The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (21 page)

‘Supposing such a photograph was not produced until 1850, what have you to say?’ Avory asked.

‘Well, I know the one I had was exactly like this.’

‘You still stick to that?’

‘Yes.’

On re-examination by Atherley-Jones, Mrs Hamilton refused to revise her story about the photograph. This led to an expert witness being called, to testify as to the age of the various photographs that had been produced in court. Mr William Debenham, former member of the Council of the Royal Photographic Society, began by setting out a brief history of the development of photography in the nineteenth century. The early form of photograph, he explained, was the ‘daguerrotype’. This was current in the 1840s, and involved fixing the photographic image on a metal plate. Later, Henry Fox-Talbot invented the ‘calotype’, the first process of printing images onto paper. The Fox-Talbot process had been patented in 1841, and images produced by it were commercially available from 1847. None of the three photographs of the alleged duke and T. C. Druce, however, were Fox-Talbot-type photographs. Rather, they were photographs produced on albumenized paper, a later technique. The first – the large photograph of the clean-shaven man with whiskers, alleged to be the 5th Duke as himself – dated from 1855–1865. The two small photographs of a bearded man, said to be of T. C. Druce, were of the ‘carte de visite’ type – a form of photograph that had not become popular until 1859.

*

Avory’s cross-examination of Mrs Hamilton had exposed flaws in her account of her family history and the genuineness of her story; to say nothing of the unmitigated disaster of Robert Caldwell’s evidence and the dubious tale told by Miss Robinson, the amanuensis who could neither spell nor recognize her own master’s handwriting. The few minor witnesses left to testify for the prosecution did little to repair the damage done to George Hollamby’s case.

A Mr Marks, a fishmonger from Baker Street, testified to seeing lead put in T. C. Druce’s coffin in December 1864 – he remembered it very particularly, as just beforehand he had been married and returned from his honeymoon. The only difficulty, as Avory was quick to point out, was that – according to his marriage certificate – he had in fact been married
after
the death and burial of T. C. Druce, in 1865.

A Mr Batt, the duke’s former tailor, testified that a coat produced in court belonged to the 5th Duke of Portland; he failed, however, to demonstrate that it was the same coat as that worn by T. C. Druce in the photographs. There was also the niggling question of how the Druce party could have obtained a coat of the 5th Duke of Portland’s in the first place. On the death of the 5th Duke, his clothes had been inherited by his old valet, John Harrington. How could one of his coats have ended up in the hands of George Hollamby? The 6th Duke of Portland immediately instructed his land agent, Thomas Warner Turner, to make extensive inquiries in order to find out how this could have come about.

After Batt, an engineer called Rudd testified as to the similarity of the large photograph of the bewhiskered, clean-shaven man with a portrait of the 5th Duke that he had seen at Welbeck Abbey; but he did not think the original portrait of the 5th Duke sported such large whiskers as in the photograph. When cross-examined, the only ‘mystery’ surrounding the 5th Duke’s life that Rudd could think of was what he darkly referred to as the existence of a secret ‘lady fraternity’ at Welbeck. This sent a
frisson
around the courtroom. What could the ‘lady fraternity’ of Welbeck possibly have been? The 5th Duke of Portland, it appeared, had almost as many secrets as T. C. Druce; but leading a double life as a tradesman in Baker Street appeared to be less and less likely to be one of them.

*

On 13 December, the prosecution closed its case and it was time for Atherley-Jones to make his closing submissions. At this point, Gearge Hollamby’s barrister took a highly unusual course of action: he disowned his own star witness. The doubts cast on the integrity of Robert Caldwell, he said – parti-cularly as to his presence in Ireland when he claimed to have been treating the Duke at Welbeck, and his likely fathering of the child buried in the Londonderry cemetery – were such that he, Atherley-Jones, could no longer in conscience place any further reliance on his evidence. Avory had therefore scored a triumph, and a serious blow had been struck to the case for the prosecution.

The announcement that Caldwell’s evidence was to be withdrawn caused a general stir in court, in the midst of which sharp-eyed observers would have spotted Edwin Freshfield exchanging whispered words with a solid-looking man sitting next to him. The man, who had a moustache and was wearing a blue serge suit, had only appeared in court late in the proceedings. He inclined his head towards Edwin and nodded. The pair then hastily donned their top hats, and slipped silently out of the courtroom.

It was now time for the defence to present its case. The witnesses called on Herbert Druce’s behalf created a powerful impression. Catherine Bayly, the now elderly nurse who had attended T. C. Druce in what the defence alleged to be his last illness, and who had given potent evidence of his final hours at the hearing before Mr Justice Barnes, came to give evidence once again. Now nearly seventy-seven years of age, her evidence was as simple and powerful as it had been before. T. C. Druce had died on the night of 28 December 1864, just before 2 a.m., in his bedroom on the second floor of Holcombe House. She herself had held his hand as his life ebbed away. He had been attended by the doctors Shaw and Blasson, along with two hospital nurses. One of the nurses had contracted
blood poisoning from tending him, and had subsequently died. Shortly after T. C. Druce died, Herbert Druce entered the room. Druce’s wife Annie May also came in, but did not stay – for the complaint from which T. C. Druce was suffering caused such a putrid smell that it was extremely unpleasant to stay in the room. After Druce’s death, Dr Shaw had come to the house, and he and Nurse Bayly had laid the body out. Because of its offensive condition, it was wrapped in chloride of lime, before being placed in a double shell and sealed in the wooden coffin. Cross-examined on the question of why she locked the doors of the room in which the coffin lay, the nurse denied that this was to keep out the Crickmer children, or that T. C. Druce’s daughter Fanny had been refused admission to see the body. Her evidence, when read out together with her testimony to the probate court in Anna Maria’s case, had barely altered since 1901.

‘You made the same statement then as you make today?’ Horace Avory asked her.

‘Yes, of course,’ came her cracked and worn reply. ‘I said the same thing then as I have said today. There was nothing else to say.’

The proceedings were now interrupted by a new sensation. Horace Avory passed a piece of paper to the magistrate. Glancing at its contents, Mr Plowden did not seem at all displeased. The note read that Herbert Druce – exhausted, presumably, by the endless years of litigation – had finally given permission for the Druce vault to be opened. In coming to this decision, Herbert had no doubt been encouraged by the opinion of Mr Plowden, who had remarked during the course of the hearing that it would be a very desirable step,
in the interests of justice, for the grave to be opened. The 6th Duke of Portland, through his solicitors, had also been pressing Herbert Druce to consent to the opening of the vault, and had offered to pay the costs of doing so. A further factor that may have influenced Herbert was the excited state of public opinion, which was now at a peak of hostility towards him and his perceived unreasonable refusal to put an end to the affair by the simple act of opening the vault. The court proceedings would now therefore be held over, the magistrate announced, until the vault had been opened and its contents examined.

And so, after ten long years of battling through the courts, it seemed as though Anna Maria Druce’s petition was finally to be granted. The Druce grave at Highgate was, at last, to yield its long-buried secret.

Dead men tell no tales.

English proverb

Before dawn on the morning of Monday, 30 December 1907, a small group of men had already taken possession of the seats positioned before the gates of Highgate Cemetery. A biting wind swept the heights of north London that day, accompanied by cutting particles of sleet. And yet the inclement weather conditions had not deterred curious members of the public, who flocked to the cemetery to witness the most momentous event of the old year passing.

By daylight quite a crowd had assembled, and at 5 a.m. the main gates were opened to let in the electricians who were responsible for the special lighting arrangements. In order to ensure absolute privacy for the exhumation, a vast shed had been constructed over the Druce vault to conceal the operations, with no windows save skylights. It was a structure that some observers could not help but comment on with grim amusement: after all, the ‘underground duke’, with his aversion to daylight, could not have dreamed up a more appropriate backdrop for his putative exhumation.

Two hours after the electricians had departed, a covered van drove up containing the men who were bringing the tools
necessary for the disinterment. Later still, three other vehicles arrived, conveying the officials authorized to attend the great occasion: solicitors, surveyors and other professionals representing the various parties. There was a significant police presence at the cemetery – officers were stationed at both the main entrance and the cemetery superintendent’s lodge, and a mounted patrol stood guard at the perimeter fence.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, the officer in charge, glanced at his pocket watch. He was not in the least disconcerted by the high level of public interest in the event. As a seasoned member of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigations Division, he had been involved in some sensational cases in his time. He had had the luck – or ill luck – to have been employed as a young detective constable in the Whitechapel division of the CID during the Ripper murders, twenty years previously. Those crimes, with their sequence of grisly finds in the form of horribly butchered human remains, were unsolved to this day. For Dew, the murders had turned into a morbid obsession. Jack the Ripper remained, among his many subsequent successes, his one haunting failure.

Born in humble circumstances – he was one of ten children, his father a guard on the railways – Walter Dew had joined the Met at the age of nineteen in 1882. He had worked his way up the force the hard way. Balding, stolid and with a well-clipped handlebar moustache, his plain habit of dress – he wore the same blue serge suit every day – had earned him the punning nickname ‘Blue Serge’ by his colleagues. For many, the swift ascent through the ranks of this rather bland man was a source of bafflement. But in a newspaper feature on the ‘Twelve Greatest Detectives in the World’ eight years later,
a journalist argued that the secret to Dew’s success lay in the very innocuousness of his appearance:

If a ‘swell’ mobman had to be shadowed the usual order was ‘Send Dew. He doesn’t look like a policeman,’ and Dew went into fashionable houses, restaurants, and theatres. He mixed in society without the slightest difficulty, for no one could suspect the faultlessly dressed, military-looking man of being an emissary from Scotland Yard. Certainly his appearance has helped him considerably.

The article continued:

Mr Dew suggests the retired army officer rather than the detective. Imagine a man just above medium height, with a dark moustache, hair turning grey, a strong face tempered with a pair of kindly eyes, a clear-cut figure reminiscent of the barracks, and you have Mr Dew as he is today at the age of fifty-three. A major in mufti is as good a description as any. You will find many like him in the famous military clubs in West End London.

But whatever the secret of Dew’s success, no officer could equal him for staunch loyalty to the only institution that had given him a chance in life – the Met, which he was later to describe as ‘the finest police force in the world’.

Dew had been drafted into the Druce case at a late stage, when it appeared increasingly likely that perjury proceedings would be brought by the Crown against key witnesses for the prosecution such as Robert Caldwell, Mary Robinson
and Mrs Hamilton. He had attended the later court hearings at the Marylebone Police Court, reporting back to Scotland Yard in his neat, round handwriting. He had also attended at St Paul’s Cathedral three days before the day scheduled for the exhumation, on 27 December, when Chancellor Tristram – frail and white-haired now, requiring an arm to lean on as he walked unsteadily along the pavement – had once again heard the petition for a faculty to open the Druce grave. It was now ten years since Anna Maria Druce’s original petition. This time, the sunlight bouncing off the statues of Carrara marble in the cathedral precincts highlighted not the worn and angular features of a middle-aged woman, but the portly figure of William Dankwerts, KC, arguing on behalf of the London Cemetery Company for a faculty to open the grave. The various legal arguments droned on at somewhat super-fluous length: after all, the chancellor had heard them all before. The faculty was, for a second time, duly granted by the chancellor. This time, no one appealed against it.