The Vanishing Bank Manager
The mysterious disappearance of William Lidderdale; PLUS Lord Lucan, and a shipwreck hunter
One winter’s morning in early 1892, Bessie Chapman received a package via registered mail from London. Bessie was 23 years old, and she lived with her uncle and aunt in the charming market town of Ilminster, Somerset, in the south west of England. The package was addressed in unknown handwriting. It contained £500 in Bank of England notes, a Christmas card, a Jubilee sixpence coin, and some ornately printed visiting cards.
The Christmas card, featuring a message referring to the “bank of love”, had been sent by Bessie just a few weeks earlier to her fiancé, William Lidderdale, who was the manager of the Ilminster branch of Stuckey’s Bank. The coin was marked in a particular way, and Bessie recognised it had once been a keepsake of William’s. The visiting cards — which would be presented to acquaintances during social calls — bore the name “Miss BAH Vining”, with no address. On the back of one of the cards, in recognisable handwriting, William Lidderdale had pencilled the message, “Was true to you.”
The package was perplexing for several reasons. Bessie Chapman and William Liddersdale had been due to be married in January. However, just days before the wedding, William had vanished. The £500, it seemed, was part of a sum of £1020 (equivalent to almost £110,000 in 2024) that William had withdrawn from his bank before his disappearance. Subsequently, an obituary for William had appeared in the London papers, apparently submitted by a Miss Vining. Bessie believed that her fiancé was dead.
William Robertson Lidderdale was 39 years old at the time of his disappearance. He was the son of a surgeon from Wiltshire and had worked initially as a clerk for Stuckey’s Banking Company — one of England’s biggest banks, before moving to Ilminster in the mid-1880s to manage the town’s Market Square branch. William became an important member of the community. He was the treasurer of the local school board, burials board, highways board, and conservative club, and he was an officer in the local Volunteer Corps. He and Bessie met in 1884 and were engaged in 1890. Their wedding banns were read at Ilminster’s Church of St Mary — known as the Minister — five days before Christmas in 1891. The couple were due to be married on 14th January 1892.
On 8th January, six days before the wedding, William took a train to London’s Paddington Station, apparently to meet a solicitor on behalf of a client. Before he left, he withdrew the £1,020 from his current account, carrying it in his small handbag. He had arranged to meet the solicitor at Paddington’s Great Western Hotel, but the solicitor did not arrive. Witnesses saw William entering and then leaving the hotel. After that, William Lidderdale was never reliably seen again.
On the following day, Bessie received a letter that William had sent from the Great Western Hotel. It said:
“Arrived safely. Am sending this… in case I should not see my darling tomorrow. As they did not tell me particulars, I fear the will is not signed. Do not be disappointed, my darling, if we are out of it. I promised you that if I ever saw Miss Vining again I would tell you, and I do so, dear, at once. She has found out her old lover is dead, and those old duffers of lawyers must tell her they expected me up, so the first person I ran against on getting out of the train was her. I soon told her what she wanted and got rid of her. She knows we are to be married, but does not seem to know the date of the wedding., Now, my sweet darling, just be happy about this. It will be all right. Excuse this haste, as I want to start off — Yours for ever, WILLIE.”
William’s home in Ilminster had been furnished for the betrothed couple and was being prepared for their “auspicious” ceremony. But he never returned, and there was no wedding. The town was in shock. Newspapers reported “a vast amount of interest” and “various disquieting rumours”. “His accounts at the bank were found correct,” said one report. “There was nothing in Mr Lidderdale’s social or business affairs to suggest a reason for his leaving home.”
It was falsely reported that William was the son of his namesake Governor of the Bank of England — a fact that the elder William Lidderdale quickly corrected via an official statement. The missing banker was, in fact, “only very distantly connected to the Governor”. However, newspapers said, William was “most highly respected” and “enjoyed the confidence of all with whom he had business”.
A month after his disappearance, on 10th February 1892, the following notice appeared in the obituary columns of London newspapers:
“LIDDERDALE — On 30th January, on Miss BAH Vining’s yacht Foresight, William Robertson Lidderdale, of Ilminster, the result of an accident on 8th January, alighting from a carriage when in motion.”
If the notice was true, William had been injured in a carriage accident on the day he arrived in London, and had died three weeks later on a yacht. The key to the mystery seemed to be the identity of the woman named in William’s letter, the obituary notice, and the subsequent package. Who was Miss BAH Vining?
Bessie’s uncle, James Shepherd, made urgent enquiries, and an Ilminster solicitor, Mr Walter, “a personal friend of Mr Lidderdale”, went to London to investigate. On 13th February, several London newspaper personal columns published the following appeal:
“MISS BAH VINING is earnestly requested to COMMUNICATE details of the death of Mr WR Lidderdale… on board her yacht Foresight, to his relatives, or to Messrs Pritchard and Marshall.”
Six days later, another appeal appeared offering a reward of £25 to anyone who could provide an authentic copy of Lidderdale’s death certificate to Pritchard and Marshall, who were London solicitors. “Any information relating to the accident or death will be rewarded,” said the message. There was no response.
The content of William’s letter implied that Bessie knew of Miss Vining. Newspaper reports suggested that William had mentioned Miss Vining to his friends. According to one report, William had shown letters from Miss Vining in which she had “expressed her determination of never permitting him to become the husband of another”. At least one of the letters “contained a threat to murder”.
In the absence of leads, speculation was wild. “A Romance of Real Life: A Gentleman Supposed to Have Been Kidnapped by a Lady,” read one headline. “Inquiries made by the Press Association in an authoritative quarter have elicited that there is now little doubt that Mr Lidderdale was kidnapped by a lady admirer.” The lady, Miss Vining, was a wealthy American who lived in a flat in Westminster and kept a yacht. “The announcement of Mr Lidderdale’s death has been believed all along to be a ‘blind’. The missing bank manager is on the vessel owned by this lady, where he is now involuntarily confined.”
A spokesperson for Pritchard and Marshall told reporters that their inquiries on behalf of Mr Walter had found there was no yacht named Foresight listed in Lloyd’s Register of ships and no yacht owner named Miss Vining. Gossip suggested she was a wealthy New Yorker who had a flat in Westminster, but they had determined that no Miss Vining had lived there.
“We are not inclined to the theory that the case is one in which violence has been done,” said the spokesperson, “because if this were true, it is inconceivable that the advertisements announcing the death would have been inserted in the London papers. Mr Walter has no theory of the disappearance. He simply wants to find out where Mr Lidderdale is. That is all. Beyond this it is at present impossible to go.”
Investigations continued for several decades, and the press around the world became borderline obsessed with the case. It transpired that William held two life insurance policies valued at £1,000 each with Bessie named as the recipient. But, to collect the money, she would need to prove he was dead. In order to do that, she would need to find a wealthy American yacht-owning kidnapper. The search was on for the mysterious Miss Vining…
Next week: The Mysterious Miss Vining. The story continues. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free to get the conclusion delivered to your inbox.
Recommends
TV: Lucan (BBC iPlayer)
In another mysterious disappearance, Lord Lucan famously vanished after murdering his child’s nanny in November 1974 — 50 years ago. This three-part documentary doesn’t re-hash the story. Instead, it follows builder Neil Berriman, who discovers he is the son of the nanny Sandra Rivett and embarks on an obsessive quest to track down the man who killed her. What he finds is extraordinary. It may or may not solve the mystery, but it’s a must-watch true crime doc. You can watch it here.
Article: The Shipwreck Detective by Sam Knight (New Yorker)
Another excellent long read from Sam Knight, this one focuses on British shipwreck detective Nigel Pickford, who has spent decades uncovering historic wrecks. When a deep-sea exploration team discovers an Asian shipwreck 6,000 meters below the Atlantic, Pickford believes the vessel may be the Modena, a 17th-century East India Company ship that vanished with valuable goods. There’s a lot of money involved, and ethics and sometimes legalities often get left at the bottom of the ocean. You can read it here.
News
You might remember that the Singular Discoveries podcast was shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2024. The winner was It’s a Continent, which won the overall award and the history category. You can listen here.
In the previous edition of this newsletter, I linked to my latest Narratively article, The Great British UFO Hoax. That article is going to be republished by the Smithsonian Magazine. Keep an eye out for that, and I’ll post a link soon.
I’ve not been using Twitter / X for a while, but I’ve now removed my content. I’m keeping the account open to prevent it from being taken over by a bot, but I’ll not be posting anything there. I’ve moved to Bluesky, which seems like the best alternative, and the nearest thing to what Twitter used to be before it was overrun by nutjobs. I’m not sure how often I’ll be on there, but you can find me at paulbrownuk.bsky.social.
If you’d like to remove your stuff from X, this is how to do it:
1. Download your data (X > Settings > Download your data)
2. Use Redact (free version) to delete content: (redact.dev/download)
Christmas is coming, apparently, so it would be foolish of me not to mention that some of my books might make terrific gifts for friends, family and yourself. The latest one is The Tyne Bridge, but you can find all of them on my website: stuffbypaulbrown.com
More next time. Please share and subscribe. “Was true to you”…
Great story can't wait for the next installment