The tenor who seduced and swindled a city

His real name was Herbert Cumberland Wilson, a man of extraordinary musical gifts whose crimes and accomplishments went far beyond Hamilton.

After reading in The Spectator's Nov. 29, 1894, edition that an opera-singing, organ-playing, adulterous alcoholic musical man about town had fled Hamilton with hundreds of dollars from a charity performance, the city editor at a Buffalo paper wired for more information.

Someone matching his description was preparing a charity opera there. When confronted, the man fled. The Spec's reporting had prevented another fraud.

Reports continued to trickle into Hamilton through February that this musician of rare ability" may have tried similar scams in Toronto, Montreal, Williamsport, Pa., and Middletown, Conn.

Rather stout," about five-foot-nine and smooth shaven with [a] slightly projecting upper lip," the musician went by many names. In Hamilton he was H.B.T Wilson." In Buffalo he was Albert Lloyd." In Middletown he was Francis Drake Carnell."

This is the conclusion to a 128-year-old cold case: who was the mysterious tenor who seduced then swindled a city? It's the story of a complicated individual who did much worse - and yet still achieved much more - than Hamiltonians of the 1890s might have expected after he ran off with more than 600 of their dollars.

Wilson's habit of running began early and innocently enough. The son of servants who met in one of England's great houses (think of a modest Downton Abbey), Wilson abandoned his first career as a draper's assistant in London when he was in his early 20s.

It was, perhaps, a blameless choice. The textile business isn't for everyone.

The most unhappy, hopeless period of my life," was how one of Wilson's exact contemporaries living just across town, also named Herbert, described working in a draper's shop in early 1880s London. His name is a familiar one. Herbert G. Wells, author of The Time Machine" and War of the Worlds," twice abandoned his duties as a draper's apprentice to pursue his intellectual and artistic dreams. Wells called this urge to run his fugitive instinct"-an exceptional want of excitable Go.'"

I must get out of this. I must get clear," Wells recalled his mind pleading. I must have the refreshment of new sights, sounds, colours or I shall die away."

The same instinct seems to have shaped much of the errant life of Herbert C. Wilson. His excitable Go'" first took him out of the drapery shop and into the army barracks in 1885. But that didn't last long either. The following spring, he was reported AWOL after failing to return from a leave spent grieving his deceased wife.

But it wasn't grief that preoccupied Wilson. His wife was very much alive. She and Wilson ran off together to America, first to New York, then Chattanooga, Buffalo and finally Kalamazoo. No longer a poor draper's assistant or soldier, Wilson remade himself into a sophisticated emigre. In America he was known as a masterful organist, choir director and operatic tenor.

Wilson's musical talent was never a sham. Critics remarked on his full and round" voice of remarkable range" and tasteful musicianship. And he came from musical stock: his maternal grandfather worked as a piano tuner and several cousins on that side attained respectable posts as organists and choirmasters in England.

The prestigious credentials he marketed, however, cannot be confirmed. The Royal Academy of Music has no record of his matriculation, though it's possible he studied privately. The Professor Herbert C. Wilson" who graduated from Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, was Herbert Chilver (not Cumberland) Wilson. Like many successful cons, Wilson crafted a backstory that seemed true enough to those who casually looked into it.

Yet there were warning signs. His letters of recommendation were written in his own hand, the originals being so worn with age" (so he said) that they could not be preserved if carried about." He reportedly lived in rather high style for an organist. And after resigning his post at a church in Buffalo in 1888, Wilson showed up drunk and bringing a small, slender, blonde young woman, other than his wife, into the congregation."

This woman, Buffalo native Maude Williams, was reportedly a chorus girl. She would remain Wilson's companion for the rest of his life. After moving briefly to Kalamazoo and again racking up debts he had no intention of paying, Wilson abandoned his first wife and child to take up yet another church position and a new identity with Miss Williams.

Now going by Francis Drake Carnell (the name of his Oxford-trained organist cousin), Wilson spent the next several years indulging his fugitive instinct in Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

In each new town his play was almost always the same. Obtain a church position with bogus letters of recommendation, promising to institute the very highest standards of Victorian English choral music. Volunteer to perform in charity concerts and earn rave reviews in the local press. Open a private music school. Drum up business by offering free lectures on the art of singing. Buy everything on credit. Sell what hasn't been paid for. Skip town.

Occasionally Wilson's past caught up to him and forced him to abandon a job early. After learning from a Chicago lawyer that Wilson had previously been charged with bigamy, adultery, forgery and larceny," a congregation in Middletown, Conn., confronted Wilson. He confessed and was allowed to leave quietly with Miss Williams (whom everyone knew as Mrs. Carnell).

The bigamy charge is difficult to substantiate. Wilson's divorce from his first wife was finalized in California on March 8, 1890. Though he had been introducing Miss Williams as his spouse since 1888, there is no record of their marriage before Wilson's divorce. The sensational charge nevertheless was repeated in a wire service story picked up by papers across North America.

His Carnell" identity now sullied throughout the continent, Herbert reverted to using his real surname, though he still tinkered with his initials. It was as H.B.T Wilson" that he arrived in the booming city of Hamilton in January of 1894. There the tried-and-true pattern began again.

He obtained the position of organist at St. John the Evangelist. Known today as the Rock on Locke," the congregation was then the most ritualistic Anglican church in the city. Wilson's tenure was unfortunately short, owing to his habit of drinking to excess."

He volunteered to sing at a charity concert to support orphans and gave a solo recital under the auspices of the Cathedral Guild of Christ Church.

Then, as the summer days shortened, Wilson prepared to open a music school at 160 James St. S. on Sept. 10. Naming himself music director of the new Hamilton Vocal Institute," Wilson enlisted the Swedish-born soprano Elizabeth Bruce-Wikstrom as a teaching associate.

He couldn't possibly have found a more respectable partner. Wealthy and worldly, Bruce-Wikstrom had sung leading roles in Europe and studied under the great Desiree Artot, a true diva and sometime love interest of Tchaikovsky.

In less than a year, Wilson had once again transformed himself from a town's enigmatic stranger to one of its leading musical lights. For his next trick, Wilson was to become the impresario and star of a lavish operetta performance at The Grand Opera House on the corner of James and what was then Gore Street (the site is currently the strip mall at the corner of James and Wilson streets.) H.B.T. Wilson's most ambitious undertaking in Hamilton - three charity performances of the farcical Billee Taylor" featuring a full orchestra and many local singers - would also be his last.

For wealth and rank I do not care, / Since virtue is its own reward," announces the title character of Billee Taylor" as he takes the stage. These were the words sung by Wilson on opening night at The Grand on Friday, Nov. 23, 1894.

Wilson had ostensibly put the operetta together for virtuous reasons. Proceeds from ticket sales were to go to St. Peter's Home for the Incurables, then just four years old, $8,800 in debt and housed in a handsome Italianate mansion at 88 Maplewood Ave. Over the course of more than a month of rehearsals, however, Wilson had fixed things such that the production's rewards would be monetary and available only to him.

He had, for example, requested a $20 advance from the hospital administrator, Rev. Thomas Geoghegan, to pay postage and customs fees for the orchestral parts. He then asked the music director, C.L.M. Harris, to pick up the scores, which he did, paying the fees with his own money. Harris's salary was to come out of the box-office receipts, though he agreed to let Wilson handle the funds for reasons of expediency on Mr. Wilson's part," according to The Spec's reporting.

Wilson was aided in all of these arrangements by an associate newly arrived in town, a short, curly-haired, bowlegged performer named James Smith, whom Wilson employed as a secretary. Nothing else is known about this man's identity.

On opening night, most performers and vendors involved in the venture had yet to be paid, including the cast, the costumer, a photographer, and many workmen. They were likely naively unconcerned. The production was received with rapturous applause and Wilson announced from the stage during bows that he and music director Harris were going to form a permanent society for the production of operas in Hamilton.

Within the week, he was gone. So too was his secretary, Smith. St. Peter's Home hadn't received a cent.

Must be someone that looks like me," Albert Lloyd told a reporter from the Buffalo Express one February afternoon in 1895 when confronted with the allegation that he was in fact Herbert Wilson.

Lloyd, according to the reporter, was about five-foot-nine, clean-shaven, bespectacled, bearing the appearance of a shrewd, intellectual and distinguished person." After a wildly successful audition, Lloyd had taken charge of an upcoming charity production of The Mikado," the proceeds of which were to go to an orphanage for newsboys.

If you are Herbert Wilson under another name and are here to do with Mikado' as was done with Billee Taylor,' the public has a right to know it," pressed the reporter.

Certainly, of course," said Lloyd. He would clear things up the following afternoon with the city editor at 2 p.m.

He never showed up. Once again, Wilson ran.

A week later, another Buffalo paper discovered that Albert Lloyd" was not only the Herbert Billee Taylor" Wilson who defrauded Hamiltonians, but also the Herbert C. Wilson who showed up tight to church with a blond chorus girl and left Buffalo with $600 in stolen funds eight years earlier. The paper called him a rascally musician."

For the next four years, Wilson, now going by H. Cumberland Wilson, continued his itinerant ways, accumulating debts in Smethport, Pa., Olean, N.Y., and St. Louis, Mo. Something had changed, however. Wilson was no longer pilfering box-office receipts. Instead, he seems to have channeled his energies into developing choirs and spearheading choral festivals, earning him praise, thanks and the gift of a silver-mounted ivory baton from the city of Olean, in recognition of his faithful and efficient services."

There was one last bit of unpleasantness in Elmira, N.Y., in 1899. After failing to pay a weekly instalment of $5 for a bicycle, Wilson was briefly arrested and then released after settling his account. The embarrassment was minor, but its effects were perhaps significant: after 1899, Wilson seems to have given up the grift for good.

Wilson's new-found virtue was not its only reward. He easily found new work in evermore prestigious venues and began to build a respectable legacy.

In Brockville, he advocated for the first Canadian chapter of the American Guild of Organists, putting in place an organization that would help to form the Royal Canadian College of Organists a decade later.

He helped to put Fond-du-Lac, Wis., on the musical map and as a result was hailed as one of the most accomplished organists and teachers in the west."

In Vicksburg, Miss., Wilson was appointed the inaugural professor of music at All Saints' College in 1909. There he concertized regularly, laid the foundations for a prosperous music program and published a treatise on church music in a national Episcopal magazine, creating a sensation," according to its editor.

Wilson's time in Vicksburg would last less than a year - but not on account of any rascally behaviour. During the night of Feb. 19, Wilson, who was reportedly in fine health, woke suddenly in terrible pain. At 8 a.m. the following morning, he died of acute kidney failure.

Wilson was only 49. He left behind his wife, Maude, their two children and a daughter from his first marriage.

It was a piteous end but by no means a tragic one. For all his misdeeds, in Hamilton and elsewhere, Wilson also left a legacy of inspirational music-making, of civic service and likely more than a few anecdotes that brought smiles to the lips of those he encountered on his many travels. He did much good while doing a little bad.

It was this irony of an ambitious life in the arts - striving for the divine while ignobly blundering through the world's absurdities - that fascinated the other, more famous Herbert, who bolted from the draper's shop in search of grander things, H.G. Wells. What he believed to be true about his own and so many artists' lives seems doubly true for the picaresque life of Herbert Cumberland Wilson.

The life story to be told of any creative worker," wrote Wells, is therefore by its very nature, by its diversions of purpose and its qualified success, by its grotesque transitions from sublimation to base necessity and its pervasive stress towards flight, a comedy."