840 de Bourbel wrote to Freppa from Valencia asking him to remit him the balance of his funds. At the time of the libel trial he was rumoured to be in London, helping Bogle. He was never brought to justice. It is believed that he ultimately went to America, dying in Texas in 1845.
²²
Where Graham went after being ejected from Tuscany is unknown. He died, probably on the Continent, in November 1845.
²³

In July 1840 de Pindray was overtaken at Iaşi in what is now Romania, but after giving his captors 1,000 francs, was set at liberty. He was later placed under the surveillance of the police at Constantinople, and was, by order of the French police, transferred to Marseilles and later to Aix, but the court there ‘declared its incompetence to take cognizance of the affair'.
²⁴
He slipped away and was not heard of again.

Alexander Graham, worn out by disease, was unable to travel. He was taken to a hospital in Paris, where he died in ‘great want and misery'
²⁵
not long before the libel trial.

Justice finally caught up with D'Arjuzon and Marie Desjardins. They had been living in Paris under the name of Bernardi but departed on 5 May in a private carriage, and it was believed, from letters seized at the post office, that they were on the way to join de Bourbel and share the booty. Arrested and accused of forgery, they stood trial at the Paris Assizes in July 1840. Marie had been convicted a few days previously and sentenced to four years in prison for passing off the child who travelled with her as her own. D'Arjuzon had promised to marry her if she had a child, and as none was forthcoming, she procured one from a midwife and convinced her lover that it was theirs. At the forgery trial she protected him by confessing that she alone was guilty and that he knew nothing of the forged letter of credit. De Bourbel's letter to D'Arjuzon was read out in court, but he denied that he had received it, and the defence claimed successfully that it could not be put in evidence against him. He was acquitted and Marie was found guilty and sentenced to five years to run concurrently with her previous sentence. In 1842 it was stated in the French newspapers that Marie had escaped custody and been recaptured in Paris. When arrested she had in her possession a false passport in the name of a commercial traveller of Marseilles, which it was believed she had been intending to pass to D'Arjuzon so that he could make his escape as he was due to be tried on further charges. Their subsequent fate is unknown.

Allan George Bogle remained in England, where he lodged above a public house at 26 Bridge Street, Westminster. The business was run by a Mr and Mrs Blake, but was funded by Bogle, who gave the Blakes £1,000. When they went bankrupt in 1842 he refused to say where he had obtained the money. The matter was never resolved, since Bogle died of pneumonia on 13 March 1843. He was 36 years old.

In 1847
The Times
appointed a new manager, Mowbray Morris, who was unhappy about the level of expenditure by foreign correspondents. In 1848 Andrew O'Reilly was reprimanded for his extravagance, and later that year Morris went to Paris to dismiss him. O'Reilly was left with the unhappy impression that his fate was the result of personal ill-feeling. He died in 1862, aged 79.

FIVE

The Bank with No Scruples

O
n the morning of Sunday 17 February 1856 a labourer walking on Hampstead Heath discovered the body of a smartly dressed man lying on the grass behind the historic inn known as Jack Straw's Castle. The cause of death was not difficult to guess. By the side of the body was a half-pint bottle labelled Essential Oil of Bitter Almonds – Poison. Very little of the liquid remained, and there were traces of it in a silver cream jug that lay nearby and from which the deceased had obviously taken his final draught. A case of razors was beside him, no doubt for the unlikely contingency of the poison not being effective. The body, which was cold and stiff, was removed to the mortuary of Hampstead Workhouse, where a post-mortem was performed. When the stomach was opened, the scent of almonds was so powerful it filled the room.

The identity of this determined suicide was revealed in a handwritten note found in his pocket, which revealed him to be 42-year-old John Sadleir, Member of Parliament, a substantial property owner and founder of the Tipperary Bank. His death was a huge shock in both political and commercial circles, where for a time the talk was of little else. With no obviously pressing reason why Sadleir should have taken his life, it was rumoured ‘that the unfortunate man's brain had become over-excited by the multiplicity and extent of his speculations'.
¹

‘Mr Sadleir was no common man,' observed the
Cork Daily Reporter
, ‘but possessed abilities of a very high order, and an inflexibility of temperament that could only be shaken by something of unusual magnitude. . . . His death . . . is indeed a deplorable event, and we record it with very deep regret.'
²
Freeman's Journal
was quick to express ‘deepest sympathy' and pronounced Sadleir's death to be a ‘melancholy catastrophe'.
³
He was, said the
Morning Advertiser
, ‘greatly respected . . . esteemed and admired'.
⁴
His ‘untimely end', said the
Morning Chronicle
, which revealed that Sadleir's unwise speculations had resulted in personal losses of £200,000, ‘has cast a gloom over many a circle'.
⁵
Sympathy was also extended to the companies that would ‘lose the benefit of his counsel and services'.
⁶

It was true that the Bank of Ireland had recently refused to cash Tipperary Bank drafts, but investors had been assured that any problems were the result of Mr Sadleir having forgotten to pay in the money required. Depositors who had hurried to withdraw their funds had found the branches open, and discovered that they paid out promptly. A Thomastown gentleman who asked to withdraw his savings of £800 was told that if he did not give the requisite notice he would forfeit interest. He decided to lodge the notice and leave his money where it was, confident that it would be safe for a few days at least.

When news of Sadleir's death reached Ireland on 18 February, branches of the Tipperary Bank were again besieged by anxious depositors, many of whom were small tenant farmers who had entrusted their life savings to its care. At Nenagh the manager declined to make payments, though the crowds were somewhat appeased by the bank remaining open to record claims, but in Thurles the surging mob was so disorderly that the police were called to protect the premises.

Not everyone took the bank's difficulties seriously. ‘There has been a kind of petty run on the three bank offices in our city,' stated the
Kilkenny Monitor
. ‘The more ignorant portion of the country people who had small sums deposited, or who held notes of any kind, at once took the alarm, and commenced looking for gold immediately. It is unnecessary to say that this trifling panic altogether confined to a very few of the lower order of the people, caused no inconvenience to any of the establishments here, and it has now almost ceased.'
⁷

A reporter from the
Limerick Chronicle
visited Tipperary on 19 February and found local farmers gathering in small groups on pathways and at shop doors, viewing their deposit receipts with gloomy expressions. On entering the bank he found it packed with customers, most of them farmers with savings of £300 to £1,000, being told by manager Michael Dillon that they could not be paid until 29 February, but that they need not worry as the assets of the bank were more than sufficient to meet any losses. Knowing that the Sadleir family owned a large amount of landed property, many customers were confident that the bank would, in time, be able to pay its investors.