Jodie Kidd: My great granddad tried to bribe Churchill

Shipyard owner Rowland Hodge was awarded a baronetcy in 1921 by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, despite being convicted and fined three years earlier for ‘food hoarding’ during shortages in the First World War.

Winston Churchill, then a Government Minister, had already warned Lloyd George in 1918 that he had refused a £5,000 bribe to arrange the hereditary honour for Hodge.

Secret: Jodie discovered her ancestor Rowland Hodge tried to bribe Churchill

Lloyd George's abuse of the honours system led to the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuse) Act that ultimately prompted the investigation in the recent ‘cash for honours’ scandal of Tony Blair’s government.

Miss Kidd, who was dropped as the face of Marks & Spencer last year when she was caught allegedly trying to sell cocaine to a newspaper reporter, said she had often wondered why none of her family spoke about her great-grandfather.

Hodge had been found guilty of concealing more than a ton of flour. Documents from the period show his house also contained 333lb of sugar, 148lb of bacon and ham, 29lb of sago, 19lb of split peas, 32lb of lentils, 19 tins of salmon and 85lb of jam and marmalade.

He was fined £600 and was castigated for his actions at a time of food shortages that were so severe that King George V had urged Britons to eat less bread.

Shamed by the public ridicule, Hodge fled his shipyard on Tyneside and moved to Kent.

Miss Kidd, who unearthed the scandal while researching her family history for BBC1's Who Do You Think You Are?, said: ‘When everything in his life seemed so perfect, Rowland committed food hoarding. It's unbelievable and quite a shocking thing to find out. Yet he still, three years later, received a baronetcy.’

Letters in the Houses of Parliament archives reveal that Winston Churchill and King George V had both been against Lloyd George honouring Rowland Hodge.

King George V's secretary wrote to Lloyd George after Hodge was knighted in 1921 to say the Monarch had found him ‘unattractive’ and the knighthood ‘disgusting’.

A letter from Winston Churchill's secretary, written in December 1918, warned that Churchill was offered £5,000 by one of Hodge's acquaintances if he could secure a baronetcy for the shipbuilder – a request that was given ‘short-shrift’. ‘Old Rowland bribed everyone,’ said Miss Kidd, who appears in the programme on September 24. ‘He was a crafty old b*****.’