Violet Charlesworth: The Edwardian Heiress Who Never Was...

The late-night journey of the bottle-green Minerva sports car speeding along the North Wales clifftop road in January 1909 was never destined to be a typical jolly outing for all concerned.

For starters, the chauffeur Albert Watts wasn’t even driving the car.

It was actually being driven by a young woman of all things, which might not seem so extraordinary today, but this was back in an era when the rare sight of a woman behind the wheel was enough to make a male driver spill his bottle of port all over the dashboard in horror.

But 24-year-old Violet Charlesworth was no ordinary woman.

At the time, she was probably one of the most well-known residents of the city of St Asaph in Wales, largely because she was a member of one of the most fabulously wealthy families in the neighbourhood.

She wasn’t the only Charlesworth travelling in the Minerva on that night. Alongside the slightly useless non-driving chauffeur Albert, the other passenger in the car was Violet’s younger sister Lillian.

But it was Violet who usually courted all the attention as she had become something of a local celebrity and the public face of the family about town.

It was also common knowledge that Violet in particular was on the very brink of becoming even wealthier by a long way, just as soon as she hit her 25th birthday.

But would she ever live to see the eagerly-awaited inheritance payday which was now only two weeks away?

The signs aren’t looking good.

Dressed in a flowing crimson cloak, Violet puts her foot down as the bottle-green Minerva approaches a sharp coastal bend which was known locally as “Demon’s Turn” but would soon acquire a brand new nickname. It’s a journey that the passengers have made many times before, but they don’t quite make it all the way past the bend this time.

The car ends up hurtling into a sea wall and coming to an abrupt halt just a few inches from the edge of the cliff. See what happens when you don’t let Albert drive? They’ll be giving women the vote next, you just wait and see.

Albert Watts and Lillian Charlesworth are dazed but thankfully not seriously hurt.

However, it seems that Violet Charlesworth was not so fortunate.

It’s believed that she was thrown through the windscreen from the impact of the crash and sent hurtling down into the sea below.

Yet although a few of her belongings were picked up near the scene, her body was nowhere to be found.

And as this tragedy sparked headlines across the world, there emerged an obvious killer question that everyone was now asking:

What was the point of the chauffeur being in the car if he wasn’t even driving? If all it takes to be a chauffeur is to sit quietly in the passenger seat, I’m sure even a non-driver like me might have been in with a chance of landing that cushy number.

But there were plenty of other more serious questions piling up, as not everything about the accident and the vanishing body made an awful lot of sense.

And the biggest question of all was: Whatever happened to the tragic Edwardian heiress who went missing just before she was really about to hit the big time?

The story that quickly unfolded involved a massive media scramble for the truth, a brutal betrayal orchestrated by a pushy mother, a lucrative silent movie deal, several St Bernards dogs, a hell of a lot of proper pissed-off people, and a shocking discovery made around three hundred miles away from that sharp bend of the road which is now forever known as “Violet’s Leap”…

Nights in White Satin

Spare a cheery thought for the poor souls who drop dead on the very first day of their retirement.

Regardless of the cause of death, that’s got to feel like a proper shark kick to the fun factory.

Just as you’re on the cusp of finally kicking back and reaping the rewards you’ve earned from a lifetime of putting your nose to the grindstone, the cruel hand of fate cruelly robs you of your well-deserved final blissful chapter.

Now that the goalposts of retirement age are consistently getting pushed further and further away, perhaps a bigger concern today is that we’ll throw a seven long before we even make it to the carriage clock, the personalised cufflinks, the comedy plaque, and the gold-plated tin-opener.

But the story of Violet Charlesworth feels like a particularly tragic variant on this theme, as she appeared to kick the bucket – or at least completely disappear into thin air – just as the young woman was finally about to make it to the day that everyone knew she’d been dreaming about for years.

The Charlesworth family were already pretty well off by the looks of it.

Violet lived with her parents, her sister Lillian, and her brother Fred in the family home which was a pretty swishy mansion in the city of St Asaph in Wales, and it was clear that the whole family relished the high life.

But Violet – an English woman now living in Wales whilst harbouring a strange obsession for Scotland – perhaps relished it more than most.

And she was about to take the family wealth to a whole new level without actually having to do anything.

Just about everyone in St Asaph was well aware that Violet was the goddaughter of none other than the late Major-General Charles Gordon – a highly decorated British war hero with a strong connection to the local folk as he spent much of his early military career based at Pembrokeshire in Wales.

He went on to serve in China where he earned the nickname of ‘Chinese Gordon’ after leading ‘The Ever Victorious Army’ – a force made up of Chinese and Western soldiers – to a long chain of victories against all odds when supporting the Qing Dynasty in suppressing the Taiping rebellion. He later received distinguished honours from both China and Britain, including the boogielicious-sounding ‘Order of the Dragon’ from China and the slightly less boogielicious ‘Order of the Bath’ from Britain – before finally meeting his end bravely defending Khartoum in Sudan from rebels in 1885.

This fearless national hero may have disappeared forever from the battlefield, but Chinese Gordon left something behind for his beloved goddaughter – a portion of his estate worth a reported £100,000 which would be worth well over £15 million today. I had no idea that British Major-Generals were paid quite so handsomely - and this sum only represented part of his estate.

Maybe he married a rich wife along the way.

The only proviso was that the money would not be awarded to Violet Charlesworth until she hit the ripe old age of 25.

That may well have seemed like a lifetime away back when Violet was a teenager. Still, the Charlesworth family weren’t doing too badly for themselves in the meantime, although life hadn’t always been quite so peachy.

Violet Gordon Charlesworth was born in the English market town of Stafford in the West Midlands in 1884 to Miriam and John Charlesworth.

Violet was the youngest of at least four children, including brother Fred and sister Lillian, but precise details of the siblings are a little sparse and contradictory. We do know from fragmented records that the eldest daughter Nellie would sadly not live to see her 21st birthday, although her cause of death is unclear today.

Mother Miriam was a homemaker, whilst father John apparently saw himself as a shrewd businessman, although in reality he sounds more like a slightly low-rent wheeler-dealer who couldn’t sit still for very long. Over the years, he had a go at flogging insurance, a brief attempt at running a hotel, and a lengthier stint as a Ship Chandler selling essential supplies and equipment for ships, although some of his stock may have fallen off the stern of a poop deck if you get what I mean.

It’s usually reported that the Charlesworths had humble and modest roots during their earlier life in England in which they showed a tendency for moving around the country quite a bit, hopping from Staffordshire to Wolverhampton to Derby, probably in line with whatever John was up to at the time.

But that makes it sound a bit like they spent their days licking sweet wrappers and begging for second helpings in soup kitchens.

They were doing okay and never went hungry. It’s just that their fairly ordinary lifestyle felt like a sharp contrast to how they spent their later days.

Because by the turn of the 20th century, things were definitely looking up for the Charlesworth family.

They took the plunge and moved to north Wales at some point in the early 1900s, first living in the seaside town of Rhyl for a few years, before settling comfortably into a stately manor house in St Asaph in 1908.

We’re not quite sure what happened to the other siblings – some of them may well have fled the nest by this point – but it was just Violet, Lillian, and Fred who were living it up with their parents in a sumptuous mansion with seven bedrooms, a coach house, vast gardens, and hopefully a well-stocked wine cellar, a skating rink, and a hot tub around the back.

And Violet Charlesworth had certainly developed a taste for the finer things in life.

She was regularly spotted around town sporting expensive furs and dripping from head to toe with diamonds, and she wasn’t averse to slipping on a tiara if she’d been invited to a really posh do.

Violet was usually accompanied by at least one of the twelve St Bernards dogs that she was reported to have owned, which speaking as an avid lover of dogs, is perhaps a tad excessive unless you have one or two helpers to assist with the walkies and the poop patrols in the garden.

And she had no less than six fancy sports cars at her disposal in which she was regularly seen racing around the countryside and coastal roads, including of course a certain bottle-green Minerva manufactured in Belgium which perhaps wasn’t the very best at handling sharp bends in the road.

Slightly weirdly for an English lady now living in Wales with no Scottish roots whatsoever, she also appeared to have quite a deep infatuation with old Bonnie Scotland, the land of the brave, the thistle, and the frozen Mars Bar.

When she wasn’t dressed in furs and diamonds, she liked to pose for photographs in full highland dress, complete with kilted skirt and bagpipes and piping hat.

Whilst she never lived primarily in Scotland, she did rent a nice country house in Inverness which was plastered in tartan wallpaper.

She also owned a player-piano which exclusively churned out traditional Scottish music on a loop, and she even had a go at writing her own composition entitled “Come Back to Scotland”.

A copy of the sheet music was reportedly sent to King Edward VII, although it’s not known if he ever got the track laid down on phonograph cylinders to shove inside the Royal Jukebox.

But she was certainly very keen to play on the highlander angle and make out as if she was some kind of long-lost Scottish folk hero.

All of this might make Violet sound like an Edwardian version of an influencer or gossip-page princess who was prone to slightly vulgar displays of wealth, and always desperate for attention.

But I’m not so sure about that. She enjoyed spending her money on things that she liked, and she saw no reason to hide her wealth.

And on the whole she was never really viewed as a self-obsessed publicity hound.

If anything, she was viewed as being quite generous with her money and time. She was known as being a very heavy tipper in hotels, and made regular contributions to the community, including the donation of silver cups for local football competitions, although admittedly she usually made sure that she was the one handing them over and getting her face in the papers again.

But although there was potential here for Violet Charlesworth to be grumpily dismissed as an annoying poser with too much money to burn, she was generally liked and warmly received by everyone she met.

Admired, even.

The Edwardian era probably wasn’t the best time in history to be a woman, but Violet wasn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers and demonstrate that she didn’t give a shit about convention or antiquated expectation of how she should be spending her time.

The fact that she raced around in six sports cars, often alone and for long distances late at night, was a pretty big deal at the time.

I’m told that licensed female drivers now slightly outnumber licensed male drivers in the U.S at least, and have done since 2015. But back then in Edwardian England it was a very different story, with women accounting for a mere 5% of licensed drivers.

I’m stressing that we’re talking about licensed drivers here, as we’re not covering all the hundreds of thousands of women joyriders who were presumably stealing cars and terrorising the towns and villages in the early hours of Sunday morning whilst lobbing traffic cones at police vehicles in pursuit.

The small percentage of women drivers in the early 20th century would at least have been able to learn everything they needed to know by 1909, thanks to the publication of Dorothy Levitt’s top-selling book “The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor.”

Some of Dorothy’s pearls of wisdom for Edwardian drivers without a penis include:

The little drawer under the seat of the car is the secret of the dainty motorist. The following articles are what I advise you to have in its recesses: A pair of clean gloves, an extra handkerchief, clean veil, powder-puff, hairpins and ordinary pins, and a hand mirror.”

“Under no circumstances wear lace or ‘fluffy’ adjuncts to your toilette. If you do, you will regret them before you have driven half a dozen miles.”

“Drive slowly past anyone driving or riding a horse, and if a lady or child is on top, stop the engine. It is an act of courtesy.

Dogs, chickens and other domestic animals at large are not pedestrians, and if one is driving at a regulation speed, one is not responsible for their untimely end.”

“If you are going to drive alone in the highways and byways it might be advisable to carry a small revolver. I have an automatic Colt, and find it very easy to handle as there is practically no recoil.

That started off quite breezy and bubbly but soon took a dark turn. And you’d think Dorothy might at least have considered slowing down a bit for a stray dog on the road instead of shrugging, reaching for the powder-puff, and waiting for the inevitable bump.

This essential handbook had not quite hit the shelves before Violet Charlesworth took her final spin in a motor, but I wouldn’t have thought she’d have needed the advice anyway, and she could probably have written an edgier version of the book herself, just as she could drive the car better than her own chauffeur.

The point of even having a chauffeur in the first place is still a bit of a mystery. Apparently, Violet preferred to drive the cars herself as she liked to put the pedal to the metal whereas she felt that Albert Watts drove like a grandma with nowhere to be.

I suppose that hiring a full-time personal chauffeur could be viewed as a status symbol even if you don’t intend to use their services. But I suspect it’s more likely that Albert Watts was the family chauffeur, and that Violet was just trying to appease her father by occasionally pretending to make use of him. She might even have let Albert take the wheel as the car was leaving the driveway of the manor house, before relegating him to the passenger seat to twiddle his thumbs whilst Violet showed him to drive properly.

Another way in which Violet Charlesworth defied expectation was the fact that she had a good head for business and enjoyed taking big risks, often startling her own stockbrokers whenever she dabbled in the stock market.

It was surprising enough to see a woman throwing around quite substantial sums of money in a Ticker Jungle dominated by wrinkly old men, but what equally floored the other traders was her young age and the way in which she did it.

Upon her first meeting with a team of stockbrokers in a fancy hotel, one of them later revealed:

We were expecting to see a middle-aged woman of the world, but we found a country girl, dressed in the best taste, with a charming manner.

Another stockbroker was struck by Violet’s confidence in her long string of bear-market investments in which she continually speculated against the market on short-term declines, and pulled in sizable profits from falling prices.

He was apparently in awe of “Violet’s courage of repeated bear transactions, when scarcely a man beyond the circle of professional speculation would venture upon bear selling!”

And she was pretty good at it too, at least for a while.

It was one of her early stock market triumphs that led her to buying the Minerva and a new diamond tiara as a little reward for her shrewd investments.

The handbook author Dorothy Levitt would probably have just treated herself to a new handkerchief, a new revolver, and an electric cattle prod.

So, as Violet was already bringing home some serious bacon without any need for a jackpot inheritance from a war hero godfather, you might wonder just how excited she really was about hitting her 25th birthday and cashing in the cheque.

But whilst the Charlesworth family were already quite clearly wealthy, they certainly hadn’t yet seen anything close to the equivalent of £15 million.

And regardless of your current financial position, £15 million is always going to make for a pretty cool birthday present stuffed inside a card.

Alas, it seems that poor young Violet Charlesworth would never quite make the full distance, but she came agonisingly close.

Crimson and Clover

The patrons of the Ship Inn pub in the North Welsh town of Penmaenmawr (pen-mine-mau-uh) in Conwy County were enjoying a typical Saturday session on the lash on the bitter night of January 2nd 1909.

But the high-octane games of dominoes, cribbage, and shove ha’penny were rudely interrupted shortly after 9pm by the arrival of a young woman in visible distress.

That woman was Lillian Charlesworth.

The younger sister of the more widely-known Violet breathlessly explained that she was in dire need of help after the car she was travelling in had ploughed straight into the sea wall at Demon’s Turn.

Lillian and Violet had spent the day enjoying afternoon tea with friends at a hotel in Bangor, and had been accompanied in the car by Albert Watts. I hope that he at least got invited inside the hotel for a couple of biscuits but I suspect he got left behind in the car all day to have a play with the steering wheel whilst the engine was switched off.

On the journey back to St Asaph, Violet had attempted to navigate the devilishly sharp coastal bend in Penmaenmawr, around 20 miles away from home, when she lost control of the Minerva and crashed it straight through the sea wall.

Albert was still on the scene, feeling dazed and confused and probably wondering why on Earth he’d been foolish enough to accept such an intensely dangerous position as a non-driving chauffeur.

But it was believed that Violet had been thrown through the windscreen and tossed down the rocks below into the sea.

The whole area was soon swarming with detectives, police officers, trawlers, and volunteers searching for the body of Violet Charlesworth.

Three items of interest were picked up almost immediately very close to the crashed vehicle:

A pocket map, a suede diary detailing all of Violet’s recent road trips, and an expensive Tam o’ Shanter – a traditional floppy Scottish hat with a fetching pom-pom on the top.

There was no sign whatsoever of a handkerchief, a clean veil, a hairpin or an automatic Colt.

But more importantly, there was no sign of the body.

Neither Lillian nor Albert were of much help on the night as the police considered them too agitated to be answering any tricky questions, but then again it’s not as if they would have any inside knowledge on where exactly the body might have landed.

The news of a young and popular woman apparently meeting her death in such a ghastly fashion sent shockwaves around the region and generated mournful headlines in the national press.

But only for a very short time. Because it didn’t take too long for Edwardian noses to start twitching in suspicion over certain elements of the accident that didn’t entirely make sense.

The passengers had been quite fortunate in a way that the car had swerved into a relatively small stretch of sea wall.

If Violet had lost control of the vehicle just ten yards further up or down the road, the car would have flown right over the cliffs and plunged about 50 feet down into the sea.

The sea wall obviously hadn’t done much to protect Violet, but both Lillian and Albert must have been counting their lucky stars that they had quite miraculously avoided any risk of getting a bit wet.

Speaking of damp spots, you’d have thought that the scene might have been a lot messier considering that a body had been flung through a windscreen.

Yet there wasn’t a single speck of blood to be found anywhere on the vehicle or on the rocks.

And the car itself was in surprisingly good shape too, considering that it had just smashed straight through a stone wall. There were a few scratches here and there, and a noticeable big hole in the windscreen, but aside from that, the Minerva was in sparkling condition. In fact it was safely driven back to the family home without any need to call out a mechanic.

You might also have expected the recovery of Violet’s body to be fairly swift as the water directly beneath the cliffs was actually very shallow and calm.

And you certainly would have expected the rest of the Charlesworth family to be consumed with grief, yet detectives observed that they didn’t seem massively concerned about this turn of events.

It’s true that they put up a £20 reward for anyone who found Violet’s body, but they forgot to sign the supporting documentation, rendering it worthless.

A certain Superintendent Rees also noted: “They have not worried me for details of the search. I have had to send to them for details and particulars.”

It almost sounds as if they were just going through the motions, and not in a particularly convincing way.

There’s an even bigger mystery regarding the Charlesworth family fortunes that were piling up long before the crash.

Whilst we’ve rattled through a potted history of the family from the small fragments of supporting evidence, you might well be thinking that we completely skipped a chapter.

One minute the Charlesworths are living a fairly ordinary life in England, and the next minute they’re basking in the lap of luxury in a stately manor house in Wales. How did that happen?

Violet’s mother Miriam was still a homemaker, whilst her husband John was still touting himself as a businessman but still hadn’t done anything more lucrative than flogging insurance and a few ship supplies.

So how had Violet suddenly found herself in a position where she could afford six sports cars, twelve St Bernard’s, and a quite incredibly expensive wardrobe?

Although detectives were not aware of this on the night of the crash, it’s a question that had also been bothering a private investigator who had been looking into the life of Violet Charlesworth for a couple of months now. He’d originally been put on the case by disgruntled lenders who were growing increasingly concerned that Violet didn’t seem interested in ever giving them their money back.

The detectives would also initially have been unaware that the very day before the crash, Violet had been served with a court summons for defaulting on a loan.

It turns out that Violet Charlesworth wasn’t quite all she was cracked up to be, and that Violet wasn’t even her real first name.

Major-General Charles Gordon had never been her godfather, and there was no massive inheritance on the horizon.

The whole thing had been a fine example of a massive ‘future payoff’ scam in which Violet had persuaded friends, fiancés, doctors, lenders, wealthy widows, and stockbrokers to lend her vast sums of money on the promise that they would be paid back when she hit her 25th birthday and received a huge inheritance that never actually existed.

What a swizz.

It soon became clear to the police and the press and the mourning public that they were no longer searching for a dead body on the rocks or in the sea.

They were looking for a bogus heiress who was still very much alive and on the run after an attempt to fake her own death had just turned into a belly flop of epic proportions.

Paint it Black

So let’s rewind back to the beginning and take another look at the roots of the Charlesworth family.

The woman known as Violet Gordon Charlesworth had actually been born May Charlesworth in 1884.

And May was not the face of the original scam.

That would have been her elder sister Nellie.

Back when the family were still living in England and Nellie was eighteen years old, her mother Miriam took it upon herself to tell a big fat porky to a Dr Barratt that young Nellie was set to inherit a fortune of £75,000 on her 21st birthday.

The details of this are a little vague, as it’s not clear where exactly the money was supposed to come from, or whether Dr Barratt lent Miriam any money on the strength of it. But he certainly seemed to believe whatever story Miriam had cooked up.

The tragedy is that Nellie didn’t live to see her 21st birthday.

But the idea must have continued to marinate in Miriam’s mind, as a few years later when May was eighteen years old, Miriam decided to go around telling everyone that May was due to be given a whopping £155,000 on her 21st birthday – or over £22 million today - from a mysterious Australian man of Scottish descent known as Alexander McDonald.

This was enough to convince a wealthy widow and kindly neighbour by the name of Martha Smith to lend Miriam her entire life savings - a total of £400, or around £60,000 today.

Mrs Smith never got her money back, and later sobbed: “I was simply taken in by them.”

This may well have been the real root of the journey to a new lavish life in Wales, by which time the story had become a little more refined.

May Charlesworth had now evolved into Violet Gordon Charlesworth, and whilst the middle name is clearly a terrible name for a woman – apologies to all lady viewers out there called Gordon – it was obviously meant to suggest a genuine connection to the legendary national treasure Major-General Charles Gordon from whom Violet was now set to inherit £100,000.

This was the culmination of a new plan which had first started to take shape back in England when Miriam and May had discovered that they could pick up expensive silk dresses and jewellery on credit just by mentioning the forthcoming windfall from Chinese Gordon.

They’d pretty much taken every shop in town for a ride before moving onto Wales to try their luck on a much grander scale.

They obviously had to tweak the details a little bit as Violet was already pushing 21 by the time the family first arrived in Rhyl, and so the date of the big payout got sensibly pushed back to her 25th birthday to allow a bit more time for the scam to flourish.

But it certainly did flourish.

They managed to swindle money out of stockbrokers, banks, lenders, and even Violet’s own fiancé, whilst all the time racking up huge amounts of credit from store owners who were more than happy to furnish the most famous lady in town with whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it.

And this long-running deception was the sole source of the flashy sports cars, the twelve St Bernards, the expensive jewellery, the diamond tiara, the rented holiday homes, and indeed the stately manor house and the entire new lifestyle of the whole Charlesworth family.

During a time when the average wage was just £70 a year, Violet was raking in around £4,000 a year from the fraud and from the booming speculations on the stock market that the scam had helped to fund.

Violet worked hard on keeping up appearances. The whole Scottish obsession was probably just another element of her disguise to make her look a bit otherworldly and interesting. Posing for photographs dressed in full highland gear suggested that she shared rich connections with a land that may have seemed much further away back when the world felt a bit smaller.

Or I suppose she could have just really liked tartan and bagpipes.

But keeping up the charade and attracting ever more wealth just got easier and easier over time because she had grown so comfortably into the role of the woman that she was pretending to be.

I would imagine that if you ask a perfect stranger for a substantial loan whilst you’re wearing ill-fitting clothes covered in gravy stains and you look like you just fell out of a skip and you smell like a bonfire, you’re probably not going to have much luck.

But when you turn up in a sports car and you’re already wearing furs and diamonds and tiaras that you didn’t even have to pay for, you’re going to inspire confidence and get showered with even more money and more expensive gifts that are only going to strengthen your image and reputation in time for the next gullible sucker.

And whilst this might all sound like a finely crafted jolly wheeze, let’s spare a thought for some of those gullible suckers.

As well as extracting loans from banks and businessmen – including one stockbroker who alone lent her a total of £10,000 - Violet also wormed her way into the heart of a rich doctor by the name of Edward Hughes Jones.

The doctor was under the impression that he was in a meaningful relationship with Violet who would soon become his fiancé. He later lamented:

I was honestly and deeply in love with her.

But it seems that Violet was just chasing another big loan.

Dr Edward Jones eventually broke off the engagement because of what he perceived as Violet’s utterly bonkers spending habits, but not before he’d lent her a total of £5,000 on a false promise of a payback.

A bizarre personal letter from Violet to the doctor was later unearthed in which it’s painfully obvious that she’s still suffering from delusions of being Scottish whilst begging for more dough. She writes:

You ken well all my fortune, when I get it, will be yours as much as mine. It cuts me to the heart to ask you for money. It is cruel, bitterly cruel, but it is all for love’s sake, laddie, laddie. And now, Eddie, my own, ever your devoted and someday wife, Violet.

Och Violet, awa’ n bile yer heid, yer silly lassie.

But the really cruel element to Violet’s plan is that she often took money from victims who couldn’t afford to lose it.

That nice widow Martha Smith may have had some savings in the bank from the death of her beloved husband, but Violet completely wiped her out, leaving her with nothing.

Apparently, Martha was a deeply patriotic soul who had become enchanted by Violet’s tales of her daring and dashing godfather Major-General Charles Gordon. And she was only too happy to hand over her entire life savings on the understanding that she would surely get it all back from the goddaughter of a war hero.

Suddenly it all begins to sound more than a little ruthless. Maybe it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if she’d just stuck to screwing over rich businessmen and bankers.

Of course, the major flaw with the whole fiendish plot is that Violet had given herself a deadline and a pretty significant expiration date for the dastardly scheme in the not-too-distant future. One day very soon, Violet was going to turn 25 years of age, and people were going to start noticing that they weren’t getting the money back that they had been promised.

Perhaps there wasn’t really an awful lot she could do about that. It would have seemed a bit far-fetched for an inheritance to stipulate that the recipient can only cash in the cheque when they turn 94. And besides, extending the date of the windfall too far into the future may have dissuaded most of the lenders from playing ball.

“I’ll pay you back in seventy years, buddy” doesn’t sound like such a good deal.

But the financial problems were already mounting for Violet and the Charlesworth family in general long before it was time to think about putting 25 candles on a cake.

Whilst Violet had initially dazzled stockbrokers with her prowess on the trading floor, her later dealings on the stock market had become increasingly reckless and had gone more than a little pear-shaped. She’d ended up completely blowing her stolen fortune.

In total, she now owed today’s equivalent of £2 million, and despite the family still putting on airs and graces in public, the reality was that they were now flat broke as the clock ticked ever closer to that 25th birthday.

I’m not quite sure how the rest of the Charlesworths were supposed to get out of this mess with any dignity, but Violet had clearly decided to rope in the services of Albert Watts and her sister Lillian to stage a desperate last resort which might just keep a whole pack of disgruntled wolves from her door.

You’d have thought they might have just put a little more effort and thought into the execution of the plan to fake Violet’s death.

They could have battered up the car a bit more instead of just smashing a hole through a window. They could have thrown a bit of blood around the scene, and they could have found a spot where the water wasn’t quite so transparently shallow.

Even the strategic positioning of the journal, the map, and the Tam O’Shanter seemed a little obvious and lame, suggesting only that Violet’s personal possessions had not travelled very far in the aftermath of the crash yet her body had vanished without trace.

It didn’t take long at all for whiffs of suspicion to start wafting over the cliffs at Demon’s Turn which only intensified when the private investigator approached the police with his own findings that Violet Charlesworth had been falsely declaring herself to be the goddaughter of Major-General Charles Gordon. This was quickly followed by complaints from a long list of duped lenders for whom the truth had finally begun to rise to the surface in exactly the same way that a dead body had not.

Some of those lenders – along with police officers, solicitors and journalists – descended onto the family mansion in St Asaph in search of answers and cash, but John, Miriam, and Fred barricaded themselves in for days, refusing to even open the door for the milkman.

One newspaper report at the time suggested that the police eventually had to scale the walls of the property to gain access, after which they began to seize everything of value to help pay back the creditors.

The initially sorrowful press headlines describing a terrible tragedy soon evolved into sensational reports of a devious fake heiress on the run from authorities, as the story began to make waves right across the world.

I think that The North Wales Weekly News succinctly captured the transformed mood of the region when they observed:

As for the people residing in the vicinity of the alleged incident, they don’t know where she is, and what is more, they don’t care a motor spanner.

And as the police swiftly abandoned the idea of finding a corpse in favour of launching a hunt for the woman in the flowing crimson cloak, sales of crimson cloaks were reported to take a sudden nosedive as potential customers didn’t want to risk being mistaken for the fugitive.

That might sound a bit silly but there were plenty of false alarms to begin with, as practically any woman wandering around the UK in a flowing crimson cloak, or even just driving a car alone, was likely to find themselves getting reported to the police by an over-enthusiastic amateur crime fighter.

But it was only a matter of days before the police finally got their most promising lead yet.

It looked as if Violet Charlesworth had skipped the country but hadn’t skipped particularly far.

The woman from Staffordshire had fled to her spiritual home in the green hills and grassy fields of bonnie Scotland.

Purple Haze

A couple of female guests had turned several heads when they checked into a hotel in the Scottish town of Oban, a few days after the supposed car crash.

One of them went by the name of Margaret Macleod and spoke with a curious accent which came across as if she was a quite posh English woman attempting to sound as if she was born and bred in Scotland.

Another curious point about this Margaret Macleod is that she was the absolute spitting image of the missing Violet Charlesworth.

Furthermore, she was staying at the hotel with none other than Violet’s sister Lillian Charlesworth.

The pair of them aroused further suspicion the very next morning by scarpering without bothering to pay their bill. Margaret Macleod even went to the trouble of cutting their names out of the guest book.

And if there are still any lingering doubts as to the true identity of Margaret Macleod, it was later discovered that the hotel guest had rather carelessly left behind a telegram in her room addressed to Violet Charlesworth.

The pair had legged it onto the next departing steamer, but news of the sighting had travelled so quickly that a pack of press reporters were already waiting to challenge them as soon as they stepped back out onto the mainland.

Margaret Macleod seemed quite taken aback by the surprise reception but appeared to be almost amused by any notion that she might be the missing woman, as if such a concept was preposterous.

She admitted that she’d been enjoying following the story herself in the newspapers, but pointed out that Violet Charlesworth had been described by the press as a very tall woman whereas she was only five foot five and a half.

If any of the reporters had thought to pack a tape measure, they could have proven right there and then that Margaret Macleod was actually five foot seven inches which by a staggering coincidence was the exact same height as Violet.

But in conclusion she insisted:

Of course, I am not Miss Violet Charlesworth. I have no objection to saying who I am—Margaret Cameron MacLeod.

Lillian didn’t have very much to say for herself other than to completely deny that she was Violet Charlesworth’s sister.

The strange point about this claim is that there might actually have been some truth in it.

Whilst the baptism records of Lillian and Violet – well, May as she was back then – indicate that they shared the same parents, later census records list them as cousins.

It’s difficult to figure out what exactly was going on here and their true relation remains unknown, but it seems that the Charlesworth children were already getting plunged into some weird kind of identity crisis long before the story of the heiress was born.

It might have been handy if some police officers had bothered to turn up to greet Violet and Lillian, but they presumably had better things to do on that day, so the pair were at liberty to walk away from the reporters and make their way to Glasgow.

But just how long could this so-called Margaret Macleod keep up the charade?

Well, just one day as it turns out. By the very next afternoon, Margaret made a complete U-turn and took the odd decision of revealing her true identity and selling her story – or at least a fragment of her story – to the newspapers.

Violet Charlesworth had become something of a notorious celebrity figure by this point. Her face was regularly getting plastered all over the newspapers, and The Daily Express had even resorted to selling collectable Violet Charlesworth postcards for three pennies each.

Perhaps this is what partly inspired Violet to come clean and attempt to somehow cash in on the story herself. She accepted the not inconsiderable sum of £400 from The Daily Mail in return for an exclusive confessional interview, although it turned out to be not particularly exclusive as she would later agree to extensive interviews with several other newspapers over the next few weeks, including The Daily Despatch who stretched out her life story over three weekly instalments.

However, whilst recent online dives into the story have suggested that this is the point where Violet finally unpacked every last skeleton from the closet, that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.

She certainly gets off to a promising start by dramatically declaring: “It is no use my denying it any longer. I am Miss Violet Charlesworth.”

But she only actually admits to running away to Scotland and leaving everyone to assume that she was dead, without ever explaining the reasons why. There’s no mention whatsoever of swindling a whole bunch of people out of vast sums of money based on a tissue of lies.

Instead, she suggests that the car crash was genuine and that her decision to flee the scene was an act of spontaneity after becoming separated from Lillian and Albert. As she puts it:

I gave one wild look around, and then an impulse came into my head to get away from the horrible associations of the place.

Her supposed true life story suggests that her father John moved away to America on his own eight years earlier which doesn’t appear to be the case at all as he was still very much holed up in St Asaph, whilst she reckoned that her wealth came from a personal allowance, topped up with gifts from family and friends, although details are suspiciously vague.

But having now made quite a bit of money just from selling a crock of shit to the press, Violet decided that she was quite enjoying her new status as a proper national celebrity, and so she decided to keep on milking it for all it was worth. Which was quite a bit.

She wrote another song, this time quite cheekily entitled ‘Goodbye Girlie, I Must Go’, which ended up getting licensed to music halls.

She appeared in a theatre production at The London Hippodrome called ‘The Cliff Road’ in which she played a version of herself re-enacting the car crash on stage. That sounds quite ambitious to me for an early 20th century theatre production, but apparently a lot of money was thrown at it, and a giant water tank was dragged onto stage to represent the sea.

And she even signed up to play the starring role in a silent movie entitled ‘The Welsh Cliff Mystery’ in which she was to play a woman who fakes her own death and then goes on the run from the police.

Bearing in mind that she still hadn’t confessed to the whole sordid story, I have no idea how the scripts for the theatre play and the silent movie would have managed to flesh out any kind of plot beyond the driver of a crashed car hot footing it to Scotland, but I’m assuming that they were both padded out with entirely fictional elements.

We’ll never know about the film as it never actually made it into production, although Violet was still reported to have been paid a very generous advance.

The theatre play was hardly a roaring success either, and the curtains came down for the last time a lot earlier than intended as the audiences had taken to aggressively booing Violet whenever she appeared on stage.

I initially wondered if this might have been some kind of vocal expression of disapproval regarding her sheer shamelessness at carving out a career in the spotlight based on somewhat dubious activity.

But no, apparently she was just a really terrible actress.

You might be wondering why on Earth she wasn’t arrested at any point in 1909.

She’d already been served with a court summons before the crash, and there were plenty of people queuing up to accuse her of fraudulent behaviour.

It’s not as if the police would have had much problem in tracking her down, considering that she was appearing live on stage at The London Hippodrome most nights.

It also seems a little odd that Violet was so keen to bask in the glare of public attention instead of quietly withdrawing to a secret location where she might be forgotten or at least never found.

It’s likely that she just viewed her new celebrity status as another lucrative money-spinner, but it could also be that she believed her fame might actually protect her from the law. The police surely can’t go around arresting rich or famous people, that’s just not how things worked in Edwardian England.

Or maybe it was.

It turns out that the police hadn’t just fallen asleep for a year. They had been continuing their investigations all this time, and were finally ready to seize their moment at the beginning of 1910, just as the glow from Violet’s moment in the limelight appeared to have dimmed.

Productions were cancelled, the offers of further work had dried up, the money had been squandered, and now Violet Charlesworth was officially bankrupt.

And if she already thought that the new year had gotten off to a pretty dismal start, she would no doubt feel a lot grumpier when both she and her mother Miriam were finally arrested on suspicion of fraud.

Violet to Blue

There were a couple of mystifying elements to the arrests and the subsequent trial which kicked off on February 23rd 1910 at the Chester Assizes in England.

The first puzzle is why nobody else aside from Violet and Miriam appeared to face any kind of criminal charges. John and Fred Charlesworth must surely have had some kind of involvement or at least knowledge of the long-running scam, and they would certainly have reaped the benefits from it. Barricading themselves in the family house to stop the police from seizing their assets acquired from the spoils of crime can’t have gone down too well, either.

And it must have been blindingly obvious that both Lillian Charlesworth and Albert Watts were accomplices in staging the car crash that was meant to allow Violet to flee from justice.

But as far as we can tell, nobody seemed too fussed about charging anybody other than Violet and her mother.

Another initially baffling point is that although there was a long list of victims who had been duped by the scam, Violet and Miriam only ever faced specific charges of fraud from her former fiancé Dr Edward Jones, and the kindly widow Martha Smith.

Whilst it’s nice to see Martha fighting back against the fraudsters, there was no sign of any of the other victims, not even the stockbroker who was scammed out of £10,000.

The most likely reason is that some of the conned businessmen were simply too embarrassed to publicly admit that they had been taken for fools by a young woman. And more to the point, it’s not as if they were likely to get any of their losses back from a defendant who had just been declared bankrupt, so why bother?

It doesn’t look as if either Smith or Jones ever saw their money again which is a crying shame for the formerly wealthy widow in particular, but their battle in the court may have been more of a personal matter of vindication rather than any serious attempt at clawing back their losses.

Both Violet and Miriam pleaded not guilty to fraud, and their defence reverted to an earlier version of the scam.

They denied ever suggesting to their victims that Violet was in line for a big inheritance from her godfather Major-General Charles Gordon – and this was probably a smart move on their part as it could easily have been proven in court that this was not the case and that they were not related.

Instead, they revisited the far foggier tale that Violet had been promised £155,000 on her 25th birthday from a mysterious Australian man of Scottish descent called Alexander McDonald.

John and Violet had apparently fallen in love when she was just seventeen, and the promise had been made shortly afterwards. The only slight niggle is that she hadn’t heard from him for several years and didn’t know where he was right now, although she helpfully pointed out that the last she heard, he might be living somewhere in Melbourne.

She conceded to the jury: “I have been disappointed.”

The Daily Herald observed the striking differences in the conduct of the two defendants in court.

Miriam Charlesworth is painted as a bit of an angry snake, frequently throwing cold and venomous looks at her own daughter as if everything was all her fault for cocking up a perfectly good plan.

In contrast, Violet is described as:

Utterly despondent. Her pale face and light hair framed hollow eyes that burned with hopelessness. She broke down when the Welsh doctor she had deceived gave his testimony, her agony unmistakably real.

And this does make you ponder over who exactly was guilty of being the ruthless mastermind driving this whole plot forward.

Violet Charlesworth usually cops most of the blame and fame for her starring role as the bogus heiress.

She’s even been accused of doing tremendous damage to other women of the era fighting for political rights and social equality.

Acclaimed British historian and author Lucy Worsley observes:

Violet was hungry for riches, for fame, for attention, and to get these things, she took advantage of new freedoms. But she did it in a way that wasn’t good for other women. Violet’s story confirmed a lot of people’s worst fears: that empowered women can be dangerous, even criminal.

But instead of trying to suggest that Violet was solely responsible for pushing back equal rights for women by years, I do think we need to consider the role played by her own calculating mother.

It was clearly Miriam’s original idea to start peddling lies about the older daughter Nellie in order to whip up credit for hugely expensive items of clothing that the family couldn’t afford.

And after Nellie died, the scam was passed down to the young and impressionable May Charlesworth who was given a new role to play and a new responsibility for generating wealth for the whole family.

That’s not to suggest that Violet was entirely blameless or was a victim herself. By the time she reached her early 20s, she could have reassessed her position and perhaps taken the time to consider that swindling nice old ladies and your own fiancé out of their fortunes might not be the most ethical way of topping up your bank account.

But it’s interesting that Violet appeared to show genuine remorse in the court whilst Miriam was just consumed with anger at the position she had now found herself in, perhaps indicating that a manipulative and overbearing mother was furious with her daughter for ruining her plans and letting the side down.

The trial itself lasted for just two days, during which it became embarrassingly clear that the mysterious benefactor Alexander Macdonald did not exist and that the staged car crash had been an attempt to flee the consequences of peddling another giant whopper involving a war hero.

It took the jury just twenty minutes to find Violet and Miriam Charlesworth guilty of two counts of obtaining money by false pretences and four counts of conspiracy to obtain money by false pretences.

It was Violet who got singled out for the most attention from the judge as he wrapped up the case by describing her as:

An exceedingly clever and ingenious woman who might have had an honourable and possibly distinguished career if half her ingenuity had been properly directed.

He didn’t have much to say at all about Miriam but maybe he considered her to be a lost cause.

They both got exactly the same punishment, regardless.

As was fairly common in the Edwardian era, they were ravaged to death by a pack of rabid wolves let loose inside the courtroom.

No, scrap that, I was looking at the wrong case.

The judge initially sentenced the pair to five years hard labour, but later felt that he’d been a bit harsh and cut down the sentence to three years.

Violet and Miriam only ended up serving two years of penal servitude before they were released on licence in 1912, after which they disappeared into complete obscurity.

Fade to Grey

This might all sound like a story that could only happen in the olden days back when people were more reassuringly stupid.

But it’s strikingly similar to a much more recent story involving the Russian swindler Anna Sorokin who infiltrated the upper-class New York social and art scenes under the fake persona of wealthy heiress Anna Delvey. Between 2013 and 2017, she managed to defraud friends, acquaintances, banks and hotels to the tune of $275,000 on the strength of a multi-million-euro trust fund that never existed.

And it seems that she took inspiration from Violet Charlesworth in more ways than one, as she later used this as a springboard for a celebrity career, albeit after serving just under four years in prison on convictions of attempted grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services.

She sold the rights to her story to Netflix for the 2022 mini-series ‘Inventing Anna’, although it was later ordered that the vast majority of money she made from the deal would be used to pay the restitutions and fines she had clocked up in court, totalling nearly $300,000.

Since then, her story has been the subject of a stage play, she’s written a book, and made countless appearances on television, most recently popping up as a contestant on ‘Dancing with the Stars’ in 2024 on which she was still legally required to wear her ankle monitor at all times.

It sounds as if Anna Sorokin is making a better fist of this shameless criminal celebrity lark than Violet Charlesworth ever managed with her lousy short-lived stage show and unproduced silent film.

But maybe the options for building a brand out of bad behaviour were a bit more limited back in 1909. You can be sure that if that had been such thing as an Edwardian version of “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” then Violet would have been in that jungle faster than a greased pig.

There’s still plenty of debate though over whether Violet Charlesworth was ultimately a cunning criminal genius or a hare-brained wannabe con artist with no cards to deal.

Her exit plan certainly left a lot to be desired. The staged death could generously be described as amateurish at best, whilst taking up a new name in Scotland is far less likely to work out if you’re travelling with your own sister and leaving telegrams behind in your hotel room addressed to your real name.

Maybe she wasn’t born to be a criminal. Often described as charming and generous, perhaps the life of May Charlesworth would have turned out very differently if she hadn’t been raised by a pushy mother flushed with pure greed.

Then again, maybe Violet’s downfall was propelled by her own pure greed.

The wicked plan actually came excruciatingly close to working out for all concerned, and could potentially have been a grand example of the ‘Fake it ‘til You Make it’ strategy leading into glorious triumph with zero consequences.

Violet’s initial dealings on the stock market may have been financed by money gained from deception, but she was pulling in some pretty impressive profits. This would have been a perfect opportunity to pay off all her creditors and set up an entirely legitimate enterprise. The people we now describe as her victims would have been none the wiser that they had ever been hoodwinked.

It’s not as if anyone had ever seen through her quite masterful disguise.

The only reason that her plan fell apart is because she continued to squander money on herself whilst recklessly gambling away the rest on increasingly foolhardy stock market speculations.

And this is what led her to the point of desperation and imminent exposure when her 25th birthday loomed ever closer into view and she suddenly didn’t have a pot to piss in.

It could all have worked out so very differently if she’d just calmed down a bit with the sports cars and the diamonds and the St Bernards, and maybe found herself a better stockbroker.

That sharp bend in the coastal road in Penmaenmawr formerly known as Demon’s Turn is now more commonly known by locals as Violet’s Leap. But the final unsolved mystery is where exactly Violet leapt to after leaving prison in 1912.

It’s believed that Miriam Charlesworth died just eight years later in 1920, possibly a victim of the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920, often referred to as The Spanish Flu epidemic despite the fact that it was thought to have originated in the U.S rather than Spain.

As for Violet, grave sleuths have recently discovered a death record which lists a certain May Charlesworth who died in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire in 1957, at the age of 73.

It’s a shame the cause of death isn’t listed. If she’d disappeared after being flung from a dog sled on fire that was about to hurdle over the top of a mountain that was also on fire, I suspect we’d be talking about the same woman.

As it is, we don’t know for sure.

And I just have a feeling that after suffering the shame and disgrace of serving a prison sentence, Violet may have been more tempted to move away to her bonnie Scotland under a completely different identity, leaving the shadow of the Charlesworth name behind in England.

Such a move would of course now make it nigh-on impossible to figure out how exactly Violet Charlesworth spent the rest of her life.

But I hope that any wealthy investors of the 1920s kept their wallets firmly in their pockets if they ever bumped into an elegant lady bagpiper in Scotland who claimed to be on the verge of inheriting a vast fortune from Lord Angus Burns - Protector of the Tartan Realm, Guardian of the Glens, and Keeper of the Highland Winds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Violet Charlesworth?

Violet Charlesworth was a young woman from a wealthy family in St Asaph, Wales, known for her extravagant lifestyle and multiple sports cars. She was on the brink of inheriting a significant fortune from her supposed godfather, Major-General Charles Gordon, when she went missing in a car crash in January 1909.

What happened to Violet Charlesworth in January 1909?

Violet Charlesworth was driving her bottle-green Minerva sports car along a North Wales clifftop road with her sister Lillian and chauffeur Albert Watts. The car crashed into a sea wall at a sharp bend known as ‘Demon’s Turn,’ and Violet was believed to have been thrown through the windscreen into the sea.

Why was Violet Charlesworth famous?

Violet Charlesworth was famous for her extravagant lifestyle, her multiple sports cars, and her public persona as a wealthy heiress. She was known for her expensive furs, diamonds, and her obsession with Scottish culture, despite having no Scottish roots.

What was the significance of Violet’s 25th birthday?

Violet was expected to inherit a significant fortune from her supposed godfather, Major-General Charles Gordon, on her 25th birthday. This inheritance was a key part of her public image and the basis for many of her financial dealings.

What was the outcome of the car crash involving Violet Charlesworth?

The car crash resulted in the disappearance of Violet Charlesworth, who was believed to have been thrown into the sea. Her body was never found, and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance raised many questions and suspicions.

What was the role of Albert Watts in the car crash?

Albert Watts was the chauffeur for the Charlesworth family, but on the night of the crash, he was not driving. Violet was behind the wheel, and the crash led to questions about why a chauffeur was present if he was not driving.

What was the public reaction to Violet Charlesworth’s disappearance?

The public reaction was one of shock and mourning initially, but as details emerged, suspicion and disbelief grew. The media and public began to question the circumstances of the crash and Violet’s disappearance, leading to a widespread search for the truth.

What was the significance of the sharp bend in the road where the crash occurred?

The sharp bend in the road, known as ‘Demon’s Turn,’ was a notorious spot for accidents. After the crash, it became known as ‘Violet’s Leap,’ highlighting the tragic event that occurred there.

What was the financial situation of the Charlesworth family?

The Charlesworth family appeared to be wealthy, living in a stately manor house and enjoying an extravagant lifestyle. However, it was later revealed that much of their wealth was obtained through deception and fraud, with Violet and her mother Miriam orchestrating a complex scam involving false inheritances.

What was the outcome of the investigation into Violet Charlesworth’s disappearance?

The investigation revealed that Violet Charlesworth had staged her own death to avoid financial ruin and exposure of her fraudulent activities. She was later found and arrested, along with her mother Miriam, for fraud and conspiracy.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Violet Charlesworth: The Edwardian Heiress Who Never Was…
• Hero image source by anogh / openverse, cc0.