A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  In the five years between leaving his job and his wedding, John Bingham lived like the young lord that he was. He had humour, vigour, a straightforward joy in his youthful existence. No money: boundless hope. If his parents ‘wrung their hands’, there was absolutely nothing that they could do. ‘I don’t know’, says Jane, ‘how many long and hard discussions there were about it. I’m sure it was an issue, because they were so totally on the other side. But they would have said, probably, if it makes him happy…’

  What was important was the sense that the times were with him then, as they would not be later. The cloak of austerity had been cast aside, the Conservatives were back in government, the heavy shadow of the atomic bomb gave a carpe diem edge to pleasure. The 1960s, with its skimpy finery, its knock-kneed nymphets and pill-popping mods, had not yet replaced smartness, suits tailored to the last eighth of an inch, ‘model box’ handbags, Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls. Fifties socialites looked like adults and behaved like hedonists, but hedonists who followed certain conventions: their spiritual home remained the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. The threat of levelling tendencies, the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon and Arthur Seaton, would not have impinged. Look Back in Anger would have been a fashionable, perhaps slightly boring couple of hours within the evening –‘Went on a bit, didn’t he, that chap?’ – cleansed away by a supper on the King’s Road and some jovial barking among one’s own kind.

  The summer Season, which today has become italicized, even ironized, by self-awareness, was a simple fact of life. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was an intensely serious business. The last debutantes were presented in 1957, but the girls in white dresses had gone out in high style; the novelist Angela Huth, one of the penultimate group of debs, recalled that ‘in those three months I went to ninety-six balls in the most beautiful houses, where fortunes were spent on flowers – £1,500 at one house – so I will never forget the scent of gardenias. It was wonderful fun… We gave lots of dinners at our house – Lord Lucan was one guest…’15

  John Bingham was firmly in the eyeline of any mother looking for a catch. Nancy Mitford’s Lady Montdore, obsessed with marrying off her daughter, would have noted his louche tendencies but still have put him near the top of her list. ‘He had’, says his Eton friend, ‘a lot of very nice girlfriends in those days. Platonic, you know. People like Caroline Hill [sister to his friend Robin, the future 8th Marquess of Downshire]. They were so fond of him, in a platonic way. You trusted him, and he was fun, one of those sort.’ He was said to have been bedazzled by Lady Zinnia Judd, whose magnificent looks were a match for his own, but marriage was somehow never a likelihood; not with her, nor any of the well-bred fillies who trotted his way. He could have found a conventional Country Life girl, or a staggeringly gorgeous girl, or a girl so rich that he need never again go to work at Harringay dog track. But he didn’t. ‘He was a bit of a loner, really,’ says Christina Shand Kydd. Later he was called a ‘playboy’, but that is not quite accurate. He was also said to have been part of a ‘Chelsea set’, a bunch of self-conscious young fortune-hunters who longed to be seen as cads, like Kim Waterfield, owner of the first ‘mobile’ telephone, perched massively in his car and with the call sign HEIRESS. But that was not Lord Bingham’s thing either. He did his own thing. He was, in fact, what the cads yearned to be.

  Heir to an earldom, after all. Pat Lucan may have disguised himself as a civil servant but his son assumed the façade of what he actually was: an aristocrat. It was rebellion against his parents again, albeit of the perverse kind that sends the rebel strutting defiantly into White’s. In the face of Pat’s exposure of the iniquitous 3rd Earl of Lucan, his son displayed a certain proud pleasure in his ancestor. ‘We had a bit of the Crimea, the six hundred in the valley of death, we had a bit of that,’ says his friend.16 Yet there was something else to this resumption of the nobleman’s mien. Nobody, but nobody, ever looked more like an earl than John Bingham. So he lived up to his own image of what an earl was, in an age when an earl was no longer really anything. To do otherwise would have been a waste, a folly, like running a thoroughbred in a donkey derby. Appearance was destiny.

  Obviously he did not consciously think this. But the way in which he was treated, the frisson that he created when he walked into a casino, the endless stream of tributes to his looks, could not have left him unaware. In 1966 he got the call from De Sica to star in Woman Times Seven, a sophisticated sex comedy whose male cast would eventually include Peter Sellers and Michael Caine. His friend recalls:

  One day he rang me up and said, I’m going to Paris. What are you doing in Paris? He said, well, I’m going to star in a major film. So I said: Elaborate, please. He said, Shirley MacLaine is the star, and it’s the seven men in her life, and I am the archetypal English gentleman. And it’ll probably be a very large fee. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it.

  So he rings up a few days later, and I said how did Paris go? He said: Disaster. I sat on a sofa, with Shirley MacLaine, and I couldn’t speak. He was very funny about it. Very disappointed, he’d been keen to do it, but amused. He just knew, from the moment he sat on the sofa, that it was no-go.

  Nevertheless, to have been asked in the first place, and by a man of refined visual taste, who had directed the classic film Bicycle Thieves, was an extraordinary thing. It says everything about how John Bingham, by then Lord Lucan, must have looked.

  In 1960 he left his parents’ home and took a flat in nearby Park Crescent, the creamy curving Nash terrace opposite Regent’s Park. He drove a drophead Aston Martin coupé – ‘He was a very fast driver, and totally unflappable,’ says his friend – which in those days, in the London before road restrictions at every turn, was a buzz in itself. He motored down the west coast of America. He skied and bobsleighed at St Moritz. He did the Cresta Run, rather well. He travelled to the glittering casinos of Deauville and Monte Carlo, but his gambling was not yet confined within the walls of a club. For all that John Bingham called himself a ‘professional gambler’, it was a role that he was playing as much as a reality. When one is very young, and healthy, and on good terms with life, one does tend to play roles, shedding the consequences as if they were costumes. The fact that a role may become a reality does not occur.

  Gambling was an adjunct to pleasure, not pleasure itself. His friend recalls:

  He told me that I was looking incredibly pale. This was late 1958. He said you’ve got to come out with a group of us and get some sun, and do the Cresta, and that we could finance the entire venture by playing ping-pong in the Palace Hotel. He said, what you have to do is to play badly for three or four nights, and then play well. Unfortunately the Italian fellow we decided to take for a ride – he was doing exactly the same thing. And we got conned. And quite right too.

  The naivety, of thinking that he could pull off this classic sting, that the other fellow wouldn’t have thought to do it also, is typical. For all John Bingham’s apparent cool, he was very much an innocent abroad. His hapless boyish exuberance was later hidden beneath a hardened veneer, but in fact remained oddly intact: he was always there to be taken for a ride.

  On another occasion he went out to America and backed himself at golf. His grandfather had played into old age, and he himself had a handicap of fourteen.

  He thought that he could get out of a bunker, and chip the ball, and guarantee to get down in two. I mean, world-famous people can’t do that. But he went off. He had lent me £1000, as I was pushed for cash. And he sent me a telegram after about three weeks saying ‘Things have not worked out as expected. Please if convenient, but only if convenient, credit my account in Old Broad St with £1000’ … I mean, another financial disaster.

  But perhaps his greatest passion was powerboat racing, physically exhilarating with the speed, the bash of hard salt spray, the ozone and the danger circling one’s head. ‘He was absolutely convinced he was going to win the Daily Express powerboat race.’ This was a 170-mile contest from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, to Torqua
y.

  It was going to cost £7,000 to build the boat, which was a lot of money in those days [1963], and so he said to me, how can I raise £7,000? I happened to know a man at the National and Provincial Bank, and he had lent me some money, unsecured. I said, it’s worth putting this proposition to him. Anyway he raised £10,000.

  The boat, White Migrant, was built by Bruce Colin Campbell, who was based at the Hamble near Southampton. John Bingham ran the boat from the marina at the Hamble and, it was later said, from Newhaven.

  And when this powerboat race took place, I went to Lord’s for the day, and on the placard for the Evening Standard at lunchtime it said ‘Surprise Leader in Powerboat Race’. The stop press said that Bingham was leading, quite comfortably, in a high-class field. And he led for four or five hours. And then sank. I came out of the cricket about 6.30 and it said: ‘Powerboat Sinks’. Well I didn’t even have to look to see…

  White Migrant had overtaken the rest at the start, like a superior car in a Grand Prix. It sank just west of The Needles. John Bingham and his boat-builder were picked up, unhurt, by a retired boat.

  They marked where he went down with a buoy, and the next day, when the insurance assessors sent their person down, there was no trace of the boat. They looked around the whole area and they couldn’t find it. Wasn’t a trace of it. And they said that the cross currents there, and in many places in the Channel, are so strong that they destroy anything.

  And therefore I’m convinced that he went over, into the sea. After the event, you know.

  The powerboat race had ended for John Bingham on 8 September 1963. Twelve weeks later, on 28 November, he married. On 21 January 1964, aged twenty-nine, he became the 7th Earl of Lucan. His gambling, from this point, grew ever more remorseless. The carefree life was over.

  The Clermont

  ‘It’s a pleasure to lose it, by God!’

  GEORGE PAYNE, EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY GAMBLER, AFTER LOSING £40,000 ON THE ROLLS OF TWO DICE

  In fact it was quite natural, traditional, for earls to gamble. In the days when they had everything, only gambling represented a challenge: the thing that would not yield to their touch. It was this aristocratic ideal that John Aspinall sought to reconstruct at the Clermont Club, which opened in 1962, with John Bingham as one of its founder members.

  The club was at 44 Berkeley Square, where had once stood the house of the 1st Earl of Clermont. He, like Lord Lucan, was a gambling earl, although the age in which Lord Clermont lived was far more suited to the breed. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, much of the aristocracy moved between horse races and gentlemen’s clubs as if under a spell, hypnotized into a desire to squander all that they owned. ‘Society’, wrote the historian Trevelyan, ‘was one vast casino.’ On Newmarket Heath, then the open-air playground of the nobility, the equivalent of millions was gambled on match races between two horses. In 1757 the Earl of March, later the 4th Duke of Queensberry, rode his own horse and backed himself to win £1,000, rather as Lord Bingham would later back himself to win a bobsleigh race (and fell flat on his face ten yards in: ‘He came back grinning from ear to ear,’ his friend recalls). In the same era the 3rd Duke of Grafton gave the fullness of his attention to racing, and was prime minister on the side. He procured a pension of £500 per annum from the Treasury for a friend who had lost his fortune on the horses; the code of the club, applied to the country. Earl Ferrers, the last aristocrat to be tried and convicted of murder, owned a racing stud and gambled heavily. In the 1780s Charles James Fox, the most gifted politician of his age and a friend of the 1st Earl of Lucan, set up a stable in Newmarket with a friend who lost £100,000 on the enterprise. Fox himself pulled off one giant win of £16,000, which he instantly gambled away. By the end he had squandered a vast inheritance, and half-ruined the friends who had loaned him money.

  The betting book at Brooks’s, the club that 200 years later would be bombed by the IRA, records a succession of gentlemanly equivalents to the cockroach race across the floor of a prison cell: ‘50 guineas that Mlle. Heinel does not dance at the opera house next winter…’ Ian Maxwell-Scott, a close associate of John Aspinall and actually a worse gambler than his friend Lord Lucan, would bet in that way, on two flies on a wall, two raindrops on a window. ‘He was a chronic gambler, he really was,’ says his then driver. ‘I can remember being at that house one day,’ says the former nanny to his children, ‘when he won £127,000 on the horses, and we had jam for tea. But I can also remember being there when he lost huge sums of money. And Susie [his wife] screaming at him one night, why the fuck don’t you just play backgammon?’

  But to win, and to lose, was the mark of a gentleman. In the 1770s a man left Brooks’s with £12,000, not realizing, or wanting to realize, that he was meant to stay and get rid of it. Beside his name in the club book was written: ‘That he may never return is the ardent wish of the members.’ Men of the proper kind did not slope off smugly into the night with full pockets. ‘Who was that chap?’ the 18th Earl of Derby would later say at the Clermont, after losing £200,000 to the Fiat boss, Gianni Agnelli, who had ‘cut and run’.

  Charles James Fox was the greatest casualty of gambling, in that he had the most to lose; not just money, but the life of achievement that he never quite fulfilled. There were others, however, like the Honourable Berkley Craven, who lost heavily on the 1836 Derby. A contemporary account described how he ‘returned to his house in Connaught Terrace, flung himself on a sofa, and later shot himself with a duelling pistol. His liabilities, about £8,000, were trifling [sic]. His friends would have paid them, had they known.’1

  When, in the early hours of 8 November 1974, Lord Lucan’s mentor Stephen Raphael heard that the police had broken into his friend’s home, his immediate thought was that Lucan had killed himself because of gambling debts. In fact one never really had to pay up, except under threat of moral dishonour (in other circles there would have been the threat of physical harm, but that didn’t apply at the Clermont). There was nothing in law to say that a gambling debt was enforceable; the Gaming Act of 1845 actually specified that it was not enforceable. This did not change until as recently as 2005, which means that throughout the whole of John Aspinall’s career, when he was acting as Lord High Executioner to the aristocratic bank account, nobody need ever have paid him what they owed.

  One evening in the mid-1960s, a Clermont regular, who was then in his twenties, was playing chemin-de-fer with a friend. John Aspinall and Ian Maxwell-Scott were also at the table, together with Aspinall’s mother Lady Osborne, ‘the Chancellor’s granny,2 who was as bent as a corkscrew. She was bliss. She always wore a wig, and when she got smashed, which was most nights, the wig would always go off at one side.’ The chemmy game began:

  And suddenly my friend and I were down £100,000. It goes up very quickly – £8,000, £16,000, £32,000 – you only have to run about eight times. The whole thing happens in seconds. I lost £50,000 in one night, which in those days would buy a street in London – I hadn’t got it. And I practically became suicidal, and I went for a walk down by the Thames and thought of throwing myself in. I got rescued by Andrew Parker-Bowles [former husband of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall] at about six in the morning, which was very nice of him. And what was quite amusing, my friend and I had both lost a fortune, and all that my friend said was, How very tiresome, let me write you out a cheque…

  But my father went to see Aspinall after I lost, tried to negotiate with him. If I’d had half a brain I would have just said to him, fuck off. You can’t, though...

  People paid, just as their forebears had paid. Aspinall was prepared to wait, because he too was a gentleman, but when a young aristocrat went to the club with a gang of heavies, saying he refused to settle a debt of £28,000, Aspinall coolly faced him down.

  ‘One nice man lost a wonderful estate,’ says the Clermont gambler. ‘He owned one of those big estates in north Yorkshire, and his father had made it over to him a year or two before. It was a proper stately hom
e – they had lived there for generations. Anyway he blew the lot. I mean, it was just awful. There were people wiped out, totally wiped out.’

  The gamblers of the Georgian and Regency years, who lost the equivalent of hundreds of millions in a night, had done so with a kind of fine, hilarious flourish. Their behaviour was stark staring mad, but they had enjoyed it in their way, just as Lord Bingham had enjoyed standing on the stone steps at Harringay dogs, beneath the warm creamy lights of the stadium, amid the infinite vitality, the jabbering of ‘9/4 the field’, the frenetic clockwork arms of Trevor the tic-tac man. ‘It’s a pleasure to lose it, by God’ could have been his battle cry, as he chucked carefree fivers into the hands of the bookmakers. There was a lonelier, grimmer determination about his later gambling, as there would be in a particular aristocrat of the later nineteenth century.

  Lord Hastings lost £120,000 on the 1867 Derby, and got no pleasure from it at all. In order to pay the debt, and the £79,000 that he had lost in one night at cards, he had to sell his Scottish estate. Yet after the Derby he had been the first to pat the winning horse, Hermit, on the neck. ‘Hermit fairly broke my heart,’ he said as he was dying, ‘but I never showed it, did I?’

  Never show it: that is the code. As important, or more so, than paying up. There was no surer sign of breeding than to maintain one’s insouciance with the hounds of hell nipping at one’s tailored shoulders. Lord Lucan, it was later said by the 11th Duke of Devonshire, also a Clermont gambler, ‘had the most beautiful manners when he gambled at Aspinall’s. He never showed emotion at any time.’3 Thus the aristocratic façade became, by degrees, a mask. It was better that way. When Lord Hastings lost a further £50,000 at Newmarket in 1867, his knees visibly buckled; he pulled himself together immediately, but in that brief moment of collapse the whole mighty edifice of illusion had been threatened.