The Victorian scam artist who tried to dupe the islanders of Skye

Hiding her true identity behind more than 40 aliases, con artist Annie Gordon Baillie made a living swindling shopkeepers across Victorian Britain.

But in the 1880s, the Scottish fraudster took her criminal activities to a new level.

She arrived on Skye during the Crofters’ War, a violent clash between tenant farmers and landowners over land rights.

Posing as an aristocratic novelist, she saw an opportunity to make a fortune – by convincing 1,000 islanders to relocate to a patch of Australian swamp.

Annie’s story is told in a new series of BBC Radio 4’s Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley.

The episode draws on newspaper articles, court reports and a book called The Adventures of a Victorian Con Woman: The Life and Crimes of Mrs Gordon Baillie by Mick Davis and David Lassman.

Annie was born into poverty in Peterhead, a fishing port in Aberdeenshire, in February 1848.

By her 20s, she was defrauding shopkeepers and running up credit for goods she had no intention of paying for.

In the 1870s, Annie became more ambitious and set up a fake charity to establish a Protestant school for girls in Rome – a heartland of the Catholic faith.

Donations poured in but the school was never built.

“The law catches up with her briefly in 1872 and she spends nine months in prison for fraud,” said historian Worsley.

Following her release from prison, Annie had a whirlwind few years.

She married an opera singer and the couple had three children. The family spent some time in New York.

But in November 1884, she turned up on the Isle of Skye “wearing fancy clothes and jewels,” according to Worsley.

“She passes herself off as a wealthy literary lady, who is writing a novel about the plight of the crofters of Skye,” she added.

Skye, along with other west coast island communities, was in the grip of the Crofters’ War.

Waged throughout much of the 1800s, it was a dispute between landowners and communities of tenant farmers distressed by high rents, their lack of rights to land, and eviction threats to make way for large-scale farming operations.

The process of moving families out of inland areas where they had raised cattle for generations to coastal fringes of large estates, or abroad to territories in Canada, had started with the Highland Clearances in the 18th and early 19th Centuries.

Both the clearances and the Crofters’ War were marked by violent clashes between people facing eviction and landowners and the authorities.

One of the bloodiest incidents was the Battle of the Braes on Skye in 1882.

After being attacked with stones by a crowd of men and women, about 50 police officers from Glasgow baton-charged the mob.

The unrest spread to Glendale in Skye and in 1883 the frustrated authorities called for military intervention to help round up the ring-leaders.

In early 1883, the iron-hulled Royal Navy gunboat Jackal appeared in Loch Pooltiel, off Glendale.

Marines disembarked from the Jackal and landed at Glendale’s Meanish Pier to help police in making arrests.

Newspapers sent reporters to cover the dispute’s twists and turns, so Annie was well versed on the “war”, and any opportunity to benefit for it.

Philanthropy was all the rage among wealthy Victorians, and Annie tapped into that.

Posing as a “lady novelist”, she told Skye’s crofters she would fundraise for their cause.

Annie did an interview on her “charity work” with the Aberdeen Evening News, turning up at a hotel in Portree in a striking crimson dressing gown and fingers adorned with jewelled rings.

Scottish historical and crime writer Denise Mina said the disguise distracted people from what Annie was really up to.

“She had a great eye for an emotive cause,” Mina said.

“Physically, how would I describe her? She’s very pretty, very petite and always well turned out.”

But Mina added: “She is taking money from crofters who are just about to go to war because they have been run off their land and burned out of their homes.

“She is going to raise money and leg it with the dosh.

“It is quite spiteful what she is doing, but it is all wrapped up in this lady façade.”

Annie’s scam took a bizarre turn when she suggested the islanders quit Skye and emigrate to Australia.

She even travelled out to Australia to negotiate a deal for land as a new home.

In Melbourne, she was shown an unwanted area of marshy ground.

Annie said 1,000 crofters could relocate there, and give up farming and become fishermen instead.

But Mina said: “The whole point is the crofters don’t want to leave – that’s the whole dispute.”

The deal collapsed and Annie returned to London where more trouble awaited her.

Publicity around her scheme had caught the attention of a Scotland Yard detective – Det Insp Henry Marshall – who had long been on the trail of Annie and her shopkeeper frauds across London.

She was arrested in 1888, leaving crofters on Skye still waiting for their “golden ticket” to a new life in Australia.

Annie was later jailed for five years for swindling the shopkeepers.

The money involved in the frauds was believed to be far less than the true amount of Annie’s ill-gotten gains over the years.

After her release, she was soon back in jail – this time for stealing paintings.

Once released from prison, she emigrated to New York where in 1902 there is a record of her being placed in a workhouse as punishment for vagrancy.

And then she vanishes without a trace.

Lady Swindlers’ in-house historian, Prof Rosalind Crone, said Annie’s story exposed the “dark side” of charitable giving in Victorian times.

“It wasn’t always about helping the unfortunate or supporting worthwhile causes,” she added.

For crofters, the war led to a public inquiry and eventually legislation that protected their land rights – and hopefully any chance of ever being scammed by phoney lady novelists again.