Family Secrets: The Scandalous History of an Extraordinary Family by Derek Malcolm

‘Some people’s secrets should never be told. The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’

Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. 

Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey.  The victim was the self-titled Count de Borch, Count de Borch, aka Anton Baumberg, a dubious character, womaniser and possibly a white slaver and spy for the Germans, who had seduced the lieutenant's wife, Dorothy.

The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passione, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. 

Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . 

By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair.

From The Church Times 15th September 1917

[The trial that followed the shooting in his Paddington lodgings of the self-styled Count de Borch, Anton Baumberg, by an army officer home from the Front, had provided a distraction from the war news. Was it, some were asking, a case of a husband’s right to avenge his wife’s honour?]

THE trial of Lieutenant [Douglas] Malcolm on the charge of murder let loose a flood of talk about what is known in some other countries as the “unwritten law”. Counsel for the prosecution emphatically affirmed that no such thing is known in the English Courts. If a person’s death is compassed with intention to kill, the slayer is a murderer, and counsel for the defence abstained from resting his case on the plea of the “unwritten law”. He argued that the prisoner, when he shot Baumberg, was acting in self-defence, and the jury accepted this theory, with the result that Lieut. Malcolm was acquitted. It was certainly better so: the law was not strained. This deplorable case raises the question why such people as Baumberg are allowed to be at large. He was known to the police as an undesirable alien, preying on weak women, keeping company with spies, and supporting himself by other infamous practices. He ought long ago to have been placed out of mischief, either by deportation or by internment. His removal through death rids us only of one among many of his sort. Possibly the fact that public attention has been drawn to the existence of this type of persons in our midst may induce the authorities to deal with them effectively.

see also:

A Murderer  in the Family
British Pathe
Like Lover, Like Son
The Sydney Morning Herald Archive
The Daily News, Perth, Archive