The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  Our arrival at the abbey was announced by the giving way of country roads to a wide avenue trimmed with smart, clipped box hedges. The car drew to a halt on a gravel pathway. Leading me through a series of arches into a warren of passages, Mr Adlam said, ‘This is all the 5th Duke’s work.’

  I took a sharp intake of breath. I was in one of the duke’s underground passageways. The scale was, quite simply, enormous. Passages branched out in every direction. Running along one was a set of tracks, laid in the floor – the very tracks along which the 5th Duke’s dinner had made its lonely, rattling journey from the abbey kitchens to the dining room. Most of the duke’s vast network of underground tunnels on the Welbeck estate is today caving in and abandoned. Locked gates and ‘Keep out’ notices bar the old entrances and exits, stone slabs cover the roof skylights, and security cameras blink warning lights to discourage the inquisitive. However, in places where sections of the underground network underlie public footpaths – such as the ‘Robin Hood Way’ – the path overground is still punctured by moss-covered stones at regular intervals, blocking the skylights that originally lit the tunnels beneath.

  Turning down a side passageway, Mr Adlam led me deftly through a maze of corridors, opening out into an enormous room that was flooded with light from huge skylights in the ceiling. This was the underground ballroom that had been constructed by the 5th Duke, originally intended as a church – unique, in its day, for possessing the largest unsupported ceiling in the world. Next came the room that had actually been the ballroom in the 5th Duke’s time: the splendid, mirror-lined room with a ceiling painted in sunset colours, as the child Ottoline had remembered it almost a hundred and forty years before. Now, it was a deserted library. Empty bookcases lined the walls, and a newer, albeit very fine, Arts-and-Crafts ceiling had replaced the Duke’s painted sunset.

  ‘This’, I could not help saying, ‘is, quite simply, extra-ordinary.’ And indeed it was: the vastness in scale, the melancholy grandeur, the echoing desolation of the cavernous spaces, were all but overwhelming.

  ‘Aha.’ Mr Adlam seemed mildly amused at my reaction. ‘Just wait for this!’ Leading me down a further set of echoing corridors, he brought me into a large, oak-panelled gallery with a solid, Arts-and-Crafts square staircase.

  ‘Meet the 5th Duke!’ said Mr Adlam.

  I turned round to find myself looking straight in the eye of the bust of the 5th Duke by Eric Boehm: the very one that had been produced in the legal proceedings as evidence of his appearance. Flanking the bust of the duke were two others of Adelaide Kemble by the sculptor Jean-Pierre Dantan. She was a strangely masculine-looking woman with a strongly aquiline nose, and her great attraction for the duke had always struck me as something of a mystery.

  ‘How strange, that this is virtually the only likeness of the 5th Duke,’ I mused, walking round the bust.

  ‘Not quite… ’ Mr Adlam was looking at me oddly.

  ‘You mean you have something else? What?’ I asked.

  ‘We have something,’ Mr Adlam replied. ‘I’ll show you in due course. But I’m not sure what it is.’

  My curiosity piqued, I followed the curator back to his office, in a large and echoing basement room. He pulled me up a chair.

  ‘We have all John Hayter’s portraits of Adelaide,’ he said, opening a file on his computer. There, in succession across the screen, flashed literally hundreds of portraits of Adelaide Kemble in different operatic roles: Adelaide in Semiramide, Norma, La Somnambula, Le Nozze di Figaro… even Adelaide in The Secret Marriage.

  ‘But then,’ Mr Adlam went on, ‘we also have this. I’m not sure what it is, as the label has been lost.’

  Another image flashed on the screen. It was the shrunken figure of a head, couched in a simple, soft-wood box, on a piece of what looked like old curtain fabric. I knew, immediately, exactly at what I was looking.

  ‘That must be the death mask made by the sculptor Henry Hope-Pinker,’ I exclaimed, and recounted to Mr Adlam what I had read in Pinker’s witness statement about the mask he was willing to produce in court. ‘There was another made by Leslie Ward and used by Sir Edgar Boehm, but that was believed to be destroyed.’

  ‘I do remember having a bit of a turn when I discovered it,’ Mr Adlam remarked. ‘I just opened this modest, non-descript box in an attic in the abbey, and found the duke within it, so to speak! The problem was I could not identify what it was, as the label had long been lost. How remarkably interesting.’

  *

  Half an hour later, Mr Adlam and I were ensconced at lunch in the 5th Duke’s great gasworks, built to power the gaslights that flared in the maze of underground passageways beneath the abbey. Now, however, it was the Lime House Café, a buzzing tearoom offering organic ginger beer and the local speciality of Stichelton blue cheese.

  We had been talking for some time about the 5th Duke.

  ‘I read something’, I told the curator, ‘about the 5th Duke having had an illegitimate child. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Mr Adlam frowned. ‘I did hear’, he replied, ‘some gossip, that he had an illegitimate daughter by a servant, who was subsequently raised on the Welbeck estate. But that was thirty years ago, that I heard it. Anyway, I simply don’t believe it to be true.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘it doesn’t fit the character of the 5th Duke. If he had an illegitimate daughter, he would have had her brought up in the class to which she belonged. He would not have let her grow up as a servant.’

  *

  By the time I left Welbeck, it was already late afternoon, and the sun was beginning to fade before the rising mist as I shivered on the Whitwell Station platform, waiting for the rickety train to take me back to Nottingham. I had promised to send Mr Adlam the document catalogue numbers of the witness statements made by Leslie Ward and Henry Hope-Pinker, to help him identify the 5th Duke’s death mask with greater certainty. Even as I waited, I turned over what the Welbeck curator had said in my mind. Was it not in keeping with the 5th Duke’s character to have allowed his illegitimate daughter to be brought up on the estate, like a servant? Did the 5th Duke care about such things? From what I could surmise of his behaviour, he seemed to prefer the company of servants to his social equals. I was not sure that he would have considered a lowly life so very distasteful. He seemed to have wanted nothing more than to disappear into the crowd.

  I arrived back at my hotel room to find a reply from my surgeon acquaintance to my query, waiting in my inbox. It was unequivocal:

  There are a number of types of groin hernia (or inguinal herniae) – the main ones are ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’. They vary in size and magnitude: one allows intestines to descend into the scrotal sac, while the other is predominantly a weakness of the abdominal wall and doesn’t facilitate translocation of the bowel into the scrotal sac. In either case, there may potentially be damage to the nerves that travel and/or vessels that travel to the scrotum, but they don’t often affect the testicle itself, and therefore don’t affect the ability to produce sperm significantly. Irrespective of whether the hernia was indirectly affecting the testicle or not, or the hernia was so large that it had to be surgically repaired with removal of the testicle, the other testicle can still produce sperm (unless there was a double hernia or bilateral hernia affecting both sides, which is unusual).

  I therefore think it unlikely that a hernia would have affected the Duke’s ability to father a child – I find it likely that he still would have been able to father one or more children following that accident.

  I already knew the duke had suffered from a hernia on the right side, not both. It seemed, therefore, that – contrary to the advice given the duke by his doctors – he was capable of, and indeed probably had, fathered at least one child. But who was the mother? Mr Adlam had mentioned local gossip of her being a servant. Fanny was born in 1855. This discounted the Roper sisters as possible candidates, as they were too young, and were not linked with the duke u
ntil the 1870s. Racking my brains, I recalled another name that had been mentioned in connection with the duke, by the gamekeeper Bernard Boaler – a cook by the name of Jane Walton. Looking up the census returns, I found that there was indeed a Jane Walton – then a twenty-one-year-old kitchen maid – on the staff at Welbeck in 1851, when the Duke was still Marquess of Titchfield. Her father had been a farmer in the Nottinghamshire parish of Greasley. Intriguingly, his name had been Joseph, as was that of one of Jane’s brothers. Another of Jane’s brothers was called William, suggesting that both Joseph and William were Walton family names.

  For twenty years Jane had stayed on at Welbeck, promoted to the status of cook by 1871. By 1881 – two years after the 5th Duke’s death – she was fifty years old and still unmarried, living as a modestly prosperous farmer with thirty-five acres of land. Her younger brother, Joseph, was the farm bailiff. Could Jane, the cook at Welbeck Abbey, have been the mother of Fanny and her two brothers? Interestingly, Bernard Boaler – the only witness to refer to Jane Walton, and the most frank in his description of the duke’s affair with the Roper sisters – had caused Turner some concern. Before interviewing Boaler, Turner had written anxiously to Baileys, Shaw & Gillett in these terms:

  I find out from Mr Bernard Boaler’s cousin that he would not be at all a desirable man to approach, in fact, he would most likely do everything he could to ‘upset the applecart’.

  Why was Turner worried that Boaler might ‘upset the applecart’? Was he fearful that Boaler, with his forthright testimony, might go a bit too far – that he might, in addition to the Roper sisters, mention one of the 5th Duke’s mistresses which the defendants to the Druce claim wished to keep hidden away? A key argument of the defence to the claim that the 5th Duke of Portland had led a double life as the tradesman T. C. Druce was that, as a result of the duke’s riding accident, he was unable to father children. If it were to be made public that, on the contrary, the 5th Duke had fathered several children, that argument would collapse. If Jane Walton was the mother of Fanny and her brothers, she and her children were potential dynamite to the defence of the Druce case. The fact of their existence must be suppressed.

  *

  By now, I had obtained the military service records of Fanny’s two sons, George and Bertram. George, the elder son, had joined the Royal Navy in 1899, at the age of sxiteen. He was promoted steadily through the ranks and continued to serve in the Gunnery Branch of the Royal Navy, including in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. In 1921 he was commissioned (in the rank of Commissioned Gunner), serving successively in HMSs Surprise, Excellent and Champion, where his ability was assessed as ‘Exceptional’. On 4 May 1920 his Captain’s report stated: ‘…I should be very pleased to have him as one of my Lieutenants any time. Specially recommended for advancement.’ He received a personal commendation for salvaging an aircraft off Malta on 4 December 1931, and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander in 1933.

  George retired from the Royal Navy in 1933, at the age of fifty. However, he re-enlisted at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was discharged in 1946 and released in 1947 (aged sixty-four), five days after being promoted to Commander. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and had the further distinction of a Mention in Despatches in the New Year’s Honours List of 1 January 1941. Altogether, George Lawson would have earned at least eight medals for his service during the two world wars. He died in 1970, at the age of eighty-seven.

  Fanny’s younger son, Bertram, had been enlisted at the age of just fifteen as a Drummer in the Royal Marines, Chatham Division. A short lad, he was only four feet eight and one-eighth of an inch in height (five feet six and a half inches when he was discharged from the Navy as a grown man). He served as a Bugler until 1907, when he became a Private. He was then promoted through the ranks to Lance Corporal, Corporal and then Sergeant, in which rank he served for the duration of the First World War. Throughout these twenty years of service, he was invariably assessed as being of ‘Very Good’ character and ‘Very Good’ ability. In 1920, he was promoted to the rank of Colour Sergeant. Like his brother George he received an impressive number of decorations during his period of service, including a Bronze Medal for Military Valour in 1918, a Meritorious Service Medal in 1919, three First World War medals and a Mention in Despatches in September 1918. He died in 1954, at the age of seventy.

  It appeared, therefore, that Fanny’s two sons – the putative grandsons of the 5th Duke of Portland – had both had exemplary careers in the military. They were, in fact, war heroes. Looking at the successive reports over the years by their commanding officers – invariably in the same neat, army script, invariably repeating the same remarks such as ‘VG’, ‘Excellent’, ‘Exemplary’ – I was struck by how different the approach of Fanny Lawson’s family to exclusion and rejection was from that adopted by the first family of T. C. Druce, the Crickmer-Druces. While the Crickmer-Druces had thought only of revenge for the wrongs done to them, of looking back to the past to reclaim a misconceived heritage, the members of this small family had looked to the future, and dedicated themselves to the service of their country.

  I then turned my attention to the two ‘brothers’ mentioned by Fanny in her letter, William and Joseph. If William was indeed the nine-year-old boy listed in the Ashbury household along with Fanny in the 1861 census, the records showed that he had died a young, and presumably tragic, death in 1870, at just eighteen years old. This was the period when Fanny was out at service with the Holland family in Sheffield, so it was perfectly possible that she had not known about his death.

  Of the other brother, Joseph, I could find no trace. A handwritten note of a meeting with Thomas Warner Turner at the offices of Baileys, Shaw & Gillett dated 17 April 1907, which included a reference to Annie Roper, also contained the cryptic words ‘In Joseph’, heavily underlined. The note, however, gave no further details or information. Other than this, I drew a blank.

  The lack of information about Joseph’s fate left me with a feeling of frustration. I had sensed the desperation in Fanny’s letters. She had wanted, so much, to know what had happened to her brothers, to the family from whom she had been separated as a child. Irrational and illogical though it was, I felt I had let her down. As far as I could see, Joseph had vanished for ever: he had been excised by the hand of Victorian censorship, wiped clean from the slate of history. Did a vital clue lie buried in some obscure archive or pile of letters, hidden in a long-forgotten drawer or crumbling to dust in an attic? For the present, I could not tell. The figure of Joseph remained an obstinately elusive question mark, hidden in the inscrutable folds of the past that blanketed him like a pall.

  I had now come to the end of my investigation of the Druce affair. Or perhaps, it would be more correct to say, I had reached the furthest point I could. For the picture I had uncovered was not so much in the form of a puzzle, to which there was a neat solution, merely requiring the finding and replacing of missing pieces. It was more like a reflection seen through a glass darkly, growing brighter and brighter and revealing more of the underlying pattern as it was polished, but never finally reaching gleaming perfection. The writer Kate Summerscale, in her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, has defined detective investigations in these terms:

  Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. ‘The detective story,’ observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, ‘is a tragedy with a happy ending.’ A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.

  And yet, the ‘investigators’ of the Druce affair across the decades – Chief Inspector Dew, J. G. Littlechild, the estate manager turned amateur sleuth Turner, myself many years after the event – all of us had polished the mirror of the past just a little more, revealing another detail of the underlying image. But to re-creat
e it to perfection would be impossible. Worse than impossible, it would be a lie. Because it would imply that time can be recaptured in its entirety – that nothing is lost by the passage of years. But the past is always the past, and something is always lost; just as something is always preserved; and, also, discovered.

  In the case of the Druce affair, what had occurred in the past had not simply been lost owing to the natural erosion of time. It seemed, on the contrary, from my investigations, that there had been a deliberate – and partially successful – attempt to cut out entire events, to erase certain people wholesale from the record, in order to facilitate the fighting of the case. The existence of Fanny Lawson and her brothers had been, effectively, hushed up in order to bolster a defence that the 5th Duke was incapable of fathering an heir. Even before the Druce claim was filed, the splitting of Fanny Lawson from her mother and brothers in early childhood was clearly an attempt to dilute the impact of their presence, so much more glaringly obvious if they had remained together as a family. It echoed the deliberate fragmenting of his first family that T. C. Druce accomplished, by telling his daughter Fanny that her mother was dead, and sending the Crickmer-Druce children on separate paths.

  The Druce affair, in fact, was significant not so much because it was a fraud; or because it was started by a mad woman; or because it was an early example of a media sensation. It was significant because of the light it shed on the lies, deceit and hypocrisy practised by society at the time, and their tragic consequences.

  In the course of my investigations, I managed to track down a great-grandson of Fanny Lawson, and therefore putatively a direct lineal descendant of the 5th Duke of Portland. Tentatively, I wrote asking for an interview. The address was a suburban house, a world away from Welbeck Abbey. Several months later, I received a reply. After long and anxious deliberation, the letter stated, the respondent had concluded that he could not help me in my inquiries. He asked that I respect his privacy. Evidently, in one small corner of England, the pain of events that occurred more than a century and a half ago lives on to this day.