The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (16 page)

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, and 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.

Coburn had been inclined to give the carpenter from Brighton short shrift, when he first appeared in his Melbourne office asking for his help. In fact, he could barely hear out his fanciful tale of double lives and dukedoms. But when, some weeks later, George Hollamby returned to Coburn’s office, claiming to have received a confidential offer of £50,000 to settle the case from the leading Melbourne law firm of Blake & Riggal, acting on behalf of an undisclosed person, Coburn changed his mind. The sum of £50,000 was, quite simply, enormous (equivalent to £5.1 million in today’s money). Although it was never openly admitted, it was generally understood that Blake & Riggal were acting on behalf of the 6th Duke of Portland. If this was indeed the case, the fact
that the duke was prepared to make such a substantial offer to settle the matter showed just how desperate he was to be rid of it. Clearly, the 6th Duke of Portland was taking George Hollamby’s claim seriously. All of which meant that Thomas Coburn began to take the case very seriously indeed.

The more Coburn looked into the Druce case, the more excited he became. There was, he was sure, something in it. The only solution was to travel to England, and stake a claim. Coburn therefore threw his energy into raising funds from his powerful Melbourne business colleagues. Soon, he had collected sufficient money to buy tickets for the pair to set sail for England to investigate further. Coburn’s obsession with the Druce case was such that he had even christened his two-month-old son, whom he had left behind in Melbourne with the rest of his family, Alan
Thomas Druce
Coburn. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had not a great deal to lose. The reality was that Coburn had already been bankrupted on several occasions. Hanging around the courthouse of Dandenong, in the suburbs of Melbourne, in the hope of picking up a brief, was hardly the greatest of vocations.

At home, Coburn was viewed with a certain amount of scepticism. ‘His career has been rather a chequered one,’ observed the Melbourne finance agent, J. Howden. ‘He is very clever and smooth-spoken, but is regarded with suspicion here, and is considered unreliable.’ But Thomas Kennedy Vernon Coburn was not one to harbour self-doubts. He was certain that he had been made for a grander fate than to frequent provincial Australian courthouses. In his eyes, the ticket he had purchased on the Orient Line to London was, without a doubt, the route to greater glories.

A great hustle and bustle arose as the
Oroya
finally hit the London docks. George Hollamby and Coburn were immediately caught up in the tide of excited passengers who swarmed onto the deck, weeping and waving to relatives fluttering white handkerchiefs on the quayside. Stevedores rolled out crates and cargo, and the ship’s horn sounded imminent disembarkation with a long, low boom. Coburn stepped forward eagerly. George Hollamby, however, held back. A lurking fear gnawed at the back of his mind. There was something that he had buried, a secret that he ought to have told his financial backers, but had not divulged to them. He knew that it would come back to haunt him.

But what a strangely mysterious land is Australia.Rightly has she been called ‘the land of the dawning,’ since she is yet enfolded in the mists of early morning, and her future destiny looms vague and gigantic… dwelling in a solitude that is akin to desolation, with no knightly legend or tender sentiment of romantic story to soothe or charm the ear.

V
ENI
C
OOPER
-M
ATHIESON
,

A Marriage of Souls: A Metaphysical Novel

The woman hesitated before the heavy black door with its bulbous brass knocker protruding like the knuckle of a fist. She could just glimpse, through the glass door panes, an entrance hall with a staircase that opened in a majestic curve onto a dark expanse of plush blue carpet, the polished handrail set imposingly on a dark green, heavily wrought cast-iron balustrade. She glanced nervously at the slip of paper she clutched in her hand: 65 London Wall. Yes, this was the correct address. Taking a deep breath, she entered the gloom of the vestibule, where a shadow was just visible behind a polished mahogany reception desk.

‘Good morning. I have an appointment at the offices of Mr George Hollamby Druce.’ The woman’s voice was soft but steady, with an Antipodean lilt.

‘Second floor,’ came the mechanical reply.