A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  ‘They were talking about John Bingham [Lucan],’ Miss Robey says. ‘The conversations were, “What are we going to do?”; “Have you been in touch?” I was just making notes. At the end of the meeting, John Aspinall was saying, “Quite definitely, we need to do something about this” and there was a bit of a disagreement between him and Sir James Goldsmith.

  ‘“No we mustn’t do anything; causes too much trouble, we just wait,” and then the end of that meeting closed with James saying, “You speak to him”, and it was then said, “You only speak to him on that phone don’t you?” gesturing to the private phone.

  ‘He [Goldsmith] looked at me, he didn’t even know my name, and said, “What does she know about anything?” And Mr Aspinall said, “She knows a bit, I’m going to bring her in on it”.’

  The plan, enacted in both 1979 and 1980, was to fly Frances and George to Gabon, where Aspinall had a gorilla centre, then to Kenya. Miss Robey also stated that Aspinall was convinced of Lucan’s innocence. ‘I’m not saying, and I can’t say, whether he would have covered up for him if he thought he was guilty but I think he’s made of better stuff than that.’

  Some years after Aspinall’s death in 2000, when according to her best belief Lucan was still alive, Miss Robey contacted the police. ‘They said to me, everything you’ve said, we’re already aware of.’ She also wrote to George Bingham, who did not acknowledge her letter and later firmly refuted the story. ‘The trip to Kenya was much later,’ he said, ‘I think nearer 1985. I was nearly 18. Both my sisters were present as were two other families, neither of which had any connection to John Aspinall.’ This was confirmed, surely unanswerably, in a statement from his mother Lady Lucan. ‘The children were wards of court, at boarding school. I was their carer. I would have known if they had gone to Africa. I can guarantee they didn’t go to Africa. I had to get permission from the court to take them abroad.’

  In 2000, Lucan’s children Frances and George visited a ‘luxury holiday lodge’ near Windhoek. An investigator named Ian Crosby later seized upon these holidays as suggesting that Lucan had been in Namibia at that time. The story was reported in the Daily Mail, 10 March 2012: ‘We do not doubt that he [George] has not knowingly set eyes on his father since 1974. However, who is to say that his father was not watching him on a visit to Namibia?’

  34. The Sun, 28 February 2012. The ‘links to Botswana’ cited in the article are unknown. In 1993 Lucan was sighted once more in Gaborone, at the Cresta Riley’s hotel.

  35. An article in the Daily Mail, 3 February 2013, examined the findings of the BBC1 Inside Out documentary broadcast in December 2012. The programme was presented by Glenn Campbell, who had uncovered new evidence regarding the hunt for Lucan, as well as a hitherto unseen police statement given by Lucan’s sister, Lady Sarah Gibbs (see p.272). The Daily Mail wrote:

  Lord Lucan’s brother has told the BBC that the fugitive aristocrat died in 2004 and is buried in Africa. Hugh Bingham is said to have made the startling disclosure in an ‘unguarded moment’ after an interview at his Johannesburg home. When the cameras stopped rolling, he was pressed by a journalist on the Inside Out programme about whether Lucan – accused of murdering his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in 1974 – was ‘dead or alive’. Mr Bingham, 72, replied: ‘I know for a fact my brother died in 2004 and that his grave is in Africa.’ The alleged admission – which would mean Lucan was 70 when he died – was revealed by Mrs Rivett’s 46-year-old son, Neil Berriman.

  None of the facts about this ‘revelation’ has ever been corroborated.

  36. It was revealed on Inside Out that Scotland Yard had considered sending an undercover detective to the Hebridean island of Eigg. Lucan was rumoured to be hiding near the ruins of Kildonan monastery, having used a powerboat to cross from the Scottish mainland. ‘That explains a lot,’ was a comment on Facebook. ‘It’s rural and isolated. I’m from Mull and even we don’t visit Eigg.’

  37. An ex-SAS bounty hunter named John Miller, who had previously found the escaped prisoner Ronald Biggs (a member of the Great Train Robbery gang), claimed that Lucan had been captured and was being held by employees of Miller’s security company. This story was revealed to be a hoax after a television reporter paid Miller $4,000 for the story and took a boat to Caracas in search of Lucan. A former drug dealer had been paid to act the part of the vanished earl.

  There was also a police report suggesting that a British citizen, living on Barbados, had been sending money to Lucan in an unidentified South American country. This rumour has echoes of a 1974 story that a telegram had been found at Lucan’s Elizabeth Street flat, sent by an unidentified relation, offering him the use of a property on Haiti.

  38. Quoted in The Times, 6 March 2012.

  39. Quoted in the Daily Mail, 27 October 2004.

  40. Many of the facts in this section come from Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–79 (Allen Lane, 2012).

  41. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape, 2010).

  THE STORY: THE LUCANS

  1. His nephew and heir, Robert, married one of the Turbervilles, whose name – as d’Urberville – was appropriated for the aristocratic ancestors of Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield. With Lucy Turberville, who unlike Tess retained her birth privileges, came the manor of Melcombe Bingham in Dorset.

  2. Richard’s nephew, Henry, became the 1st Baronet Bingham of Mayo in 1634. Henry’s brother John was the progenitor of another family line: his great-great-great-grandson was created 1st Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook in 1800. The MI5 operative John Bingham was the 7th Baron.

  3. This was Anne Vesey, whose grandfather William Sarsfield had married Mary Stuart, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II and Lucy Walter. The Vesey family held senior posts in the Irish church. Coincidentally Anne Vesey’s aunt, who bore the same name as her niece, married one of the Clanmorris Binghams.

  4. Horace Walpole, that supreme aesthete, who would have revelled in bitchiness had Margaret been in the usual run of amateurs, wrote to a friend in 1773 that ‘Lady Bingham is, I assure you, another miracle. She began painting in miniatures within these two years… She allows me to point out her faults, and if her impetuosity will allow her patience to reflect and study, she will certainly very soon equal anything that was ever done in water-colours.’

  5. Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, sister to the 2nd Earl Spencer, suggests that Lavinia displayed a tight-lipped jealousy towards her glamorous sister-in-law. ‘She looked well and healthy but is so coarse I hardly knew her,’ was Lavinia’s report to her husband in 1788, when Georgiana was out and about campaigning for the Whigs. (Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, HarperCollins 1998)

  6. A contemporary account gave a shrewd, gossipy description of the 2nd Earl’s parting from his wife. ‘It was more from disagreement of temper and extreme absurdity on both sides than any other cause. How extraordinary, after giving up the world for each other and living happily near ten years! At the end of that time they went to Brighthelmstone [Brighton] where he had the gout. She took to racketing and neglecting him, he grew low spirited and scolded her… This continued for near two years!’ The stay at Brighton was glittering, despite the gout: the Lucans were listed in The Times as guests of the Prince of Wales at the Royal Pavilion.

  7. The Irish lords were elected, but only by each other, so there was no wide democratic principle in play. The system came to an end in 1922 with the creation of the Irish Free State.

  8. Only rich men could afford, for instance, the £1,190 that it cost to buy a lieutenant’s position in the cavalry in the 1830s. After that, officers could keep climbing the ranks by paying the difference. Naturally there was a black market; some commissions were sold to pay off a debt (from gambling, most likely), and in 1806 a mistress of the Duke of York was found to be doing a roaring trade in them. In the 1850s Lord Cardigan paid £40,000 to become Colonel in the 11th Hussars, which had previously charged so calamitously with the Light Brigade
during the Crimean War. It was this hapless campaign that helped to draw attention to the deficiencies inherent in the system, and it was abolished in 1871.

  9. Nobody really knew how many people lived on these poor little fields. One landlord, who requested famine relief for what he estimated to be around sixty tenants, received more than 600 applications.

  10. What Lucan wanted, in fact, was for the British government to deal with the Irish famine. The government thought that the responsibility lay with the landowners, whom it blamed not just for the suffering but for the alarming torrents of half-dead people disembarking at Liverpool. Rescue funds for Ireland were ineffectually deployed, although some £8 million was contributed by the British taxpayer. In 1851 a correspondence was published between Lord Lucan and the prime minister, Lord John Russell, regarding the repayment of this money. True to form, Lucan made endless difficulties. ‘Great care’, he lectured, ‘should be taken in the collection of a tax so onerous.’ Russell, keeping his temper, nevertheless concluded his reply with a cool coda: ‘I must again ask your Lordship, yourself a member of the Legislature, to withdraw your plea of setting yourself above the law.’ In the end, the government was obliged to write off about half of its debt.

  11. The description is from William Forster, a Quaker philanthropist and later Chief Secretary to Ireland under Gladstone. During the famine he was involved in distributing the Friends’ relief fund.

  12. In 1842 Lucan had been seriously enraged by an incident that began at the Castlebar Petty Sessions, where he had accused Mr St Clair O’Malley, a Mayo magistrate, of hunting and ‘sporting’ on his land. ‘This is’, O’Malley declared, ‘a mean and malicious prosecution, and I entertain the most utter contempt for it and Lord Lucan and everything emanating from him.’

  Lucan thundered: ‘I call on you to commit that miscreant to the dock,’ but O’Malley was equal to him. ‘If it were not for where you are,’ he replied, ‘I would be licking you with this stick [a giant shillelagh] until I would break every bone in your body.’ After their ludicrous brawl both men were excluded from the magistracy. Lucan raised the matter three times in the House of Lords, and in late 1843 was restored to his position; but so too was O’Malley. Lucan, who declined to be reinstated and, strictly speaking, had right on his side, bore a deep grudge.

  13. Although history has found the 3rd Earl of Lucan peculiarly guilty in the ghastly affair of the famine, he was by no means unsupported in his attitudes. It was quite true that the farming of Ireland needed to be reformed; Lucan was not the only landowner doing this, albeit his methods were notably ruthless, and some (not all) of his fellow peers took the same view as the Times correspondent. The fact was that, despite its status as part of the United Kingdom, Ireland was still regarded by many as separate, alien and intensely annoying. ‘The real difficulty’, wrote the lord-lieutenant of the country, Lord Clarendon, in 1847, ‘lies with the people themselves – they are always in the mud… their idleness and helplessness can hardly be believed.’

  14. As recounted by William Russell, first of the great war reporters, in The Times.

  15. Lord Raglan said, very damningly, that Lucan had made ‘some misconception of the order’. Lucan said that Raglan’s order had been extremely imprecise. Lord Cardigan accused not only Lucan but also Captain Louis Nolan, who had delivered Raglan’s order, of relaying the instructions incorrectly. Lucan pleaded that he could not have disobeyed Raglan ‘without any reason than that I preferred my own opinion to that of my General’.

  16. At first Lord Cardigan had returned to a hero’s welcome and tea with Queen Victoria; this despite the fact that he was seen to have galloped away from the charge before hand-to-hand combat began. He airily stated that he had done his duty by leading his men and had not wanted to ‘fight the enemy among private soldiers’. Having emerged without a scratch, Cardigan ‘calmly returned to the yacht on which he lived, had a bath, dined, drank a bottle of champagne, and went to bed’. (from Volume IV of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 1958)

  17. In 1675 Charles II bestowed the title of Duke of Richmond upon his illegitimate son by Louise de Kérouaille. The Lucans were also descended from Mary Stuart, his daughter by Lucy Walter (see note 3, above).

  18. The 1901 census records a list of nineteen servants at Laleham, including three ladies’ maids, three housemaids, two kitchen maids, two footmen and two grooms. In addition there were three gardeners, an undergardener, a ‘seedsman’ and a carpenter.

  19. At the July auction the Duchess of Albany’s Surrey seat was also up for sale; so vast was its acreage that it realized £51,000.

  20. This quotation by the Liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman is taken from David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale, 1990), as are many of the facts in this section.

  21. Two years later, Leverhulme had the house pulled down. It was re-erected, like Dorchester House, as a hotel.

  22. The calm, mysteriously atmospheric river path leading to Laleham House had been a favourite walk of the poet Matthew Arnold, born in the village and buried close to the Lucans in All Saints’ church. ‘I could’, he wrote in 1848, ‘make out the wide sheet of the gray Thames gleaming through the general dusk as I came out on Chertsey Bridge…’

  23. Respectively: Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath; Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Privy Counsellor; Territorial (Officer’s) Decoration; Deputy-Lieutenant; Justice of the Peace; Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order.

  THE STORY: JOHN BINGHAM

  1. A British social research organization founded in 1937, a rich resource from a panel of some 500 untrained volunteers who commented on everyday life, either through diaries or questionnaires.

  2. From an interview with the News of the World, 8 November 1981.

  3. The remark about Kait’s clothes was made by her brother-in-law, John Bevan; the description of her hair came from Jonathan Miller, in an interview for James Fox’s Sunday Times Magazine article, 8 June 1975.

  4. These recollections come from Kate Bassett, In Two Minds: Jonathan Miller (Oberon Books, 2012).

  5. The Spectator, 28 November 2009.

  6. This interviewee, whose contributions appear throughout the book, requested anonymity.

  7. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  8. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2001.

  9. The quotations and facts about National Service are taken from Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (Allen Lane, 2006).

  10. Quoted in Ruddick, Lord Lucan: What Really Happened.

  11. News of the World, 8 November 1981.

  12. Daily Express, 21 January 1975.

  13. An unnamed interviewee in Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  14. Tic-tac, now pretty much defunct in the era of computerized on-course betting, was the sign language whereby bookmakers’ prices could be conveyed across the track.

  15. The Times, 12 May 2001.

  16. The reference is to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1854 poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, whose first stanza runs:

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

  ‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  THE STORY: THE CLERMONT

  1. Vincent Orchard, Tattersalls: Two Hundred Years of Sporting History (Hutchinson, 1954).

  2. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is the grandson of Lt-Colonel Sir George Osborne, 16th Baronet, who married John Aspinall’s mother in 1938. She was previously married to Dr Robert Aspinall, a British Army surgeon.

  3. Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2001. The duke’s description of Lucan’s demeanour is well supported by those who attended the Clermont, although in the Mirror, 9 Augu
st 1998, Lady Lucan offered a very different view. ‘Speaking of their life prior to the killing, she said: “He was easily stressed and he used to drink and gamble, that was his life. When he gambled you could see the sweat pouring down his face and I often thought I’m going to be a widow.”’

  4. The description is by Thormanby, the pseudonym of a renowned Victorian racing writer.

  5. Lilian Pizzichini, Dead Men’s Wages (Pan Macmillan, 2003).

  6. The story of the ‘Big Edge’ came to light in 2007, with the publication of Douglas Thompson’s The Hustlers: Gambling, Greed and the Perfect Con (Pan Macmillan). The charming Irishman Burke had been a longstanding associate of Aspinall, dating back to the days of the itinerant chemmy parties, although the partnership ended rancorously.

  7. John Burke made a silky response to Lady Annabel in the Daily Mail, 14 August 2007.

  Choosing his words with great delicacy, Burke, who once dated model Sandra Paul, now wife of ex-Tory leader Michael Howard, says of Lady Annabel: ‘She seems to have had a lapse in memory.’… Protecting Aspinall’s reputation, Lady Annabel dismissed Burke as a mere employee. But Burke, now in his 80s, tells me: ‘I was a founding director of The Clermont Club. There were two of us – the other was John Aspinall.’ He alleges that before the club was established, Annabel, then married to Mark Birley, lent him and Aspinall their home in South Kensington ‘where we hosted one of our illegal games… If her memory is going, I have all the records. I know how much she won and lost. I have all the paperwork about that and my days at The Clermont.’ He says he has furnished the book’s publishers with certified copies.