The 'Lady', the baby, and a spot of bigamy

“One of the greatest hoaxers of the century”

In 1939, Lady Haldon announced that she had given birth to her recently deceased husband's child. The press besieged her home, hoping for a sighting of the new fifth Lord Haldon, but lurid stories emerged - 'Lady Haldon' was not what she seemed....

I came across the police file on 'Lady Haldon' at the National Archives. After searching census records and news reports of the case, I managed to piece together the strange story of one fraudulent lady, a shop-lifting baronet, and a stolen baby...

 

Florence Elizabeth, 'Lizzie', Summers, was at the centre of one of the most bizarre bigamy trials in history, but she was born into an ordinary West Midlands farming family in 1878. Lizzie was a “troublesome girl with no respect for the truth,” conning the local vicar to re-christen her 'Florence Marcia'. By the time she left home at 18, even her sister considered her a “dangerous woman." In 1897, her mother found Lizzie a job as a mother’s help 100 miles away in West Yorkshire. 

Lizzie left within a couple of months, claiming that she had a new job as housekeeper to a widower in Surrey. Soon she wrote home to announce that she had also become his wife. In fact, Lizzie was living with gamekeeper Job Jacks, a widower with two children. Census records reveal that Jacks had lived ten miles away from the Summers farm, and in 1897, around the time that Lizzie ran away, Jacks’s wife, Mary Ann had died. 

Four years later, the 1901 census shows 36-year-old Job Jacks, gamekeeper in Emberton Woods, Buckinghamshire with his 'wife' , 22-year-old Florence M Jacks. But Lizzie – or Florence Marcia as she now called herself – only married Jacks in 1907. They lived together for ten years, and had three children, but in 1914, the Summers heard that Lizzie had married again. 

There is no marriage record or any evidence that Jacks had died. Lizzie's paper trail emerges again in 1917. Still "good-looking, slim and golden-haired” she picked up Canadian Royal Army Medical Corps, Captain Dr Arthur Ireland in the Strand. Born in Ontario, Ireland was regarded as a “valuable officer." He said that when they married, Lizzie – or 'Norah Marcia Florence Jacks', as she told him her name was – claimed to be a 23-year-old widow. She was 39. 

The marriage was a failure. Arthur wrote to Lizzie in 1931, “We have never been happy, at least I have not.” Her sister thought that Lizzie “held Dr Ireland under her thumb” as he “would do anything for a bottle of whiskey.” They had one child, Joan, in 1918. Lizzie was now an accomplished con woman, as well as a bigamist. Betsy told the police: “she has defrauded many people during her career. In 1919 she bought three large houses in Nightingale Lane...incurred a debt of £400 to the Gas Light and Coke company and then disappeared leaving the tenants to pay.”

'Lady Haldon' at her 'husband's funeral

From babyfarming to husband-hunting

Florence Gibson, Lizzie’s former neighbour in Lowestoft, wrote to the police to tell them that around 1927 Lizzie had practised “the nefarious trade of Baby Farming.” Her police file includes a tantalisingly incomplete account from 1940 by Alys Herring, a 23-year-old hairdresser from County Durham, adopted by the Irelands around 1928, and abandoned aged 12, in 1930 at a Convent School in Cannes. 
 

But Lizzie gave up babyfarming; she had bigger fish in sight - a baronet, no less! A friend of Lizzie’s, Mrs Brightman, an actress, married Lawrence Palk, the third Lord Haldon in 1930. Shortly afterwards she “was found dead under the cliffs at Brighton” and Lizzie comforted the grieving widower by trying “to induce [him] to marry her.” He declined and died soon after.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering Arthur Ireland wrote to Lizzie requesting a divorce. “I have come to the conclusion that life and happiness is impossible for us...It cannot upset you very much as you are always travelling and I am left on my own.” The Irelands never officially divorced, but in 1933, Lizzie met Joseph Allan Rickards, a Yorkshire insurance salesman. Rickards insured a car for 'Lady Norah Haldon, widow of the third Lord Haldon,' and then married her on the 24th April 1935. He was 31, she was fat and 55, with a “peculiar walk.”

Rickards travelled a lot, but often stayed with Lizzie at her home in Cheshire. In late 1935, Rickards hired a private detective who spotted Lizzie “and the man Ireland in a bedroom both in a state of partial undress.” In 1936 he divorced her, citing Arthur Ireland as co-respondent. 

But 'Mrs Rickards,' soon found another husband, the charming Frederick George Hugh Clive Linwood. Linwood 41, ran the Mayfair Luncheon Club in Shepherd Market. They had plenty in common, for one thing they were both confidence tricksters. Linwood posed as ‘Lord Hugh Clive,’ although he may have once been a plate boy at the Carleton Club. They married at Caxton Hall, Westminster on the 24th April 1937 – the same day on which she had married Rickards two years before. Lizzie's name was recorded as “Rickards or Holdon [sic]” and Joan Ireland, Lizzie's 19-year-old daughter was one of the witnesses. Lizzie's sister, Betsy judged the marriage “not a success... her husband being a sodomite” and Lizzie had it annulled six months later, due to non-consummation. 

Desperate measures... 
 

The Haldon family were nobility – technically. Their family estates had long been sold and the third baronet lived in a tumbledown cottage in Devon and had allegedly slept on park benches. His son, the fourth Lord Haldon, also named Lawrence Palk, was little better off. In poor health and penniless he was imprisoned for petty theft. He had “no income except from...Public Assistance and his job as a packer at Selfridges.”

In early 1938, having jettisoned Linwood, Lizzie Ireland arrived in Lawrence Palk’s life. She wrote to him, signing herself ‘Lady Clive’ and offered him a weekly allowance, saying she wanted to assist him as she had known his father. Haldon eagerly accepted and Lizzie paid for his health care and a better flat. The police later found letters from Haldon, dated mid-June 1938, in Lizzie's flat, referring to his gratitude towards her. 

Their relationship didn't blossom into romance– the most romantic line from his letters offers Lizzie “Bundles of hugs” – in any case Haldon was seriously ill. But when he died in August 1938, Lizzie, now claiming to be his widow, took charge, arranging for him to be buried near her home in Toft, Cheshire. She was pictured in the newspapers, a pudding-faced voluminous figure in black. Although Haldon's illness would have made it impossible for him to travel, Lizzie claimed they had eloped that July.

She told the Daily Mail that they had had a long romantic history with Lord Haldon. Originally, she said their engagement was “broken off because he was so dictatorial... eventually we made up our quarrel and in 1927...re-engaged. By this time he was in serious financial difficulties and as he had been sent to prison at Marylebone police court for fraud and theft it was I who broke off the engagement. But I soon realised that he...only stole because he was desperate.” She said that they married secretly “because it seemed odd for an elderly couple like us to marry so late in life.”

Headline 'The Mystery of Lady Clive' (Daily Mail 18th August 1938)

In September 1939, when war broke out Dr Ireland re-joined the RAMC and was sent to Palestine, but first he and Lizzie remarried on her 60th birthday, the 2nd October. But Lizzie wasn't satisfied with a real husband and an imaginary dead noble husband. In early 1939 she started approaching pregnant working class women with many children, like Mrs Wilkinson, enquiring about adopting their baby. One, Mrs Basford in Middlewitch, agreed and on the 13th March 1939 Lizzie collected Mrs Basford's three-week-old baby boy. The next day she had him baptised and announced to the press that she had given birth to the fifth Lord Haldon (also claiming she was 49). Arthur Ireland wrote to the local registrar stating that he was “present at the delivery, at least at the afterbirth.”

When the press started arriving, Lizzie returned the baby to a puzzled Mrs Basford and fled to London. Between babies, she carted around a plastic doll. If this wasn’t suspicious enough, an anonymous letter informed the police that Lizzie was "an adventuress and an imposter.” But the police didn't have enough evidence to arrest her and during the Blitz aging con women were hardly a priority.

On New Years Day 1940, Chief Inspector Bridger of Scotland Yard searched Lizzie's flat and questioned her. “Before Lord Haldon died I realised I was pregnant,” she told him “he was very worried because the religious ceremony had not taken place.” She painted herself as a “lady of independent means” saying that she had “lived for many years in the Riviera.” She showed Bridger a marriage document, a piece of writing paper embossed with the House of Lords crest, which said – in her handwriting – that she and Lord Haldon had married at the Royal Hotel, Edinburgh on the 13th June 1938. The Royal Hotel had no record of the marriage and Bridger discovered letters written to Lizzie by Lord Haldon, from London on the dates when she claimed they were in Scotland.

The next day Bridger interviewed Lizzie’s sister Betsy Gordon. Bridger now had a damning case and on the 12th November 1940, Lizzie Ireland and her live-in companion Isabella Blackett were tried at the Chester Assizes. Both were charged with conspiracy to enter false information in a Births register and Lizzie also for two counts of bigamy. She pleaded guilty to bigamy, but denied everything else. 

"Uncontrollable vanity"

It was a lost cause. Even Lizzie’s defence didn't really try to exonerate her during the four day trial, attributing her lies to “uncontrollable vanity...when she became associated with someone with a title.” Although she wept while Bridger read her letters in court the jury failed to sympathise and found her guilty in just 40 minutes. Lizzie got three years and Arthur Ireland was also bound over for two years for £25 for conspiracy to put a false entry into a Births Register of Births, although his defence argued that he “had been dragged into the matter by his wife who was the mastermind.”

There is a record of an Elizabeth Ireland of the right age, dying in Surrey in December 1941 and a Florence M Ireland, aged 48, (around the age Lizzie claimed to be) in June 1941, but it is difficult to prove what happened to Lizzie. Perhaps after prison she found another husband - or another con. Either way, once she entered prison, ‘Lady Haldon’ disappeared.

Lady Haldon’s police case file is in the National Archives (MEPO 3/968) and there are many references to her in contemporary newspapers.