The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  The obsession of the nineteenth century with the figure of the ‘governess’ matched its preoccupation with that of the ‘gentleman’. In fact, virtually every self-respecting Victorian novel had to have one in its cast of female characters, usually of the scheming sort. This was another reflection of the intense social anxieties of the age, of which the ‘governess’, like the ‘gentleman’, became a potent symbol. For whether she was a distressed member of the gentry or social upstart, the governess also reflected a new social fluidity, at once both dynamic and destabilizing. She was a reminder that, in this brave new world, one could go up – but also down – the social ladder with startling rapidity. ‘Reader, I married him,’ Jane Eyre triumphantly asserts – words that would have filled the average Victorian mistress of the house with dread for the safety of her son.

  Whether Annie May, the widow of T. C. Druce, had any such misgivings when Anna Maria arrived as a governess in the Druce household in the early 1870s, has not been recorded. By then, old T. C. Druce had been dead about ten years. After her husband’s death, Annie May had moved from the palatial house in Mill Hill to a rather more discreetly grand address at 43 Belsize Square. There she was slightly more socially adventurous than in the days when her reclusive husband was alive, venturing forth in a carriage and pair and regularly spending the season in Brighton. Of the six Druce children, only three remained in the house – Florence, Walter and Bertha. Anna Maria was taken on as a governess to the fifteen-year-old Bertha.

  With her pale complexion, black hair and forceful personality, the new governess was more than a match for the rather insipid Walter, four years her junior. A passionate romance followed, ending in the governess’ dismissal. Walter followed Anna Maria until a succession of pleadings and reproaches by a family friend persuaded him to leave her and return to the family in Belsize Square. Anna Maria, however, held the final and fatal trump card. Late in 1872, the former governess paid a visit to the former mistress in Belsize Park. What was discussed at that meeting, neither the elder Mrs Druce nor Anna Maria ever divulged. What is known, however, is that a marriage was arranged swiftly afterwards. On 9 December 1872, in the wettest year on record in England, Anna Maria Butler married Walter Thomas Druce at the parish church of St John in Upper Holloway, amidst strong winds and heavy rain. She was twenty-four years old; he was just twenty, and therefore under the then legal age of majority. Eight months later, on 7 August 1873, their eldest daughter, Florence, was born.*4

  Walter Druce did not know much about old T. C. Druce – he was, after all, a mere twelve years old when his father died – but he did keep saying that there was a certain mystery about him, some family secret that he did not fully comprehend. After all, why had T. C. Druce waited so long before he finally married Annie May?

  Given the unpromising start to their relationship, the marriage between the high-spirited ex-governess and weak-willed draper’s son was never going to be easy. For a while, the couple made an attempt at farming in Staffordshire. Florence was followed by four other children: Marguerite in 1874, Sidney George in 1876, Charles Walter in 1877, and finally Nina Bertha in 1878. The couple lived extravagantly, eating into the capital left to Walter in his father’s will. But by 1880 Walter’s health was deteriorating, and after a number of business failures, the family returned to London. In November of that year, Walter died from typhoid. He was buried in the family vault at Highgate, beside the coffin of his father.

  Walter’s will – proved at below £1500 – was hardly sufficient to sustain a family. Worse, relations with old Mrs Druce – never the most cordial – broke down in a series of bitter arguments, reaching a peak when Anna Maria quarrelled with the family over the administration of T. C. Druce’s will. In the end, the money ran out, and Anna Maria and her young family were left with no choice but to enter that most bleak of Victorian institutions: the workhouse.

  In February 1884 – a month of coldly bright dawns and colder drizzle – Anna Maria entered the forbidding gates of the institution on Northumberland Street officially known as the ‘Marylebone Workhouse’, and unofficially as ‘the Spike’. At the time when Anna Maria arrived, the Marylebone Workhouse had moved on from earlier in the century, when its most hated and feared Master, Richard Ryan, was dismissed for beating female inmates senseless. Nevertheless, it remained the largest workhouse in London and a grim and chilling place.

  The procedure for the reception and incarceration of workhouse inmates barely varied from institution to institution. On arrival at the workhouse gates, Anna Maria would have been placed in a reception room, disrobed and thoroughly scrubbed to get rid of germs. Her clothes would have been taken away and ticketed, and then she herself would have been dressed in the standard female workhouse uniform – a gown in a print known as the ‘workhouse stripe’, covered by a white shift, bonnet and shawl. She and the children would have been separated. Meals were served in a hall at wooden trestle tables, the men and women separated in long, silent rows that permitted no conversation. Admonitions from the scriptures frowned down in scarlet-lettered anger from the blue walls in the gaslight, with such exhortations to reflection and self-improvement as, ‘GOD IS GOOD’, ‘GOD IS TRUE’ or, perhaps the most open to question in the eyes of the inmates, ‘GOD IS MERCIFUL’. Regularly on the hour came the clang of the workhouse bell, tolling out the course of the day’s activities, from rising and the daily roll-call at 6 a.m. to lights out at 8 p.m., when the inmates would gossip and whisper tales in their communal dormitories of their lives ‘outside’, in the gaps between the heavy footfalls of the patrolling night attendant.

  If Anna Maria’s lot was wretched at this point in time, so too was that of the rest of Walter’s family. Florence, the eldest daughter, was put out to work as a general servant with a family in Willesden. Sidney and Walter, the two sons, were apprenticed as sailors; Walter stayed on the training ship HMS Exmouth, while Sidney decamped for Australia in 1895. Marguerite, an invalid, stayed with Anna Maria, while Nina, the youngest, was sent to board at the Field Lane Industrial School in Hampstead, a missionary establishment where well-meaning evangelicals attempted to instil Christian virtues in the unruly street urchins committed to their care. Not long after his transfer to HMS Exmouth, Anna Maria’s younger son, Walter, fell sick and was moved to the Workhouse Infirmary at Rackham Street in Ladbroke Grove. He died there in 1891, at the age of fourteen. Despite Anna Maria’s pleading, the recalcitrant old Mrs Druce could not be persuaded to give her grandson a decent burial. The Druce vault at Highgate remained firmly shut, and the child was buried in a pauper’s grave. Anna Maria never forgave the slight: ‘Yes, yes, it’s a vile conspiracy against me and mine!’ she would cry to the assembled pressmen, shaking her fist and swearing to have the dead child Walter reinterred in his rightful place. ‘That will be exhumation number two, but, if necessary, I will exhume and exhume until I get my rights!’

  By August 1898, however, dark memories of the workhouse seemed to belong to the distant past. Anna Maria was now the toast of London, indeed the entire country. Journalists fought over her for exclusive interviews; she was on the guest list of every fashionable hostess in town. Old Mrs Druce was finally out of the way, dead and buried in 1893. Herbert Druce had been exposed as illegitimate in the pages of the popular press, every man on the street aware of the fact that the old man of Baker Street had produced several offspring before he finally made an honest woman of his mistress. Most importantly, as far as Anna Maria was concerned, Herbert was now considered a bounder, who refused to allow a simple step to be taken – the inspection of his father’s grave – that would speedily clear up the whole affair.

  Recently, Mrs Druce had even been approached by City financiers proposing to issue bonds to the public to fund her case. It was a most attractive proposition, given that Mrs Marler, the landlady of her lodgings in Tavistock Square, was at that moment hammering on her door for nine months’ unpaid rent. Mrs Marler had, unsportingly, refused to accept a future invitation to Welbeck Abbey in
lieu of ready money. Mrs Druce’s lawyers had shaken their heads at the idea of auctioning shares in the outcome of her case, warning that if she did proceed with such a plan, they would be unable to continue to represent her interests. But Anna Maria did not care for the warnings of old men. Her opponents were evidently alarmed, and that was what mattered. In the past few months she had been approached by the legal representatives of both the Duke of Portland and Herbert Druce, with offers to settle the case for upwards of £60,000, which she had refused.*5 Six judges had already decided in favour of her application to open the grave, and three courts had ruled for her.†6 How could she fail to win?

  Mrs Druce could not, of course, possibly have guessed at the ominous wind that was even then gathering across the sea, and which was about to swallow her into a whirlpool from which there was little, if any, hope of escape.

  *1 The fact that the duke’s representatives had taken such a step was not known until decades after the events.

  †2 No birth or baptismal certificate for T. C. Druce has ever been found.

  *3 The law terms were (and still are) Hilary, Easter, Trinity and Michael-mas. The long vacation (when London was the most empty) extended from 10 August to 24 October.

  *4 Florence Druce’s birth date was usually given in census and other official documents as ‘about 1874’, instead of the actual year of 1873, and her age was generally stated as a year younger than she really was. This disguised the fact that she was born only eight months after the marriage of her parents, as shown on her birth certificate.

  *5 Enormous sums for the day, worth over £6 million in today’s money.

  †6 It is a remarkable fact that Mrs Druce, making allegations which on the face of them appeared to be highly improbable, managed to convince every judge before whom she found herself that she had a prima facie case.

  If a scandal of more than usual piquancy occurs in high life, or a crime of extraordinary horror figures among our causes célèbres, the sensationist is immediately at hand to weave the incident into a thrilling tale.

  Quarterly Review, 1863

  The man from the Star shuddered and retreated further into his muffled greatcoat against the damp December chill that permeated the crooked streets. Even though it was early morning, a smoky veil already hung over the house tops, a dense and heavy yellow fog that condensed in oily drops on the windowpanes. The Star man recalled with grim amusement how, like Esther in Bleak House, on setting foot for the first time in London, he had asked the driver of the stagecoach whether there ‘was a great fire anywhere?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ had come the sniggering reply. ‘This is a London Particular. A fog, yer know.’ London fogs – also known as ‘pea soupers’ – were made up of a thick greenish-yellow or black smog that hung like an almost permanent veil over the City skyline. They were caused by a combination of soot and sulphur dioxide released from the burning of millions of coal fires, together with the mist and fog of the Thames Valley. The Star man smiled to himself at the recollection of his youthful innocence. His confusion over the London fog had occurred when he was but a youngster, newly arrived in the capital from a sleepy village. Now of course, although still young in years, he was a wise old hack in terms of worldly experience, expertly steering his course through the winding alleys with no heed to the thick swirls of the pea souper that wreathed around him.

  Even at this early hour, Fleet Street was abuzz with activity. Indeed, in those days, it was a street that never slept. All around the Star man, crammed into every available building, were newspaper offices: the Daily News in Bouverie Street, the Daily Telegraph in Peterborough Court, his own newspaper, the Star, in Stonecutter Street. Towering over Shoe Lane was the stately pile of the Standard, while the Morning Advertiser confronted the Daily Chronicle on opposite sides of the thoroughfare. Further away, aloof from the rabble, The Times stood in gloomy isolation under the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, like a mournful reminder of a bygone age: the only morning newspaper whose offices were not within the immediate precincts of Fleet Street. The entire area was dotted with newspaper offices, and it was impossible to turn left or right without being confronted by a publication of some kind: religious, comic, sporting and society newspapers; papers of every conceivable political persuasion and platform – conservative, radical, liberal, historical or just plain heretical. Every garret, cellar and attic room, it seemed, was occupied by some pale-faced correspondent, busily wiring telegrams to his editor in Chicago or Cork in the dim light of a gas jet, racing against the deadline of the approaching dawn.

  The roots of the Fleet Street frenzy of the 1890s dated back earlier than the Star man could remember. In all probability it had started with the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers in 1855, the doing away with the old ‘tax on knowledge’. For from that moment onwards, the established sixpenny papers – led by the venerable Times – had been subject to fierce assault from a battery of new publications, costing a mere penny or even halfpenny apiece. The Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, Pall Mall Gazette, Sun, Daily Chronicle, Star – such papers represented but a handful of the quarrelling upstarts that had sprung up over the past twenty years, and which now jostled for space on Fleet Street. These were a new generation of newspapers for a new generation of readers: young folk, the first in their families to read and write, brought to the gates of learning in the Board Schools established by Forster’s Education Act.*1 This new and eager readership of clerks, tea boys and housemaids – often clubbing together to share a battered penny paper between them – preferred thrills to politics, inclining more towards devouring the gory details of the Whitechapel Murders than mulling over the knotty issues of Irish Home Rule. Savvy, sensation-seeking and worldly wise, they sought a savvy, sensational, worldly wise kind of journalism; and the new newspapers provided them with the diet for which they hungered. In America, the pages of the ‘yellow press’ owned by media magnates such as Randolph Hearst were full of stories of crimes, adventures and family sagas. They also employed new reporting techniques, such as interviews and investigative journalism. Inspired by this, the British newspapers in the 1880s followed suit. From the popular freaks of the penny fairs – bearded ladies, dwarves and Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man – to the lurid waxworks of the newly established Madame Tussaud’s with its notorious Chamber of Horrors, the Victorians delighted in everything that was grim, ghoulish and grotesque. Their newspapers did not disappoint them.

  Of course, as the Star man himself would have acknowledged, had he put his mind to it as he padded down the street, it had all started off very admirably indeed, with a laudable and messianic zeal to educate and entertain the masses. As the great founder of the Star himself, the Irish Nationalist MP Thomas Power O’Connor, had declared on the front page of the newspaper’s first issue: ‘The rich, the privileged, the prosperous need no guardian or advocate; the poor, the weak, the beaten require the work and word of every humane man and woman to stand between them and the world.’

  One of the leaders of the new journalism had been the great W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Convinced of journalism’s mission to educate and entertain, this visionary Nonconformist from the north-east had shocked the late Victorian public in 1885 with his series of articles, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, a controversial exposé of child prostitution. A tour de force of early investigative journalism, ‘The Maiden Tribute’ revealed, in all-too-graphic detail, the luring and abduction of underage girls to London brothels. The ‘infernal narrative’, in Stead’s own words, shocked its middle-class readership with a hellish vision of a criminal underworld, unscrupulous procuresses, drugs and padded chambers where well-heeled paedophiles could delight in the torture and cries of an ‘immature child’. The serialized newspaper report was a sensation: in London, crowds laid siege to the Pall Mall Gazette offices for reprints. With attention-grabbing headlines such as ‘The Violation of Virgins’ and ‘Strapping Girls Down’, ‘The Maiden Tribute’ threw London into a state of panic. It also led to
the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen, thus fulfilling the New Journalism’s sense of moral purpose. Stead’s zealotry acquired him as many enemies as it did friends, and he would later find himself jailed for using illegal methods in the course of his investigation. Undeterred, he spent his time ‘inside’ writing an essay on ‘Government by Journalism’.

  Heady with idealism and reforming zeal as those early years of the New Journalism had been, the Star man knew all too well that things had changed since then. An ominous new publication had appeared on Fleet Street a couple of years back in 1896, undercutting the penny papers with even more sensational headlines for the ludicrous price of a halfpenny. This was the vastly popular Daily Mail, founded by the audacious Mr Harmsworth. The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had described the latest offspring of Fleet Street with the greatest contempt, as ‘written by office boys for office boys’. But the paper of the office boys was now selling better than the journals of the establishment. As more and more newspapers entered the fray, the original mission to educate the masses gave way to a grubby circulation war, where everybody scrambled to print the latest, headline-grabbing shocker.

  In this respect, the Star was no better than other newspapers, as the Star man well knew. The paper had been involved in many a cut-throat battle to drive up circulation figures, not least over the Whitechapel Murders or ‘Jack the Ripper’ case, ten years back. Indeed, the Star owed Jack the Ripper a favour. As the drama of the murder spree that was unfolding in London’s East End in 1888 was reported in ghastly detail over successive editions of the then newly established paper, its circulation went up to 232,000 – a record – as the public became convinced there was a dangerous serial killer on the loose. There were even murmurs in Fleet Street that several of the letters taunting the police, supposedly sent by the killer, were in fact hoaxes written by Star men to ‘keep up the business’. Not that our Star man knew anything – officially – about such hoaxes, of course. What he did know was that the Ripper was the best ‘rummy go’ of the 1880s, and that the Druce case showed very promising signs of being the new runner of the 1890s.