The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (19 page)

The Druce claimants thus had two potential estates they could choose to pursue: the Welbeck estate, then owned by William, the 6th Duke of Portland, or the Marylebone estate, at that point owned by Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, the descendant of Lady Lucy. After much discussion, it was decided by the company committee that the claim would be brought against Lord Howard de Walden. A further action could be commenced against the 6th Duke of Portland and the Welbeck estate at a future date, if the first were successful.

A claim against the vast resources of the de Walden estates was embarked upon, but it soon became clear that to carry such a claim through to conclusion would be a lengthy and expensive process. Something more manageable was required. A softer target was therefore decided upon: a private prosecution for perjury would be brought against T. C. Druce’s son Herbert Druce, who had testified during the course of the proceedings commenced by Anna Maria Druce, almost a decade ago, that his father T. C. Druce had died and was buried in December 1864. If T. C. Druce had indeed been the Duke of Portland in disguise, then Herbert must have lied. And winning the case against Herbert would be a major step towards victory, the real prize that beckoned with tantalizing elusiveness: the Marylebone estates, Welbeck Abbey and, ultimately, the Portland dukedom.

Yet again, therefore, clerks scurried to the Inns of Court with briefs for leading counsel; advertisements for witnesses were placed in newspapers around the world; proofs of evidence were prepared; witnesses gathered. The Druce case was once more ready for the road.

*1
  
G. H. Druce, Ltd, was incorporated with a capital of £11,000, divided into 10,000 shares of £1 each and 20,000 shares of one shilling, all held by George Hollamby himself except for statutory nominees. He soon began to sell the shares to raise funds, and by 1907 had sold over 10,000.

*2
  
Although she did not know it when she took on the job as secretary for G. H. Druce, Ltd, Amanda was to find fame (and notoriety) in the future as the spiritual healer, writer, guru and self-publicist extraordinaire, Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she was to set up a number of churches in Australia along Christian Science lines. She was also to publish numerous books on positive thinking that were, in essence, early predecessors to the modern self-help manual. Her 1906 ‘metaphysical novel’,
A Marriage of
Souls
, was finally published in Perth in 1914, and is believed to be the first novel published in Western Australia.

*3
  
Worth over £50 million in today’s money.

*4
  
Characteristics of the condition include prominent pores and a fibrous thickening of the nose, commonly associated with the skin complaint known as rosacea.

He who states his case first sounds right, until the other comes and examines him.

The Holy Bible, Proverbs,
18
:
17
(Revised Standard Version)

Marylebone Police Court, 2 Seymour Place, W1, was an imposing, two-storey Italianate building in white brick and Portland stone. On most days, it was surrounded by a rabble of vagabonds and pickpockets, plus the odd policeman on the beat. But this day – Friday, 25 October 1907 – was different. True, the courtroom was besieged as usual, but not by the usual crowd. For on this damp, wet and dreary morning of an exceptionally wet and dreary month, an impressive queue of smart carriages jostled for space in front of the courtroom doors, disgorging onto the muddy thoroughfare an array of fine gentlemen and fashionable ladies.

Those lucky enough to push their way through the clam-our-ing crowd, past the narrow scrutiny of the burly policemen stationed at the court entrance, and into the crowded courtroom, would have discovered an even more unusual spectacle.
This was the surreal sight of the Marylebone police magistrate, the bespectacled and grey-haired Alfred Chichele Plowden, surrounded by a cluster of titled females, the delicate scent of rose water that wafted from their collective presence mingling with the more familiar police court odour of old rags, tobacco, stale beer, sawdust, turpentine and cheese. Not that Mr Plowden objected to these charming invaders of his court. Throughout his life, he had been very susceptible to the charms of women. As he frequently said himself, the passages in his life which he most loved to recall were those in which the ‘blue or black eyes of some goddess or other had played a leading part’.

Alfred Chichele Plowden was, perhaps, typical of a police magistrate of his day. He had been born in Meerut, India, and sent to school in England for the Spartan form of schooling then considered obligatory for his class, at the hands of a cane-wielding vicar. An education at Westminster and Oxford had followed, after which he had trained for the Bar. He was descended from the illustrious Sir Edmund Plowden of Plowden Hall: the great Tudor lawyer and advisor to Elizabeth I, whose legacy survives to this day in the splendid architecture of Middle Temple Hall. But Alfred Chichele Plowden would be the first to concede that he had not matched the high achievements of his famous ancestor. After a desultory career as a barrister on the Oxford circuit and part-time law reporter for
The
Times
, he had narrowly lost the opportunity of a judicial appointment – by just three votes, he was at pains to point out – and had been obliged to settle for the much less prestigious post of a magistrate within the seedy confines of Marylebone Police Court. He often complained that it was like ‘playing Hamlet in a barn’.
‘Anything less like a Temple of Justice’, he would lament, ‘can hardly be imagined. Marylebone compares favourably with some of the police courts in London, but with its sickly blue tiles running round the walls and its hideous wooden fittings, a stranger entering for the first time might feel puzzled to say whether he was in a lavatory or a conventicle.’

Plowden was especially incensed by the fact that, at this point in time, a police magistrate was not admitted to the hallowed ranks of the judiciary. Bereft of wig or gown, he was given no uniform or external badge to signify his position. ‘It is almost of the essence of justice’, he would complain, ‘that it should at least look wise, and never has anything been better designed for this purpose than a judicial wig. There is no face so wise to look upon, that it may not be made to look wiser still in the framing of a wig. As his sword is to an officer, or his gaiters to a Bishop, so is the wig to a Judge.’ Nevertheless, the twinkling-eyed and discontented would-be judge was known for the efficiency of his dealings with the ragged crowd of London’s flotsam and jetsam that regularly found its way before him. Plowden was, quite simply, the Law in Marylebone.

On that October day, Mr Plowden’s courtroom presented a crowded scene. On the defendant’s side sat Herbert Druce, the accused, his head bowed. He had been spared the ignominy of the dock owing to his status as a gentleman. Close by sat the pale figure of the 6th Duke of Portland, who kept vigil day in and day out, alone amidst the brightly coloured throng of chattering ladies.

The task of Mr Plowden at this hearing was not fully to try the case, but rather to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to justify the committal of Herbert Druce for trial on the
charge of perjury. The case was opened for the private prosecutor, George Hollamby, by the eminent barrister and Member of Parliament, Llewellyn Archer Atherley-Jones, KC. Atherley-Jones, who was later to become a judge, was also a leading Liberal politician. A dreamy idealist, his primary calling was to politics more than the law. His father, Ernest Jones, had been a leader of the Chartist movement in the 1840s, and had devoted his life to improving the conditions of working men. A man of affluent birth, Ernest Jones had given up his personal fortune to tour the country in worn-out shoes, campaigning for the rights of the poor. His inflammatory rhetoric had even landed him in prison, where he had continued unrepentantly to write polemical poems in his cell, it was said in his own blood. His son Llewellyn was to carry on his father’s progressive battle, albeit in a less colourful fashion. As a lawyer at the Bar, he authored several handbooks on the rights of miners, and as a judge in later years he was to become famous for his leniency towards homosexuals. He was not a man to shrink from the prospect of representing an Australian bushman who claimed to be a duke.

Atherley-Jones’ first task was the rather delicate one of explaining to the court that the defendant, Herbert Druce, was the son not of Thomas Charles and Mrs Druce, but of Thomas Charles Druce and a woman named Miss May.

‘Illegitimate?’ The magistrate’s blunt question cut through the charged courtroom atmosphere like a knife. Herbert Druce’s head hung even lower.

Counsel for the defence shot up from his seat like a bolt. ‘He was the son of the second wife!’ snapped Horace Avory, KC, representing Herbert Druce.

Horace Edmund Avory had been almost born into the Old Bailey. His father, Henry Avory, had been the chief clerk there for many years, and was said to know more law than many of the judges. Avory had therefore grown up surrounded by the cut and thrust of litigation. To the right of the legal spectrum and a fanatical advocate of the death penalty, Avory was a ruthless lawyer who, in later years, was to become the most feared of the ‘Hanging Judges’. He was well aware of his reputation, which he regarded with a certain amount of black humour. In his later years, when an acquaintance passed him by in the street as an old man and asked him how he was doing, he is said to have replied: ‘Oh, just hanging on, you know.’ Small and wiry, with a mummy-like, expressionless face, Avory was described as ‘the Sphinx of the courts’ by the
Law Society Gazette
. ‘Emotionless, austere, he holds the scales of justice in skinny, attenuated hands. One tries in vain to read the workings of the mind behind that mask-like face.’ To the witnesses he cross-examined and those in the dock that he was later to judge, Avory was known as ‘the Acid Drop’. Others described him as not so much dry, as ‘desiccated’.

The latest instalment of the Druce saga opened with the shocking revelation that the diary kept by Miss Mary Robinson – a key document in George Hollamby’s case – had, within the past few days, been stolen. Miss Robinson’s account, which was supported by her lady companion, Miss O’Neill, was that she had been shopping in a London street, when a man came up and told her there was a spider on her shoulder. She had put down her handbag, which contained the diary, to glance at her shoulder, only to reach for the bag a few moments later and find that it had gone. The incident was all the more suspicious since Miss Robinson had already complained to the police about the theft of several other letters and papers during the course of her voyage to England from New Zealand. Notices had been posted in the newspapers, offering a £100 reward for information leading to the diary’s return. But there had been no positive leads so far. Who had stolen the diary? Accusing fingers pointed at the agents of Herbert Druce and the 6th Duke of Portland.

George Hollamby’s solicitor, Edmund Kimber, next gave evidence to the effect that he had sought an expert opinion on the age of the paper on which the diary had been written. He had been informed that the paper could well date from before 1860. This accorded with the dates when Miss Robinson claimed she had kept the diary. Miss Robinson then declared that she had made a copy of the diary prior to it being stolen. Application was made to admit the copy in court in place of the original, but – after a great deal of legal wrangling – the copy was ruled by Plowden to be inadmissible in evidence. Miss Robinson, it was concluded, would have to rely on her own recollection of events when it came to her turn to give evidence, without any
aide-mémoire
.

Llewellyn Atherley-Jones then finally got to the substance of the case, with a lengthy restatement of the facts, including a summary of the events at the trial before Mr Justice Barnes in the probate court six years earlier. He explained that evidence had then been adduced as to T. C. Druce’s death and burial in 1864 by Herbert Druce, the nurse Catherine Bayly and Doctors Shaw and Blasson – Dr Blasson having died in the intervening years.

‘I think’, remarked Atherley-Jones, glancing at Horace Avory, ‘that my learned friend will probably assent to my statement that Dr Blasson is now dead, and has been dead for some time.’

‘Nothing,’ remarked Mr Plowden, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘is to be taken for granted in this case.’

Atherley-Jones went on to explain that the prosecution’s case was that Herbert Druce had lied on oath during the proceedings in the probate court before Mr Justice Barnes, when he had stated that T. C. Druce had died and was buried in 1864. The prosecution intended to prove this by calling witnesses who would testify to seeing Druce alive after 1864, to the fact of a ‘mock’ funeral, and to the fact that T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke of Portland were one and the same person.