The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  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?

  My head was in a whirl. Could the 5th Duke of Portland really have fathered two sons and a daughter? Could they have been brought up secretly, separated from each other, the daughter raised by a local Welbeck family called the Ashburys? It seemed, on the face of it, incredible. What Horace Avory would have made of such a letter, when he received it ten months after the Druce trial, I could only speculate. Somehow, I suspected it would have prompted a raised eye-brow, even on that mask-like countenance.

  Incredible or not, I had to find out more. I sent a request for information to a medical acquaintance of mine, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Was it possible, I asked, for a man suffering from an untreated groin hernia to father children? I then set to work looking up any records of Fanny that might exist. If – as Fanny intimated – she and her two brothers, William and Joseph, were indeed children of the 5th Duke who had been brought up by a local family, surely there would be records relating to them in the Portland archives: correspondence regarding the terms on which they were handed over to the Ashburys, details of any sums of money transferred to them for the children’s maintenance. However, a thorough search of the papers in the archives drew a complete and utter blank. If any docu
ments relating to Fanny or her brothers had once existed, they must have been destroyed. The two letters I had found had clearly slipped through the net – presumably because they had been filed with seemingly innocuous correspondence with the public in the aftermath of the perjury trial. It seemed, in fact, that I only knew about Fanny’s existence because somebody in the lawyers’ offices had not been careful enough.

  Since the Portland papers were not of assistance, I turned to the public records. Surely there must be some reference to Fanny in the official registers of births, marriages and deaths, or the census returns? After some searching, I found that a Fanny Ashbury was registered as born to a couple named George and Hannah Ashbury in 1855, in Whitwell, a village on the Welbeck estate. The couple were clearly of lowly stock. George was a joiner and Hannah was illiterate, marking Fanny’s birth certificate with a cross as her signature. The same Fanny was listed as living with the Ashburys at Whitwell, aged six years, in 1861, along with a brother, William, then aged nine. Could this be the Fanny Lawson who wrote to Horace Avory, and was this William the brother she had mentioned in her letter? If this was indeed the Fanny for whom I was looking, she would have been fifty-three years old when she wrote to Avory. In the 1871 census, the sixteen-year-old Fanny reappeared, working as a servant in the household of a man called Calvert Bernard Holland, a manager in Sheffield. But then, she seemed to disappear from the records. What could have happened to her?

  Realizing that I would have to spread the net wider, I began to search the census records for Scotland and Ireland. I also searched the emigrant passenger lists of persons on outbound ships in the 1870s and 1880s to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Finally, I struck gold. Trawling through the Scottish marriage records, I discovered that a Fanny Ashbury had married a George Lawson in Edinburgh in 1880. The couple were subsequently recorded in the Scottish census records until the end of the century, living in Midlothian. The Scottish census records also contained vital information that proved I had indeed found the Fanny Lawson who had written to Horace Avory in 1908. For they recorded, as members of Fanny’s household, her sons George and Bert, referred to in her letters (‘Bert’, in fact, turned out to be short not for ‘Robert’, but for ‘Bertram’). George, the elder son by just one year, was born in Midlothian in 1884; and true to Fanny’s letter, Bertram, the younger son, was born on the Welbeck estate, in the village of Norton Cuckney, in 1885.

  By the turn of the century, Fanny had disappeared from the Scottish records. The 1901 and 1911 censuses showed her as a widow living in various villages in Kent, not far from the village of Great Mongeham, from where she had written her letters to Horace Avory. Curiously, while Fanny had given her birthplace as Whitwell in the earlier censuses, in these later records, her birthplace was simply listed as ‘not known’. George and Bert, just as Fanny had written, were destined for careers in the Royal Marines. In 1911, George – at the age of twenty-seven – was a petty officer on HMS Albemarle at Weymouth. At just sixteen years old, Bertram was already a bugler on HMS Wildfire at Sheerness in Kent; and by 1911, aged twenty-six, he was a Lance Corporal at the Royal Marine barracks at Chatham. According to the England & Wales death index, Fanny Lawson died in 1917, in Portsmouth, at the age of sixty-two.

  Curious to find out more about Fanny’s sons, I contacted a specialist military researcher, to see if it was possible to track down the boys’ service records from the information given in Fanny’s letters. These, I reasoned, might well shed more light on Fanny and her family. I also put in a tentative request to visit Welbeck Abbey: perhaps someone there might know something, if anybody were willing to talk. I had, in any event, been intending to visit Welbeck for some time, and now seemed an ideal moment to take my research to this next stage. Having put out these feelers, there seemed little more to do, other than to wait and see what happened.

  *

  By this time, the reading room had closed, and I had headed back to my sparsely furnished but comfortable hotel room, with its wide window overlooking the grey slate roofs, red-brick warehouses and smoking factory chimneys of Nottingham’s old industrial Lace Market district. A light, sooty drizzle was falling from the scudding clouds. Somewhat wearily, I began to look through images of documents relating to the Druce police investigation held by the National Archives at Kew. To save time and extra travelling, I had obtained several volumes of these on a computer disc. My vision began to blur as yet again, pages and pages of yellowing briefs, opinions and interview notes, mostly in faded copperplate script, passed in succession before my eyes – this time, somewhat incongruously, on a flickering computer screen. Perhaps it was time to call it a night. On the verge of switching the machine off, I suddenly sat bolt upright as I found myself clicking through a series of photographs that I had not seen before: a grave, staked off with cordons… the inside of a vault… a large, dusty coffin swathed in a black cloth… an open coffin lid… the outline of a shroud…

  I was looking at the police photographs that had been taken when the Druce vault was opened.

  It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between!

  DIANE ACKERMAN

  A Natural History of the Senses

  It was a crisp, cold, misty October morning when I stepped onto the platform at Nottingham City Station to take a train to Welbeck. The station, in the middle of a major refurbishing programme, was not an attractive sight. Scaffolding and temporary façades covered over the old, red-brick Edwardian baroque building, with its terracotta walls, slate roof and art-nouveau-style wrought-iron gates. Most of the people at platform 4 – where I stood, stamping my feet in the cold and blowing my fingers – were waiting for the fast train to King’s Cross. Only a few remained on the platform afterwards, awaiting the local train that would travel the length of the ‘Robin Hood line’, the track that runs through the remote, hilly region north of Nottingham to the town of Worksop.

  The train was one of those ambling, rickety affairs that stopped at every village station. I therefore had ample leisure to review the astonishing photographs from the National Archives, which I had pulled up on my computer the night before. There were six photographs in all, just as Edwin Freshfield had listed them in his letter to the Home Office. The first three showed the exterior of the Druce grave ready for the exhumation, surrounded by the high walls of the temporary shed that had been constructed around it to protect the privacy of the proceedings. The fourth showed the open vault, with the outline of two adult coffins side by side. A tiny baby’s coffin was clearly visible, to one side. The fifth photograph showed the coffin of T. C. Druce: a heavy, old-fashioned affair with a great plaque and brass handles, adorned with two crosses, exactly as Inspector Dew had described it. The sixth and final photograph was the most eerie of all: it revealed the open coffin, with a shrouded figure bundled inside. The face, beneath the shroud, was indistinct; but it was just possible to make out the outline of a beard. A pencilled note with the photographs, headed ‘Mr May – Registry’ and dated 30 January 1932, read:

  I have turned out these photographs. They are of the Druce grave opened by S. of S.’s authority early in the century. They are not for general consumption. They might be put away with papers which I suppose are preserved about this cause célèbre.

  It therefore appeared that, even as late as 1932 – twenty-five years after the events – the police photographs of the Druce grave had been hidden away, considered by the authorities as unfit for public consumption.

  My attention was suddenly caught by the fact that the train was approaching its final destination. I now saw that the nature of the countryside had changed dramatically since leaving the outskirts of Nottingham. No longer dense and cluttered, it had become wild and open, a chill wind whipping the lean grass in the meadows and the forlorn leaves that still clung to the trees. The few villages that we passed were remote and grim, clusters of small stone cottages hugging the windswept slopes. My guide at Welbeck for the day was to be Dere
k Adlam, the long-serving curator of the Portland Collec-tion at Welbeck Abbey. He had, by an odd coincidence, asked me to meet him at Whitwell – the stop before Worksop, and Fanny’s birthplace.

  Alighting from the train, I could not help but look curiously around me at the village that – ostensibly, at least – was the place of Fanny’s birth. But Whitwell had the same shut up, reserved expression of so many villages of this region: a tiny community fallen on hard times, closed in on itself, jealous of its secrets. I was met at the station by Mr Adlam, a charming gentleman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Welbeck estate.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, as we drove through winding country roads, through shafts of glancing sunlight.

  ‘Oh, about thirty years,’ he replied, with a smile.

  ‘Does all this land still belong to the Welbeck estate?’

  ‘Most of it.’

  The extent of the terrain was impressive. I knew that the Portland London estates had already been split off from the Welbeck and other provincial estates, under the terms of the 4th Duke’s will. The London estates had passed through the 4th Duke’s daughter, Lady Lucy, by marriage to the de Walden family, who own a significant portion of Marylebone to this day. The gloomy palace of Harcourt House was demolished in 1906, its vast bathrooms, trapdoors and glass screens making way for a block of expensive flats. As for the Welbeck estate, that had passed to the 6th Duke of Portland, who died in 1943. His son, the 7th Duke – known as ‘Chopper’ Portland – was described by the Duke of Bedford as ‘a pompous-looking man with a moustache’. He had two daughters but no sons. On his death, therefore, the Portland dukedom passed to a remote kinsman who claimed his descent from the 3rd Duke, Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, who became the 8th Duke of Portland. The last Duke of Portland was Ferdinand’s brother, the 9th Duke, William Cavendish-Bentinck: after he died in 1990 without a male heir, the dukedom became extinct. Many years before this, however, ‘Chopper’ Portland had stripped the title of assets, ensuring that his daughters obtained the benefit of Welbeck Abbey and all the treasures within. The descendants of those daughters live at the abbey to this day, which remains a private residence. I was, I knew, extremely privileged to be allowed a glimpse into this closed world.