Edgar Wallace - Marriage, Initial Success, Return To UK 1898-1902

Marriage, Initial Success, Return To UK 1898-1902

With Edith Anstree out of sight and out of mind, he met one of his avid readers, a girl of similar age, Ivy Maude Caldecott, whose father was a Methodist minister, the Reverend William Shaw Caldecott. He forbade any contact between the two. For some years the Reverend had desired to return to England unencumbered by his family, and fondly imagined them unaware of this. His wife Marion Caldecott knew he would eventually seize upon an excuse to desert them, so when Ivy defied her father's wishes and married Edgar Wallace, Marion sided with her daughter. Infuriated, Caldecott did indeed book passage back to England, but was further outraged by the lack of penitently weeping family on the Cape Town docks; the realisation they were gladder to get rid of him than he was to go was an unpalatable epiphany. Many years later, Ivy would bear the brunt of his vindictiveness.

In 1900 Edgar moved to a large, comfortable house at 6 Tressillian Crescent, Brockley S E London, only a mile from the house where he was born in Greenwich. He was to live in the same house for the next 30 years. It is said that he liked the house as the garden had a rear gate which allowed him to make a rapid escape from debt collectors.

In 1900, Ivy had their first child, Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace, and Edgar met one Harry F. Cohen, a financier. With Cohen's complicity, Edgar came up with an ingenious way of scooping the press-hating General Kitchener in 1902 with the signing of the Treaty ending the Boer War. Impressed, Cohen appointed Edgar editor of the Rand Daily Mail with a £2,000 per annum salary. Edgar had become successful, but it was all about to go horribly wrong.

Superstitiously, Edgar viewed any "economising" as a sign his luck was about to end, and thus had been living in excess of a £2,000 per annum salary since the first day of his employment. Then he and Ivy were devastated when the two-year old Eleanor died of meningitis, going from healthy to dead in less than 24 hours. Reeling from the shock, Edgar was as grief-stricken as Ivy, but he was also unemployed and seriously in debt. Eleanor's death caused Ivy to loathe Johannesburg, so Edgar promptly sold their house and put them aboard a liner for England, while keeping Ivy completely unaware of their financial situation. When they arrived, Edgar possessed only 12 shillings.

His one prudence since the mid 1890s had been to "keep in" with his colleagues at the Daily Mail and so he presented himself at their office with the tale of his daughter's death and his wife's fragile health. The newspaper's new proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, promptly hired Edgar as a sub-editor. Despite the annual wage being only £750, Edgar promptly took Ivy and began living in excess of his means. She was not aware of what was happening and Edgar ignored the letters of his South African creditors.