The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  He also comes across as a schemer and a dreamer, with a knack for adventure and pulling off the improbable. He boasts about using inside information gleaned from his bookmaking to “pinch points” at the racetrack, a process that required “flitting from course to course.” Bunton won a fair amount of cash but never amassed a fortune because he was a spendthrift. In general, he paints a self-portrait that would shock those who knew him only as a relatively staid lorry driver in later years: “Young, free, well dressed, I knew how to spend, travelling always by rail. . . a gay life indeed.” Of course, a synonym for professional gambler is loser, as Bunton learned the hard way. On those days when his system broke down, “I had to crawl home.”

  Even so, he reached adulthood without much trauma. In 1922 he met, and three years later married, a housemaid. The following year, with unemployment rife in Newcastle, his mother sent him to Australia (sans wife) to start a hotel (then send for wife). He made it down under, but the hotel never got off the ground. Instead, Bunton wandered around Australia living hand to mouth: “If I had a family motto it would be ‘steal but never beg.’” Eventually he landed a job in Lithgow as a boilermaker. He had not been on the job long when he was accosted at work by a policeman and falsely (he says) accused of stealing £50 from his landlady.

  Such harbingers dot the landscape of Bunton’s memoirs. In story after story, he gets himself in trouble through some combination of his own stubbornness, the malevolence of others, and bad luck. He had to leave Lithgow because, on one not atypical occasion, friends dragged him into a bar. Closing time by law was six, but Bunton, when told to leave at that hour by a cop, insisted he was entitled to finish his beer. A difference of opinion ensued, followed by a brawl in which Bunton inadvertently “put my rear end through the glass panel of the door,” followed by a hasty exit and a chase through the streets. Bunton remarks that “a camera could have made a good Comic Cuts film of this incident, of which I have no reason to be proud.” Then this man, who would find himself in prison for wacky crimes in his fifties and sixties, asks forgiveness on account of youth: “Remember that I was still in my twentys [sic]. Today I think it stupid but then I thought it comical.” He managed to outrun and avoid capture by the rotund cop and concludes that this was “not a glamorous incident, but this book is not meant to be such, just a true outline of memories as they come to mind.”

  Those memories are nothing if not action packed. Back at his lodge after successfully fleeing the law, Bunton encountered one Paddy Edwards, “a boxer of sorts who fought an occasional ten rounds in the ring.” Edwards whisked him off to a pub whose back door remained open after hours, and the two indulged in beer and billiards. Gambling and alcohol don’t mix well, and Bunton and his friend soon engaged in his second “half drunken scuffle” of the day—with one another. That, in turn, gave rise to a new wager: whether Edwards would defeat his professional opponent in a bout scheduled for a few days later. Since Bunton himself had held Edwards to a draw in their barroom brawl, he placed £5 on Edwards’s opponent. But Edwards prevailed. Such bad luck, and a growing reputation as a troublemaker, led Bunton to abandon Lithgow for Sydney.

  His experience in Sydney reinforced Bunton’s contempt for law enforcement. He encountered all sorts of public debauchery in plain view, leading him to observe that “Sydney police work just in spurts, and have one day a month in cleaning up the city.” They could have devoted that day to cleaning up Bunton, for whom Sydney offered too much temptation. Though he labored to find employment, he had far more success finding racetracks and pubs, and the two combined to ensure that whatever money came went just as fast. Even apart from finances, not all the entertainment was harmless. He recalls witnessing a barroom dustup that aroused his curiosity. Alas, “I remember going toward the dispute, and that is all—complete blackout. It must have been an hour later when I woke up on a hospital bench.”

  This episode marked Bunton’s first stay in prison. A policeman visited him in the hospital, accompanied by a van, and arranged a “free journey to the lock-up.” It also marked Bunton’s first appearance in court, where he “pleaded, argued, denied” in vain. He was found guilty and sent back to prison, sentenced to two weeks, which provided a much-needed opportunity to take stock of his life. His ruminations produced a stark assessment: “I had tried, strived, and still remained in the gutter.” His morale plunged but his pride remained steadfast: “I would starve, but I would ask no man for a handout.” Instead, he scraped up enough money to return to England, where he settled down (after a fashion) in Newcastle with his wife.

  He continued to bounce from job to job while also taking up a new hobby: “Between jobs my main pastime was writing novels, books, and articles for the newspapers—books and articles which never seemed to get published.” The Dickensian figure with the Dickensian name kept plugging away in what “I shall always remember as the empty years.” But writing his memoirs in 1966, a time of abundance, he sounded nostalgic for the England of the empty years. There had been abundant poverty, yes, for him and his country alike, but not the violent crime “and countless other evils persistent today.” He came to see “money to be an evil. . . . Yes, there is something definitely dangerous in affluence.” Indeed, “it is much easier to live a healthy life if one hasn’t a lot of money.”

  Chapter 3: WHEN AND HOW

  Just four days after the disappearance of the painting, Philip Hendy drafted a “Director’s Interim Report on the Theft of Goya’s ‘Duke of Wellington’” (stamped at the top “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL, PLEASE”). It consisted mostly of an hour-by-hour account of the security situation starting at 6 P.M. on August 21, when the National Gallery had closed its doors to the public.

  As per the daily routine, security personnel had patrolled the entire building for roughly half an hour, starting at 7 P.M. Around 8:30 or 9:00, the automatic alarm system (consisting of “electric contacts of doors, invisible beams where there are no doors and in certain rooms supersonic machines”) had been switched on. Hendy observed that the alarm system alone “should rule out the possibility of theft,” whereas “further patrols made [were] primarily regarded as precautions against fire.” The next patrol of the building commenced at 10 P.M., when the new warder began his shift.

  Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington was seen in place at 7:40 P.M., during the first patrol, and was noticed missing by a warder at roughly 10 P.M., during the second patrol. There is confusion about whether its absence was reported to the warder sergeant as it should have been. The warder claimed he noticed it missing, assumed a benign explanation, but nevertheless reported it—albeit “in a jocular manner, to keep myself clear in case something had happened.” Perhaps he was so jocular that his report made no impression, for the warder sergeant denied learning that the painting was missing. However, the latter himself noticed the painting missing around midnight. He made written note of this observation, but his report was not received by the deputy head attendant until eight the following morning.

  Hendy’s confidential report was for the gallery’s internal files, but the details about the theft were passed along to Scotland Yard almost immediately on the morning of August 22—albeit presumably a good ten to twelve hours after the theft. That lag time exacerbated the major challenge facing the Yard, which sensed that it was not dealing with an ordinary thief. The bandit had somehow seized a painting and transported it from the National Gallery undeterred by guards, infrared beams, and photoelectric barriers. He clearly knew what he was doing. As unnamed gallery staff told the London Times, “Only an expert could have removed the picture undetected.”

  Yet a review of the museum’s security system suggests that the miracle was not that a creative thief had penetrated a world-class system but rather that no one before had penetrated what was actually a porous system. The security shift on the night of August 21 consisted of a handful of men on a site covering more than two acres. The building had forty external doors and 250 windows spread out over four floors—three d
isplaying works of art and the Conservation Department on the top floor. The main floor alone featured thirty-four exhibition rooms open to the public and five additional rooms closed to the public. The ground floor included a restaurant, lavatories, a lecture room, a seventy-five-hundred-square foot reference room, and ninety other rooms, many of which were accessible to authorized visitors. The basement, inaccessible to the public but used by workmen, encompassed ninety additional rooms. Between floors were various small rooms off staircases and corridors. All in all, the ratio of security personnel to space was staggeringly small. To make matters worse, the site backed onto a three-quarter-acre yard where construction was taking place, and thus machinery and equipment lay around. (Major reconstruction of the National Gallery building and rearrangement of the collection had been ongoing for five years.)

  All of that made the museum susceptible, despite its technologically impressive security system. On the fateful day The Duke disappeared, the inherently shaky security situation was made vastly more vulnerable by a series of improbable coincidences and contingencies.

  Museums guard against four primary security risks: war, fire, defacement, and theft. Internal National Gallery memoranda dating back more than a century document that defacement was the most significant security problem facing the National Gallery until the late 1930s. Records reveal that in 1913 four pictures were “damaged by a maniac.” The following year, Velázquez’s famous painting Rokeby Venus was defaced by a suffragette. At a later date, suffragettes damaged five pictures by the Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini.

  The gallery’s voluminous internal security files show that because of the threat of war, beginning in 1937, “easy detachment of pictures”—which would assist gallery personnel in saving works of art—became the paramount concern. War and fire endangered the entire collection, whereas theft tended to involve only one or a few works of art. For that reason, and also because the gallery had not experienced a single theft in its history, protecting against theft became a relatively low priority.

  As usual in the world of security (museum or otherwise), protective measures exact a tradeoff. In the event of fire or war, “easy detachment” would help in saving works of art, but on August 21,1961, it no doubt assisted those who illegally removed the Goya.

  Like generals who always fight the last war, museum security safeguards against the last crime. One finds many examples of this phenomenon in the National Gallery’s response to the theft of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. For example, in his aforementioned interim report about the theft, Director Hendy observed that the thief probably came through a lavatory window, and he noted, “Since August 22 the windows of both lavatories have been sealed.”

  One finds similar benefits of hindsight in Hendy’s final report, two weeks later, under the melancholy title “Security before and after 21st August, 1961.” The report notes that formal “Instructions to Warder Sergeants” were issued in 1952 and that “an instruction particularly relevant to the events of August 21 was that during closed hours a post was to be maintained if possible in the vestibule.” However, because of cutbacks, “this has been impossible since 1957.” And, inevitably, the report features the too-late adjustment: “Immediately after the theft the Instructions were revised orally,” and “a completely new series were typed and issued before the end of August.” These included: “At least one Warder is stationed in the Vestibule during closed hours.”

  The theft of the Goya would have been impossible if these new practices had been in place. Owing to measures taken in the wake of the Goya theft, all works in the gallery became safe short of someone sending in a SWAT team to remove them. All pictures not in public exhibition were withdrawn to rooms “kept permanently under lock and key, day and night.” Exhibited pictures, too, received far greater protection. The burglar alarm was activated earlier and its weekend hours extended considerably. Plans were introduced to add another dozen men to guard exhibition rooms during open hours. At least for the foreseeable future, uniformed police patrolled outside the gallery and plain-clothes officers patrolled inside. Eventually the gallery added a night patrol with a dog as well, and Parliament created a new position: a senior police officer as security adviser for all the UK’s national art collections.

  The theft of The Duke, however, wasn’t simply a function of inadequate security arrangements. Rather, existing precautions and protocols were not followed. As a result, The Duke was noticed missing many hours before anyone became sufficiently alarmed. As Newsweek would immediately declare, “Of all the incredible aspects to the theft last week of the famous painting, perhaps the most astonishing was that it went unreported for eleven hours.”

  A major source of this neglect was understandable: paintings get moved around. Accordingly, when security personnel do not see a work where it belongs, they may infer a benign explanation. However, The Duke had been on special exhibition, and by well-established gallery practice, when a painting from an exhibition was moved, a tablet explaining its removal was to be substituted. Had that practice been in place on August 21, an investigation would have commenced as soon as security personnel noticed the painting’s absence (without tablet). Instead, crucial hours were lost because, as Director Hendy’s interim report noted, “These rules have had to go into abeyance during any large-scale rehanging of the Gallery such as has only recently been completed.”

  However, in a subsequent report, dated February 21, 1962, Hendy acknowledged that he had misdescribed the situation—not simply in his interim report but also to investigators. The tablet practice had indeed been suspended from January through June 1961, but after the gallery’s rearrangement had concluded in June, “the fixing of tablets had been resumed immediately” and thus had “certainly been resumed nearly two months before the theft.” All of this was much ado about nothing, he insisted, because “the practice of fixing tablets was never regarded as a security measure. Tablets are sometimes stolen; they are easily switched from one place to another.”

  Perhaps the lack of a tablet was indeed irrelevant, but the thief undeniably benefited from other blunders by gallery security—a comedy of errors with serious consequences. As the police quickly discerned, at the closing of the gallery at 6 P.M. on the night of August 21, a man lingering in a men’s room stall had to be ushered to the lobby by an attendant, in keeping with the normal closing-time procedure for clearing all visitors from the building. But when it comes to museum clearance, the key is follow-through. Normally, the warder sergeant stood atop the stairs leading to the lavatory to assure that no one returned. On this occasion, however, he was summoned across the vestibule by an attendant who needed assistance clearing umbrellas and other materials from the cloakroom. This departure from protocol stemmed from the regrettable combination of a large crowd and a shortage of staff. Accordingly, the authorities determined, the man removed from the lavatory likely returned there. One of the workmen reported finding the same stall occupied at 7 P.M.

  Allowing lingerers in the men’s room was hardly the gallery’s only mistake on August 21. Deactivating the alarm system during the evening constituted another. Several construction workers had wandered around the building after six that night, along with eighteen gallery employees. The warders had failed to activate the burglar alarm system until 8:30, slightly later than usual, after the last of the workers on duty—several floor polishers and char-women—had checked out.

  Various documents pertaining to the crime, produced by both the police and the National Gallery, revealed a devastating combination of negligence and bad luck. To take one of numerous examples, a National Gallery document tersely reported, “Warder Sergeant Barber on leave. Acting W.S. knew he should inspect lavatory but did not.” Another report mentioned that construction on the outside yards had commenced on July 4, seven weeks before the theft, and remarked that this work unfortunately coincided with leave periods and a change of staff.

  Although, as noted, security personnel failed to report The
Duke’s absence when it was first noticed the night of August 21, relatively little harm resulted because the warder sergeant himself noticed the painting missing around midnight. However, his report did not reach his superior until the following morning. Dissemination of the news then became more rapid, as suggested by the minutes of a National Gallery emergency board meeting on September 11, describing activity on the morning of August 22:

  8:15 A.M.: [Painting] reported missing to the Keeper by the Deputy Head Attendant

  9:15–9:30: Director & Keeper notified

  9:30: Police summoned by Deputy Head Attendant

  10:05: C.I.D. take over.

  At some point that morning, police and security personnel searched offices and studios throughout the National Gallery. It was too little and certainly too late. Assuming that the painting had been taken the previous night, the thief had had many hours to escape London before the police were even notified of the theft.

  The eventual report by a government committee of inquiry, while criticizing a wide range of conduct by the gallery’s security apparatus, focused on the lag time between recognition that the painting was missing and notification of the authorities. The committee’s findings emphasized a wholesale sloppiness with respect to tracking the movement of paintings. As for the breakdown in security that allowed the theft in the first place, the committee saw much blame to go around. Doors had been left open, patrols had been too infrequent, staff had been too scanty, and there had been no comprehensive list of people entitled to be in the building after it was closed to the public. In addition, the gallery had been insufficiently apprised of the construction work outside. And so on.