Camilla’s grandfather beat his wife unconscious while she was pregnant with the new Queen’s father, triggering their divorce… so is THIS secret family trauma the reason Her Majesty is so vocal against domestic violence?

It’s the cause closest to Queen Camilla’s heart. For more than a decade, she has spoken out against domestic violence, and almost her first act on becoming Queen was to convene a conference at Buckingham Palace to draw world attention to the rising tide of violence against women.

Her new status meant her message was heard by a powerful audience, which included government ministers such as Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, the queens of Jordan and Belgium, Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska and anti-violence campaigner and ex-Spice Girl Melanie Brown.

In a forthright speech, Camilla spoke of ‘the global pandemic of violence against women’ and described her sorrow at meeting many victims and their families. Her sincerity and passion were evident.

Yet it has never been fully explained why Camilla feels so strongly about this issue – perhaps above all others. 

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal a possible reason: an appalling episode of domestic violence in her own family which blighted the life of her father, leaving him at times parentless and in childhood misery.

For more than a decade, Queen Camilla has spoken out against domestic violence, but the reason behind why this cause is so close to her heart has never been fully explained

Writer Philip Morton Shand, Camilla’s grandfather, was a wife-beater and serial philanderer, documents from the National Archives reveal

Official divorce papers detail how Philip Morton Shand violently assaulted his wife by dragging her by her arms out of bed into a spare room in her night-dress, bruising her breast and knees and knocking her head, as a result of which [she] fainted

Major Bruce Shand, who died aged 89 in 2006, was the son of writer Philip Morton Shand and his first wife Edith.

Morton, as he preferred to be known, came from a wealthy background and was educated at Eton and Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Heidelberg University.

Edith came from a different class, a descendant of Essex farmers who grew up in an unfashionable London suburb.

It was an odd match, but it was wartime. The couple married in April 1916. Edith soon became pregnant.

But, as distressing documents retrieved from files in the National Archives by The Mail on Sunday last week show, Camilla’s paternal grandfather was a wife-beater and serial philanderer, leaving a trail of destruction across three marriages.

On August 17, 1916, when Edith was four months pregnant with the baby who’d grow up to be Camilla’s father, her husband attacked her in their mansion flat overlooking Battersea Park in south-west London.

Official divorce papers (Edith sued for divorce in 1919) state: ‘The said Philip Morton Shand violently assaulted [his wife] by dragging her by her arms out of bed into a spare room in her night-dress, bruising her breast and knees and knocking her head, as a result of which [she] fainted.

‘At this time [she] was pregnant, and in view of her condition she was removed under doctor’s advice by [Shand’s] father to his house in Edwardes Place.’

Not surprisingly after such brutality, the marriage was over, after just a few short months.

Shand joined the Royal Fusiliers – ‘a brief and undistinguished service’ as he described it – while Edith was left alone to give birth to their son. 

Almost Camilla’s first act on becoming Queen was to convene a conference at Buckingham Palace to draw world attention to the rising tide of violence against women

Three years later, when Shand returned from the war, he arranged what men of his class did to provide grounds for divorce: he allowed himself to be discovered by a private investigator in a room at London’s Strand Palace Hotel with an unknown woman.

However, this was no orchestrated one-night stand with a lady of easy virtue to comply with divorce court requirements. Shand spent a long and enjoyable weekend with the woman.

So when the case came to court, the terrible episode of domestic violence was overshadowed by the (in those days) far more socially unacceptable event of having been found in bed with another woman. 

Shand himself was an unrepentant, complex character. 

‘An extrovert, raconteur and eccentric, he annoyed many with his outspokenness,’ wrote one biographer.

‘His impatience and intolerance were legendary. And he bore all the hallmarks of upper middle-class intolerance – he was racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic – though he was undeniably clever.’

His friend Sir John Betjeman, later Poet Laureate, chose his words carefully when he contributed to Morton’s 1960 obituary in The Times. 

‘His fastidiousness, honest expression of opinion and sharp wit isolated him from the crowd,’ he wrote – in other words poetic licence for ‘he was an objectionable man’. The fallout from this lack of self-control was considerable.

During the time Morton Shand was at war, his estranged wife Edith – Camilla’s grandmother – fell in love with a shell-shocked former infantry officer called Charles Tippet and, after her eventual divorce from Shand, they married.

It meant her son Bruce had an unsettled, unhappy and peripatetic childhood, living some of the time with his grandparents, other times with his mother and stepfather.

In his memoirs, titled Previous Engagements, he fails to mention his mother and barely acknowledges his father. In his mind, he had grown up as an orphan.

His grandparents paid for him to go to Rugby School, which he said he ‘cordially disliked’. He joined the Army at the age of 18 where he finally found the family framework he felt he had been denied.

Meanwhile, Bruce’s bully father blundered on, marrying the daughter of an Indian police administrator. 

That union lasted a couple of years and she successfully sued for divorce in 1924 on the grounds of ‘cruelty, adultery and desertion’.

There was a daughter from the marriage – Camilla’s half-aunt Doris – who is believed never to have met her father. 

Morton Shand briefly paused for breath after this second divorce but then, while living in France, met a rich 29-year-old rejoicing in the name of Georgette Elisabeth Edmée Thérèse Avril.

At their wedding in Lyon, Morton described himself as a company director, adding to the numerous other labels he’d given himself over the years – writer, journalist, private secretary and literary agent among them.

Georgette’s father owned a velvet factory and Morton was put on the board – but even that couldn’t secure his fidelity. 

After the couple moved to London, he began an affair with the wife of a retired naval officer, sharing a flat with her not far from his marital home.

At the time, his mistress was pregnant. It is possible he was the girl’s father. In any case, Morton and the woman did go on to have a daughter together – who grew up to be the wife of Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe.

When the inevitable divorce proceedings between Shand and Georgette came around, the same old story of adultery was easily proved – though no cruelty was alleged.

At the divorce hearing in the High Court, the judge, Lord Merrivale, tore into Shand: ‘There is, of course, no statutory means of preventing a man like [him] from playing the havoc which he is apparently capable of playing, but perhaps a little wholesome publicity may limit his activities a little – at any rate in this country.’

Georgette was awarded the equivalent of £15,000 a year in maintenance – a sum easily affordable from his wealthy mother’s Liverpool shipping empire family.

If Bruce Shand’s childhood had been miserable, so, too, had his father’s. One biographer described it as ‘unhappy’, explaining: ‘His father’s lifestyle was that of a dilettante while his mother was religious, straitlaced, and energetic.

‘Constantly engaged in the pursuit of good works and personally vague and hopeless, she would express concern over the upbringing of her son but then largely left that responsibility to nannies.’

Philip Morton Shand died in 1960 in Lyon – home of his third wife –with his fourth wife by his side.

Quite what Camilla thinks of the black sheep of the family, only her closest circle know. Perhaps she is pleased her grandfather became a writer of amusing books.

But as official documents in the National Archives show, his ultimate legacy is an act of savagery on a pregnant woman, which may well have inspired Camilla to devote much time to defending the victims of domestic violence.

A spokesman for Queen Camilla said she had no comment to make about her late grandfather.

Christopher Wilson is author of The Windsor Knot: Charles, Camilla, and The Legacy of Diana. Additional research by Cameron Charters.