He said he was the Marquis St Leger - descended from the famous St Legers of Normandy - and had the paperwork, the plummy voice and the posh friends to prove it. So why did he live with his mum on a housing estate in Swindon? And who was Keith Andrews? Andy Beckett investigates

Andy Beckett
Guardian

Thursday May 4, 2000

Until four years ago, in the small, quiet towns west of Swindon, Wiltshire county council employed a most mysterious social worker. The Marquis St Leger worked with deaf people. He had a qualification from a college in Kent, wore cravats and corduroys, and always arrived for work in a Mini. And that, almost, was as much as anyone knew about him.

The Marquis never socialised with colleagues. He never gave the council a home address. No one ever ran into him in the street, or bumped into an acquaintance of his. Over six years, he did not once see his boss: "I would normally expect to meet with our teams quite regularly," says Dr Ray Jones, the head of Wiltshire social services, "but the Marquis St Leger would always be absent with an illness or appointments elsewhere."

The council had more than 3,000 staff. And the Marquis kept filing the required reports on his charges. His insistence on his title, his plummy tones and manners, his fuzzily detailed stories about weekends abroad and royal functions - these were taken as an aristocrat's vanities. Until 1994: that year, the council received an anonymous letter suggesting they check the Marquis' credentials. Challenged, he produced a vast family pedigree and a supporting letter from his "agent", a Colonel Villiers. But more doubts sprouted. His mileage expenses did not tally with the travel he did for work. His reports seemed to be exaggerating his clients' ailments. His explanations were growing ever more complicated and unlikely. In 1996, the council asked the police to have a look.

Three weeks ago, the "Marquis St Leger", or "Marc St Leger" as he was also known, was convicted of deceitfully obtaining £60,000 in wages from Wiltshire county council. He was also found guilty of falsely claiming £19,000 in benefits. His real name was revealed to be Keith Andrews; his real identity that of a 51 year-old bachelor who lived with his mother in a small housing association property on an estate on the edge of Swindon.

In court, Andrews reportedly cut a sad figure. A slight, short middle-aged man in a grey cardigan, leaning on a crutch and apparently having trouble hearing. He had already been held on remand for a year. His crimes did not sound so heinous: proper con artists do not usually plot to become modestly paid social workers. Andrews was sentenced to 18 months in jail, a term immediately cancelled out by the length of his pre-trial confinement.

Yet he left a cloud of further doubts behind him. He never spoke in court. In police interviews, he evaded even the plainest questions. He maintained, and maintains still, that he really is the Marquis St Leger. In his voice and gestures, he has relentlessly remained in character - and not just since 1990, when he was hired by Wiltshire social services, but for decades before that, with other employers, with aristocratic organisations he managed to join, with the ancient and high-born St Leger family itself. He has deposited a family tree in the British Library "proving" his title. He has written many letters to the St Legers. He has been entertained - and believed - by some of them. In 1996, he even appeared on a BBC Radio 4 programme called Face The Facts, helping to expose another fraudulent aristocrat. Such confidence makes you wonder. How did Andrews manage all this? And did he even convince himself?

Anyone can call themselves an aristocrat, according to British law, "for any purpose not unlawful". Burke's Peerage, for a fee, will help you "find" a Scottish barony. Plenty of the existing nobility, too, have their own status anxieties, ambitions and artificial additions. Titles have always been bought and disputed. There are even two rival Burke's Peerages. A clever person, like Andrews, can profitably wander this hall of mirrors.

Keith Alfred Andrews was born in Erith, on the flat, grey border between Kent and south-east London, in a pebble-dashed box of a council house with a view of mudflats and factory chimneys. His birth certificate is dated February 16 1949. His father is described as "a general labourer". Andrews went to a secondary modern. From the age of 15 he worked in catering, for printers, doing what the police now describe as "menial jobs". He lived in Oxford and London. He was unemployed for a while. And then, around 1974, he went to a solicitor and changed his name to Marc Philip Onslow Berkeley St Leger Curzon.

The St Leger family were temptingly different. In 1066, Sir Robert de St Leger had left his lands near Dieppe in Normandy to accompany William the Conqueror across the Channel. Family tradition had it that St Leger steadied William's arm as he stepped down into the cold English surf. The family coat of arms was in the cloister of Canterbury Cathedral. There were traces of the St Legers in castles and place names all over Kent.

Andrews had come across a history of the dynasty. He noted a small point of vulnerability: during the early 20th century, there had been a St Leger, Richard, who died a bachelor. Andrews invented a wife for him, and offspring, and further generations, using fictitious births and deaths and the scrambled-up names of actual Andrews ancestors, leading ultimately to the Chevalier St Leger, as he first titled himself.

From the mid-70s on, he began to fortify this identity. He photocopied the family crest from Debrett's Peerage and made headed notepaper. He illicitly obtained a second national insurance number in the name of St Leger. He faked the appropriate birth certificate. He typed up his own version of the family tree. And then, in January 1980, he introduced himself to his intended relations.

Moya St Leger received the first letter. "I descend from William St Leger, son of John St Leger," it began, in boldly sloping black ink. "I am just starting to write a family history..." Moya, who was a journalist and also assembling a family history, felt a prickle of suspicion. "I thought he was a bit forward, a bit too familiar," she says now. "I discussed the letter with my teenage children. I thought he was somebody in the family who was doing research. But there was something elusive about him." She makes a slippery gesture with her fingers: "Something I couldn't get to grips with..."

She replied and asked for details confirming his identity. Andrews wrote quickly back: "Dear Moya, I trust as one related to you, you will permit me to use your Christian name..." For the next two decades, his courtly but persistent requests kept arriving. Could he borrow some microfilmed family records? Did she have information on some disputed St Leger land in Ireland? She suggested they meet. He was always unavailable.

In the meantime, Andrews was improving his career prospects. In 1982, as a St Leger, he began a social work course at Mid-Kent college. On qualifying in 1984, he applied for a job with the Salvation Army in Swindon. Captain Richard Cook was on the interview panel: "He was excellent," Cook remembers. "We found him a caring social worker. His work was impeccable." Andrews did extra hours. "He got on all right with people." Some mocked his height. But no one questioned his title.

"He started off as the Chevalier," says Cook, "then he informed us that he had become the Marquis, which was a higher status." There was the odd joke about it - "people called him the marquee" - but Andrews had a clever way of deflecting questions about his surprisingly humble choice of profession. "He said his family had been killed in a road accident in Australia," says Cook. "He mentioned depression and getting involved in drugs, and going to a special clinic."

By the mid-80s, Andrews had become very thorough at crafting his fables. Every October 15, on the anniversary of the supposed car crash, he placed a memorial notice to his wife and children in the Times. He persuaded smart acquaintances to let him borrow their houses for entertaining. He travelled widely, visiting members of the St Leger family - Moya apart. And he grew bold enough to test his persona on other aristocrats: in particular, the Irish Peers Association.

They and he had something in common. Since the 70s, they too had been seeking an improvement in status - a recognition of their "right" to sit in the House of Lords. They had a committee and held grand meetings; Andrews saw a chance to gain credibility by association. Lady Dunboyne, the current secretary, remembers his efforts: "I met him in lots of places. He was interested in finding out whether he was in line for Doneraile [a defunct St Leger title in Ireland]... I really had no idea what his motives were."

Andrews eased his way onto the committee, then into becoming secretary. He was "instrumental", says Lord Dunboyne, in persuading the late Duchess of Beaufort to hold an association gathering at Badminton. Andrews also "raised money for charity". Yet opinions seem to differ, now, as to how his precise status was understood at the time. "Everyone knew he wasn't the Marquis," says Lady Dunboyne. "One knew perfectly that such a title did not exist - he seemed to deceive himself." But her husband still refers to Andrews as "St Leger".

All these levels of fantasy were sustained from two upstairs bedrooms in Swindon. Behind the net curtains and the small, frosted windows, Andrews accumulated boxes of correspondence with aristocrats, family trees in progress, a wilder and wilder fiction linking him to Bavarian royalty, French nobility and a made-up "Ancient Order Of The Crown Of Thorns". At the same time, as plain Keith Andrews, he began a letter-writing campaign to obtain from Wiltshire social services - in fact, from his very own head of department - a stair-lift for his elderly mother. Andrews' letters grew increasingly impatient, but when a meeting was suggested, he said he worked too far away.

He came to feel he could bluff any one. When he got caught speeding, he wrote to complain, as Colonel Villiers, that the Marquis had been undone by badly-placed roadsigns. When the BBC asked him to appear on their programme unmasking the Countess Esterhazy, he told them that he had long been suspicious about her title, and had investigated her genealogy. His claims were broadcast.

But his deceptions had swelled too far. In 1996, Wiltshire county council sacked him for incompetence. In 1997, after probing the council's further allegations, the police arrested him on suspicion of fraud while his mother sat in his car. When she was asked who she was, she said, "I am Amy Andrews, his mother." Then she quickly corrected herself: he was not her son, but her "carer", the Marquis. Yet, back at their house in Swindon, the mantelpiece told another story. The police found it covered in old birthday cards to "Uncle Keith".

He lives in Lincolnshire now, still being kind to his mother, in a bungalow way past Skegness. He is not answering the door. He is still calling himself Marc St Leger. Part of a website under the title "The Marquis St Leger" still beckons in cyberspace, offering "Skills, Experience and Knowledge" to the deaf people of west Wiltshire.

Later this month, the St Legers plan to gather in Eu in France to celebrate their family's millennium. "I wish we could get him out of our hair," says Moya St Leger. "When I heard [after his trial] that he still wanted to be called Marc St Leger, I had this sort of sinking feeling." She sits, very upright, in her tiny but smart London flat, a trim middle-aged woman with fine earrings and a fondness for Ken Livingstone - not, you sense, much like the St Legers Andrews has spent half his life imagining.

But perhaps his fantasy has lived long enough now to acquire a little substance. All aristocratic titles, after all, make overblown claims about their moral authority and permanence. They require a certain suspension of disbelief. And down in Swindon, the woman who now answers the door at his old house has never heard of a Keith Andrews. "There was a guy - a St Clare," she says. "No. A St Leger."