Fraudsters and Charlatans

by Linda Stratmann

  In June 1907 an informal meeting of the shareholders of G.H. Druce Ltd was advised that the case was now so strong that the onus of proof was no longer on George but on his opponents. George’s descent from Thomas Druce and Elizabeth Crickmer was beyond doubt, they had a witness to the fake burial, and it only remained to prove that Druce and the Duke were the same man. It was now implied that the young future Duke had commenced his imposture by the time he was 16 and had lied about both his name and his age on his marriage to Elizabeth Crickmer. Dazzled by the promise of millions, George and his associates did not think this improbable. Coburn told the excited throng that he had spent five years gathering evidence, and that he honestly believed not only that G.H. Druce was the grandson of the 5th Duke of Portland but also that he would be able to establish the point in court. He was greeted with loud cheering. Only one more thing was required, George told them: more money for the forthcoming trial. He was willing to offer 3,000 £1 shares to existing shareholders at £2 a share. Any not so taken up would go on the market, where he believed they would sell at £4. The meeting closed with the shareholders expressing their unabated confidence in his claim. A series of articles later published as pamphlets in which Mrs Hamilton confirmed the Duke’s imposture was a key part of the campaign to persuade the public to part with their money. One article was by Coburn, but the rest, published under the name of George Hollamby Druce, were written by Kenneth George Henderson, manager of the Idler magazine and grandson of Frances Izard. The question of establishing identity was then an uncertain science. Was Druce the Duke? presented a host of clues to convince the public. There was one admitted photo of the Duke and also one of Druce, and the pamphlet declared that persons who had known the Duke had picked out Druce’s picture as a lifelike picture of the Duke, while business associates of Druce identified a photo of the Duke as Thomas Druce. The photographic evidence would have been more convincing but for the fact that the Duke was cleanshaven, apart from side whiskers, while Druce had a substantial bushy beard and moustache. It was, however, no great leap of imagination to suggest that the eccentric Duke had specially made false whiskers that he wore when masquerading as Druce. Other ‘evidence’ stated that the two men were similar in height, build and manners, and both suffered from a hereditary skin disease. The most dubious section was the one headed ‘Habits of life generally’, which listed, among other things, ‘secrecy and reserve, subterranean wanderings, passion for building and making alterations to buildings, mysterious journeyings, and peculiar style of closed carriage’, all of which may well have been true of the Duke, but there was no evidence at all that these traits were also those of Thomas Druce.11 Some research had been done to identify where the Duke and Thomas Druce were at different periods, in an effort to show that blanks in the history of one could be explained by activity of the other. The Duke’s Army career, which coincided with Druce bringing up a family in Bury St Edmunds, was an inconvenience explained away by suggesting that it was an appointment on paper only.

  By the autumn of 1907 most of the shares in G.H. Druce Ltd had been sold, but by then two more companies had been launched by John Sheridan Sheridan, the Druce-Portland Company in October, with the object of promoting George’s claims, and The New Druce-Portland Company in November, which acquired Sheridan’s commission notes. If George was successful, the holder of each 5s share would receive £16.

  On 25 October 1907 Herbert Druce was summoned before magistrate Mr Plowden of the Marylebone Police Court, and some of the best legal minds in the country appeared in a case where ‘laughter in court’ was virtually the rule of the day. The prosecution was led by the brilliant Llewellyn Atherley-Jones KC MP. His formidable opponents were Horace Avory KC and Sir Charles Matthews KC. The audience in the crowded court included the 6th Duke of Portland. Anna Maria Druce took no part in the case. She was by now an inmate of the London County Asylum.

  Atherley-Jones, emphasising Herbert Druce’s continued refusal to permit the coffin to be opened, made the powerful point that, if it was shown that the funeral had been spurious, there would be an intestacy so far as Thomas Druce was concerned, Herbert Druce would have to surrender all the property he had received under his father’s will and George Druce would then succeed to the whole of Thomas Druce’s property. He made no mention of Charles Edgar Druce, and it may well have been that at that point he had not been advised either of that person’s existence or of his true relationship to George.

  Mr Avory asked for an adjournment of two weeks to prepare his defence, and one of the first things he wanted to examine was Miss Robinson’s diary, which she had given to Edmund Kimber. On 29 October Herbert’s solicitors, Messrs Freshfields, wrote to Kimber to make an appointment to view the diary. Kimber replied that the diary had been returned to Miss Robinson, who had been subpoenaed to produce it in court, and he could not produce the original until she went into the witness box, but would be happy to provide a copy. Freshfields pointed out that the magistrate had said that the defence should be able to inspect the diary, and on 1 November Kimber replied with some disturbing news: the diary had been stolen. Miss Robinson had gone shopping with it in her handbag. While she was looking in a shop window, a man had come up and told her that there was a spider on her shoulder. She was distracted and the man disappeared with her bag. Kimber added that this was the sixth theft of important documents, and alleged that they had been carried out by agents employed by Freshfields’s clients.

  When the hearing resumed on 8 November, Avory boldly read the correspondence in court. Atherley-Jones dissociated himself from the unwise allegation, and Kimber was obliged to apologise. Avory must have known he had already won. He was too experienced not to realise that important documents going mysteriously missing at a critical moment, and wild allegations of theft, showed a very serious weakness in the prosecution’s case. ‘You at the proper time will know what is the proper inference to be drawn from this proceeding,’ he said.12

  Next, 71-year-old Robert Caldwell took the stand, amid considerable excitement. He was a brazen and careless liar, happy to tell any story that suited him (as long as the people he mentioned were dead), unconcerned that some of his claims contradicted those of Anna Maria and utterly oblivious to the fact that many of his statements could be disproved by official records. He told the court that as a young man he had suffered from a disease that had made his nose bulbous and unsightly. Arriving in England in 1855, he consulted Dr Morell Mackenzie, the renowned specialist, and was told that his condition was incurable. Having heard of a gentleman in India who could help him, he travelled there and met British Army Captain Arthur Wellesley Joyce, who not only cured him but gave him the secret of the cure. (A later interview with Joyce’s daughter revealed that Wellesley Joyce was a Limerick man, who had never been to India.) Returning to England, he again called on Morell Mackenzie, who invited him to apply the cure to a poor man, which he did. It was through the specialist that he was introduced to the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey, early in 1864.

  The Duke, claimed Caldwell, had suffered from a similar malady, and so he was invited to commence treatment, which was carried out sometimes at Welbeck Abbey and sometimes at Druce’s bazaar in London, where he was introduced to Druce’s wife and children and stayed as a guest. In 1864, at the Duke’s direction, he had employed a carpenter to construct a coffin. On 27 December he bought about 200lb of sheet lead, which was placed in the coffin, and a funeral took place on the following day, a magnificent affair with fifty mourning coaches filled with old retainers of the Duke from Welbeck. Caldwell had no difficulty in recognising the photographs of the Duke and Druce that were produced in court as being of the same man, adding, to the amusement of the spectators, that he had seen the Duke put on a false beard.

  When Avory began his cross-examination, he revealed that the Druce-Portland affair was not the first scandalous mystery in which Caldwell had been involved. In November 1878 the body of Alexander Turney Stewart, a multimillionaire who had died two years ea
rlier, was stolen from his family crypt in St Mark’s Churchyard, New York. The newspaper-reading public was kept amused for several months as detectives spread their investigations over most of the eastern United States. In 1880 Judge Henry Hilton, the administrator of Stewart’s estate, announced that he had paid a ransom and recovered the remains, which he had had interred at Garden City Cathedral.

  After Hilton’s death in 1899 Caldwell had approached the New York Herald, offering to sell it a story for $10,000 in which he accused Judge Hilton of forging Stewart’s will and stealing the remains himself. He claimed to be a trustee of twenty-seven compromising letters that had passed between Judge Hilton and Cornelia, Stewart’s widow, who had died in 1886.

  Avory suggested that, once the New York Herald had refused to purchase the original story, Caldwell, popularly known as ‘the great American affidavit maker’,13 had taken it away and ‘cooked it and served it up again’14 with embellishments (that is, forged letters), which Caldwell hotly denied.

  Caldwell was obliged to backtrack on his claim to have seen Morell Mackenzie in 1855 (Mackenzie, born in 1837, had opened his clinic in 1862), saying he had been given a recommendation to him in 1857 and carried it about for several years. ‘Waiting for him to grow up, I suppose?’ asked Avory.15

  Avory next tried to discover more about the supposed cure of the poor man.

  ‘What did you do to his nose?’

  ‘Ah, you would like to get at that.’ (A roar of laughter) ‘You would go into the business yourself if you could.’ (More roars of laughter)16

  Caldwell claimed he had cured two rajahs, who had paid him £5,000 each, while the Duke had paid him £10,000, of which half was for putting the lead in the coffin.

  Asked why he had abandoned this remunerative business, Caldwell said that the whole medical faculty were after him for dispensing medicines without being a doctor. ‘You find me a man with a bulbous nose and I’ll cure him in a month. That is a fair offer, but I should want £5,000.’ (Laughter)17

  Caldwell had a poor memory for his own lies. When questioned at the adjourned hearing a week later, the two rajahs had become a German and an Italian, and he denied dispensing medicines at all, saying he had removed hair from the Duke’s nose and applied an ointment. Avory now led Caldwell into even deeper waters, as he asked him about the living arrangements at the Baker Street Bazaar, since Caldwell had claimed that Druce, his wife and five children all slept and dined there, and they were waited on by eight servants.

  ‘If there was no bedroom, kitchen nor dining room at Baker Street Bazaar your story must be untrue?’ asked Avory, who was clearly aware that the bazaar did not incorporate living accommodation. ‘I throw in the servants too. Supposing there were not any, your story about them must also be untrue?’18 He also challenged Caldwell about the date of the funeral, which had actually taken place on 31 December, and his supposed recollections of Welbeck Abbey, the underground rooms, magnificent 100ft ballroom and picture gallery.

  ‘Now just listen to me,’ said Avory, dangerously. ‘Suppose these underground rooms, picture gallery and ballroom were never constructed until 1872, your whole story must be untrue?’19 Under this barrage of questioning Caldwell could do little more than stubbornly insist that he was telling the truth.

  Avory later established that Caldwell had been in service with a Mr Christy of Londonderry between 1863 and 1871, the period when he was supposed to have been such a favourite of the Duke, and Caldwell was reduced to the ridiculous excuse that the Londonderry man had been his brother, with whom he had exchanged names.

  The next star witness was the writer of the missing diary, a lady who stated her name as Miss Robinson, her age as 56 and that she was originally from America, where her father had owned a tobacco plantation. Not one of these statements was true. She said that as a schoolgirl she had been introduced to Druce and had once attended a party at Gadshill, the home of Charles Dickens, where Druce sang songs to entertain the children. In May 1868 she had met Dickens again in Boston, and he had suggested that she should become a secretary for Druce at Welbeck Abbey. Dickens later took her to Welbeck, where she recognised Druce as the man she had met when she was a child. Her duties were to receive packets for the Duke at her lodgings, which were sent to her under the name of ‘Madame Tussaud’ and contained letters for him in the name of Druce, and she also posted letters for him. She ceased to be on friendly terms with the Duke in 1876, and went to New Zealand.

  Avory naturally pressed her as to how much she had received in expenses to come to England, and led to a slip of the tongue that the court found hilarious:

  ‘Have you had anything on account from anybody?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Not overmuch. I cannot tell you how much. I have not kept a diary.’ (Laughter)20

  It was easy for Avory to cast doubts on the veracity of her claims with questions such as ‘Supposing Mr Dickens left America in April and was in Liverpool on 1 May 1868, how can you reconcile that to your story?’, and ‘Are you aware that it has been publicly proclaimed by the Dickens family that Mr Dickens had nothing to do with the Duke?’21 Shown samples of handwriting, the supposed secretary was unable to identity that of the Duke and was obliged to admit that samples of the Duke’s and Druce’s writing had been written by different hands. She was also unable, despite several attempts, to spell ‘Tussaud’. Further questioned about her meetings with Dickens, Miss Robinson was reduced to pleading that her memory was fading, and after being allowed a break of ten minutes returned to the witness box and sat still, her eyes closed, saying she felt unwell. She later denied all knowledge of the mock funeral.

  Mrs Hamilton, another prolific liar, stated that she had been born in Rome, the daughter of Robert Lennox Stuart, a great friend of the 5th Duke of Portland. From the age of about 14 she had known the Duke as Mr Druce and visited him at the Baker Street Bazaar; he used to refer to her affectionately as ‘Madge’. On being shown a photograph of Druce, she at once identified the sitter as the Duke, or ‘Dear old Scott’. The Duke, she said, had always gone around with a false beard in his pocket, confiding ‘Well, of course, you know I am Mr Druce when I put that on.’22 She also claimed that the Duke had wanted to marry her, but her father had refused permission. The Duke had told her about the supposed death of Druce, and she had seen him after the mock funeral. In her earlier affidavits she had said nothing about the Duke having a affliction of the nose, but she now said there had been some ugly lumps on his nose and that she had heard a gentleman she thought was named Cardwell was going to help cure him.

  The remaining witnesses called by the prosecution were a parade of past employees or associates of Druce and the Duke. They did their best to recall events more than forty years in the past, peered at old photographs and gave their impressions of whether either man wore wigs, false whiskers or eyebrows. So many claimed to be privy to the ‘secret’ that the onlookers must have wondered just how it had remained a secret for so long. Henry Marks, the son of Druce’s fishmonger, said he had seen a coffin being made and some rolls of lead, but contradicted Caldwell’s story by saying there had been only two funeral carriages and not fifty. (This was confirmed by the records of the funeral directors.) He recalled that the coffin had been made at the time of his marriage, but his evidence foundered when Avory produced a certificate showing that Marks had been married in 1865. An engineer named James Rudd who had worked at Welbeck from 1872 said that the Duke did not entertain visitors and that he had never heard of Miss Robinson or ‘Madge’ and was not aware of the alleged friendship with Mr Stuart.

  Many of the shareholders of G.H. Druce Ltd were, like the public, convinced that Caldwell was lying, but Coburn said he still thought the man was truthful. The committee met to discuss the matter and decided to send one of their number, a Mr Hill, to Londonderry to make enquiries. When Hill returned he described Caldwell as ‘a damned old fraud’.23 The committee decided to have no more to do with him. Caldwell
called on George and Coburn, asking them for money to go to America to get documentary proof of his statements. They told him he was no longer wanted. Borrowing £10 from the company secretary, he went away.

  On Friday 13 December Atherley-Jones, having closed his case, made an extraordinary announcement: he disowned one of his own witnesses. After the suspicion cast upon Caldwell’s evidence, he said he felt that it would not be proper to rely upon his testimony. The following day the Bow Street Magistrates granted a warrant to arrest Caldwell for perjury, and the police went at once to the home of Charles Crickmer, where Caldwell had been lodging. They were too late. The previous Thursday Caldwell had taken a cab to Waterloo, where he caught the train to Southampton. That afternoon he departed by liner for New York.

  On 16 December Avory opened the case for the defence. He wasted little breath on Caldwell, except to describe him as ‘the most noxious perjurer that ever polluted the fountain of justice’.24 He had few witnesses to call. Alexander Young had died the preceding August, and Dr Shaw was too infirm to travel to court. Perhaps the prosecution had hoped that Miss Bayly would also be unable to testify, but, aged almost 77, she appeared and was able to confirm everything she had said previously. Additionally, she insisted that from 1848 to the date of his death Thomas Druce had never spent a night away from his home except in the company of his family – a statement which, if true, would have rendered his appearance as the Duke impossible.

  Herbert Druce, under enormous public pressure to stop the undignified proceedings, finally relented, and on 21 December The Times announced that consent had been given to open the grave of Thomas Druce. On the same day, Robert Caldwell arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, well aware of what lay in store for him. The news of the warrant had been transmitted by wireless telegram, and he and the other passengers were able to read about it in a daily paper that was published on board ship. Taken into custody by a US Marshal, he was arraigned before a US Commissioner, who appointed doctors to examine him. On being told that Caldwell was ‘desperately ill’,25 the Commissioner fixed bail at $5,000 and Caldwell went home to Staten Island to stay with his daughter.