Who was Mrs Gordon Baillie?

Two local authors have tracked down amazing con woman who swindled what today would amount to millions.

Frome historians Mick Davis and David Lassman have just published their latest book The Adventures of a Victorian Con Woman published by Pen & Sword which tells the amazing story of the illegitimate daughter a Scottish washerwoman who amazed and shocked the Victorian world in equal measure.

Possessed of beauty, charisma and cunning she began her career by preaching evangelical Christianity and raising funds most of which she kept. Having made a name for herself she conned thousands with a scheme to start a protestant collage on the continent, all of which went to finance her champagne lifestyle but despite her grand schemes she was addicted to petty crime conning everyone from the baker to the cab driver, ordering luxury goods on credit which she never paid for.

She met an immensely rich aristocrat, Sir Richard King, twice her age who fell in love with her and set her up in grand London houses and estates in Scotland it is estimated that she took around £18,000 from him over 10 years - a huge sum in those days and possibly around £2 million in today's money.

Despite more money than she could need she continued a life of petty crime, swindling shopkeepers out of small items that she could easily have afforded and in 1872 she was caught and went to prison for nine months.

In 1876 she married an operatic tenor using the stage name of Knight Aston. Shortly after their marriage he began a tour of America and Annie realised that she was expecting a child. She conned a shopkeeper out of a large amount of baby clothes and went off to join Aston in New York. Their daughter Gabriella was born there and they returned to England in April 1878. (she had spent her time in NY defrauding various shopkeepers).

Annie continued her career of fraud. (I should point out at this point that she never actually had a real name. The baptism registers are blank and she used over 40 aliases, her first name was Annie which she used consistently).

In the mid 1880s her career really takes off. She teams up with a revolutionary socialist son of a vicar and goes out to Australia to start a scheme to move 1,000 Scottish families who are being evicted by their landlords to Australia and she comes within a whisker of being given 75,000 acres of land to resettle them and of course she is constantly raising funds to 'finance the scheme'. Taking money from the landowners as well as their victims. All the time running up petty debts with tradesmen and getting thousands from Sir Richard King - who is by now senile and in his 80s

It all falls apart. The London & Edinburgh police put their heads together. She is arrested and sentenced to five years in prison in 1888. When she comes out she carries on in the same old way and gets another seven years in prison. She comes out in 1899 and moves to America, still the same old Annie, she goes around conning money for missionary work and in 1903 she gets a few months in Blackwell's Island Asylum and Workhouse, New York. After that the trail goes cold and she disappears from history, as do her children.

The Adventures of a Victorian Con Woman by Mick Davis & David Lassman is available from The Hunting Raven bookshop in Cheap Street in Frome.