The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  *

  In December 1864, Fanny received the following letter from Mr Edney, a manager at the Baker Street Bazaar:

  68 Baker Street,

  December 30th, 1864

  MY DEAR MADAM –

  Your poor dear departed father will be buried at Highgate Cemetery tomorrow, Saturday, at half-past one o’clock.Will you, if convenient, call here one day next week, and oblige.

  Yours faithfully,

  W. EDNEY

  Fanny had already been informed that her father was ill, with ulcerated legs. She had not been told the truth that it was in fact anal ulcers from which T. C. Druce was suffering, presumably to protect the delicacy of Victorian sensibilities. Fanny tried to come to pay respects to her father’s body at Holcombe House, but found that she was locked out of the room in which it was laid out, Nurse Bayly holding the keys. On the morning of the funeral she and her brother Charles Crickmer walked to Highgate Cemetery, no carriage in the funeral cortège having been provided for them. Charles Crickmer was present at the official reading of his father’s will, at which it was revealed that the wife and children of the second marriage were the sole beneficiaries of T. C. Druce’s estate. The only one of the Crickmer children to receive a legacy was the second son, George, who had emigrated to Australia, and who was bequeathed £1000 in the codicil to the will. Here was another mystery. Why had Charles Crickmer, the eldest surviving son of the first marriage, been passed over in favour of his younger brother George?

  At last, however, Elizabeth Crickmer’s children could breathe a sigh of relief. They had finally been freed from the shadow of their tyrannical father. There was also a strange irony in the fact that both Elizabeth and Thomas Charles Druce could be said to have died false deaths. While the question of whether or not T. C. Druce faked his own death was to be debated in subsequent years, there is no doubt that he did fake the death of his first wife. But despite all Thomas Druce’s efforts to bury his first wife and family, he failed to do so. And the shadow of the Crickmer-Druces – the outcast, wronged branch of the Druce clan – was to haunt their favoured cousins for many decades to come. Even though vengeance did not come until some forty years later, and from a most unexpected quarter.

  The new century, in fact, had many surprises in store.

  ‘Ah, you would not believe me; the world never believes — let it pass — ’tis no matter. The secret of my birth—’

  ‘The secret of your birth! Do you mean to say—’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ says the young man, very solemn, ‘I will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke!’

  MARK TWAIN

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  The two men stood silently on deck in the wind, gazing intently ahead as the shadowy outline of the London docks took on concrete form, looming ever closer as the steamship ploughed towards the approaching shoreline. Each was wrapped in his own thoughts. The first man thickset and swarthy, with close-set eyes, darkly tanned face, and a rough handlebar moustache; the second lighter in build, more refined-looking, with heavy eyes and pursed lips, sporting merely a trace of hair on the upper lip.

  The land drew nearer, as RMS Oroya forged ahead. Soon, bustling figures could be discerned on the wharfs and jetties, accompanied by the boom of ships about to leave and the scream of whirling gulls. The stocky, swarthy man gave a sharp intake of breath, his knuckles clutching the ship’s railing so tightly that their sun-parched skin seemed on the verge of tearing. For George Hollamby, this day – 6 May 1903 – was one for which he had waited so long that he could hardly believe it was actually happening. At last, for the first time – at forty-eight years old – he was seeing the land of his fore-fathers, the distant country that had shadowed him throughout his life like a riddle, a question that haunted his past and hung tantalizingly over his future. It held the key to the destiny of which he had so often dreamed, and which had, for so long, eluded his grasp. For George Hollamby had come to claim his inheritance, as the grandson and rightful heir of Thomas Charles Druce. The rightful heir of the 5th Duke of Portland.

  Not that George Hollamby had found it easy to adopt his new, ducal mantle. He still flinched when his friends called him ‘Your Grace’. The son of George Druce, the ‘sailor boy’ – for whom Elizabeth Crickmer used to save newspapers for his return from the high seas – George Hollamby had been born in a mining camp at Campbell’s Creek, Victoria, at the height of the Australian gold rush of the 1850s. It was here that his father, George, had arrived in 1851, after the death of his mother, Elizabeth Crickmer. At Campbell’s Creek, George had met the daughter of another settler family – Mary Hollamby – and set up home as a farmer and prospector.

  The Australian gold rush had gripped the country in a wild frenzy during the second half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the earlier Californian gold rush. It had been started by an Australian pioneer of the American diggings. Edward Hammond Hargraves, an unsuccessful prospector in the American rush for gold, had spotted the uncanny resemblance between the landscape of California and his Australian homeland. Returning to Australia with the burning conviction that there was gold to be had in New South Wales, he made the long trek from Sydney across the Blue Mountains, to a tributary of the Macquarie river. There – in his own words – he felt himself ‘surrounded by gold’. Sure enough, effluvial gold was discovered at Ophir, the spot at which he came to a halt. His words, on raising the first nugget to the sun, proved an illuminating insight into the hopes and dreams of the average Australian settler of the time. ‘This,’ he exclaimed to his puzzled guide, ‘is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put into a glass-case, and sent to the British Museum!’

  Hargraves’ discovery of gold in the mountains of New South Wales in 1851 launched a deluge of fortune seekers onto the Australian continent, such as had never been seen before. Overnight, it seemed that the image of Australia was transformed. Previously a grim convict colony, it now became a land of opportunity, where all those who were outcast, down-at-heel or purely adventurous, could try their luck. Inevitably, the days when the tin-sieve-shaking prospector, with his rough tent and billycan, could stumble on a fortune, were short-lived. In a matter of a decade, the big mining companies had taken over. Some made it rich, some did not. George Druce was one of the many unlucky ones, scraping together a living on a farm in the shadow of the gold fields of Mount Alexander. George Hollamby’s earliest memories were of growing up in a makeshift slab hut, a child of the diggings. All this, however, was soon to change irrevocably.

  In 1865 – when young George Hollamby was about ten years old – his father received a letter from a man called Alexander Young, acting executor to the late Thomas Charles Druce of the Baker Street Bazaar. The letter stated that George Druce had received a legacy of £1000. George Hollamby’s father set off immediately for Melbourne, a distance of some two hundred miles from Campbell’s Creek. When he returned, to the great excitement of all at his unexpected enrichment, he made the momentous decision to leave the diggings and purchase a business in Melbourne.

  For those brought up in towns and cities, it would be impossible to imagine the delight and wonder of the child George Hollamby when he saw the bustling city of Melbourne for the first time. As he was later to recall, even a two-storey house was amazing, and the noise and clatter of the city was terrifying to a child who had been brought up in the silence of the bush. Gradually, however, he became accustomed to town life. His father had bought a market-gardening business, which was prosperous at first: in the early days, cauliflowers would bring as much as 12 shillings a dozen. But hard times were to follow, and with the failure of his father’s business, George Hollamby found himself apprenticed to a fireproof-safe maker in the city. It was a miserable experience. Subjected to a terrifying and painful ‘tarring’ by his fellow-apprentices – that is, being doused in hot tar and rolled in feathers – George soon made
his escape. Finding nothing much else coming his way, he made up his mind to head for adventure – out in the Australian bush.

  When George Hollamby announced his intention to his parents, his father presented him with a new billycan, a loaf of bread, some tea, sugar and 3 shillings, saying: ‘There you are now, you can be off.’ He then added, as an afterthought, ‘And you can take the dog with you.’ His mother fetched a blanket and rolled it round a change of clothing. ‘That’, George Hollamby was later to remark, ‘was the start in life she gave me.’ And so, the following morning, whistling as heartily as any seasoned swagman with his dog at his heel and his billycan over his shoulder, George Hollamby sallied forth into the dark and inscrutable forests of Victoria.

  George Hollamby spent the next three years wandering in the Australian bush. He moved from makeshift camp to camp, picking up whatever work he could – gold prospecting, clearing bush, working as a casual labourer on remote farms. Finally, he settled as a ‘selector’ – or pioneer farmer – clearing scrubland in a corner of the remote area known as Gippsland. This was the wild, dark forest known as the Tableland of Neerim, populated by some of the tallest trees on earth: the mountain ashes of Victoria, many of them more than 300 feet high, through whose tangled canopy the sun shone with a sickly, watery green light. There were no natives in this district, but their former presence was revealed by the exotic names of the locations and the ancient stone axes and other implements that littered the forest floor. George Hollamby’s home was a small hut, to make space for which he himself had made a clearing in the thick scrub. The mail came by packhorse once a week, and his nearest neighbour – another selector – was a mile away. They would meet on Sundays and at night, when one would pay the other a visit, striking out across the beaten track with gun on shoulder. Their only entertainment was what they made themselves – poems, bush ballads and the occasional moonlit possum or wallaby hunt.

  For many years, George Hollamby remained living in his slab hut by the billabong, one of the countless lone swagmen of the Australian bush. However, the time arrived when the urge came upon him to leave the wandering life and settle down. Thus, in his thirties, he found a job as a carpenter in Melbourne, married a local girl and set up home with his new family. Settled in the northern suburb of Brighton, a soon-to-be – but not as yet – fashionable beach haunt of the smart Melbourne set, he devoted the daytime to his humble trade. By night, he pored over charts and equations, immersing himself in his abiding passion: the construction of machines – specifically a contraption that would resolve the problem of perpetual motion. And so, perhaps, he might have remained – a somewhat eccentric former swagman in the heart of a bustling New World city – had not something extraordinary happened.

  It was late 1898. George Hollamby was sitting at home, poring over one of his mechanical contraptions as usual, when his younger brother Charles burst into the room.

  ‘George, you are the Duke of Portland!’ he cried, in a fever of excitement. He proceeded to show his astonished elder brother an article in a Melbourne newspaper. The piece was about an English widow called Anna Maria Druce, who was then claiming in the London courts that her father-in-law, the Baker Street businessman Thomas Charles Druce, had lived a double life, and had, in reality, been the 5th Duke of Portland. On this basis, Anna Maria claimed that her deceased husband Walter, as T. C. Druce’s first legitimate son, had been the rightful heir to the vast Portland estate, which had therefore devolved on their son, Sidney, upon her husband’s death. What the article did not mention – but which George Hollamby and his brother well knew – was that Anna Maria’s husband was not the first legitimate son of T. C. Druce. Druce had, as we know, been married before, and there had been several sons from his first marriage, including George Hollamby’s father, George Druce, who was now dead. As George Hollamby gazed at the glaring newspaper headline, he realized that here, at last, was the key to the mystery of his grandfather’s life – the mystery to which his father George had referred so many times, but which had constantly eluded his comprehension. His grandfather was not Thomas Charles Druce, but the 5th Duke of Portland.

  From then on, George Hollamby was a man with a mission. He was going to redress the double wrong done to the Crickmer-Druce family – the dual inheritance of which they had been deprived. True, his family had been denied a decent share in the fortune of T. C. Druce, the businessman. But what did that matter if George Hollamby could lay a claim to the title of Duke of Portland?

  When it came to raising funds for his cause in Melbourne business circles, George Hollamby found a receptive audience. New Worlders claiming Old World titles were all the rage at the turn of the century. There had been, for a start, the celebrated Tichborne case, in which a butcher from Wagga Wagga had laid claim to the ancient Tichborne baronetcy, and had been accepted by the missing heir’s own mother. The theme had also surfaced in America, where it had been treated extensively by the satirical writer Mark Twain. Twain’s classic 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn featured two otherwise unnamed con artists calling themselves ‘the Duke’ and ‘the King’, who became entangled in many of Huck’s adventures. The middle-aged ‘Duke’ claimed to be the missing Duke of Bridgewater (which he frequently mispronounced as ‘Bilgewater’), while the elderly ‘King’ claimed to be the long-lost Dauphin of France. Twain had attended a hearing during the Tichborne perjury trial and had met the claimant at an event in London, concluding that he ‘thought him a rather fine and stately figure’. Twain had, moreover, a personal interest in the case. His own distant cousin, Jesse M. Leathers, an insurance broker, had sought his advice on a potential claim to the earldom of Durham. Twain’s reply to his cousin’s query is instructive:

  Hartford, October 5, 1875

  Dear Sir:

  I have heard cousin James Lampton speak of his Earldom a good while ago, but I have never felt much interest in the matter, I not being heir to the title. But if I were heir to the title & thought I had a reasonable chance to win it I would not cast away my right without at least making enough of a struggle to satisfy my self-respect.

  You ask me what I think of the chances of the American heirs. I answer frankly that I think them inconceivably slender. The present earl of Durham has been in undisputed possession thirty-five years; his father, the first earl, held possession forty-three years. Seventy-eight years’ peaceable possession is a pretty solid wall to buck against before a court composed of the House of Lords of England—backed, as 128it seems to be, by a limitless bank account. It cost the Tichborne claimant upwards of $400,000 to get as far as he did with his claim. Unless the American Lamptons can begin their fight with a still greater sum, I think it would be hardly worth while for them to go into the contest at all. If the title & estates were in abeyance for lack of an heir you might stand some chance, but as things now are I cannot doubt that the present Viscount of Lampton (lucky youth!), son of the reigning Earl, will succeed to the honors & the money, all in due time. That lad was born lucky, anyhow—for he was a twin & beat his brother into the world only five minutes—& a wonderfully valuable five minutes it was, too, as that other twin feels every day of his life, I suspect.

  No, indeed. The present possessors are too well fortified. They have held their lands in peace for over six hundred years; the blood of Edward III. & Edward IV. flows in their veins; they are up in the bluest-blooded aristocracy of England. The court that would try the case is made up, in a large measure, of their own relatives; they have plenty of money to fight with. Tackle them? It would be too much like taking Gibraltar with blank cartridges.

  I heartily wish you might succeed, but I feel sure that you cannot.

  Truly yours.

  Mark Twain.

  Twain was to take up the ‘lost title’ theme again in 1892, in his humorous novel The American Claimant. This features the dreamy and eccentric Colonel Mulberry Sellers of Washington, a dabbler in many trades who is convinced that he is the long-lost and rightful heir to the earldom of Rossmore, an
d therefore entitled to the fictional-Warwickshire pile, Cholmondelay Castle. Colonel Mulberry’s white picket-fenced suburban house in Washington is emblazoned with the Rossmore coat of arms, and he fires off claim after claim to the English usurper of his title from his ‘library’, which is also his ‘drawing room’, ‘picture-gallery’ and ‘workshop’. The walls are covered in portraits of ‘dead Americans of distinction’, which have been relabelled as former Earls of Rossmore. Like George Hollamby, the colonel is an engineer of some talent: he makes marvellous mechanical toys, which, if patented, would make money, as a friend points out. ‘Money – yes; pin money: a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps. Not more,’ is the colonel’s dismissive response. It could just as well have been George Hollamby speaking. What after all is a few hundred thousand dollars, compared to the Portland millions? The prospect of an ancient title and fortune fulfilled the ultimate New World settler’s fantasy. For it carried with it not only the promise of riches, but also the priceless asset of belonging – of being not only a member of a hierarchy from which so many in the New World had been expelled or excluded – but at its very pinnacle. What better vengeance to take for such expulsion or rejection than to return in triumph to claim a title?

  Twain’s writing, like that of his contemporary Charles Dickens, contained an implicit warning about such dreams. The message of Colonel Mulberry’s wasted talents seemed to suggest that the success of the New World lay in skills and hard graft, rather than inherited riches. But stronger men than George Hollamby would have failed to resist such a seductive prospect as now offered itself to him.

  *

  As George Hollamby’s knuckles flexed white from gripping the ship’s railings, his companion and fellow passenger on the steamship Oroya frowned, deep in thought. Thomas Kennedy Vernon Coburn, solicitor and barrister of the Supreme Court of Victoria, presented as great a contrast with his fellow passenger as chalk from cheese. Still in his late thirties, he was some ten years younger than George Hollamby. And yet, in his self-confidence and sophistication, he far outshone his travelling companion. This sometimes had awkward results: on being introduced to the pair as the new parties to the Druce case, most observers tended to assume that the pretender to the Portland dukedom was the suave and polished Coburn, rather than the rough-and-ready George Hollamby.