A tent in winter: how Constance Marten and Mark Gordon caused baby's death

The Guardian

14-07-2025

By the time baby Victoria died, she and her parents had been reduced to living in a tent in the middle of winter on the South Downs with insufficient clothing and basic supplies.
Constance Marten and Mark Gordon claimed they had no choice but to make their daughter live like this. In the end, she died. But that was not through a lack of money. They could have accessed large sums from Marten's trust fund to provide whatever their daughter needed. Indeed, before they spent a single night in that tent, they had spent thousands on taxis to take them around the country, and on hotels and holiday lets to live in.
So, how did the aristocratic trust-fund beneficiary end up in this position?
Marten and Gordon claimed they felt forced to stay on the move. They tried to avoid spending more than three days in any one council area, believing that any longer would give that local authority jurisdiction over their newborn daughter.
And, while taking whatever steps necessary to access the money may have helped them provide for their daughter, it may also have forced them to face up to difficult questions from the authorities.
Marten and Gordon had already been judged unfit to look after four of their children, who had been taken into care. They felt that should social services learn of Victoria's birth, they would take a keen interest in her welfare.
A jury has decided in their second trial – a first having failed to reach verdicts on the manslaughter charges – that, when it came to it, Marten and Gordon decided it was better for Victoria to be in mortal danger with them than in relative safety under social services' care. The lengths to which they went to ensure this amounted to gross negligence. And cost their baby her life.
Marten, known as 'Toots' to her friends, spent her early childhood at Crichel House, a palatial 18th-century Georgian estate in Dorset. Her father, Napier Marten, who describes himself as a film producer, is from aristocratic stock; his mother was a playmate of Princess Margaret and goddaughter to the Queen Mother.
But, after inheriting the £115m family estate, Napier gave it up after a mid-life awakening in 1996, when Constance was nine. She has three younger brothers: Maximilian, Freddie and Tobias.
Napier left home and travelled the world, reportedly on a journey of spiritual discovery, pursuing his love of nature, heading first to Australia. At one time he was living in a lorry. He worked as a chef, and trained in craniosacral therapy, according to reports.
On his return, he passed the estate to his eldest son, Max, who reportedly sold it to a US hedge fund billionaire for £34m in 2013.
Constance Marten attended the £30,000-a-year St Mary's school in Shaftesbury and studied Arabic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Leeds. At 21, she featured in the society magazine Tatler as its 'babe of the month'. In the feature, she described her favourite place as being on top of the Matterhorn, which she had recently climbed; her best party as 'Viscount Cranbourne's party in Dorset – the theme was the Feast of Bacchus'.
She has described herself as a freelance journalist and photographer and also took an acting course at a school in Essex. But, in 2016, it is said Marten suddenly dropped out. Her classmates said she had 'changed' and was in an erratic relationship with a man they had never met. She reportedly went off-grid and became estranged from her family.
That man was Mark Gordon. The court heard he had come from a background in which his mother – whom he described as a hard-working nurse who was passionate and empathetic – had instilled compassion in him. 'The idea I was underprivileged was not the case. My mother had two or three houses. She always provided for us. She showed me empathy.'
Marten and Gordon reportedly met in a shop selling incense in 2014 and they had a marriage ceremony in Peru two years later, although it was not legally binding.
During their retrial, which witnessed the unusual sight of one parent and defendant cross-examining the other after Gordon's barrister withdrew and he began representing himself, Marten told the court her family had never accepted her partner, claiming they were 'highly embarrassed about the fact I had children with Mark and the fact they do not come from an upper-class, privileged background'.
According to the Evening Standard, Gordon and Marten lived together in Ilford, east London, until 2020, with neighbours telling the paper that they often heard shouting coming from the flat.
Concerns about their fitness as parents were first raised in mid-2017, when Marten turned up at an antenatal unit pregnant, having sought no care up to that point. A national hospital alert was issued later that year when they disappeared.
Marten next appeared at a hospital in Wales that winter – this time she was heavily pregnant. She had put on an Irish accent and was claiming to be from a Traveller community to hide her identity. It transpired she and Gordon were living in a tent and social workers had to explain to her this was unsuitable for a baby.
She and the baby, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, were placed in a series of mother-and-baby placements with foster carers to help her. The moment was key to what followed because it was the point when social services began to play an active role in the care of Marten and Gordon's children.
It was also important because it was the moment it was made plain to Marten it was potentially lethal to take a newborn to live a tent. To do so again, prosecutors argued, would be grossly negligent and would amount to manslaughter. On 14 July, an Old Bailey jury agreed.