Database: Olwyn Owers aka Lady O

Date of Birth: 25 August 1847. Olwyn Owers, known to her many acquaintances and employees as 'Lady O', was born sometime between 1845 and 1848.
In reality, she was born Mary Williams. She grew up poor and illiterate in the East End of London, but what she lacked in formal education, she more than made up for with street smarts.
It is believed Miss Williams was married to two men before moving in with a solicitor with good connections and deep pockets named Thomas Owers, whose name she subsequently took.
Initially, Miss Williams had a fried fish and potatoes stall in the slums of Clement St. Danes, supplementing her income as a dealer in second hand clothes, before she hit on a more lucrative line of work: prostitution.
While all London praised Lady Owers efforts to improve the lives of the Unfortunates of Whitechapel, 'Lady O' was running brothels and recruiting the borough's destitute women in order to entrap clients by learning their secrets and taking compromising photographs.
Owers Manor became a hothouse of illicit activities with the Lady of the Manor organizing sumptuous parties and procuring women for, in particular, the scandalously permissive members of "The Cannibal Club", an elite men's club associated with London's Anthropological Society, which was founded by famed explorer and Orientalist, Sir Richard Francis Burton.
(I must note here that the members of The Cannibal Club were considered radicals, and even deviants, for speaking freely about sexuality in this most repressive Victorian era. Granted many of them were racists and British supremacists who traded in soft-porn from the Colonies...
But when observed from a more modern point of view, Sir Richard Burton and his friends were ahead of their time, at least with regards to human sexuality. Sir Richard translated the "Arabian Nights"("One Thousand and One Nights) and the "Kama Sutra".
This aside by no means excuses the activities of Lady O or the clients who took advantage of London's "Unfortunates".)
In a nutshell, Lady O was the devil disguised as Mother Theresa and one of the greatest con artists you'd never want to meet.
Category:Database: People
Category:Helix database entries