The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  The committee’s findings did not satisfy everyone. In a report responding to those findings, Director Hendy criticized the committee’s modus operandi, noting, among other things, that the assistant head attendant, “a first class man” named Turner, “was on the list of staff which I recommended the Committee to interview; but he was not interviewed. The Head Attendant, who was interviewed, states that he was not questioned about ‘day-book’ or tablets.” Hendy’s own summary of the situation, which sounds like a passage from Dickens, suggests the difficulty of reconstructing exactly what did and did not happen on the night of August 21:

  Frequent failure to fix the tablets is stated to have been alleged by Mr. McGarrity, a Warder who has since been asked to go not because of the theft but because of a general incapacity which the effort to improve security after the theft soon made very obvious. Mr. McGarrity told the Police that he had reported the absence of the stolen picture to Sergeant Havell “in a jocular manner more or less to keep myself in the clear in case something happened.” Sergeant Havell said that [McGarrity] had not reported it. It does not therefore seem to me that McGarrity is a reliable witness. . . . Sergt. Havell told the Police: “It is usual for the Working-Party to put a tag in place when a picture is removed for any reason and I saw that no such tag was there.” He gave no explanation of why he did not consult the “day book” or of why he decided only to report the matter to his successor at 7 A.M. He has since died from thrombosis . . . and he may well have been in a very bad state of health at that time.

  Cutting through all the predictable finger pointing, butt covering, and other inconveniences to the fact-finding process, one thing seems safe to surmise: The two officials who noticed the painting missing on the night of August 21 were not sufficiently alarmed because they assumed the painting had been moved. A 135-year track record of zero thefts can beget such complacency, but perhaps the gentlemen should at least have consulted the museum’s daybook. Indeed, the daybook included several entries describing various movements of Goya’s Duke from the time of its reception until it was placed on exhibition. Had the men consulted the daybook on August 21, the absence of a relevant entry describing movement that day might have alerted them to the fact that something was amiss.

  The lead warder was an ailing gentleman (he died three months later) who had served the gallery loyally for thirty-four years. In his more than three decades at the museum, no work of art had been pilfered, whereas works were routinely moved around. Thus one can understand his assumption that the missing Goya had simply been moved. On the other hand, perhaps one reason works were never stolen is that security staff generally followed protocol. Here, protocol required immediately trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing picture, a task nonchalantly neglected.

  In sum, an awful lot had to have happened for the painting to be seized and removed and for the theft to have gone undetected for so long. These events included, among other things, the outside construction (with someone supplying a ladder and extra people floating around the building), the night warder being ill, an assistant dealing with umbrellas, and personnel failing to check the daybook or otherwise take more timely action when they noticed the painting missing.

  On the surface, then, the thief benefited from astonishing luck. But, as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design. Top-flight criminals often seem lucky because their painstaking preparations are unseen. It was possible, even likely, that this professional bandit knew exactly what good luck lay in store—that is, he stole the painting precisely because the outside construction facilitated entry and exit, he knew when the alarm system would be off, he knew when the painting would be unguarded, and so forth.

  Under normal circumstances, there was no easy escape route. Assuming the thief exited the gallery through the lavatory (a safe assumption, as we shall see), he found himself in a courtyard. In normal times, that courtyard and another it leads into yield no exit except into other parts of the museum building. However, as one of the director’s reports noted, “From July 28, those yards have been made accessible to the Old Barrack Yard by the removal of windows in the intervening buildings and from August 5th by the enlargement of these apertures to ground level. This gave ready access therefore to the internal courtyard.” Note that these changes happened less than a month before the theft of the Goya. More amazing luck? More likely, the thief had cased the joint, figuring out entrance and exit possibilities. Someone hadn’t jumped out the lavatory window and found himself an escape route by sheer serendipity. Rather he had entered and exited through the lavatory window precisely because he knew what changes had taken place in the previous weeks.

  But it would be equally mistaken to attribute the success of the theft entirely to foresight. It would have been impossible for the thief to foresee the various violations of protocol that gave him a several-hour head start before the police even learned about the crime. Surely shrewdness and careful planning intersected good fortune.

  Once the police got in the act, at roughly 9:30 A.M. on the morning of August 22, they hit the ground running. After Detective Inspector John MacPherson led a group of officers from West End Central Police Station to the National Gallery, he immediately ascertained that the window on the ground floor male lavatory was open and found (as he characterized it in a deposition years later) “a piece of mud which looked as though it had been left by someone’s shoe.” He further noticed, under the window, a ladder resting a foot or two beneath the sill. MacPherson also observed marks on the south gate, abutting St. Martin’s Street, which “I assumed to be marks of egress,” especially when “on that gate I found long vertical marks on the inside as though someone had climbed over the gate.”

  MacPherson and his underlings took over an office in the gallery and spent several days searching the building and interrogating staff, amassing a large pile of written statements. It did not take long for them to ascertain how the crime had gone down, based on MacPherson’s instant deductions and two key aforementioned facts learned from interviews with security personnel: (1) The painting was seen during the early evening patrol at roughly 7:40 but not seen during the later patrol, sometime between 10:00 and 11:00; (2) The alarm system was activated at roughly 8:30 and took up to half an hour to become fully operational. (The lag time, as explained in one of the director’s reports, stemmed from “inevitable weakness of contact in places, such as those caused by slight faults in doors, and owing to the presence of late workers in some parts of the building.”) The conclusion was straightforward: “The picture must have been taken from its place between 7:40 P.M. and about 9 P.M. . . . The picture appears to have been taken through the window of the men’s lavatory and through two internal courtyards to the Old Barrack Yard. From there it appears to have been taken over wooden gates into St. Martin’s yard.”

  Substantial evidence supported the inference concerning the thief’s exit path. The ladder found left against the sill of the men’s lavatory, the fact that lingerers were twice spotted in the bathroom after hours, and the absence of other nearby escape routes that would enable someone to go undetected established with near certainty that the picture had been removed through the window of the lavatory.a

  There were nevertheless other theories advanced. For example, Sir Kenneth Clark, a prominent critic and former director of the gallery, opined that the thief had hidden in one of the gallery’s unused cellars and then slipped out with the painting in a satchel.

  If the thief had indeed entered and exited through the lavatory, he had traveled some distance to and fro with the painting. There were thirty-five steps, encompassing three flights, between the lavatory and the room where The Duke had stood alone. The thief would have emerged from the lavatory, taken a narrow staircase from the ground floor to the main floor, turned sharply right, and ascended more steps from the main entrance to the so-called bridge, which branched in three directions. He then would have taken additional steps to the second landing, where he would have found The Duke on a
screen. After removing The Duke, he presumably retraced these steps and returned, painting in hand, to the lavatory. That was the relatively easy part. The fourteen-foot drop from the windowsill to the ground presumably made it difficult to carry the painting, particularly with its heavy frame, through the window and down the ladder. Some believed that the physical dexterity and derring-do pointed to someone trained as a paratrooper with the Special Air Service during World War II.

  If the thief had removed the canvas from the frame, he would have had a lighter object to transport, but such removal would have been no easy task, since the heavy 33” x 28” frame was carved from wood measuring 4.5’ x 3’, with miters at the corners bolstered by a diagonal batten inlaid in the wood. Extracting the picture from the frame likely required a tool of some sort and, if it was to be done quickly, possibly more than one pair of hands.

  If the heist had involved two or more people, how many others may have assisted? Pulling this off without even arousing suspicion was hard to imagine without substantial resources, expertise, and support. Taking and transporting a famous work out of the building likely involved a decoy and lookout man and perhaps a getaway driver as well.

  The authorities felt they had at least some idea of when and how the painting was taken, but many questions remained unanswered. Who had taken the painting and with what assistance? Why? Most importantly, where was the painting?

  Chapter 4: THE MAKING OF A CRUSADER

  The more things changed for Kempton Bunton, the more they stayed the same. As Europe crept into World War II, Bunton continued to bounce from job to job, typically driving vehicles—first an ambulance, then a van delivering newspapers in the wee hours for W. H. Smith & Son—all the while awaiting his nation’s call to service.

  Bunton loved driving the van, but his wife felt differently. On account of the war, wages in factories skyrocketed, and she wanted her husband to jump on the gravy train. Bunton acquiesced “rather than strangle the wife,” but not before a last bit of mischief with lasting effects. With his novelist’s sense of connection and foreboding, he notes, “There was one incident that happened while I was at Smith’s which was to have some bearing as to my future way of life.”

  Bunton was driving his van accompanied by a half dozen crated hens that he had purchased that day from a farm. (No further explanation is given.) Rounding a bend in the road slowly, on account of “an extremely high velocity gale,” he noticed a large plank of railing in the middle of the road. Apparently the wind had toppled a fence. Bunton stopped the van and tossed the debris into a field off the road. A bit later he was pulled over by a cop. Bunton figured the cop must have passed him while he was clearing the wood and mistakenly thought he had stored it in the back of his van. Ever the bane of law enforcement, Bunton writes, “I must confess to the feeling that I was going to enjoy this.”

  The officer did indeed ask for permission to look in the back of the van, where to his surprise (or so we assume, since Bunton writes that the officer “concealed his surprise”) he saw hens rather than fencing. The cop asked whence the hens had come, and Bunton named the farm. Finally the skeptical constable let him go, and Bunton “sped on my way blissfully unaware as to the sequel to this incident.”

  Two months later, he was summoned to court on two charges: carrying livestock in a van not appropriately licensed for that purpose, and “wasting petrol” by traveling to the farmstead for the elicit purchase and transportation. (Wartime rationing begat such laws.) Bunton was not amused: “Ye Gods, there is a war on, and we have policemen and magistrates wasting their time thus. I was naturally indignant at these ridiculous assertions.” He fought the charges in court but was found guilty on both counts and fined £6. He declined to pay. He was given a month to do so, but as a “matter of principle I persistently refused.” Nine months later, he was hauled off to a penitentiary in Durham. The principle for which he endured loss of liberty? “If a country could take a man from his work during wartime, and shove him in gaol for nothing, then I would go to gaol.”

  Although, as noted, Bunton introduced the anecdote with the tease that it was to have a bearing on his “future way of life,” he failed to elaborate. With the benefit of hindsight, we can take a good guess as to what he meant: The episode presages Kempton Bunton the civil disobedient, who would find himself strangely entangled with the court system. His coda to the incident captures both his fatalism and his disappointment in his own irrelevance in the scheme of things: “I did [go to gaol], and nobody seemed to worry about it, and the war still went on.”

  But when Bunton returned home after his brief period incarcerated, it was not the hypothetical factory job that lured him away from W. H. Smith & Son. Instead, he took a job as a lorry driver for a cooperative milk store—”the job paid reasonably so this kept the wife quiet.” So it went for seven months, until one day, in the midst of a rainstorm, Bunton took pity on his young assistants and sent them home early. His manager disapproved this act of generosity, and what “started out as a peaceful debate between us ended in a heated argument which resulted in instant dismissal for me.”

  He next took a job delivering beer to pubs, but after two weeks he was arrested because he still hadn’t paid the fine for the hens heist and wasted petrol from the earlier incident. The arrest cost him his new job, but he landed another driving a lorry, this time for a fruit merchant. That too lasted only a short while, until “I walk[ed] straight into another transport job,” driving lorries for someone else.

  So it kept on keeping on for Kempton Bunton during the forties and fifties (his and the century’s), one driving job to another, and in between “I often visited the local dog tracks, sometimes as a punter [gambler], oftimes as a bookmaker’s clerk.” This lorry driver and freelance bookmaker raised (or at least supported) a large family—five children suddenly make their first appearance in the memoirs on page 40, described as “growing up fast.” At this point there was no hint that Bunton would become a figure history stooped to notice. As he put it, “Life seemed to be slipping by in unnoticeable fashion.”

  In 1948 tragedy struck. His daughter was killed in a bicycle accident. Bunton lost whatever religious faith he may have had: “I remember bitterly and silently cursing God. If there were such, then he must be a Demon God to have allowed this thing to happen.”

  Life goes on, and for Bunton it did so in a mostly unremarkable fashion. At some point in the early 1950s, he switched from lorry driver to cab driver, earning £55 a week. And though this part of his life seems relatively jejune, in the memoirs it gives rise to a curious digression. In the course of discussing the incongruities of the cab driver’s graveyard shift—one minute you drive a prostitute to a pub, a few minutes later “a parson’s wife going to a Mother’s meeting and occupying the seat so recently vacated by the prostitute”—Bunton vents about the cabbie’s plight. He posits a hypothetical situation in which he lawfully drives somebody a few miles out of town and, after dropping him off and heading back to base, is hailed by a pedestrian. Bunton notes angrily, “Even if the man’s wife is expecting a baby, even if the man is in any sort of difficulty, by law I am not supposed to pick him up.” Bunton does not explain the law in question but does offer a perspective on it: “The law is an ass you may think, well we drivers also thought the same—a fig for the law in such a case.”

  Kempton Bunton’s willingness to break the law, which would eventually make him famous, dots his memoirs almost from the first page. Less obvious, if more intriguing, are the unself-conscious literary touches. Readers of Oliver Twist may recall Dickens’s declaration that “the law is an ass.” (Bunton’s acquaintance with British fiction would surface, bizarrely, in connection with the kidnapping of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington.)

  For some reason, perhaps just his usual restlessness, Bunton left the transportation business and took a job in a bakery. While there, “something happened completely out of the blue to alter everything.” The problem arose when Bunton noticed that the ba
kery foreman gratuitously added four hours to the time card of Bunton’s colleague, a Pakistani (who was, in Bunton’s oxymoronic description, “the quietest and most sociable chap anyone could wish to meet”). Because experience had taught Bunton that “certain foremen had made it a practice to give jobs to coloureds” for exploitative purposes, he sensed something unseemly. He opted to say nothing, until gazing out the window he happened to spot a poster that read: “Expose evil wherever you find it.” This exhortation apparently tapped into some inner conviction, and Bunton squealed on the foreman. He summarized the ethics of his actions in a line that will resonate for those familiar with the ransom notes from the man who kidnapped The Duke of Wellington: “Right in the eyes of propriety, but wrong in the eyes of friendship to the Pakistani.”

  The manager of the bakery pledged to investigate, but the only consequence was punishment of the whistleblower: Within days, the manager discharged Bunton. In what would in his eyes become a recurring pattern, Bunton had spoken truth to power but failed to achieve anything other than trouble for himself. He “applied for justice to the head manager of the firm—no satisfaction—the matter was forgotten.” But Bunton never forgot the accumulation of slights that was coming to define his life.

  Following a prolonged spell of unemployment, he landed in a factory that wrapped boxes, which he did not wrap fast enough. Before long the manager informed him that his rate of 750 wrapped boxes per shift was 25 percent below the norm, and “I am sure, Mr. Bunton, you can do better than that.” Bunton responded to this impertinence by quitting the job. Apropos of that decision, he makes an observation aptly supported by his actions over the course of a career involving literally dozens of jobs: “I have always been of the opinion that a man far better leave a job than hang on to a position which he is not fully able to cope with.”