On 3 September 1939 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced on the
radio that Britain was now at war with Germany. People expected air raids, but nothing happened until the
Blitz began in September 1940. This was the period that came to be known as the
‘phoney war’, but while Britain waited there was considerable public concern and rumours about
German spies.
A German Spy Ring
On the 30 Sept 1939, 27 year old Wilfred Ronald Ward who lived with his
parents at 187 Heathfield
Road, Handsworth,
appeared at the Birmingham Police Court. He was charged with demanding £500
from a man, never named but referred to as ‘Mr X’ throughout the proceedings.
Unless the money was paid, Wilfred had threatened to expose Mr X as a German
spy. Mr X had received a letter on 5 September signed by ‘Jim Rickards’ and had
gone to the police. They had listened in when Ward, using the name Rickards,
telephoned and repeated the threat but Mr X had lost his temper and the call
was ended.
Three days later on the 8
September the Chief Constable was sent an anonymous letter which named Mr X and
four other people as spies. The police spoke to Ward who admitted writing the
letters. He said he just wanted to frighten Mr X. He explained that for the
past few months, both he and Mr X had been seeing a woman with the wonderful
name of Treasure Muffett. It was Treasure who had told Ward that she and the
other people were part of a German spy ring. The police investigated and decided
Mr X and the others were definitely not spies. Ward said: ‘Blimey, I did it all in the interests of the country. I became
infatuated with her and believed every word she told me to be true’. He was
held on remand pending trial.
On 26 October Ward re-appeared in
court on a charge of demanding money with menaces. The letter he sent to the
Chief Constable had contained a drawing of a badge with the letters S.H.V.K.
which he said was the emblem of the spy group. Ward alleged Mr X had entered
factories at night and copied aircraft plans. Other people named in the letter as
German spies were Miss B, Mr C, Dr A, and Mr D, who all strenuously denied the
allegations.
Giving evidence 31 year old Mr X said
the only time he met Ward was when he had introduced him to Mrs Treasure
Muffett at her flat in Acocks Green Birmingham on 26 August. Mr X had formed a
liaison with Treasure Muffett who was a very attractive brunette with a vivid
personality. She told him she was a German married to an Englishman. But he now
realised that she was leading a fantasy life of make-believe.
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| Treasure Muffett |
Treasure Muffett
Treasure Muffett was then called
to give evidence. Her real name was far less glamorous, Mabel Nellie Muffett.
She said she and her friend Mair Williams were nurses and lived at 34 Alexandra Road in Kilburn. Far from being German, Treasure’s parents were
English and she’d never been out of the country. But she admitted she sometimes
pretended to be German and spoke broken English as a joke.
In fact, neither Marie nor
Treasure had finished their medical training. They met in July when working at
a nursing home in Birmingham and shared the flat in Acocks Green, loaned to them by a
patient in the home, for three weeks. They had held all-night parties there and
then left for London the day before War was declared.
When the defence barrister pointed
out that Ward had said the S.H.V.K. drawing was an emblem of the German spy
ring, Treasure said this was tripe. She explained that the letters stood for
‘Sacred Heart, Virtuous Knowledge’, which was the badge of her old school, the
Convent of the Sacred Heart at Harrow on the Hill. She admitted to having affairs with both Ward
and Mr X. When asked if she was something of a liar, she said, ‘Yes I am. I have told thousands of lies to
the prisoner and Mr X’.
The case was remanded for a week.
Suicide in Alexandra Road
On Wednesday 1 November, landlady Lily
Abbott and other tenants heard the noise of constant running water coming from
the upstairs flat at 34
Alexandra Road. When
she looked through the glass door she was horrified to see 25 years old
Treasure Muffett and 22 years old Mair Williams were lying motionless on the
floor. When the police forced their way into the flat they found that the girls
had died from gas poisoning sometime over the weekend. They were both due to give further evidence
in Birmingham on Thursday 2 November.
The trial went ahead and it was
agreed that the dispositions which the girls had signed could be used as
evidence.
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| Mair Williams |
In court Mrs Abbott said the girls
had rented the Alexandra
Road flat for
about five weeks. They told her they’d had come down from Birmingham ‘to get away from a man’, and paid their first two weeks
rent but nothing further. Mrs Abbott said she lent them money and even got
shoes for them. They had signed up for work with a nursing agency in Kings
Cross but were desperately short of money and only had six pence halfpenny between
them when they died.
Mrs Abbott said when they had
returned from the trial in Birmingham on Thursday night they were very depressed because so much
of Treasure’s past had been brought up in court. An aunt had advised Mair that
she should go home to Treforest in South
Wales, but she had said to Mrs
Abbott, ‘What kind of pal should I be to
leave Treasure on her own now. I could not do it.’
One of the witnesses, Mr D said he had first known Treasure
in 1935 when she worked as a nurse in the County
Mental Hospital in Gloucester.
She was then known as Treasure Street.
The Inquest
At the St Pancras inquest on 3
November, Treasure’s husband, Alan John Muffett of Grant Avenue Bournemouth,
said he married Treasure
Mabel Street on 12 July 1938, but she left him after 11 weeks. He had not seen her
since and the only contact had been a letter she sent last Christmas containing
a pawn ticket for a ring she had pledged to recover.
Treasure’s mother Mrs Gertrude Street, said the girls had visited her in Wimborne, Dorset for
one day in early in October. She’d ignored a letter from the police asking her
to send money to her daughter as the girls hadn’t eaten for three days. Mrs Street said, ‘I took no
notice of that. I had helped her so much in the past’. She told the court
that when they visited her she’d loaned them coats.
Mrs Winifred Pugh said she had not
seen her daughter Mair Williams for over a year. She had no idea she’d gone to London until she had a letter saying she was there. Mair had told her mother she was planning to go to France with Treasure, to work as a nurse. Mrs Pugh had sent her
daughter £3 in September.
Detective Inspector Culliss of the
Birmingham police said the girls had nothing to fear from them. When
the Metropolitan police saw the girls on 3 October they were staving and the
policeman sent out for some food for them and lent them a pound. The famous
pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury who conducted the autopsies, said Treasure
and Mair had died from gas poisoning and that Miss Williams showed signs of
early pregnancy.
The coroner concluded that the
girls had returned from the trial very upset, depressed and virtually penniless.
They couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Birmingham to face further questioning and decided to commit suicide.
They had left notes saying they were going to die. The jury brought in a
verdict that they had taken their lives while of unsound mind.
Wilfred Ronald Ward
On 8 November 1939
at Manchester Assizes, Wilfred Ronald Ward was sentenced to three years in
prison. After serving his sentence he married Jillian Shirlaw in Bromsgrove in
1947. He died in Birmingham in 1973
aged 61. Jillian died in 2002.
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