In the late Victorian period, Kensal Green was still known as Kensal New Town which had been built in the 1840s, following the 1838 opening of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway which passed nearby.
Viscount Howard as he was called, was a member of the local Conservative Association, and popular with the ladies of the Primrose League. He was also very well known in the Kensal New Town pubs. He lived at 72 Kilburn Lane for over 20 years, which he rented at 8sh and 6d a week.
He was born in Walsall in 1840 as William Little Howard, the son of a respectable solicitor. Aged 19 he joined the Royal Navy, and in 1862 he was a clerk at the Admiralty but was obliged to retire because he went bankrupt. He continued to spend more than he earned, and when his father disowned him, William had to live on his wits using various scams and frauds. He wrote begging letters, made false accident claims, used blackmail, and found mugs who wanted to invest in schemes from the fake Viscount.
When the famous jockey and Derby winner, Harry Constable (who had been born in Kensal Green), died aged just 26 in 1881, Howard wrote a letter as a ‘brother sportsman’ to the Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, who he knew greatly admired Constable. He obtained a £25 cheque from Rosebery by saying Constable had not paid a debt to Howard. He particularly liked telling this tale to anyone who would listen in the pub.
He wrote audacious begging letters. In one he claimed to be the illegitimate son of a nobleman, who would not recognize him so he was leaving the country. He wrote to a gentleman saying, ‘Before I go, I want to take with me the only thing I value in this world, my mother’s watch, which, unfortunately, I have been forced to pledge for £20’. The victim sent the £20 to redeem the watch, but by the next post he received a letter saying ‘the interest was £1 6s 8d, and he must ask his benefactor to send him that amount’. When he received the interest amount William spent it on a meal in the Strand. With the £20 in his pocket, he arrived at a pub in Kensal Green and ordered a dozen bottles of champagne for his friends, which they drank out of pewter pots. Whenever he ‘got a bit’ as he called a successful fraud, Howard sent word that the Viscount would be at a particular Kensal Green pub and he wished the boys to ‘join him in celebrating a birthday’.
On race days, he would hang around railway stations and beg or borrow the fare from criminals heading to the racecourse. Here he was in his element, and he would find a 'mug' to pay his entrance fee to Tattersall’s ring and the Paddock, where he drank champagne with the lords and dukes.
In another scam, he wrote to society people on black-edged paper, that his daughter, ‘the only thing he had to love in the world, had just died and he wanted just enough money to put her decently in her grave’. He managed to get a total of £50 from the letters. But four years later he slipped up when he sent another batch of letters asking for money to pay for an operation on his daughter to the same people.
One of his favourite schemes was to find a man with a few hundred pounds in a bank and get cheques for various small amounts from him. The Viscount would then frequent a pub and when he was on good terms with the landlord get him to cash one of the cheques. This would be paid into a bank and honoured. After about a dozen cheques had been cashed, the Viscount would hand the landlord one for £10, which was returned for ‘insufficient funds’. The next step in this often repeated drama was that some of the Viscount’s friends would begin drinking in the pub. When the landlord complained about him, they would say the Viscount was always broke and he had been presenting ‘stumers’ as bad cheques were called, all over the place and unless he kicked up a row he would never get his money back. The next time the Viscount went into the pub, not surprisingly, the landlord called him a swindler and a thief. Outraged, the Viscount denied all knowledge of the stumers and demanded the landlord again presented a cheque at the bank. This time, because enough money had been banked to cover the amount, the cheque was honoured. The landlord was surprised, but then stunned when he received a writ demanding £500 damages for slander. Again, Howard’s friends went to work, spreading stories about the landlord until he eventually settled with a £50 or £100 payment to get the writ withdrawn.
William changed his middle name from Little to William Liddell Howard as it sounded better. In addition to Viscount Howard, he used several other aliases including Captain Arrowsmith of the Royal Artillery, Grant and Gerard E. Slingsby.
In February 1868 he married Ann Webb, the daughter of a farmer, at All Souls, Langham Place. But he quickly went through her £3,000.
In June 1868 when he was declared bankrupt for the third time, his addresses were given as formerly of 13 Acacia Road St Johns Wood, then of Brighton, then of 236 Kings Road Chelsea, now of Bolwell Terrace Kennington.
At the end of November that year, when William applied to be discharged from bankruptcy, two people came forward to object. Mr Lee, an estate agent from Chester, said he had paid Howard who said he had influence and could get Lee’s son a government job. This turned out to be a lie as he had no influence at all. The second objector was Mrs Leharle, a widow from Kennington. Howard had lived with her and she had advanced him £300. He said a man from Chester was going to pay him £100. He also said they would be married but had married Ann Webb instead. Surprisingly, the discharge from bankruptcy was granted.
In May 1870 Howard appeared in the Clerkenwell court. Described as a gentleman living in Bolwell Terrace Kennington, he was charged with obtaining £26 under false pretences and fraud from Mrs Maria Nash, of Regents Mews St Pancras. Howard said he had won nearly £100 on the boat race from a bookmaker who promised to pay him in a week’s time. As he was short of cash, he borrowed the money from Mrs Nash which he was going to repay once he got the money from the bookmaker. For once, this was not a scam. He had won the boat race bet and the bookmaker was late in paying Howard his winnings. The case was dismissed.
In August 1871 Howard was found guilty at the Middlesex Sessions of obtaining cash from several fraudulent cheques and he was imprisoned for 12 months with hard labour.
In the 1891 census he was shown as a turf commission agent, living at 72 Kilburn Lane with Elizabeth, described as his wife. But he did not marry Elizabeth Noble until June 1894, when he said he was a widower and a journalist. They had three children but two died as infants.
In January 1898 Howard wrote to and then met Mrs Helen Hartopp in Eastbourne. She was a very wealthy woman who was going through divorce proceedings. It is probably no coincidence that her maiden name was Liddell, the same as his changed name and he had read about her divorce case in the newspaper. He said he would be able to act as a private detective to obtain information against her husband to stop the divorce being finalized, overturn the large financial award to her husband, and get her custody of the children. She told him to spare no expense so long as he ‘defeated that scoundrel of a husband of hers’.
Howard employed five men to follow Mr Hartopp and they observed his meetings with a young woman called Lancaster. Howard told Mrs Hartopp he believed he could prove adultery, and this would greatly help her divorce case. But when she refused to pay after Howard had worked on the case for two months, he first blackmailed her by threatening to publicise the fact that her eldest son had been expelled from school. When this did not work, he commenced a legal action saying she owed him £200 for his investigations, and £114 for other expenses.
In April 1899, he instructed a QC and Howard appeared in court on the first day. But Howard had made a major mistake because he was cross-examined by Edward Marshall Hall (later known as ‘The Great Defender’ for his skill in high-profile cases), who was the QC for Mrs Hartopp. Howard, clearly unnerved by Marshall Hall, did not turn up for the second day, sending a note from a doctor saying he was too ill to attend. His QC said he had now received very negative information about Howard and abandoned the case. Marshall Hall said he was sorry that he could not question Howard further and told the court about Howard’s background. He had been convicted 20 years ago for fraud and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. When he was released, he worked as a clerk for a firm of solicitors. But he fraudulently obtained money from a servant girl he was living with, and when she went to his firm to complain about him, he was sacked.
After that Howard noted cases of bereavement in the newspapers and wrote begging letters to the wealthy relatives. Marshall Hall said he had letters signed by Howard and ‘Captain Arrowsmith’, and the handwriting and signature was the same. The Charity Organization Society had numerous complaints from people to whom Howard had written begging letters using the names of Arrowsmith, Grant and Slingsby. As a result, the Society had issued a special warning against Howard. Because of the newspaper reports about the current case, Marshall Hall had received letters and bad cheques from many people defrauded by Howard. There was no doubt he was an impostor of the worst possible class. The jury found in favour of Mrs Hartopp with costs.
1899 was a very bad year for Howard. On 12 September he found himself in the Old Bailey charged with unlawfully attempting to obtain £533 from the North Western Railway. In January he had written to the railway company claiming he had been injured by slipping off a plank covering a hole in the platform and stairs at Kensal Rise Station on 13 January. (Kensal Green Station had been re-named Kensal Rise Station in 1890).
Howard said he damaged his back and his head was bleeding. Railway staff and workmen all gave evidence that they did not see any accident that day. A key witness for the prosecution was Charles Abbott, an out of work surveyor from Kensal Green. Howard had asked him to take photographs and make plans of the station to support his claim against the NW Railway. He had bought him meals and paid his fare to deliver letters to Mr Van Tromp, the solicitor of the railway company. But when the chief detective of the company and the solicitor told Abbott the case was fraudulent and he would be prosecuted, he turned against Howard. In court Abbott said he had known Howard for seven years. He had seen him on 17 January and every day afterwards and he was not injured in any way. A doctor for the railway company examined Howard and found no injuries. Howard was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to six months imprisonment.
By the time of the 1911 census William and Elizabeth had moved from Kensal Green to Bedford Park in Acton. Five years later, the career fraudster and ‘Viscount of Kensal New Town’ died in Eton.
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