Adolphe de Werdinsky (1803–1856) was a central European, according to accounts written at his death, a displaced Polish nobleman, who had served under Józef Bem and was subsequently exiled. Other sources show him as a manipulator and predator upon women and a fraud. In 1850, after a case of assault on his adopted daughter was found to be true he moved from London, to Southampton, then Hull; renamed himself Dr. Beck, he moved to Hull in around 1855, and died in 1856, in abject poverty, of heart and lung problems, and starvation.