The Scandalous Duchess of Argyll – Loose Morals or Brain Injury?

In 1963, Britain was gripped by the sensational courtroom drama surrounding the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The newspapers were saturated with lurid revelations regarding the supposed sex lives of the celebrity couple. Although the swinging sixties had dawned and societal norms were shifting, a public, vitriolic clash between members of the aristocracy was something the country was fundamentally unaccustomed to.

When the case finally concluded after five years of legal wrangling, the outcome of the most protracted and expensive divorce in British history was absolute. The reputation of the Duchess was thoroughly ruined. She was shunned by her former circle, referred to in hushed, disparaging tones as the “Scarlet Duchess,” the “Dirty Duchess,” or worse.

The judge denounced her as a “highly sexed woman” who, having ceased to be satisfied with normal sexual relations, had indulged in “disgusting sexual activities” to gratify a “debased sexual appetite.” As a neuropsychiatrist, I wanted to explore the extraordinary life of the Duchess to determine if this behavior was truly a result of loose morals, or if it was, in fact, the tragic consequence of a severe brain injury sustained when she fell forty feet down a lift shaft.

Ethel Margaret Whigham was born in 1912 in Scotland, the only child of George Hay Whigham, an engineer who worked on projects across Egypt, Sudan, and Cuba. Her mother, Helen Hope, was the daughter of a wealthy cotton merchant who had cut her off when she married the penniless Whigham. Relations with the family remained strained, so when the baby was just six weeks old, Helen set off to join her husband in New York.

George’s business acumen soon brought him immense success. In America, his wealth opened doors to society that would have remained firmly closed in Britain, where “new money” was often regarded as vulgar. As a child, Margaret—who decided to drop the “Ethel”—was a bit of a loner. She disliked other children, preferring to read and keep her surroundings neat and orderly; it was not the happiest of households.

Her mother was prone to volatile moods and frequent headaches. Margaret learned early on that she could tell the moment she entered her mother’s room in the morning whether she would be met with warmth or a day of temper and criticism. Her father, however, doted on her, much to the annoyance of her mother, who considered the girl plain and ordinary.

Margaret was naturally left-handed, a trait still heavily stigmatized at the time. Like many children, she was forced to write with her right hand, after which she developed a stutter. This was regarded as shameful, and she was taken to London to be treated by Lionel Logue, who later achieved fame as the speech therapist who helped King George VI. His treatment of Margaret was ultimately unsuccessful.

She was then taken to see Sir John Weir, a royal physician, who prescribed her various powders. All sorts of useless remedies and surgical procedures were marketed at the time by unscrupulous snake-oil salesmen. Although her stutter improved briefly, it soon returned. Margaret quietly accepted her lot while her mother grew increasingly impatient, eventually taking her to see a psychiatrist who recommended Charlie Chaplin movies to improve her mood, though she failed to find them funny.

In 1920, George invested in the chemical industry, buying the patent for cellulose, or “artificial silk,” and overnight transitioned from being rich to super-rich. His daughter, however, remained a lonely child. She befriended Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, but was considered odd, and adults discouraged the friendship. Margaret attended the Hewitt School in New York and performed well academically.

At thirteen, her mother—concerned about the lawlessness of Prohibition-era America—decided to take her to London. There, she attended Miss Wolf’s famous finishing school in Mayfair, learning social etiquette and dancing. The end of her childhood was signaled by her mother giving her “the facts of life,” describing it as an “awful thing we women have to put up with,” advising her to simply “close our eyes and bear it.”

During a school holiday on the Isle of Wight, she met David Niven. She was fifteen and he was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy with no thoughts of Hollywood at that point. In her memoirs, she wrote coyly that she developed a crush on him, though she doubted he even noticed. Later, however, she admitted to a biographer that Niven did notice her and that she became pregnant by him.

Her parents were understandably not amused. She was taken to a clinic to have the matter dealt with and then dispatched to Paris for further finishing school lessons on how to conduct herself in society. She hated the school, feeling that she already knew everything she needed to know. Winters were spent skiing, and summers were spent at the German spa town of Bad Homburg, where her parents took the “cure” while Margaret danced.

Just before her eighteenth birthday in 1930, she was presented to Queen Mary along with other debutantes and was chosen as “Deb of the Year.” It was a significant honor for a girl not yet part of the aristocracy. She was described by the magazine The Bystander as the smartest jeune fille in London. The social pages loved her; she was a celebrity on par with film stars and royalty.

This status was bolstered by her mother, who arranged a coming-out party for four hundred guests. She wore a silver gown designed by Norman Hartnell at the staggering cost of £40,000—nearly £4 million in today’s currency. It was a spectacle that drew widespread criticism for its extravagance, yet Margaret embraced it entirely.

“I had wealth. I had good looks,” she later wrote. “As a young woman, I was constantly photographed, written about, flattered, admired, and included on lists of the ten best-dressed women in the world.” It was a privileged lifestyle that stood in stark contrast to the harsh economic realities faced by the working class during the Great Depression.

She told her biographer that the period between 1930 and 1933 was packed with gaiety and fun. “It was heaven. Undiluted heaven. Three parties a night. Not a serious thought in my head. It was a constant ball.” Playboy princes and millionaires queued up to court the eligible young lady, and she had youthful romances with aviator Glen Kidston, publishing heir Max Aitken, and Prince George, the Duke of Kent.

By the age of nineteen, she had been engaged at least three times, though she seemed to treat these commitments lightly, moving on swiftly when someone more exciting appeared. On a trip to Egypt, she agreed to marry Charles Greville, the 7th Earl of Warwick. The engagement was announced, and a date was set for Westminster Abbey, but last-minute doubts emerged.

The Earl’s own mother had described him as an “ill-mannered liar,” and Margaret ultimately called off the engagement. The press described her in subtly rebuking terms as the most “discussed” young woman of the hour, though this was nothing compared to the savaging she would receive later in life.

With Warwick out of the picture, she moved on to another suitor: the dashing American Charles Sweeney. Sweeney is often described with classic British snobbishness as merely an “amateur American golfer,” but he was also a successful businessman. During the war, he played a major role in the formation of the Eagle Squadrons—Royal Air Force units made up of volunteer American pilots.

The Sweeney family, originally poor Irish immigrants who grew rich from silver mining in Idaho, were Catholics, and Margaret had to convert to Roman Catholicism before they could marry. The ceremony at Brompton Oratory in 1933 was billed as the “society wedding of the year.” Media hype was such that thousands gathered, and traffic in London was blocked for three hours.

With nine bridesmaids, the blushing bride wore a silk gown by Norman Hartnell, adorned with silver-embroidered thistles to symbolize her Scottish heritage. The early years were happy, but she suffered eight miscarriages and a stillbirth before producing two healthy children: Frances, born in 1937, and Brian, who would later become one of the youngest students ever admitted to Oxford University.

There were no hints of scandal at this time. She told her biographer she was a “model wife” until she learned her husband was finding satisfaction elsewhere. During the dark days of the war, the Sweeneys moved into the reinforced Dorchester Hotel. She worked as a volunteer and entertainer at the American Red Cross Club in Mayfair, as did the daughter of the US Ambassador, Kathleen Kennedy.

One day, while visiting her chiropodist, Margaret suffered a near-fatal fall down a lift shaft. She fell forty feet, or twelve meters, and lay groaning in pain at the bottom. The caretaker, hearing noises and assuming it was a cat, stopped the lift from descending to investigate. She was barely conscious. Her fingernails were torn off from clutching at the cable; she had hit the back of her head and fractured several vertebrae.

She was rushed to St. George’s Hospital, where she required thirty stitches to her head. “The only thing that saved me was the lift cable, which broke my fall,” she later remarked. When she regained consciousness, it became apparent that she was paralyzed down one side. Doctors told her she would need to spend at least three months recuperating and might never walk again.

Determined as ever, she was out of the hospital within three weeks—shaken, weak, and having lost her sense of taste and smell, but fully mobile and even able to dance. Her friends, however, felt there was a distinct change in her personality. It was after this fall, when she felt a little stronger, that they claimed she became “sexually voracious.”

Her husband, Charles, agreed, writing in his memoirs that the accident “changed her totally, and not for the better.” Even before the fall, tensions had been mounting. Charles spent his time playing golf or making deals; he had no interest in socializing but was pathologically jealous if any man dared speak to his wife.

Charles was having a long-term affair with Lady Isabella Mills-Laid, though she eventually left him to marry the Earl of Derby. The Sweeneys’ marriage was effectively over, and they divorced amicably in 1947, citing desertion rather than the affairs they privately accused each other of.

After the divorce, Margaret enjoyed her independence in America. She had a serious relationship with Theodore Russo, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whom she described as “highly intelligent, witty, and self-confident to the point of arrogance.” Although he proposed, she feared that as a mother of two, “Ted was not stepfather material.”

She then fell for the Texan-born banker Joseph Thomas, a senior partner at Lehman Brothers. Handsome and athletic, he saved her life when she was swept out by currents while swimming on Long Island. They became engaged and planned to split their time between London and New York until he abruptly married someone else, leaving her to nurse her bruised pride.

In 1947, she met Ian Campbell on the Golden Arrow, the luxury train between London and Paris. As a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Campbell’s regiment had been surrounded and forced to surrender in the early days of the war, and he had been held as a prisoner of war for five years.

He had a reputation as a gambler and a drinker, and he was a regular user of amphetamines. His first two wives alleged that he was physically and mentally abusive. The writer Norman Mailer, who married Campbell’s daughter, described him as one of the “coldest, nastiest men I’ve ever known.”

Those wishing to be charitable have suggested he may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it may have just been his inherent personality. He was still married to his second wife when he met Margaret, but the relationship was already strained, and he was hunting for another wealthy heiress.

In 1949, he became the 11th Duke of Argyll and Chief of Clan Campbell on the death of his childless cousin. Fearing that the Duke’s eccentric nature was a form of madness that could be passed down, his second wife filed for divorce. When it was granted in 1951, he moved quickly and married Margaret before she could change her mind, making her the Duchess of Argyll.

Because of the vitriol later spewed in the divorce court, it is hard to know if there were ever truly happy times in their marriage. There are many conflicting versions of history. According to one biography, the Duke forged a deed of sale, offering important antiques from Inveraray Castle as security before their marriage in exchange for her money.

Suspicious from the start, he is said to have wiretapped her car to see what she was getting up to. The new Duchess did not exactly cover herself in glory either, reportedly forging letters to sow doubt about the fatherhood of the Duke’s sons from his second marriage in an attempt to displace them from the inheritance.

By 1959, the Duke’s temper and preference for his London club rather than his wife had driven them apart. She had moved back into the Mayfair townhouse her parents had bought for her. At some point, the Duke obtained her diaries and a set of compromising photographs. She claimed he broke into her house and forced open a locked drawer; he maintained a different story.

Using the diaries and photos as evidence, he filed for divorce. There was a long, drawn-out legal battle over the admissibility of this evidence. Could her private diaries be used, especially if he had stolen them? These preliminary rounds went on for four years.

In the end, the diaries were used, as were the famous Polaroid photographs. The pictures showed the Duchess naked, apart from her signature three-strand pearl necklace, kneeling in front of a man whose face remained hidden. He was engaging in what many at the time regarded as a “perverted” sexual act.

In 1963, attitudes remained closer to the Victorian era than to the modern day. The recipient of her attention became known as the “Headless Man,” and speculation ran wild in the press. Was he a government minister? An actor? An American? A German? Everyone wanted to know.

Only a few months before, the public had been shocked by the Profumo affair, in which a senior government member—the Secretary of State for War—was involved with a young woman who also shared her bed with a Russian spy. The scandal had led to the fall of the government. People wondered if this was another example of the establishment behaving badly.

The newspapers reveled in the salacious details. The Duke produced a list of eighty-eight men with whom he claimed his wife had consorted, including ministers and members of the royal family. As well as the Headless Man, there were four photographs of a man masturbating with handwritten captions saying he was “thinking of her.”

The Duke produced no evidence of assignations with these lovers other than their names in her diary. Many of the men on his list were gay, but they could not testify to this effect, as homosexuality remained a criminal offense at the time.

The judge, Lord Wheatley, did not need eighty-eight photographs; he only needed one. Summing up in his fifty-thousand-word judgment, he concluded that the evidence established the Duchess of Argyll was a “completely promiscuous woman” whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men.

He continued, “Her attitude to the sanctity of marriage was what moderns would call enlightened, but which in plain language was wholly immoral.” Her reputation was destroyed. Former friends dropped her instantly. Social invitations dried up. Her own daughter, who by this time was a Duchess herself after marrying the Duke of Rutland, distanced herself; the two barely spoke for twenty years.

Her extravagant lifestyle, ill-considered investments, and unwise litigation rapidly depleted the money she inherited from her parents—money that had not already been poured into the restoration of Inveraray Castle. She was forced to open her London house to paid tours and eventually sell it to live in a hotel.

Later in life, she gave interviews for magazines and appeared on TV, doing her best to maintain her once-glamorous image. “But horses are bred to compete,” she once said in an interview, “whether it’s on the flat, whether it’s on jumping… how can you ask a horse? That’s a silly question.”

Her complete lack of funds eventually led to her being ignominiously evicted from the Grosvenor House Hotel. She had to move into a smaller flat with the help of her remaining friends and her first husband, Charles Sweeney. Time eventually caught up with her, and she spent her final years in a nursing home in Pimlico, where she died after a fall in 1993, aged eighty, and virtually penniless.

Fittingly, she was buried beside Charles Sweeney, who had died only four months earlier, in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Margaret Whigham had a truly extraordinary life—a life of wealth, luxury, travel, designer clothes, and the attention of princes. But her biographer, Charles Castle, summed her up: “She had known everybody, been everywhere, had every material advantage bestowed with legendary good looks. Never had so much fortune been used to achieve so little.”

This seems to be borne out by one of her favorite sayings: “Always a poodle, only a poodle, the hat, and three strands of pearls. Together, they are absolutely the essential things in life.”

As Margaret Whigham, Margaret Sweeney, and Margaret Campbell, she was famous. Famous for the glamorous high-society lifestyle of her youth, and infamous after the divorce as the “Dirty Duchess.” Cashing in on her racy reputation, composer Thomas Adès wrote a controversial opera based on her life, which has seen many productions since its 1995 premiere.

The BBC drama A Very British Scandal also revived interest in her story. It was praised by some but criticized by others for avoiding taking sides, portraying the Duchess as neither a tragic victim nor a heroic free spirit. I enjoyed it precisely because it didn’t take sides; people are rarely all good or all bad.

The Duke, however, was in no doubt that she was “all bad.” He ended up hating her with such passion that he called her “S” for Satan and tried to make a case for her being a nymphomaniac and therefore legally insane.

In recent times, the Duchess has been held up as a pioneer of women’s liberation—someone who did exactly what she wanted regardless of public opinion. As always, when there is so much conflicting information, one must make their own mind up about which version to believe.

But one possibility that occurs to me as a neuropsychiatrist is that her fall down the lift shaft in 1943 could have permanently affected her behavior. Her first husband and several friends noted she was never quite the same after the accident. Falling forty feet onto a hard surface is associated with a significant risk of death. Even with modern medical care, mortality would have been high; in wartime London, with services stretched and many hospital wards damaged by bombing, the situation was precarious.

We know she lost her sense of taste and smell for years after the fall. Anosmia—loss of smell caused by damage to the olfactory pathway—is common in frontal head injuries and is often associated with impaired verbal fluency and executive functioning deficits.

Although the Duchess hit the back of her head, her frontal lobes could have been damaged in what is known as a “contre-coup” injury, where the brain moves inside the skull, shearing fragile nerve fibers and causing tiny hemorrhages. Are there other pointers to her having sustained a brain injury?

She was famous for having an expressionless face, and one biographer suggested this was a “Canute-like” attempt on her part to hold back the onset of wrinkles. I am not sure about the wrinkle theory, but decreased emotional expressiveness is common after severe head injuries, as is an impaired ability to recognize the emotions of others.

In Margaret’s case, however, her lack of emotion dated back to childhood; not even Charlie Chaplin could make her smile. Stuttering, too, can occur after a brain injury, but we know this was also present from childhood. What we don’t know is whether these issues worsened after the accident.

What about her notorious clumsiness? Friends said she was prone to trips and stumbles. Could this have arisen from her head injury? Clumsiness and balance problems are indeed common after severe brain injuries, but once again, we do not know if this was something that only emerged after her fall.

What about her behavior? Personality change after traumatic brain injury is common. The more severe the injury, the greater the likelihood of developing distressing or dangerous behaviors. Common effects include becoming more impulsive, irritable, losing drive, becoming apathetic, becoming self-centered, lacking insight, and making poor decisions.

Again, in someone who had such a privileged youth, who never had to work or think about money, it is hard to know if these traits were present beforehand. Another type of behavioral change is “disinhibition”—a reduction or loss of the ability to restrain oneself from following basic impulses.

This can manifest in language, such as being blunt or swearing, or in social behavior, such as a loss of table manners. Disinhibited sexual behaviors can include removing clothes in public, inappropriate propositions, groping, and, in extreme cases, sexual aggression. Sexual behavior can also be affected in other ways, the most common being a reduction in sexual interest, but in some cases, there is a dramatic increase in the desire for sexual activity, or a change in sexual preferences.

So, surely this must be the answer? Her famous maxim to “go to bed early and often” suggests she had hypersexuality as a result of a traumatic brain injury. Case closed. Or is it?

The problem is that much of what is written about the Duchess is either hearsay or prejudiced—written with the intention of either demonizing her or, more recently, casting her as a feminist pioneer ahead of her time.

Assessing the clinical significance of behavioral symptoms after a brain injury is a major part of my job. I would typically have access to thousands of pages of medical notes, high-resolution scans, detailed neuropsychological assessments, nursing reports, and sworn statements. Even with all of that, it can still be difficult to be certain about what is happening in individual cases.

The limited and conflicting information in the case of the Duchess of Argyll makes a definitive diagnosis impossible. I must conclude, therefore, that although it is possible she suffered a brain injury that increased her sexual drive and perhaps contributed to her making unwise decisions about recording her experiences, it is equally possible she was simply enjoying life to the full in the way that she chose.

And as for the judge? Well, it wasn’t his fault. Nobody told him that the Victorian era had actually ended.