THE DUCHESS AND THE HEADLESS MAN

It was a scandal that sent shockwaves around the world – pictures of a naked Duchess Margaret of Argyll engaged in a sex act with a man whose head was obscured.

The images were the trump card of the Duchess’s humiliated second husband Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, during their 1963 divorce case.

He produced a list of 88 of her suspected lovers and graphic Polaroids of her in compromising positions with two other men.

One of the stolen images showed the Duchess performing a sex act on a man whose face is not visible, and there has been much speculation over the years as to his identity.

Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and US airline executive Bill Lyons have all been in the frame.

Margaret married Campbell in 1951 and he set about using her family’s millions to restore his crumbling seat, Inveraray Castle in Argyll and Bute.

Their marriage was unhappy and volatile but it was the Duke ultimately who set about destroying his wife in open court by stealing the x-rated photographs.

The trial ruined her reputation and earned her the nickname “the Dirty Duchess”.

Granting the divorce, Lord Wheatley, the presiding judge, said the evidence established that the Duchess of Argyll “was a completely promiscuous woman whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied with a number of men”.

Margaret never revealed the identity of the headless man. She died in 1993.