…on the danger of dealing with shady people and mixing politics with business – for R[eilly] has I fear compromised his position in Prague by identifying himself too much with Savinkov who is now out of favour there. R[eilly]’s great danger is his associates before he worked with us, he is not careful enough.12
If 1921 had seen its ups and downs so far as the Spears/Reilly relationship was concerned, then 1922 was downhill all the way. On 20 April another Reilly ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme hit the dust. Held out as another sure-fire winner, the ‘big Moravian scheme’, in Spears’ own words, ‘went fut’.13 Following another row over Reilly’s business methods in June,14 Spears no doubt decided that he had no other option but to terminate his business relationship with him. On 2 August over lunch, he ‘very pleasantly’ severed his connection with Reilly.
This was a further blow to Reilly’s already depleted bank balance, which was still bearing the brunt of funding Savinkov’s activities. His chance meeting in Berlin with the wealthy widow Pepita Bobadilla, some four months after parting company with Spears, can therefore be seen as a somewhat fortuitous lifeline.
Like Reilly, much mystery has surrounded Pepita Ferdinanda Bobadilla’s true identity, nationality, parentage and origins. Many have claimed that she was born in Latin America and came over to England, where she found celebrity as an actress. According to an interview Pepita gave to The Tatler magazine in October 1918, she was born in Equador.15 On various other occasions over the years she claimed to have been born in Argentina and Chile. Reilly himself told a number of friends and acquaintances that she had an Equadorian mother and an Irish father,16 although it is not clear whether he actually believed this himself or was simply a willing accomplice in perpetuating the myth. She herself also did much to encourage and perpetuate this myth. The truth, however, is somewhat less exotic and very much more down to earth. Her mother, Isobel, was born in 1862 in Lancaster, the daughter of a flour warehouseman.17 On 5 June 1888 Isobel arrived in Hamburg, and registered at the British Consulate where she informed them she was looking for a job as a servant.18 It would seem that Isobel had met Franz Brueckmann in England and on his return to Germany had followed him. One month after her arrival in Hamburg, on 5 July, she gave birth to a son, Franz Kurt Burton.19 Although Franz Kurt’s record of birth does not indicate the name of his father, he was almost certainly Brueckmann. In fact, Isobel moved into an apartment owned by Brueckmann shortly after Franz Kurt’s birth.
Her second child, Nelly Louise Burton, was also born in Hamburg on 20 January 1891.20 Again, no father’s name appears on the record. Isobel was still living at the apartment owned by Brueckmann at the time, and Brueckmann may possibly have fathered the child too. On 27 April 1892, Isobel returned to England with her two young children in tow.21 Two years later, Isobel gave birth to her third and last child, a daughter named Alice. Again, no father is indicated on any records.22
In 1910 Nelly made her modest entry into show business as a dancer and in 1912 was engaged by the Bal du Moulin Rouge, in the Pigalle district of Paris.23 The Moulin was reputedly the centre of Parisian sinfulness and was famous for having first commercialised the cancan in the 1890s. It was here that she adopted the stage name of Josefina Bobadilla.24 In 1915 the Moulin burnt down and Nelly returned to England. The war had provided a great stimulus to all forms of entertainment, and the theatre in particular. Musicals proved a popular form of escapism, and were packed out by servicemen wanting to make the most of their brief period of leave. Nelly’s initial break in London was with Charles B. Cochran, who recruited her as a chorus girl after an audition in spring 1916.
With more productions and performances came the demand for more actors and actresses. This was good news for chorus girls like Nelly, as the chorus line was a ready source for promoters to tap into. In November 1916 she was given her first acting role by Cochran, who cast her as Gladys in Houp-La, which was to be the first production staged at his new theatre, the St Martin’s, which was due to open in December. Houp-La, described by Cochran as ‘a comedy set to music’,25 starred Gertie Millar and George Graves. Gertie Millar, eleven years Nelly’s senior, was an old hand and had been on stage since the age of thirteen. She had been the mistress of a Russian businessman, who had only recently left London for New York, by the name of Alexandre Weinstein.26
The London stage was a honey pot for rich ‘playboys’ like Weinstein and Reilly, and it was some three years later in January 1920, after a performance of Daddies, at the Haymarket Theatre that Nelly was first introduced to Reilly. It would also seem that Reilly had met her wealthy brother-in-law, Stephen Menzies, during his time in New York. By all accounts, Alice and Stephen Menzies had a very ‘open’ marriage, and it was rumoured that she and Reilly had been more than acquaintances on his return to London. Alice, the more extrovert of the two sisters, threw herself headfirst into the ‘Roaring Twenties’, as an emancipated Flapper, dancing the Charleston till dawn and maintaining her own apartment at Pembroke Mews in Belgravia.27
In October 1920, Pepita married the sixty-year-old playwright Charles Haddon Chambers, thirty-one years her senior.28 The marriage was a great surprise to everyone, not least the forty-year- old widow engaged to Haddon Chambers, who only learned that her intended had deserted her when she picked up the Evening Standard the following day.29 Pepita, like her sister, had now found herself a husband of substance and, like Alice, maintained her own apartment, at 35 Three Kings Yard in Mayfair.30 The adjective that could most accurately describe their marriage would have to be ‘short’, for five months later Haddon Chambers died of a stroke at the Bath Club, leaving the newly wed Pepita the not insub-stantial sum of £9,195.31
Although she had first met Reilly in 1920, her 1931 book tells of a ‘love at first sight’ encounter with ‘Master Spy’ Reilly the year after Haddon Chambers’ death:
My first meeting with Sidney Reilly took place at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. It was in the December of 1922, and the Reparations Commission was in session in the German capital. I was staying there with my mother and sister and among the acquaintances we made was an English delegate on the Commission.32
This delegate apparently regaled Mrs Burton and her two daughters with tales of Britain’s Master Spy and his daring exploits. That same evening at dinner, Pepita claims to have had her first glimpse of Reilly:
When raising my eyes from my coffee I found them looking straight into a pair of brown ones at the other side of the room. For a moment his eyes held mine and I felt a delicious thrill running through me. The owner of the eyes presented a well-groomed and well-tailored figure, with a lean, rather sombre face, which conveyed an impression of unusual strength of resolution and character. The eyes were steady, kindly and rather sad. And with it all there was an expression, which might almost have been sardonic, the expression of a man, who not once but many times had laughed in the face of death.33