In 1963, the Duchess of Argyll turned into accused by way of her husband of cheating on him with 88 different guys.
The accusation came in a divorce case that transfixed Britain. it's at the centre of BBC One's new drama, a really British Scandal, which stars Paul Bettany and Claire Foy. The collection serves as a look at of entrenched misogyny in the 1960s British press and judicial gadget.
Notoriously, as facts for his claims, the duke produced a series of photos displaying the duchess performing fellatio on an unidentified man. He had stolen the Polaroid from her desk, and the media grew to become obsessed with identifying the identification of the person she become with, who was handiest visible from the neck down. He grew to be well-known because the "headless man".
There become hypothesis it could be either the movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jr; a member of the royal family; the Pakistani prince, Aly Khan; Lord Beaverbrook's inheritor, Max Aitken; or the then-secretary of state for the Commonwealth, Winston Churchill's son-in-legislations, Duncan Sandys.
lots of the other men that Ian Douglas Campbell had accused his spouse Margaret of cheating on him with had been homosexual, and had by no means been involved with the duchess, however she selected no longer to problem the accusations to give protection to her pals, as homosexuality become yet to be decriminalised.
The choose on the case, Lord Wheatley, concluded that the duchess became a "completely promiscuous girl" and said she had engaged in "disgusting sexual actions". He delivered: "Her perspective to the sanctity of marriage turned into what moderns would call 'enlightened' but which in simple language was utterly immoral."
The Argyll's bitter divorce case – which also featured accusations of forgery, theft, violence, drug-taking, secret recording and bribery – dominated the entrance pages and society columns in 1963.
The duchess has given that been described because the first woman to be slut-shamed within the British press. She is additionally thought of as the first sufferer of revenge porn.
The Duchess of Argyll and Claire Foy, who's portraying her
(Shutterstock, BBC)
before she met the duke, the duchess had been a debutante and was considered as an "it girl". however, after the divorce, her reputation become left in tatters. Yet she remained defiant, internet hosting lavish parties at her Grosvenor highway domestic until bills pressured her out and he or she grew to become her attentions to animal rights campaigning.
Sarah Phelps, the screenwriter of the BBC's new sequence, noted: "here is a narrative about a lady who refused to be slut shamed, who refused to go quietly and refused to do as she became instructed. She set hearth to the expectation of her category, gender and her sex.
She put the inner most lives of the prosperous, the landed and the titled all over the place the front pages, now not the untouchable exceptional and good but bare forked animals."
The duchess died aged eighty in 1993, having on no account revealed the identity of the "headless man".
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