Doreen Smith (part 3)

We must now turn our attention back to the Countess, the former Doreen Lucy Smith who had gone from authoress to publisher to fraudster in only a few years. When she and her husband were arrested in Bristol on 20 August, they were separately charged and while Barry Shafto Leopold Ferdinand Casimir Herbertus de la Feld as he was known, although he was most likely born Francis Roach-Jackson, was sent to Cornwall, Doreen found herself before the magistrates at West London Police Court answering her own charges.

After appearing in court on Tuesday, 31 August 1937, and with the case adjourned for a week, she was present at her husband's court case the following day and he even consulted her when a question arose about a handwritten obituary notice that had been found announcing the deaths of Barry and Doreen de la Feld in a motor accident. When pressed, and after he had spoken to his wife, Barry admitted that it was she who had written the note, although he had not the slightest idea why she had written it.

That they were trying to dispose of their De la Feld aliases was clear. Shortly before being arrested, the two were in Dublin in order to be remarried. "My wife wanted to drop our title and use an ordinary English name. He gave the name of Beaumont to the registrar in Dublin, and asked him to marry them at once."

Did you tell the registrar the reason your wife wanted to change her name was that she would inherit a legacy if she used the name of Beaumont, asked the prosecution. "Yes," said Roach-Jackson before asking, "Was there any harm in that?"

After seeing her husband sentenced to a month's imprisonment, Doreen faced her own trial at West London where she was found guilty of two cases of cheque fraud on Harrods and of obtaining £6 by false pretences from Mr. James Henry Collins, a provision merchant. One of the cheques that were returned marked "Account closed" was for three return tickets to Jersey. 

Appearing as Doreen de la Feld, she pleaded guilty to the three charges and asked for another similar offence committed at Bath to be taken into consideration.

In Jersey, she had obtained a passport in the name of Theodora Craster (given in the newspapers as Custa), having given a false statement to the Governor of Jersey, who had decided not to take any further action after withdrawing the passport.

She was sentenced to three months imprisonment on each of the three charges, the first two to be consecutive.

Doreen Lucy Smith had been educated at Clifton High School and, at the age of 16, began training as a music teacher. She became a convert to Catholicism in around 1927. In 1933 she had entered a convent as a Carmelite novice but remained there for only four months. On leaving, she had started her a publishing business in Bloomsbury Square, but, after two years was forced to put it into liquidation. Later she started another publishing business in New Oxford Street, and that had been wound up in June 1937 after amassing quite a number of outstanding debts.

On her release, and registered as Dorothy Roach-Jackson, she was living at 112 Denbigh Street, Westminster S.W.1, with her husband, now styling himself Francis Bentick Roach-Jackson, and her mother-in-law, Adelaide Roach-Jackson. It was whilst in Denbigh Street that she found herself arrested and brought before Westminster Magistrates on charges of stealing books and obtaining goods by false pretences from a West End store. She pleaded guilty to five charges and asked for 30 others to be taken into consideration. She was sentenced for a second time to six months imprisonment.

Since her marriage, Doreen Roach-Jackson had been living on the proceeds of crime, posing as the wife of a parson, as a baroness and as a countess. She was a very plausible woman and induced people to put faith in her, said Detective-Sergeant O'Sullivan, who had received notification from Ireland that she was wanted for fraud on an allegation of issuing worthless cheques.

The Electoral Roll gives possible later addresses as 30 Gloucester Street, Westminster S.W.1 [1939, living with Stella Maud Smith] and 42 Kingston Ave, Feltham [fl. 1945].

It seems likely that, following the publicity of her rapid downfall in the late 1930s, Doreen had been unable to pick up the threads of her career. Perhaps it is the sharp decline in her career that is the most fascinating aspect of this story. Her interest in religion seems genuine: her earliest published novels were written for Burns, Oates & Co., a prominent Catholic publishing house; she travelled to Genoa (and possibly to Rome) in 1932 and attempted to enter a convent in 1933.

A slim hardcover book, St. Philip Neri by Doreen Lucy Smith, was published by Sands in 1945, a tribute to the life of Philip Romolo Neri, a 16th century Italian priest, known as the Apostle of Rome, who founded the Congregation of the Oratory. Sands & Co. was another religious publisher who had earlier published Doreen's novel The Gates Are Open.

From this we might conclude that Doreen retained her Catholic faith and continued to write. I have found no further trace of her in the UK and it is possible that she moved abroad soon after the war. The only later trace—and I cannot say for certain that it is "our" Doreen—is a "Sea Arrival Card" for a Doreen Lucy Smith who arrived aboard the S.S. Braemar Castle on 17 December 1960. Apart from revealing that she resides in Southern Rhodesia, the card has no other information.

Postscript: There are two books for young girls that caught my eye when I was researching the above. The first is Dorothy Smith's Those Greylands Girls (Nelson, 1944), which the Encyclopaedica of Girls' School Stories describes as a "charming story of an orphanage/school and the girls who inhabit it," and Jenny at Durrington Grange by Doreen Smith (Pickering & Inglis, 1973). Could these be by Doreen Lucy Smith? Let's not forget that she was listed in the 1938 Electoral Roll as Dorothy Roach-Jackson, so linking her to the first book is not a big stretch of the imagination. If she was to have written the latter, she would have been in her early seventies when it was published.

Doreen Smith (part 2)

Barry Shafto Jackson, aged 25, stood in the dock in Truro, Cornwall, on 1 September, and argued that it was his right to call himself Count de la Feld, claiming that his father's grandmother was the last of the house of De la Feld. It was a very old family which had been settled in England for many generations. They had a title bestowed by the Pope and he and his father were the direct descendents.

Whilst using the name Count De la Feld, he  had visited Messrs. Timothy Whites and Taylors in Truro on 26 June, saying that he wanted a three months' account as he and his wife, the Countess, were planning to sail to America in September and that, meanwhile, they would be staying at a small cottage called The Haven, Mount Hawke. He gave as reference a bank in Park Lane, London.

On the strength of this statement he was given on various days goods to the value of £7 17s. 8d.

On around 12 July, the manager had his attention drawn to a London newspapaer dated 8 July, on the front page of which was a photograph of Jackson. He contacted the police and visited the premises at Mount Hawke, but found they were shut up and that Jackson was gone.

Inquiries were made to ascertain that the man in the photograph in the London papers was Barry Shafto Jackson and that he had travelled to Bristol on about 8 July. On 20 August, a Detective Sergeant Arthur Rudge of the Bristol C.I.D., went to a Bristol hotel, where he saw a woman whose age was about 60. He followed her to another hotel, where there was an entry in the register in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Beaumont. He visited the room they occupied and there saw Jackson with a woman who presumably was his wife. When cautioned, Jackson said, "You have made a mistake. My name is Beaumont." He then produced a passport bearing the name of R. D. Beaumont.

In a later statement, made after he was taken to Truro, he said that he had gone to Bristol for a short holiday and had intended returning to Mount Hawke; he had also intended paying his account at Messrs. Timothy Whites & Taylors. However, the "dreadful scandal" in the Press had made it impossible to return. He signed this statement "Feld".

In a letter written shortly afterwards, as he was being taken to Exeter Prison, he claimed that his parents had been separated for ten years and he was unsure whether his father, 2nd Lieutenant B. Roche Jackson of the 1st Gordon Highlanders, who had held a commission in the Army during the war, was alive or not. This letter he signed "Roger Beaumont".

Father Edward Charles Taylor, a Roman Catholic priest of St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, gave evidence that Jackson had come to him to be received into the Catholic Church and underwent a short course of instruction. Taylor knew the man as Mr. Roche Jackson and refused to agree with the prosecution counsel, Mr. Moore, that Jackson could have been made a papal count as a reward for his services to the Roman Catholic Church—Taylor said "I am not conversant with how papal counts are made or how the titles are carried on. Unless he has inherited the title I cannot see how he can be a papal count because of his short career as a Catholic."

Detective-Sergeant Rudge gave evidence that he had found visiting cards inscribed Rev. Viscount and Viscountess Beaumont of Detroit, Michigan" when he visited Jackson's room at the hotel. He also discovered a notice written on a sheet of paper: "De la Feld. On August 24, 1937. In a motoring accident near Avignon, Barry and Doreen, Count and Countess De la Feld." This obituary notice was in his wife's handwriting.

The Count then gave evidence that he was born Barry Shafto Roche Jackson and he claimed that he could call himself Count De la Feld because his father's grandmother was the last of the house of De la Feld. It was a very old family name and the title had been bestowed by the Pope. He had used the title on and off for about two years.

Jackson admitted that he had had many jobs, that he and his mother had been employed as houseboy and cook on a joint wage of £85 and that he had also been a butler. He also admitted that he had married under the name Barry de la Feld and that he and his wife had gone to Dublin on 16 August and applied to the Registrar of Marriages to be married, in order to "get the tangle of out marriage adjusted. My wife wanted to drop our title and use an ordinary English name." Whilst in Dublin, he obtained a driving license in the name of Viscount Roger Beaumont.

Admitting that he had used a number of different names and that he had posed as a Roman Catholic priest as "a journalistic trick to get our names in the paper," Jackson was found guilty and agreed to have four other charges involving another £23 taken into consideration. He was sentenced to one month's imprisonment.

According to Police-Superintendant Osborne, Jackson was, in fact, born in Dunsmore, Buckinghamshire in 1913. His mother was a housekeeper in Bayswater. His mother had told the police she believed there was a title on her husband's side, but that her husband had left her 11 years ago and she did not know his whereabouts.

There was some truth in Barry Jackson's tale. His father, Bernard Roach-Jackson, had volunteered during the Great War, joining on 14 August 1914, and he served with as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Gordon Highlanders, for which he was awarded a Silver War Badge. He was put on the H.P. (half-pay) list for ill health on 11 June 1916 and soon after, in November 1916, he was acquitted by a general court-martial for exchanging two cheques for £5 and £1 at the Carlton Hotel, knowing that he did not have sufficient funds to meet them.

He was born Bernard Jackson in Yapton, Sussex, in 1880, the son of the Revd. George Jackson (1838?-1903), rector of Ford and vicar of Yapton, and his wife Alice (1849?-1932?). Jackson grew up in Yapton and in Westfield, another Sussex town where his father was vicar. Bernard had some early experience in the military—this is mentioned on his 1914 army papers.

Bernard Roach-Jackson had married to May A. Craster in 4Q 1911 in Fulham, London, but they had not remained together; by 1918 he was living at 58 Portland Road, Holland Park Avenue, W.11, and by 1930 he could be found at 5 Fairholme Road, Fulham, W.14. He was registered as one of the civilian war dead, having died in Richmond, Surrey, on 21 September 1940, aged 70 [actually 60].

What happened to the man known as Barry Shafto Jackson is open to some speculation. His mother, May Adelaide Craster, born in 1872, was the Adelaide Roach-Jackson living at 112 Denbigh Street, Westminster S.W.1, in 1938 along with Dorothy Roach-Jackson and Francis Bentick Roach-Jackson, whom I believe to be Doreen and Barry. Although I haven't been able to nail down a birth certificate (or even registration) for Adelaide's son, I have a strong suspicion that he was originally named Francis.

I can find no further trace of him beyond this sighting in 1938. Perhaps he changed his name again and continued his career as a fraudster.

More tomorrow.

Doreen Smith

My mate John Herrington always sends me the most interesting mysteries. "You like a good story about an author," he said in a recent e-mail, "and this is a good one."

And indeed it is.

The 2 July 1937 edition of the Western Morning News carried a couple of paragraphs under the heading:

SON OF PRINCE 

Spending Honeymoon In Cornwall

The attached story related how Count and Countess Barry de la Feld, were spending three months honeymooning at The Haven, Mount Hawke, in Cornwall. The Count, the story continued, was a descendant of an ancient German family and he was the son of H.S.H. Prince Bernard de la Feld of the Holy Roman Empire, Chamberlain to the late Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph. He was also the grandson of H.I.H. the Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria and a great-nephew of the late King of Norway.

The Count had recently married Miss Doreen Lucy Smith, a native of Bristol and the author of a number of books. And Doreen Lucy Smith, an author based at 14 Craven Street, Charing Cross, W.C.2, can be found in The Author's and Writer's Who's Who for 1935-36, to whom the following novels can be attributed:

Quest. London, Burns, Oates & Co., 1930.
East Wind. London, Burns, Oates & Co., 1931.
Lonely Traveller. London, Burns, Oates & Co., 1931
The Gates Are Open. London, Sands & Co., 1933.
May Be Tomorrow (as Clare Craven). London, John Long, 1936.
Four in Hand (as Michael Bairns). London, Stanley Smith, 1936.

The A&WWW notes her birth in Bristol, 1904 (sic), and her recreations as tennis and dancing. She is also listed as the managing director of Stanley Smith (Publishers) Ltd. This was a minor library hardcover publisher active in 1935/36, authors including Vere Hobart, T. R. Morden, G. H. Teed, E. M. Crawford, Paul Dornhorst, Geoffrey Ellinger, Richard E. Goddard, John Marsh, Eugene Thomas, Nigel Vane and Philip Wade. The authors are not especially notable, but include the prolific George Teed (best known for his Sexton Blake stories), John Marsh and "Nigel Vane", better known as Gerald Vernor, and playwrites Philip Wade and Paul Dornhorst, who had the misfortune of drowning shortly after the publication of his book trying to assist a friend in danger. Perhaps  the most memorable of all Smith's books was Richard E. Goddard's bizarre horror-thriller The Whistling Ancestors.

Stanley Smith (Publishers) Ltd. were struck off the register of companies in December 1938. Before then, Doreen, who in 1937 was boasting that she was the only female publisher in England, had been jailed. Twice.

Before we reach that part of the story, let's take a step back to the few earlier traces of Doreen's career.

In 1911, Doreen Lucie Smith was living with her father, Henry Stanley Mundy Smith (1869-1917), a 41-year old auctioneer, valuer and estate agent, and her brother, 15-year-old Reginald Stanley Smith, born in Clifton, Bristol, Gloucestershire, in 1895 and baptized at St Werburgh, Bristol, on 21 September 1895. In the 1930s, Reginald Smith was the manager of the television department at Alexandra Palace.

Stanley Smith, as her father called himself, had been married for 16 years to Clara Smith, nee Colmer (1866- ), the daughter of company chairman James Colmer, who was based in Bristol, and a niece of Cardinal Vaughan. Their second child, a daughter registered as Doreen Lucie Smith, was born in 2Q 1901, in Clifton, Bristol, Gloucestershire. [Not 1904 as her A&WWW entry would have us believe.]

Little is known about her upbringing. She later said that she had lived in Clifton until she was 17. However, the 1911, when Doreen was aged 9, gives their address as 17 Gardnor Mansions, Hampstead, London. Stanley Smith died on 30 April 1917, his probate record giving his address as 4 Connaught Place, Weston-super-Mare.  In 1929, Doreen was living with her mother at 11 Cheniston Gardens, Earls Court, and the following year on the first floor at 9 Hornton Street, Holland Park. I believe Clara Smith died in Kensington in 1932, aged 66.

Miss Doreen Lucy Smith, giving the address 22 Gloucester Walk, Kensington W.8, booked a 2nd class ticket to Genoa, Italy, on a Dutch passenger ship, Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, departing Southampton on 5 November 1932.

By 1935, she is to be found in the Electoral Roll living at 14 Craven Street, Westminster W.C.2. Her publishing company, named after her father, was active in 1935-36 before publications came to a grinding halt.

She married Barry de la Feld at Caxton Hall in Westminster on 2 June 1937 and within weeks both she and her husband were accused of numerous frauds.

Their activities began immediately as the two travelled around England (Cornwall, Somerset, Avon), Jersey and Ireland as Count and Countess de la Feld, obtaining goods from tradesmen on the strength of their title. In Jersey, Countess de la Feld obtained a passport in the name of Theodora Craster (uusually reported as Custa) and the Count shortly after . It was reported that the two were arrested on Friday, 20 August 1937 and appeared at Bristol Police Court the following day, appearing under the names Roger Beaumont (25) and Theodora Mary Craster (31), also known as the Count and Countess de la Feld, on warrants issued by the Metropolitan and Truro police.

The "Countess" appeared before Mr. Paul Bennett the following Monday charged with obtaining £6 by false pretences on 6 August. On the same day, Barry Shafto Jackson, alias Count Barry de la Feld, was charged in Truro with obtaining goods to the value of £7 17s. 8d. from Messrs. Timothy White and Taylors Ltd. by false pretences between 25 June and 1 July.

In June, the Count and Countess Barry de la Feld, were spending their honeymoon n Cornwall and granting a number of interviews with newspapers. The Count, a former Catholic priest, hoped to go the following month to either St Augustine's, Canterbury, or Wells Theological College, for six or eight months; he was considering subsequently working as a missionary in Africa. When interviewed. the Count wore clerical garb.

The Countess explained how she had met the Count—and the consequences of their marriage—in an interview with the Western Morning News (7 July 1937):

It was five years ago in the Church of San Silvestro in Rome, which is the church for English-speaking Catholics. He was a priest, and I was introduced to him, but did not see him again until six months ago. The Church of Rome does not allow married priests and we have had a lot of trouble in consequence.
    We have been literally hunted to death. There has been quite a scandal about him leaving the Church, and we have had insulting letters from priests and Archbishops.
    That is why, up to now, we have had only a civil marriage in Caxton Hall, London, but we are having a religious ceremony in Bristol Cathedral shortly. Because of this trouble my husband is becoming an Anglo-Catholic.

Giving the story an added twist was the revelation that the Countess was an ex-nun, and the story of the marriage of the ex-priest and the ex-nun travelled widely in local newspapers and even made it as far as the famous Life magazine, which recorded that "Father Leopold" had outraged the Church by marrying and a Papal bull was issued excommunicating both.

It wasn't long before accusations were made against the couple. The Bishop of Bristol declared that the Count was not a member of the Church of England. A London newspaper shortly after claimed that the Count de la Feld was, in fact, named Barry Shafto Jackson and he was the son of a London cook.

The Countess left Cornwall and took a single room at a hotel in Wells, Somerset, on 10 July, signing the register Countess Delafield of 77 Audley Street, London W.1. She chatted easily to the staff and claimed that she was expecting the Count to arrive in Wells by Wednesday. On Monday (12 July) she went to Bristol by bus to visit him. Returning to Wells, she transferred to another hotel.

When interviewed she protested vehemently against accusations published in newspapers. "The statements are libellous," she declared. "This persecution must stop. It is becoming a menace. This morning I seriously considered getting police protection." It was, she said, still the Count's intention to enter the Church of England, but she was not aware of his present whereabouts.

As to the notion that he was really Barry Shafto Jackson, the Countess stormed: "He's a Count. His name has never been Jackson and what's more he can't cook. He has papers to prove who he is."

As mentioned above, the couple were soon after arrested and the Count—under the names Barry Shafto Jackson (reported widely as Barry Shafto), alias Count Barry de la Feld, of no fixed abode—was charged in Truro on 23 August; he was remanded in custody for eight days and bail was refused. At the same time, in West London, the Countess was also remanded for eight days, magistrates accepting a surety in £25.

What happened next will be revealed tomorrow.