The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (32 page)

My head was in a whirl. Could the 5th Duke of Portland really have fathered two sons and a daughter? Could they have been brought up secretly, separated from each other, the daughter raised by a local Welbeck family called the Ashburys? It seemed, on the face of it, incredible. What Horace Avory would have made of such a letter, when he received it ten months after the Druce trial, I could only speculate. Somehow, I suspected it would have prompted a raised eye-brow, even on that mask-like countenance.

Incredible or not, I had to find out more. I sent a request for information to a medical acquaintance of mine, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Was it possible, I asked, for a man suffering from an untreated groin hernia to father children? I then set to work looking up any records of Fanny that might exist. If – as Fanny intimated – she and her two brothers, William and Joseph, were indeed children of the 5th Duke who had been brought up by a local family, surely there would be records relating to them in the Portland archives: correspondence regarding the terms on which they were handed over to the Ashburys, details of any sums of money transferred to them for the children’s maintenance. However, a thorough search of the papers in the archives drew a complete and utter blank. If any documents relating to Fanny or her brothers had once existed, they must have been destroyed. The two letters I had found had clearly slipped through the net – presumably because they had been filed with seemingly innocuous correspondence with the public in the aftermath of the perjury trial. It seemed, in fact, that I only knew about Fanny’s existence because somebody in the lawyers’ offices had not been careful enough.

Since the Portland papers were not of assistance, I turned to the public records. Surely there must be some reference to Fanny in the official registers of births, marriages and deaths, or the census returns? After some searching, I found that a Fanny Ashbury was registered as born to a couple named George and Hannah Ashbury in 1855, in Whitwell, a village on the Welbeck estate. The couple were clearly of lowly stock. George was a joiner and Hannah was illiterate, marking Fanny’s birth certificate with a cross as her signature. The same Fanny was listed as living with the Ashburys at Whitwell, aged six years, in 1861, along with a brother, William, then aged nine. Could this be the Fanny Lawson who wrote to Horace Avory, and was this William the brother she had mentioned in her letter? If this was indeed the Fanny for whom I was looking, she would have been fifty-three years old when she wrote to Avory. In the 1871 census, the sixteen-year-old Fanny reappeared, working as a servant in the household of a man called Calvert Bernard Holland, a manager in Sheffield. But then, she seemed to disappear from the records. What could have happened to her?

Realizing that I would have to spread the net wider, I began to search the census records for Scotland and Ireland. I also searched the emigrant passenger lists of persons on outbound ships in the 1870s and 1880s to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Finally, I struck gold. Trawling through the Scottish marriage records, I discovered that a Fanny Ashbury had married a George Lawson in Edinburgh in 1880. The couple were subsequently recorded in the Scottish census records until the end of the century, living in Midlothian. The Scottish census records also contained vital information that proved I had indeed found the Fanny Lawson who had written to Horace Avory in 1908. For they recorded, as members of Fanny’s household, her sons George and Bert, referred to in her letters (‘Bert’, in fact, turned out to be short not for ‘Robert’, but for ‘Bertram’). George, the elder son by just one year, was born in Midlothian in 1884; and true to Fanny’s letter, Bertram, the younger son, was born on the Welbeck estate, in the village of Norton Cuckney, in 1885.

By the turn of the century, Fanny had disappeared from the Scottish records. The 1901 and 1911 censuses showed her as a widow living in various villages in Kent, not far from the village of Great Mongeham, from where she had written her letters to Horace Avory. Curiously, while Fanny had given her birthplace as Whitwell in the earlier censuses, in these later records, her birthplace was simply listed as ‘not known’. George and Bert, just as Fanny had written, were destined for careers in the Royal Marines. In 1911, George – at the age of twenty-seven – was a petty officer on HMS
Albemarle
at Weymouth. At just sixteen years old, Bertram was already a bugler on HMS
Wildfire
at Sheerness in Kent; and by 1911, aged twenty-six, he was a Lance Corporal at the Royal Marine barracks at Chatham. According to the England & Wales death index, Fanny Lawson died in 1917, in Portsmouth, at the age of sixty-two.

Curious to find out more about Fanny’s sons, I contacted a specialist military researcher, to see if it was possible to track down the boys’ service records from the information given in Fanny’s letters. These, I reasoned, might well shed more light on Fanny and her family. I also put in a tentative request to visit Welbeck Abbey: perhaps someone there might know something, if anybody were willing to talk. I had, in any event, been intending to visit Welbeck for some time, and now seemed an ideal moment to take my research to this next stage. Having put out these feelers, there seemed little more to do, other than to wait and see what happened.

*

By this time, the reading room had closed, and I had headed back to my sparsely furnished but comfortable hotel room, with its wide window overlooking the grey slate roofs, red-brick warehouses and smoking factory chimneys of Nottingham’s old industrial Lace Market district. A light, sooty drizzle was falling from the scudding clouds. Somewhat wearily, I began to look through images of documents relating to the Druce police investigation held by the National Archives at Kew. To save time and extra travelling, I had obtained several volumes of these on a computer disc. My vision began to blur as yet again, pages and pages of yellowing briefs, opinions and interview notes, mostly in faded copperplate script, passed in succession before my eyes – this time, somewhat incongruously, on a flickering computer screen. Perhaps it was time to call it a night. On the verge of switching the machine off, I suddenly sat bolt upright as I found myself clicking through a series of photographs that I had not seen before: a grave, staked off with cordons… the inside of a vault… a large, dusty coffin swathed in a black cloth… an open coffin lid… the outline of a shroud…

I was looking at the police photographs that had been taken when the Druce vault was opened.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between!

D
IANE
A
CKERMAN

A Natural History of the Senses

It was a crisp, cold, misty October morning when I stepped onto the platform at Nottingham City Station to take a train to Welbeck. The station, in the middle of a major refurbishing programme, was not an attractive sight. Scaffolding and temporary façades covered over the old, red-brick Edwardian baroque building, with its terracotta walls, slate roof and art-nouveau-style wrought-iron gates. Most of the people at platform 4 – where I stood, stamping my feet in the cold and blowing my fingers – were waiting for the fast train to King’s Cross. Only a few remained on the platform afterwards, awaiting the local train that would travel the length of the ‘Robin Hood line’, the track that runs through the remote, hilly region north of Nottingham to the town of Worksop.

The train was one of those ambling, rickety affairs that stopped at every village station. I therefore had ample leisure to review the astonishing photographs from the National Archives, which I had pulled up on my computer the night
before. There were six photographs in all, just as Edwin Freshfield had listed them in his letter to the Home Office. The first three showed the exterior of the Druce grave ready for the exhumation, surrounded by the high walls of the temporary shed that had been constructed around it to protect the privacy of the proceedings. The fourth showed the open vault, with the outline of two adult coffins side by side. A tiny baby’s coffin was clearly visible, to one side. The fifth photograph showed the coffin of T. C. Druce: a heavy, old-fashioned affair with a great plaque and brass handles, adorned with two crosses, exactly as Inspector Dew had described it. The sixth and final photograph was the most eerie of all: it revealed the open coffin, with a shrouded figure bundled inside. The face, beneath the shroud, was indistinct; but it was just possible to make out the outline of a beard. A pencilled note with the photographs, headed ‘Mr May – Registry’ and dated 30 January 1932, read:

I have turned out these photographs. They are of the Druce grave opened by S. of S.’s authority early in the century. They are not for general consumption. They might be put away with papers which I suppose are preserved about this cause célèbre.

It therefore appeared that, even as late as 1932 – twenty-five years after the events – the police photographs of the Druce grave had been hidden away, considered by the authorities as unfit for public consumption.

My attention was suddenly caught by the fact that the train was approaching its final destination. I now saw that the nature of the countryside had changed dramatically since leaving the outskirts of Nottingham. No longer dense and cluttered, it had become wild and open, a chill wind whipping the lean grass in the meadows and the forlorn leaves that still clung to the trees. The few villages that we passed were remote and grim, clusters of small stone cottages hugging the windswept slopes. My guide at Welbeck for the day was to be Derek Adlam, the long-serving curator of the Portland Collec-tion at Welbeck Abbey. He had, by an odd coincidence, asked me to meet him at Whitwell – the stop before Worksop, and Fanny’s birthplace.

Alighting from the train, I could not help but look curiously around me at the village that – ostensibly, at least – was the place of Fanny’s birth. But Whitwell had the same shut up, reserved expression of so many villages of this region: a tiny community fallen on hard times, closed in on itself, jealous of its secrets. I was met at the station by Mr Adlam, a charming gentleman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Welbeck estate.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, as we drove through winding country roads, through shafts of glancing sunlight.

‘Oh, about thirty years,’ he replied, with a smile.

‘Does all this land still belong to the Welbeck estate?’

‘Most of it.’

The extent of the terrain was impressive. I knew that the Portland London estates had already been split off from the Welbeck and other provincial estates, under the terms of the 4th Duke’s will. The London estates had passed through the 4th Duke’s daughter, Lady Lucy, by marriage to the de
Walden family, who own a significant portion of Marylebone to this day. The gloomy palace of Harcourt House was demolished in 1906, its vast bathrooms, trapdoors and glass screens making way for a block of expensive flats. As for the Welbeck estate, that had passed to the 6th Duke of Portland, who died in 1943. His son, the 7th Duke – known as ‘Chopper’ Portland – was described by the Duke of Bedford as ‘a pompous-looking man with a moustache’. He had two daughters but no sons. On his death, therefore, the Portland dukedom passed to a remote kinsman who claimed his descent from the 3rd Duke, Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, who became the 8th Duke of Portland. The last Duke of Portland was Ferdinand’s brother, the 9th Duke, William Cavendish-Bentinck: after he died in 1990 without a male heir, the dukedom became extinct. Many years before this, however, ‘Chopper’ Portland had stripped the title of assets, ensuring that his daughters obtained the benefit of Welbeck Abbey and all the treasures within. The descendants of those daughters live at the abbey to this day, which remains a private residence. I was, I knew, extremely privileged to be allowed a glimpse into this closed world.

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.’