A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  His political career began under Clement Attlee, as an under-secretary of state in the Commonwealth Relations office; although, political new dawn notwithstanding, he was shunted into opposition when Churchill regained power in 1951. In fact Pat never served in government: he died just a few months before Harold Wilson won the 1964 election. But he did honourable service for his party. Some of the causes that he espoused, such as the integration of foreign students into British society, the ‘tragic’ paucity of affordable London housing, and the need for oil companies to respect the environment when laying pipelines, are notably contemporary. Together with other members of the opposition, including its leader Hugh Gaitskell, he sent Christmas cards to anti-apartheid activists kept under house arrest in South Africa. In late 1954 he was appointed opposition chief whip, a post in which he was praised for his ‘spirit of reasonableness’. He held the position until his death, after which Lord Carrington, paying tribute, said that ‘he knew of no one in any quarter of the house who did not regard him as a personal friend’.

  His wife remained a member of the Marylebone Labour Association after the disappearance of her son, during the campaign for the 1979 election won by Margaret Thatcher, indeed until the end of her life in 1985, when she was given an unceremonious, non-Christian burial near her eighth-floor flat in London’s St John’s Wood. Her political beliefs were less compromising than her husband’s. Kait was a great scatterer of pamphlets, a dinner-table debater. Neither her son nor his circle shared her views, but it is quite untrue to say, as it has been, that she was an embarrassment to Lord Lucan, and that his friends regarded her socialism as some sort of personal tragedy for him. ‘She was the most lovely woman,’ says Christina Shand Kydd, sister to Veronica Lucan. ‘Lovely. She had the most incredible gift of being able to disagree with you about politics without there ever being any sign of it becoming an argument. It was always, merely, a good fun discussion. And it’s a really great gift.’ Bill Shand Kydd says: ‘You couldn’t help but love her.’ One of Lord Lucan’s oldest friends remembers her as ‘rabid Labour, and charming. She was so nice, Kaitilin.’ He also recalls how Lucan bought his mother a car for the 1959 general election: ‘And he had it sprayed red. So she could go canvassing with a, you know, proper vehicle.’ Lucan’s sister Jane says: ‘My mother and John would have good, intelligent discussions. But I think it always kept within bounds – I don’t remember any real bad arguments. They could talk about politics in a sane way, and she could kind of bring him down off his pedestal, and say now, don’t you really think this, or something… I know he was very fond of my mother – actually

  everybody was very fond of my mother. Wonderful eccentric lady.’ The only person who admitted to open disputation with Kait was her future daughter-in-law, Veronica. They first met in September 1963, at the time of Veronica’s engagement to the then Lord Bingham (John). ‘We went to dinner at the Arts Theatre Club and had the most frightful political row. His father [Pat] sat at the other end of the table, looking horrified. John just stayed silent and let us continue fighting. The extraordinary thing was that she was wildly left-wing – I, the non-Countess, the conservative.’2

  At the age of eighty Kaitilin took an ‘A’ Level in Russian (‘getting ready for the revolution,’ as Bill Shand Kydd puts it: but as a joke). This did not necessarily mean sympathy with communism, although there probably was a bit of that. She had grown up in a time when the creed attracted many highly intelligent idealists. Kait Lucan’s relentless denial of the world of privilege extended to her appearance: she was described as ‘wearing worn-out sandals and awful baggy trousers’, as driving a clapped-out Land Rover, as having hair that looked as though ‘someone had stabbed a sofa’.3 It could have seemed like deliberate oddity, but it was born of a true conviction that other things mattered more. She was not, by her own admission, an especially good mother; at least not in the modern, hands-on, everything-stops-to-take-the-children-to-oboe-lessons sense. For all her kindness she had a definite touch of Bleak House’s Mrs Jellyby about her, being at least as engaged with her political activities as with her offspring. Nevertheless nobody ever had a bad word to say about her, except those who took her daughter-in-law’s side in the aftermath of November 1974: the police, Veronica Lucan’s counsel at the inquest, certain chroniclers of the Lucan myth. Kait, who would have been appalled by the suffering of the Rivetts and was as vehemently disapproving as anybody of her son’s behaviour, was unflinching in his defence to the end.

  But even left-wing aristocrats remain who they are, and throughout their happy marriage the 6th Earl and his wife lived in a kind of rackety grandeur. They were far from poor, however much the Lucan fortunes had diminished since the days of Laleham House and its nineteen servants. ‘I know’, says Jane, ‘that between them my parents had quite a lot of money at the beginning. But they didn’t care about it. They gave it away or spent it.’ In Essex they owned for a time a large house, Wakes Colne Place, near Braintree. In London, where they moved just before the outbreak of war, they remained within the sacred postcodes: Cheyne Walk, on the Thames at Chelsea, then Eaton Square. ‘I can vaguely remember the house looking on to the river,’ says Jane. ‘John [the future 7th Earl] and I went to a little school in Tite Street. But then the house was bombed.’ The four Bingham children – Jane, born 1932; Richard, always known as John; Sarah, or Sally, born 1936; Hugh, born 1939 – were evacuated. The Lucans themselves did war work in the fire service.

  Jane says:

  Eaton Square I don’t remember before the war but we came home afterwards to dustcloths, and crazy furniture. It had a huge drawing room, and my father put a hook in the ceiling with a climbing rope through it that we could all climb. And they did things with us like carpentry, and making chocolates… I suppose they were trying desperately to get to know their children.

  But the house was not fancy at all, even though there was a cook in those days – she had lived through the war with them. In fact they were all in Eaton Square during the war, because we came home and they had taken the windows out. And my parents had insisted on continuing to sleep on the second floor, because they didn’t want to go down in the basement – which I guess every normal person did. As you may have gathered they were not a normal couple.

  It was quite normal, however, to send one’s children out of London at this time, when death by bomb was a very real threat. The Binghams went first to Wales, then Canada en route to America. ‘It was a very quick decision that was made in England, and they had apparently forty-eight hours to decide, my parents, whether they would accept the berths that were available on the ship. And they sent nanny with us – Flora Coles.’ Nannies, too, were a natural fact of life, although there is no evidence to corroborate the story that Lucan also had his own personal maid.

  The four Bingham children arrived in Washington in 1940. They had no definite place to stay. It was all very ad hoc, rather terrifying. The policeman, David Gerring, who later described this flight to America as ‘Gone With the Wind Up’, was really quite wide of the mark. Perhaps what had inspired the sneer was the fact that when the children did acquire a home, it was as different as could be from the usual evacuee billet. In the mysterious way that the upper classes have of knowing people, the Binghams found themselves living with the Brady Tuckers, one of the richest families in the US.

  The Brady Tuckers had made their money in finance at the end of the nineteenth century. In good Edith Wharton style, they used this very modern fortune to recreate a kind of European ideal of bygone living, of gentility untainted by commerce. Having the children of an earl to stay with them did no harm to that image. Essentially, though, they acted out of benevolence; they were, says Jane, ‘fabulous, wonderful, generosity-unbounded people’. Jane, who qualified as a doctor and married an American, has remained close to the family. Much later, the then Earl of Lucan would appeal to the Brady Tuckers in his custody fight with his wife. When Marcia, the matriarch, died in 1977, her will was found to contain a $15,000 bequ
est to Lucan. ‘She was’, says Jane, ‘our sort of fairy godmother.’ She was also as grand as any English duchess. Every morning she would dictate orders to her private secretary, who then delivered them to her enormous staff, some of whom were employed simply to walk around her giant estate and scare away cats. At the same time she lived in a way that was somehow very American, utterly free from that fear of vulgarity that so cramps the English style. Comfort, luxury and opulence were there to be had, so why not have them?

  The Brady Tuckers had, as Jane puts it, ‘three major houses’. They lived like Astors, spending the winter in their home on New York’s Park Avenue. In summer they used their beach property in Florida or, in the main, enjoyed their estate at Mount Kisco in Westchester. The splendour of this place was almost unreal. ‘We lived with everything – swimming pools, tennis courts, the whole nine yards.’ The family also had homes in Washington and Maine, as well as an ocean yacht, The Migrant, requisitioned by the US military after Pearl Harbor. Twenty years later John Bingham would name his own powerboat White Migrant. This tribute to the Croesus-like benefactors of his childhood strengthens the idea that the five years with the Tuckers represented a kind of nirvana. The golden ease of wealth; how it garnished every separate moment with something beautiful or special that other people did not have; how it spread itself across every problem, smoothing away heat, cold, boredom, a cat on the estate, four children with nowhere to stay… ‘I think the USA remained with him,’ says a former police officer who investigated the case. ‘Battalions of servants and all.’ That, says the myth, was the dream of living to which the future Lord Lucan would always, fatally, aspire.

  ‘But John was miserable!’ says Jane.

  Miserable. I think the Tuckers thought that they would do what would be normal for a little English boy. They sent him away to school, and he hated that. Really hated it. Tried to run away. So that was the first trauma. Then they sent him to a summer camp [at Adirondacks]. Then they tried another school – and he really was not happy at all. I think he tried to damage things.

  The problem was mysterious. Certainly it was not with the Brady Tucker family, even if they had got it wrong by sending John Bingham away to school when he was already away from home. The sense of displacement was intense. It could be called homesickness, but it seems to have been something more, a kind of wrenching out of roots. Both the Lucans wrote regularly to their children, Kait with affectionate emotion, Pat more formally, and Jane recalls that one of Kait’s uncles, an admiral, ‘came over during the war when they were collecting boats from America, and he came to visit us in Westchester. At the request of his niece, I’m sure.’ And of course John Bingham would always have been sent away from home, to school, although perhaps not at the age of five. But his sister, at a distance of more than seventy years, remembers his unhappiness in America with extreme clarity, and implies that something of the trauma remained with him. ‘I think’, she says obliquely, ‘that’s when it all started.’

  The children and their American governess returned home by ship, arriving in Liverpool in February 1945. ‘It was perfectly apparent by then that there wasn’t going to be an invasion,’ Kait later said, ‘and Pat and I thought they would feel bad if they hadn’t seen anything of their own country.’ At a time when millions of children had died, or been orphaned, or were without a home at all, it is hard to say that there was anything very terrible about coming back to live in Eaton Square. Yet it must have been bewildering, after the land of plenty. A ten-year-old would not yet know that there was a Britain beyond Belgravia. And the house was cold and white as a ghost with its empty rooms, its knocked-out windows, its natural beauty rendered incongruous by the giant, levelled-out bombsite that London had become. This was a strange homecoming, another displacement.

  It was in fact the return from America, rather than America itself, that infected John Bingham with his driving urge to find pleasure in life. ‘Too many people say that money isn’t everything,’ he would write to his uncle, John Bevan, ten years later. ‘It can’t buy happiness, and all the usual patter. But this is either sour grapes or stupidity.’

  His parents thought very differently, of course. A complexity of reasons had begun to drive their son away: not from them, but from their beliefs. As Jane puts it: ‘He was going to do everything opposite to the homeland.’ If he had felt an obscure resentment at being sent to America, he may have felt it even more against the home to which he returned. Why was his father’s mansion interior-designed as if by a squatter? And his mother: he adored her, but why did she dress like a bag lady? Why did the family car have a leaking roof? Why could these people not live in a manner appropriate to who they were, the Earl and Countess of Lucan?

  At first John Bingham attended Arnold House prep school in London. A fellow pupil was Jonathan Miller, later to be a star of Beyond the Fringe, a doctor, a theatre director, a ragingly brilliant polymath of a man whose own politics were very much in the Kait Lucan camp. At the age of eleven, however, he was immensely friendly with the ‘intriguingly exciting and excitable’ Lord Bingham. The pair would slope off to watch films in the West End, such as Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. They were, recalled Miller, ‘equally delinquent’, although his friend ‘turned out, in the end, to be much more delinquent’. Miller was fascinated by the objects in the Eaton Square house, ‘leftover uniforms from his grandparents, from the Light Brigade. I remember sometimes we used to let ourselves out of the sixth-floor window, on these fire escape ropes that would let you down into Belgrave Place.’4 ‘They had a great time,’ says Jane. ‘I remember one instance when my mother and I came back to the house one night, and John was in bed swaddled in bandages because he and Jonathan had had some failure with a chemical experiment.’

  The cleverness of Miller, whose prodigious mind would already have been in evidence, makes these two seem unlikely companions. In later years it would become usual, or perhaps safe, to say that Lord Lucan was utterly brainless: Muriel Spark called him ‘a stupid gambler’, and the 8th Earl of Warwick recalled that ‘the first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham, who was very stupid’.5 Yet those who knew him better disagree. His oldest friend, who was also at Eton,6 says: ‘People say he was not intelligent – he was very, very bright.’ And Stuart Wheeler, a Clermont gambler who also played bridge with Lucan at the Portland Club, says: ‘I don’t think he was stupid. I think you can have the gambling bug, and be quite illogical about that, without being stupid. Silly, perhaps, is a better word.’ According to his sister, who describes herself as the ‘serious student’ of the family:

  He was smart as a fox – very, very intelligent. Probably the brightest of all of us. He had other sides – he loved music, Bach. He took my mother to the opera. He taught himself to play the piano. He was hugely good at everything he tried. And yet he didn’t put it to good use, which was so sad.

  He continued, says Jane, to be restless and troubled throughout his childhood years in London. The conflicts in his upbringing, which some children could have weathered (his two sisters, for instance), seem to have weighed on him; he had persistent headaches and took large quantities of aspirin. He looked like an immensely confident person. In some ways he acted like one. In fact he was anything but.

  In 1949, when his father inherited the earldom, his parents decided to send him to Eton. This may seem surprising given their political persuasion, although the Labour Party has of course never abolished private education, and indeed Attlee himself was perfectly comfortable with having attended the public school Haileybury. But the intention was that John Bingham should attend only for a short time. Jane says:

  They thought that Eton would give the extra attention needed – because he was showing signs, and I’m not sure what those signs were, of needing extra help. Not academically, but psychologically. I’m no psychiatrist, but I think it well could have been to do with the separation from home at a young age, because I know for a fact that he was very, very unhappy.

 
; The possibility of psychotherapy was even put forward, which may have been Kait’s modern idea of how to deal with an apparently intangible misery. ‘Lonely,’ says his sister-in-law Christina Shand Kydd. ‘It was a lonely childhood.’ And Eton, as it happened, worked a kind of magic. For the first time John Bingham was somewhere that suited him. It affirmed who he was. It gave him his first real place of security. And it offered the first taste of the gambling that represented a kind of liberation. ‘At Eton he got into this world, which was exciting,’ says Jane. ‘He would go and gamble on the dogs, horses. I have always blamed Eton, the fact that he started his gambling there.’ From this point, certainly, John Bingham’s life was taken down a path to illusory pleasure. But it might have happened anyway.

  Eton, more than any other school, is more than a school. It is a totem, charismatic to some and repellent to others; rather like the aristocracy. It is probable that if prime minister David Cameron had gone to any other school, even Harrow, he would not receive the level of ‘posh boy’ abuse that is frequently hurled his way. Such is the symbolic power of Eton. With its ‘beaks’ and ‘bobs’ and ‘Pop’, its wall game, its tailcoats, its Floreat Etona, its fantastically beautiful buildings, some dating back to the fifteenth century, that loom on every side of the little town close to Windsor, it has the aspect of a small separate world, standing casually impregnable beside the Thames. And its boys, almost all of whom are covered with a cool sheen, a smiling haze of confidence, seem never quite to leave that world. They are always Etonians; even the ones who turn against the system tend to let people know that they went there. As one of Lord Lucan’s gambling circle now puts it: ‘People talk about public schools, but it’s Eton and the rest.’ There is nothing parochial about the place; its cosmopolitan aplomb is what sets it apart. The idea that Kait Lucan would have been an embarrassment to her son, turning up to the Fourth of June in her Aldermaston-marcher clothes, is nonsense. As Jonathan Miller put it, she ‘would probably have shocked only the parvenus. It would probably have been more shocking at Radley than Eton.’7