As he wound his way from the bustling pavements of Fleet Street to the more sedate thoroughfares of Holborn, the Star man reflected on how all the papers were now fighting over the Druce affair. The Daily Mail (which, by its own account, was the first newspaper to have published an interview with Mrs Druce) was currently at loggerheads with the News of the World over the accuracy of plans that the News of the World had published of tunnels that supposedly existed under the Baker Street Bazaar. The Mail claimed that the plans were inaccurate, while the News of the World countered that they were based on documents from the Land Registry. Not to be outdone, the Mail had proceeded to publish samples of the duke’s and T. C. Druce’s handwriting, along with an analysis by the handwriting expert George Inglis, which suggested that there were strange parallels between the two hands. It had also published two portraits of Druce and the duke, along with a commentary by ‘one skilled in the science of the head’, who concluded that ‘not only have the general expression and shape of the head and features been found strikingly similar, but the chin, mouth, and the eyes are seen to be almost identical’.
This was the era of the birth of forensic science, when pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy jostled for space in the criminologist’s armoury, along with new and groundbreaking techniques such as fingerprinting. It was the age when the modern detective was born, whole murder cases turning on the ingenious resolution of puzzles involving such apparently mundane objects as a lock of hair or a missing button. In the Druce affair, everybody – journalists, housewives, butlers and laundry maids – had turned into super sleuths, bent on unravelling the mystery of the Highgate vault. Newspaper editors were deluged with suggestions from members of the public as to what might hold the key to the affair. John Hughes of the Analytical Laboratory in Mark Lane pointed out in a letter to the Editor of the Daily Mail that, even if Mr Druce’s remains had decomposed in the phosphate of lime in which his body had been wrapped, the presence of mineral constituents, commonly known as ‘bone earth’, would determine the fact of previous mortal remains. A member of the Downlay Golf Club pointed out that there were some illustrious precedents for the exhumation of human bodies. After all, the bodies of Edward the Confessor, Edward I and Henry IV had all been disinterred for purposes ranging from the purloining of a royal ring (that of Edward the Confessor) to ascertaining whether – as in the Druce case – there was a body there at all. The latter exhumation was that of Henry IV, whose coffin was opened up in 1832 to establish whether his body had been buried in Canterbury Cathedral or thrown in the Thames, as had been alleged in certain quarters.
When all was said and done, the Star man was of the opinion that the Druce case was actually even better business than the Ripper affair. For while the Ripper had been inconsiderate enough to vanish without trace after his last purported murder in 1888, the Druce case just kept on running and running, turning up new twists and turns in its tortuous path through the courts. First, there had been the granting of the faculty by Chancellor Tristram in March, followed by a series of appeals and every possible attempt to prevent the opening of the grave by Herbert Druce. Then – just when it seemed that Herbert’s resources were exhausted and Mrs Druce was calling in the men with spades to start digging – there was the surprise declaration by the home secretary, a matter of days ago in early December, ordering the London Cemetery Company to desist from permitting the disinterment without his permission, and that of Herbert Druce as the rightful owner of the grave. Quite what or who had persuaded the home secretary to take this belated course of action was, in the Star man’s mind, open to question. Was it not whispered that the present Duke of Portland himself was acting, shadow-like, behind the scenes? Nor had the home secretary’s intervention in the proceedings put an end to the sensational revelations. Oh no, far from it. Even now, rumours were circulating in Fleet Street that were quite the most astounding developments to date in this extraordinary affair. Oh yes, old T. C. Druce had kept a skeleton in his closet, all right. It was just not the skeleton that everybody had expected. Now, there was a new twist to rattle the bones of an old story.
At this juncture, the Star man was interrupted in his thoughts by his abrupt arrival at his destination, the front door of which loomed suddenly through the mist. Featherstone Buildings gave every appearance of being a once genteel, but now faded Georgian terrace in Holborn, soot-faced as most London buildings were in those days.*2 There, sure enough, freshly painted on the door of no. 5, was Mrs Druce’s name beneath the firm of ‘Driver and Driver’ on the ground floor. When he knocked at the door of Mrs Druce’s new office – for such this was – it was opened by an old, shifty-looking man who introduced himself as Mr Beaumont of Driver and Driver.
‘Mrs Druce is not in,’ said the old man. ‘She’s living at a secret address nearby, for fear of being pestered to death. But she will be here presently. Would you care to wait inside?’
‘Much obliged,’ replied the Star man. Once inside, the old man divulged that he was acting as Mrs Druce’s agent for the selling of bonds in the Druce–Portland case.
‘Ah, yes,’ replied the Star man. ‘Mr Plumbly of Queen Victoria Street was her old agent, was he not?’ In fact, as the Star man well knew – like all of Fleet Street – Mrs Druce had, on the Wednesday last, stormed out of the offices of Mr Plumbly in high dudgeon. Quite what the reason was for her falling out with him was unclear. What was only too apparent, on the other hand, was that she was losing many of her old friends as fast as she was making new enemies. In truth, Mrs Druce’s most recent behaviour showed the distinct possibility that her mind was becoming unhinged. Her solicitors, Messrs McArthur & Co., along with her former barrister, Arnold Statham, had both warned her as long ago as August that they would have no choice other than to step down from her case, if she were to float bonds on the market in order to raise funds. Ignoring their advice, she had proceeded to do so, and thus lost their support. At least in Mr Plumbly, however, Mrs Druce had had a vaguely reputable agent to deal with her case. Driver and Driver, a.k.a. Beaumont, however, was another matter. It was immediately apparent to the Star man that he was a distinctly shady type, rather like the other queer folk that Mrs Druce had been seen with recently. She had, for instance, been spotted with a dubious pair of company promoters – the brothers known as Thomas and Henry Marlow, who operated on the fringes of the City underworld. Mrs Druce had also been spotted with the notoriously sharp young journalist John Sheridan, who had been plugging her case incessantly in his column in the newspaper Society. Sheridan in particular would have been known to the Star man as a journalist living on his wits, and on the very edge of legitimacy. He had been given the column on Society because the editor of the paper apparently thought highly of him for divulging certain information about the Dreyfus affair, but the Star man was sceptical as to how he could have laid hands on such information, or whether there was any truth in it. Whatever the Marlow brothers, Sheridan and these other queer folk were up to with Mrs Druce, it was certainly with the purpose of making money out of it.
‘Bonds selling well?’ asked the Star man innocuously.
‘Like hot cakes, sir,’ replied Driver and Driver. ‘Applications coming in from all over the country. Yesterday, I was unable to leave my office because of all the personal callers.’
‘Right,’ replied the Star man, glancing around the deserted office.
‘In fact, I’ve an even better case for yer,’ said Driver and Driver hopefully. ‘It beats Mrs Druce’s into fists. A case of a poor woman from the Potteries, who was swindled out of her husband’s wealth. A case with forgery, suicide, murder and a gas explosion in it!’
The Star man was about to reply, when Mrs Druce entered the room with a female companion. She was breathless with excitement.
‘I don’t care that for McArthur’s,’ she cried, snapping her fingers. ‘I have retained a great firm of parliamentary lawyers – people, mind you, that want £10,000 put down on the table before they will move, you can s
ay that!’
The Star man ventured to ask how much Mrs Druce intended to raise by the bonds. ‘I am Mrs Druce of Baker Street,’ the lady replied hotly. ‘And I am going to take up my proper position. I am going to ride in a carriage. I don’t care for their Duchess of Portland. I’ll let them see. I’ve got three witnesses now who saw the lead put into the coffin!’ Hardly pausing to take breath, she went on: ‘Lord Salisbury has promised to take £500 of my bonds, and everybody at his club is on my side – the Prince of Wales is, too!’
The Star man was, to say the least, somewhat taken aback by the assertion. So too were Driver and Driver, and Mrs Druce’s lady companion, who tried to calm the overexcited lady as she swept out the office in pursuit of Lord Salisbury at his Club. When she had departed, the old man opined that Lord Salisbury’s investment in the Druce bonds should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. He would believe it himself, when he ‘saw the cheque’. But people were certainly queuing for the bonds; why, only the other day, an earl had sat in the very chair upon which the Star man was perched.
The Star man nodded sagely as he bade his goodbyes. Poor Mrs Druce, as everybody knew, had been overtaken by events. Her bonds would not be exchanging hands any time soon for notes, gold, silver or even… dare one whisper it… copper. The story had left her behind and, as had become character-istic of this affair, the newest events were the most sensational yet. Oh yes, the Druce case was quite the best ‘rummy go’ in town…
*1 The Elementary Education Act of 1870, commonly known as Forster’s Education Act after the Liberal MP, William Forster, who drafted it, set forth the principle of universal elementary education for children aged five to twelve years old through the establishment of so-called Board Schools.
*2 Featherstone Buildings in Holborn was a charming Georgian terrace that was hit by a 250kg bomb in the London Blitz and completely destroyed. It now houses the rather less lovely Mid City Place.
Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a mad little old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows for certain, because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents: principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender.
CHARLES DICKENS
Bleak House
On the morning of Tuesday, 3 December 1901, a queue of expectant members of the public wound its way along the pavement before the cast-iron gates of the new Law Courts on the Strand. It was a damp, foggy morning, mild for the season, as had been the whole winter so far. As usual for the time of year in London, a damp drizzle saturated with soot and the carburetted hydrogen of coal smoke smothered the streets in a blanket as suffocating as any to be found on the Essex Marshes. The weak sunlight did little to mellow the hard edges of Portland stone that defined the outline of the new civil court buildings, which rose with Gothic foreboding on the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand.
The buildings were an extravagant affair, flourishing with turrets, pinnacles and pilasters. Her late Majesty the Queen herself – for Victoria had died in March that year – had opened the courtrooms nineteen years earlier, in December 1882. Then, cheering crowds had thronged the pavements of the Strand, and the great entrance hall – an imposing hundred and forty feet high – had been filled to the brim with a bobbing mass of big wigs and scarlet robes. The queen had ascended the daïs and made a speech expressing her satisfaction at the admirable work performed by the architect of the works, the late Mr George Edmund Street, Esq. She had expressed her hope that ‘the uniting together of the various branches of judicature in this Supreme Court will conduce to the more efficient and speedy discharge of justice to my subjects, upon which the chief security of the rights to my Crown, and the liberties of my people, depend’.
Peering into the semi-darkness of the same entrance hall in December 1901, an observer might question whether Her Late Majesty’s hopes had been fulfilled. The courtrooms had a peculiar odour unique to them: a Law Court Particular, different from the London Particular that swirled outside the gates. For one contemporary visitor, it was a sort of ‘amalgamated effluvium’ produced by the ‘reek of stuff gowns, dog-eared papers, mouldy parchment, horse-hair wigs, imperfectly washed spectators, police constables and witnesses’, with a bracing whiff of ammonia from the dung and mud on the pavement in the Strand outside. To this must be added, on days when a sensational trial such as this one was in progress, the warm scent of Pears soap and the heady waft of Houbigant perfume emitted by fashionable ladies, who flocked like brightly coloured birds to listen, with breathless attention, to the scandalous unfolding of a salacious case.
Victorian ladies were fascinated by court cases, particularly those that centred on women, whether the trial involved a murder, divorce or a dispute over a title. The Pall Mall Gazette noted this grisly interest, mockingly observing of the female spectators at the trial of a murderess that: ‘Hour after hour did these ghoulish women, armed with opera glasses, sherry flasks and sandwich boxes, hang with eager curiosity upon every movement and look of their miserable sister.’
The reason for the large crowd that assembled before the Law Courts on this particular day was that it was the start of the long-anticipated hearing of Druce v. Young. This was the case to set aside the probate on T. C. Druce’s will that had been started by Anna Maria Druce in the civil court, back in 1898. After three long years of protracted legal wrangling, the case was finally up for trial. Anna Maria’s contention was that, as T. C. Druce had not died in 1864, the probate granted on his will was invalid, and should therefore be discounted. The principal defendant in the case was the accountant Alexander Young, an old friend of T. C. Druce and one of the executors of his will. Anna Maria’s application to the church court before Chancellor Tristram for a faculty to open the Druce vault had stalled, halted by the home secretary as long ago as December 1898, as the Star man had observed. Anna Maria had hoped that, by issuing these alternative civil proceedings, she might secure the exhumation by a different route.
As the crowds milled round the court building, hoping for entry, the gates were guarded by a burly policeman with truncheon at the ready. Members of the public lucky enough to gain entry would have been confronted with a pale-faced attendant, lurking in a forest of coats and umbrellas. They would then have followed the passageway that led to the courts of the probate, divorce and admiralty division, leading to a winding staircase that ended with a long, thin corridor linking the warren of panelled courtrooms. Here they would have been confronted by a tide of human flotsam and jetsam: grey-wigged and black-gowned barristers flapping and bobbing amidst a wave of copy clerks, process-servers, solicitors, wealthy merchants and shabby litigants in person. The doors of the courtroom, thrown open at 10 a.m., would have revealed a dark and ill-ventilated, panelled room where seats were arranged, amphitheatre-like, in ascending tiers, from the carved rows in front dedicated to the newly renamed King’s Counsel, to the narrow benches for the clerks at the back.
On this first day of the hearing of Druce v. Young, an impressive array of bigwigs and stuffed gowns assembled in the rows of seats on the defendant’s side of the courtroom. They were attended by bustling clerks carrying bundles of papers tied with red tape and green ferret, the shiny string used to tie bundles of legal documents. Behind the bearded King’s Counsel, junior barristers whispered to each other and passed notes. Behind them sat the sleek, well-groomed lawyers of the firm of Freshfields, presided over by the venerable senior partner, Edwin Freshfield. One of the canniest solicitors of his generation, Edwin had taken over the helm of the family firm of solicitors, and was personally in charge of the Druce case on behalf of Alexander Young and Herbert Druce. With his silvery locks and elegant morning dress, a huge pelisse lined with the costliest Russian sable thrown over his shoulders, he called to
mind a rich Venetian merchant in an old Renaissance portrait, more than a City lawyer. Beside the men-at-law sat Herbert Druce, pale and drawn. As the eldest son of T. C. Druce he was not an actual defendant in the proceedings, although in practice he stood accused of lying because he had certified his father’s death. He had the fearful look on his face of someone who dreaded the revelation of some new and sordid secret about his family’s past.
In all this hurly burly, one part of the packed courtroom appeared strangely deserted. This was the row of pews on the plaintiff’s side of the court. They were completely empty, save for the figure of one diminutive lady clutching a pile of yellowing papers. It was now getting on for four years since Anna Maria Druce had first brought her application for the Druce vault to be opened before Chancellor Tristram in the London Consistory Court. But she had aged at least two decades in that time. Previously energetic and forceful, she now seemed old and ill. She had been hounded from pillar to post, application after application refused or appealed. After her request for a faculty to open the Druce vault had been called to a halt, she had been forced to pursue the case in the civil court. Now, with the full civil case finally coming up for hearing, she had lost both her barrister and solicitor. Her bond issue had failed, and she was entirely without funds. Dr Forbes Winslow, having testified so convincingly before Chancellor Tristram that the photograph of T. C. Druce shown to the court was that of a man in his asylum known as Dr Harmer, had hastily revised his view, after the wife of someone alleged to be the real Dr Harmer had announced herself to the newspapers, loudly protesting his separate identity. Mrs Druce’s key witness, Mrs Hamilton – the mysterious old lady who had testified to seeing T. C. Druce after his supposed death, and who had made such an impression on the president of the probate division, Sir Francis Jeune – had unaccountably withdrawn from the case. The truth of the matter, although nobody knew it at the time, was that Mrs Hamilton had backed out of the case, owing to pressure exerted by the 6th Duke of Portland’s private investigators.
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 8