The affair between Britain’s richest heiress, Countess Edwina Mountbatten of Burma, and West Indian cabaret singer and pianist Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, shocked the country in 1932. The story has now been told by voice-online.co.uk as one of the most famous scandals of the 20th Century

An article printed in the People alleged that weeks before Hutch and Edwina had become locked together during sex through a rare medical phenomenon known as vaginismus. This had reportedly led to them being taken from the Mountbatten residence, Brook House, in London’s Park Lane, to a private hospital where doctors separated them.

When King George V saw the article, he ordered Edwina and her husband, Lord Louis, to return to London from his naval posting in Malta immediately, and to sue for libel, in order to clear the royal family of the allegation that Edwina had been exiled from Britain on the orders of the Palace, and Edwina from the claim that she had a black lover.