I’ve been reading Sara Lodge’s book on female police detectives in the nineteenth century, and excellent it is too.

Understandably, most of the material that she covers comes from the British Isles so, out of interest, I searched both Trove and Papers Past for evidence of female detectives in Australia and New Zealand. I was fairly cursory about it, but suffice to say there were enough in the way of court reports to suggest that the police in both Australia and New Zealand were using female detectives at the end of the nineteenth century.

And certainly it’s well known that the police employed women to search female detainees, some of whom may have been officially employed, or in the case of the indecent assault on a country train in Lauriston, a woman known to the police who was trustworthy to care for the victim and report on her injuries.

In the Lauriston case the victim, and supposed perpetrator were taken off the train at the small fishing village of Johnshaven where there was a policeman stationed.

Given it was a November evening, and possibly the last train of the day on a rural branch line, it would have been impossible to fetch help from a larger police station, so putting the victim into the care of a local woman was possibly the best they could do.

Equally at the same time the various Matrimonial Causes acts of the mid to late nineteenth century gave rise to a class of private female detectives who assembled evidence of errant husbands – at the time we are talking of wives suing their husbands for divorce had to provide evidence of behaviour such as desertion, sodomy, incest or beastiality, rather than simple adultery or infidelity.

And both in combnation, led to the development of the female police detective.

But there’s an interesting turn here – were there also female spies or secret agents?

In 1896 an Italian anarchist was arrested in London for plotting to carry out a bombing. (In the 1890’s there was a bit of a panic in Britain about foreigners carrying out bombings and murders for political purposes and always the fear that somehow these socialist and communist agitators might form common cause with Irish Nationalists and engage in a sustained campaign of terrorism. Remember that Alexander II of Russia had been assassinated some years previously and various Russian and Austro Hungarian politicians had been the victims of assassination attempts by people usually labelled as anarchists – the term anarchist being used as a catch all for the alphabet soup of left wing European politics)

Anyway, my Trove search for “female detective” turned up a report of the 1896 arrest in London of the Italian anarchist, Polti, and mentioned a female detective was involved, suggesting that the police, including possibly the Special Branch used female agents, possibly as spies.

One newspaper report does not of course make a story, but then there is the slightly strange tale of the attempted assassination in New York of the Irish nationalist O’Donovan Rossa by Lucille Yseult Dudley a British nurse working and living in the United States.

At the time of the assasination attempt some newspapers alleged that Lucille Yseult Dudley was a British spy.

The British government at the time claimed that Dudley had acted alone and had a history of mental illness and had previously attempted suicide, and certainly, after her return to England she seems to have spent time in Broadmoor, before running a nursing home with her sister.

The question of course is was she simply mad, was she a British agent, or was she manipulated by the British, as may also have been the case with Fanya Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin in 1918…