Forget about the ‘dirty duchess’ - the dastardly duke was the one to watch
Among the many fiercely proud clans of Scotland, there are few as long-established or powerful as the Campbells of Argyllshire.
Totemic, quintessential Scots, the Campbells are legends in their own land, and around the world, too. Some would argue they are practically royal. Indeed, the 9th Duke, the 11th Duke’s great-uncle, married Princess Louise, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria.
The family seat - the stunning Inveraray Castle, built to a design by Vanbrugh (architect of Blenheim Palace) - is set on the banks of Loch Fyne, in 75,000 acres of estate, and the head of the family holds 29 hereditary positions, including Chief of Clan Campbell, Admiral of the Western Coasts and Isles, Master of the Royal Household of Scotland - not to mention Duke of Argyll, one of just 24 non-Royal dukedoms in the United Kingdom.
Most proudly claimed name of all, the present Duke says, is ‘MacCailein Mor’ after the first chief Colin Mor Campbell (‘Colin The Great’) who settled his clan in 1220, at Loch Awe.
Over the centuries noted ancestors have included Sir Neil Campbell, companion and brother-in-law of King Robert the Bruce; Archibald, 2nd Earl of Argyll, who died at Flodden fighting the English; and Archibald, fifth Earl, who fell in defeat when in command of the army of Mary Queen of Scots in 1568. As recently as the 19th century, George, the 8th Duke - a Liberal politician of the Gladstone era - was publishing scientific tracts and positing theories on the future of human flight.
So, for anyone who watched the BBC drama A Very British Scandal, this week, the shocking divorce of the 11th Duke of Argyll from his third wife, Margaret in 1963, seems a little off-message for such a noble family.
After all, the Duchess did became notorious at the time, thanks to salacious photographic evidence which showed her dressed only in pearls, engaged in a sex act with a naked partner, dubbed at the time the Headless Man as his identiity was then unknown.
But it is the Duke himself who comes off far far worse from the programme. Arrogant, cruel, evil perhaps, there is little “great” about this particular ‘MacCailein Mor’. Yet, while Margaret was shamed from the time of the court case until her death at the age of 88 in 1993, her former husband seems to have rather got away with his loathsome behaviour.
So what led the 11th Duke, known as Big Ian to distinguish himself from his son, Little Ian, and born in 1903 with so much to be grateful for - those vast landholdings and gallons of blue blood, develop such a flawed character?
The truth was that Ian was a long shot to become the duke when he was born. As the grandson of Lord Walter Campbell, third son of the 8th Duke, he wasn’t in the direct line of succession. Only a strange series of unfortunate events – and unhappy dukes – meant Big Ian inherited the title, aged 46, in 1949, something he was not prepared for in any way.
The Campbells’ problems began with the 9th Duke who seemingly had it all. Not only was he married to Queen Victoria’s daughter but was also Governor General of Canada and the first President of Rangers Football Club.
However he and his wife couldn’t or didn’t have children – so the title passed to Niall, a nephew, who became the 10th Duke.
Avid viewers of the TV series will remember Niall portrayed as a barking-mad bachelor. There seems to have been some truth in this: dubbed “Scotland’s most picturesque duke” Niall was really Scotland’s craziest duke. He hated the modern age – including cars and phones – and bellowed Italian arias at tourists visiting Inveraray. In later life, he took to a hermit’s existence in his castle.
Perhaps with some prescience, he never married or had children, for fear they might inherit his eccentric genes, which he thought he’d inherited - in turn - from his mother, Janey Sevilla Campbell.
Janey was a beauty, captured by James Abbott McNeill Whistler in Lady in a Yellow Busking. A theatre producer, she was much admired by Oscar Wilde, who called her the Moon Lady, thanks to her bewitching, huge, emerald eyes. But Janey was a card-carrying eccentric, too, with a keen interest in the occult, writing articles about Celtic mythology in the Occult Review.
Niall Argyll was also haunted by the scandalous divorce – almost as scandalous as the Headless Man divorce – of his uncle, Lord Colin Campbell.
Lord Colin was an unpopular Liberal MP. When he became MP for Argyllshire in 1878, disillusioned constituents composed a song about the Campbells: “But their aim, and their claim, which are one and the same,/Are founded in falsehoods of sand, you know./The Campbells are cunning, oho, oho ..”
Things got worse after Lord Colin married Gertrude Elizabeth Blood in 1881. They separated in 1884, because Gertrude thought he’d infected her with syphilis.
Gertrude tried and failed to divorce her husband in a salacious trial, where both sides accused the other of adultery. The jury even visited the Campbells’ Belgravia home to investigate ‘what the butler saw’; a butler alleged he’d seen, through a keyhole, Gertrude cavort with other men. Somehow, the couple remained married until Lord Colin’s death from syphilis in 1895.
It was “the longest, nastiest and most sensational divorce case in English legal history”, according to Big Ian’s daughter-in-law Lady Colin Campbell – better known as Lady C after her stint on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
So, when Big Ian inherited the dukedom in 1949, all wasn’t quite so rosy in the Argyll garden. A Victorian scandal hovered in the background. He’d inherited just after the war, when land values were low and the Labour government wasn’t too enamoured of ducal types. He hadn’t been born at Inveraray nor had he grown up there. So Big Ian had less of the attachment and duty to the estate that previous dukes felt.
Finding himself asset-rich but cash-poor, Big Ian became obsessed with finding sunken treasure in Tobermory Bay – allegedly buried with a Spanish Armada pay ship, which blew up in 1588. The ship was said to be the Almirante di Florencia or the San Juan de Sicilia. Its sinking was blamed on a gunpowder accident, although some say it was ordered by local clan chief, Lachlan Mór Maclean of Duart, who, after the sinking, bartered with the captain to hire his soldiers.
As early as 1608, the 7th Earl of Argyll, claimed salvage rights, finding six cannon in 1645. Twenty years later, the 9th Earl found ‘two brass cannons’ and a ‘great iron gun’.
By 1950, salvage was more sophisticated. Big Ian hired Navy divers to recover items then valued at $9m. He even employed Buster Crabb, the famed frogman who disappeared in 1956, diving in an MI6 mission around a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth. Nothing of value was found. (The family passion goes on: the current duke has carried out expeditions in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2014 – some Spanish artefacts were found but none of the fabled treasure, said now to be worth ￡30m.)
With two marriages behind him and no treasure ahead, Big Ian’s marriage to heiress Margaret Whigham in 1951 was hardly a surprise.
No glamorous young aristocrat by this point, Big Ian was recovering from his experiences in the Second World War. A captain in the 8th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he was captured in 1940, after a doomed rearguard action at Saint-Valery-en-Caux, Normandy, and then held as a prisoner-of-war until 1945.
He was already known to be a heavy drinker. “I remember him at the Oban Ball [the great annual Argyll gathering] in the 1950s,” says a Scottish relation of mine. “Very good-looking – and very drunk.”
Lady C adds: “Margaret was also trying to wean him off purple hearts” - a type of amphetamine - “and he was determined to remain on them.”
By 1963, Big Ian was desperately short of cash again; he demanded ￡250,000 from Margaret in return for a quiet divorce.
Lady C says, “When she refused to oblige, telling him, ‘You can’t divorce me. You have no grounds,’ he retorted with words to this effect: you’ll see what I can come up with.”
The 11th Duke then recruited his own daughter to help break into Margaret’s flat, hold her hostage and steal her private papers to find the evidence he wanted, including - by chance - the Headless Man photograph.
Big Ian may have been broke and a substance abuser, but what seems to have carried the case was his title. Lady C says, “The judge, a humbly born and devout Roman Catholic, couldn’t wrap his head around a duke being both a cad and a liar. As it is, he bought Big Ian’s lies wholesale.”
But she agrees with the appraisal of the BBC series, that there was something deeply flawed in the duke’s character all along.
“He was like Satan, a name he reserved for Margaret,” says Lady C. “He determinedly set about destroying the woman he had once loved.”
Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Penguin)
