Mary Ann related how she had been living in 1906 as a widow in the suburbs of Christchurch, New Zealand, with her daughter Maud. One day, she saw an advertisement in a local newspaper, seeking people who knew anything about the 5th Duke of Portland. Having lived briefly on the Welbeck estate thirty years previously, she responded to the advertisement. About three weeks later, two men came to call on her. One of them said that his name was Druce. When she subsequently met George Hollamby in person, Mary Ann was positive that he was not the man who had visited her in Christchurch in 1906. The two men, however, were extremely similar – the visitor had the same blue eyes and bushy moustache as George Hollamby. She believed the man may have been George Hollamby’s younger brother, Charles.*1
The ‘man named Druce’ told Mary Ann that he had heard she was clever at writing, and that if she did as he asked, she would receive £4000.*2 The task was easy: all she had to do was write down everything she knew about the 5th Duke from her time at Welbeck, and make it as attractive as possible, to help them get the funds to fight their case. The visitor explained in outline the Druce claim that the 5th Duke of Portland had led a double life as T. C. Druce of Baker Street. Mary Ann was, in any event, familiar with the case from the extensive reporting of the proceedings to date in the New Zealand newspapers.
Mary Ann immediately set to work. As her father’s favourite, she had been privileged to receive an education at the progressive teacher-training institution, the Home and Colonial College. It was an unusual distinction for a policeman’s daughter at the time. Gifted from her childhood days with a knack for telling stories, she did not find it difficult to amalgamate the information that had been fed to her by the visitor named Druce, the newspaper accounts of the Druce case, and her own recollections of her brief sojourn at Welbeck as a shepherd’s wife in the 1870s, into a highly romantic and fictionalized account of a young girl’s encounter with a mysterious and haunted nobleman, who lived a double life as a tradesman named Druce. As she compiled her story, George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn – who were then in England preparing the case – kept in touch with her by letter, sending her pamphlets with further information about the claim. Having written out her ‘diary’ on sheets of notepaper and being well satisfied with the result, Mary Ann transcribed the pages into a copybook that she bought cheaply at an auction house.
Early in 1907, George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn cabled Mary Ann £250 to enable her to come to England with her daughter, Maud. On board ship, she took on the name of ‘Miss Mary Robinson’, and Maud posed as her female companion, Miss O’Neill. When they disembarked at Plymouth, Mary Ann and Maud were met by the Druce party’s legal men, Edmund Kimber and Thomas Coburn. Mr Kimber said to her, ‘We want to make a sensation: there is nothing done without it.’ On the train to London, there was a lot of talk about the Druce case. Kimber kept repeating to her, over and over: ‘Stick to your tale, stick to your tale.’ As they pulled into London, he told her: ‘You will get your £4000 without a murmur, perhaps £5000, if you will stick to your guns.’ Mary Ann also recalled that, during the course of the train journey, a strange incident took place. An unknown woman came up to her in the carriage and said, ‘Mrs Robinson, beware.’ Mary Ann later saw her in court, but she never found out who she was.
On their arrival in London, Mary Ann and her daughter were introduced to George Hollamby, whom everybody addressed as ‘Your Grace’. Kimber took possession of the diary and Thomas Coburn told Mary Ann that she had been brought over to ‘make a sensation’. He also told her that Mrs Hamilton was writing a life of the 5th Duke, which would cause ‘another sensation’, and for which she was to be paid £600. A few days later, Edmund Kimber told Mary Ann that he had read her diary, and that she should have been a historian: ‘It will just suit our purpose!’ he exclaimed. ‘We can raise any amount of money on it.’ He also told her that he would keep possession of the diary, that she should keep her counsel, and reiterated that she would get £4000, without a doubt. Mary Ann was insistent that the first time anybody had asked her any questions about the diary was when she was cross-examined in court by Horace Avory.
In the meantime, the diary did indeed seem to be making plenty of money – for some people. Whenever someone turned up at G. H. Druce, Ltd, and expressed an interest in buying shares in the Druce case, they were immediately taken to Kimber’s office to be shown the diary. Each time this happened, Kimber charged the company commission – with the result that, as George Hollamby complained to Mary Ann, Kimber was making £50 (£5000 in today’s money) or more a week out of it. Various newspapers also began to serialize the diary. Both George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn expressed annoyance to Mary Ann that they did not themselves have possession of the diary, and began to plot how to get hold of the elusive document with the unfailing Midas touch. In fact, it was clear that desire to gain possession of the diary was causing members of the Druce party to fall out with each other. But Edmund Kimber kept the diary under lock and key. Every day, Mary Ann would go to Kimber’s office, where he would read out extracts from it and then ask her to make alterations, marked on pieces of paper. But he took care to take the pieces of paper away afterwards.
‘Kimber and Coburn were constantly vying with each other, and running each other down,’ Mary Ann related to Inspector Dew. Coburn, she said, had told her he came from Australia, that he was a practising lawyer of some standing, and had made £20,000 from the land boom, but that he had then lost it, and gone bankrupt. If George Hollamby lost the case, he (Coburn) would ‘take good care that he did not lose anything by it, and that he would be worth a million, but if Druce got his rights he (Coburn) would be worth a lot more’. Like Kimber, he told her to stick to her guns, and she would get her £4000, which he described as ‘a mere flea bite’. Coburn asked her repeatedly to request the diary back from Kimber, but Kimber refused to return it. Coburn also told Mary Ann that the Druce claimants would have to depend on their witnesses, as they did not intend to say anything in court themselves.
During their stay in England, the Druce party rented a flat for Mary Ann and Maud in Lavender Hill. However, they were usually late with paying the rent, and Mary Ann frequently had to chase Kimber for it. Kimber’s chief clerk, Jenkins, would come over with the money, and used to mutter darkly that everybody involved in the conspiracy ‘would sign their own death warrant’. George Hollamby, in Mary Ann’s view, was a crude man, his behaviour hardly befitting the claimant to a dukedom. One day, he and one of his cronies exposed themselves to Mary Ann and her daughter by opening their trousers in front of them. Coburn also behaved lecherously towards them, running his hands up Mary Ann’s and her daughter’s clothes. When she complained about him to Edmund Kimber, he said he knew Druce was a ‘low man’, and asked if he or the others were drunk at the time.
Her suspicions of the Druce party growing deeper as the days passed, Mary Ann instructed her own solicitors, Oswald Hanson & Smith, and through them finally managed to recover her diary from Kimber. But the diary was subsequently stolen: the account of its theft in the street, which Mary Ann had given in court the previous October, was true. She did not know who stole it. ‘I never actually told the Druce people I manufactured the contents of the diary,’ Mary Ann told Dew. ‘But I felt that they knew it, from the manner they treated me.’ She had thought the diary was just to be used for the purposes of raising funds for the case, and never imagined she would have to appear in court. ‘I told Coburn I should be no good, as I knew nothing about the lead in the coffin, and would not swear it for nobody,’ she told the inspector. ‘He then said I should only have to kiss the book and that it would be over, and that the others would swear to lead in the coffin. But when I read Nurse Bayly’s evidence, my eyes were opened, and I could see that Druce was nothing but a base imposter. Then I made up my mind I would tell the police all about it. I know my father was a policeman, and I would rather tell the police than anyone else.’
Mary Ann related that shortly after she was remanded in custody
following her arrest by Dew on 17 January, Edmund Kimber came to see her in Holloway Prison. She told him, defiantly, that she was minded to plead guilty, and ‘show the lot of them up’. Kimber replied, ‘Oh, you must not do that, if you do, they will give you seven years.’ He then persuaded her to allow him to represent her, but at the same time was writing to all the newspapers claiming that she was mad.
Thus ran the substance of Mary Ann’s confession.
*
Back in his office at Scotland Yard Inspector Dew sighed, leaning back in his black leather chair, studded with neat rows of brass nails. Ranged on the top of the leather-topped walnut desk, which was littered with papers, were souvenirs from some of the chief inspector’s famous cases: a framed letter from the dowager Duchess of Sutherland thanking Dew for his efforts in capturing the international jewel thief ‘Harry the Valet’, and one from Parr’s Bank expressing gratitude for his role in tracking down the notorious Russian fraudster Friedlauski, who had posed as a City gentleman under the name of Conrad Harms.
Dew thought it over carefully. Mary Ann Robinson was not a reliable witness, but somehow, he felt that the bulk of what she said was probably true. What, after all, had she to lose, now that she was pleading guilty? It seemed clear to him that her ‘diary’ was a clever fake, an amalgamation of personal recollections of Welbeck, newspaper reports of the case, and what the Druce people had told her about the claim, without their specifically directing her to make it up. The fact that the diary was a fabrication had been implicitly assumed by all the parties, but never openly discussed. Presumably, this was part of the strategy by which George Hollamby, Kimber and Coburn intended to avoid directly incriminating themselves in the fraud. In her confession Mary Ann had persisted with her claim that she did indeed know the author Charles Dickens, although she admitted that she had concocted the story of his introducing her to Druce/the duke. She had also hinted to Dew, although she did not put this in her official statement, that she had enjoyed intimate relations with the 5th Duke of Portland. This Dew considered utterly preposterous (he did not, after all, know of the 5th Duke’s apparent penchant for servingwomen, as revealed to Turner). The 6th Duke also dismissed the idea of a liaison between Mary Ann and his cousin as ridiculous, highly amused at the ‘old liar that she was’. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is a curious fact that Robinson – the wife of a lowly shepherd – possessed valuables, including jewellery and a piano, to the amount of £400*3 in her Christchurch house. These items were certified by the insurers, and subsequently made the subject of the fraudulent insurance claim.
Certainly, Dew had to admit that the lady had a gift for high-flown rhetoric. A cache of ‘letters’ to her from the 5th Duke, penned by her own hand, had been found in her flat, along with other correspondence. One of them read as follows:
My dear Mary,
Remember this that though you were not the wife of my youth, you are the joy of my life. You are the most worthy of my earthly comforts.
You possess what I most admire in womanhood, sweetness and cheerfulness mixed with gravity of manner.
For your studies I recommend some of the most useful parts of mathematics, as in my eye they are a special object of interest.
So farewell my dearest
From your faithful and dearest friend
John CS Bentinck
Welbeck Abbey. 1874.
Dew could not resist a chuckle. Why, in another life, the lady might have been a writer of romance. He had read worse among the cheap railway fiction paperbacks on the shelves of news stalls in railway stations. At least, however, the wretched woman had now dispensed with the services of that blackguard, Kimber: for even as Dew had been interviewing her in prison, a message had arrived for the governor of Holloway from Kimber, asking if Mary Ann wished him to continue to represent her. She had, at last, the wit to refuse. Dew thought that she would be immeasurably better off without him, especially as he had heard on the grapevine that she would likely be represented at her future court hearings by the formidable Sir Edward Marshall Hall (known as ‘the Great Defender’).
Inspector Dew’s musings were cut short by the sudden, shrill ring of the black candlestick-and-wall telephone that was precariously perched on the piles of papers on his desk. He lifted the receiver to his ear. George Hollamby, he was informed, had that day publicly repudiated Kimber. At the same time, ‘Miss O’Neill’ had finally confessed to being Mary Ann’s daughter, admitting that her real name was Maud Robinson.
In his estate office at Welbeck, Turner too was exultant. It appeared that the Druce show was falling apart.
‘We just need to find some evidence getting Kimber and Coburn into our net,’ he wrote to Horseman Bailey, echoing the 6th Duke’s impatience to put the master puppeteers of the Druce charade behind bars as soon as possible.
*
Events now seemed to be gathering pace. In the ensuing weeks, the civil action that George Hollamby had commenced against the estate of Lord Howard de Walden disintegrated, like the perjury proceedings that had been brought against Herbert Druce. Only this time, rather than being voluntarily withdrawn, the case was dismissed out of court as ‘frivolous and vexatious’. The evidence of T. C. Druce’s body in the grave, the judge ruled, had finally laid to rest any doubt as to the matter.
Then, in early spring, the last of the key Druce witnesses was apprehended. On 7 March 1908, the mysterious Mrs Hamilton was arrested on a charge of perjury, and brought before the police court. The true identity of the ‘Veiled Lady’ – the woman in black who had testified both for Anna Maria Druce in 1898 and for the second Druce claim of 1907 – was about to be revealed.
*1 The identity of the ‘man named Druce’ who visited Mary Ann in Christchurch has never been established for certain. It is likely that he was a relative of George Hollamby.
*2 More than £400,000 in today’s money.
*3 £40,000 in today’s money.
It is perfectly obvious by the mere application of one’s common sense to the problem before us, that this woman is the smallest possible component part of the great whole which constitutes this conspiracy.
SIR EDWARD MARSHALL HALL, KC
in defence of Mary Ann Robinson
Margaret Jane Atkinson – the woman who was in her later years to play a leading role in the Druce saga, as the mysterious ‘Veiled Lady’ – came from a family cursed by madness. Born in the 1840s in the town of Kendal, in Westmorland, her childhood was spent in a windswept valley of southern Lakeland. Much of the world in which Margaret grew up was grey, from the slate roofs of ‘the auld grey town’, as the locals called it, to the winding ribbon of the old Kendal canal with its barges drawn by packhorses, soon to be replaced by the new, steel-grey ribbon of the railway. Perhaps this was the reason she felt the need to invent a world of colour for herself. Certainly, she cut an eccentric figure in the old town, with her curious, old-fashioned stuff gowns and black ringlets. Rumour had it that the whole family was mad: Margaret’s sister Isabella was incarcerated in a Carlisle asylum from an early age, and her uncle was known to the Kendal townsfolk as ‘Silly Ned’.
Margaret herself was prone to wild fantasies. At some point in her youth, she took up with a dissolute married sailor by the name of Captain William Hamilton. She was subsequently to claim that they married on board ship, in a storm. Whether this really happened was doubtful, and was vehemently denied by Captain Hamilton’s wife. What is certain, however, is that Margaret had two children by the captain and a third by a travelling scissor-grinder, whose baby she gave birth to in a barn.
When Captain Hamilton found out about his mistress’ unfaithfulness he immediately returned to his wife, leaving Margaret to wander the country, supporting herself and her children by taking jobs as an itinerant housekeeper. Margaret’s daughter became a prostitute in London, until she was ‘rescued’ by a worthy lady called Mrs Whingate. Mrs Whingate ‘saved’ Margaret’s daughter by persuading one of the girl’s former clients, a Mr Edward Mussabi
ni, who went by the name of Edward Bower, to marry her. It was at the Bowers’ home in Norwich in 1898 that Margaret, or Mrs Hamilton as she was now known, appeared one day, talking about Anna Maria Druce and the extraordinary claim to the Portland millions. Her late father had been intimate with the 5th Duke, she declared; and of course, Druce was the duke.
Whether or not Edward Mussabini strictly believed his eccentric mother-in-law’s story, he was quick to spot an opportunity. He therefore paid a call on the barrister who was then representing Anna Maria Druce, Mr Arnold Statham. During his visit, a journalist by the name of John Sheridan knocked on Statham’s door. ‘Oh, here’s the very man,’ Statham exclaimed, and introduced Sheridan to Mussabini. Sheridan wasted no time in setting up an interview with this intriguing new witness, and within a few days Mrs Hamilton found herself ensconced in a plush red velvet sofa in the cosy panelled dining room of Anderton’s Hotel on Fleet Street, engaged in conversation with the charming young journalist before a roaring fire. Sheridan carefully recorded everything that Margaret said in his notebook, and promised that she and Mussabini would get £3000*1 each for the information.
‘In fact,’ Mussabini complained bitterly to J. G. Littlechild, the private investigator employed by Freshfields and the 6th Duke to investigate the case, ‘he never gave her more than £1 after each interview, and not a penny more than £7 altogether.’ Sheridan guarded Mrs Hamilton jealously, Mussabini continued. He kept the old lady to himself until he had exhausted all the stories she could tell, which he reported, with padding, in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. Finally, when he had got all he could out of her, he introduced her to Mrs Druce’s solicitors. After Anna Maria’s case collapsed in 1901, Sheridan ‘took her with him’ to George Hollamby, who paid him handsomely for the new and valuable witness. Asked by J. G. Littlechild if he actually believed his mother-in-law’s story, Mussabini became evasive: ‘My wife always found her mother reticent and mysterious,’ he replied. ‘She would often say to her, “Ah my dear, I have seen a bit of the world you know, and have had a good time in my day.” But she never told her where or how she had the good time.’ Mrs Hamilton spoke often of visiting Welbeck, but whether this was imagination or reality, they had no idea. ‘From past experience,’ Mussabini mused, ‘I think she is quite capable of imagining a thing, putting it forward as truth, and coming in time to believe it herself.’
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 19
