Understandably, Campbell didn’t include the traumatic incident in her 1975 memoirs. Decades later, their cook wrote about the fall-out from that event (“all hell broke loose”) and how the teenager was rushed to a London hospital for a secret abortion. Her mother struggled with her father’s endless affairs, and as a result was cold to their only daughter - one of the Duchess' biographers has claimed that her difficult upbringing left her with a lifelong preference for men.Īt 15, shortly after the family returned to the UK, Campbell fell pregnant on holiday in the Isle of Wight following a fling with an 18-year-old David Niven, who would one day become a major Hollywood star. She was born Margaret Whigham in 1912, the daughter of a Scottish millionaire who moved the family to New York when she was a baby. It is the perfect story for the small screen, not least because the titular scandal began early for Campbell.

Claire Foy is taking on the role of Margaret Campbell, and Paul Bettany is playing her vengeful husband in a show that will air on the BBC early next year.

Now dubbed A Very British Scandal (because the Duchess was Scottish), the series focuses on the acrimonious divorce that rocked the aristocracy and delighted the tabloids with its salacious details. Counsel went so far as to earnestly submit that an allegation of sex taking place 'as early as nine o' clock in the morning' was extremely unlikely.Īll this is set to be dramatised in a follow-up to the highly acclaimed BBC drama A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Wishaw. The details of their divorce electrified a still socially conservative Britain: the judge described the Duchess as having a 'sex perversion' and said she was 'a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men'. Margaret Campbell’s reputation never recovered after being branded a nymphomaniac by the Duke, who claimed she’d had 88 lovers over the course of their marriage. Not least because the photograph had been revealed by her then husband, the 11th Duke of Argyll, as evidence of her adultery.

Swinging Sixties be damned - when a Polaroid was released in 1963 of the Duchess of Argyll wearing nothing but a three-strand pearl necklace while performing oral sex on a faceless man, British society was scandalised.

Scandal no thank you english