The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (30 page)

The 6th Duke, in the meantime, stoically acknowledged defeat in his attempts to bring the main players to justice. He appears to have thrown in the towel and moved on with the many challenges that awaited Welbeck in the new century. He did not, however, forget to reward those who had assisted him in the bitterest battle of his life. The faithful land agent Thomas Warner Turner received a monetary gift, as did the old servants of the 5th Duke who had assisted with the compiling of witness testimony. The 6th Duke also sent a cheque for £100
*3
to Inspector Dew, together with smaller sums for the other officers involved in the case. He thanked them all, and in particular Dew, who, he said, had ‘throughout dealt with the case and its innumerable ramifications in the most thorough way’. He then turned the page on this
particularly distasteful episode in the family history, and moved on to shooting, stalking and suchlike more pressing matters.

*

Did Chief Inspector Dew proudly display a souvenir of the Druce case on his desk? Somehow, it seems unlikely. Within just two years of the closure of the Druce file, Dew was to become one of the most famous detectives on earth, applauded the world over for his pursuit and capture of the murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen, in a transatlantic chase that held the world in thrall. As a result of detective work by Dew, Crippen was caught and convicted of murdering his second wife Cora, having allegedly buried parts of her dismembered body in the basement of his house before attempting to flee the country with his lover, Ethel Le Neve. He was hanged in Pentonville Prison in 1910.

The Crippen affair made Dew a household name. It was the case by which he liked to define his detective career. Even his autobiography, published many decades later in 1938, was triumphantly entitled
I Caught Crippen
. As the
Saturday Post
commented dryly in 1916:

Ask the average person who Walter Dew is, and he will answer, ‘The man who arrested Crippen.’ Some will cut down the answer to ‘Crippen Dew.’ Such is fame.

There were those who speculated, as indeed had been the case throughout his career, that Dew, the bland and avuncular ‘major in mufti’, had a certain amount of luck; that it was the
wireless telegraph message from the canny skipper of the ship on which the murderer had fled that really turned the tables on Crippen. To any such insinuations, Dew was quick to protest loudly, firing off lengthy letters to the offending newspapers, with threats of libel action. Like J. G. Littlechild and John Conquest before him, Dew followed the venerable path of becoming a ‘Confidential Agent’ on his retirement from the force, which he announced immediately after the conclusion of the Crippen case in 1910. From 1928 he lived out his retirement in a bungalow in the stolidly respectable seaside town of Worthing, West Sussex, where he blended imperceptibly into the crowds of other pensioners reading newspapers in deck chairs and strolling the windy esplanades. The only matter worthy of note relates to Dew’s rather curious household arrangements: a widower since 1927, Dew shared his little bungalow with two women, a widow called Florence Idle and her spinster sister-in-law. (Dew was to marry Florence, twelve years his junior, in 1928.)

In marked contrast to the Crippen case, Dew was forever to maintain a mysterious reticence with respect to the Druce affair. He skirted around it in his autobiography, with the excuse that he did not wish to comment on it, for fear of causing pain to the relatives. But – as Dew’s biographer Nicholas Connell has pointed out – this excuse could just as easily have applied to many of the cases that Dew
did
cover in his autobiography, in graphic detail. Was it that he simply did not wish to reveal too much about this particular investigation? In any event, there was a good reason why he could not have done so, even if he had wanted to: the fact that, for the next eighty years, a number of the key police files relating to the
Druce fraud investigation were classified. Whatever secrets they held, therefore, were under lock and key, and could not be revealed until many decades later.

*1
  
Champerty is an illegal agreement,
by which a person (with no previous interest in a lawsuit) finances it, with a view to sharing the disputed property if the suit succeeds.

*2
  
Metropolitan Police detectives were, at this time, permitted to carry out assignments on behalf of private clients if this did not interfere with their official police duties.

*3
  
Equivalent to £10,000 today.

Very, very deep is the well of the past.
Shall we not call it bottomless?

T
HOMAS
M
ANN

Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his Brothers)

The atmosphere in the Manuscripts & Special Collections reading room was suffocatingly hot and stuffy. Hunched at the wide tables arranged in rows beneath the glare of the strip lights, bespectacled researchers pored over cracked, ancient manuscripts propped on great foam cushions, held open by leather weights and beaded chain bookmarkers. There were sumptuous illuminated medieval manuscripts, early drafts of classic literary works in the authors’ original handwriting, nineteenth-century legal documents painstakingly written out by clerks in laborious copperplate. Aloof and above them all, a marble bust of the Duke of Wellington – a somewhat random and incon-gruous figure in this harshly modern setting – frowned at some unspecified spot in the middle distance. The only sound was the intermittent tap, tap, tap of the librarian’s fingers on a computer keyboard, and the angry buzz of a trapped fly
periodically hitting the glass windowpane.

Feeling a headache coming on, I sighed. My throat was parched from the heat, dryness and dust of the atmosphere: new dust from the concrete and asphalt motorway network that surrounded the warehouse in which the library was housed, old dust from the ancient tomes that were, in many instances, seeing the light of day after decades in sunless storage. The reason I was here, whiling away the hours at the Manuscripts & Special Collections department at Nottingham University, was that this was the place where the most important collection of contemporary documents relating to the Druce case was to be found. For by a combination of bequests, auction sales and transfers in lieu of death duties, the vast bulk of the archives of the Dukes of Portland – archives running to tens of thousands of documents, spanning over three hundred years – had ended up in the possession of the University of Nottingham. The documents included the private and estate correspondence of successive dukes, the correspondence of their solicitors, Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, in relation to the Druce case, private investigators’ files, court papers and a comprehensive collection of newspaper cuttings. The documents had been carefully and accurately catalogued, but many had clearly never been reviewed before. Some were simply rotting away: pieces of the past that were mouldering to extinction, disintegrating in my hands as I placed them gingerly on the foam reading pad.

This was my last visit to Nottingham, ending several weeks during which I had been steeped in the Portland archives. Like most days of archive research, it had been a mixed day. In the course of the week I had waded through a good part of the correspondence of Baileys, Shaw & Gillett and many court documents. The earlier court documents about the case – dating from the late Victorian period – were in fading, yet still beautifully engraved, copperplate script. Later documents, from the Edwardian years, began to appear in early, rudimentary typewritten form. In trawling through the records, even I – a trained lawyer – found it a challenge to keep up with the twists and turns of this most complex of cases: the multiple hearings in different divisions of the civil and church courts, the endless interlocutory applications, the interminable legal arguments, the hundreds of pages of affidavit evidence. In all my research, however, I had not found the jewel for which I was so eagerly searching: the missing photographs taken by the police photographer at the opening of the grave. That they had existed at one time was not in doubt – Edwin Freshfield had referred to them in a letter to the Home Office. They had certainly never been published, however, and indeed, it appeared that they had been suppressed at the time. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I could only assume that they had been destroyed.

Having trawled through the court papers and correspondence, I was now working my way through the proofs of witnesses in the civil proceedings of
Druce
v.
Howard de Walden
. These were statements taken on the duke’s behalf from witnesses with a view to their appearance in the civil case against Lord Howard de Walden that had been started by George Hollamby. In the event, the proofs had never been made public, as the case was dismissed before it came to a hearing, after the grave had been opened. The witnesses, therefore, were never called to give evidence in court. Their
statements, however, made fascinating reading. Many were old servants of the 5th Duke, and as I read them, I caught glimpses of an aloof, haughty, yet ultimately lonely and vulner-able man. With the exception of a few close friendships with some of his female relations – his sister, Lady Ossington, being perhaps the most dear – the 5th Duke appeared alone and alienated from his class. If he was close to any human beings, he seemed closest to his servants: his valets, the tenants on the Welbeck estate and the hoards of navvies that he employed on his endless building projects. Many of these told affectionate and touching stories of their master. Seventy-two-year-old Henry Powell, for example – the duke’s valet from 1852 to 1862 – recalled a fire in the vast downstairs bathroom at Harcourt House. The duke, ever ailing, had been taking a bath for the cure of sciatica, trying out an improvised arrangement of blankets hung around the bath on clothes horses to try to trap the heat. An oil lamp had set fire to the blankets. Powell had returned to find his Grace shivering and alone, wrapped in a blanket at the top of a staircase.

Other estate workers suggested that the duke was not unaware of his reputation for eccentricity. Seventy-year-old Joseph Burns, for example – employed by the duke’s contractors for the fitting up of iron fencing round the abbey park – stated:

The late Duke well knew the opinion of the outside world concerning him. Upon this his Grace once questioned me, and as I did not wish to answer him, he said the lightest opinion was that he was a Welbeck oddity, while others would go so far as to say that ‘he was covered with leprosy
and not fit for a human eye to gaze upon.’ ‘It would be well,’ he said, ‘for the working class if England possessed a few more oddities like me and with no more leprosy than I have, which is none.’

What was immediately apparent from the mass of evidence gathered by Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, in preparation for the defence of the civil proceedings of
Druce
v.
Howard de Walden
, was the enormous amount of work the firm had done in establishing the Duke and Druce’s separate identities by an analysis of their movements. Of course, this evidence had never been made public, as the proceedings were dismissed after the opening of the Druce vault. Effectively, every single documented location in which T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke had spent any time in their lives, was minutely diarized in handwritten record books split into double columns, to enable the ready identification of any dates on which there was clear evidence of them being in different places. The comparison made it abundantly clear that T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke could not possibly have been the same person. For example, on 15 October 1856, there was documentation recording T. C. Druce in Torquay, Cornwall. At this point in time, there was incontrovertible evidence that the 5th Duke was in Paris. In September 1857, T. C. Druce visited northern Europe – including Brussels and Paris. In the same month, the 5th duke’s daily correspondence located him firmly at Welbeck.

I had already made a search of the nineteenth-century census records, which indicated that T. C. Druce and the duke had been in different locations on census nights. In the 1851 census, for example, the 5th Duke (as Marquess of Titchfield)
was recorded as being at Harcourt House, while T. C. Druce was recorded in his then residence at Richmond. In the 1861 census, the duke was recorded again as being at Harcourt House, while T. C. Druce was recorded at his then address at 58 Finchley Road, St John’s Wood. In the 1871 census, after the death of T. C. Druce, the duke was recorded as being at Welbeck Abbey. However, while apparently persuasive evidence, the census returns were not totally conclusive, as anyone leading a double life could easily have lied on his returns. This point was made by Baileys after the Druce case failed, when an action was brought against the 6th Duke by a researcher called Mr Haworth. Haworth claimed remuneration for research as a result of an idea he had proposed, of establishing the separate identity of the 5th Duke and T. C. Druce based on the census returns. Quite apart from the point – reasonably made by Baileys – that anybody could have had the idea, they also made the argument that the census returns did not provide conclusive proof, by themselves, of separate identity. The voluminous correspondence anchoring the duke and Druce in different locations, however, was a different matter. Here were real letters, stamped and postmarked, sent at the same time from different continents. That would have been pretty hard to fake.