Downfall of a Victorian Fraudster

Jabez, pictured on the front cover, was
described by contemporaries as being
short  and stout with spindly legs.

Jabez Spencer Balfour was a Victorian businessman and MP who had some very creative accounting methods. When his fraud was discovered and his massive business empire collapsed, he ran away to Argentina with a young lady who was not his wife (she was in a mental hospital), leaving thousands of destitute victims behind. Some of the people whose lives he destroyed were so distraught they killed themselves: unable to face a future where they had nothing to live on, they preferred death to the workhouse.

Today Jabez is largely forgotten, but in the mid-1890s he was at the centre of a huge scandal, involving financial mismanagement, corruption and fraud. Colourful and charismatic, his life and his misdeeds rival anything you'll find in fact or fiction. The obvious comparison in modern times is newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, with a touch of 'great train robber' Ronnie Biggs thrown in for good measure. And his story also echoes that of Augustus Melmotte, in Anthony Trollope's 'The Way We Live Now'.

The similarities are not lost on journalist David McKie, who pieced Jabez' history together. Initially looking to write an article about this flamboyant swindler, McKie soon realised he had enough material for a book, and the result is Jabez,The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Scoundrel. I borrowed it from the library because Jabez was, for a time, MP for Tamworth (where I live), and I couldn't put it down. It's a riveting and well written tale, which reeled me in and kept me reading into the early hours of the morning, because I wanted to know what happened to Jabez.

By the way, I should mention that he preferred to be known as J Spencer Balfour, especially after he entered Parliament – perhaps he felt it made him sound more serious and important. But I shall continue to call him Jabez, because it is such a wonderful name!

Born in 1843, his mother was Clara Lucas Balfour, who lectured on literature and the status of woman and was a famous temperance campaigner. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Jabez was also a great temperance man – yet after his fall from grace a collection of fine wines and champagnes was found at his home, one of many contradictions in his life.

Jabez,  painted in watercolour by Sir Leslie
Ward. The painting, which was originally
published by Vanity Fair in 1892 is in the
National Portrait Gallery.

However, he owed his success to the temperance movement and its non-conformist supporters. His company, the Liberator Building Society, aimed to help non-conformists buy their own homes, rather than renting. While poorer folk saved what little cash they could spare, Jabez also persuaded wealthy non-conformists to invest. He attracted many powerful backers, and the business went from strength to strength. Jabez was invited on to the board of many other companies, and became involved in ambitious property developments, as well as a scheme to reclaim Brading Harbour (now known as Bembridge) on the Isle of Wight.

A staunch Liberal, he was MP for Tamworth, and later for Burnley, but was rejected by voters in Croydon (where he made his home), so decamped to Burcot, near Oxford, where he lived in style and set himself up as squire, distributing largesse to the local community.

When the crash came, in 1892, investigators discovered an interconnected web of companies (including the London and General Bank) where assets had been grossly over priced, and cheques for huge sums of money were passed from business to business, which may have looked good on paper – but there was no actual money to change hands. The same directors sat on many boards, and did very nicely out of it, while Jabez's trusted henchmen also seemed to have fingers in many pies. On the whole, it seems there were no proper accounting systems or auditing, and little discussion: everything was decided by Jabez, who was known as Skipper.

Jabez when he was Mayor of Croydon.

Protesting his innocence, he insisted he was a wronged man, said it was all a mistake, and claimed the money was there but he needed time to sort it out – then fled to Argentina accompanied by two young women, one of whom appears to have been his lover. All efforts to have him sent home failed, until 1895 when a Scotland Yard detective kidnapped him!

He was jailed, as were some of his business associates, and after his release in 1906 his memoirs about prison life were serialised in the Daily Mail. After that he became a consultant mining engineer (though what his credentials were for this it's hard to know), travelling to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Burma, where he hoped to work in a tin mine. He died on a train in February 1916, while travelling from Paddington to Wales, where he was due to start a new job. He was 72.

A sketch made by P Renouard, showing
Jabez at his trial. 

Jabez is a fascinating character, but it's hard to know what his motives were. Alongside the business scam, he did a lot that was good. Over the years the Liberator Building Society did help many people buy a home. In Croydon, Jabez was actively involved in numerous worthy causes to help the community, and he gave £1,000 and a peal of bells for a new Congregational Church. In Burcot he replaced farm workers' cottages, installed gas lights in the village and built an institute for residents.

I can't decide if he was a scoundrel who set out to deliberately defraud people, a victim of his success, or delusional. McKie seems to have the same problem. Did his many business interests get too big and unwieldy, making them difficult to manage? Did something go wrong, and in an effort to put things right did he borrow from one company to pay off another, intending to put the money back? Was he some kind of egomaniac who thought anything he did was OK, and that he was above the normal laws of society – or was he some kind of fantasist who genuinely thought everything was all right?

Whatever the truth, I can't help but feel a certain admiration for him, even though he fooled so many people and wrecked so many lives. He was hard-working, enthusiastic, always grabbed life with both hands, and managed to pick himself up and start all over again when things went wrong. And he does seem to have been genuinely interested in improving the lot of those need. Not that any of that excuses his behaviour, but it does seem he was more complex than I originally thought, and wasn't a total villain. 

A House on Stilts

Ledbury, in Herefordshire, is one one of those beautiful, historic, little towns where everything in the town centre seems to be hundreds of years old. It's where my mother lives, so while she was ill and I was looking after her I took the chance to wander around and take some new photographs, since most of mine were taken a long time ago, so here are a few for this week's Saturday Snapshot.

The Market House, a distinctive black and white building, stands on 16 wooden stilts, with narrow steps leading up to the entrance. It dominates the main street and is generally regarded as the jewel in the town's architectural crown – and when you see how impressive all the other buildings are you realise this one has to be pretty special.

Timber framed, with brick infill, it was built in the 17th century as a corn warehouse: the grain was stored inside the raised structure, where it was protected from the weather and was safe from rats, mice and other vermin, while traders sold their wares from stalls and shops in the covered area below. A market is still held there twice a week, which is a nice link with the past I think.

Work started in 1617, but was not completed until 1668 because somewhere along the line cash (raised by public subscription) ran out. Eventually the trustees took money from legacies set up to provide clothing for the poor, and in return were supposed to provide 12 sets of garments each year, paid from the profits made by renting out the Market House. It sounds a pretty fair deal to me, but I've no idea whether the promise was ever carried out!

At that stage the house itself had two floors, and it's possible one was use for storage, and the other for meetings. But when the Turnpike Act was levied in the early 18th century, traders couldn't afford to pay the toll gate taxes, so they brought samples of corn to the market, and the building where they had previously paid to store grain got emptier and emptier, and had to be used for wool, hops and acorns for the local tanning industry. I knew very little about the Turnpike Act, or its effect on people, but that's what I like about local history - you like at a building, and think how gorgeous it is, then discover a whole social history attached to it!

It brought in little money and was rarely full. However, the enterprising Victorians stripped out the inside, leaving the outer shell intact, and created space for meetings, exhibitions, sales and performances by travelling theatre companies. It was also been used as a Town Hall. Today it still provides a venue for meetings, sales and exhibitions and, more recently, weddings were held there, but the Disability Access law put paid to that.

It's thought much of the construction was undertaken by John Abel, who was appointed King's Carpenter by Charles I. He was a local man, and a number of Herefordshire buildings are attributed to him, but there is no evidence to support the theory that he was involved with Ledbury's Market House. The wooden supports are made of oak, and were repaired and strengthened in 2006, when the entire building, including the posts, was raised into the air with the aid of hydraulic jacks. It was a tremendous feat of modern engineering, and somewhere I have a photo showing it surrounded by scaffolding, and perched on metal framework, but I can't find it anywhere, although I have searched and searched.

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/  

Kilmeny of the Orchard

Kilmeny had been, she knew not where,

And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;

Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,

Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew.

That's the only bit I can ever remember from James Hogg's spooky poem 'Kilmeny', but I've always loved its haunting quality. So when I learned that LM Montgomery, author of the wonderful Anne of Green Gables, had written a book titled Kilmeny of the Orchard, I was interested, and thought it would be an ideal choice for the Canadian Book Challenge. This was earmarked for my September contribution, but although I read it last month I'm behind with posts, as I explained earlier in the week, and there will be two Canadian reads during October so I can catch up.

Anyway, I digress. Nan, at Letters From a Hill Farm, really rated this, but I'm not so enthusiastic. Bits of it were delightful, and Montgomery is excellent on descriptions of scenery and wildlife, but overall it really, really irritated me. Our heroine, the beautiful and virtuous Kilmeny is just too perfect, and lacks the appeal of Anne Shirley. I always find Anne very endearing and human, but Kilmeny is neither. The novel also lacks the humour of Anne of Green Gables – not that every novel needs to be funny, but the occasional laugh would have levened the mix in this one.

But what annoyed me most was the notion that that beautiful people are good and clever, and that foreigners are somehow not quite right, and a are 'low' and not to be trusted. I know theories like this were widespread when the novel was published in 1910, but I thought they were distasteful in the extreme, and there are other novelists writing at the same time who didn't express such views.

And I found the hero's obsession with naive, childlike Kilmeny, and his assertion that he will teach her everything she needs to know was more than a little disturbing.

Possibly, at this point I should try and give you a brief synopsis of the book, otherwise my comments will make no sense whatsoever. So, here goes. Eric Marshall has just graduated from college, but has no need to work because he is heir to a fortune and will work in his father's department store. However, he agrees to help a sick friend by temporarily taking over as schoolmaster to a small community on Prince Edward's Island. In the beautiful woods he catches a glimpse of a beautiful young maiden playing beautiful music on her violin. She is Kilmeny, who is an orphan and is very beautiful – oh, sorry, I have already mentioned that, but Eric can only ever love a beautiful woman (shallow bastard). Anyway, she cannot speak, but communicates most ably (and beautifully) by writing lengthy messages incredibly quickly. Brought up by her dour uncle and aunt, who are brother and sister, Kilmeny has never been to school, and never mixes with people.

She's a mysterious figure with a tragic back story dating back to the months before her birth – for her father discovers his first wife is not dead, as he thought, but very much alive, and Kilmeny's goes mad. Well, maybe I exaggerate. She has some kind of breakdown and becomes very peculiar indeed.

Eric, who is terribly good looking, and clever, and everything that is right and honorable, has clandestine meetings with with Kilmeny because he loves her and she loves him. But there is a fly in the ointment...

Before our upright hero can tell Kilmeny's guardians he has been meeting their niece in secret, and ask for her hand in marriage, Neil, the son of Italian pedlars who has been brought up by the aunt and uncle (his mother died and his father ran away) tells on them because he is love with Kilmeny (are you still with me?). I felt sorry for Neil, who is portrayed as 'sullen' and 'low', a thoroughly bad lot, because of his Italian heritage!

Kilmeny won't marry Eric because she can't speak, and Eric's friend, a brilliant doctor, believes her muteness is caused by some kind of psychological disorder, and she may speak if she is shocked into it.

All ends happily, of course, so there you have it it, a sweet, charming, romantic fairy tale – only I don't think it is really. None of the characters really came to life, and Kilmeny and Eric are so beautiful and perfect and good that it's positively sickening.

And, as I said before, it's idealogically unsound, even if some of ideas were prevalent at the time, and there is stuff about children paying for the sins of their parents which also annoyed me, and it's chock full of that rather cloying sentimentality which was so popular with Victorian and Edwardian readers (but not with me). 

By the way, downloaded this from Project Gutenberg, and read it on the Kindle, which is not an attractive image, so I've used pictures of book coves to brighten things up a little! And I should mention that Montgomery quotes quite extensively from the poem, and if you want to read it you'll find it here.

Wordsworth's French Lover

My Virago edition of 'Fair Exchange'. Personally
I'm not keen on the cover, but I often whinge
 about front coverss, so feel free to disagree!

I've always been fascinated by William Wordsworth's youthful espousal of revolutionary French politics, and his love affair with Frenchwoman Annette Vallon, who had his child in 1792. Somehow it's hard to reconcile this passionate, young man with the more familiar, older poet., who always comes across as a rather reactionary, quiet and isolated man – the two selves seem at odds with each other.

Writer Michèle Roberts was equally intrigued took inspiration from the story for a novel, creating characters, places and events based on the romance. But there's a twist in her tale, and things are not quite as straight forward as you think, for the worlds of England and France overlap as two women, both unmarried, both expecting a child, seek sanctuary in the same small French village. And, as we learn in the opening sentence, a crime has been committed: a 'wicked and unusual crime' that took place in 1792...

In an author's note at the start of 'Fair Exchange' Roberts is at pains to stress that her novel is not about Wordsworth, but about his 'compatriot and friend' William Saygood who is, she assures us, 'a wholly fictonal character'. Even so, it's clear that Saygood and Wordsworth are one and the same – although, with tongue in cheek, she actually has the poet make appearances off-stage. And she tells us: “Similarly, although Mary Wollstonecraft appears in the novel, I have plundered aspects of her life for my character Jemima Boote.” Throughout, names are changed: Annette Vallon becomes Annette Villon, Wordsworth's wife Mary Hutchinson is Fanny Skynner, while his sister Dorothy is Polly.

And there's a whole raft of purely fictional characters, including Daisy, the slip-shod maid of all work at both Fanny's childhood home and the cottage where she lives after her marriage. Then there's Louise, the pragmatic French peasant who looks after Annette and is the perpetrator of the mysterious crime.

The female characters really came to life - I felt I knew them. And I liked the way the perspective shifts between them, from Louise, to Jemima, to Daisy, back to Louise, to Annette and so on. But we never see things from William's point of view or learn what motivates him. He may be rather charming and, presumably, rather good-looking, but he comes across as a bit of wimp, a man who goes out of his way to avoid confrontation, rather weak-willed, and selfish, with no sense of responsibility. Frankly, I think his women would have been happier without him, but I've never been a huge Wordsworth fan.

It's the women who dominate, and the themes about their role in society, apply as much to the 21st century as they do to the Georgian period. Louise, Fanny, Jemima, Annette, and Daisy all have different expectations of what life has to offer - and they all make very different decisions. 

At heart Annette, the cosseted daughter of a doctor, is very conservative, but it's easy to understand how she fell in love with an English poet during the upheaval of the French revolution. When her convent school is ransacked she escapes to friends and meets William. Alone and afraid, far from home, she is entranced by the young man, and offers to teach him English. And, of course, love blooms during the lessons. When she returns home pregnant, her parents are only too happy to pack her off to the village of their maid (Louise) so she will be out of the way. Abandoned by William, who marries his childhood sweetheart, she is unable to cope on her own, accepts a proposal of marriage from her wealthy landlord, even though she doesn't love him, and settles down to lead a respectable life.

Jemima is probably the character modern women will identify with: tall and robust, with big feet, she is 'all too obviously a young woman with an independent mind and an active brain', and is a free-thinker who refuses to be tied by convention, and is determined to carve out a career as a writer. In contrast, her friend Fanny is a small, pretty airhead, set on catching a husband by fluttering her eyelashes and acting helpless. Actually, I feel rather sorry for poor Fanny, because she should have married a wealthy man who would have kept her in style. But she weds William, and instead of living in a big house, wearing fine clothes and holding a good position in society, she ends up in an overcrowded, grubby cottage, with hardly any cash, and a husband who spends more time with his sister than he does with her and the children. No wonder she takes to her bed and imagines herself ill!

The novel also raises questions about 'nature versus nurture', which was a popular subject for debate in the late 18th and early 19th century, with some philosophers claiming children were born innocent, and others maintaining that man was essentially brutish and cruel.

'Fair Exchange' is also a wonderful portrayal of Georgian life – not just the social divisions and manners of the day, but the way middle-class households were run, and how poor agricultural labourers got by. Housework and food figure large. In England Jemima enjoys fresh, sweet oily walnuts dipped in salt, sultana studded buns, twists of cheese pastry, and mushroom ragout. In France, as you might expect, people seem more concerned about what they eat and there are delicacies like roast woodcock, soups made from home-grown vegetables, and cabbage leaves, stuffed with chestnuts, breadcrumbs and herbs, and cooked in cider.

William Wordsworth painted by William Shuter in 1798
 when he was 28 years old.

As an aside, I'm thinking of trying this last recipe, because it sounds so delicious, though I'm not sure which herbs would be best – sage, perhaps? Does anyone else ever want to eat dishes which feature in novels? Or am I being light-weight, and do you all consider more serious matters?

Anyway, on that note (or almost) I shall finish. I loved this novel: I loved everything about it, the story, the characters, the setting, the way it was written, and the revelation of the hidden secret. Years ago I started reading 'The Daughters of the House', and didn't get along with it all, and never finished it. So I've never tried anything else by Michèle Roberts, until I spotted this in a charity shop, and now I feel I have missed out on a great author. I need recommendations for her other work - what shall I read next?

October Reading - and Writing!

To celebrate the start of October, here
is the the illustration for the month from
the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours, which
was created in the 15th century.

Well, October is upon us, and what with holidays, various trips, visits from my Mother and Elder Daughter, outings with Younger Daughter, computer problems, and then mum being ill, I seem to be way off track with reading and blogging, and need to get myself organised again. August and September really didn't go according to plan, and while I seem to have read lots of books which weren't on the monthly list, there were things I meant to read and didn't - and I didn't get round to posting many reviews. So October is going to be a kind of mopping up month, caching up on writing, and reading things which have been sitting around for a while. Actually, I said that about September, but I can but try – and if I don't succeed, at least I will be well prepared for November!

I didn't get round to 'To The Lighthouse', because I loved 'Mrs Dalloway' so much that after years of being scared to read Virginia Woolf, I'm now afraid to read more in case I don't like it as much! And Kate O’Brien’s Without My Cloak' is still on the shelf, unopened.

My notes on Carol Ann Duffy's 'The Bees' flew away when Younger Daughter's old computer (which I used after my laptop died) ceased to function at all and, despite assurances from The Man of the House, they do not appear to be on the hard drive. Since this was a library book, I can't write about it until I can borrow it again - unless I buy it! A rough draft of my thoughts on 'The Provincial Lady Goes Further', by EM Delafield also disappeared into the ether in the great computer disaster, but I can remember what I said about that, and re-instate it fairly easily.

Meanwhile, the stack of books that are 'read but not posted' seems to have grown. There's 'Kilmeny of the Orchard', by LM Montgomery, for my Canadian Reading Challenge (I've got mixed feelings on this one), and 'The Third Miss Symons', by FM Mayor, which was difficult to get into – it was one of those books where I wanted to slap the central character (you can't possibly call her a heroine) good and hard.

Some of the 'read but not posted' pile.

But Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles' and 'Fair Exchange' by Michele Roberts were both absolutely fantastic, and Diana Tutton's 'Guard Your Daughters' was one of the best novels I've read this year. And I mustn't forget 'Jabez', David McKie's account of the rise and fall of a Victorian rogue whose financial frauds rival anything dreamt up by modern scoundrels, and could come straight from a Trollope novel.

That sounds a lot of catching up, but they are books that I've read, and I've even scrawled out some some ideas about them, so it won't take long to turn my thoughts into proper posts (as long as I can decipher my writing!).

To be read...

So, hopefully, I'll have plenty of time for more reading. Susanna Moodie's 'Roughing it in the Bush' will put me back on course with my Canadian Reading, and I'm looking forward to 'The True Deceiver' by the wonderful Tove Jansson, which was just begging to be rescued from a charity shop. And I bought 'The Town in Bloom' when I ordered 'Guard Your Daughters' because I wanted to explore more Dodie Smith. In addition, although the Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week is long since fiished, I've acquired 'Every Man For Himself' and 'Injury Time'. And I got Carola Dunn's 'The Gunpowder Plot' from the library, because people keep telling me how good her Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are, so I thought I would give one a go. Finally, I'm just finishing Robert MacFarlane's 'The Wild Places', downloaded on the Kindle some weeks ago for an incredible 99p. I love a bargain!