A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  In June 1975, the police and press made a mass excursion to Cherbourg, where the earl was said to have been staying at the Grand Hotel. He was then seen in a casino at Saint-Malo, before apparently travelling to the Riviera. The Daily Express asked his wife to comment: ‘“I find that impossible to believe,” sighed the Countess of Lucan, sipping one of France’s better burgundies in her Belgravia home.’29

  In 1975 Lucan was also in Mozambique. A Welsh GP called Brian Hill ‘met a tearful Englishman weeping over his prawns. After a number of beers the tall, dark stranger confessed he longed to go back to England but could not because he was Lord Lucan, and wanted for murder.’30 In 1980, corroboration of the Mozambique connection was seized upon when a former Guards officer and Clermont gambler, David Hardy, was killed in a car accident. In his address book, the police found the entry: ‘Lord Lucan, c/o Hotel Les Ambassadeurs, Beira, Mozambique.’ It was subsequently reported that the hotel register for 1975 included the name ‘Maxwell-Scott’.

  From the first, Africa has been the most consistently favoured location for sightings. Directly after the murder Lucan was reported to be in South Africa, and in 1976 he was there again, seen at the Café Royal in Cape Town by a woman who knew him from the Clermont. ‘His hair was blond and fringed and he had shaved off his moustache.’31 He has been sighted in Zimbabwe and Zambia;32 he is rumoured to have seen his children, albeit at a distance and without their knowledge, in Kenya, Gabon and Namibia.33

  In 1994 the former detective Roy Ranson travelled to Johannesburg, where he was told that Lucan had been posing as the boss of a South African clothing company. Throughout the murder investigation Ranson always claimed that Lucan was dead, but in his book about the case he executed an agile volte-face and stated, with absolute conviction, that the earl had escaped to Africa and was based in Botswana. This is the country most frequently cited as Lucan’s hiding place. In 1976 a former inmate of Leeds jail saw him there, playing craps in the casino of the Gaborone Holiday Inn.

  In 1990 two British engineers saw him, again in Gaborone, at the bar of the Cresta Botsalo Hotel, without his moustache and with a ‘neatly-trimmed grey beard’. Twenty-two years later one of the men recalled: ‘There had been talk for weeks that Lucan was around – he had links to Botswana. The instant he walked in I said to myself, “That’s him.” He was with about six people and had a very noticeable military bearing. His accent was so upper-class English that it cut the air and turned everyone’s heads when he spoke.’34

  In the 1990s, according to Ranson, Lucan was living in Botswana’s vast, secluded, residential Tuli Block. A woman named Janice Main, who ‘moved in the upper social circles of white Botswana’, had encountered him on a street and looked straight at him. ‘Lucan, in safari shorts, strode to a waiting four-wheel-drive vehicle and drove off. She never saw him again.’

  In 2012 Lucan’s younger brother Hugh, a resident of Johannesburg since 1975, took part in a short BBC documentary in which he declared his belief in his brother’s innocence. Subsequently it was reported that he stated, off camera: ‘I know for a fact my brother died in 2004 and that his grave is in Africa.’35

  Lucan has also been seen in:

  Scotland, 1979.36

  Trinidad, 1982.

  South America, 1982 and at other times.37

  Perth, 1987.

  Goa, 1991, where he was mistaken for the pot-smoking, bare-chested, shorts-wearing Barry Halpin, a former folk singer who addressed his friends as ‘old cock’.

  Brisbane, 1992, where he was identified as a manic depressive with memory loss, a butcher by trade, attending a group of recovering alcoholics.

  New Zealand, 2007, where he was mistaken for a man named Roger Woodgate, who lived in the back of a van with Camilla, his goat. ‘I am not Lord Lucan,’ he told the press.’38

  Undated rumours and sightings are as follows:

  Mexico, on James Goldsmith’s estate. In 2004 a man named Piers Dixon, who ‘shared a godson’ with Lord Lucan, stated: ‘Lucan spent the first few years under the wing of Jimmy Goldsmith. It is more than a feeling – I know it to be true.’39

  America, specifically San Francisco, where Lucan was said to be working as a waiter.

  Canada. Lucan was said to have been a warehouse worker in Ontario, and to have been seen sobbing in a changing room at the British University of Columbia gym in Vancouver.

  Japan.

  The Philippines.

  Madagascar.

  Hong Kong.

  Macau.

  The Bahamas.

  An unnamed Pacific island, close to Guam.

  Wales.

  And so on.

  The strangest thing about a myth is that it makes the real seem surreal. It becomes extraordinarily hard, in the face of this vast mesh of collective perceptions, to realize that at its heart is something that happened, that was actual. One walks down Lower Belgrave Street, coming upon it from Eaton Square, with a sense of sudden trespass, as if one’s thoughts were about to traduce the innocent present. Then imagination tries to conjure it all. The blue-black November sky, the discreet movements of traffic, the presiding calm before the brick-and-white symmetry was flung out of joint; the wrench of the stately front door and the footsteps clattering along the pavement; the little white-faced woman, her head full of clotting blood, scurrying and tumbling into the warm-lit pub; the man, heavy-footed, heading toward the dull white gleam of Chester Square; the girl bent double in the sack, her small black shoes beside it. One slides guilty eyes towards the basement: the steep steps down to the outside door, the small barred window with the sink, and behind it the dark hint of the indoor staircase; none of it giving anything away – just a formal London basement, like its neighbours – but holding the memory of that moment in time.

  And that moment is unknowable, the mystery within mysteries. Of course murder can be described, and is rendered so frequently as to make it commonplace; nevertheless its truest depiction comes in the 1960 Powell and Pressburger film Peeping Tom, when the murderer attempts to film his victims as they die, and at the last moment the camera goes blank.

  Twelve years later, a film by Alfred Hitchcock offered a complementary view. Hitchcock, whose fascination with murder was as great as anybody’s has ever been, had the genius to render the greater part of its reality. He would have done an amazing job with the Lucan case. In Frenzy, released two years before the death of Sandra Rivett and set in contemporary London, he shows a murder so graphic as to be barely watchable, which is truth of a kind, but later in the film he does something much more insightful. Another victim is strangled in a flat above the old Covent Garden fruit market. Nothing is seen of the act. What is shown, instead, is the girl and her killer walking up the stairs to the door of the flat; as they enter, silence falls, and the camera shifts to an exterior shot of the flat’s window; then it pans out, and out, and out, until it touches the merry bustle of the market; the window grows ever smaller and less significant, and as it does so becomes ever more resonantly the heart of the shot. Behind it, behind it: that is where the focus lies. And time, and life, move on.

  This, then, offers the other side of the story: the context of murder, the backdrop, the world in which it takes place. The hushed rustle of Victoriana is necessary to the stories of Charles Bravo and Adelaide Bartlett, just as the post-First World War illusion of female liberty surrounds that of Edith Thompson. The early 1970s setting of the Lucan case, in which Lord Lucan himself was as out of place as a grandfather clock in a Wimpy bar, is the final component of the myth.

  The era in which Sandra Rivett died carries its own imagistic power. Strikes; states of emergency; a three-day week; astronomical taxes; astronomical inflation; power cuts: these were the stuff of daily life. Did the lights go out at Lower Belgrave Street? They must have done. And at the Clermont Club? Did chemin-de-fer by candlelight merely add to the fun, the illusion? Men would have played that way in the eighteenth century, after all, and that was the spell that the club sought to cast.


  In the real Britain beyond, the Conservative administration of Edward Heath tried and failed to assert itself against the unions. ‘Who governs?’ Heath asked, to which the implicit answer was ‘Not you’. He had offered the Trade Union Congress a seat at the table to plan the national economy, and was turned down. In October 1973 OPEC announced a 70 per cent rise in the posted price of oil. On the first day of 1974, the brief era of the three-day week began. In February, the miners went on strike. An election was called, resulting in a hung parliament. Harold Wilson, who had become leader of the Labour Party in 1963, when Lucan’s father was its chief whip in the Lords, led a minority government. In the autumn of 1974, he won a narrow victory.

  Labour, with its ‘social contract’ between government and unions, opted for propitiation. When Heath’s policy of wage controls ended, unions demanded rises and Wilson gave them, which at least got the lights back on. Public spending for 1974–5 increased by 35 per cent. The top rate of tax rose to 83 per cent. To those paying the surcharge on invested income, the rate was 98 per cent. By the end of 1974 inflation was heading for 20 per cent.

  A Budget took place the week after the murder at Lower Belgrave Street. ‘Don’t squeeze too hard,’ begged a Daily Express editorial, as cars queued to fill their tanks before petrol rose by 8½p per gallon. The plea was in vain, as such pleas always are. ‘Everyone’, wrote the newspaper, ‘is condemned to four years’ hard labour.’ Once again, the unions raged and threatened. There was an argument for saying that Lord Lucan, wherever he was, was well out of it.

  The Wall Street Journal, which called Britain ‘the sick man of Europe’, wrote: ‘The British government is now so clearly headed towards a policy of total confiscation that anyone who has any wealth left is [taking] any chance to get it out of the country… Goodbye, Great Britain, it was nice knowing you.’ There were fears of a return to a 1930s-style depression; of a Communist takeover; of totalitarianism.

  Then came the IRA bombing campaign, reaching a climax of short terrible bursts during the dark autumn of 1974. On 5 October five people were killed in a pub in Guildford. At 10.17pm on 7 November, as the first detective was about to enter Lower Belgrave Street, an IRA bomb exploded at a pub by the army barracks at Woolwich in south-east London. Two people died. Later that month twenty-one people were killed in a single night, from two more pub bombs in Birmingham. Irish pubs were attacked in retaliation. The National Front gained popularity; in June 1974 it clashed with the International Marxist Group of Students, and a student was killed. To both left and right militancy was on the rise; the opposing factions were equally violent, equally voluble, and extraordinarily similar.40

  And in the midst of it all was the Clermont Club, an impregnable place of safety with its gentlemanly excitements, its sublime wines, its promise of untaxable winnings. Yet on 22 October 1974, its walls were metaphorically shaken when an IRA bomb exploded at a fellow gentleman’s club, Brooks’s in St James’s Street. Three staff members were injured. Reality, hitherto kept courteously at bay, lurched up to the Clermont door, although entrance was denied. The façade remained of a different Britain: an England, as one might say.

  Neither the Clermont, nor indeed Lower Belgrave Street, nor of course Lord Lucan, looked anything like the Britain that they inhabited. They all looked old and remote and solid. The Britain of the early 1970s looked almost deliberately ersatz, with its leatherette and Formica, its linoleum floors and skimpy patterned curtains; its hefty dial telephones; its cars with their juddery gears and alligator-head bonnets, Marinas and Cortinas and Corsairs; its food, which knew little of pizza or artichokes or olive oil, which served prawns in a glass full of pink sauce and grilled its grapefruits; its pub drinks, Babychams, Cherry Bs, or a frothing cocktail known as a Snowball, which mixed yellow Advocaat with Schweppes lemonade and topped it off with a cherry; its pubs, which were plentiful and fuggy, and sold Golden Wonder crisps instead of tapenade and grissini; its cigarettes, Embassy and Player’s and Senior Service, which were smoked on trains, in offices, at the cinema; its cheap-looking fonts and colours, its cheap-sounding pop music; its flapping collars and flares and hair. Then there were other things, which provoke a more complicated breed of nostalgia: evidence of a different kind of engagement with life, communal and consoling within the chaos. Everybody used the same incompetent GPO telephone system. Everybody, including Veronica Lucan on the night of 7 November, watched the same television programmes at the same time as everybody else. Nobody used computers, or clutched smartphones like talismans, or had headsets in their ears as they walked the streets; and the streets themselves were different, not just because they were free from CCTV, from Starbucks, from beggars at every turn. As Martin Amis would later write, ‘one humble and unsonorous adjective comprehensively described the London of 1970. Empty.’41 This was the Britain before mass immigration, before globalization, before privatization and deregulation; when people still talked of the recently dead shillings and sixpences, when the Second World War was a more recent memory than the case of Lord Lucan is now. And, like Lucan’s world, this Britain with which he collided was a dying place, although at the time it did not know it: it had scant notion of the changes that would soon be wrought upon it.

  Not that everything has changed. Forty years on here we all are again, indebted and ill-at-ease with ourselves, debating austerity versus borrowing, in fear of bombs and street violence, watching a television programme about posh people and their servants. Rage and ridicule and death warrants have been thrown at class, yet still it stands there in its shallow mystery, to be obsessed over anew; like its infamous representative, the 7th Earl of Lucan.

  PART II

  The Story

  ‘The Lucan myth? That’s the tragedy of it, really.’

  DR JANE GRIFFIN, ELDER SISTER TO LORD LUCAN, IN CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  The Lucans

  ‘Lavinia did not come from a particularly distinguished family – her father, Lord Lucan, was a mere Irish peer…’

  AMANDA FOREMAN, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1998

  If the 7th Earl of Lucan had not disappeared on or around 8 November 1974, and if he had inherited the family tradition of male longevity, he might now be contemplating the prospect of his burial at All Saints’ Church, Laleham.

  The Lucan memorial in the churchyard holds the remains of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Earls, together with their countesses. Earlier ancestors are interred in the Lucan chapel, and the family name of Bingham recurs on the list of war dead at the entrance to the church. Lord Lucan had inherited the right to appoint the All Saints’ vicar. His parents did not choose to be laid in this ground, but unlike them he prized the notion of earldom; although it is probably true to say that he didn’t know what to do with it.

  There is nothing grand about All Saints’: no pomp or circumstance. Twelfth century in origin, it stands on the corner of the road, a little red building with a low tower shaped like a brick chimney. It is quietly, comfortingly English. Even the tumultuous 3rd Earl, whose grave is marked by the tallest cross in the churchyard, seems becalmed in this setting. The Lucan memorial has that sense of rightfulness which comes when centuries of the same blood are gathered together. Here, it seems to say, order remains for all time.

  The manor of Laleham was bought in 1803 by Richard, the 2nd Earl of Lucan, who paid £22,000 for the greater part of the village. He built a family home, a creamy neoclassical box with marble floors and a giant Doric porch, fronting on to a narrow stretch of the Thames at the point where Surrey meets Middlesex. In the grounds, beneath some cedar trees, the 3rd Earl buried two horses that he had ridden in the Crimea. The 4th Earl lived there in considerable state, with nineteen servants that he could not really afford.

  The earldom, however, was Irish. The Lucans owned an estate in Co. Mayo, some 61,000 acres by the nineteenth century, and lived in the county town at Castlebar House. Yet the Bingham family is as English as they come. Its Saxon roots run deep through the West Country. In 1228 Robert
de Bingham became Bishop of Salisbury, and is buried in the cathedral.1 The family lived peaceable centuries in its country paradise, marrying the daughters of local baronets, weaving itself into the faded fabric of domestic history. It was not so much grand as profoundly assured. So the lord only knows what happened to turn that first famous Richard Bingham, Dorset-born in 1528, into the fearless mercenary who would end up as Marshal of Ireland; but from somewhere he acquired a raging fire in his belly. Perhaps it was simply that he was a fourth son and needed to make his mark. Meanwhile Robert, the eldest, carried on the Dorset line; the estate remained in the family until 1900.

  Richard Bingham was a force, albeit not a moral one: an adventurer with an eye for the right adventure. Today such men rarely rise from the comfortable bed of Western Europe, although the 7th Earl of Lucan had a couple of them in his circle of friends. Ireland, so dangerous to England with its alien proximity, let loose Bingham’s ruthless gifts. He quashed rebellions and cut the throats of Spaniards washed ashore from the Armada. In 1584 he became Governor of Connaught, fighting off the local chieftains to acquire the nucleus of the Lucan estate, and received his knighthood. At the age of nearly seventy, still putting down rebellions with his sword aloft, he became General of Leinster and Marshal of Ireland.

  He died in Dublin in 1598, at the height of his tainted glory. As he had no son the line continued through his brother, whose heir was created the 1st Baronet Bingham of Mayo in 1634.2 By degrees the Binghams became that body of people who would be loathed by the Irish: the Protestant Englishmen who owned the better part of another people’s country. And yet there was, within the Lucan earldom, a very real Irish connection. The 5th Baronet, born in 1690, married the grand-daughter of a man named William Sarsfield.3 In 1691, the deposed King James II created William’s younger brother, Patrick, the 1st Earl of Lucan.