John Walden Poulson – The Wastrel; my great grandfather – had so much going for him, but couldn’t seem to avoid turning every advantage into a tale of risk, broken promises, embezzling and very likely drinking and gambling. Some parts of his tale are very public (were covered in local newspapers), but lots of the details I’ll probably never know for sure. Today he might be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but in the late 1800s even if there had been such a diagnosis, there wasn’t anything to be done other than watch a life unravel.
I’ve covered his three marriages in prior posts – the shotgun wedding, marrying his dead wife’s sister and finding a handsome (if poor) widow. In between wives two and three, he ran away to Canada for six years. Around the time he married Bertha (née Buckstone) in 1921, he took over as manager of the Sydney Hotel in Goole, Yorkshire. Goole was a busy port on the River Ouse and it was through the business connections and good name of his father, Edwin Llewellyn Poulson, that the Wastrel obtained this opportunity as landlord of one of the two main hotels in town. At John Walden’s trial in 1923, Mr. T. J. Sides testified that John Walden’s father had said he would be responsible “…for his integrity and honesty”.
From newspaper accounts of trouble at the hotel or applications for licenses, I know that John Walden Poulson had not yet started working there in June 1920 – the manager applied for a license to sell liquor on market days (turned down). There is a Sheffield Telegraph report of a property sale in July 1920 of a Knottingley home occupied by Mr. J Poulson, possibly indicating a move. On the certificate for his marriage to Bertha – 25 Jan 1921 – his occupation is Hotel Manager, and residence, Sydney Hotel, Goole Yorkshire. John Walden and Bertha Poulson appear in the electoral roll for Goole (57 Aire Street) for 1921 and 1922.
The marriage certificate conflicts with a newspaper report of the later court hearing, which said John Walden became the manager in March 1921. Someone was wrong or someone was lying. Bottom line, he started early in 1921 and was gone by December.
For a while, however, it looked as if John Walden’s life was getting back on track. In April 1921, the Hull Daily Mail reported John Walden donated £5 5s as a second prize in a competition held by the Goole Fat Stock Show Committee – starting to get involved in civic life in his new hometown as he had in Knottingley. But then…
A newspaper report in the Hull Daily Mail in 23 December 1921 said his disappearance had been reported to the police and the next day expanded the details saying the “…well known licensed victualler…” John Walden Poulson was reported missing from Goole ; left the hotel saying he was going to Hull and he didn’t return. He was seen in Hull but then disappeared. The Sheffield Telegraph ran the story too.
The owners of the Sydney Hotel, Carter’s Brewery of Knottingley, had their 30th annual meeting 15 December 1921, having had a very successful year financially. They were about to find out about deductions from earnings as a result of hiring the Wastrel!
Kingston-upon-Hull is the largest of the places John Walden ran to (nearly 300,000 population in 1921). Possibly he thought to disappear in a larger city – I know of no family or other connections in Hull. By comparison, Goole’s 1921 population was about 19,000 (and Knottingley’s nearly 7,000). He is basically a small-town boy at heart. Perhaps a smaller city is a good compromise – place to blend in and vanish, but not too big. He next surfaces in Grimsby, a busy port on the coast (1921 population about 85,000).
In April 1922 there’s a Sheffield Telegraph story with the first report of the Wastrel ending up in prison. The story explains where the Wastrel went after he left the Sydney Hotel (Dec 26 to Jan 9 1921 at the Ship Hotel in Grimsby). I didn’t initially find a second story on this case because his last name was mis-spelled as Coulson, but the Yorkshire Post covered the Grimsby Quarter Sessions too. They provided the additional sad detail that Bertha was in the Goole Union Workhouse. They hadn’t even celebrated their first wedding anniversary! Her son by her first marriage, Lawrence Hollyer, was 13 when Bertha married John Walden, so I would assume he was with her in Goole, and thus in the workhouse too. Other than knowing that Bertha died (as Bertha Poulson) in 1935 in Battersea and Lawrence Hollyer went on to work as a stock jobber on the London Stock Exchange, I have no other details about the rest of their lives – other than they parted company with the Wastrel.
John Walden pleaded guilty to fraud, showed remorse (which is different from feeling remorse), and was sentenced to two months in the “second division” – there was a class hierarchy in prison sentences too. This probably means it was his first time in prison although you’ll note that there were three other hotels in Grimsby he had similarly defrauded, I assume around the same time. Third division was for the common criminal and first division was for very well connected or political prisoners (your own furniture, food and clothes, but you had to pay for it all).
Both articles mention John Walden had served in the Army, something I can find no record of. I am assuming he lied, but I don’t know where he was between returning from Canada at the end of 1916 and moving to Goole in 1921.
It was also noted that a “considerable amount” was missing from the funds of a sick club (many workplaces had subscriptions to clubs that were a very simple form of insurance; The Leeds Infirmary was subscribed to by workers at the Poulson Brothers pottery) which had been foolish enough trust the Wastrel as treasurer. His father Edwin Llewellyn had made good on the missing money, likely the last time he bailed his ne’er do well oldest son out.
When the owner of the Sydney Hotel (who was also the Mayor of Pontefract) finally pressed embezzlement charges in 1923, he had given up hoping Edwin Llewellyn would cover the stolen funds as he had the money missing from the sick fund. He testified that it pained him to do this as he’d been a friend of the prisoner’s father for years. Mr. T. J. Sides went to the Sydney Hotel on December 18, 1921 after receiving a letter from Bertha saying that her husband had left the hotel. She turned him in! You have to wonder if they’d had a row and she was angry or whether she was horrified at the stealing and wanted to avoid being charged as part of his scheme.
John Walden had run off with the week’s takings – £91 5s 6d – plus about £50 missing for the prior months. That totals about £8,250 in 2018 terms. Not petty cash, but given that you’re ruining your life and risking prison, it’s even more sad to be doing it over relatively modest sums.
The papers report John Walden being arrested in Filey – a small town on the coast south of Scarborough (population 4,500 in 1921) – and going with Superintendent Budge without a fuss. I have no clue why he picked this town – possibly the fact that no one new him was a plus, and he’d had enough of larger towns after Grimsby? At a hearing in Goole on May 16 1923 he was remanded in custody for a week.
Before the Goole magistrates on May 18th he was “committed to the Sessions” – to be tried at the Leeds Quarter Sessions – and was given bail – three sureties of £100 each. One from him, and two from what I assume are the equivalent of bail bondsmen. Who knows where John Walden got the money from for his own £100, or why anyone would trust him to show up and risk £200 of their own money (about £18,000 total). I have to assume the money came from his father or his youngest brother (who took over running the potteries) as John Walden had no money (which is why he was in this mess in the first place).
No one gets any prize for guessing that the Wastrel didn’t show up in Leeds at the end of June. They moved his hearing to the Sheffield Quarter Sessions a few days later and he skipped that too, so the judge moved to take the securities – in the terminology of the time “The whole of the sureties were estreated”. Another headline said “SECURITIES MULCTED”.
The lawyer for the two men who put up the £200 pleaded that they’d been in touch with John Walden in London where he’d found temporary work and the previous Friday had sent him £3 for his railway fare for the hearing. They made enquiries and he had been seen boarding a train at Kings Cross Station but had never shown up. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
I have not found any report of his trial and conviction. Or of a settlement or restitution. I have no idea why that would be – he lived until 1941 although not in Yorkshire. It’s possible they just gave up looking (I doubt there’d be a nationwide manhunt for something like this).
There was one other John Poulson in Leeds Crown court (which by then was in a new building), but that was John Garlick Llewellyn Poulson, the corrupt architect who was convicted in 1974 – the Wastrel’s nephew. Not the sort of family tradition one wants to continue (he was Gamps’ cousin – my first cousin twice removed).
The Sydney Hotel is no more – that’s an old post card view of it in the picture headlining this post. From newspaper accounts it struggled to keep a landlord for more than a few years and had more legal troubles, including a 1927 and 1928 case of the manager and a bookie running an unlicensed betting shop in the basement and getting caught by undercover police.
One of the many things the Wastrel had missed as a result of his legal troubles in Yorkshire was that his only son (my grandfather, John Ernest Llewellyn Poulson) was married in April 1923 in Portsmouth. The opportunities to abandon, betray and hurt family just kept presenting themselves and the Wastrel kept taking them up. Sad and despicable in about equal measure. My cousin Kate remembers Gamps being very dismissive about his father and mentioned he used to call him a wastrel – which I found entirely fitting as that was the nickname I had separately arrived at when trying to help Jeffrey keep the characters straight as I relayed the family tales to him.