by Alan Hirsch
At the hearing, several of the police who had questioned Bunton when he turned himself in the previous month—Officers Walker, Johnson, and Weisner—briefly recounted their interrogation and his confession. Bunton did not testify at the hearing but did submit a written statement (read aloud in the courtroom by Crowther) describing his motives. It echoed the statement with which he had come armed when he confessed at Scotland Yard: “I had no intention of keeping the painting or depriving the Nation permanently of it. . . . I never wished to obtain anything for myself. My sole object in all this was to set up a charity to pay for television licenses for old and poor people who seem to be neglected in an affluent society.”
Also present at the hearing was Goya’s Portrait of the Duke, in a new frame and wooden case, accompanied by a security officer from the National Gallery. The painting was produced as an exhibit and held at shoulder height by a court usher. According to a contemporaneous account by the Evening Standard, for most of the hearing, “Bunton sat impassively with his arms folded. Only when the portrait was produced as an exhibit did he move slightly to get a better look.” A more thorough account of the hearing by the London Times made the seemingly gratuitous observation that Bunton weighed seventeen stone (238 pounds), perhaps intuiting that his girth would become an issue at trial.
Toward the end of the hearing, Crowther offered an unusual statement on Bunton’s behalf. Recognizing that the absence of the frame was a thorn in the defense’s side, Crowther made a personal appeal to Bunton’s old landlady (without naming her, lest he get her in trouble) to dig it out of the dusty cupboard where it had lain for four years and restore it to the nation. Apparently Bunton, who had told police that he had thrown the frame in the Thames, had told his lawyers a different story. But, as Crowther lamented years later in his memoirs, “the plea [to the landlady] went unheeded and the Duke stood unadorned in the Old Bailey” courthouse when the case went to trial two months later. His memory was faulty: The Duke stood in its new frame, not unadorned.
With trial scheduled for late October (though it ended up continued until early November), the defense found itself with more than two additional months to develop a strategy. During this time, Bunton was assigned a far more experienced attorney, Jeremy Hutchinson (aka Baron Hutchinson of Lullington), an art lover himself who later became chairman of the trustees of the Tate Gallery. Eric Crowther and Hugh Courts were relegated to supporting roles, which suited the young attorneys fine.
Hutchinson, who had been practicing law for twenty-six years and had been involved in the ballyhooed Lady Chatterley Trial (over censorship of the D. H. Lawrence novel) five years earlier, was in the process of getting divorced from actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Despite or perhaps because of the personal turmoil, he threw himself into Bunton’s defense. Bunton took an immediate liking to Hutchinson, whom he perceived as “like myself a fighter.” The admiration was reciprocated. In an interview in 2011, the ninety-seven-year-old Hutchinson recalled Bunton as “just rather a darling. I had an affection for him.” Bunton told his fellow warrior his incongruous plan: “I am pleading not guilty to all charges, even though I have already admitted to taking the picture.”
He was, at least in this sense, the ideal client for an ambitious defense attorney—factually guilty and wishing to raise a creative defense. For Hutchinson, such a situation created a welcome challenge and a no-lose proposition. In other respects, Bunton was a defense attorney’s nightmare. He had trouble keeping quiet, except on those occasions when he stubbornly refused to provide basic information, and his story changed somewhat with each telling.
Chapter 12: PRETRIAL
In the United Kingdom, as in many jurisdictions in the United States for civil cases (but less so in criminal cases), the actual trial is largely the playing out of a drama well rehearsed in advance, albeit with an uncertain outcome. Prospective witnesses give offers of proof—sworn statements that begin, “John Doe will say”—and proceed to explain exactly what information they will offer at trial. If what a witness has to say is significant, the opposing attorney calls him in for a deposition, during which he is questioned about his statement. By virtue of this procedure, lawyers can better determine whether to call witnesses for trial and can know in advance of a trial what the other side’s witnesses will say. Should a witness change his story once on the stand, opposing counsel can confront him with his deposition testimony.
In the Bunton trial, two dozen witnesses gave offers of proof. They included the foreman in charge of the construction project taking place in the gallery yard during August 1961; a police constable who had taken measurements of the gallery and produced a plan to the scale of eight feet to one inch; the warders who had first noticed the painting missing; the assistant keeper at the gallery who had verified The Duke’s authenticity upon its return; the warehouse manager whose company had stored the painting for the Duchess of Leeds in 1958; a handwriting expert who had analyzed the ransom notes; the policeman called to the scene at the National Gallery on the morning of August 22, 1961, when the painting was reported missing; the luggage room attendant who had taken the painting from “Mr. Bloxham”; and, most importantly, the various police officers who had questioned Bunton at different times. Their testimony suggested that the government had done a thorough job putting together a case that hardly required the effort. Most of its case went toward establishing what the defense did not dispute: Kempton Bunton had stolen and attempted to ransom off Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington and, when that failed, had returned it minus its frame.
The most important witness pretrial, as well as at the eventual trial, was Bunton himself. On four separate occasions, he either offered written responses to questions submitted in advance or sat for depositions in which he responded to questions in person. The various written documents and oral sessions (which were transcribed) covered his entire life as well as the specific events that gave rise to his prosecution.
In a written document, Bunton set forth, in narrative form, a summary of his life and his commitment to free television licenses for the elderly. For the most part, this statement gave facts described in earlier chapters, though it also included a strange and noteworthy summary of his attitude toward charity in general and more specifically his commitment to the cause that ended up driving his life:
I do not believe in charitable organizations, but when I was a taxi driver I never took tips from old people. I never had anything myself to give to any charity.
My first important charitable endeavor was connected with my campaign for free television licenses for the aged. . . .
I got the idea of defying the Post Office hoping that another couple of thousand people would follow my lead. Undoubtedly about 100,000 people did, but they only did it secretly. This didn’t help my campaign. . . .
I don’t believe in organized charity, because I think more money goes in expenses than goes to the people who ought to receive the charity. Before my television campaign, I had not been concerned in any important charitable enterprise.
Bunton was asked at a subsequent deposition to elaborate on his involvement with his charity of choice, as well as on how it led him to take and eventually return the Goya. His characterization of his various acts of civil disobedience with respect to the BBC licensing fee was uncharacteristically succinct: “My campaign which lasted from April 1960 until January 1961 was unfortunately not successful, although it achieved considerable publicity for my idea.” He added, “Since this campaign had not been successful, I had a chip on my shoulder about this.”
He had told the police that he “took the Goya for a reason I am not prepared to state at this moment.” Now he was ready to disclose his motives. He recited the story described in chapter 6, explaining how he had learned about the auctioning of The Duke and contrived to steal the painting and ransom it for the auction amount. Only one detail differed from his prior accounts. Now he claimed that he had expected the money, and interest from its investment, to yield “fo
rty-six licenses each week,” an increase of six over the estimate he had given on many other occasions.
While again acknowledging that he had taken the painting, for unspecified reasons he remained “not prepared to provide any details for my solicitor or counsel of the precise details of the actual taking.” At this point, one of Bunton’s attorneys pointed out to him that this refusal might place the defense at a disadvantage, “because the manner and mode of taking may throw some light on the question of intention at the time of taking.” Nevertheless, Bunton “refused to take the matter any further.”
In a final deposition, when asked at the outset to describe all relevant events, starting with his arrival in London two days prior to the theft, he readily acknowledged what he had pointedly denied when he had turned himself in—”the intention of taking this particular painting.” But he still avoided discussing the details of the actual taking. The day he arrived in London, he did now disclose, he visited the gallery and looked The Duke over. Ditto the next day, though he was suffering from the flu. He “drank a certain amount of rum to sweat it off.” He apparently was itinerant those two days, or maybe too nervous to think straight, because “I cannot remember exactly how many places I stayed at during the time that I was in London.”
Most of the deposition was devoted to the aftermath of the theft, with an emphasis on the various letters and ransom notes Bunton had written. As for the theft itself, he said only: “I took the painting between five and six o’clock in the morning. I took the picture and the frame with me straight back to the lodging.”
He addressed at some length the first ransom note, sent shortly after the theft. He stated, “I went out of my way to post this letter on 30th August,” but he failed to explain why. He “did not post it in the area in which I was staying in London,” a notion that made more sense. He emphasized (likely at the behest of his attorneys) that although he used the word ransom in his note, that terminology was “not a threat to harm the picture.”
There were other instances in the depositions where precise word choice assumed importance. Bunton tied himself in knots trying to explain why he had used the word culprits in the initial ransom note while now denying criminal wrongdoing: “I knew that I had done wrong. I believed that what I had done had been wrong in the eyes of the law, but not in my own eyes. I thought that what I had done was not a crime, but that I would get charged with a crime. I felt that it had been wrong to borrow an article which was not mine.” He explained that the plural (culprits), as well as references to the group, we, and us throughout, was a “red herring,” and he insisted, “I was the only person involved in the whole affair.” The red herring apparently had multiple causes, since he went on to explain that we and us are “Newcastle colloquial expressions for ‘I.’ At times I forgot the red herring.”
At one point he was asked what he meant by the phrase red herring, which he also had used repeatedly when questioned by the police. He replied that a red herring was something “which any criminal will say [he] is entitled to place as an obstacle in the way of the police.” This response was doubly odd, both a weird sense of entitlement and an implicit concession that he was a criminal—not exactly what you would expect from someone who had pleaded not guilty.
When asked about his statement “On the night of the ‘borrowing’ I was hooded with a silk stocking,” Bunton replied, “I was not hooded with a silk stocking. This is only theatrical.” Asked about the elaborate scheme (outlined in Com 4) for turning over The Duke on some “dark street in London,” he explained, “The proposals I put forward for the handing over of the Goya in this letter are entirely serious.” The proposals included the sending of a check to an establishment of “national repute”—he meant the post office, Bunton now explained.
Bunton was asked about his personal appeal to Lord Robbins to “assert thyself and get the [painting] on view again.” He expressed annoyance with the chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery and acquitted himself: “I was suggesting in this sentence that Lord Robbins was asleep. I do not regard it as an indirect threat, because I had always intended to return the painting to the Gallery but he would not have had it back just then without the money being raised.” Here, at least, Bunton remained on message, hewing the defense line that he had committed no crime because he always intended to return the painting.
Bunton was asked about his final ransom note, Com 5, dated March 15, 1965, the one in which he sounded forlorn, more or less admitting failure while making one last-ditch effort to induce a ransom payment. What had he meant when writing in Com 5, “I know that I am in the wrong”? As before, he expressed a confusing ambivalence: “I knew all along that I was wrong. . . . I never felt that I was committing a sin—on the contrary.” Regardless, he had pretty much realized that the jig was up: “I was prepared to hang on a while longer, to think up a way of getting the money, although I was thinking of giving up the picture after this letter if it didn’t produce a result.”
The Com 5 reference to a fund-raising effort by “Hendee-Wheeler” gave rise to this explanation at his deposition: “Mr. Hendee and Mr. Wheeler are two separate people who were often mentioned in the press as being connected with the Gallery.”a
“Hendee” was Philip Hendy, director of the gallery, and “Wheeler” was Sir Charles Wheeler, then president of the Royal Academy of Art, who in January 1964 had written a letter to the London Times urging the thief to turn over The Duke to the academy.
Finally, at the deposition Bunton made cryptic remarks about his general circumstance at the time he returned the painting: “At the beginning of March 1965 I found myself in a trap, and instead of lying low, I could have been stopped at any time. It was only later, when £30,000 was offered (considered) that I thought that I had succeeded. This sum would have provided seven free licenses per week.” But in almost the same breath he contradicted himself, saying that, at least from the time he conceived Com 5, he was optimistic: “I thought they’d jump at the idea of an exhibition for one month.”
They did jump after a fashion, or at least the Daily Mirror responded with its “sporting offer” of March 18, prompting Bunton’s follow-up letter of March 21. At the deposition, he explained the contents of that letter, sprinkling in Latin in the process: “This letter [was] in reply to Daily Mirror’s ‘sporting offer’ of 18th March, 1965. In the sporting offer, the Daily Mirror said—inter alia ‘In return the Daily Mirror will at once hire a hall.’” Bunton
explained his cryptic stipulation that money collected from the exhibition be directed to charities “on instructions from TYA.” TYA referred to 12 Yewcroft Avenue, Bunton’s home address in Newcastle, though it is unclear how he expected the Mirror to know that. FHC, which he had written but crossed out (in favor of TYA), stood for “Faith, Hope, and Charity.”
Someone had also written a letter from Birmingham to the Daily Mirror on March 19, and Bunton was asked about that. (This was the letter, described in chapter 9, signed A.D. and claiming that the author’s “good friend” had jumped the gun in accepting the Daily Mirrors sporting offer.) Bunton said he had nothing to do with that letter, which was actually written by “a crackpot,” someone “who knew of a letter previously sent from Birmingham” and “got his clue from what the Daily Mirror had published.” On this, he was almost certainly correct.
When asked about the return of the painting by a Mr. Bloxham, Bunton gave the same explanation he had given the police. He had traveled to Birmingham with The Duke on May 5,1965,”and asked a teddy boy to put it into the left luggage office for me.” The teddy boy had obliged and given Bunton the counterfoil of the ticket, which on May 20 Bunton mailed to the Daily Mirror. In his letter, he had also included a cartoon from the March 18 issue of the newspaper (the edition that included the “sporting offer” that had led to the painting’s return) and cautioned the Mirror that “some future wise guy may offer to tell you all. Ask him for references.”
At his deposition Bunton explained bo
th the cartoon and the admonition as follows: “I anticipated that on the return of the painting, many people would get in touch with the Daily Mirror and ask for the money for all sorts of charities. I enclosed the corner of the cartoon because I wanted to retain my identity as the person who had actually returned the painting so that I could specify the charity to which the money was to be donated.”
Bunton was also asked about his bitter May 25 missive to the Daily Mirror and his appeal to Lord Robbins on May 26. The former was the one that had declared a “black day for journalism” and had ended, memorably, “Animal—vegetable—or Idiot.” Bunton clarified the obvious: “I was referring to the editor of the Daily Mirror who had broken his word.” In the same letter Bunton also said of the editor, “I wonder if he is worthy of £2,500 reward or should be drummed out.” Bunton explained that “the paper has said a few days previously that it had got back the Goya painting, and wondered whether it would be entitled to the £2,500 reward, i.e., half of the £5,000 for the return of the painting, even if not for the capture.”
In his May 26 letter to Lord Robbins, Bunton stated, “I personally did not take the portrait, I safeguarded it for future return.” At his deposition, though, he said, “This is not strictly correct, and I am here guilty of a white lie.” However, at that point one of his lawyers chimed in to observe, “None of the letters says expressly that the writer actually took the painting.”