The Duchess, diaries, divorce

The Duchess of Argyll, a British socialite born 110 years ago today, troubles the history books little other than for the way her upper class promiscuity was given such public exposure. As a young woman, she was known for glamour and style. Not yet 30, though, she was divorced once, and married for a second time, to a duke, the Duke of Argyll. This relationship was much troubled. It lasted little more than a decade, and ended up in the courts, scandalous fodder for the tabloid and magazine press. Centre stage in the divorce proceedings were photographs and the Duchess’s diaries (stolen by her husband to provide evidence of her infidelity).

Ethel Margaret Whigham was born in Newton Mearns, Scotland, on 1 December 1912, the only child of George Hay Whigham, a self-made millionaire. However, she spent the first 14 years of her life in New York City, where she was educated privately. She had youthful romances with Prince Aly Khan, millionaire aviator Glen Kidston and publishing heir Max Aitken, and later the second Lord Beaverbrook. During a holiday on the Isle of White, when 15, she had a fling with the future actor David Niven, and fell pregnant. She was taken to a London nursing home for a secret abortion. 

In 1930, Margaret was presented at Court in London. Soon afterwards, her engagement to Charles Guy Fulke Greville, 7th Earl of Warwick, was announced. Nevertheless, it was a wealthy American businessman, Charles Francis Sweeny, that she married (after having converted to Roman Catholicism). For the wedding, she famously wore a Norman Hartnell wedding dress which attracted much publicity, and set her on course for a life of glamour and media attention. Interspersed with many miscarriages, she had three children with Sweeny (one of whom was stillborn). In 1943, she had a near-fatal fall down a lift shaft.

Margaret was divorced from Sweeny in 1947. She was then briefly engaged to a Texas-born banker, Joseph Thomas of Lehman Brothers, and she had a longer term relationship with Theodore Rousseau, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1951, she became the third wife of Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, but it was not be a happy union. He used her money (as he’d done with previous wives) to maintain the family seat, at Inveraray Castle; while she forged letters to throw doubt on Argyll’s paternity of his sons. Apart from various addictions, the Duke was also violent. 

The relationship turned extremely messy, and in 1963 Argyll filed for divorce, accusing his wife of infidelity. It was a huge scandal, attracting widespread media coverage. Granting the divorce, the judge stated that there was evidence to show the Duchess ‘was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men’ - her husband believed there had been 88 of them! In 1975, she published a memoir - Forget Not - but it was poorly received; by 1978, she was so short of money she opened her house for paid tours. She then moved to a hotel suite, from where, in 1990, she was evicted for failing to pay her bills. Her children placed her in a nursing home, where she died, in 1993. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Vanity Fair, Tatler.

In 1994, Pan Books published Charles Castle’s The Duchess Who Dared - The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. This was reprinted by Swift Press in 2021 (to coincide with the TV series A Very British Scandal). It provides some detail on diaries kept by the Duchess which were a key factor in the divorce case. Lyndsy Spence’s biography The Grit in the Pearl: The Scandalous Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, published in 2019 by The History Press, also examines minutely the role of the diaries in the divorce case.

Here is Spence taking up the story: ‘It was in Sydney that the saga of their marriage reached its penultimate conclusion when Ian, looking for a comb on Margaret’s dressing table, noticed her red leather engagement diary for 1956-59. He glanced at it, and among the notes of her travel arrangements and cheques he saw the names of half a dozen men, all of whom Margaret was meeting. It might have appeared harmless, for her duties as a duchess saw her meet with chairmen and other male officials, but the unusual format of her diary gave Ian reasons to think otherwise. She was fastidious about recording her daily life, and each page was divided into four sections, giving the same days of the month for four years, allowing her to compare what she had done on that day the year before and so forth - or to confuse prying eyes. ‘What are you doing with my property? Give it to me,’ Margaret said, as she tried to retrieve the diary from his grip. He accused her of adultery and she did not deny it.’

The Duchess then flew to New York to be with her father, but back in London, Spence says, Argyll searched though his wife’s private belongings, finding four diaries in a desk drawer, two more diaries behind a bookcase, and some polaroid photographs of the Duchess and a man, from the neck down, naked. Secret codes (for intercourse) in the diaries, and these photographs would be the undoing of the Duchess.