The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (31 page)

Interestingly, despite the extensive and painstaking research that had clearly been carried out by Baileys into the lives of the two men, there remained two unexplained ‘gaps’ in T. C. Druce’s life that were unaccounted for. The first was the period prior to 22 September 1815, the date of the first written record for T. C. Druce, when he appeared on a rate book in Bury. This was a year before he married Elizabeth Crickmer.
Before September 1815, Druce’s life was a blank page. The second unexplained ‘gap’ was the decade between 10 September 1818 (the last recorded entry for Druce in the Bury rate book) and 1829 – the year in which he first appeared at Graham’s in Holborn, signing invoices, prior to moving to Munn’s. While T. C. Druce was patently not the 5th Duke of Portland, he remained a man of mystery. Where had he come from? What was he doing for the first ten years after abandoning Elizabeth Crickmer?

There was one statement, however, for which I had not been prepared, and which came as something of a shock. It was that of sixty-four-year-old William Kerridge, the 5th Duke’s valet from 1859 to 1860. According to Kerridge, when he first went to Harcourt House, the furniture in the reception room was packed in the middle of the room and covered in dust sheets. This was because the duke had given orders that the furniture was to be looked over and cleaned, the renovation work being given to Druce & Co. of Baker Street. Then came the surprise. According to Kerridge, he clearly recollected one occasion when T. C. Druce was in the house, and the 5th Duke upstairs. In fact, he had left Druce in the reception room, talking to Lewis the butler, when the duke rang his bell to order his dinner. On descending the stairs after seeing the duke, he had found Druce still in conversation with Lewis.

If it were true, William Kerridge’s statement was the only eye-witness account of Druce and the duke being effectively together in one place, at the same time. Of course, Kerridge might not have been telling the truth. His statement had never been subjected to the test of cross-examination in court. But I did know that T. C. Druce had done work for the 5th Duke,
from the existence in the duke’s papers of a trade circular from Druce & Co. dated 15 October 1869, which I had already seen. This implied that the duke had indeed been a customer of Druce’s at one time or another, prior to this date. There was nothing unusual or suspicious in this. Druce & Co. were a leading firm of house decorators and furniture suppliers, counting among their clients the French Embassy in London, Buckingham Palace, and many establishment figures from Charles Dickens to Albert, the Prince Consort (who was said to be a frequent visitor to the bazaar).

Other witness statements were tantalizingly suggestive. For example, both Leslie Ward – the
Vanity Fair
artist who had been commissioned to paint a posthumous portrait of the 5th Duke – and the sculptor Henry Hope-Pinker, who had made a posthumous bust of him, submitted proofs testifying to the existence of two death masks of the duke. Leslie Ward stated that he had instructed a professional caster, an old Italian who used to work for Sir Edgar Boehm, to take a cast of the duke’s head shortly after he died, at Harcourt House. The caster described the duke’s features as being of ‘the most regular and delicate type’, and did not notice any evidence of skin disease, although he did notice that there was ‘a little sign of eczema on the duke’s chest’. After the picture was finished, Ward sent the cast to Sir Edgar Boehm to assist him in making his bust. He did not know what subsequently became of it, and feared it had been broken up when Sir Edgar’s things were disposed of, after his death. Henry Hope-Pinker stated that he had cast the duke’s head himself. He had made a very close inspection of the duke’s face in death, and found no evidence of skin disease. The duke was, on the other hand, very pale, with refined features, and had no eyebrows or hair. Intriguingly, Pinker said that he still had the death mask he had made in his possession, and that he intended to produce it as evidence in court. Yet there was no record of a death mask of the 5th Duke in existence. What could have become of it?

Every day, therefore, brought resolutions of old mysteries, and the appearance of new ones. The frustration of searching what appeared to be an endless haystack was more than made up for by the sheer delight of finding – buried among the acres of dross – the occasional, glittering gem for which I had been looking. The conflicting newspaper reports of Anna Maria’s alleged ‘death’ in 1911, for example, led me to search through the official death records, where I found a death certificate for an Anna Maria Druce who died at a London asylum in 1914, having been transferred there from the Marylebone Workhouse. The dates fitted with Anna Maria’s age. What a grim irony it was, that the woman who dreamed of being a duchess ended her days in the very workhouse from which she had started her journey. Mr Justice Grantham had been all too correct when he described the Druce case as ‘one of the most serious and cruel cases which have been brought before a Court of Justice’.

The reasoning that had led Anna Maria to link T. C. Druce with the 5th Duke of Portland in the first place remained frustratingly elusive. Was she simply mad? The idea that ten years of bitter and hugely expensive litigation could have been triggered by the fantasies of a crazed woman beggared belief. On the other hand, nobody had ever been able to identify the parents of T. C. Druce or the circumstances of his birth, and there had been persistent rumours that he came
from aristocratic origins. A former salesman at Druce & Co., Joseph Elliott Lawledge, for example, told Freshfields that it was generally believed that Mr Druce was the ‘offspring of a ducal house’, and that he ‘had been born on the wrong side of the blanket’. It was not, therefore, beyond the bounds of possibility that T. C. Druce was in fact of aristocratic birth, possibly illegitimate, and that this was the basis for Anna Maria’s misguided conflation of him with the Duke of Portland. The tissue of lies and deceit that Druce had woven around his life compounded the confusion. His concealment of his first marriage and his refusal to discuss his family or his past, created an aura of mystery that fed local gossip, fuelling the wildest imaginings of a neurotic woman.

The reasoning and motives of the later players in the Druce saga – Kimber, Coburn and George Hollamby– were equally hard to fathom, especially those of George Hollamby. After all, he had at one point rejected an offer of today’s equivalent of £5.1 million to drop the case. For a carpenter hailing from the suburbs of Melbourne, such a sum would have been like winning the lottery. And then there was his single-minded determination to have the Druce vault opened. George Hollamby’s rejection of the huge offer to drop the case and his insistence on having the grave opened could be consistent only with a belief that the grave was indeed empty or filled with lead. He might have used fraudulent
means
to obtain his ends, putting forth false witnesses, but he must surely have believed that, when the tomb was finally laid bare, Anna Maria’s story would prove correct. Edward Swift, a commission agent and one of the salesmen of Druce company bonds, informed investigators that George Hollamby had told him that his
brother had tried to convince him to accept the offer to drop the case, but that he had refused, saying that ‘if it was worth what they offered him, it was worth fighting out’. The writer and journalist Bernard O’Donnell, who shared lodgings with George Hollamby in London during the 1907 perjury trial, was also convinced that George fully believed in his title to the Portland estates. According to O’Donnell, George was:

a quaint little fellow, as eccentric as his grandfather, Thomas Charles Druce, and at the time I knew him used to spend all his spare time at his workshop, trying to perfect a perpetual-motion machine which he had invented. But he was quite convinced that his grandfather was one and the same as the Duke of Portland, and he took himself very seriously in this belief.

As with Anna Maria, any motives or misconceptions of George Hollamby’s must ultimately have stemmed from the callous and deceitful behaviour of T. C. Druce. By deserting his first wife and children, burying the fact of their existence and so obviously favouring his second family, Druce created a deep-felt anger and resentment that was to be passed down through generations to come. How many of George Hollamby’s actions could be attributed to a desire to take revenge on the man who had rejected his father?

Whether the lawyers Thomas Coburn and Edmund Kimber had as fervent a belief in the genuineness of the Druce claim as George Hollamby is doubtful. Coburn was well known as a sharp practitioner, who as a twice bankrupt didn’t have much to lose; and Kimber must have profited
handsomely from the fees he charged his client, as well as the commission he presumably obtained from the newspaper serialization of Mrs Robinson’s notorious ‘diary’. George Hollamby, it seems, was a stooge to his canny partners-in-crime.

*

My review of the correspondence of Baileys and Freshfields further revealed that some events that had seemed highly suspicious at the time – such as the unexplained transferral of the title to the Druce vault from Anna Maria’s son Sidney to Herbert Druce – had quite an innocent explanation. In this case, Freshfields had originally been advised that the vault was legally defined as land or ‘real property’ (in which case it would devolve on the legitimate heir, Walter), but were subsequently told that it was defined as a ‘chattel’ or personal property, which meant it was included within the residuary estate that devolved on the named executor and residual legatee, Herbert Druce. Other documents were intriguing in the possibilities they suggested. Included among the 5th Duke’s papers, for example, was a plan and ‘specification of Works to be done in Erecting and Completing a Sub-Way connecting Harcourt House with the stables in Wimpole Street’. The plans were signed by one George Legg of 14 Westbourne Place, Eaton Square, SW, and were dated May 1862. There was also a letter from William Cubitt & Co., Gray’s Inn Road, offering to undertake the contract for the ‘sub-way at Harcourt House’ for £883. Was the 5th Duke planning a maze of underground tunnels under Harcourt House, like those he was constructing at Welbeck Abbey?

These were interesting questions, but they paled into insignificance next to the extraordinary discovery I made one afternoon, as I was trawling patiently through the correspondence received by the lawyers during the perjury trial. The Druce affair being the sensation that it was, Baileys, Freshfields and Horace Avory received a deluge of letters from the public during the course of the case. Some letters contained hints and advice about the case and possible witnesses, of varying degrees of usefulness; many were begging letters addressed to the 6th Duke; a fair number were from people who were clearly stark raving mad. One letter, however, was different. It was faded, written in the crabbed script of a middle-aged person. I almost missed it, buried as it was in the boxes of paperwork that I was working through. It read as follows:

Great Mongeham
Nr Deal, Kent

November 3rd 1908

To H.E. Avory, Esq

Sir,

Will you please excuse this liberty I am taking in writing to you? For one reason that you may know where I could be found if I should be required. Formerly Fanny Cavendish Bentinck, known as Fanny Ashbury since between 4 and 5 years of age. Now Mrs Fanny Lawson, and the only daughter of the Fifth Duke of Portland. My circumstances prevented me from coming over when the case was on in Court. I should like to know who is receiving the money my mother’s father tied on me as a child. I don’t know if
my grandfather is living or my mother’s sister. I should be very pleased Mr Avory if you could tell me anything about them or my two brothers William and Joseph. The Ashbury family kept me in the dark concerning my own people.

I remain, dear Sir, very truly,
F. Lawson

My immediate reaction to the letter was one of incredulity. How could the 5th Duke of Portland possibly have had any children? Had he not been advised by the doctors that he was ‘no use to a woman’, on account of having suffered a groin hernia? In any event, how could the existence of a child born to such a prominent personage possibly have been kept secret? Dismissing the letter as the production of yet another deluded crank, I continued with my review of the correspondence. But then, a few letters on, I came across a second letter, written a month later, in the same hand:

Great Mongeham
Nr Deal, Kent

December 4th 1908

H.E. Avory Esq, KC

Dear Sir,

[sic] May I trouble you to forward the inclosed [sic] to Messrs Bailey Howard [sic] & Gillett the solicitors? And many thanks for sending me their names. My place here is a little thatch bungalow, one of two little dwellings at the precinct and would not be noticed very much from the road. I have two sons the oldest George married with a little son two months old, a petty officer at Portsmouth, and Bert, a marine Lance Corp. at Chatham, just joined the HMS Inflexible stationed at Chatham, he was born on the Welbeck estate at the Ashburys. The old couple are dead. The HMS Inflexible leaves in a few weeks for foreign service.

Attached to this letter was a statement that read simply:

Will Messrs Bailey Howard [sic] & Gillett please send to Mrs Fanny Lawson statement of what her father left to her credit in their care and oblige. Her father the Fifth Duke of Portland and also address of her brothers William and Joseph. To the Thatch Bungalow…

address, etc

I reread the letters several times over. Somehow, they did not strike me as being the product of a diseased brain. The writer was clearly at least middle-aged – the handwriting was evidence as to that – and the spelling and punctuation errors indicated a lack of education. But mad, no. And the information was too specific to be fabricated – there were Fanny’s sons’ names, George and Bert, and details of their positions in the armed services. There was a genuine sense of personal loss in the letters that touched me, too. These were not mere begging letters. They were letters beseeching the recipient for information, for news of what had happened to the writer’s maternal grandfather, aunt, and most of all, two lost brothers. It seemed that the writer, Fanny, had been kept away from virtually her entire family. There was also the slightest hint of subterfuge, in the reference to her cottage being one that ‘would not be noticed very much from the road’. Was Fanny hinting that she was expecting a personal visit from the 5th Duke’s lawyers?