In reference to the death of Elwes’s cousin Saul, who killed himself in 1966, she wrote: ‘I ran into Dominick Elwes in the street & he said: they drove poor Saul mad (he said with a wealth of feeling) by finding him jobs. Of course one quite sees that would drive D. mad…’ Yet to her friend Raymond Mortimer she described Elwes as ‘that super crook (for whom I have a slight weakness)’.
Elwes had any amount of attraction, and was outlandishly funny, which went a long way with Nancy Mitford. Like James Goldsmith, although unlike him in every other way, he staged a highly public elopement. He ran away with eighteen-year-old Tessa Kennedy in 1958, marrying her in Havana in defiance of a High Court injunction, which he was obliged to purge with two weeks in Brixton jail. This was typical: a rush of excitement draining away in sad and pointless solitude. He lived a kind of high-end vagabond life, moving from place to place, seeking who-knew-what. He was wanted everywhere, including the Clermont, because he was so amusing. He wanted to be there, not so much for the gambling but because he was dependent on the comfort of friends. He was also restless and indebted and rather unhappy. ‘He was warm, friendly, sexy, clever – and drunk,’ says Marilyn Lownes. ‘Alcoholic I think. He must have been depressive – you don’t kill yourself in life because of one thing.’ At the inquest into his death, like the Sandra Rivett inquest held at Horseferry Crown Court, Elwes’s brother said that he was ‘an extremely extroverted character, and like many extroverts always had a depressing [sic] side to his character’.
As Stephen Ward had been the sacrificial victim in the Profumo affair twelve years earlier, so Elwes would become the Clermont set scapegoat after the Lucan case. He was Lord Balcairn in Vile Bodies, who put his head in an oven after being cast adrift from aristocratic society. That, at least, is the myth. Elwes had spoken to the Sunday Times Magazine for its incisive, coldly damning account of the circle, published in June 1975. He was paid £500, which he no doubt needed, for his somewhat caricatured portrait of the club members.25 He was also said to have handed over holiday snaps to illustrate the article, including one (cleverly cropped on the cover) that appeared to show Lady Annabel Goldsmith cooing lubriciously into the face of Lord Lucan. In fact the pictures had been lent by Veronica Lucan, who on subsequent occasions would reveal more photographs to the press.26
Goldsmith, predictably, went berserk. Annabel’s son Robin Birley wrote to Elwes, accusing him of selling the photographs. Robin’s father Mark banned Elwes from his two clubs and issued spiteful writs for two small debts. In other words, the angered parties were Annabel’s relations. John Aspinall had covered his own back and humoured Goldsmith in his rage, but that was all. Nor was Elwes banned from the Clermont, which anyway was now owned by Playboy. His ostracism, therefore, was not exactly from the Lucan set. Two of its members, Benson and Meinertzhagen, believed his denials and staunchly took his side in the affair. His suicide note specifically read: ‘I curse Mark and Jimmy from beyond the grave. I hope they are happy now.’ Many years later, in a typical conflation of the circle and its individual members, an article about Elwes stated that ‘a friend who considered him to be close to a nervous breakdown sent him abroad to recuperate. When he returned in August, he found the Lucan set implacably turned against him.’27 Yet the ‘friend’ had been Meinertzhagen: one of the ‘Lucan set’.
Of course none of this – not the Sunday Times Magazine article, nor the furore over the photographs – would have happened had Sandra Rivett not been murdered. Nor would Elwes have given another interview in late June 1975, this time to the Daily Express. It was headlined: ‘Lucan, Please Call Me’. Elwes talked with the same lack of self-awareness as he had shown with the Sunday Times; one can picture him getting carried away in the presence of a sympathetic listener, rather than telling them to get lost as he ought to have done. This time, however, he sounded semi-hysterical with nerves. ‘I am one of Lucky Lucan’s best friends… Why, oh why, doesn’t he get in touch with any of us? We are all prepared to accept his alibi and help him in any way possible.’ Then he added: ‘This is a ghastly business with police asking me questions all the time.’ Elwes was weak, and it wasn’t just Goldsmith and Birley who sensed it. The police and the press did too. They were probing away at him like a tongue at a sore tooth. They knew that they could get him to talk. Among other things, he told the police about the lunch held at Aspinall’s house on the day after the murder. This did not lead to his ostracism. Yet it may have led to the belief that he had given the photographs to the Sunday Times; that he was unsound. And the relentless, cumulative pressure upon a lightweight but sensitive person became scarcely tolerable. In that more nuanced sense, therefore, Dominick Elwes was indeed the scapegoat for the Lucan affair.
At his memorial service in Farm Street, his friend Kenneth Tynan lamented his ‘pathetic adulation of a worthless group of people’. John Aspinall’s address, which contained the very true remark that ‘modern society does not repay someone like him’, was rewarded with a punch on the jaw from Elwes’s cousin, Tremayne Rodd: ‘That’s what I think of your bloody speech, Aspinall.’ Tynan, and possibly Rodd, blamed the set directly for Elwes’s death, and the belief has persisted, although it is only part of the truth.
Shortly before he died Elwes had written a letter to Aspinall, in which he referred, somewhat heartbreakingly, to ‘the incredible, wonderful times spent, more often than not, with you, Aspers’. Yet the irony is that if anybody blabbed to the Sunday Times Magazine, it was John Aspinall himself. He said far more than Elwes, and it was infinitely more damaging. When, at his first wedding in 1956, a group of bailiffs seeking him out served writs on Elwes by mistake, this had been a small prefiguring of what was to come.
In the Sunday Times article, Aspinall spoke in his usual florid vein, describing Lord Lucan as ‘a leader of men’, extolling his ‘loyalty, honesty, reliability’. Aspinall was not stupid; he must have known how this would sound in the context of a young woman’s murder. His final remark, quoted at the very end, was: ‘Of course, out of politeness one says it’s very tough on the nanny.’ If anybody damned the set to its eternal perception as the symbol of a dying, unlamented world, it was he, its architect.
The members who remain to be mentioned are Ian Maxwell-Scott and Lord Lucan himself, who visited the Maxwell-Scott house on the night of the murder. Although Maxwell-Scott is rarely mentioned as an individual, he did indeed display all the arrogance of the Clermont myth. He was, in truth, what Lucan is said to be: a mad gambler and snob who treated his wife appallingly.
‘Oh no, not the Ritz,’ he had whined to the young John Aspinall, who in the early 1950s had found him sitting alone in an unspeakable slum of a flat, clutching the Greyhound Express, and had offered a stay at the hotel (where the pair remained for seven months). ‘They don’t know what they’re doing with their wine.’ Maxwell-Scott certainly did understand wine, and created a fabulous cellar at the Clermont. Aspinall also employed him as a director of the club. For a compulsive gambler this was a dream job, although a Balliol man might have been expected to do more with his life. ‘The fellow is not to my taste,’ said Sir Andrew Clark, who refused to attend Maxwell-Scott’s wedding to his daughter Susan. ‘He has no proper job. He is a gambler. I prefer the man who does an honest day’s work to any amount of nobility or family names.’
Maxwell-Scott, a Roman Catholic like his wife Susie, was a relation of the Duke of Norfolk. His mother, Ferga, was a descendant of Sir Walter Scott. She lived in an annexe of Grants Hill, the beautiful house in Uckfield bought with the payout received when Maxwell-
Scott insured against his wife having twins, who were born in 1966. Ten years later Maxwell-Scott appeared before magistrates, threatened with jail over a £301.49 rates bill, which was paid at the last minute. He had been living on social security for the past five months. After this the Maxwell-Scotts moved to Wales, and effectively separated. The house was sold by mortgagees, the means to maintain it frittered away.
Maxwell-Scott gambled like a Lord Has
tings: incessantly, joylessly and obsessively. ‘He couldn’t help himself,’ says his then driver:
At the weekends I used to take him to Brighton dogs. Dogs on Saturday, church on Sunday. And he’d come into the betting shop on Saturday, place a cash bet, because he’d probably exceeded his limit with his phone account. He had two cars, a Jensen Interceptor and a Bristol, and one day I was passing the car showroom – and Ian’s two cars were in there. I said, what are they doing here? Oh, they said, we had to go and collect them…
His marriage, too, was an unhappy one. Susan Maxwell-Scott was a highly intelligent woman, a qualified barrister, stuck in a life that frustrated her, finding a release in alcohol and occasional flashes of temper or bizarre behaviour (as when the Lucans stayed for the weekend with their children and Susan scrawled on a wall, in shoe polish, ‘Don’t let Lord George fall down the fucking stairs’). Her former nanny says:
Susie had all these children, six of them, and she said to me all I want is to be in London with Ian. She used to go to bed on Monday, and stay in bed till Thursday, when she’d get ready for his coming home. She was drinking, and then she would have something called Fernet Branca – she drank that to sober up quite a lot. And he would arrive on the Friday, and then they’d have a huge row – it used to be such a huge build-up. Often I’d get up the next day and he’d be asleep at the dining-room table.
One night she got drunk with a lot of people from the pub. So I went up to my room and phoned the Clermont and said Ian, you’ve got to come home. Which he did. He came to my room, and I said to him this is untenable, all she wants is to be with you. And he said, but I cannot have her in London. She lets me down all the time. I said, but she loves you. He said I don’t know what to say to you, but I cannot tolerate her behaviour. He and Susie weren’t very well suited, but I don’t know what would have been suited to him.
A friend of Marilyn Lownes, a former bunny who also worked as a lunchtime receptionist at the Clermont, remembers the regular gamblers as ‘gorgeous, some of them. But Ian was a pompous ass. He was got rid of by Playboy. Good riddance.’
Lord Lucan, on the other hand, she recalls as ‘very pleasant’. As Christina Shand Kydd says, ‘All the staff there liked him, the doormen absolutely adored him.’ The Maxwell-Scott nanny supports this. ‘Some of those people would come for weekends, for Glyndebourne. John Aspinall came. I remember him with his new wife, and we all had to forget about his old one… I liked Lord Lucan the best of all the houseguests we had.’ The receptionist remembers him bringing in boxes of shirts to the linkman, Billy Edgson, who would then take them to be laundered. By this time, Lucan no longer lived at Lower Belgrave Street, and the Clermont had become his de facto home.
It had been that way for some time, in fact. It had become an alternative life, an alternative to life. The reasons for this lay in his gambling, of course, but they also lay in his marriage. If the Clermont Club is the imagistic heart of this story, then the real heart lies in that complex alliance with Veronica Lucan.
Marriage
‘Oh Enter Into His Gates With Thanksgiving’
CARVED ON THE ARCHWAY LEADING TO THE CHURCH OF HOLY TRINITY, BROMPTON
The engagement between Lord Bingham and Veronica Duncan was announced in The Times on 14 October 1963. ‘He rang me up one weekend,’ says his old Eton friend, ‘and he said, I thought I ought to let you know, I’ve decided to get married. I said, what do you mean, you’ve decided to get married? Who’s the lucky girl? He said, she’s a very nice girl. But he was sort of matter of fact. The most unemotional conversation. It sounded as if he thought it was the right thing to do, at his age.’
He was almost twenty-nine years old, his fiancée twenty-six. Today that still seems very young, but fifty years ago men typically married at twenty-five, and women at twenty-three. When John Bingham’s friend, Bill Shand Kydd, whom he had first met at St Moritz, married Veronica’s younger sister, Christina, in January 1963, they were precisely those ages. It was through this marriage that John Bingham met Veronica, some three months later. She was, as it were, thrown his way at the Shand Kydd home, Horton Hall in Buckinghamshire, where he would sometimes spend weekends. ‘Bill and Christina were partners,’ says his sister Jane, ‘and he was going around with them, in and out of their house, and there was Veronica – alone.’ One particular golfing weekend, throughout which it rained incessantly, ‘I told him to come down and stay here,’ says Bill, ‘and bring a bird. And he said – well, what about your sister-in-law?’ ‘He obviously fancied her,’ says Christina. ‘She was exceptionally pretty.’
She was doll-like with her extreme smallness, her air of breakability, her white china face tilted up towards the splendid, sculpted height of Lord Bingham. As they began going about together he talked to Veronica about his views, his ideas, his belief that he could make his way in the world as a professional gambler. She listened and nodded understandingly. A few months later, at an engagement dinner at the Mirabelle, Stephen Raphael asked her if she minded her husband-to-be’s habitual gambling, and she replied that he could do whatever he liked. ‘He was absolutely straightforward with her,’ says Christina. ‘He said this is my life, this is how it will be. And people mustn’t come into my life if you feel you can’t do this. And she said she could do it.’
Naturally: he was quite a catch, after all. Breathtakingly handsome and heir to an earldom. Gambling, in such a context, could surely be put up with. Cynical to say, but marrying a catch – a millionaire, a celebrity, a looker, an aristocrat if that takes your fancy – does tend to entail putting up with things. In Agatha Christie’s worldly little novel The Hollow, John Christow is a rich and brilliant doctor, desperately attractive, and an incurable adulterer. The implicit message is that this is only to be expected; one can’t have everything. Today the Pride and Prejudice myth is the prevalent one: just by being herself, a girl can spear the catch of the season, ten thousand a year and a husband who will never put a foot wrong. No wonder the book, or at least this simplified version of it, has acquired a whole new non-readership.
Veronica Duncan was far more intelligent than that. She surely did not think that Lord Bingham would become a put-the-cat-out husband as well as a supremely debonair earl. Nevertheless reality does not obtrude at such times. Her own life had not always been easy. Her father, Major Charles Moorhouse Duncan, who received the Military Cross in the First World War, died when she was two years old. His first marriage, to the daughter of the 6th Baron Castlemaine, ended in divorce; he had two daughters with his second wife, Thelma, who died in 2012. After his death Mrs Duncan married James Margrie, and from 1947 the couple ran the Wheatsheaf Inn, near Basingstoke in Hampshire. One of Lord Lucan’s friends apparently referred to Veronica as coming from ‘that place on the way back from Ascot’; an insult convenient to showing the friend in a snobbish light, although geographically the remark makes little sense. But a policeman who worked on the case remarks: ‘I’m a Countess of the Realm, she used to say – she loved that phrase. She only lived in a pub!’
Certainly the Wheatsheaf Inn is some metaphorical distance from Goodwood House, for instance, where the 4th Countess of Lucan had grown up as a daughter to the Duke of Richmond. Veronica had little in common with the Lucan wives who had gone before: the cultured Margaret Smyth; the grand, reckless Elizabeth Belasyse; the high-born Anne Brudenell and Cecilia Lennox; the fabulously correct Violet Spender Clay; the warm and charming Kait Dawson. Kait argued about politics with Veronica, as she did with everybody, but from their first meeting at the Arts Club the usual good humour was lacking. Violet, by this time in her eighties and about to lose two children in quick succession,1 treated Veronica with semi-cordial froideur, rather as the Spencer family had treated Lavinia Bingham back in the 1780s. Yet Veronica, in the early days at least, was as carefully conservative as Lavinia had been. She was not the sort to declare open war on snobbery. She wanted to enter this world. When invited to meet Violet at the Portman Square flat, she did not wear a skirt
two inches above the knee and start a prurient little chat about the Profumo affair. She smoked, which Violet didn’t like, but that was not the real problem. Quite simply, Violet thought that her grandson was marrying beneath him. Not so much in pure class terms; there was, after all, the Baron Castlemaine lurking in the background. Anyway Violet herself had been a step down from her husband, while Kait Lucan was a downright flaming Red. But Kait was assured and frank and bursting with personality. This silent young woman would not, in Violet’s eyes, cut it as the Countess of Lucan. Clearly her grandson didn’t see it that way. Whether Veronica did is another thing altogether.
As a child she had lived in Uckfield, the quiet East Sussex town that recurs in strands of this story: John Aspinall spent some boyhood years there before attending Rugby school, Lord Lucan spent time there on the night of the murder. Then the Margrie family moved for a while to South Africa. The girls were sent to boarding school: ‘We genuinely were tormented and bullied there,’ says Christina. ‘Our English accents, you know… Veronica couldn’t handle it. But then we went to Grahamstown day school, and there were no problems.’ Nevertheless, and in an odd echo of Lucan’s own childhood unhappiness, Veronica had already been seen by a psychiatrist. She had suffered from meningitis, a sometimes fatal trauma, and it had left her fragile.
On the return from South Africa, the Duncan girls were sent to St Swithun’s school near Winchester, which again was a perfectly happy experience. Veronica had a good brain, and St Swithun’s, which her own two daughters would later attend, is an excellent school. After this came perhaps the best time of all, when she studied graphic design in Bournemouth, and performed with the local dramatic society at the Palace Court Theatre. Veronica, who is still remembered at the society, cut an intriguing little figure on stage. ‘She was’, says her sister, ‘a consummate actress.’
A Different Class of Murder Page 14