John Verrall

Two for the price of One: Who lies in Plot C3, Grave no. 469?

In the summer of 1975, I walked into a room in an abandoned house in the small Yorkshire town of Howden whose floor was littered with paper documents of all sorts and sizes. I randomly picked up six letters from the late 1920s, some pre-war newspapers and a Boots paper wallet full of large photographic negatives as potentially interesting curiosities. I had no idea then that these scant materials would occupy me, on and off, for the next fifty years.

Two other letters came from a firm of London solicitors; one contained the latest news concerning their ongoing investigation into the adultery apparently committed by John Cole’s wife, Claribel Edith Cole (née Nevill), at the luxurious Hotel Cecil in The Strand in April, 1929. The co-respondent was named as Carl Nachod, an electrical engineer from Louisville, Kentucky, whom Edith had ‘married’ in Louisville on 16 March 1929. This was the very same day she had obtained a Kentucky divorce from Cole, making her a bigamist under English law, as Cole did not divorce her till 1931 and there was no international treaty that a divorce obtained in one country would be recognised in another as legally binding. Cole himself certainly did not recognise it, and a solicitor’s letter on his behalf to the Kentucky divorce court was of the opinion the American court had no jurisdiction.

Carl and Edith had arrived in England on 16 April 1929. The passenger list tells us that after their nights at Hotel Cecil they were going to stay at 4, Chilston Rd., in Tunbridge Wells, which was the home of the prominent non-conformist Fairchild Huxtable family. The Rev. H. Fairchild-Huxtable was at the time the minister at St John’s Free Church in St. John’s Rd. Dorothy Fairchild Huxtable, a year younger than Edith became a close friend of hers.

The other three letters I picked up were written by a woman called Lily Sharp with whom Cole enjoyed some sort of close relationship. Lily, it turns out, was a member of his congregation during his ministry at Crossbrook Street Congregational Church in Cheshunt. Her letters show she was sympathetic to Cole’s marital problems, and was, for at least a time, clearly hoping to marry Cole herself. Her letters range in tone from warm and affectionate (“Let us be lovers, dear, all through our married life” – though they were never to marry) to minor domestic detail of where to meet, state of family health, breaking pen nibs, etc.

Intrigued by these fragments of a seemingly rather sad story of a jilted priest that clearly required further study, I took these materials back home to the Netherlands and tried to find out more about John Cole. What emerged was a story I could not have invented.

In 1923, John Cole was the newly-ordained 28-year-old Congregationalist minister in Buntingford, Hertfordshire. Born in Brighton, he had survived the horrors of the Western Front and a German prisoner-of-war camp. His wife-to-be, Edith (1894-1996), was born in New York and had come to England with her father in 1919, settling initially in Brighton, where she probably met John Cole through church connections which may also have introduced her to the Huxtables.

We know that Edith and her father then moved to Cottered, a small hamlet near Buntingford, and Edith sang a solo and Dorothy played the organ at Cole's ordination ceremony. Edith became engaged to Cole two or so months later, incidentally displacing Cole's then fiancée (much to the distress of the Church deacons), and then married him in London in 1925 (causing more distress that was to last throughout Cole’s time in Buntingford). Once married, Cole and Edith never lived together, ostensibly because Cole didn’t have the means to establish a home for the both of them (his stipend was roughly £9,000 a year in today’s money). So she remained in London, sharing digs with Dorothy, and while he lived in Buntingford, and after two and a half years of what was essentially a long-distance relationship, it was agreed that Edith should visit America in 1927 to see friends on a six-month visa, accompanied by the faithful Dorothy. Eventually, the pair moved on to Louisville, where Edith took a job as a stenographer at Carl Nachod’s firm and later became his wife, as we have seen. Dorothy worked in a photography store, and when the Nachods went on their ‘honeymoon’ to the UK after their marriage, Dorothy went with them.

I said earlier that Edith Nevill had travelled with her father to England in 1919. But so far, I have said nothing about him. His name was Vincent St John Nevill, but there are few traces of his presence in England. There seemed to be no census data whatsoever for anyone called Vincent St John Nevill. Nor is there a record of a birth under that name. He was a witness at his daughter’s wedding to Cole in 1925 (as was Dorothy Huxtable.) We know that Edith was born in New York City in 1894, but, so far, the identities of her father and mother or possible siblings were something of a mystery.

Apart from his presence at his daughter’s wedding, all I found initially was that he had married someone in 1933 when he was 68, that he hadn’t attended Edith’s wedding to Carl Nachod in Louisville in 1929, and that he died in the Tonbridge area of Kent in 1938, aged 73, which means he was born in 1864 or 1865.

Edith having been born in New York, a search of American records was now obviously required. I immediately found Nevill in an entry in the 1930 United States Census for Michigan City, Indiana, which lists him as ‘Vincent S. Nevill’. His details show him to be 66 years old, married at age 30, widowed, able to read and write, born in England, emigrated to the US in 1882, and not having American citizenship. There are no other family members listed as living with him. But then neither do any of the other fifty or so people on that page of the census. And all of these fifty are male … The penny finally drops: the census data were collected at Indiana State Prison, where Nevill had been an inmate since 7 November, 1929.

The authorities were clearly keen to be rid of him, however, and on 1 April, 1930 (the day the census was taken), the following appeared in The Richmond Item of Indiana:

‘Vincent Neville (sic), an English citizen, who has served terms in Wandsworth prison in England, in Sing Sing Prison in the United States and who is now serving a two to fourteen-year sentence for false impersonation in the Indiana prison, was granted parole on the provision that United States immigration officials would order him deported immediately.”

No wonder Nevill was considered persona non grata in America. He had been imprisoned in two of the most notorious prisons in Britain and America and had a substantial criminal record. And indeed, in November 1930, Nevill was on his way back home to Southampton via Montreal. The passenger list puts him together with six other people under the heading ‘DEPORTS’. His address in England is given only as ‘Tunbridge Wells’.

This was not the only time Nevill was to be deported. Two and a half years later, on 25 April, 1933, at the age of 68, he had married Annie Martha Constantine Nicholls Fletcher, widow, aged 35, at Birkenhead Register Office, across the Mersey from Liverpool. Annie’s 15-year-old daughter by her previous marriage, Kathleen, was also present. All three lived at the same address, a nice waterfront terraced house in nearby Wallasey. According to reports in The Cincinnati Enquirer of 5 August and 7 September, 1933, Nevill had persuaded Annie, who “(came) of a cultured family”, that if she married him and financed their journey to America, he, as “a man of means with property in Louisville”, would “obtain possession of his wealth and provide handsomely for her in the future.” Annie duly took her daughter out of private school and sold up, and the three of them crossed the Atlantic to Canada, from where they entered the United States. Having previously been deported in 1930, Nevill could hardly enter the United States by legal means, and he would later boast of twice crossing the border without a passport. In 1933, he claimed he had entered under the name of A.J. Fletcher, Annie’s late husband, so they all could have been travelling on the by now invalid Fletcher family passport.

Once in America, Annie very quickly discovered that her new husband Vincent had none of the assets he had promised and thus would not be able to provide for her and her daughter. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, after the three of them had arrived in Louisville, “relatives of Nevill persuaded the woman and her daughter to accompany them on an automobile trip. In Cincinnati, it is alleged, the relatives left mother and daughter stranded.” As far as I can discover, the only adult relatives in Louisville were Carl Nachod and Vincent’s daughter Edith Nevill-Nachod.

The new Mrs Annie Nevill did not take well to being abandoned in a strange city 100 miles from Louisville, and, now penniless, sought help from the local police. She later told the US Director of Immigration in Cincinnati that she had been ‘duped’, and wished to be repatriated. Vincent Nevill was arrested and held in Louisville, and on 6 September, 1933, Nevill, Annie and Kathleen were taken to the Canadian border, so that they could be deported, again from Montreal. They sailed back to Liverpool on The Duchess of Richmond, and were home on 16 September. On the passenger manifest, they all appear in the ‘Deports’ section, harsh judgement on the unfortunate Annie Nevill and her daughter.

Once landed in Liverpool, Nevill wasted no time in resuming his life of crime, and in November 1933, some two months after returning from his forlorn trip to Louisville, he was sentenced to six months’ hard labour in Salford, near Manchester, for obtaining money by false pretences in a favourite scheme involving the sale of advertisements on ink blotters.

In 1929, The Journal & Courier of Lafayette, Indiana stated that Nevill had spent half his life behind bars, and other newspapers called him ‘an international worthless check expert’ and ‘forgery teacher’. By now we will already have understood that Nevill was nothing but a life-long petty criminal, a con artist, a flimflam man. Although he is described as distinguished-looking, handsome, well-spoken, and well-dressed, he possesses few redeeming features. Forgery, passing fake cheques, embezzlement, identity theft, obtaining goods and services under false pretences, thefts of watches and clocks, these are his stocks-in-trade. He is a criminal on two continents and in at least four countries (Canada and France being the third and fourth). I have found reports of his criminal behaviour in Britain and the US spanning nearly 60 years, and there must be many more reports I have missed, such was the vast number of aliases he used.

Two surprising facts about Nevill’s criminal behaviour must be noted before we examine specific cases: first, Nevill always pleads guilty to the charges brought against him. I have found no exceptions to this generalisation in those 60 years of crime. Second, Nevill is almost never arrested for his misdeeds. He simply hands himself in to the police periodically. Once detained, he recites a litany of the crimes he has recently committed in other cities, accompanied by a liberal dose of mock-pious regret and remorse, which he may repeat in court. On occasion he is sent packing, as the local police have no record of him and cannot be bothered to follow up crimes in other cities or states. I have found at least ten examples of such voluntary surrender in Britain and the United States. It is no wonder he spent so much time in jail.

Here is one example: At the end of November, 1927, The Birmingham Daily Gazette, The Police News and other papers have an account of a London court appearance by Nevill after he rang the Scotland Yard police from a phone box on 31 October to ask to be picked up from a waiting-room at Victoria Station. At the time, there were no warrants out against him. Once at the station, Detective-Sergeant Thomas was approached by Nevill, who is quoted as saying, “I suppose it is me you are looking for. My name is Vincent St John Nevill. I want to give myself up for stealing money by worthless cheques.” Apparently he was destitute at the time.

Another example: On 29 November, 1901, The Muscatine Semi-Weekly News Tribune (Iowa) and papers across the United States reported on a certain John Verrall (a regular Nevill alias), who called in at a police station in Indianapolis in order to hand himself over as a fugitive from justice:

GAVE HIMSELF UP: Said his criminal record was blacker than hell

Indianapolis, Ind. Nov. 25. – Shortly after 11 o’clock the other night while Sergeant Crane, of police headquarters, was seated at his desk, a well appearing man, giving his name as John Verrall, entered from the street and remarked: “I want to come and stay all night.”

Crane replied in a half jocular way, “We are receiving no guests unless there are charges against them.”

“Well, you have a hundred against me,” and Verrall exhibited a paper which proved to be a forged check … which Verrall said he had attempted to pass in a dozen saloons.

“Ever since I committed my first crime I never had any other purpose but to surrender myself to the authorities, but heretofore I lacked the courage. I now come to face a criminal record that is blacker than hell.”

Sergeant Crane realized he was up against a peculiar proposition and he summoned Detectives Dugan and McDuff, to whom the stranger surrendered a list of his wrongdoings in a number of cities, saying, however, it is not a tenth part of his criminal operations. In forging the local bank check he had used the name of Walter Parsons, but he reiterated that his right name was Verrall, originally of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, but that he was best known in Cincinnati, where he had lived for five years as H.V. West.

Verrall, alias West, alleged that something over two years ago trouble arose between himself and his wife, and then he determined to revenge himself upon the world, and so he had traveled to every quarter, swindling wherever he went.

He submitted a list showing that he had operated under aliases as Vincent Neville at Evansville …; V. St J. Verrall in New York; V.R. Lord in Philadelphia; J.H. Verrall in Boston, Mass.; Dr West, Peoria, Ill.; H. Vincent West, in Chicago; V.T. Berkley in Boston, Mass. … during which time he was straight; T.V. Latham, Halifax, N.S.: K.D. West, Toronto, Ont.; W.R. West, Hamilton, Ont., and Vincent West, in Dayton, Ohio.
(…)

Verrall was very bitter in reference to his wife, and stated that it was her conduct that had driven him to desperation, for which reason he had committed crimes wherever the opportunity offered. His ill-gotten gains, however, were of but little benefit to him, as the money was quickly squandered on faro, roulette and poker, and as he was unlucky as a gambler, although fortunate as a swindler, he was continually broke.

“I had a wife whom I trusted”, said he, “and when I left her I made up my mind to ‘do’ everybody. I have pawned sufficient valises and clothing throughout the United States to fill many wardrobes. I have executed forged paper in a hundred places, and I have now reached the end of my string, and determined to do no more wrong and submit myself for punishment.

“I am troubled with valvular disease of the heart and I will not be alive in three months and I am going to do right and prepare myself to meet my Maker. I may not be able to make a man believe that I am telling the truth, but as there is a living God I am a dirty scoundrel, and you would be doing right (addressing the detective) if you took me out and clubbed me to death. I have always considered that the world owed every man a living, and after my trouble came I acted upon this belief. I don’t believe I will live three weeks, but I cannot commit suicide.”

Other attempts to bring him back to his English antecedents were fruitless, save once, when he asserted, referring to the name Neville (sic), which he used in some of his operations, that he had a right thereto, as he was a descendant of Lord Neville. He also remarked that before coming to the police station, he had stopped and taken a final drink of whisky, and that this was the last, in view of his prospective imprisonment, that he ever expected to take.

Although Nevill is a well-travelled criminal and appears frequently in the press for his crimes, I have only found two newspapers that carried photos of him. There he is, aged 36, in the Indianapolis News of 21 November, 1901, while the same photo forms part of a trio of photos of him from 1899 and 1929 in the Indianapolis Times issue of 24 September, 1929. A much better photo is his Bertillon mugshot from Indiana Prison taken in 1901.

One or two more examples of his activities will serve to illustrate the general pattern of Nevill’s crimes and his character: The Times (Philadelphia) of 25 November, 1894, reports that Nevill (again under the name of Verrall), ran off with the wife (‘a tall handsome brunette, about 27 years of age’) and baby daughter of his friend and employer, Francis F. Horner, who had previously stood bail of $500 (about $15,000 today) for Nevill after he had got into trouble with the law. Nevill apparently proved ‘very fascinating’ to Mrs Horner, while Mr Horner pointed out that Nevill already had a wife and child living in New York City and a wife in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Evening World Sun of New York takes up the story on 10 February, 1895: Nevill has now assumed one of his aliases, ‘Theodore Berkeley’, and has been arrested on a warrant issued on behalf of Mr Horner (who has himself been slightly morphed by the reporter into ‘F.C. Horney’). Apparently Nevill/Berkeley and Mrs Horney (the unwitting change of name seems sadly appropriate) went to Chicago, and then on to New York. The crime mentioned in the Times article appears to have been the theft of a watch, for which he was convicted under the name of Berkeley in Baltimore in October 1894. He had previously told his benefactor that he was the son of an English noble (the earliest record I have found of such a claim dates from 1887), and his father would be sending him £10,000 if he could prove he had not stolen the watch. An attempt at reconciliation between the Horners at New York police headquarters, where Mrs Horner is described as being desperate and threatening suicide, ended in failure, and Mr Horner went home to Baltimore with his daughter. Mrs Horner, The Evening World Sun notes, went home on the same train. Perhaps in a different compartment, though.

When he was not seducing the wives of his benefactors or running off with the savings of ‘a young servant girl in London, who he had promised to marry’ in 1926, he was committing endless fraud and forgeries. In Buntingford, as John Cole was struggling with the church deacons to keep his post due to his unwelcome relationship with Edith, her father Vincent Nevill will not have endeared himself to the community when in 1924 he was charged with unwisely defrauding Henry Jeffrey Smith, a local Buntingford grocer and Congregational churchgoer, out of £15 (about £1,000 today). According to The Hastings & St Leonards Observer of 5 July, Nevill, a ‘white-haired man, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and of cultured appearance’, stood in court in Hastings, Sussex, after handing himself in to the Tonbridge police in Kent and also confessing he had in March obtained £20 by forging an entry for that amount in his Post Office Savings Deposit Book, on the strength of which a gullible shopkeeper, Walter Holdaway, who believed Nevill’s story that he was stranded in Hastings, had advanced him the cash. Holdaway had obviously also been impressed when Nevill told him that he was “a Nevill from Eridge Castle, Tunbridge Wells”, but at least was sufficiently on his guard to ask Nevill about various tenants on the Eridge estate who he, Holdaway, had known for many years. Nevill apparently bluffed his way through this test and convinced Holdaway that he was honest. But then Holdaway clearly wanted to believe he was dealing with a genuine member of the noble Nevill family.

The court heard that Nevill had later gone back to the shop to explain to Holdaway why he had not yet been reimbursed for his £20. Nevill apologised for ignoring Holdaway’s letters and said that his brother Ralph, the then Marquess of Abergavenny, had just died, and that the estate at Eridge had passed to him. As a result, he had inherited the absolutely staggering sum of £350,000 (about £21 million today).

Unbelievably, Nevill proceeded to write a cheque on a piece of paper handed to him by Holdaway, and offered to add interest for his trouble. Holdaway refused the interest, but Nevill insisted that he wanted to reward him for all the kindnesses he had shown him. Nevill then signed the cheque ‘St. John Nevill, KCB’ (‘Knight Commander of the Bath’), and left the shop, saying he would return shortly to place more orders. Holdaway told his assistant to let Nevill have whatever he wanted. When Holdaway called him “Mr Nevill”, Nevill reminded him that he was now “Lord Nevill”. Holdaway told the court that he had concluded that Nevill was “in drink, not drunk, but pretty lively.”

When Nevill returned, he ordered furniture to the value of £222 (about £13,500 today) for his daughter, who was getting married (but was also “very ill”). Again he asked for a piece of paper and made out a cheque for £230. When the assistant queried the larger amount, Nevill said that he hoped that the assistant wouldn’t mind giving him the difference in cash to see him through till the next day, and asked for the goods to be forwarded to his address in Cottered, where we know Nevill was living. The assistant agreed to do so, once the cheque had been cleared. The following day, Holdaway received a telegram from Nevill in London, saying, “Do nothing for a few days, imperative – Nevill.” It was eventually discovered that Nevill’s Post Office deposit account only contained 3s 4d, and the bank account he had drawn the cheque on naturally did not exist.

Mr Holdaway was asked by the court if he actually believed that the accused was a member of the nobility:

Holdaway: I hadn’t a doubt about it.
Clerk of the Court: What, not when you saw KCB after his name?
Holdaway: I didn’t think he would dare to call himself a Knight of the Bath if he was not one.
The Clerk: I never knew anyone except a wrong’un to sign KCB after his name.

Nevill blamed whisky for his misdeeds and resolved to lead a ‘right life’. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to 12 months with hard labour, which, the court noted, would certainly keep him off the bottle. He would continue to appeal to God’s good offices, and blame alcohol for his criminal impulses to the bitter end. In court in Indianapolis in 1929, Nevill repeats the by now almost standard script: “I am not begging for clemency. I only wish to say that I have never committed a wrong deed except when under the influence of liquor”. In January 1926, he had told the court in Gloucester exactly the same thing. He had surrendered to the police, he said, because he was just starting to be sober.

An account of his court appearance, where he was charged with obtaining goods by false pretences, not only shows how easily taken in people were in his presence, but also how much mayhem he could create in a single afternoon. On Friday, 8 January, 1926 at about 2pm, he booked himself into a Gloucester hotel he had never stayed at before, the picturesque New Inn. He said his luggage would follow from Hereford. By 2.45 pm he had entered a clothes shop in the town, and told the owner that he had lost his luggage in transit and thus needed some new items of clothing. He said he was staying at the New Inn and asked the shop owner if he would accept a cheque. But he was reluctant to do so without a reference, which Nevill supplied in the form of a business card marked ‘Shipping Publication Ltd., British Representative, Room 51, New Inn’. On the strength of this card, Nevill was supplied with two shirts, pyjamas, two pairs of socks, two collars, a tie and two handkerchiefs worth in total £2 8s. These were sent to his hotel. Needless to say, the cheque proved to be worthless.

At about 3pm, Nevill appeared at another clothes shop, again announcing that he was staying at the New Inn. He wanted to buy an overcoat and a suitcase, and would it be all right to pay by cheque as he had no cash with him? Again he was asked for a reference, and this time he said that he had stayed at the New Inn nine or ten times and knew the licensee there, a Mr Herbert Berry, very well. He also knew several business people in the city. And he had banked with Barclays for many years. He duly got his coat and suitcase to the value of £3 18s 6d, and of course the cheque subsequently bounced.

Nevill’s next call was at a jeweller’s around 4.30pm. After announcing that he was a guest at the New Inn, he said that the shop had been recommended to him by Mr Berry. He picked out a gold watch costing £11 2s 6d (nearly £700 today) for his ‘son’, who was about to come of age. Nevill offered to write the inevitable cheque, saying that he did not need the watch till after the weekend, leading the shop owner to assume that the cheque would have cleared by then. Having made out the cheque, Nevill left the shop without the watch, only to return later saying he had also decided to give his son a gold chain to go with the watch. He selected one worth £5 and wrote out another cheque. This time Nevill told the shopkeeper that he had in the meantime talked to Mr Berry, who was surprised that the firm would not trust a customer whom he had sent along. That did the trick, and Nevill walked off with the goods, leaving behind the two dud cheques for items worth £1,000 in today’s terms! Nevill returned to the hotel, enjoyed some double whiskies, had a meal at about 6pm, and disappeared without paying about 30 minutes later. In court, Mr Berry stated that he had certainly not authorised Nevill to use his name in shops and he had actually only once ever clapped eyes on him, in the hotel smoking-room.

The assistant manager at Barclay’s Bank in Clapham also gave evidence: Nevill had opened an account on Christmas Eve, 1925, and by 22 January, the date of the proceedings, twelve of Nevill’s cheques had bounced, worth together £63 (or roughly £3,900 in today’s money). Interestingly, one of the few cheques Nevill wrote that was honoured was made out to his brother-in-law, a certain Rev. John Cole for £2 8s.

In Gloucester, Nevill seems to have foregone the ‘noble Nevill’ trick for once, but he had certainly not forgotten it. On 4 February, 1938, his last court appearance, Nevill pleaded guilty in London to fraudulently obtaining £1 10s from a female social worker, £14 from her sister, and a gold watch from her husband, possibly the final criminal acts of his life. The magistrate, upon hearing that Nevill had been living in various doss houses, asked whether his current prosperous appearance was due to his having spent the money he had purloined on clothes. “Yes,’ came the reply. He also spun the usual line that he was the son of the Marquess of Abergavenny, with a rightful claim to the estate, but needing funds to get his hands on it. In an attempt at mitigation, he told the court that he had been trying to discover his real identity for 15 years, and he had finally found out, a mere day before the previous marquess had been killed in a hunting accident.
The magistrate was having none of this and replied,

“I cannot listen to anything as regards your birth and origin. The family you refer to would be under no legal obligation to recognise you in any case. Certainly in view of your record they would have no moral obligation.”

On this occasion, the magistrate was lenient, and refrained from sentencing Nevill, given his age and his ready confession of guilt. Instead, Nevill would be bound over not to commit criminal acts for three years, provided he was willing to live in an institution and give up alcohol. Nevill readily agreed, saying, “Yes, it is all I can do. I am almost blind.” A pathetic end to his criminal career, and he was dead within three months.

We now come to the thorny question of Nevill’s actual identity. From newspaper reports, prison records, ships’ manifests and other sources, it is possible to construct a rickety life story for him, but given he was a fantasist, almost everything he says has to be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly his life-long claim to be related to the Marquess of Abergavenny. There remain many gaps in his story, especially in the early years. We have said nothing about his parents, where he was born, whether he had brothers and sisters, who Edith’s mother was, what Nevill did during the First World War, and so on.

The most detailed account of his life is his own, reported in The Hastings & St Leonards Observer during court proceedings at Hastings, Sussex, in May and July 1924. Nevill maintains that he is the illegitimate son of William Nevill, first Marquess of Abergavenny (1826-1915). He goes on to say that after his birth in 1864 or 1865, he was placed for adoption with a Reverend Verrall at Haywards Heath, in Sussex. The name ‘Verrall’ was of course one of Nevill’s many aliases he used in America. He was sent for a time to board at St Margaret’s College, Dover, in Kent. When he was 17, (so in about 1881 or 1882), Verrall allegedly told him who his real father was, and gave him a very substantial £2,200, the balance left over from the funds the Marquess had provided for his keep and education. Nevill decided to travel and went to France and Brazil, before settling in the United States for the next 35 years. During the war, he claimed he worked in a munitions factory, though this stint could have been a form of ‘hard labor’. In 1917, he popped up in a Cleveland, Ohio, directory under the name Vincent St J. Neville. In 1919, he returned to England with Edith to pursue his claim to the marquisate of Abergavenny. He also maintained that he had instructed the eminent barrister and politician Sir John Simon to act on his behalf, but Simon vigorously denied all knowledge of such a brief.

What of the Reverend Verrall of Haywards Heath, then? In the England and Wales census of 1861, there are living in Brighton a Charles Ebenezer Verrall (26), a ‘reporter and printer’, his wife Marion (27), and two young daughters. This entry alone does not establish if Charles and Marion are actually Nevill’s parents (real or adoptive), but with Nevill due to be born after this census took place, a check of the next census of 1871 is certainly in order. And lo and behold, the Verralls have moved to Wivelsfield, a village close to Haywards Heath, and there are now six children, one of whom is called John. What is more, Charles Verrall’s occupation is now given as ‘Independent Minister of Haywards Road Congregational Chapel’. He has become the Reverend Verrall of Haywards Heath. Surely we now know who Vincent St John Nevill really is - John Verrall. So the name Verrall is not an alias and Nevill is being used to establish a spurious link to the Abergavenny family (whose name is Nevill). But of course there is no documented evidence that Nevill was born out of wedlock; Charles and Marion Verrall may very well be his natural parents, and Nevill is simply lying. His birth certificate shows he was actually born on 26 November, 1864, though his birth was not registered till 6 January, 1865.

Nevill/Verrall does not appear in the 1881 census, so it may indeed be true that he had left the country for France and Brazil. That he had been abroad at a young age is evident from reports in April 1880 in newspapers across the country of Nevill, as John Verrall, standing trial (likely for the first time) at Lewes Assizes on a charge of forging cheques in his father’s name. He is only 15.

Described as ‘a genteel, good-looking lad’, he pleads guilty, and when asked if he has anything to say in his defence, he bursts into tears and says he will never do such a thing again. His father Charles Verrall is also in court, and, under questioning from the judge, tells him that his son had been working diligently in his office as a clerk, and had no doubt forged the cheques in order to raise the money to go to Russia to see a young woman he had met in Paris to whom he had formed an attachment and with whom he was in regular correspondence. Young Verrall had cashed two or three of the cheques in Newhaven and was arrested on board the ferry to Dieppe prior to sailing.

Verrall senior maintained that his son was unaware of the serious nature of his offences, given his youth, and he would not hesitate to re-employ him if the sentence was sufficiently lenient. The judge said that he was unwilling to destroy a young man’s prospects by sending him to prison “if such a course could be avoided consistent with public duty”, before somewhat inconsistently sentencing him to a token week behind bars, most of which he had already served.

In this description of the court case, we already see all the essential elements of Nevillism: petty offences, the guilty plea, the insistence that ‘it will never happen again’. In the mouth of a 15-year-old, these latter words may have been sincerely meant, but a pattern is set for the future, nonetheless. We must also note the newspapers’ reference to his good looks, and a touch of feminine intrigue. None cover the story with such delight as The South London Press of 17 April, 1880.

One possible clue as to what he did in the years before going to the United States is to be found in Nevill’s Sing Sing Prison registration of 15 February, 1908. Among his ‘Scars and identification marks’ are two ‘tats’ (sic) on his left forearm consisting of a ‘V’ and the “English and American (?) flag with anchor”. Was John Verrall a sailor in his younger days? Perhaps, as in a Boston Globe report of 17 July, 1913, he had claimed that he had already crossed the Atlantic 27 times.

And so to the identity of Edith’s mother, a task made somewhat easier now by the discovery that Nevill was really a Verrall. As Vincent St John Verrall, he married Margaret Sachs in Manhattan on 5 August, 1893. The marriage certificate states that he is a widower. Margaret was a New Yorker born in 1866, the daughter of Bavarian immigrants, and the third of six children. As we know, Edith was born on 19 May, 1894 in New York. A brother, Ralph, followed a year later. Vincent and Margaret apparently divorced rather quickly (perhaps triggered by Nevill’s dalliance with Mrs Horner mentioned earlier, and others), and in 1898, Margaret married Gustav (or Gustave) Fiebicke (or Feibick, Feibicke, etc.). At first, Edith and Ralph lived with their mother, new step-father and step-sister Elsie, but then Margaret seems to have died in or around 1905 and the children went to live with grandmother Sachs and an uncle and aunt, where they remained till at least 1915 (see p. 134). In that year, Edith had a job as a stenographer in Rochester. She was now 21.

Nevill had been sent to Sing Sing prison in 1908, but was transferred to Clinton prison, NY, in 1910 (where he was employed as a book-keeper, of all things). He was paroled in March 1913 after serving half his term. In July 1913, he appeared in court on a charge of passing worthless cheques. At some point thereafter, Nevill re-appears in Edith’s life. Nevill and Edith spend some time travelling, leaving traces of themselves by registering at Lutheran churches in Cleveland, Minneapolis, and, critically, Louisville between 1917 and 1919, as we have noted earlier, before sailing from Montreal as Nevill father and daughter, and arriving in Liverpool on 22 August, 1919, with a final destination of Brighton. This is, it seems, Edith’s first visit to England.

Perhaps the reason Edith had decided to accompany her father was that she had been persuaded by him that he would be inheriting an enormous sum from the Abergavenny estate as soon as his birthright had been acknowledged. One would have thought that Edith knew better, given her father’s history, but the sad truth is that father and daughter had spent relatively little time together prior to their trip to England.

On 11 July, 1920, Nevill sailed to Quebec. His Passenger Declaration states that he is ‘returning home’ to Montreal. By the end of 1920, however, Nevill is back in prison in England, serving two 6-month sentences concurrently. And so it goes on: deported from France where he had been living as a member of the British nobility, on trial and guilty in 1924, 1926, 1927, 1933, 1934, and finally in 1938.

There are two final twists: if one closely examines Nevill and Annie Fletcher’s marriage certificate of 1933 (see p. 139), one will note that in the space reserved for the name of the bridegroom’s father, the registrar has written - and crossed out - ‘Charles Ebenezer’, and then added ‘Reginald William Branbsy (sic) Nevill’ (noted as being ‘of independent means’). As we know, ‘Charles’ and ‘Ebenezer’ were the given names of Nevill’s legal father, the Reverend Verrall, but Reginald William Bransby Nevill just happened to be the 2nd Marquess of Abergavenny, who had died unmarried in 1927 (and was therefore without legitimate issue). This is all well and good, but this particular Abergavenny was born in 1853, and so would have (illegitimately) sired Vincent Nevill at the tender age of 11, a precocious, if unlikely, achievement.

One can almost imagine the scene at the register office: On being asked by the registrar to provide the name of his father, Nevill replies, “My father? Why of course, he is Charles … Ebenezer … …” (pregnant pause). “Yes?” says the registrar, eyebrows raised, pen poised. “Ah, well no, actually,” says Nevill. “That man, you see, was only my guardian. My real father was the late Reginald … William … Bransby ... Nevill, the 2nd Marquess of Abergavenny, fabulously rich ... er do you think you could possibly see your way to lending me £20 till tomorrow, my dear chap?”

The second twist concerns Vincent St John Nevill’s death at the age of 73, registered as occurring on 31 May, 1938 in the district of Tonbridge, Kent (which includes Tunbridge Wells). A John Verrall is also recorded as dying on exactly the same date in 1938 at the same age, also in Tonbridge. Is this mere co-incidence, ‘John Verrall’ being a common enough name, after all? Strangely, Nevill’s name has not been printed in the national index of deaths, unlike all the other entries, but has been added at the bottom of the page in ink.

It turns out that despite the two entries, there is only one death certificate, issued in the name of Verrall. It shows that he died at the Public Assistance Institution at Sandhill, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells. The cause of death was ‘myocardial degeneration’. There is also an addendum to the death certificate which reads as follows:

(F)or “John Verrall” read Vincent St. John Nevill, otherwise John Verrall. Corrected on the 10th November 1944, by me, (…) Stewart, Deputy Supt(?) Registrar on the production of Statutory Declaration made by Annie Martha Constantine Nicholls Nevill and Dorothy Fairchild Rogers.

Dorothy Rogers is the married name of Dorothy Huxtable and Annie is the former Annie Fletcher who married Nevill in 1933, was duped into going to America with him on false promises, and was deported with him after he had abandoned her and her daughter in Cincinnati. Whatever passed between them in the years that followed – and despite his apparent beastliness towards her – Annie bore him a son in 1936, when she was 38 and he was 71, but by the time of his death in 1938, they were living apart. She kept his name for the rest of her life and did not remarry, raising his son alone. Given that she left a substantial estate of £14,452 (worth about £112,250 today) on her death in 1976, and given Nevill's lifelong talent for extracting money from those closest to him, the chances are she also kept him in funds during those final years. It is not easy to know what to make of her loyalty, given what he had put her through, and further speculation is pointless.

Nevill was buried on 3 June, 1938 at Tunbridge Wells Cemetery, in an unmarked plot in unconsecrated ground, a classic pauper’s burial, funded by the local municipality. It is curious that Annie and Dorothy Huxtable went through the bureaucratic bother of publicly declaring that Vincent Nevill and John Verrall were one and the same person, but Edith was not a signatory, perhaps because she was in America in a time of war, so trans-Atlantic communication with Britain would have been restricted and difficult.

However, there is something rather disquieting about these three women’s indifference towards Nevill in death, and it is a sad commentary on the apparent effect he had on those nearest to him. The existence of the statutory declaration and the absence of a headstone appear to signal quite contradictory impulses, the former carefully acknowledging the man’s double life, while the latter says emphatically that he does not deserve to be remembered at all. Edith certainly had plenty of opportunity post-war to have done something about this state of affairs. For instance, she and Carl and Joy came to England for two months in July 1949 and gave as their address 3 Somerville Gardens, Tunbridge Wells, new home of the Huxtables. She thus had ample time to arrange a marker for her father, had she wanted to.

Vincent St John Nevill seems like perfect fodder for a forensic psychiatrist. Always well turned out, though ever the rolling stone that gathers no moss, Nevill demonstrates a particular form of compulsive recidivism that could have come about from learning he was abandoned by an aristocratic father and then adopted. He may also be regarded as a fantasist, a pathological liar exploiting his acting talents and natural charm for personal gain. Strangely enough, he seems to have been tolerated by those close to daughter Edith, namely John Cole, Carl Nachod, and the Huxtables, who must all have known about his criminal nature. Perhaps he does suffer periodic bouts of self-disgust strong enough to make him turn himself in. Or perhaps he simply wants the free board and lodging that prison life affords him from time to time, whether with hard labour or not. On the therapeutic benefits of prison, he himself said as early as 1901 that the quiet and freedom from excitement a spell in prison afforded him would give him an opportunity to recover.

In any case, he must have been a nightmare to have dealings with. One can only imagine what life was like for first wife Margaret Sachs (or his other putative wives of the time), while Nevill was away swindling and philandering or in jail? It is hard to imagine how his immediate family could have borne him - did they constantly have to make up excuses to explain his ‘absences’ or were they blissfully accepting of his stories? One wonders why Edith chose to accompany her father to England in 1919 after having been to all intents and purposes abandoned by him for most of her life. What was his hold over her? Did he promise her riches as he spun the ‘noble Nevill’ line yet again? As for John Cole, he must surely have known his father-in-law was more often in jail than out of it. It is hard to imagine that Nevill’s glib tongue and a complicit and cowed Edith were able to hide much of the truth from him. What on earth induced Carl Nachod and Edith to assist Nevill in ditching poor Annie Nevill and her daughter in Cincinnati? Why were people so gullible? Nevill spent sixty years fantasizing to anyone who would listen about his being a Nevill of Eridge Castle, a marquess's son, a man of substance - and all there is to show for it ultimately is an anonymous patch of grass between two strangers’ headstones.


Eric Kellerman 2026