Revealing life of master criminal

Four major book awards since 2007 for, among other subjects, biographies of Brian Clough and Harold Larwood, have enhanced Menston-based sports writer Duncan Hamilton’s reputation.

So why for his latest publication has he turned his attention to the life and times of a master criminal nicknamed Harry the Valet?

He says: “I was asked by a publisher to do a book about Walter Dew, the detective who caught the murderer Doctor Crippen. In the course of research, I came across Harry the Valet. We both thought he was a more interesting character, a real-life Raffles.”

Duncan memorably describes Walter Dew: “He became a convert to the art of public relations and self-promotion. Seeing its benefit in furthering his own claims, Dew made a point of always backing into the limelight. The swell of his ambition was diminished only by the size of his ego. He began to shape an image of himself as thoughtful and modestly erudite – a plain man’s Sherlock Holmes without the stained-glass mind.”

You only have to read the foreword to realise that Harry the Valet, whose real name was Henry Thomas Sands, belongs to that cast of larger-than-life characters dimmed rather than lit up by posterity – Max Woosnam, reputedly Britain’s greatest all-round sportsman, and Eddie Chapman, the safecracker who was a wartime double-agent for M15 and deceived the Germans so well that they awarded him an Iron Cross.

On the back of the dust jacket is a facsimile of a report in the New York Times dated January 19, 1899, which tells how Harry the Valet, erroneously named as “Johnson”, was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for stealing £25,000-worth of jewels from the notorious Duchess of Sutherland. The story’s concluding sentence is: “He was betrayed in the Sutherland affair by a former actress, to whom he was apparently devoted.”

The actress was a former Gaiety Girl who called herself Maude Richardson, but whose real name was Louisa Lancey. She knew him as Harry Williams, a multi-millionaire.

The man of a dozen aliases who, before his decline and fall, was a member of three swanky London clubs, lived in luxury in West End hotels, who made the detectives of Scotland Yard look as foolish as Arthur Conan Doyle’s private eye Sherlock Holmes said they were, was brought down by his love for one woman and his theft from another.

As with other books by Duncan, a good deal of absorbing circumstantial material supports the main story, the rise and fall of Harry the Valet – from the lack of training of London detectives to the rise of the scandalous Mary Caroline Mitchell, the second Duchess of Sutherland; her story includes two possible murders, a family feud, a court case over a contested will and six weeks in Holloway Prison for contempt of court.

Harry the Valet died at the age of 76; the last 20 years of his life were spent in poverty. His end may have been wretched, but in the words of the author: “The path towards it was, however, lit with bright flares, which illuminated one of crime’s braver spirits and a man who out-postured Narcissus.”

An assuming man himself, Duncan is clearly attracted to life’s braver spirits; Brian Clough, Harold Larwood and Harry the Valet have one thing in common – unshakeable self-belief.