The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (15 page)

Contemporaries recalled Elizabeth Crickmer as tall, finely built and good-looking, with dark eyes. By most accounts, she was handsome even in middle age. In later years she turned to drink, haunting the street corner outside the Baker Street Bazaar and deeply embarrassing her estranged husband – now a prosperous pillar of Victorian society – with her drunken and dishevelled appearances. The Baker Street salesman Joseph Lawledge recalled how, one evening in about 1849, he
went outside with a colleague to lock up at the Baker Street Bazaar and saw the first Mrs Druce ‘hanging about outside’. In Lawledge’s view, ‘she appeared to be intoxicated’. When Elizabeth did, finally, really die in October 1851 at the premature age of fifty-six, she was buried quietly in Norwood Cemetery.

Seeing little to tie them to a homeland where they had encountered mainly hardship and exclusion, two of the Crickmer sons, George and William, took outbound ships to Australia, eager to find their fortunes in the excitement of the gold rush. Charles Crickmer was to follow them in 1878. Fanny lived on quietly with Mrs Tremaine in Edgware Road and subsequently St John’s Wood, marrying after her ‘aunt’s’ death a butcher by the name of John Izard. For the proud and possessive father, the encroachment of another man in his daughter’s life was not to be tolerated, and while Thomas Druce did continue to see his daughter after her marriage, the bond between them was broken. Fanny would not receive a penny in her father’s will.

*

At some point in the 1840s – some twenty years after deserting Elizabeth – Thomas Charles Druce met and set up house with the woman who was to become his second wife, Annie May. Annie was initially described on census forms as Druce’s ‘housekeeper’, but relations between them were clearly of a more intimate nature, evidenced by the birth of three children before the couple’s marriage, barely a month after Elizabeth’s death in October 1851.

Nothing could be more marked than the difference in
treatment of the children of the first and second wives. For while the children of Elizabeth (with the exception of Fanny) were largely left to fend for themselves, the children of Annie were brought up in pampered luxury, with private tutors, pet ponies, holidays in Brighton and a country home. Never would Thomas Charles Druce allow the children or associates of the first wife into the presence of the children of the second.

Elizabeth’s nephew, John Crickmer, the son of brother Charles, used to go to the Baker Street Bazaar to collect his aunt’s allowance on her behalf. Many years later, he recalled that T. C. Druce never spoke to him about the family of his second wife, that he was never introduced to any of them, and that he was not even allowed into the Baker Street office when they were present. He attributed this reticence to Druce being ‘too much of a gentleman’ to enter into conversation about his second ‘wife’, when the representative of his first was present. But it could also have been to maintain the ruse – which Thomas Druce seems to have tried to keep up – that Elizabeth was dead. This was the story he had told Fanny, and which the children of the second marriage appear to have believed also, since they did not know that their parents had lived together outside wedlock in the 1840s, until Herbert was told this by Edwin Freshfield.

*

In December 1864, Fanny received the following letter from Mr Edney, a manager at the Baker Street Bazaar:

68 Baker Street,
December 30th, 1864

M
Y
D
EAR
M
ADAM
–
Your poor dear departed father will be buried at Highgate Cemetery tomorrow, Saturday, at half-past one o’clock.Will you, if convenient, call here one day next week, and oblige.

Yours faithfully,
W. E
DNEY

Fanny had already been informed that her father was ill, with ulcerated legs. She had not been told the truth that it was in fact anal ulcers from which T. C. Druce was suffering, presumably to protect the delicacy of Victorian sensibilities. Fanny tried to come to pay respects to her father’s body at Holcombe House, but found that she was locked out of the room in which it was laid out, Nurse Bayly holding the keys. On the morning of the funeral she and her brother Charles Crickmer walked to Highgate Cemetery, no carriage in the funeral cortège having been provided for them. Charles Crickmer was present at the official reading of his father’s will, at which it was revealed that the wife and children of the second marriage were the sole beneficiaries of T. C. Druce’s estate. The only one of the Crickmer children to receive a legacy was the second son, George, who had emigrated to Australia, and who was bequeathed £1000 in the codicil to the will. Here was another mystery. Why had Charles Crickmer, the eldest surviving son of the first marriage, been passed over in favour of his younger brother George?

At last, however, Elizabeth Crickmer’s children could breathe a sigh of relief. They had finally been freed from the shadow of their tyrannical father. There was also a strange irony in the fact that both Elizabeth and Thomas Charles Druce could be said to have died false deaths. While the question of whether or not T. C. Druce faked his own death was to be debated in subsequent years, there is no doubt that he
did
fake the death of his first wife. But despite all Thomas Druce’s efforts to bury his first wife and family, he failed to do so. And the shadow of the Crickmer-Druces – the outcast, wronged branch of the Druce clan – was to haunt their favoured cousins for many decades to come. Even though vengeance did not come until some forty years later, and from a most unexpected quarter.

The new century, in fact, had many surprises in store.

‘Ah, you would not believe me; the world never believes — let it pass — ’tis no matter. The secret of my birth—’

‘The secret of your birth! Do you mean to say—’

‘Gentlemen,’ says the young man, very solemn, ‘I will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke!’

M
ARK
T
WAIN

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The two men stood silently on deck in the wind, gazing intently ahead as the shadowy outline of the London docks took on concrete form, looming ever closer as the steamship ploughed towards the approaching shoreline. Each was wrapped in his own thoughts. The first man thickset and swarthy, with close-set eyes, darkly tanned face, and a rough handlebar moustache; the second lighter in build, more refined-looking, with heavy eyes and pursed lips, sporting merely a trace of hair on the upper lip.

The land drew nearer, as RMS
Oroya
forged ahead. Soon, bustling figures could be discerned on the wharfs and jetties, accompanied by the boom of ships about to leave and the scream of whirling gulls. The stocky, swarthy man gave a
sharp intake of breath, his knuckles clutching the ship’s railing so tightly that their sun-parched skin seemed on the verge of tearing. For George Hollamby, this day – 6 May 1903 – was one for which he had waited so long that he could hardly believe it was actually happening. At last, for the first time – at forty-eight years old – he was seeing the land of his fore-fathers, the distant country that had shadowed him throughout his life like a riddle, a question that haunted his past and hung tantalizingly over his future. It held the key to the destiny of which he had so often dreamed, and which had, for so long, eluded his grasp. For George Hollamby had come to claim his inheritance, as the grandson and rightful heir of Thomas Charles Druce. The rightful heir of the 5th Duke of Portland.

Not that George Hollamby had found it easy to adopt his new, ducal mantle. He still flinched when his friends called him ‘Your Grace’. The son of George Druce, the ‘sailor boy’ – for whom Elizabeth Crickmer used to save newspapers for his return from the high seas – George Hollamby had been born in a mining camp at Campbell’s Creek, Victoria, at the height of the Australian gold rush of the 1850s. It was here that his father, George, had arrived in 1851, after the death of his mother, Elizabeth Crickmer. At Campbell’s Creek, George had met the daughter of another settler family – Mary Hollamby – and set up home as a farmer and prospector.

The Australian gold rush had gripped the country in a wild frenzy during the second half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the earlier Californian gold rush. It had been started by an Australian pioneer of the American diggings. Edward Hammond Hargraves, an unsuccessful prospector in the American rush for gold, had spotted the uncanny resemblance
between the landscape of California and his Australian homeland. Returning to Australia with the burning conviction that there was gold to be had in New South Wales, he made the long trek from Sydney across the Blue Mountains, to a tributary of the Macquarie river. There – in his own words – he felt himself ‘surrounded by gold’. Sure enough, effluvial gold was discovered at Ophir, the spot at which he came to a halt. His words, on raising the first nugget to the sun, proved an illuminating insight into the hopes and dreams of the average Australian settler of the time. ‘This,’ he exclaimed to his puzzled guide, ‘is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put into a glass-case, and sent to the British Museum!’

Hargraves’ discovery of gold in the mountains of New South Wales in 1851 launched a deluge of fortune seekers onto the Australian continent, such as had never been seen before. Overnight, it seemed that the image of Australia was transformed. Previously a grim convict colony, it now became a land of opportunity, where all those who were outcast, down-at-heel or purely adventurous, could try their luck. Inevitably, the days when the tin-sieve-shaking prospector, with his rough tent and billycan, could stumble on a fortune, were short-lived. In a matter of a decade, the big mining companies had taken over. Some made it rich, some did not. George Druce was one of the many unlucky ones, scraping together a living on a farm in the shadow of the gold fields of Mount Alexander. George Hollamby’s earliest memories were of growing up in a makeshift slab hut, a child of the diggings. All this, however, was soon to change irrevocably.

In 1865 – when young George Hollamby was about ten years old – his father received a letter from a man called Alexander Young, acting executor to the late Thomas Charles Druce of the Baker Street Bazaar. The letter stated that George Druce had received a legacy of £1000. George Hollamby’s father set off immediately for Melbourne, a distance of some two hundred miles from Campbell’s Creek. When he returned, to the great excitement of all at his unexpected enrichment, he made the momentous decision to leave the diggings and purchase a business in Melbourne.

For those brought up in towns and cities, it would be impossible to imagine the delight and wonder of the child George Hollamby when he saw the bustling city of Melbourne for the first time. As he was later to recall, even a two-storey house was amazing, and the noise and clatter of the city was terrifying to a child who had been brought up in the silence of the bush. Gradually, however, he became accustomed to town life. His father had bought a market-gardening business, which was prosperous at first: in the early days, cauliflowers would bring as much as 12 shillings a dozen. But hard times were to follow, and with the failure of his father’s business, George Hollamby found himself apprenticed to a fireproof-safe maker in the city. It was a miserable experience. Subjected to a terrifying and painful ‘tarring’ by his fellow-apprentices – that is, being doused in hot tar and rolled in feathers – George soon made his escape. Finding nothing much else coming his way, he made up his mind to head for adventure – out in the Australian bush.

When George Hollamby announced his intention to his parents, his father presented him with a new billycan, a loaf of
bread, some tea, sugar and 3 shillings, saying: ‘There you are now, you can be off.’ He then added, as an afterthought, ‘And you can take the dog with you.’ His mother fetched a blanket and rolled it round a change of clothing. ‘That’, George Hollamby was later to remark, ‘was the start in life she gave me.’ And so, the following morning, whistling as heartily as any seasoned swagman with his dog at his heel and his billycan over his shoulder, George Hollamby sallied forth into the dark and inscrutable forests of Victoria.

George Hollamby spent the next three years wandering in the Australian bush. He moved from makeshift camp to camp, picking up whatever work he could – gold prospecting, clearing bush, working as a casual labourer on remote farms. Finally, he settled as a ‘selector’ – or pioneer farmer – clearing scrubland in a corner of the remote area known as Gippsland. This was the wild, dark forest known as the Tableland of Neerim, populated by some of the tallest trees on earth: the mountain ashes of Victoria, many of them more than 300 feet high, through whose tangled canopy the sun shone with a sickly, watery green light. There were no natives in this district, but their former presence was revealed by the exotic names of the locations and the ancient stone axes and other implements that littered the forest floor. George Hollamby’s home was a small hut, to make space for which he himself had made a clearing in the thick scrub. The mail came by packhorse once a week, and his nearest neighbour – another selector – was a mile away. They would meet on Sundays and at night, when one would pay the other a visit, striking out across the beaten track with gun on shoulder. Their only entertainment was what they made themselves – poems, bush
ballads and the occasional moonlit possum or wallaby hunt.