by Alan Hirsch
In any event, the outing of John Bunton was bad news/good news. Bad news: My secret was no longer secret. Good news: John Bunton no longer had any reason to withhold, or ask me to withhold, any aspect of the story of perhaps the greatest art theft ever. I was finally in position to tell the whole story—of the crime, the criminal, and the innocent man who chose to take the fall. While the who was now known (at least to readers of the London Guardian), I could reveal the how, why, when, and where, most of which had never been told.
THE REAL STORY OF THE THEFT
The conviction and three-month sentence of Kempton Bunton for stealing the frame of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington was perhaps a case of what T. S. Eliot called “the greatest treason—the right thing for the wrong reason.” Bunton had not stolen the frame, or for that matter the painting. But nor was he blameless. The theft of the Goya did indeed result from his obsessive crusade against the government policy requiring the elderly to pay the BBC licensing fee, and he did indeed write the various ransom notes that perhaps constituted crimes in their own right.
Even though they ended up with the wrong man, Scotland Yard and the prosecution at Kempton Bunton’s trial got some things right. For starters, they were right to conclude that the government’s substantial expenditure to keep The Duke of Wellington in England had set off Kempton Bunton and had set in motion events leading to The Duke’s disappearance. It may seem psychologically bizarre to connect the government’s purchase of the Goya with its television licensing fee, but the injustice of the latter, once it took hold of Bunton’s mind, never let go. From the moment he heard about the extravagant expenditure for a mere painting, he writes in his memoirs, “something clicked within me, seeming to say that the picture and I were fated to cross swords.”
Kempton Bunton loved to talk, loved pubs, and spent a fair amount of time indulging those passions simultaneously. We’ll never know how many people in how many pubs heard about his bitterness that the government had spent a substantial sum to keep The Duke of Wellington in London while forcing old people to spend money to watch television, but quite likely it was more than a few. It also seems safe to speculate that virtually all of them dismissed Bunton as a crank. But at least one young man took Bunton seriously: his own son John, nineteen at the time.
It wasn’t so much that John Bunton shared his father’s outrage about the BBC licensing fee or the government’s expenditure on the Goya. He was a ne’er-do-well who didn’t much follow or feel strongly about public affairs. To some extent, he was a rebel without a cause, and his father supplied one. Young Bunton felt sympathy for Kempton; he recalls that his father “got no support from the OAP [old age pensioner] community and only received one letter while in prison, and was mocked and a bit of an outcast as a result.” He figured he could make amends—”the Goya could be used as leverage for [my father’s] campaign.”
John also had a second motive, albeit one that backfired. He thought he could take advantage of the system whereby insurance companies would pay 10 percent of the value of stolen art to get it back on the quiet. He did not realize that this practice did not apply to government property. Looking back at that foiled incentive, John Bunton says he pulled off the “perfect crime in reverse.” Yes, he seized a valuable object without getting caught, but what could he do with it?
As Scotland Yard surmised early on, and Judge Aarvold openly asserted at Kempton Bunton’s trial, the theft required a “remarkable athletic feat.” John Bunton, a rugged man near his physical prime, was equal to the task. A half century later, he described a childhood that produced impressive physical fitness:
My childhood was free and loose, [I was] allowed to do what I wanted. We were pretty much chucked out of the house, they just wanted to be rid of us. . . . Nature was a free baby sitter for us all day. I was never into any specific sports but always active from a young age. I had about 16 different boats between the age of 10 and 15. At 10 years old I would swim in the Tyne River and moor my boat in the middle of the river (so no one would steal it). I would have to swim to get to it, by judging the tides 200 yards upstream when setting off.
John Bunton, like his father, was a self-described drifter, more apt to get into a fight than to get (or at least keep) a job. He recalls, “I always seemed to have money in school, hustling one way or another.” And, as his actions on August 21, 1961, vividly demonstrate, he shared his father’s keen sense of mischief and almost ridiculous optimism.
Notwithstanding some marked similarities, the Buntons weren’t buddies. Asked what Kempton was like as a father, John, the youngest of seven children, offered a not terribly fond reminiscence:
We had a poor upbringing (like Oliver Twist) at the end of WW2. Kempton wanted to be a writer and wasn’t concerned about getting a stable job, he was always in and out of menial jobs and my mother was always nagging him to get a job. My father never harmed me. Never hit me in my life. We were never hungry. The only way we were abused in a sense was by having no education whatsoever. When I was leaving the school as an 11 yr old to go to secondary school, the teacher said I should go to Rutherford College instead of Whickham View Comprehensive. I remember the head teacher and another teacher arguing my case saying, I should go to Rutherford because I was too clever to go to Whickham View. However, I ended up at Whickham View because my parents wouldn’t pay for a uniform and you didn’t need one at Whickham View! That was pure ignorance, and that’s the way it was all the time with my father. I even had a dog that he sold when I was at school. [P]robably for beer money. It was a big disadvantage having a father like mine.
According to his devoted son, Chris, John Bunton was an opinionated young man, intelligent and idea oriented but not well educated. Financial exigency forced him to leave school when he was fifteen. Like his father, he worked many jobs across the UK, often as a mechanic. Chris, who speaks highly of his father in most respects, does note his dad’s Kempton-like tendency to “simplify things to a black and white level” and adds, “I think this is how he approached the Goya heist.”
The facts support Christopher’s surmise. As John explained, looking back a half century later, he was living at home in Newcastle with his parents when he heard his father grouse about television licenses and the government’s purchase of the Goya. Two days later, “I went to London with a purpose and with £1.50 in my pocket. Two weeks later, I had the painting”—one worth £140,000.
John Bunton did not tell his father (or anyone else) what he planned to do, and it all happened rather quickly. He arrived in London with virtually no money and no particular plan. He recalls “taking things one step at a time” and continuing until the end only because “things kept going in my favor.” John Bunton felt prepared to back out at any point, but it was as if “God was helping,” so there was no reason to stop.
He stayed one night in a hostel but spotted a newspaper advertisement for a live-in position as a bell boy/chauffeur at a hotel in South Regents Park. He applied for and got the job. During his three weeks in London (two before the theft, one after), he worked a number of odd jobs.
In the off hours, young Bunton visited the National Gallery several times, undertaking what we might call a feasibility study regarding the theft. On his first visit, he located the offending Goya in its special exhibit. During his second visit, he waited until he was alone with the painting, then stuck fluff behind it to test whether the painting got moved. On the third visit, he noted the presence of the fluff, suggesting that the painting was being left alone. He also took note that a lavatory window looked onto a building site in the courtyard behind the gallery. He obtained the gallery plan so that he would know the precise route from the lavatory window to the painting. He also took note that there were parking meters on the street abutting the courtyard, so he could park fairly close to the wall that would enable him to climb to the lavatory window. He noticed that workers doing construction in the courtyard had left a ladder lying around, which would enable him to do the necessary climbi
ng.
But, of course, none of that would matter if the painting were closely guarded. John Bunton struck up conversation with security guards about their work, in the guise of interest in applying for a job as one of them. At least one guard let down his guard (so to speak) too much, informing Bunton that the alarms were switched off in the wee hours to allow cleaners to come in without setting off an alarm.
More planning had to be done, starting with the acquisition of an escape vehicle (since Bunton owned no car). Given his background, acquisition of a vehicle figured to pose little difficulty. He had worked as an auto mechanic and knew how to break into and start a car without a key. He chose an enclosed parking garage roughly three miles from the National Gallery, picked a dark green Wolseley to pilfer, and opened the hood (or bonnet, in British parlance) in search of the power source. Then he encountered his first piece of bad luck—he heard voices, presumably two or more people approaching their own vehicle in the vicinity. Bunton shut the hood and climbed under his chosen vehicle. While he hid, a car with a young couple in it drove in and parked next to him. They opted for serious necking, and Bunton estimates that he remained under the car for an hour, though one’s sense of time can hardly be reliable in such an adrenaline-flowing situation. When the couple finally drove off, he emerged covered in oil.
Well after midnight he drove to the gallery and parked his new vehicle on the street abutting the gallery. He wore gloves, and a jacket to match the guards’ attire. When he entered the gallery, he feared “only” two things: alarms going off and security guards. He encountered neither, and acquiring the Goya turned out to be the easiest part of the operation. He quietly walked with it into the lavatory and climbed down the ladder into the courtyard, picture in hand. The gate had closed behind him, so to leave the courtyard and get to his car, he had to climb a wall that was topped with barbed wire. Holding the picture in one hand, he used the other to grab the barbed wire and hurl himself over the wall. He and The Duke both fell hard to the ground, but neither was injured. He tossed the painting into the backseat of the car and started to drive off.
Bunton had driven maybe three hundred yards when a policeman in the street stopped the car. With Goya’s Duke sitting unconcealed in the backseat, Bunton thought that his caper was over and he was headed for the hoosegow. But the policeman was simply checking the sobriety of someone driving at an improbable hour. Whatever offenses he may have committed, Bunton did not drink while thieving. The policeman looked the sober young man in the eye, then waved him past. (Reflecting on the various near misses, Bunton says that he must have been watched over by a guardian angel.)
Bunton drove to the inn he was staying in on Grafton Way off Tottenham Court Road. He whisked the picture up to his room and put it under his bed. He then drove the car several miles west before abandoning it in a suburban street and taking the Tube back to Warren Street Station. After catching up on sleep, he decided that the painting’s frame was an unnecessary encumbrance. He removed it and chopped it up with a junior hacksaw. Later that day, he dumped the parts in the Thames River at Victoria Embankment. Of the various versions Kempton Bunton gave regarding what happened to the frame, the true one involved it ending up in the Thames—albeit with John, not Kempton, the man who so disposed of it.
John called his father that night and said that he had in his possession a stolen painting. It was the second shock that day for Kempton, who earlier had heard about the theft of the Goya on the news. When his son mentioned stealing a painting, Kempton immediately put two and two together and said, “It’s the Goya.” He offered to rush down to London to help his son with the next step but had to borrow money from another of his sons, Kenneth, to make the trip. Kempton and John met at Kings Cross, found inexpensive lodging, and smuggled the painting in. They then found an even cheaper room, a Swiss cottage (a “basement bedsit”) in Northwest London, for the purpose of storing the painting.
The unemployed Buntons had in their possession a valuable painting, but between them no cash, so each sought immediate employment. Kempton landed a job in a bakery, while John found employment driving fur coats around London. The latter employment gave John a van, which he used to transport the pilfered painting from their digs to the cottage. As a result, John received the only punishment he ever experienced related to the theft: “I was sacked from my job because I used the work van to transfer the painting from Grafton Way to a Kings College Road basement room, and somehow they noticed I went off route.”
The discharge made him concerned that someone had seen him moving the picture, which led the Bunton father-and-son team to contrive to move it up north. They packaged it carefully, and Kempton took it on the train back to Newcastle—as he described in his memoirs and I recounted in chapter 6. His account of the theft and its aftermath in the memoirs artfully mixes fiction (the whole fabricated story of him stealing the painting) and fact (his description of how he handled the painting over the next four years).
John recalls Kempton’s state of mind upon learning what his son had done: “Surprised and anxious, worried about the consequences. Not organized at all.” John further describes the two of them scrambling to improvise in the wake of his ill-considered venture. “If you’re in London with no money it’s a hard business, and if you’ve got that picture under your bed, it’s a harder business! It wasn’t planned properly because when you do a thing like that, you don’t think you’re going to get away with it, and the further you go on you just make it up on the fly.”
John followed Kempton to Newcastle. As he sat on a bus from the train station to his home, he saw someone seated in front of him reading a newspaper (the Daily Express) with the headline “No Goya, No Clue.” As John Bunton would soon learn, “There were headlines about the case all over the world.”
The first ransom note, written by Kempton just ten days after the theft, might suggest a man with a plan, but in reality, according to John, Kempton was winging it. He wrote the original ransom note because he feared instant apprehension and, in John’s words, “wanted to soften the blow” by claiming that the theft was for charitable purposes so “we would not be classified as red hot thieves.”
One thing led to another, and what began as an improvised effort to mitigate the severity of the crime morphed into an extended ransom effort in which Kempton actually hoped to obtain money in service of his crusade on behalf of the elderly. The Com ransom notes were written by Kempton. The cause of safeguarding and eventually returning the painting became his. John Bunton had been the prime mover, but after the fact, the Goya caper became a solo operation by and for his father. Between September 1961 and the spring of 1965, John Bunton and his father never discussed the theft or the painting’s fate.
That changed in March 1965, when Kempton asked John for his help in returning the painting. It is unclear why Kempton did not return the painting himself, but perhaps a sense of symmetry appealed to the would-be playwright: His son’s involvement was the story’s alpha and omega, with nothing in between. John Bunton stole the painting and returned it. Kempton did everything else.
He eventually concocted the plan to return the painting to the left luggage office in Birmingham, as well as the name Bloxham for John. John, aka Mr. Bloxham, is the one who actually returned the painting. That suggests one of the more remarkable aspects of this entire caper—John was in the courtroom throughout Kempton’s trial, and he even took the witness stand at a time when the police were looking for Mr. Bloxham and had circulated an Identikit image of him.
Since the police remained on the lookout for Mr. Bloxham, it seems awfully cheeky, if not suicidal, for John Bunton to testify at his father’s trial—in the very presence of some of the police officers involved in the case. When, almost a half century later, I asked John whether he in any way had altered his appearance or was worried about being recognized in court, he replied: “No, because I didn’t know about the artist’s [Identikit] impression that was circulated. When I took the stand I knew I’d only hav
e to answer one question (about the typewriter) because it was arranged beforehand by Hutchinson, so I wasn’t unduly concerned about being recognized.” And thus, at a trial in which the jury convicted the wrong man, the actual culprit took the witness stand to testify about a minor matter.
Two months after the painting’s return, Kempton gave himself up for exactly the reason he gave in his memoirs—he feared that Pamela Smith was about to come forward and collect the £5,000 reward. This was consistent with the version he gave police and at trial, except for the identity of the person to whom he had recklessly confided. However, even apart from claiming that the would-be rat was an old male friend, rather than his son’s girlfriend, at trial Bunton dissembled a bit about his motives for coming forward. It wasn’t so much a desire to keep Pamela Smith from making off with the reward money. Rather, Kempton sought to protect his son John: If Smith came forward, she was going to say (as she later in fact did) that John had stolen the painting. Kempton sought to preempt her identification of his son as the thief by taking responsibility himself.
Meanwhile, both John and his brothers Kenneth and Tommy sat silent during their father’s trial, watching him testify at length about a crime they knew he did not commit. The reason they did so is simple: They were following Kempton’s unambiguous orders. Kempton had little trouble convincing his sons that the opportunity to evangelize about his cause easily trumped the risk of a short prison sentence (and he didn’t expect worse). So Kempton took the fall for his son’s crime.
Chapter 22: SECOND MYSTERY SOLVED
As discussed in chapter 20, in 1969, four years after Kempton Bunton’s conviction, someone else came forward and confessed. Though the new confessor was never publicly identified (much less prosecuted), decades later writer Sandy Nairne correctly speculated that this man might have been John Bunton. And with the benefit of the lengthy DPP file, along with John Bunton’s recollection, we can piece together what transpired when he came forward and why the authorities chose not to prosecute him.