This is the story of a Brondesbury resident who for many years enjoyed a respectable and prosperous lifestyle but was eventually beset by financial problems that led to bankruptcy and drove him to crime.
City trading – prosperity and problems
Leon Tauber was born in Lithuania around 1870, where he married and had two sons Solomon Sidney (b. about 1891) and Samuel (b.1892). We don’t know when Leon and his family moved to England, probably around 1900, and he became a naturalised citizen in 1905. He made a lot of money working as a lace and embroidery merchant in the Houndsditch area where he was a well-known and respected businessman.
The Tauber
family moved into Fern Brae, 5 Brondesbury Park in 1910; previously Leon had
been living in Houndsditch. Leon was absent on census night the following year,
when his wife and their two sons described themselves as wholesale lace
manufacturers. We know all the family were involved in the business.
In November 1913 the property was for sale, when No.5 was described as ‘a superior detached residence without basement, eight bed, three reception rooms, nice garden. Lease 70 years, let at £95 per annum’. The advert said vacant possession could be arranged by Christmas so as the Taubers remained, presumably they bought the lease.
Unfortunately, by the end of 1916 their business was in trouble. Solomon later said that his father’s mental abilities declined after the War, he became absent-minded, almost childlike and lost a lot of money. In 1917 Leon was bankrupted by a creditor.
In February 1921 he was accused, along with two others, of stealing and receiving goods. They got prison sentences, Leon was discharged. If what Solomon said was true, then perhaps his father’s judgement was impaired. However, it indicates Leon was willing to break the law to raise cash.
A couple of months later Leon, Sarah and Solomon were home on census night. That July Leon’s discharge from bankruptcy was delayed until 1927, one of the reasons given being ‘misconduct’, which could refer to the court case. In August 1922, he had second brush with the law, when he appeared before the magistrates with an accomplice, charged with breaking, entering and theft. They were given a ‘not guilty’ verdict.
Did Mrs Tauber know about these court appearances? Her English was very poor, she spoke mainly German and the cases do not appear to have been reported in the press. Leon had been bailed on both occasions and so long as he returned to court for his hearing and was discharged (as happened), Sarah didn’t need to know. But as she helped run the family business, she couldn’t have been ignorant of their financial position. Without a regular income, the comfortable lifestyle at Brondesbury would not continue indefinitely.
Arrested again
There was no question of a cover up the next time Leon turned to crime in April 1925. This was his third and most serious attempt that we know of, to raise money. He was arrested with two other men, and charged with a robbery in March, from the warehouse of Gerhard and Hey at Upper Thames Street, of furs and skins worth nearly £9,000, (around £650,000 today). Samuel Cohen and Charles Benjamin Waitzer were both merchants like Leon. Charges of robbery were later dropped but all three were charged with receiving stolen goods. On 3 April, Detective Inspectors Wagstaff and Phillips of the City police went to a draper’s shop on Willesden High Road. There they found Cohen and Waitzer in a room rented by Tauber over the shop. It was full of furs, identified as the stolen pelts. The men denied all knowledge of the robbery and blamed Tauber, saying he had given them the keys to inspect the furs with a view to purchase.
In court the next day all three men pleaded not guilty. Bail was refused and they were remanded in custody, but at their next court appearance on the 7th, it was agreed bail could be granted. Inspector Wagstaff requested that Tauber’s amount should be substantial and it was set at £2,000, twice that for Cohen and Waitzer. Leon went home to Sarah, but who had put up the bail money?
Cohen and Waitzer were committed for trial on 6 May, but Tauber failed to turn up. A phone call to his wife confirmed that he had left home for court that morning.
Suicide?
Two days later, a man’s jacket and trilby hat were found on Brighton beach. In the pocket was a letter written in Yiddish to Mrs Tauber. The writer said he was innocent but ‘had been dragged into trouble’, lost all his money and friends, and concluded that ‘the only way out’ was to end his life. The handwriting was said to be Leon’s. The City of London police received a letter along the same lines, purporting to come from Tauber and posted in Brighton. The beach was watched but no body was recovered and the police decided the suicide letter was a ruse, and that Leon was on the run. Interesting to note that Brighton was familiar territory for the Taubers who had lived there for a few months in 1918.
The Trial
That June, in Tauber’s absence, Samuel Cohen and Charles Benjamin Waitzer were in the dock at the Old Bailey. They pleaded not guilty to the charges but were sentenced to 12 months imprisonment ‘in the second division’. This meant they were kept away from the worst, third division criminals.
If a prisoner failed to show up at court, their bail was forfeited. When Tauber’s bail was set at £2,000, four men, Joseph Henry Elkes of Houndsditch, and Judah Lubell, John Henry Fish and David Rosenberg, all of Barbican, City of London, had each guaranteed £500. This was in addition to Tauber’s personal recognizance of £2,000. When Tauber absconded, they had to pay up, but as business acquaintances not friends, why did they agree to this arrangement in the first place?
An insight was provided by a couple of articles that appeared in John Bull, a right-wing patriotic magazine, its content including antisemitic material unacceptable today. The writer of ‘Mystery of a vanishing swindler’ claimed David Rosenberg, as a practising Jew, responded to a tearful plea from Mrs Tauber, begging him to save her devout husband from a Brixton cell. The four guarantees were duly called in when Tauber disappeared, but Rosenberg could only manage to raise £300. He advertised a reward for information leading to Tauber’s arrest, and despite leads that sent him searching up and down England, Tauber remained at large. John Bull pointed out that Rosenberg would be sent to jail if he failed to pay the outstanding £200 but did not say what happened.
An expensive sleep – enter Mr Dove
The police continued their unsuccessful search for Tauber on both sides of the Channel. It’s likely his case would have been forgotten, were it not for dramatic events at 5 Brondesbury Park that happened later that year, within a few days of each other. Sometime on the afternoon of 1 August, a thief entered the house and stole around £1,500 worth of jewellery and cash while Mrs Tauber was asleep in the back garden. There were signs the back door had been forced. From the outset, this incident attracted wide publicity. Leon’s court case and disappearance were resurrected by the press who asked even more questions. Could it have been an inside job? The time of the theft was vague, Mrs Tauber said she had been in garden during the morning and afternoon so couldn’t say when it happened. She had only recently redeemed the jewels which had been pawned, and the stolen items had been carefully selected.
One report asserted that the police believed it would be impossible for anyone who didn’t know the house well, to have carried out ‘such a daring robbery’. It went on to say that part of the stolen goods had been recovered. They had been pawned by a bearded man who called himself Dove, which the reporter incorrectly claimed was English for Tauber, but it was possible Tauber might have chosen it as a pseudonym, as ‘taube’ is German for dove. The article went on to say a man answering the description of Mr Dove was seen in Kilburn on the day of the robbery. Mr Dove never appears in the press again, and the publican and shop owner who said they’d seen a man answering Dove’s description, ‘a queer customer’ said the tobacconist, were hardly the most convincing witnesses. But the fact no one was ever arrested for the theft begs the question, did Tauber return to his old neighbourhood and with his wife’s cooperation, steal the jewellery to provide himself with funds?
Tauber was variously reported as being in Amsterdam, Brussels, Manchester, Leeds, Hull, Grimsby, St Albans and London, always one step ahead of his pursuers. When asked, Mrs Tauber said she didn’t know where he was living. In September 1925, John Bull reported Leon had shaved off his moustache, grown a beard and acquired a new passport in the name of ‘F. Harvey’, intending to journey to Buenos Aires via Norway.
The last straw
The second incident was tragic, the suicide of Mrs Tauber’s cook on 3 August just two days after the burglary. Dora Sternlicht (38) took a dose of spirits of salts (hydrochloric acid), a corrosive poison, and was found lying in agony at the bottom of the stairs. She died two days later at Willesden General Hospital. Some reports said she believed she was suspected of the robbery. Poor Dora had many problems. Her husband Woolf had abandoned her and their children five years earlier, leaving Dora with no means of support. At the inquest her son Abraham said his mother was always worried about making ends meet and that she complained about being overworked and run down. Mrs Tauber said she never thought Dora had anything to do with the robbery and was away at the time. The coroner did consider the possibility Dora had thought she was suspected of the theft, ‘this would have been the last straw after her other troubles’, but the verdict was ‘suicide while of unsound mind’.
The press dubbed Fern Brae the ‘House of Three Mysteries’, but Leon’s son Solomon told a reporter, ‘It is ridiculous to connect the burglary here or Mrs Sternlicht’s sad death with the disappearance of my father. They are unfortunate coincidences and nothing more’. But were they? While poor Dora Sternlicht was caught up in the aftermath of the burglary, there is evidence to suggest that the Taubers worked together to steal the jewellery.
The man who wasn’t drowned at Brighton
In December 1925 the press reported Tauber was living with relatives in Germany, Fern Brae had been sold and Mrs Tauber had ‘departed for an unknown destination’. John Bull went further, saying that Leon was running a business under his own name in Nuremberg. But there’s no evidence to back this up and so far as Leon is concerned, that is where the trail ends; in fact it ended earlier, on 6 May as Tauber was never reliably seen again after that. We don’t know if Sarah joined her husband, but in 1937 she was living in a Bloomsbury hotel, moving to 12 Glebe Court Stanmore by 1939, where she described herself as a retired widow. She was living there when she died aged 82 in May 1954, with probate of £4,127 (worth about £150,000 today) granted to her son Samuel. Sarah was buried in Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery.
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