Inside the incestuous upstairs, downstairs tryst that could rock British aristocracy

A tradesman of humble origin from Kettering could be about to light the touch paper on one of the biggest scandals ever to hit Britain’s aristocracy, if his claims that he’s related to the 10th Duke of Buccleuch are proven via a legally forced DNA test.

Robbie Calder, 65, who runs a company laying tarmac and asphalting roofs in the Northamptonshire market town, has long since claimed he’s related to Richard Montagu Douglas Scott, 71, who is both the 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry.

He says the two men share a bloodline following not one, but two extraordinary upstairs/downstairs affairs between their relatives during the early 20th century.

While illicit encounters between aristocracy and the staff who serve them has been commonplace over the centuries, what makes Calder’s claims potentially explosive is that he says one of the secretive trysts did not just cross class boundaries, but was also incestuous.

The labourer is convinced that his late mother was born as the result of a passionate teenage affair between the 10th Duke’s father, John Montagu Douglas Scott, and his grandmother, Andrina, who worked as a maid at one of the family’s ancestral piles.

The 9th Duke, then the Earl of Dalkeith and affectionately known as ‘Johnny’, was not yet 16 in 1939 when Andrina, also believed to be in her teens, allegedly gave birth to their illegitimate daughter as a result of their clandestine rendezvous.

What neither the aristocrat or his lower class lover realised during their brief entanglement was that they were, alleges Calder, biologically related – half brother and half sister – following a similar Downton Abbey-style dalliance the generation prior.

The space for the father’s name on the subsequent birth certificate remained blank, says Calder, who told Daily Mail columnist Richard Eden last year that the child’s parents had no clue they were more than lovers, saying: ‘They didn’t know it – couldn’t have known it – but they were half-brother and sister.’

Three years later, with Britain in the throes of the Second World War, the young Earl would set sail with the Royal Navy, listed as Ordinary Seaman J. Dalkeith.

Later, Johnny married British model Jane McNeill in 1953 and had four children, the eldest being the current Duke. He finally inherited his father’s title in 1973, becoming the 9th Duke of Buccleuch.

While the true nature of the connection between Robbie Calder and the current 10th Duke, Richard Scott, is yet to be proved, what is clear is that the lives of the two men, just like their parents’, are at polar opposites.

The 10th Duke of Buccleuch resides in inherited opulence as one of Britain’s richest landowners, with four ancestral seats to his name, including Boughton House in Northamptonshire, often dubbed ‘the English Versailles’.

Educated at Eton and Oxford, he owns around 215,000 acres across southern Scotland and a significant art collection, with his estimated wealth of around £213million seeing him placed second on Scotland’s wealthiest people list in 2024.

In 2023, just months after the death of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Marian Frances Kerr, at 68, with whom he shares four children, the Duke was appointed Chancellor of the Order of the Thistle by King Charles, a position he continues to hold.

Meanwhile, Calder has led a more down-to-earth life, running Kettering Asphalt since 1981, a company that specialises in felt and flat roofing, pavements and asphalt driveways.

Unlike the impressive property portfolio the man he claims to be related to owns, Calder lives in a pretty, modest house in a north Northamptonshire village.

What makes asphalter so sure his heritage is definitely entwined with the upper echelons of British society?

Calder claims the apparent attendance of the 9th Duke of Buccleuch, which is pronounced ‘buck-loo’, at his late mother’s funeral in 1983 is all the proof that he needed of the affection shared between the two former lovers.

He told Richard Eden in 2024 that he had arrived at the funeral, which took place in Edinburgh, late after hitchhiking his way north of the border.

A wheelchair-bound man, who he claims was the 9th Duke, sat quietly amongst the mourners with ‘a grey blanket or shawl over his knees’.

Calder added of their brief meeting of eyes: ‘He smiled at me but we didn’t speak.’

However, the 53-year-old said that, in the months that followed, he was offered the chance to meet the man who might be his blood relative, saying a mutual acquaintance who’d worked at the family’s regal Boughton estate had told him the 9th Duke was keen to see him.

He reflected that he didn’t make the association at the time, saying: ‘I’d never heard of the Duke of Buccleuch and I didn’t know he was in a wheelchair’.

The 9th Duke, who served as an MP and was described as a ‘colourful, energetic’ character, became paralysed and wheelchair-bound in 1971, after falling from his horse while hunting.

So convinced is the tradesman that he is biologically related to the 10th Duke of Buccleuch, he has contacted him many times in recent years. His requests to meet remain unanswered.

Now, Calder says he has begun the legal process of forcing the Duke to take a DNA test to out the truth once and for all.

The 53-year-old has submitted a formal plea to the Selkirk Sheriff Court ‘to serve a request to the (Duke) to provide DNA’.

The erstwhile trysts of the two men’s relatives could see the Duke, who attended the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Service of Thanksgiving in Edinburgh in 2022, forced to face skeletons he’d seemingly much prefer stayed firmly in the closet.

The fall-out from the scandalous inter-class affairs amounts to much more than just a modern-day aristocrat having to face his family’s indiscretions, with the shame, according to Calder, also sparking the three tragic early deaths of both his mother and her two sisters.

Speaking again to Richard Eden this week, Calder says the impact of the family secret haunted his mother so much she smoked herself into the grave at just 43; neither of her two siblings saw their 40th birthdays.

‘I have nothing against the Duke,’ Calder told the columnist, saying: ‘I just want to know the truth. Anyone in my position would.’

The Daily Mail has approached the 10th Duke of Buccleuch for comment.

It remains to be seen whether a simple swab from both men will finally put the story to bed, as it’s likely the Duke will wish, or find genetic markers that will confirm a shared bloodline once and for all.