It is late Saturday evening, January 2, 1909, at Penmaenmawr, Conwy, on the Welsh coast. The moon is a ghostly galleon tossing about over cloudy seas.
And the handsome Minerva car recklessly rattles the twisting clifftop roads until, fatally, the youth behind the wheel and in a flaming crimson cape hits the infamous curve, the Demon’s Turn.
There is a collision. Shattering glass; fallen stone wall. The vehicle stops inches from the edge.
Two shaken passengers scrambled away, but there was no sign of the driver.
Just days after her 25th birthday, Violet Charlesworth – beautiful, vivacious, locally famous, on the eve of a huge fortune – is thrown through the windscreen into the sea.
Violet, who was a fan of all things Tartan, poses with a plaid and a small Glengarry bonnet
At least that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
For a long time, Violet had turned her head and lived a life of conspicuous consumption. He loved fast cars: he owned six.
He smelled of fur; vision in diamonds. He loved dogs – Saint Bernards; he had 12 of them – and he simply adored Scotland.
He had taken an estate near Inverness. Decorated throughout with tartan wallpaper. Installed a player piano that played Scottish sounds while playing – presumably the equivalent of a Spotify playlist – and even photographed himself wearing a pipe, plaid and Cairngorm brooch and a small Glengarry bonnet. .
Violet and her family had not long lived in a corner of Conwy, Wales. Indeed, they had moved into the house an odd number of times.
But they now lived in some style in a country house with a Carriage House and acres of manicured garden.
He had donated silver cups to local football competitions and so on and was well thought of.
When dawn breaks and the search for him begins, the general reaction is horror. A notebook detailing his restless tour of Britain by motor can be found on the rocks below.
And – oh my – the Tam o’ shanter bonnet. Journalists will soon be swarming everywhere.
The mansion is under siege, selected noses are shamelessly peeking through its windows.
Sightseers, ghosts, reporters… and oddly enough, a few explosive people claimed that the deceased young woman owed them a lot of money.
Something is missing. There is no trace of his body. His relatives don’t even seem too concerned about it.
There is no comparison in the car or in the rocks. The water below is very shallow: the sea very calm.
And the vehicle is remarkably intact based on the described accident. The windshield is half broken, yes, but the headlights and fenders are like new.
This is no longer the story of a tragic accident. The hue and cry is raised for a woman on the run—a young woman who has knowingly, if clumsily, faked her own death.
We don’t know much about Violet Charlesworth. His father was a lowly insurance agent; her mother seems to have been the real Lady Macbeth, who was determined to turn her daughters into “influencers”.
The family moved a lot and – based on blushing hints and whispered confidences that on her 25th birthday she would receive a £155,000 inheritance – people were only too happy to win Violet cash; shops and merchants so that he would have considerable credit.
If you earned £200 a year in 1909, you could afford a maid. Violet spent £4,000 a year.
He owed his stockbroker £10,000, the equivalent of a million euros today.
A gullible local doctor to whom he had grown attached had given him £5,000. “I was honestly and deeply in love with him,” she lamented.
The neighbor’s old Mrs. Smith had loaned Violet and her mother £400, practically all of her life’s savings—”I was simply taken in,” she sobbed—and, as the authorities were quick to point out, Violet’s case had already been investigated by a private investigator. months.
Indeed, just a day before the cliff collision, the young woman had been served with a summons for neglect, and when the details of it all came out, suddenly it was about the woman.
Now Violet Charlesworth’s extraordinary life is the subject of a new episode of BBC Sounds’ Lady Swindlers, presented by national treasure Lucy Worsley, alongside tartan noir author Denise Mina and the podcast’s ‘resident historian’ Professor Rosalind Crone.
Violet Charlesworth was beautiful, smart, cunning and ruthless. He dropped names, batted an eyelash, and claimed that Gordon of Khartoum had been his godfather.
Even the wronged stockbroker had to appreciate that he showed “a very masculine sense of business.”
But Violet was no criminal. Putting a deadline on his future “inheritance” was the crucial mistake that blew up his nice little Ponzi scheme.
Then he topped it with a second. Anyone who seriously wants to disappear heads abroad or at least to a big city.
Spectators present as Violet Charlesworth crashes over a cliff in “Demon’s Turn”
Charlesworth instead made for the wilds of Scotland.
Britain in 1909 was exceptionally sophisticated. Many journeys by public transport – from Brodick to Glasgow city centre, for example – could be made faster than they are now.
The message was so powerful that you could send a letter to a friend across town in the morning, know they’d drink it with tea, and be sure they’d reply at breakfast.
And that was the era of newspapers. Many Scots bought four or five a day.
The Daily Mail alone had a circulation of more than a million – and the must-have garment for women of that era, the brilliant red cloak, fell out of fashion overnight when the papers reported a fugitive running across the country together.
Then a stylish young woman calling herself Margaret Cameron MacLeod checked into a hotel in Mull, out of season and insanely striking.
Early the next morning, he crept downstairs, removed his information from the register and fled – without paying his bill – to Oban.
Even more carelessly, he had left behind a telegram addressed to his real name.
The hotel’s furious management supposedly made Oban the first. Because, completely frustrated, he stepped off the steamer into a crowd of reporters.
At first “Miss MacLeod” played horror. The infamous Violet Charlesworth was very tall, she says, “and I’m only five foot five and a half”.
Then, in a cynical calculation, he decided that the best strategy was to monetize the notoriety.
“There’s no point denying it any longer,” he whispered to a press conference of sorts in Edinburgh, rubbing his eyes. “I am Miss Violet Charlesworth.”
He might as well cash in, he figured. One newspaper already advertised his postcards “in six different outfits”.
The hit song, Goodbye Girlie, was licensed to music halls. And London’s Hippodrome was already staging the melodrama The Cliff Road, complete with a water tank, to splash into the Irish Sea.
Violet has now sold her story to the Daily Mail for £400. Signed another deal with the Daily Despatch – a three-week series, The Story of My Life.
He even landed a movie deal – The Welsh Cliff Mystery, in which he naturally played himself.
He no doubt calculated that celebrity might be enough to avoid justice. And that many of his humiliated creditors would be too embarrassed to come forward.
As Worsley points out, Violet Charlesworth “has gone from a woman on the run to someone with great earning potential.”
Folk joked that he was more famous than the king or the prime minister; someone even named a racehorse after him.
But his earning power proved limited.
It quickly became clear that Violet couldn’t act and was prone to terrible stage fright. The annoyed crowd started booing him for it.
Nor could the authorities ignore his looming debts – some £12,000 to friends, shops and creditors; another £12,000 in stock market debts – or in at least two cases, apparent criminality.
By the end of the year, Violet and her proto-Kardashian mother had been arrested.
They went to trial on 23 February 1910 when, despite Violet’s protestations that she had been promised a fortune by an Australian admirer, no evidence was produced that ‘Alexander MacDonald of Melbourne’ even existed.
Violet’s life is explored by Lucy Worsley in Lady Swindlers
The jury took just 20 minutes to convict them and the pair were jailed for five years – quickly reduced to three when the judge reconsidered.
Violet “was obviously a gifted woman,” rumbled m’lud. “He could have had a glorious future if he had used his ingenuity properly.”
Their appeal against the sentence was rejected.
Violet Charlesworth served only two years, returned to Scotland in February 1912 – and disappears from history.
Nothing has ever been revealed about his later life. He may have married, he may have emigrated, he may have died in the 1919 pandemic.
One professional genealogist has suggested that May Charlesworth, whose death is recorded in Stoke-on-Trent in 1957, could have been a violet.
“I think he’s amazing,” Rosalind Crone reflects, “and quite dark. I mean, three years isn’t a lot for that money when you think about the damage he’s done.
Lucy Worsley believes that Violet Charlesworth did deep damage to womanhood at a critical stage in her pursuit of all her rights.
“Violet thirsted for riches, fame, attention and to get them, he took advantage of new freedoms.”
Just confirms the general fears of Edwardian men – “that empowered women can be dangerous; even criminal”.
But some of you prefer that Violet was picked up in America, married a sleazy millionaire, and died in the 1970s of decades of rich, widowed old age.
And at Penmaenmawr? They haven’t called that nasty bend the Demon’s Turn in a century.
It will forever be Violet’s jump.