The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  While the Mirror showed only a mild and occasional interest in actual news, it craved making news. For some time King pushed for the paper to get directly involved in the story of the Goya theft, proposing that it offer a reward of £10,000 for return of the painting. But, as noted, the law precluded the payment of a ransom for pilfered art. The thief’s latest letter, however, so-called Com 5, gave King a new idea for inducing the thief to return the painting without the Mirror violating the law.

  On March 18, the Daily Mirror published the thief’s letter on page 2 and urged him to turn back to page 1. There, he and other readers would find a long appeal under the bold heading “THE MISSING GOYA AND THE MIRROR. OUR SPORTING OFFER TO THE MYSTERY LETTER-WRITER.” The article urged the man who possessed this “national art treasure” either to return it through a newsagent to the Mirror office in Holborn Circus or else “deposit it in any safe place of his choice,” followed by informing the editor of its location. In either case, the Mirror would arrange to have the painting exhibited for a month “for the benefit of any charity nominated by the present possessor of the painting.” The Mirror noted that it could not promise the thief immunity from prosecution, as that was a decision only the government was empowered to make. However, it reminded the thief that Lord Robbins, chairman of the National Gallery trustees, was on record as saying that if the painting were returned, the probability of further search for the perpetrator would be “virtually nil.” The Mirror included an inset quoting Robbins to that effect.

  The Mirror acknowledged that, by law, Robbins “cannot bargain. Nor can the Mirror,” but it added that “this newspaper can and does invite the letter-writer to return the Goya. This newspaper can and does promise that it will try to meet the writer’s wishes in this affair.” It concluded, “What matters most is that the historic painting by Goya should be speedily restored to the National Gallery and the nation.”

  A few days later, the Daily Mirror received a letter postmarked Birmingham, March 21, with the return address “Urgent.” The letter began by noting, “My good friend and I are rather upset over the recent publicity concerning the missing Goya.” This alleged good friend is “part owner of the ‘Goya’” (presumably along with the letter writer) and the man who “wrote to you early in this week.” This sequel sought to clarify his good friend’s offer to return the painting if the requisite money was raised.

  The author noted that his friend had “jumped the gun” in making the offer without contacting the author, a potentially fatal error since the author had “possession of the Goya at my home in Birmingham.” The good news, however, was that “my good friend and I have sorted out our misunderstanding and I am willing to accept these terms offered. Rather reluctantly however!” The purpose of this letter? To assure the editors and the public that he and his repeatedly referenced “good friend” were “art lovers and wouldn’t dream of damaging [the painting] in any way.” He urged the Mirror to print this letter “so that the good people of Britain can see that although we committed this awful crime, we didn’t mean any harm whatsoever.” The letter expressed the hope that “no one will bear a grudge against my good friend or I” and gave the editors a heads-up: They could expect a letter “from my good friend in Darlington next week.” It was signed: A.D.

  The gratuitous nature of the letter, which did nothing to advance return of the painting, convinced the Mirror that it was a hoax, and the editors declined the offer to print it. They never heard from the author’s “good friend” (or, at any rate, they received no relevant communication postmarked Darlington), which would seem to support their assessment and justify their inaction.

  By contrast, the Mirror considered legitimate a letter also posted March 21 from Birmingham and marked “Confidential, For Mirror Editor Only.” Inside, the letter began with one of the ransomer’s characteristically puzzling assertions: “As no pardon has been offered, a deal can only be arranged if a guarantee is forthcoming.” He proceeded to move the negotiation forward and propose another specific means for returning the painting:

  If you can assure me that £30,000 can be got from exhibition, or that you can get Gallery permission to continue exhibition until a minimum of £30,000 is taken—you will get the portrait.

  If in your power to promise such, you may wish to publicize openly, or I will accept an obvious message in personal column of Daily Mirror signed Whitfield.

  The morning after public or private message appears, you will receive a letter informing you to pick up Goya.

  The ransomer added a second sheet with a cryptic message: “If collected, direct charity money on instructions from TYA.” (“FHC” was legible but crossed out, with “TYA” replacing it.)

  On March 23, the Daily Mirror printed in its personal column: “Personal—T.Y.A. (or EH.C.) Your letter received and being considered—Whitfield.” The next day, under the bold heading “THE MISSING GOYA: A LETTER TO THE MIRROR,” the Mirror brought readers up to date (“The man with the Goya has been in touch with the Daily Mirror”) and made a counteroffer to the ransomer. It essentially agreed to his terms, except it clarified, “Nobody can guarantee that £30,000 will be raised by public exhibition of the Goya portrait, but the Mirror offers to place the portrait on public exhibition (with acceptable arrangements over security and guards) or to endeavour to reach a similar arrangement with the National Gallery from which the Goya was stolen in August 1961.”

  The ransomer sat tight for two months. Then, on May 21, the Daily Mirror received some strange items in the mail: a cartoon with one corner missing cut out of the March 18 issue of the newspaper, a receipt for a parcel at the left luggage station in Birmingham, and another cryptic message: “Some future wise guy may offer to tell you all. Ask him for references—a corner piece for enclosed cartoon.”

  The newspaper turned the ticket over to the police, and the next day Detective Constable Harold Stanley Reeves showed up at the left luggage office in Birmingham and asked for the parcel with ticket number F24458. He received a parcel secured by rope and wrapped in brown paper with two labels reading, “Glass: Handle With Care.” Reeves found inside a wooden box with six screws securing the lid and inside that a pink polythene bag secured with Sellotape. He opened the bag and found another brown paper parcel secured with Sellotape and through an opening what looked like a piece of wood. When he turned it over, he saw a canvas covered with a piece of hardboard secured by more Sellotape. He further noted six pieces of pencil eraser positioned so as to protect the painting from rubbing against the hardboard. On removing the canvas, he saw Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, but without glass or frame.

  Reeves learned from the luggage room attendant, Ronald Lawson, that the parcel had been left seventeen days earlier (May 5) by a tall, bushy-haired blond man in a blue duffel coat, appearing to be in his early twenties. This mystery man signed his name “Mr. Bloxham” and had urged the baggage clerk to “be very careful with this.” He had paid one shilling and was given a ticket number. Lawson described the man as “well spoken and [having] sharp features” and claimed that he looked like an art student.

  Reeves brought the painting down to West End Central Police Station and summoned Michael Levey, assistant keeper at the National Gallery, who inspected the painting and declared unequivocally that it was the real thing. (Levey would later explain his certainty to reporters: “The paint surface was right and because of a general thing I can’t explain about recognizing paintings.”) On May 24 the gallery held a press conference, where it displayed the painting to throngs of reporters. The Duke was missing his original seventeenth-century frame, but before long the gallery purchased a suitable imitation from Paris. As for the painting itself, it had suffered a few minor scratches, which took less than a day for conservators to fix. On May 27, the curators returned The Duke to an exhibition. But, perhaps spooked by his disappearance four years earlier, this time the gallery kept him in good company—whereas he had been displayed solo before, now he was part of a larger
exhibition devoted to Spanish paintings. (His neighbors included two less famous Goya portraits.)

  The National Gallery had The Duke, but Scotland Yard wanted his kidnapper. That meant locating Mr. Bloxham, who may or may not have been the thief and in all likelihood was not in fact named Bloxham. It seemed improbable that someone would give his real name when dropping off a highly valued stolen painting. Something else also hinted at a pseudonym. In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, one Lady Bloxham rents the home of Jack Worthing, who as a baby had been found in a handbag in the cloakroom of a railway station. The new evidence suggested that some sleuths had been right all along: The thief was young and cultured and had a puckish sense of humor. But the only potentially meaningful lead to help the authorities pursue the self-styled Mr. Bloxham was his physical description by the baggage room attendant. Based on that, Scotland Yard artists composed and the police circulated an Identikit portrait, which leading newspapers published.

  In the meantime, the Daily Mirror tried to make good on its offer to the ransomer, urging the National Gallery to exhibit The Duke for charity. The gallery, however, believed the public deserved to see their long-lost Duke without attaching strings for the benefit of a thief who had enjoyed sole and illegal possession of him for four years. Accordingly, the gallery declined to go along with the negotiated quasi-agreement between the Mirror and whoever returned the painting. Without the gallery’s third-party assistance, the Mirror was powerless to assist the thief’s charity operation. And so, as Milton Esterow would write in a book about art thefts published just a few months later, “the man who had once asked £140,000 for the portrait had ended by paying 14 cents to get rid of it.”

  The snubbed thief did not accept this result passively. He let loose two more letters, one postmarked May 25 and one May 26, both sent (for unclear reasons) to the Exchange Telegraph. The first one railed against what he considered a broken promise by the Daily Mirror:

  Goya. Extra Com. Lost—one sporting offer. Property has won—charity has lost. Indeed a black day for journalism. . . . We took the Goya in a sporting endeavor—you, Mr. Editor pinched it back by a broken promise. You furthermore have the effrontery to pat yourself on the back in your triumph. Animal—vegetable—or Idiot.

  In the letter the next day, again sent to the Exchange Telegraph though addressed to Lord Robbins, he showed that he had still not given up hope:

  When a certain influential gentleman offered to put Goya on pay exhibition for charity, I take it that Lord Robbins must have agreed.

  I ask you to keep the agreement & withhold your plan of free show.

  I did not personally take the portrait, safeguarded it for safe future return.

  The Mirror is more intent on our arrest than keeping its word, but I take it that you at least are a gentleman.

  I am a man of no substance—but my word I do not break.

  According to Times legal expert (May 24) we may have no serious case to answer. Ask this gentleman to elaborate on this affair, and give me some guidance on the matter.

  In addition to the delusional ending (what motive could Lord Robbins possibly have for providing guidance to someone who had pilfered a gallery treasure?), the letter is noteworthy in two respects. First, the ransomer suggested for the first time that he did not personally take the painting. Second, he alluded for the first time, albeit elliptically, to something that would become central to his saga. The Times legal expert he referred to had opined that the man who had stolen the Goya might not be guilty of a crime since he had returned it.

  Perhaps the expert expressed this view to lull the thief to come forward, but his suggestion actually had some legal basis. England’s Larceny Act of 1916 defined a larcenist as one who without the consent of the owner steals something “with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof” (italics added). If the kidnapper intended to return the painting all along, he lacked the requisite intent to permanently deprive the National Gallery of its possession and therefore had committed no crime. On its face, this interpretation made little sense. It licensed “involuntary borrowing,” such as taking your neighbor’s car for a joy ride or, worse still, using it for a month or two, or even a few years, provided you eventually returned it. But however absurd the language of the Larceny Act, it looked unambiguous. You do not commit a crime when your action violates no criminal law, even if the void in the law produces manifest absurdity.

  The legal nuances could wait. The nation was still absorbing the welcome return of The Duke, though Newsweek detected a sense of anticlimax. Whereas imaginative speculation had the painting taken by exotic people and turning up in crazy places (like Dr. No’s lair), the reality turned out to be vastly less dramatic: “The man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo was captured singlehandedly by a slightly crackers Robin Hood.”

  Not everyone felt let down. The Daily Mirror found the resolution of this caper deeply satisfying. On Sunday, May 23, the cover of the newspaper displayed a large picture of the gallery’s Michael Levey inspecting The Duke, and on page 2 it ran a long article entitled “My Goya. The Mirror Found It.” The newspaper indulged in major braggadocio:

  There are things which judges can do. There are things which Parliaments can do. But there are some things which only the newspapers can do. To be more factual: there are some things which only the Daily Mirror can do. Such as helping to restore to the nation the famous £140,000 Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington. . . . The police searched in vain. The critics and connoisseurs wrung their hands and prayed that the painting would not be destroyed. Anonymous ransom demands were made to news agencies. But the missing Goya stayed missing. Then, on March 18 this year, the Mirror stepped in. . . . Today, little more than nine weeks later, the Goya is safely restored. . . . The Mirror, in its own modest way, is proud of its role in rescuing a part of the national heritage. But we doubt if Mirror readers will be surprised. It’s all part of the service.

  The back of the newspaper carried an article titled “How the Goya Returned Home,” which laid out the facts surrounding the negotiation and return of the painting. At the bottom was inset a wry comment by Lord Robbins: “I hope whoever had the Goya feels better now that he has sent it back.”

  As for the identity of that mystery man, speculation ran rampant. A letter to the Guardian proposed that, in a case of life imitating art, the thief took after the eminent rogues in John Buchan’s novel John MacNab—a bored VIP looking for thrills. Because of the name Bloxham, the Daily Telegraph proposed that the thief had a literary or theatrical background.

  Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror was not through tooting its own horn. The next day it featured a front-page article titled “How We Got Goya Back,” and another article about the case, titled “The Man Who Got the Goya Back,” which included the following self-congratulatory note:

  It might have been some other newspaper, but it was, in fact, the Daily Mirror that brought the Goya portrait back to the nation. There are now many characters in the case. Success has a thousand fathers, but two men were responsible—and only two. One of them was the thin, well-spoken man who deposited the £140,000 picture in the parcel office at Birmingham New Street railway station—Mr. X. The other was Cecil H. King. For a long time King has believed that the Mirror could be instrumental in encouraging the thief to relent.

  That day’s Mirror also ran several other articles about the theft. One contained the opinion of a handwriting expert to whom the Mirror had turned over the letters that led to the painting’s return. He announced that the thief “is probably an artist.”

  Just three days later (May 27), the Mirror offered yet another smug take on the affair, with a front-page headline story titled “Did the Mirror Pinch the Goya Back?” This was ostensibly a response to one of the thief’s angry letters accusing the Mirror of welching on its alleged promise to exhibit the painting (and referring to the paper’s editor as “Animal—vegetable—or Idiot”). This letter had been sent to the
Exchange Telegraph, perhaps on the assumption that, whereas the Mirror would never publish an accusatory letter, the Exchange Telegraph would relish the opportunity to publish an attack on its rival. If so, the letter writer got things exactly backward: the Telegraph had dutifully turned the letter over to the Daily Mirror, which had published a photograph of the letter and was all too eager to quote from and discuss it.

  The paper explained, “The man who returned the Goya is angry with this newspaper. In fact, he is very rude about its editor. . . . [But his] allegations are not true.” The Mirror reminded readers that it always made clear that it could guarantee nothing and that it had kept its promise and approached the National Gallery for permission to put The Duke on exhibition. However, the gallery had vetoed the idea. The newspaper now met the thief’s venom with venom, proposing that “perhaps the happiest ending of all would be for the man who stole the Goya . . . to choose this moment to vanish from contemporary history.”

  Whether or not recent developments would lead the thief to vanish, they had the opposite effect on others, bringing out of the woodwork various folks who wished to take credit for the now consummated deed. For example, the Daily Mirror received, in an envelope postmarked May 24, a five-page handwritten letter signed “Anon,” stating that while “the actual theft of the Goya from the National Gallery can’t be explained here,” the author could at least offer a full account of all the ransom notes—written by himself and a mysterious accomplice referred to throughout as Mr. X. The letter ends on an incongruous note. After describing how Mr. X and Anon had jointly deposited the painting in the left luggage office in Birmingham, it continues: “Why we left the painting there for so long neither of us knows, but now that it is back, what does it matter?”