The true story of the Duchess of Argyll, one-time Tatler columnist and the ‘dirty duchess’ at the heart of A Very British Scandal

During her marriage to Sweeney, she had three children, one who was a stillborn girl, as well as a son Brian and a daughter Frances (who went on to marry the Duke of Rutland), and she also suffered eight miscarriages. She also almost died during a horrific accident while visiting her chiropodist, in which she fell down a lift shaft. The couple divorced in 1947, and she went on to become engaged again to Lehman Brothers banker Joseph Thomas, although they never married. 

Her second husband - and the subject of the BBC's A Very British Scandal - was Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. Married in 1951, Margaret was at the height of her fame as a glamorous and stylish socialite, and had even been name-dropped in Cole Porter's song, You're the Top.  The marriage did not last long before fractures began to form, and the duke, suspicious that his wife had been unfaithful, hired a locksmith to break into her private drawers while she was away in New York. Inside, he discovered a cache of evidence of her infidelities, including Polaroid pictures of her with another man. 

The pictures were part of a legal case the duke drew up against the duchess as part of divorce proceedings, alongside a list of 88 men he accused her of having sex with behind his back. The case soon became a tabloid sensation, with Margaret dubbed the ‘dirty duchess’ and the identity of the ‘headless man’ in the Polaroid pictures being widely speculated on (Sir Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, was one of them, as it was reported only the Minister of Defence had access to a Polaroid camera). While granting the divorce, the judge said of Margaret that she 'was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men. Her attitude to the sanctity of marriage was what moderns would call “enlightened” but which in plain language was wholly immoral.' 

After the historic case she never remarried, and lost much of her fortune in later life. She died aged 80 in 1993.