The Kilburn tobacconist and the actress’s jewels

Nellie Seymour was an attractive actress, one of many who made a living from the stage; it was a hard life, often moving with a company from town to town. If you were lucky, you found a role in a production that stayed in a theatre for a few months. One such was ‘Sergeant Brue’ by Owen Hall which premiered in London in 1904. A musical farce, the plot centres around the police sergeant of the title, who comes into £10,000 a year, on condition he remains in the force and is promoted to inspector. Nellie played Vivienne Russell, a society lady and one of the chorus.

 

The cast of Sergeant Brue, Nellie is seated in the centre (Marianne Colloms)

The play was staged at the Strand Theatre and the Prince of Wales Theatre, running in London’s West End until February 1905. The ladies are carrying unusual animal heads or masks which they had to wear at some point in the performance. One critic disparaged another prop, paper hoops, because the ladies were expected to jump through them, despite wearing long gowns.

By this time, 22-year-old Nellie was a wealthy lady. Her fortune is unlikely to have come from acting; she was popular and featured in the professional papers but not as a leading lady. Nor did it come from her family. We know she had money because shortly after the premiere of Sergeant Brue, Nellie appeared in court in June 1904. She was described by one paper as ‘most elegantly gowned’ and was there to give evidence against 33-year-old German born Otto Kruger. He ran a tobacconist’s shop at 5 Kilburn High Road, near the Queen’s Arms public house and stood accused of stealing and receiving jewellery that belonged to Nellie. It was worth £3,000, which is about £320,000 today. It was claimed Otto had an accomplice, Marie Marthaler, who had been Nellie’s maid. The case seemed straight forward enough: Nellie had returned from a brief outing on 24 May 1904, to find Marie and her jewels missing. Marie had not been seen since; the police thought she had fled the country, but items of jewellery had been traced back to Otto.

But it was complicated by the fact that Otto’s brother, Rudolf was in a relationship with Marie. Some sources suggest it was he who persuaded her to steal the jewels, promising they would set up home together. But he too had gone missing. Police visited Otto’s shop, after they had recovered some pearls sold by George Zink. He lived near the Kilburn High Road and regularly went to Otto’s shop to buy tobacco. Zink said the pearls had come from Otto, who told the police, ‘they are the ones I got from my brother who has run away.’

Rudolf Kruger had been questioned by police before he disappeared. They found four £5 notes in his pocket. Otto denied having anything to do with the theft but admitted he had sold items for Rudolf and given him the money. He wasn’t very good as a ‘fence’, disposing of Nellie’s jewellery at well below its true value. He began to cry and threatened to shoot himself before leading the police to the cellar below the shop. Buried about six inches deep in the earth floor they found two tin boxes containing more of Nellie’s property.

In court Inspector Drew said that jewels worth around £1,000 had been recovered but the rest were still missing. Otto was sentenced to nine months in Wormwood Scrubs; the absent Marie was never charged.

After prison

The local directory only lists Kruger at No.5 Kilburn High Road in 1904 when he was sharing the premises with other businesses. The property was demolished when a WWII bomb hit the Queen’s Arms. The 1911 census reveals him, now a clerk in an estate agent’s office, living at 40 Park Road, in West Dulwich. The only other occupant of the house was Marie Marthaler! Her occupation is given as that of housekeeper. At the time of the court case in 1904, the papers reported Otto’s wife had been at the Kilburn shop when the police dug up the tin boxes, but in the 1911 census he said he was single. Martha gave her status as that of widower. There was no sign of Rudolf.

George Frederick Zink

Zink had told the police he ‘dabbled’ in jewellery but was no expert. He was not prosecuted for selling the items, presumably because he believed the jewellery belonged to Otto. In his professional life, Zink was a very talented miniature painter, regularly exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1885 and 1902 from his Kilburn home at 34 Princess Road. In 1911, he was still living at No.34 with his wife and two sons. He died in December 1946 at 1 Randolph Gardens in South Kilburn.

Step forward the real Nellie Seymour

After considerable research we found that Nellie’s real name was Verena Georgina Venour. She was born in India in 1881, the daughter of Surgeon Major William Venour and his wife Julia Rose. The family came to England around the time William retired in 1889 and lived in Wales. The marriage was unhappy; two years later Julia accused William of a violent assault but did not appear in court, so the case was dismissed. She also petitioned for, but did not obtain, a divorce. William died in February 1903 and on 30 April, Julia married General Sir George Richard Greaves. Nellie was a witness. Charles had been on the General’s staff in India and the Venours had been Greave’s guests on the night of the census in 1901.

 

Nellie Seymour, 1904

Nellie apparently left the stage after her appearance in Sergeant Brue. During the London run, she had married 25-year-old Brian Durrant Kemp-Welch in September 1904. His father was a partner and Managing Director of the Schweppes mineral water company and Bruce later took over from his father as the MD. It appears his family disapproved of the match. Their witnesses were friends, not family members; the ceremony was a quick one, arranged by special license followed by a small luncheon party at the Savoy Hotel. The couple went on to have three children, Elizabeth (born 1906) and twin boys Peter and George (born 1907), but their relationship was complicated by repeated affairs on both sides. In 1908 Brian sued for divorce on the grounds of Verena’s adultery, but the divorce was never finalised. The co-respondent was Stanley Brotherhood who was the husband of Brian’s sister Vera, and this caused a rift with his family. In 1927, Brian was named as the correspondent in another divorce case and £1,000 damages were awarded against him.

 

Brian Kemp-Welch, MD of Schweppes

Their daughter Elizabeth (Betty) wrote her biography entitled ‘Jennifer’s Memoirs’, reflecting the fact she was the creator of ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ which appeared for many years in Tatler, Queen and Harpers, under her married name of Betty Kenward. It seems very unlikely that Betty didn’t know her mother had been an actress, but she never mentions the fact. She wrote fondly of her brothers and her father but was generally critical about Verena who she described as, ‘very pretty and very immoral and always desperately spoilt’. Her mother took no interest in her, said Betty, because Verena had wanted her first child to be a boy, not a girl. Betty was often sent by her mother to stay with friends or relatives, ‘as I was growing up and complicating her life.’ She remembered wonderful holidays in Wales with her maternal grandmother and step grandfather General Greaves, who she called ‘Dod’. Betty went on to a successful career as a social columnist, and although increasingly out of step with the times, Jennifer’s Diary ran for almost 50 years. Appointed an MBE in 1985 she died aged 94 in 2001.

Peter Kemp-Welch and George Kemp-Welch

Brian and Verena’s sons were both talented amateur cricketers, George played for Warwickshire and the MCC. They both worked for the Schweppes company and served with the Grenadier Guards during WWII. 

In 1934 George married Lucy, the daughter of MP Stanley Baldwin.Ten years later, on 18 June 1944, and now a Captain in the Grenadier Guards, George was attending a Sunday morning service at the Guards’ Chapel in Birdcage Walk when it was hit by a V1 flying bomb. The roof and most of the walls collapsed burying the congregation in rubble up to 10 feet deep. In the worst V1 attack of the war, over 120 soldiers and civilians died and around 140 were injured. George’s body was one of the last to be found three days later.

 

George Kemp-Welch

Both brothers are commemorated by an inscription on the font in the rebuilt Grenadier Guards’ chapel. Peter died in 1964, and his family donated a window in his memory to St Margaret’s church, Westminster.

Brian and Verena agreed to live apart until shortly before Brian’s death in 1950 at their London home in Bruton Place, following a stroke. He was 72. Verena continued to live there until her death in 1968, aged 86.

This complex story began with a simple newspaper report about Otto Kruger’s conviction for receiving stolen goods. But it required considerable time to untangle all the parts.