He was a self-styled adventurer who gained fame throughout Edwardian England for pushing a perambulator around the world while wearing an iron mask to win a fortune.

However, exactly 100 years after his epic six-year “expedition”, it appears that, so far from pushing his pram through Persia, Egypt and even China, the visored Harry Bensley may never have left these shores.

The day after huge crowds gathered to witness his departure from Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Day in 1908, The Times reported that Bensley had accepted a “strange wager” from an American millionaire of $100,000 – or £21,000, equivalent to about £1.5 million today – to travel the world wearing the metal mask.

He told reporters: “He [the American] declared that no Englishman would walk around the world masked and pushing a perambulator. After hearing the conditions, I at once made up my mind to accept the wager myself.”

The wager stipulated that he had to pick up a wife without revealing his name, was allowed only one change of underwear and could raise money only by selling postcards of himself.

Now research by his descendants has cast doubt on Bensley’s odyssey and the reasons for his embarking on it – if he did.

Bensley’s granddaughter, Kim McNaught, said that her father had tracked him down to a hospital in Brighton in 1956, only months before he died aged 79. He was already very ill and confided the truth about the famous wager. “He said it was not a bet, it was a forfeit,” she told The Times. “He had bet a great deal of money on a hand of poker having made out that he had a big estate in Ireland and money in Russia.

“When he lost, he was told he would have to go to jail or take a forfeit, and that was to go around the world in an iron mask. It was a punishment.”

At the time the Man in the Iron Mask became as celebrated a figure as the fictional Phileas Fogg as he toured British towns at the start of his tour. When arrested in Bexleyheath, southeast London, for hawking his postcards without a licence, the magistrate allowed Bensley to keep on his mask to maintain his anonymity. The postcards are now collectors’ items.

Public interest intensified when it emerged that the bet had been laid at the National Sporting Club by John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, the founder of the bank, and Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale. The pair sent an American minder to ensure that Bensley, then 31, abided by the rules.

From late 1908 nothing was heard of Bensley until he arrived back in London six years later, having apparently travelled through Ireland, Canada, America, Japan, China, India, Persia, Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and Italy. He boasted that during his trip he had turned down 200 offers of marriage, some from titled ladies.

Bensley claimed that Morgan had aborted the wager because of the start of the First World War. He claimed that because he had covered 30,000 miles and had just a few hundred more to do the banker had agreed to pay £4,000 compensation.

Ms McNaught is the granddaughter of Bensley and a housemaid called Mabel Reed, whom he is believed to have married secretly soon after starting the journey. He had probably kept the marriage secret because he had been released from jail only recently for another, bigamous marriage.

Her son, Ken McNaught, 49, fromWakefield, Yorkshire, said: “What we cannot establish is whether he ever left Britain. There are plenty of postcards of him in this country, but none I have seen from abroad.

“We have never seen evidence that he left Britain, and because no one knew who he was, he could have quite easily carried on living here. What we are keen to find out is what he was doing for those 6½ years, to prove if he did go to the countries he claimed to have.”

The family also want to discover the identity of the American minder and what became of the iron mask.

As for the £4,000 compensation from Morgan, the banker had died a year before the start of the war and Bensley went on to live in obscurity without any apparent wealth.

“Harry may have been a rogue and a trickster but he was still an amazing man,” Ms McNaught said. “We just want to find out the truth.”

Do you have more information about Harry Bensley? Please e-mail david.brown@thetimes.co.uk

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