The auctioneer was Benjamin Wheatley, who had substantial premises in Piccadilly. He was a widower with children, who was to become Wainewright’s brother-in-law, for while cataloguing the contents of Linden House before the auctions, he had met Madalina Abercromby, then 19 years old, and in May 1832 he was to marry her.
Madalina, her sister Helen and their mother had moved to Linden House to be with Wainewright and Eliza from Sheen, where they had been teetering on edge of genteel poverty. Eliza’s mother, Frances, despite her small property holdings in Mortlake, where they had recently lived, was so short of money that she had borrowed £200 from John Stuart, the auctioneer who collected her rents. When her properties finally had to be sold in 1829, she still owed him £40, which he was never to receive.
But she must have been delighted to move to such a fashionable address, to which the cream of artistic London, such as Charles Lamb and the famous actor-manager Charles Macready still came to dine; Wainewright’s artistic talents might have forsaken him through idleness, but he was a witty host who entertained lavishly and kept at his dinner table a vicarious hold of his former life.
Now even this was threatened. The local tradesmen were owed hundreds of pounds - credit
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on a scale almost unthinkable today - and the supplies of even the staples of life could not be guaranteed for very much longer.
The only person in the household who had any was Mrs Abercromby. She had been left a small sum and some rental income by her late husband, but this was pitifully little. However, poor as she was, she made a will on August 13th 1829, leaving everything she had to her eldest daughter Eliza, wife, as the document says, of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - he who would have persuaded her not only to make the will but to make him the sole executor. It was witnessed by Sarah Handcocks, who was to see her die within the week.
She, Helen and Madalina watched the course of the sudden illness that killed Mrs Abercromby in her mid-fifties. Sarah was to claim much later that if followed a path of vomiting, violent convulsions, then death, much like Uncle George’s the previous year.
In the 1894 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, where Wainewright’s life is chronicled - to some extent inaccurately - by Thomas Seccombe, there is a suggestion that Mrs Abercromby had objected to Wainewright’s plans to insure Helen’s life for suspicious purposes and that this had dramatically shortened her own. To die within seven days of making a will, where none had existed before, should have raised the alarm, but her death went unremarked. As to her relatively young age, the average life expectancy at the time was in the mid-thirties, but this figure is heavily skewed due to the huge incidence of infant mortality in the 19th century.
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The course of Mrs Abercromby’s illness, its swiftness and fatality, was to be duplicated a few months later, and in that case there is now little doubt that poison was responsible. Whatever her motives for making a will, her death was doubly fortunate for Wainewright. It enabled Eliza to receive a small bequest of £100 to ease the family’s financial burdens and, without benefit of mother-in-law, allowed a bold scheme for alleviating Wainewright’s chronic shortage of money to be put into place.
In the meantime, any little sum helped. Helen, who had come of age on March 12 1830 wrote from Linden House in August to the Board of Ordnance asking for the pension of £10 a year which she had had since the death of her father in 1811 to be continued, as it had expired when she reached 21. The letter is written from beginning to end without a full stop as if it had been dashed off without thought – or perhaps had been taken down verbatim while it was being dictated by her relatives:
…(I) have attained the age of 21 years, am totally unprovided for, being also deprived of the support of my mother who died August last, and require the continuance of the assistance of the Honourable Board whom I trust will take my case into consideration and direct that the allowance may be continued to me for which I shall be ever grateful.
I have the Honor (sic) to be Sir, Your very humble servant
Helen Abercromby
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The Board agreed that the Bounty, as they called it, should continue, but first they needed an affidavit from Helen as to her circumstances. She swore it at the Hatton Garden police office on October 20,
The Bounty would never be paid – she had only two months to live.
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CHAPTER 7
THE INSURANCE FRAUDS
It must have been at this point that the Wainewrights realized that there would have to be another fraud; it was the only way in which large sums of money could be obtained quickly enough to pay off the most pressing debtors and ensure the continuity of life at Linden House.
The Bank of England forgeries had now remained undetected for six and more years. If an august and secure body like the Bank could be duped, it would be relatively easy to deceive other institutions with large amounts of capital - insurance companies for instance and although such a plan would involve more risks, the rewards would be so much greater.
The details fell neatly into place. The life of Eliza’s sister, Helen Abercromby, could be insured for a short period, then perhaps she could leave the country and the insurance companies could be persuaded that she was dead - and forced to disgorge. Alternatively, she could be done away with…
Helen became 21, old enough to sign papers on her own behalf, on March 12, 1830. She was a bright, energetic girl and handsome, one witness was to say, though Wainwright’s crayon drawing of her as a young girl a few years earlier fails to do justice to the description. For insurance purposes she was ideal - young and healthy.
Laying the groundwork carefully, note had to be made of her good constitution. Wainewright’s
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surgeon friend in Turnham Green, Dr. Thomas Graham, examined her and declared her “an excellent life” for insuring.
The records of Helen’s insurances are well-documented. The original company policy papers have long since disappeared though some scanty board minutes survive. The evidence itself comes from two trials in the Court of the Exchequer which took place in 1835, which show clearly the extent of the desperate fraud - and how unlikely it was to succeed.
The cases were brought to try to force the insurance companies to pay up and were reported extensively in the Times, Morning Post, Morning Chronicle1 and other newspapers, from which these accounts are drawn.
The audacious scheme, which was to involve eight different insurance companies, began within days of Helen’s 21st birthday. She was taken on a bewildering round of London life assurance offices by Wainewright and Eliza. In all, Helen made 15 visits to insurance offices between March and October 1830. In almost all of them it was Eliza who accompanied her and did a lot of the talking.
In the 18th century there had been very few life assurance companies in London, but by the 1830s the number had grown substantially and there was stiff competition for premiums. The Alliance, for instance, one of the offices on the grand tour, had been founded only six years previously.
The first call was at the Palladium on March 23rd 1830; it had also been founded for only six years,
1. Issues of June 30, 1835 and December 4, 1835.
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and