This the story of a 1950s swindle to get money from young couples desperate to buy their own homes. The brains of the scheme lived in West Hampstead, Kilburn and Willesden.
On 11 September 1956, five men appeared at the Old Bailey charged with fraud. They were William Frederick Montgomery (46) a clerical assistant of 2a Riffel Road Willesden, John Frederick Attenborough (54) the company negotiator of Albion Street Dunstable, Herbert Henry Skelly (35) master builder of Manor Road Dagenham, Richard Neel (46) travel agent of Beckenham Road Beckenham, and Ernest Rea (79) the company director of Katherine Road East Ham.
They were charged with conspiring together between February 1953 and January 1955, to defraud people to buy a home from the Harmsworth Building and Construction Company Ltd. 120 prospective buyers paid deposits totalling £23,184 (today worth about £870,000), for homes that were never built. All five men pleaded ‘not guilty’.
Deposits were not returned, and the company went to liquidation in January 1955. There were 70 witnesses and the trial lasted 23 days, but when a juror inadvertently and through no fault of his own spoke with a defence counsel, the judge dismissed the jury and ordered a re-trial which took a further 30 days. The second jury found the men guilty of fraud.
On 29 November, the judge passing sentences said, ‘it was a mean, deliberate, and cold-blooded swindle. I have listened in vain for a large number of weeks for a single word of regret from any of you for these unfortunate people, some of whom have lost their whole life savings’.
Montgomery and Attenborough each received five years imprisonment, Neel 3 years, and Skelly 18 months. Rea got just 10 weeks, but he was a sick man and had already been held on remand, so he was released.
The Sunday Pictorial investigation
At the end of 1955 John Nobel and his team at the Sunday Pictorial had been contacted by several readers who had each paid £175 deposit (10%) for a house to be built in Kidlington Oxford in eight months’ time.
Adverts had been placed in newspapers saying, ‘Come to the Harmsworth Building Company if you want a brand-new house on easy terms.’ Fourteen houses had been built and sold in Dagenham, but then seeing how easy it was to obtain deposits they offered houses in other parts of the country, including Oxford.
The land in Kidlington was purchased with a loan, but no work took place. On 8 January 1955 John Nobel called at the shabby Soho office, 6 West Street off Cambridge Circus and asked, ‘can the people have their money back?’ The elderly, balding, company negotiator Mr Attenborough, a bankrupt and struck-off solicitor, was evasive but basically said ‘No’. The Sunday Pic team passed their findings to Chief Inspector Stanley Barker of the Scotland Yard Fraud Squad who conducted a lengthy investigation before arresting the men.
The brains behind the swindle was William Frederick Montgomery. Using the deposits, the gang enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle and played roulette in the basement of their Soho office. In an office above they installed a one-way mirror to watch young women changing into swimming costumes to audition for the photographic modelling agency they had set up.
Who was William Fredrick Montgomery?
Our research concentrated on Montgomery, who we found was really William Frederick Rea. His father was the elderly Ernest Rea (1877-1961), discharged from the court, a figure head director of the Harmsworth Building Co. who took no active part in the fraud.
William had been born in Upton Park East Ham on 10 August 1910. In 1938 he married Marjorie Bodger in Romford, and they were living at 86 Alexandra Road in West Hampstead. The following year they were at 1 Eresby Road in Kilburn, when he gave his occupation as a ‘cost clerk at a scientific institution’. William and Marjorie moved frequently, and by 1946 they were in Paddington, at 198 Sussex Gardens.
In March that year, William, now a builder and property developer, rented 34 Avenue Road (now rebuilt). This was a large house in St Johns Wood, which he divided into five flats and charged the tenants £300 pa for several years in advance.
In February 1947 he was successfully prosecuted by the Eyre Estate who owned the property and demanded it back, as he had no right to divide it and sub-let. In December 1948 William went bankrupt and spent nine months in prison, before he re-invented himself as Montgomery. This scam obviously led him to set up the Harmsworth Building Company swindle.
After his first marriage to Marjorie, he married several other times, as William F Rea to June Hare in 1947 in St Pancras, and in Kensington 1951 as William F Montgomery to Jane Elkington. We have not found a photo of this illusive man.
We believe he died as William Rea in Hillingdon in 1980, he was the right age but with his various identities we can’t be certain.
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