‘… you do occasionally find a carrion crow among the eagles.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’
In 1890, Cecil Hambrough had every reason to feel optimistic about his prospects. Born Windsor Dudley Cecil Hambrough in 1873, he was the son and heir of Major Dudley Hambrough. Young, handsome and full of lust for life, he would one day – so he believed – take over as head of his wealthy and revered family.
The Hambroughs came from the Isle of Wight off the English south coast, where they had lived in the grand, gothic Steephill Castle a little outside the booming seaside resort of Ventnor. If that extraordinary building, with its imposing square battlement and high round tower, looked like it was built centuries earlier, it was in fact of rather more recent vintage. Although the Steephill estate had passed through various aristocratic hands over the years, the main accommodation had always been a cottage – albeit a rather splendid one. Then, around 1830, the estate was bought by John Hambrough, Cecil’s great-grandfather, who had made his fortune in banking and through a series of wily property deals.
Hambrough knocked down the cottage, along with several other buildings, to make room for the castle of his imagination. Oak panelling and extravagant carvings adorned the walls of the library and study, a stained-glass window illuminated a grandiose billiard room, and in the dining room an oversized marble chimney piece rose up through a polished pine ceiling. Outside, the driveway was spanned by an arch into which were carved Hambrough’s initials, along with those of his wife, Sophie Townsend. Hambrough had made a success of his life and he was not about to hide his light under a bushel – it was said that the castle had cost a quarter of a million pounds (over £11 million today) and took over two years to build.
But tragedy was to stalk the family. Hambrough would never get to see the product of his labours, since he went blind shortly before the castle was finished in 1835. Nonetheless, Steephill soon became a focal point of island life, attracting many illustrious visitors – among them Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, who rented the castle in the summer of 1874. She so loved her time on the island that she commissioned a London jeweller to create a cup for the winner of the annual Ventnor Steeplechase. The inaugural champion was a mare called Beauty, whom Dudley Hambrough (Cecil’s father) had once owned but had sold on in the belief that she was too slow. It would not be the last time he would back the wrong horse.
By then, John Hambrough had been dead eleven years, with Steephill passing to Dudley when he came of age in 1870 (his father – John’s son – a renowned botanist called Albert, had died in 1861). Dudley also inherited some property in Middlesex (the Stanmore estate) that provided an additional income and retained a prospective interest in the Pipewell estate in Northamptonshire, on the assumption that his ageing, widower uncle died childless. But where John Hambrough had been so financially astute, Dudley was completely inept. Intent on maintaining the family’s social position, he haemorrhaged money in order to be seen in the right places with the right people. A major with the Isle of Wight Rifles, part of the Hampshire Regiment, he also served as a magistrate, but his principal source of income was the money generated by Steephill. In all, he got about £4,500 per year, at a time when most families made do on not more than a few hundred.
But still Dudley could not make his money stretch. As a mover-and-shaker – he was, for example, the first captain of the Royal Isle of Wight Golf Club – he could see no way to rein in his spending. By 1885 he was a crushing £37,000 in debt (some £2 million in modern money). In a last-ditch attempt to get his finances into some sort of order, he mortgaged his life interest in Steephill – his lifelong entitlement to the rents that the estate generated – to the Eagle Insurance Company for £42,000. It was all to no avail. Within twelve months, he had borrowed another £2,500 but it was not long before he fell in arrears with the repayments. With no more credit lines to be plumbed, Hambrough found himself in a true fix. In 1890, his creditors foreclosed and took over his life interest in Steephill.
This was, of course, bad news for the family. Dudley and his wife, Marion, had no choice but to take up temporary tenancies in a series of gradually more depressing addresses in London. Meanwhile, life rumbled on. Dudley was determined that Cecil should follow in his military footsteps but the boy was at that difficult age, flighty and prone to distraction. He had always been kept on a short leash by his parents, who had opted not to send him to school but instead had him educated by a certain Mr Jackson of Ventnor. The boy was not a particularly good student, preferring to be out with his dogs and horses, hunting, fishing and shooting, rather than being stuck indoors. Only his love of botany encouraged him to pick up a book at all. Naive and somewhat guileless, he was nonetheless ready to cut the apron strings as his teenage years rolled by. Moreover, if the parents wanted to instil in him a sense of duty and responsibility, their personal circumstances seriously undermined their authority. In the end, they decided that some outside influence was needed, so they set about finding Cecil a tutor to prepare him for life as an army man.
Mr and Mrs Hambrough also had it in mind to send their two daughters to school on the continent. All of this was far beyond them financially but Dudley was Mr Micawber-esque in his faith that ‘something will turn up’. It was an attitude that did little to sharpen his financial acumen or make him a better judge of character. Instead he had an unfortunate tendency to attach himself to anyone who seemed to offer him a way out of his troubles. As often as not, their words of encouragement were inspired by self-interest rather than altruism.
Yet all was not lost for the Hambroughs. Far from it. The family might have been impecunious but hope abounded in the son. Under the terms of his great-grandfather’s will, the Hambrough estates were held entail. That is to say, they were passed from generation to generation on the male side so that no one generation might sell the estates outright. An individual could choose to lease his interest for the duration of his life but, upon his death, the property would revert to his male heir. For Dudley and Cecil this was vital. Although Dudley had forfeited his life interest to Eagle Insurance, on turning twenty-one Cecil would theoretically be able to leverage credit on the expectation that he would in due course take over the estate. Father and son could even choose to legally disentail, so as to be able to sell the properties outright and start afresh. There was certainly the prospect that, with some careful management, Cecil could come into some serious money – even enough to dig his father out of the mess into which he had got himself. All Cecil needed to do was stay alive. It could not have been simpler.
Had Dudley been of a more patient disposition, his problems would surely have been solved or at least relieved. Relations might sometimes have been fraught with his boy, who no doubt felt intense frustration with his profligate parents. They were all in mourning for a glorious lifestyle now lost – at least for the time being. But things had not become so bad as to think that Cecil couldn’t manage his birthright – which would have included Stanmore in Middlesex, as well as the claim to Pipewell in Northamptonshire – to restore them to something approaching their old standing.
But among his many failings, Dudley was not patient. At a time when he would have been best served by sitting on his hands, he attempted to remedy the mess of his own making. The Eagle Insurance foreclosure ought to have been the low point of his life. Instead, it was merely the starting point for a catalogue of ill-judged decisions that heaped unimaginable grief on the Hambroughs.
In a story full of ‘if onlys’, Dudley Hambrough must surely have wondered how things might have been different if only he had never encountered the grandly named Beresford Loftus Tottenham (or Tot, as he was known to his acquaintances). A financial agent with the firm Kempton & Co., based in Westminster, he had an outward veneer of respectability. He claimed, for instance, the former Tory Member of Parliament and one of Britain’s largest landowners, Arthur Loftus Tottenham, among his relations. Yet Beresford Tottenham, incorrigibly shady, was the very model of a Victorian rogue.
Only in his thirties when he met Hambrough, Tot had already crammed in an extraordinary life. After a stint with the Tenth Hussars cavalry regiment, he followed his former commander, Valentine Baker, to Turkey (Baker had been dishonourably discharged from the British army in 1875 after being convicted of indecently assaulting a young woman on a railway carriage somewhere near Croydon). There Tot became a fully paid-up member of the Ottoman army under Baker Pasha, as Valentine now modelled himself. Tottenham eased into life as a mercenary and only a year before he encountered Hambrough in London, he was helping the Ottomans suppress an uprising in Crete. There were also rumours that he took himself off to Venezuela for a while. But by 1889 he had dreams of making money in a less immediately hazardous environment.
Setting himself up in business in Westminster, Tottenham dispensed advice to a roster of clients in the guise of a financial agent, but he was essentially a moneylender with his eye on the prize. How the pound signs must have flashed before him when Hambrough came on the scene. If he could somehow find a way to untangle the incompetent Major’s financial dealings, he might yet win back Steephill for his grateful customer and earn himself a hefty – perhaps life-changing – commission in the process.
Tottenham quickly inveigled himself into Hambrough’s confidence. When Dudley shared his hopes of getting a tutor for Cecil, Tottenham found himself able to offer a seemingly perfect solution. He had recently been introduced to a fellow by the name of Alfred Monson – a man, as luck would have it, who had spent the previous few years building up a name for himself as a personal tutor to the sons of well-connected families.
To an aspirational parent like Hambrough, Monson seemed like a dream. He was presented as a product of some of England’s finest educational establishments, including the University of Oxford, and his uncle was Lord Oxenbridge, who would become the Queen’s Master of the Horse in 1892, while his maternal grandfather had been Lord Galway. There were also familial ties to the Duchess of Lincoln, while another uncle served as an ambassador on the continent. Monson’s own father was the Rev. Thomas Monson, formerly Rector of Kirby-under-Dale in Yorkshire, himself the son of a bishop. Respectability was ingrained in the family line.
Monson began working as a tutor after turning his back on what had seemed a promising civil service career as a colonial administrator in South Africa at the start of the 1880s. Self-possessed, eloquent and smart, he was ideally placed to persuade Major Hambrough that the search for a ‘guiding hand’ for his son was over. All at once he gave the impression of modesty and gravitas. As an acquaintance who knew him would later say, he exuded the broad-ranging knowledge of the teacher, the exactitude of the lawyer and the wisdom of the philosopher.
And if Monson’s charisma and accomplishments weren’t enough on their own, the presence of his wife, Agnes, was sure to seal the deal. Elegant, comely and fashionable, she was used to turning heads wherever she went. She, too, came from good stock. The daughter of a self-made mine-owner from Barnsley in Yorkshire, she was raised in the affluent village of Sherburn within a family considered pillars of local society. Her father, William, had died in 1882, leaving his wife and children in a healthy financial state. But by then, Agnes had already bound herself to Monson.
Besotted with him, in 1881 she had followed him to Cape Town (then part of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa), where they married shortly before Alfred decided that life abroad was not for him. Once back in England, he had attempted to get a number of businesses off the ground alongside his teaching, but with little success. By the time the Monsons met Hambrough, they were living at a property called The Woodlands, near Harrogate in Yorkshire. There they enjoyed a seemingly comfortable lifestyle, socializing with the local great and good while earning a reputation for largesse. It was all just the job for Hambrough, who agreed to entrust Cecil to the Monsons’ supervision.
Terms and conditions were quickly ironed out. Alfred was to be retained on a fee of £300 per year (a sum that must surely have caused the Major to wince in private) and Cecil would travel to Yorkshire to take up residence with the Monsons. After a brief stay at The Woodlands, Cecil and his guardians moved to a new home, Riseley Hall near Ripley. Monson continued to spend freely on good food and drink, and encouraged Cecil to join him in manly pursuits such as horsemanship and hunting – not that Cecil needed much urging. It was not long before Cecil came to regard the Monsons not so much as in loco parentis but as genuine friends. That they offered him the footloose and fancy-free existence that his own mother and father could no longer afford only cemented their appeal.
For a while, it seemed like everyone was reaping the benefits of this arrangement. Cecil had apparently fitted into Monson family life with consummate ease, they meanwhile had a new paying pupil, and the Major could rest easy that he was looking out for his son’s future interests – even if the immediate strains on his finances were punishing. Yet it would not be long before the first cracks in the veneer began to show.