In marked contrast to the Crippen case, Dew was forever to maintain a mysterious reticence with respect to the Druce affair. He skirted around it in his autobiography, with the excuse that he did not wish to comment on it, for fear of causing pain to the relatives. But – as Dew’s biographer Nicholas Connell has pointed out – this excuse could just as easily have applied to many of the cases that Dew did cover in his autobiography, in graphic detail. Was it that he simply did not wish to reveal too much about this particular investigation? In any event, there was a good reason why he could not have done so, even if he had wanted to: the fact that, for the next eighty years, a number of the key police files relating to the Druce fraud investigation were classified. Whatever secrets they held, therefore, were under lock and key, and could not be revealed until many decades later.
*1 Champerty is an illegal agreement, by which a person (with no previous interest in a lawsuit) finances it, with a view to sharing the disputed property if the suit succeeds.
*2 Metropolitan Police detectives were, at this time, permitted to carry out assignments on behalf of private clients if this did not interfere with their official police duties.
*3 Equivalent to £10,000 today.
Very, very deep is the well of the past.
Shall we not call it bottomless?
THOMAS MANN
Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his Brothers)
The atmosphere in the Manuscripts & Special Collections reading room was suffocatingly hot and stuffy. Hunched at the wide tables arranged in rows beneath the glare of the strip lights, bespectacled researchers pored over cracked, ancient manuscripts propped on great foam cushions, held open by leather weights and beaded chain bookmarkers. There were sumptuous illuminated medieval manuscripts, early drafts of classic literary works in the authors’ original handwriting, nineteenth-century legal documents painstakingly written out by clerks in laborious copperplate. Aloof and above them all, a marble bust of the Duke of Wellington – a somewhat random and incon-gruous figure in this harshly modern setting – frowned at some unspecified spot in the middle distance. The only sound was the intermittent tap, tap, tap of the librarian’s fingers on a computer keyboard, and the angry buzz of a trapped fly periodically hitting the glass windowpane.
Feeling a headache coming on, I sighed. My throat was parched from the heat, dryness and dust of the atmosphere: new dust from the concrete and asphalt motorway network that surrounded the warehouse in which the library was housed, old dust from the ancient tomes that were, in many instances, seeing the light of day after decades in sunless storage. The reason I was here, whiling away the hours at the Manuscripts & Special Collections department at Nottingham University, was that this was the place where the most important collection of contemporary documents relating to the Druce case was to be found. For by a combination of bequests, auction sales and transfers in lieu of death duties, the vast bulk of the archives of the Dukes of Portland – archives running to tens of thousands of documents, spanning over three hundred years – had ended up in the possession of the University of Nottingham. The documents included the private and estate correspondence of successive dukes, the correspondence of their solicitors, Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, in relation to the Druce case, private investigators’ files, court papers and a comprehensive collection of newspaper cuttings. The documents had been carefully and accurately catalogued, but many had clearly never been reviewed before. Some were simply rotting away: pieces of the past that were mouldering to extinction, disintegrating in my hands as I placed them gingerly on the foam reading pad.
This was my last visit to Nottingham, ending several weeks during which I had been steeped in the Portland archives. Like most days of archive research, it had been a mixed day. In the course of the week I had waded through a good part of the correspondence of Baileys, Shaw & Gillett and many court documents. The earlier court documents about the case – dating from the late Victorian period – were in fading, yet still beautifully engraved, copperplate script. Later documents, from the Edwardian years, began to appear in early, rudimentary typewritten form. In trawling through the records, even I – a trained lawyer – found it a challenge to keep up with the twists and turns of this most complex of cases: the multiple hearings in different divisions of the civil and church courts, the endless interlocutory applications, the interminable legal arguments, the hundreds of pages of affidavit evidence. In all my research, however, I had not found the jewel for which I was so eagerly searching: the missing photographs taken by the police photographer at the opening of the grave. That they had existed at one time was not in doubt – Edwin Freshfield had referred to them in a letter to the Home Office. They had certainly never been published, however, and indeed, it appeared that they had been suppressed at the time. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I could only assume that they had been destroyed.
Having trawled through the court papers and correspondence, I was now working my way through the proofs of witnesses in the civil proceedings of Druce v. Howard de Walden. These were statements taken on the duke’s behalf from witnesses with a view to their appearance in the civil case against Lord Howard de Walden that had been started by George Hollamby. In the event, the proofs had never been made public, as the case was dismissed before it came to a hearing, after the grave had been opened. The witnesses, therefore, were never called to give evidence in court. Their statements, however, made fascinating reading. Many were old servants of the 5th Duke, and as I read them, I caught glimpses of an aloof, haughty, yet ultimately lonely and vulner-able man. With the exception of a few close friendships with some of his female relations – his sister, Lady Ossington, being perhaps the most dear – the 5th Duke appeared alone and alienated from his class. If he was close to any human beings, he seemed closest to his servants: his valets, the tenants on the Welbeck estate and the hoards of navvies that he employed on his endless building projects. Many of these told affectionate and touching stories of their master. Seventy-two-year-old Henry Powell, for example – the duke’s valet from 1852 to 1862 – recalled a fire in the vast downstairs bathroom at Harcourt House. The duke, ever ailing, had been taking a bath for the cure of sciatica, trying out an improvised arrangement of blankets hung around the bath on clothes horses to try to trap the heat. An oil lamp had set fire to the blankets. Powell had returned to find his Grace shivering and alone, wrapped in a blanket at the top of a staircase.
Other estate workers suggested that the duke was not unaware of his reputation for eccentricity. Seventy-year-old Joseph Burns, for example – employed by the duke’s contractors for the fitting up of iron fencing round the abbey park – stated:
The late Duke well knew the opinion of the outside world concerning him. Upon this his Grace once questioned me, and as I did not wish to answer him, he said the lightest opinion was that he was a Welbeck oddity, while others would go so far as to say that ‘he was covered with leprosy and not fit for a human eye to gaze upon.’ ‘It would be well,’ he said, ‘for the working class if England possessed a few more oddities like me and with no more leprosy than I have, which is none.’
What was immediately apparent from the mass of evidence gathered by Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, in preparation for the defence of the civil proceedings of Druce v. Howard de Walden, was the enormous amount of work the firm had done in establishing the Duke and Druce’s separate identities by an analysis of their movements. Of course, this evidence had never been made public, as the proceedings were dismissed after the opening of the Druce vault. Effectively, every single documented location in which T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke had spent any time in their lives, was minutely diarized in handwritten record books split into double columns, to enable the ready identification of any dates on which there was clear evidence of them being in different places. The comparison made it abundantly clear that T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke could not possibly have been the same person. For example, on 15 October 1856, there was documentation recording T. C. Druce in T
orquay, Cornwall. At this point in time, there was incontrovertible evidence that the 5th Duke was in Paris. In September 1857, T. C. Druce visited northern Europe – including Brussels and Paris. In the same month, the 5th duke’s daily correspondence located him firmly at Welbeck.
I had already made a search of the nineteenth-century census records, which indicated that T. C. Druce and the duke had been in different locations on census nights. In the 1851 census, for example, the 5th Duke (as Marquess of Titchfield) was recorded as being at Harcourt House, while T. C. Druce was recorded in his then residence at Richmond. In the 1861 census, the duke was recorded again as being at Harcourt House, while T. C. Druce was recorded at his then address at 58 Finchley Road, St John’s Wood. In the 1871 census, after the death of T. C. Druce, the duke was recorded as being at Welbeck Abbey. However, while apparently persuasive evidence, the census returns were not totally conclusive, as anyone leading a double life could easily have lied on his returns. This point was made by Baileys after the Druce case failed, when an action was brought against the 6th Duke by a researcher called Mr Haworth. Haworth claimed remuneration for research as a result of an idea he had proposed, of establishing the separate identity of the 5th Duke and T. C. Druce based on the census returns. Quite apart from the point – reasonably made by Baileys – that anybody could have had the idea, they also made the argument that the census returns did not provide conclusive proof, by themselves, of separate identity. The voluminous correspondence anchoring the duke and Druce in different locations, however, was a different matter. Here were real letters, stamped and postmarked, sent at the same time from different continents. That would have been pretty hard to fake.
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:
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 22
