The Detective Who Investigated Shakespeare's Grave Robbery
A Scotland Yard spycatcher investigates Shakespeare's skull theft AND the Whitechapel Murders...; PLUS Frank Chambers revealed!
Last month, my article The Man Who Stole Shakespeare’s Skull, a gothic investigation into the alleged theft of the great Bard’s cranium, was published by Narratively. Two weeks ago, I published a related story, The Woman Who Haunted Shakespeare’s Grave, about the remarkable writer and Shakespeare conspiracy theorist Delia Bacon. In the original article, I briefly mentioned the former Scotland Yard detective and Secret Service agent Edwin T. Woodhall, who claimed to have investigated the theft of the skull. Woodhall is another fascinating character, and this is his story…
In the Spring of 1933, multiple US newspapers published a syndicated article titled The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Skull. The illustrated full-page article told the remarkable story of how, in the late 18th century, the great bard’s grave inside Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon was “rifled and Shakespeare’s skull stolen!” The article was written by Edwin T. Woodhall, who was billed as “one of the best-known criminologists in the world.” Woodhall, a former Scotland Yard detective and Allied Secret Service agent, had an impressive and colourful background. But his dubiously sourced writings raised questions about his investigative techniques.
Woodhall wrote that he first came across the story of the theft in “an odd little volume” containing an article with the “amazing headline” How Shakespeare’s Skull Was Stolen. Woodhall doesn’t specify, but we can determine that the volume was an edition of the London literary magazine The Argosy from 1879, and the article, credited to “A Warwickshire Man”, was likely written by a vicar named Charles Langston.
According to Langston’s article, in 1794, a young surgeon named Frank Chambers robbed Shakespeare’s grave and stole his skull in the hope of receiving a reward. Langston, writing almost a hundred years after the event, referred to Chambers’ personal diaries and the recollections of Chambers’ nephew, and included verifiable names and places, giving the article apparent credibility. (If you haven’t already, you can read my story about this here.)
In Woodhall’s 1933 article, accompanied by a striking illustration of Chambers and his associates digging for the skull, the former detective claimed he was so astounded by the tale that he went to the British Museum to check Frank Chambers’ diaries. There is no record of the British Museum holding the diaries, yet Woodhall recounts the tale as if he were reading from them rather than from Langston’s article. “Thus, if records are to be believed,” wrote Woodhall, “was committed one of the most sensational thefts in the history of criminology, and I personally have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the doctor’s diary.”
Woodhall includes nothing in his account that isn’t in Langston’s article, casting doubt on his claim to have obtained Chambers’ original diaries. He also misses the entire second part of the story, which Langston published in 1884 as How Shakespeare’s Skull Was Found. Here, Langston referenced letters from Chambers to claim that the skull had been hidden in a crypt at a nearby church in Beoley. This didn’t quite solve the mystery — investigators are still trying to figure out if Shakespeare’s skull was removed from his grave and if the skull found at Beoley belonged to the Bard. But it was a pretty big oversight for “one of the best-known criminologists in the world.”
Edwin Thomas Woodhall was born in 1885 in Finchley, Middlesex. He had ambitions to be a detective from an early age, and applied to join London’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1906. Woodhall had gone through basic military training and was supremely fit. Unfortunately, he was half an inch under the police force’s regulation height. “Never shall I forget my fears that I might not be accepted,” he recalled. However, Woodhall impressed Chief Inspector John McCarthy, who took him on board. Woodhall proudly noted, “I had the distinction of becoming the smallest officer in the Metropolitan Police.”
Woodhall rapidly rose through the police ranks, from uniformed beat constable in Battersea to detective at the elite Special Branch at Scotland Yard’s CID (Criminal Investigation Department, under John McCarthy). His duties included undercover work, monitoring underworld figures, foreign spies, and Russian radicals, including Vladimir Lenin (“I shook hands with Lenin,” he wrote, “little realising that this man was soon to be the leader of All Russia.”) He also served as a “Guardian Detective”, providing protective surveillance for Edward VII, George V, Winston Churchill, and David Lloyd George.
At the outbreak of the Great War, Woodhall enlisted with the British Army and was transferred to Military Intelligence and the counter-espionage department of the Military Police. It was here that he engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with the notorious criminal and deserter Percy Toplis, known as the “Monocled Mutineer”. According to his own account, Woodhall disguised himself as a French priest and tracked Toplis to a village bar on the outskirts of Etaples, where he held the fugitive at gunpoint until backup arrived.
This story was included in the 1978 book The Monocled Mutineer and the 1986 BBC TV show of the same name, which starred Philip McGough as Woodhall. Some historians — including the historical advisor for the TV show — have claimed Woodhall’s capture of Toplis could not have happened because Toplis was not in France at the time. (In any case, Toplis must have escaped as he was shot dead during a police chase near Penrith in 1920.)
Following the war, Woodhall returned to work as a police constable before leaving the force in July 1919. Woodhall claims to have transitioned into the Secret Service before ultimately retiring to open a private detective agency and launch a career as a crime writer.
Woodhall’s first published book was the memoir Detective & Secret Service Days, which was released in 1928 by Jarrolds of London, and was well-received. “Mr Woodhall writes entertainingly on many famous crimes,” said one reviewer. A series of related newspaper articles followed, initially based on his career, before moving to cover famous crimes, including one with which he had a particular obsession.
Woodhall was a toddler at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, but he later became obsessed with the case and came to know several of the officers involved in its investigation after joining the police force. In 1929, Woodhall published an article Did Jack the Ripper Die Last Year?, in which he theorised that the murderer did not stop killing after the Whitechapel murders, but instead became an international serial killer. Woodhall named his suspect as Pierre Rey (known as Landru II in a reference to the previous French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru). Rey had recently died in a French prison after murdering 15 women in Marseilles.
That theory would soon change, driven largely by Woodhall’s growing interest in the paranormal and the occult. He began to write about his belief in “psychometry” and clairvoyance as legitimate investigative tools. “The real question is: Can those who practise the occult find clues which detectives cannot discover?” he wrote.
Woodhall revealed his new Whitechapel theory in a chapter of his book, Crime and the Supernatural, published in 1935, and then doubled down with a dedicated tome, Jack the Ripper; or, When London Walked in Terror, in 1937. Woodhall abandoned the idea that Jack the Ripper was Pierre Rey and instead asserted that the murders had been solved, but the killer’s true identity was an official secret, locked away in a “black-japanned box” in confidential government archives.
According to Woodhall, the murders had been solved by Robert James Lees, a man with “supernormal powers of clairvoyance,” who picked up a “psychic trail” that led police to a mansion in London’s West End. Woodhall claimed the murderer was a highly distinguished physician who suffered from an insane “Jekyll and Hyde” dual personality. In his abnormal state, the doctor was a sadistic monster who took “the fiercest delight in inflicting tortures” on animals, violently kicking cats or putting his hand into a globe to squeeze “goldfish to a pulp”.
Because the doctor moved in influential circles, Woodhall alleged that authorities wanted to avoid a public trial, so a secret medical commission quietly locked him in a private lunatic asylum, while his family covered up the scandal by conducting funeral rites and burying an “empty coffin” in a London cemetery to explain his sudden disappearance. While Woodhall did not name the alleged murderer, his theory points to a known Ripper suspect, the royal physician Dr. William Gull.
Woodhall’s theory was not well-received. He insisted that many senior police officers believed the story but admitted he had “no actual proof of its truth,” and was relying entirely on rumours overheard during his years at Scotland Yard. The fact that he had previously promoted an entirely different theory involving Pierre Rey did not help his cause.
Today, historians and Ripperologists view Woodhall’s theory as a fantastical rehash of existing lore rather than a credible investigation. They point out that the original 1937 edition of his Jack the Ripper book contains numerous errors and confusions. (For example, he misnamed the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, as Marie J. Taylor.) So Woodhall’s story became regarded as entertaining pulp fiction rather than a factual account. Which is interesting, because that is how Charles Langston’s account of the theft of Shakespeare’s skull was initially regarded — before scientific investigations suggested it might be true.
The negative reaction to Woodhall’s paranormal Whitechapel theory ruined his reputation as a respected criminologist. By the outbreak of the Second World War, he was churning out cheap biographies of highwaymen, pirates, and other criminals to make ends meet. Fearing the Blitz, Woodhall fled London for Eastbourne. In January 1940, he was summoned to the County Court by his landlords for rent arrears.
Woodhall sent a long, pleading letter to the court, explaining that his career as a journalist had collapsed. However, the magistrate, Judge F. K. Archer, had zero sympathy for the former spycatcher. Reading Woodhall’s letter aloud, the judge publicly mocked him for fleeing the capital, stating, “I cannot help thinking that it would have been as well if some people who ran away to escape the bombs had stayed in London.” In a devastating final blow, the judge criticised the detective’s writing abilities in open court. Looking at the grammatical state of the letter, Judge Archer declared, “No wonder this man has no work as a journalist. He cannot write the King’s English.”
Judgment was ruled against Woodhall. He left Eastbourne for Hapton in Lancashire, where he died penniless in 1942, aged about 57.◆
If you haven’t already read The Man Who Stole Shakespeare’s Skull, you can find it on Narratively. And if you haven’t read The Woman Who Haunted Shakespeare’s Grave, you can find it in the Singular Discoveries archive.
Notes
In the original Shakespeare’s Skull article, I mentioned that, in 1927, the Birmingham Sunday Mercury published a sketch of a foppish young man it claimed (without apparent validation) was Frank Chambers, “the writer of the diary in which the confession appeared.” Charles Langston had mentioned a portrait of Chambers in his account. Could this sketch have been taken from that? Was Chambers real, and if so, what did he look like? This is the sketch:
The 1927 article told the story of the skull theft under the headline “Amazing Confession in an Alcester Doctor’s Diary.” There is no byline, but it is entirely possible that the author was Edwin T. Woodhall.
Back in 2024, I wrote a series of articles about the Vanishing Bank Manager, William Lidderdale, who disappeared on the eve of his wedding in 1892. It was speculated that Lidderdale had run off with a mysterious Miss Vining, who owned a yacht named Foresight, although other theories suggested that the story was invented to cover either Lidderdale’s absconding abroad or his committing suicide.
I recently received an email from Lianne Costa, who was researching her family tree when she came across the Lidderdale family coat of arms, which bears the interesting motto: “Foresight is All”.
It seems quite a coincidence that the name of Miss Vining’s yacht is connected to William Lidderdale’s family motto, and those who don’t believe in coincidences might suggest that the yacht’s name must have been invented by Lidderdale or a family member. This would imply that the yacht story was a cover to disguise his eventual fate, which remains unknown.
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