by Alan Hirsch
Next came a job in the chimney sweeping business. He seemed to enjoy that line of work, less for the work itself than for the opportunity to hear about people’s troubles—another trait that would prove crucial in making him a historical figure. Apparently, many folks treat the chimney sweep as a sounding board, and Bunton found himself listening to complaints about life “in a never ending stream.” He offers no explanation for leaving this job, but leave it he did, returning to the streets as a cab driver. That apparently did not last long and was followed by another spell of unemployment, during which the law again intervened in his affairs.
Finding himself disconsolate at a bar in Durham, he encountered a friend who needed a drive back to Newcastle. Since Bunton knew the man to be reliable behind the wheel, he let the man drive his van and rode shotgun. As Bunton was himself a professional driver, his motivation for turning over the keys remains unclear. (Perhaps he had had a few drinks too many.) In any event, his friend failed to justify Bunton’s confidence in him, brushing into a stationary car and choosing not to stop at the scene of this small accident.
The next day Bunton received a phone call from the police, who had received word of the accident and the license plate of the offending vehicle. Bunton informed his friend, the culprit, who pleaded that he had an expired license. Accordingly, he convinced Bunton to take the rap, promising to reimburse Bunton for the inevitable fine. At this point, and for no obvious reason, Bunton decided to do something else that would foreshadow later events: He unnecessarily complicated his planned fabrication. Instead of taking the small fall for his friend, he concocted an elaborate story in which a hitchhiker was the actual culprit. Unfortunately, “the Court treated this masterpiece with great suspicion” and imposed a surprisingly substantial fine of £15.
Bunton next turned to another self-styled “masterpiece,” a fifty-thousand-word novella that he says attracted much praise but no publisher. He followed that with a ninety-minute radio play, which also languished in London at the hands of the gatekeepers of culture. This was apparently both a prolific and barren spell for the would-be author: “In all I completed four sound radio plays, three television ones, and one book, all landed in the top cupboard.” The failures brought out in Bunton a mixture of perseverance and self-pity: “They say he who tries and tries again, but not for me. Interspersed between various jobs, I continue writing, and crying at the rubbish which has made the grade.”
Not surprisingly, this period churning out unpublished fiction coincided with unemployment. But during this time, a seemingly innocuous incident set in motion the improbable series of events that some years later would put the name Kempton Bunton on the path to infamy.
On a dreary, snow-filled Newcastle night, Bunton found himself in the shelter of a city doorway next to “a tramp-like sort of old man.” Seemingly harmless conversation ensued, and Bunton discovered that the man was in fact “not of the tramp class” but rather “an old aged pensioner of Newcastle,” a widower who lived alone. The man had a pet peeve that he no doubt shared with many a stranger, but none more sympathetic than Bunton: “Although his relative had given him a television set, he could not use it, because £4 for the license [to watch BBC] was out of the question.”
Bunton’s response reflected his iconoclastic mind-set: “Why not view without a license?”
But the “frightened little old man” did not share Bunton’s anarchic streak. The more Bunton learned about the man, the more he seethed at the injustice. The man had fought in World War I, and all he wanted from the government was to be allowed to watch a little telly. Bunton reports that he headed home, and then he resorts to remarkable understatement: “Somehow the incident did not end there.”
Until encountering the pathetic veteran, Kempton Bunton was a rebel without a cause, unless an amorphous sense that the world was irrationally stacked against him can be said to constitute a cause. Now, as he reflected on the injustice of the BBC licensing fee, Bunton became a man with a burning cause that would occupy him for the rest of his life.
To be fair, there was merit to Bunton’s position. When the BBC was literally the only show in town, the licensing fee amounted to a defensible user fee. But starting in 1956, commercial television in Great Britain existed side by side with BBC programming. Yet all those with television sets were forced to pay the BBC fee, even if they had no interest in watching anything on BBC.a
The television license was introduced after the war, in June 1946, to coincide with the postwar resumption of BBC TV service that same month. It cost anyone with a television set £2 (about £73 today). The fee was increased to £3 in 1954, and when Kempton Bunton refused to buy his license in 1960, it cost £4 (the equivalent of £86 or $130 today).
In Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, the narrator observes that “Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage where on to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.” That Kempton Bunton felt a profound passion about an obscure cause cannot be doubted. That this passion would in fact play out on a prominent London stage could not have been predicted.
Chapter 5: ANATOMY OF AN INVESTIGATION
It is never uplifting for a nation to wake up and find one of its treasures lost, but 1961 could be seen as a relatively good time for the United Kingdom, and especially London, to handle such a blow. London, and especially its art world, was brimming with confidence. On the other hand, one could see the timing of The Duke’s disappearance as devastating for exactly the same reason: A city (and nation) finally flourishing after a long period of stagnation hardly needed to suffer such a loss.
Time magazine coined the term Swinging London in 1966, the same year Roger Miller’s hit song “England Swings” captured the city’s casual swagger (“Take a tip before you take your trip / Let me tell you where to go, go to England, oh / England swings like a pendulum do / Bobbies on bicycles, two by two”). Four years earlier, the Daily Express referred to “the rollicking revolution of merrie England.” In fact, the cultural revolution that produced Swinging London traces back to the 1950s and a long overdue social and economic recovery from World War II. From 1951 through 1964, average wages in real terms rose 50 percent.
Wealth accounted for only part of the city’s and nation’s transformation. The lid came off a city steeped in fear and austerity, and a flashy, freewheeling modern culture emerged, with particular indulgence in cigarettes and automobiles. (Expenditures on cars and motorcycles rose tenfold, from £90 million in 1951 to £910 million in 1964.) The Beatles and rock took to London, along with miniskirts and minicars, bright red buses, and black leather jackets. The art world bustled, with new galleries springing up all over the city, and London threatened to replace Paris as epicenter of the European art scene.
Baby boomers reached adolescence en masse—teens with vastly more disposable income than their parents had enjoyed when young and influenced by a range of left-wing social and intellectual currents, including the Beats (imported from the United States) and existentialism (imported from France). These movements celebrated freedom and the individual, while artistic movements in England, including New Wave cinema and its literary cousin the “Angry Young Men,” championed the heretofore neglected working class.
The energy from the youth-oriented culture and avant-garde art world only intensified the city’s attachment to its time-honored icons. The National Gallery thrived in Swinging London. Such was the state of affairs when, on August 22, 1961, both the gallery itself and the arts community learned that Goya’s The Duke of Wellington had vanished.
Responsible parties honored the long-standing tradition in Great Britain and offered their resignations. Acknowledging that “I missed that window”—meaning the one through which the thief had apparently entered and exited—the gallery’s head of security, George Fox, announced his intention
to resign to Philip Hendy, the gallery’s longtime director. Hendy replied that Fox’s fate was in the hands of the trustees and that Hendy himself would not endorse Fox’s resignation. Rather, he planned to tender his own. The next day he did so, but he was informed that only the prime minister or chancellor, not the gallery trustees, had the authority to accept his resignation.
While insiders took responsibility, the public at large sought to solve or exploit the crime. Announcement of The Duke’s disappearance triggered an inundation of letters and phone calls to police and media, spouting theories, claiming knowledge (including numerous alleged sightings of the painting), taking credit, and making accusations. Various hoaxes included a man who called Reuters Fleet Street office to demand ransom money for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) “in the interests of humanity at large.” A CND spokesperson disavowed any knowledge of the matter.
The early response also included a few leads whose specificity made them more promising. On August 24, three days after the theft, a man reported seeing a painting resembling the Goya in the backseat of a car on Tottenham Court Road on the night it disappeared. But follow-up inquiries did not yield anything concrete. On August 31 an anonymous caller informed Reuters that the painting had been sold and would be whisked out of the country the next day on British European Airways flight B292 to Rome. On September 1, detectives were waiting at Heathrow Airport and delayed that flight thirty-five minutes with an extra search of luggage that unearthed nothing untoward.
Amateur sleuths also offered assistance. An anonymous two-page letter from the self-styled “Infuriated Art Lover” to the chief superintendent of Scotland Yard, postmarked August 24, offered detailed knowledge of the missing painting and the gallery’s electronic security system. The art lover presented an elaborate theory pinning the crime on a “closely organized gang” that had hired someone wearing a tailored suit with a forty-inch chest and seventeen-inch sleeve, who had slipped the painting into “a specially contrived pocket in the back of an overcoat.” If nothing else, the impressive detail made the letter writer himself a suspect, but tracing anonymous letters was nearly impossible.
Media hyped the theft as well. On the ahead-of-its-time television show Three after Six, in which pundits sparred about current events, high-profile newspaper columnist Dee Wells (the wife of eminent British philosopher A. J. Ayer) predicted that the police would beat up “the poor hopeless little nut” who had stolen the painting. Wells was forced to apologize, but the episode amounted to more than an ill-considered comment by a celebrity provocateur—it presented an alternative profile of the criminal. Might Scotland Yard be wrong to assume the kidnapping of The Duke was a professional job?
It was at least worth considering that anyone acquainted with the art world would have known the difficulty of doing anything profitable with a famous work by Goya. No one would be foolish enough to purchase and display such a recognizable work. Could Dee Wells have been right? Could a “poor hopeless little nut” be behind the theft? Half-right maybe. A nut perhaps, but the act almost certainly required resources and resourcefulness.
One intriguing aspect of the crime—the calendar—commanded everyone’s attention. Investigators could not help fixating on the date The Duke had been kidnapped: August 21,1961, fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, the most famous art heist in history. Unless this was a staggering coincidence, the culprit knew something about art history and had a mischievous streak to boot. Or, as the Daily Mirror cheekily implied in its initial story about the theft, the man who had stolen the Mona Lisa and the man who had taken The Duke could be one and the same! After all, a twenty-year-old in 1911 would now be just seventy.
The improbable single-thief theory to the side, the Mona Lisa coincidence suggested ingenious pranksters. And in the immediate aftermath of the theft, the media quoted an anonymous senior police officer in London who believed that the theft “might be a crank, someone playing a joke, someone who doesn’t like the Duke of Wellington.”
The supposition that the thief was a prankster fit the other circumstantial evidence alluded to above: Anyone daring and savvy enough to pull off this crime had done his homework and thus would have known that The Duke of Wellington could never be displayed and therefore probably could not be sold. The prankster angle thus supplied a plausible motive to an otherwise bizarre move for professional thieves. But some observers, emphasizing the rash of thefts of major artworks in the 1960s, conjured a reclusive millionaire hiring thieves and secretly amassing a collection of masterpieces for his own enjoyment. Sir Kenneth Clark, former director of the gallery, forlornly declared, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the painting isn’t already on its way to one of those very, very private collectors in the U.S.” The writer Richard Condon (famous for his novel The Manchurian Candidate from two years earlier) concurred, observing, “If a miser can find joy sitting within a double locked room and counting gold doubloons, there are any number of art appreciators who would gladly dine quite alone with a few Goyas and Breughels.”
Condon was asked to weigh in because of his 1958 novel The Oldest Confession, about a wacky attempt to pull off an impossible art theft. Others had personal agendas or professional reasons for putting in their two cents. Pravda, the official news agency of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, in full Cold War propaganda mode, offered a theory consistent with that of Clark and Condon: The thefts had been commissioned by Western capitalists. The US humorist Art Buchwald proposed in his newspaper column that the Goya had been taken by “Piccadilly Lock Pickers,” who had transported it to southern France for a meeting of art thieves to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa.
In a more serious vein, the London Times editorialized that there were four possible reasons that someone might steal a “booty picture”—its name for a work too recognizable to be sold on the open market. While minor stolen works (“say a sketch by Constable or a small Dutch flower piece”) might be placed on the art market without rousing suspicion, booty pictures could not be. However, “the theft may be prompted by misguided patriotism. It may be due to some form of mania. A picture may be stolen in order to sell it to some eccentric collector who is prepared to gloat over it in private. Or lastly and more probably, it may be stolen in order to elicit ransom from the owner of an insurance company.”
While seemingly everyone had a theory about the thief’s motives and the painting’s whereabouts, Scotland Yard detectives could not get away from the same fact that appealed to humorist Buchwald—the theft occurring fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa. That couldn’t be a coincidence, and it suggested that the thieves were the sort to play games. A good thing, perhaps. Experienced crime solvers know that many criminals, consciously or unconsciously, wish to be caught. Other criminals may prefer to remain at large but desperately want their crimes noticed. Both groups deliberately leave clues or at least take unnecessary risks that may leave clues. Naturally, law enforcement prefers these kinds of criminals—those who almost go out of their way to assist the investigation. It would have been more problematic if the theft of The Duke had indeed been commissioned by a reclusive private collector who would stash the work away in some remote location, never to be heard from again. But given that The Duke was taken on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mona Lisa’s pilfering, it seemed likely that the thief would be heard from. Stealing the work on that very day expressed a message of some sort (if only “I’m having fun”), and those who get off on sending messages don’t stop with only one.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming assistance the public offered the Yard amounted to a mixed blessing. Just separating potentially legitimate leads from pure cranks required substantial work. The Yard, which rarely received so many fake confessions and false tips, employed a number of men to handle the “noise” while assigning an elite team of detectives to pore over every inch of the National Gallery’s two acres and 250 rooms. Still other agents conducted dozens of inte
rviews with gallery personnel. In keeping with common practice at the time (which continues to this day in a surprising number of precincts in both the United States and Great Britain), the Yard also consulted with psychics.
In the immediate aftermath of the theft, the digging produced nothing promising. But experienced investigators know—or choose to believe—that if they are patient enough, at some point something will break. The break may not enable them to solve the crime right away, but it at least gives them something to work with. It may come at any time—sometimes within days of the crime, sometimes months or even years later. But if you keep your eyes and the case file open, it will come. Cases go cold, but they rarely freeze unless you let them.
In the case of the missing Goya, little patience was needed: The first significant potential break came just ten days after the theft, in the form of a letter, postmarked London, sent to the Reuters news agency on Fleet Street. In handwritten block letters, it began: “Query not that I have the Goya,” and it sought to prove the point by identifying marks and labels on the back of the canvas. (“It has a stick label on back saying F Le Gallais & Son. Depositories Jersey. Name Duke of Leeds. Date 22.8.58 no 2. It has 6 cross ribs each way.”) The note further assured that “the picture is not damaged, apart from a couple of scratches at side. Actual portrait perfect.”
Then the letter writer got down to business, beginning with an oblique reference to the motive behind the theft: “The act is an attempt to pick the pockets of those who love art more than charity.” An unusual ransom demand followed: “The picture is not, and will not be for sale—it is for ransom—£140,000—to be given to charity. If a fund is started—it should be quickly made up, and on the promise of a free pardon for the culprits—the picture will be handed back.” The letter concluded with a point of personal privilege and a widespread appeal: “None of the group concerned in this escapade has criminal convictions. All good people are urged to give, and help the affair to a speedy conclusion.”