By the time Bessie Field became famous, she was already 60 years old. What made Bessie famous was a bankruptcy petition that had been issued against her. It had to be advertised in local newspapers because she was suddenly nowhere to be found. And some people even said that she wasn’t who she claimed to be.
Bessie had been running a bakery and cake shop on North Street in Stokes Croft, Bristol. She had opened the shop in January 1925. It was double-fronted, and the bread and cakes it sold were all baked on the premises. Things went well for a while. The shop was often packed and the business was said to be bringing in £70 a week (equivalent to almost £4,000 today).
But Bessie had been living the high life. She liked a bet. The gowns she wore were bought in Clifton. And her home, a large flat on Linden Road in Redland, was also done up to the nines. She shared the flat with another woman, and together the two of them bought jewellery and hired a limousine for jaunts into the countryside.
Bustling American ways
When the creditors held a meeting after Bessie disappeared, there turned out to be 60 of them, owed in total almost £3,000 (£160,000). It was a grocer on Victoria Street who issued the bankruptcy petition. Other people had supplied Bessie with furniture and crockery. A decorator was owed £98 for work done on the flat. And several creditors were young women who had each paid Bessie £50 to be taught the baking business.
“Have you ever known such a lot of fat heads as we have been?” one creditor asked at the meeting. “I can’t say I have,” the Official Receiver replied, and a warrant was duly issued for Bessie’s arrest.
But who, precisely, was she? Newspapers noted a resemblance between her activities and those of a woman named Dora Wright, who had recently left Glasgow owing nearly £6,000 (£320,000). One person said Bessie had an American accent. Another recalled her “bustling American ways”. And a third said she was from Yorkshire. There was even speculation that she was actually a man, a shaving kit having reportedly been found after she quit the flat on Linden Road.
Greasing cake tins
In June 1925, Bessie was finally apprehended, after being found living behind the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, and when she appeared in Bristol police court, the public benches were packed. She was, of course, smartly dressed. And further information was provided about the charges she faced.
It wasn’t only the flat on Linden Road that had been done up. A Redland builder named Edwin Jones said he had made alterations in the shop and was still waiting to be paid £619 (£33,000). And then there were the women who had paid Bessie their £50. Two of them, Miss Hopkins and Miss Perkins, complained that they had received no training and had simply been put to work serving in the shop or greasing cake tins.
A third woman, a Miss Brookman of Fishponds, had been promised that she would be promoted if she proved satisfactory, but that came to nothing. As Brookman’s father, Alfred, recounted this sad tale in court, Bessie interjected: “I explained everything to you,” she shouted.
“Oh yes,” Alfred replied, “but you didn’t say you were going to run away.”
It turned out that Bessie had been doing this for years. She had first been made bankrupt before the Great War. Then, in Hull, she had opened a gown shop of her own, only to abandon it with debts worth more than £270,000 today. In Maidstone, she had filled her house with hired furniture but then sold the furniture and disappeared. Bailiffs pursued her after she disappeared from Leicester owing a similar sum again. Having been made bankrupt there as well, she had never been discharged – which was something else to add to the charges.
People of position
On 26 July 1925, Bessie appeared at the Quarter Session in Bristol, in front of Holman Gregory, KC, the Recorder of Bristol. When she pleaded guilty to all the charges, the truth finally came out. Dora Wright had indeed been a name she had used, as had Ada Scott and Mollie Walton, but she was really called Elizabeth Greer. And she hadn’t been born in America or Yorkshire, but in Southport, the child of what the prosecutor called “people of position”.
In her defence, Bessie said that she was a good organiser who had merely lacked the capital to make a success of the businesses she had started. The Recorder, however, said she was “a cruel and heartless fraud” who had induced poor working women to part with what was probably the last penny they had in the world. He was surprised, he went on, that she had been able to persuade so many people to give her so much credit. “Is that evidence of her criminality or their stupidity?” he asked.
“A little of each,” the prosecutor replied. Bessie was sent to prison for 15 months with hard labour.
Three years later, a woman named Elizabeth Paton came up before the Assize Court in Swansea, charged with fraud. She had opened a chain of cake shops in South Wales, took as much as £120 from young women she had engaged as assistants but then absconded and was made bankrupt.
Convicted of fraud, she was sentenced to three years in prison. But she fell silent after it was revealed she had once been Bessie Field. She would prefer it if that Bristol business wasn’t brought up again, her lawyer told the court.
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