The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  *

  Thomas Warner Turner beamed with satisfaction as he read over the telegram that was handed to him by Horseman Bailey, the 6th Duke’s solicitor. He could hardly think of three words that would have given him greater pleasure. The telegram was from J. G. Littlechild, one of the private investigators tailing the Druce party on the Duke’s behalf. It read simply: ‘Woman just arrested.’ The terse words glossed over the high drama of what had happened on Friday, 17 January 1908, in the normally quiet suburban streets of Lavender Hill, south London. That morning, a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Miss Mary Robinson, the second key witness in the Druce case. She it was who had testified to being the duke’s amanuensis, or ‘outdoor secretary’, and to have seen Druce/the duke as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in a show of amateur theatricals. All that day, Detective Inspector Walter Dew had kept a close eye on the rented flat in Lavender Hill in which Miss Robinson and her companion, Miss O’Neill, had been staying. He was armed with his warrant. Finally, at 8 p.m., he and a fellow officer had forced their way into the property.

  ‘Your name is Mary Ann Robinson,’ Dew said, before reading out the warrant for the lady’s arrest on the grounds of suspected perjury.

  ‘Mary Robinson,’ she corrected him. ‘Well, now then, how have I committed perjury, that is what I want to know?’

  ‘At the police court you said that your name was ‘Miss Mary Robinson’, that you were born in America and that your father was the owner of a tobacco plantation,’ Dew replied. ‘But it is alleged that your name is ‘Mrs Mary Ann Robinson’, that your father’s name was Webb and that he was a police sergeant in the ‘V’ Division, for many years stationed at Mortlake.’

  ‘Good God, who told you that?’ asked the lady.

  Dew remained unperturbed. ‘That is what is said, and I have a photograph which is said to be you, and that you were married to a butcher named William Robinson at Leeds in 1863.’

  At this, the woman sullenly stepped aside, and allowed Dew and his fellow officer to inspect the flat. Having confiscated a pile of documents, Dew laid a hand upon her shoulder. She did not resist. As she was led out, she whispered fiercely to Miss O’Neill: ‘I won’t say a word, I’ll die first.’ Her companion replied, with equal vehemence, ‘Nor will I, they can kill me first!’

  The next day, Saturday, 18 January 1908, ‘Miss Mary Robinson’ – or rather, to give her her true name, ‘Mrs Mary Ann Robinson, née Webb’ – appeared in court at Bow Street, charged with perjury. Walter Dew was not pleased to see that she was represented by Edmund Kimber, the solicitor who was acting at the helm of the Druce claim. Dew was convinced that Kimber was of the shadiest breed of solicitor, operating barely within the boundaries of the law. He had in the past been accused by one of his clients of committing perjury, and although he had been cleared, there was no smoke without fire, in Inspector Dew’s opinion. A further stain on Kimber’s character in Dew’s eyes was the fact that he had also represented that archetypal fraud, Arthur Orton, the butcher from Wagga Wagga who had claimed the Tichborne title. Dew was sure that Kimber had only offered to represent Mrs Robinson to protect his own interests, and indeed the solicitor was even then busy writing letters to the newspapers claiming that the lady was mad. Kimber had gone so far as to write to the Lunacy Commission, stating that he was willing to make submissions in support, should they be so minded to commit Mrs Robinson to a lunatic asylum. How very convenient, Dew muttered to himself.

  From his researches, Detective Inspector Dew was sure that Mrs Robinson was not mad. As to whether she was cunning and avaricious, of course, that was a different matter. Following his own favourite adage that ‘dogged perseverance has brought far more criminals to book than flashes of genius’, Dew had for months been supervising a detailed search of local records. Throughout the country, dozens of detectives had been conducting hundreds of personal interviews, trying to piece together the true story of the duke’s self-professed ‘amanuensis’. The turning point in this investigation had been the discovery of Mrs Robinson’s long-lost younger brother, now an insurance agent in Barnes. From the identification evidence of the brother, Dew was satisfied that he could prove that ‘Miss Mary Robinson’ was in fact Mary Ann Webb, the daughter of a Metropolitan Police officer, who had married a butcher by the name of Robinson in 1863. Her so-called ‘lady companion’, Miss O’Neill, was in fact her daughter, Maud. The family had emigrated to New Zealand at some point in the 1870s, and in 1886 Mr Robinson had died. After this, mother and daughter had lived in various districts of Christchurch, finally settling in the coastal suburb of New Brighton in 1906.

  Information that the Home Office had received from the Christchurch police and passed on to Dew suggested that Mrs Robinson and her daughter were a thoroughly bad lot. There was, for instance, the case of a mysterious fire that burned down the Christchurch house they had been letting in 1906 – an occasion for Mrs Robinson to make the then enormous claim of £400 on the household insurance policy, taken out to cover a collection of valuable jewellery and furniture, including a piano. The local police, Dew was informed, had always regarded the incident as highly suspicious, but the true cause of the fire had never been proved. Dew was fairly sure it had been started by the Robinson women themselves, in order to claim on the policy. Mrs Robinson had stated that everything in the house had been destroyed by the fire. How, therefore, could her diary – if genuine – have escaped intact? ‘There is no doubt’, wrote a Christchurch police officer to Scotland Yard, ‘that Mrs Robinson is a fraud.’

  The 6th Duke, only too delighted to facilitate the perjury prosecution, sent the Home Office a cheque for £500* to pay the travel expenses of any New Zealand police officers required to attend a future trial of Mary Ann Robinson. However, from the local knowledge demonstrated by some of her statements in court, it seemed likely that Mary Ann had, at some point, been at Welbeck. She referred, for example, to the town of Worksop in the same dialect as locals, as ‘Warsop’; and her description of ‘Lady Hill’ corresponded with Lead Hill, an area of the town that was known to be a rough place. Neighbours in Christchurch also recalled that Mrs Robinson had talked a great deal about her time at Welbeck Abbey from the moment she arrived, and that she had adopted the most extraordinary airs and graces. The precise nature of Mary Ann’s contact with Worksop had yet to be clarified. And so it was that Detective Inspector Dew travelled to the town on the afternoon of Wednesday, 22 January 1908, finally fulfilling a promise of long standing to visit the hub of the wheel around which the Druce case still so tantalizingly turned. His mission: to find out exactly what had been ‘Miss’ Robinson’s business at Welbeck Abbey.

  *

  Thomas Warner Turner waited impatiently in the flock-wallpapered vestibule of the Royal Hotel on the Market Place at Worksop. He had some important news to tell Inspector Dew – information that he was bursting to impart. When the great detective himself appeared, descending the oak stairway that led down from the guest rooms, Turner was at first surprised by his appearance in the flesh. Could this bland and avuncular figure, the ‘major in mufti’ with a sandy moustache and dressed in a blue serge suit, really be the famous detective of whom he had read so much in the newspapers? Swallowing his surprise, Turner advanced with hand outstretched. It did not take him long to brief the inspector on his discovery. He had, that very morning, found out that Mary Ann Robinson’s husband had been employed as a shepherd on the Welbeck estate, around the year 1872. If the inspector was so minded, they could interview the informant – an old shepherd still employed on the estate – that very day.

  Soon Dew and Turner were rattling in a cart from Worksop to the neighbouring hamlet of Cuckney. There, on a windswept farm, they spoke with two elderly shepherds who recalled William Robinson quite well. He was employed by the 5th Duke for about a year, they said, and had been discharged because his dog had worried the sheep. They knew he had a wife, but could not recollect meeting her. She was known, they said, to ‘be a loose character
in Worksop’. The next day Mr Whall, a local solicitor who had been searching the registers of births, marriages and deaths on Turner’s behalf, telephoned Dew at the Royal Hotel to say that he had found death certificates for a daughter named Kate Ellen Robinson, who had died at Lead Hill, Worksop, on 6 August 1870, at the age of six, from smallpox; and for a son named Frederick Robinson, aged three, also living at Lead Hill, and also suffering from the same disease. Dew, without a moment’s hesitation, established that the signatures on each of the death certificates were identical to the one on the papers relating to the Christchurch fire insurance claim. So this was the reality of Mary Ann Robinson’s connection with Welbeck: far from being the Duke’s confidante and personal secretary, she had in fact been married to a shepherd who had worked, for barely a year, on the abbey farms.

  While Inspector Dew was well satisfied at the day’s outcome, Thomas Warner Turner was rather more circumspect. He had not told the inspector all that he ought to have told him. The cause of Turner’s unease was the contents of a letter that he had received two months previously, in late November 1907, from a local businessman by the name of Arthur Markham. Markham was a conceited fellow, who had got himself into trouble with the local press in the past, on account of his overbearing behaviour. However, the information that he had imparted in his letter to Turner was troubling.

  In his letter, Markham related how he had fallen into conversation recently with a local farmer called John Crowder. Crowder had been employed as the 5th Duke’s foreman on the building works at the abbey. For the last four or five years of the duke’s life, Crowder had seen him every day, reporting to nobody else. On his master’s instructions, he had been given a lodge facing the old abbey, looking directly onto the duke’s suite of rooms above the abbey entrance porch. From his window in the lodge, Crowder could even see the duke’s bedroom. The duke, he said, was nearly always up at 5.30 in the morning, and he frequently saw his tall figure silhouetted against the bedroom window in the early hours.

  Over the years, Crowder said, he had become extremely attached to and protective of his master. He recalled that the late duke would take long nightly rambles over the Welbeck estate, even in rain or hail. In particular, he liked to roam the rugged terrain of Cresswell Crags, a deep gorge nearby that cut through the gentle slopes of the surrounding Nottinghamshire countryside. Before striking out into the darkness, the duke would strap a large bull’s-eye lantern on a belt round his body. Crowder, anxious for his safety, took to following him in these midnight rambles. He recalled how the duke once got into difficulty in boggy ground in the shrubbery in the early hours of the morning. Crowder was obliged to get hold of some planks to enable his Grace to clamber out.

  Markham’s letter also touched on questions he had put to Crowder concerning the duke’s relationships with women. Crowder had been adamant that the duke saw no women whatsoever during the time that he served him, except a young lady called Annie Roper and her sister, Becky. There were the daughters of a baker on the Welbeck estate, and were both in their twenties. According to Crowder, the duke had a lodge built especially for the two young women. There were three keys to the lodge, one each for the two sisters and his Grace. The duke, Crowder said, used to ‘go into’ the lodge with these two women, at about seven or eight o’clock at night.

  After reading Markham’s letter, Turner interviewed Crowder personally. When questioned by the land agent, Crowder changed his story to say that he had merely seen the duke speaking to the two young ladies. However, when he interviewed the other servants, it became apparent to Turner that the duke did indeed have an intimate relationship with the two sisters. In particular, it seemed that he had been very fond of Annie Roper. Joseph Burns, an old employee on the building works, related to Turner that he remembered Miss Roper, and that he himself used to take books and sometimes notes to her from the duke, who would also tell him what to say, such as: ‘Tell Miss Roper I shall be passing at six o’clock’ (although he never said for what purpose). Once, Burns said, he saw the duke with Miss Roper when they were working near the lodge in which she lived. In fact, he thought that the work they were doing there was only being carried out as an excuse for the duke to speak to her. On at least one occasion, the duke went into the house with Miss Roper.

  A former gamekeeper at the abbey, Bernard Boaler, also recalled Annie Roper. The duke, he told Turner, fenced off a plantation of evergreens of about four or five acres. There were three ways to get into it, but there was only one official entrance gate, which was kept securely locked. Nobody was permitted to enter the plantation, except the duke and Miss Roper. In its dark and secret depths was a little summerhouse. According to Boaler’s account, Miss Roper always dressed well, appeared to have plenty of money, and used to go to London – thus fuelling gossip as to her relations with the duke, who was then well over sixty. Boaler added that the 5th Duke had also been associated with another woman, a cook named Jane Walton. But he left it cryptically at that, giving no further information about her. Further investigations revealed that Annie Roper had subsequently married a man named Baker, and moved north. Her sister, Becky, had remained a spinster.

  Turner’s interviews with the duke’s old servants also shed light on the old rumours that his Grace was incapable of fathering an heir owing to an injury suffered in his youth. An old teller of underwood cuttings, who had married the daughter of the 4th Duke’s stud groom, told Turner the story. ‘I heard’, related the old man, ‘that the three young Lords, Lord John, Lord George and Lord Henry, were riding and larking across the country to Fitzpatrick the Tailor of Worksop. Lord John’s horse stumbled, and he was thrown onto the pommel of the saddle, and as a result a London doctor said he would not ever be any good to a woman.’ The duke’s valet of ten years, Henry Powell, supported the old man’s story. He would regularly rub down the duke with glycerine for his eczema, he told Turner, and ‘when seeing him naked had observed that he was badly ruptured’. He also noticed that the duke’s testicles ‘hung down very much’. Furthermore, a man called William Higgs had also written to Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, the 6th Duke’s legal advisors, in December 1907. In this letter Higgs stated that his father, a builder, had done a great deal of work for the 5th Duke, and on his Grace’s death his butler, Lewis, had given him a truss for a rupture of the right side of the groin, for his own personal use. From this, it was apparent to Turner that the 5th Duke had suffered from an untreated groin hernia on the right side, which might well have prevented him from having children. The hernia would also explain his refusal to ride in later years, turning his back on a pastime that had been a passion of his youth.

  Turner’s interviews with the 5th Duke’s old servants would provide useful ammunition for the defence of the Druce claim, and witness statements of their testimony were drafted accordingly. The fact that Crowder was prepared to swear that the 5th Duke saw no women other than the Roper sisters in the 1870s contradicted Mary Ann Robinson’s claims to have been his ‘outside secretary’. Similarly, the evidence that the late duke suffered from a groin hernia, rendering procreation unlikely, struck a blow to the very heart of the claim that he had married in secret under the guise of T. C. Druce, and fathered several children. On the other hand, as a gentleman born and bred, Turner found the thought of exposing the 5th Duke’s private affairs abhorrent. The idea of such confidential information being mauled over by press hounds and paraded before the general public was unthinkable. Luckily for him, however, the problem was about to be solved by itself, without him needing to breathe a word of the duke’s secret. For on Monday, 27 January 1908, the Home Office received the following message, transmitted via the Medical Officer at Holloway Prison:

  To the Chief Inspector of Police, New Scotland Yard.

  Mary Robinson would feel much obliged if the Chief would send an Inspector to see her at the above Prison.

  (sgd) Mary Robinson.

  A matter of days after his return from Welbeck, Inspector Dew found himself on the way to Hollow
ay Prison. Mary Ann Robinson, it would appear, was about to make a confession.

  * Equivalent to more than £50,000 today.

  The criminal is the creative artist;

  the detective only the critic.

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

  The four-wheeled cab pulled to a halt outside a pair of iron gates, which cast their shadow over the busy thoroughfare. Behind the gates rose a mass of Gothic battlements, towers and pinnacles. Holloway Prison, when it was built in 1852, had been modelled on the front of Warwick Castle. Originally envisaged as a mixed prison, it had over the course of the nineteenth century come to house predominantly women, in response to the increased demand for space to incarcerate the prostitutes, Molly cutpurses, thieves and drunks who constituted London’s burgeoning female criminal population.

  Accompanied by a fellow officer, Inspector Dew rang the doorbell, at which a wary eye appeared at the grating. Then, after a deafening clanking of bolts and turning of keys in ancient locks, the two officers were let in. A melancholy prison guard led them through a series of winding, gas-lit passages. They passed through a courtyard overgrown with weeds, and continued on to a large reception room, flanked by narrow individual cells. The pale shafts of winter sunlight that struggled through the window casements made barely an impression on the dingy walls. Mary Ann Robinson awaited them in one of the cells, accompanied by the prison matron and two strapping female wardens. Dew barely recognized the confident woman who had given evidence scarcely a month ago in the crowded police court. Now, she was pale and drawn.

  As Dew had expected, Robinson announced that she had decided to plead guilty to the charge of perjury, and to make a full confession. She then went on to tell her story. It was an extraordinary tale, even in the light of the bizarre revelations that Inspector Dew had come to expect of the Druce case.