Tough love Counterfeit count and the sensational wedding that never was
Friday is St Valentine’s Day, when it’s traditional for lovers to exchange cards, chocolate and promises. It’s also traditional for Bristol Times to dig out longforgotten local tales of love-disasters. Eugene Byrne has been exhuming this year’s crop of romantic disappointments
MICHALOWSKY-TUCKER – On Thursday, May 14th 1908, at Westbury Church, by special licence, Emily Tucker, widow of the late Chas. P. Tucker, and the only child of W. Talbot, Esq … to Count Theophil Michalowsky, only child of the late Count and Countess Alexandra Michalowsky, Colonel in the Russian Lifeguards, St Petersburg.
So ran the marriage notice in the Bristol Evening Times on Saturday May 16, 1908. The advert was placed in the paper in advance anticipation of the nuptials …
… But the wedding never took place.
The marriage of a local widow to a Russian aristocrat in what was then the sleepy village of Westburyon-Trym was, by any measure, sensational local news.
On the day, the happy couple drove up in a carriage pulled by two handsome grey horses, and driven by a smiling coachman in a cocked hat and with a huge spray of flowers on his lapel.
Inside the church were 200 guests, and a crowd of onlookers gathered outside to watch as the Russian count got out, wearing a silk hat, frock coat and a sash in the red, white and blue colours of his country’s flag. The bride, who gave her age as 45 years, wore a white satin gown with a wreath of orange blossom.
Inside the church, the minutes passed and the vicar had not arrived. Count Michalowsky and Mrs Tucker repaired to the vestry to ask the curate what was wrong. The curate had no idea.
Could he perform the service for them? Alas, he could not.
Now the Russian vice-consul arrived in a carriage, followed by a detective inspector of the Bristol Constabulary. All stood around awkwardly in the vestry, while the guests wondered what was going on.
Finally, three-quarters of an hour late, the Rev. Wilkins arrived, apologising.
In the vestry, he explained that he had been forced to make inquiries as to whether or not he could marry an English Protestant to a member of the Russian Orthodox church. He said he needed to make further inquiries, and the wedding would have to be postponed.
The conversation grew quite heated. There were more questions and someone – we don’t know who – used the word “adventurer” to describe the count.
He became furious, saying: “I do now know what you mean by the word ‘adventurer’ but if it means what I think, I would thrash you if it were not for this lady’s presence.”
Between the lines, and given the presence of a police detective, it was clear that the difficulty was more than merely religious. The vicar was playing for time.
The disappointed pair drove off in their carriage to Mrs Tucker’s home, accompanied by the jeers of some of the factory girls in the crowd outside.
The couple and some of their guests partook of the wedding breakfast anyway, and the count later visited the vicar at his home, interrupting the Rev. Wilkins’ lunch to harangue him.
The following week, Mrs Tucker wrote to the local press:
“During the last few days various reports have appeared in your journal about the postponement of my marriage with the Count Michalowsky … I have declined the honour of an alliance with him, and it is quite on account of my attitude in the matter that the marriage will not now take place.
“Sincerely yours, Emily Tucker, 39 Westbury Road, Westbury-onTrym”
Bristol’s society wedding of the year was now off, but that was far from the end of the story.
In July, Count Theophil Michalowsky, whose address at the time was Caroline Place, Hotwells, was arrested and charged with making a false declaration to the Bristol Diocese.
During the committal proceedings before Bristol magistrates, it transpired that he was no Russian aristocrat, but one Gustave William August Reber, an office clerk and interpreter. A Mr Luke of Stackpool Road told the court that he had employed Reber 20 years previously, that Reber spoke six languages fluently and had been an efficient and honest employee.
He also deposed that Reber already had a wife and a number of children.
Luke testified that when he had read in the press of the interrupted marriage, he had visited Mrs Tucker at Westbury and had had strong words with Reber. As he was talking to Mrs Tucker, the housemaid and Mrs Tucker’s son ran into the room to say that the ‘count’ was at that moment running off up the road with his suitcase.
Reber was arrested and spent four months at Horfield on remand before his case came up at Bristol Assizes in November.
He was now giving an address in Fulham and the court was told that his wife was devoted to him and wanted him back.
She had informed counsel that Reber had been a loving husband, but had started to behave erratically two years previously because he had been swindled out of some money.
Reber, in the dock was in tears. “Don’t distress yourself,” Mr Justice Bucknill told him. “I am not going to punish you. You seem to have been a very kind husband and father, and your wife is evidently very fond of you. Go to her in your trouble.”
Reber was bound over for £10 and released.
But we don’t know the full story, and probably never will.
The obvious conclusion was that Reber had merely been preying on a vulnerable, and supposedly wealthy, widow. But she might not have been completely naïve.
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If it means what I think, I would thrash you if it were not for this lady’s presence Count Theophil Michalowsky AKA Gustave William August Reber
Mrs Tucker’s late husband had been a timber importer, and the business was in financial trouble when he died. The creditors had not gone away. Mrs Tucker, far from being a rich widow, needed a lot of money. A Russian aristocrat would resolve her problems very well indeed.
Later in 1908, Mrs Tucker ended up marrying one of her husband’s creditors. Little good it seems to have done her. By 1911 the couple were renting two rooms in Fishponds. When she died in 1935 the total value of her estate was £68. She was far from destitute, but even further from great wealth.
So who had been using whom?
Minnie Small’s big problem
THERE was commotion in Bristol police court the day that a coal haulier named Shadrach John Baker testified that he had agreed to perform a marriage ceremony because he had nothing else on that day.
The tale of Minnie Small provided a momentary and humorous distraction for newspaper readers around the country in January of 1910, though the reality for the poor woman was anything but funny.
On January 10 she presented herself at Bridewell police station, saying she wanted to turn herself in for bigamy.
In the police court a couple of weeks later, she stated that in 1906 she had married a man named Frank Small. Small was a violent and abusive husband, and at that point was serving six months in a prison in South Wales.
In 1909, she went through a marriage ceremony with one Robert Johnson at the register office at Pontypool. Johnson had now deserted her and she and her baby were destitute, which is why she had presented herself at the police station.
The difficulty was that her original marriage to Small was not altogether kosher. Shadrach John Baker, coal haulier of St Pauls, testified that he had officiated at the marriage of the defendant and Frank Small.
No, he agreed, he was not a registrar. On the day, he had agreed to carry out the ceremony for them because he “had nothing else to do”.
Robert Johnson, now working as collier at Pontypridd, told the court that he did not propose to the defendant. He married her because she asked him to.
Small admitted that when he deserted his wife he joined the Army, stating in his enlistment papers that he was single. He also added that Johnson knew he and Minnie were together and that Johnson had wanted to fight him for her, “and let the best man claim her”.
Johnson denied this, saying that he had told Small, “You can have her and the child. Do what you like with her.”
Small had never contributed a penny towards his wife’s maintenance and the proceedings ended with Minnie trying to assault Small in court.
It’s an unfair cop
THE Bristol police court was crowded on Wednesday September 8, 1875, as it wasn’t often that an actual police constable was up before the magistrates.
Charles Hannay (PC 124) was charged with assaulting Mr Thomas Stoyel, landlord of the New Inn, Bath Road, Bristol.
Mr Clifton, opening for the prosecution, said Mr Stoyel had left home to go for a few days’ partridge shooting in Somerset with friends, leaving his wife and child at the inn.
He returned earlier than expected, arriving at Temple Meads on the mail train from Taunton at 12.40am. He walked home and knocked on the door, but no one answered. He threw pebbles at the bedroom window, to no avail, and so walked around in the hope of finding a window he could open.
He managed to let himself in, had some bread and cheese, took off his boots and went up to bed, only to find the bedroom door was locked from the inside. He knocked loudly on the door for several minutes and his wife came to the door and tried to engage him in conversation to prevent him from entering.
Growing suspicious, he pushed his way into the room, turned the gas lights up full and found PC Hannay asleep in the bed. Stoyel grabbed Hannay and pushed him towards the stairs and tried to get him to leave, even though he was only wearing a night-shirt.
Hannay became belligerent, while all the time Mrs Stoyel was screaming abuse at her husband. Stoyel ran out and called a passerby to summon the police as Hannay attacked him, yelling that he could beat 40 men like him. He made a grab for Stoyel, yanking out a handful of hair from his beard. The pair then fell to fighting, with Hannay still yelling abuse even when a constable arrived and arrested him.
Hannay got 21 days hard labour. And presumably that was the end of his police career.
Saved by her stays
ON Sunday March 2, 1879 Frank Sedgbeer, aged 22, was walking along Dove Street, Kingsdown, with his fiancé, a young woman named Emily Tripp.
Suddenly and without warning, he pulled a six-chambered revolver from his pocket and shot her twice.
Alerted by the noise, residents and passers-by saw him running away and a group of people started to chase him down Gay Street, where he stopped, turned the gun on himself, shot himself in the mouth and fell down dead.
Sedgbeer was an out-of-work clerk who had been working as a boiler stoker at a hat factory, while Emily Tripp was a barmaid at the Alhambra music hall in Broadmead.
It was thought that he had shot her because she had been seen walking out with another man.
The inquest was told that he had taken the revolver from the suitcase of a friend who had been visiting him, and that he was of an excitable temperament.
The inquest jury duly recorded a verdict of felo-de-se – the old legal term for suicide. Normally, Victorian juries went out of their way to avoid such verdicts because of the stigma and the pain it would cause the deceased’s families, but since Sedgbeer had clearly planned to murder his fiancé, they presumably took against him.
The verdict was, to any good Christian, a terrible one. Suicides had previously been buried in unconsecrated ground or at crossroads, and by 1879 things were only slightly more enlightened. There would be no Christian funeral, and no clergyman would attend.
He was buried in a local cemetery – we don’t know which – and a few of his friends came along, one of them saying a prayer over the grave. A large crowd of curious sightseers turned up, too, but the cemetery gates were closed to them.
So far so tragic, but the story did have a happy outcome for Emily Tripp at least. One of the bullets
made a small wound in her shoulder which did no serious harm.
The other, aimed straight for her heart, hit one of the steel stays of her corset and so glanced off to one side.
‘A forward little hussy’
IN 1906, it was reported that magistrates in Scunthorpe were fining courting couples for overtly public displays of affection. An unnamed lady writing in the Bristol Magpie considered this an unnecessarily bureaucratic intervention and fondly recalled how she and friends would disturb local lovers:
In my younger days, I used to take an unholy delight in taking a stroll around the Downs in summer evenings accompanied by a couple of schoolboy friends, and when we spotted a particularly loving couple, seated on a comfortable seat, and the young lady’s head rested on her lover’s manly shoulder (probably so that her neck might not ache, while she was occupied in looking at the moon), we three would calmly seat ourselves on the selfsame seat, and distinctly whistle ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ or something equally appropriate.
As a rule, the flirting couple would rise, and casting looks of scorn upon us, leave us in possession of the seat, whereupon we also would take our leave and go and disturb someone else. On one occasion my two boy companions got their ears soundly boxed by a particularly muscular swain, while I being only a girl was let off with nothing more severe than being called a forward little hussy!
Now if any magistrate has an objection to flirting, I can assure him that half a dozen small boys can rout more courting couples off the grass, than a whole station full of the biggest policemen in the force.
I charge nothing whatever for my advice but if followed I should be pleased to hear the result. But should any of the disturbed couples call upon me, it may be as well to say that I am a very busy woman, and am usually out, I certainly should be when they called.
A serial killer’s true love?
EDITH Mabel Pegler is one of very few Bristolians who can claim the questionable honour of having been married to a serial killer.
This was George Joseph Smith (1872-1915), the notorious ‘bridesin-the-bath’ killer, who married and then murdered at least three women to take their money. He also married several other women whom he simply deserted.
Having already spent several short sentences in prison for various minor offences, Smith met Edith Pegler after already having married one woman, and then, bigamously, another.
By around 1908 Smith was running a small shop on Bristol’s Gloucester Road, dealing in secondhand furniture. Between 1908 and 1915 the couple had a number of addresses on or around the same neighbourhood, including Ashley Down Road and Cranbrook Road.
The two had initially come into contact when Pegler had placed a local advertisement in the paper, seeking the position of housekeeper.
Smith responded to the advert and swiftly gave her the job. The work turned personal and after only a month George Smith and Edith Pegler were (bigamously) married on July 30, 1908 at St Peter’s register office in Bristol.
The relationship between the two was unique in the sense that Smith never felt the need to con her out of any finances despite constantly lying and obviously cheating on her.
In the following two years, Smith travelled throughout England, bigamously marrying several women along the way. His murder victims were drowned while taking a bath, Smith having discovered a technique which enabled him to kill them with no obvious signs of a struggle.
He explained his absences to Edith by telling her that, as a dealer in antiques, he had to travel to wherever items were for sale. During this time, Smith made sure Pegler was provided for financially, making her the only woman who gained wealth out of her relationship with Smith.
Police finally caught up with Smith when the father of one of his dead brides noticed a newspaper story in which a woman had died in the bath in similar circumstances. He was hanged in 1915.
There is no reason believe Pegler had the faintest idea what her ‘husband’ was doing. As far as she knew, he was a dealer in art and antiques whose work explained his long absences.
Following Smith’s death, Pegler continued to live with her mother on Ashley Down Road, later moving to rural Gloucestershire. She died in Slimbridge in 1953.
During Smith’s trial at the Old Bailey she had appeared as a witness and had been asked whether she had ever had any conversations with Smith about baths.
“I remember having a small conversation with him once,” she replied. “He advised me not to have too much to do with baths, as they were rather dangerous.”
A happy ending (possibly)
SIR William Gordon MacGregor, Bart. had been a familiar figure around Leyton and Walthamstow, and was a regular at the local cricket ground. Alas, he fell on hard times, and when he ended up partially paralysed (the result of a stroke?), he signed himself into the West Ham workhouse.
This was early 1903, a time when an actual baronet, a titled aristocrat, entering the poorhouse was a scandal and a sensation. But while the papers went mad for the story, others among the upper classes thought that this sort of thing Just Wasn’t Cricket. People might lose respect for their betters!
(Why his extended family – his brother was an army colonel with a distinguished record – could not look after him is a mystery.)
A high society lady – we don’t know her identity – took it upon herself to resolve Sir William’s predicament.
And so it was that Sir William’s dependence on the hospitality of the West Ham ratepayers was soon ended as he travelled to Bristol to marry.
Alas, the lady with whom Sir William had been matched by the mystery benefactress took one look at Sir William and changed her mind.
At this point, the sister of Sir William’s intended, Miss Alice Gulliver, a well-to-do spinster in her early fifties, decided that she would have Sir William.
Local satirical magazine the Bristol Magpie published a drawing of Sir William after the wedding took place at Southmead on Sunday April 5, 1903. The couple signed the register with a quill pen which Sir William declared he would have set in gold.
The couple took up residence at 11 Rockleaze Road, Sneyd Park, where they lived as man and wife for just two years before Sir William died, aged 57.
Lady MacGregor’s name was in the papers for years afterwards. It appeared in advertisements in which she recommended a patent medicine for kidney trouble.