Decline began in the 1880s, although it did not immediately show its inexorable face. It was propelled by the forces of democracy: the doubling of the size of the electorate meant that the social status quo could not hold. The 1881 Irish Land Act gave far greater rights to tenants. The 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ imposed British land taxes. When the House of Lords made trouble over it, Lloyd George simply took them on and cut their powers. ‘Oh these dukes,’ he said, ‘how they oppress us.’ The cry continues, although it no longer has meaning.
Aristocratic life, which had seemed so gloriously spacious, was becoming hedged in by reality. In 1913 the Duke of Bedford was glad to take £2 million for his Covent Garden estate. The First World War killed more aristocrats than any conflict since the Wars of the Roses. It was said that ‘the feudal system vanished in blood and fire, and the landed classes were consumed’.20 This was true in a way, yet in another way the aristocracy en masse were survivors; they would face facts and do what needed to be done; although among them there would be those, like the 7th Earl of Lucan, who would remain preserved in the ancestral amber, rigid as fossils.
The untrammelled life had also been an insular one, in which a country house, filled with the accretions of generations, was the centre of the known universe. Now the world was suddenly bigger. International trade brought down the prices of all that could be grown on British land, a quarter of which was sold in the years around the war. Upper-class families sought to save themselves by marrying American heiresses. Men who understood money, like the Rothschilds, became the source of true power. In 1924 the newly ennobled soap magnate Lord Leverhulme, born the son of a Bolton grocer, bought Grosvenor House on Park Lane, where as recently as 1887 the Duke of Westminster had paraded his Derby-winning horse at a garden tea-party.21 Small wonder that Nancy Mitford, daughter of the impoverished country squire Lord Redesdale, took consolatory delight in conjuring, for her 1948 novel Love in a Cold Climate, the unassailable wealth of the Montdore family: a Mayfair mansion, two country castles, its ‘acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other possessions of the sort. Lord Montdore owned an incredible number of such things, fortunately.’
Fortunate indeed. Elsewhere, the scale of territorial transfer was comparable only with the Norman Conquest. What happened to the Lucans was entirely typical. If the 4th Earl had done a bit less spending in the good times, the family would have had more resilience in the bad; but they were also carried along by forces beyond their control. In 1895 Earl Lucan sold the family’s Macclesfield estate, using the £42,000 proceeds to reduce his mortgages. His son sold off great chunks of Mayo, again to pay off debts. By 1914 the rental income had fallen to a bare £3,336. For in Ireland an even greater set of external pressures was being exerted, culminating in the 1921 treaty that established the Irish Free State in the south. As the Act of Union was being severed, so it was estimated that more than three-quarters of the land, previously in the hands of the Protestant Ascendancy, had been transferred to tenants. The Lucans had been absentee landlords, of course, and this was just as well. In the end, Castlebar House was donated by the 5th Earl to an order of nuns, who converted it into a girls’ school. In 1933 it was burned to the ground. The 3rd Earl would have been spinning and sparking like a Catherine wheel in his Laleham grave. He may have won his grisly war with Ireland, but what had it all been for? By the time that his great-great-grandson assumed the title, his 100,000 tenants had been reduced to 600. The former Lucan rent house became an arena for a different kind of conflict: Castlebar Boxing Club. The most secure and peaceable legacy was the family cricket ground, given to the town by the 5th Earl and still used by the local club.
At Laleham, meanwhile, land was sold off bit by bit. In 1966 the 7th Earl disposed of one of the family’s last possessions in the village, the seventeenth-century house that stands beside the church and was once home to the Lucans’ bailiff. By the time of the earl’s disappearance, little more than the 100 acres of the golf course remained (‘Not’, says his friend Bill Shand Kydd, ‘the road to riches’). Laleham House, which back in the 1920s had taken six years to sell, was eventually also acquired by nuns for use as a school. In 1981 it was converted into flats by Barratt Homes. A community of sleek gated houses stands on the site of the Lucan stables, where the 3rd Earl’s Crimea horses lie buried beneath the immaculate courtyard.22
Having done his duty by the family finances, the 5th Earl went on to do it in every other way. He was the model of the great and good, irreproachable and respectable, the lifelong cricketer who always played by the rules. ‘A long career of public service’, was the unarguable heading for his obituary in The Times. Born in 1860, he went to Sandhurst and, like his forebears, retained close links with the military. He became chairman of the City of London Territorial Army in 1912, holding this position until 1947, just two years before his death. By this time his life’s work was symbolized by the veritable alphabet of letters that had accumulated after his name: C.B., K.B.E., P.C., T.D., D.L., J.P., G.C.V.O.23
As Lord Bingham, he was Conservative MP for Chertsey. As Lord Lucan, he served diligently as government whip in the Lords from 1931 until 1940. After Irish independence, peers had lost the right to sit formally in the House, so in 1934 the 5th Earl was created the 1st Baron Bingham of Melcombe Bingham, after the calm Dorset village from which the family had sprung.
As befitted his courtly rectitude the earl also served upon royalty, both George V and VI. In 1929 he was appointed ‘Captain of His Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms’. When a visiting monarch or statesman arrived in Britain, it was the 5th Earl who was sent to do the infinitely polite greeting at Victoria Station. At the coronation of George VI in 1937, he was there in his Gentlemen-at-Arms role, his own coronet carried by his page, Viscount Althorp, into whose family his great-great-aunt had been slightly grudgingly accepted. The following year he became a Privy Counsellor. More so than any other Lucan, he was Establishment: but he had all the sense of responsibility, and none of the arrogance, that this implies.
He also had none of his father’s inconsequentiality, nor of his grandfather’s lethal fire. When he was obliged to appear in court as a plaintiff, the judge commended him for conducting his case ‘with great tact and ability and good temper’. Anything less like the 3rd Earl could hardly be conceived. Nevertheless he resembled him in other ways: his staunch tirelessness, his determination to live a life publicly, in the sphere of activity. In 1939, at the age of seventy-eight, he fell in the wartime blackout as he left the House of Lords. The Lords lamented, with evident sincerity, the ‘dreadful accident which had deprived them of the services of Lord Lucan’; but he was soon limping back to work, broken leg braced in a support, dogged in his refusal to give in to age and injury.
The same year, he attended a ceremony at the parish church of Wilton. Robert Bingham was commemorated by a statuette on the façade of the church where, in 1229, he had been consecrated Bishop of Salisbury. A memorial tablet was also unveiled, dedicated to two Robert Binghams: the thirteenth-century bishop and his descendant, the twentieth-century American ambassador. Thus nineteen generations of the family were brought together, in quiet ceremony, in an ancient English chancel. It was the sort of occasion for which the 5th Earl was beautifully suited and, in its way, it too represented a high point of sorts for the Lucans.
Yet at the same time, and after a fashion, the earl and his countess, Violet, were homeless. Without Laleham, some of whose furniture was sold in 1938, they moved from house to house in London, staying for a time in Gloucester Place, where the future Veronica Lucan would live in a bedsit before her marriage. Eventually they took a flat behind Selfridge’s department store. Violet lived there until her death in 1972, thirty-three years after her husband. The earl himself died at the Clarendon Hotel in Eastbourne. He was eighty-eight years old, and had gone there to convalesce in the soft sea air. His hotel stood just a handful of miles from where the Ford Corsair borrowed
by his grandson would be found, abandoned, at the port of Newhaven.
John Bingham
‘He should have had a trade, a profession. The calling of a gambler is madness. Being an Earl, full stop, is madness.’
MURIEL SPARK, Aiding and Abetting, 2000
In October 1934, the future 6th Earl of Lucan and his wife were involved in a road accident in Essex. George Patrick Bingham, known as Pat, had stopped after a collision, and was talking to the other driver when they were knocked down by another car. Both men suffered head injuries and were taken to hospital in Romford. Lady Bingham, who had remained in her husband’s car, was apparently unharmed by the first collision, although later she was found to have a blood clot on the lung. Although Kaitilin Bingham was the kind of stoical, resilient woman who would, as far as was possible, have taken this in her stride, what made it peculiarly disturbing was that she was heavily pregnant at the time of the accident with her first son, Richard John. He was born on 18 December. A telegram of congratulations was sent to the Lucans from Buckingham Palace.
Pat was then based in Colchester, at the White Lodge army quarters. Like all the Lucans, he served in the military, in his case with high distinction in two world wars. Born in 1898, at a house in Mayfair close to where his great-grandfather had lived in old age, he attended Eton, then Sandhurst. During the First World War he was commissioned in the Coldstream Guards. He was wounded in action, and in 1918 awarded the Military Cross. In the 1920s he was aide-de-camp to the governor general of South Africa, where his eldest son would later be so frequently sighted.
During the Second World War, as colonel, he commanded the 1st Battalion of the Coldstreams. He then moved to the Air Ministry, before retiring from the army in 1947. Three years later he became captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard, who in July 1950 were reported as parading before King George VI at Buckingham Palace in their bright Tudor outfits. ‘King’s Bodyguard, Hats off. Three cheers for his Majesty the King,’ ordered the new Lord Lucan, as the king looked on in his naval uniform. Inspection over, crimson standard fluttering in the sun, the yeomen marched through the garden to their quarters at St James’s Palace.
It was all very nice, very pomp and circumstance; and very unlike Pat Lucan. The previous year, on inheriting his title, he had taken the Labour whip in the House of Lords. ‘My father’, says his daughter Jane, his eldest child, born in 1932, ‘was a political person after he retired from the army, and when his father died he could take up the politics.’ If one sought to write a concise history of the Lucan earldom, its thesis might be that each peer behaved, in some fundamental way, in reaction to his predecessor. So where the 1st Earl was uxorious, the 2nd preferred the conquest to the comfortable fireside; where the 2nd Earl was refined, the 3rd burned with aggression; where the 3rd Earl was combative, the 4th was emollient; where the 4th Earl was carefree, the 5th was careful; and where the 5th Earl held, with a benign tenacity, to the values of the past, the 6th believed in stripping them away. That, along with social rise and financial decline, was pretty much how the story went. Interesting, but not atypical; until the 7th Earl, partly in reaction against the 6th, took the story in a direction so extreme as to lead to its abortive, final chapter.
Although Pat Lucan resembled his father in his powerful sense of public duty, his move leftwards was as striking a turnabout as if Carol Thatcher had gone CND marching with Michael Foot. ‘It certainly distressed my grandparents,’ says Jane, sister to the 7th Earl, who has lived for many years in New York and shares her parents’ political affiliations, ‘and the rest of the family. My grandfather was absolutely establishment. And his wife.’ It was unusual, but not unknown, for aristocrats to support a system that would, logically, lead to their obliteration. This was particularly true after a war that had laid Britain bare, when the Labour minister Herbert Morrison could speak of what he called the ‘genuine social idealism’ emerging from the carnage: ‘a revolution of outlook, shifting from the values of private enterprise to the values of socialism.’ But the 6th Earl of Lucan and his wife had been Labour sympathizers as early as the mid-1920s, when the party had a brief shot at minority government under Ramsay MacDonald. The decline of the Lucan fortunes, the sale of Laleham, would have seemed to Pat not a disaster but a corrective.
Like his father, he believed in noblesse oblige; yet at the same time he did not, because being an earl meant nothing to him. This is easier said than lived. Even the least pompous aristocrats cannot help, on occasion, but remind one of who they are. And they enjoy being who they are. They prefer being Lord Venison of Deerpark to Mr Butcher: many people would prefer it, if they were honest about it, which of course they are not. Certainly all the Lucans enjoyed being earls, except Pat.
His forebears were earls by profession, as one might say. Because they were earls, the Lucans were also in the nature of things representative peers for Ireland, the 5th Earl being one of the very last of these. They had land, tenants, responsibilities (even the 3rd Earl would have thought in this way). They were officers, MPs, leaders of men. One could keep quite busy, merely by being an earl. Yet by the time of the 6th Earl, after two world wars, a social semi-revolution and the election, in 1945, of a government dedicated to principles of nationalization, the entire notion of what an earl was had come up for question. What was an earl for? What did an earl do, that could not be done anyway, or indeed not at all? And as soon as such questions are asked – What is the House of Lords? What is a Lord Chancellor, or a Black Rod? What is tradition? – then it becomes hard to answer them, other than by saying that this is the way that things have evolved, and that Britain is probably better at being inexplicable than at being logical.
As is all too apparent today, the class system did not disappear. When Pat Lucan inherited in the middle of the twentieth century, an earl was still a figure to be reckoned with. But something had been lost, the belief that aristocracy had an intrinsic value. Now its value came extrinsically, with the way in which it justified an unjustifiable position.
Pat Lucan, a man in tune with his time, was an earl ahead of it. He not only saw the direction the world was going, he approved of it. Physically less imposing than most of the Lucans, with the handsome face of his son rendered ordinary by humility, he looked more like a decent, slightly worried chief constable than the inheritor of a venerable but bloodied title. He was described as ‘quiet, unassuming, gentle, and kind’: a good man. Although it was fashionable among thinking people to support the left, sometimes a kind of snobbery in itself, Pat actually meant it. He would have agreed without a qualm with this respondent to Mass-Observation,1 replying to the question of what changes would be needed after the war: ‘There’ll have to be more equalness. Things not fair now. Nobody can tell me they are. There’s them with more money what they can ever use. This ain’t right and it’s got to be put right.’ After Pat’s death in January 1964, another member of the House of Lords said: ‘He was always for the under-privileged. If there was a question of a minority being bullied by a majority he was there to speak for them. Wherever there seemed to him to be injustice he was against it.’ Pat would never know that his son, overprivileged in every objective sense, would also come to represent a minority under siege; that the first principle of justice, innocent until proven guilty, would be rejected by the majority in the case of the 7th Earl of Lucan.
It was Kaitilin who had to live with that irony. She was the person who first raised her husband’s political consciousness, a woman of character, two years his junior, whose upbringing had encouraged independent thought. She was not high-born in the manner of her husband’s grandmother, a daughter of the Duke of Richmond; nor did she belong to a family like her mother-in-law’s, the status quo-affirming Spender Clays. Kait’s father, the Honourable Edward Dawson, was a naval captain. ‘The word’, says Jane, ‘was he’d run away to sea at thirteen. And she was the only child, and she was taught to do all the boy-type things as a little girl. She loved it. And while being brought up
in a very unconventional way she acquired a wonderful education, even though she didn’t go to school, of course, because in those days girls didn’t.’
Yet for all that she was not raised to be a simpering debutante, Kait’s grandfather was the 1st Earl of Dartrey, and her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, wife of George V. Meanwhile one of Pat’s sisters, Margaret, married Field-Marshal Alexander of Tunis. His other sister, Barbara, married Colonel John Bevan; her memorial service in 1964, held at a church in Chester Square, was attended by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and the Countess Spencer. The old family connections held firm, keeping the Lucans in the social stratosphere. But the 6th Earl and his wife breathed less rarefied air.
Pat made the clearest possible rejection of his aristocratic past when he gave access to family papers, concerning the Irish famine and the conduct of the Crimean War, to the author Cecil Woodham-Smith. This was an act of remarkable openness, one might even say atonement. Woodham-Smith’s Crimea account The Reason Why was published in 1953, followed nine years later by The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–49. The 3rd Earl of Lucan came out of both books, especially the second, very badly. ‘It is almost impossible’, wrote Woodham-Smith, ‘to picture the deference, the adulation, the extraordinary privileges accorded to the nobility in the first half of the 19th century. A peer was above the law which applied to other men.’ The 6th Earl, in helping these histories to be written, was placing himself firmly in their author’s court.
A Different Class of Murder Page 7