A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Eton’s alumni include James Bond, Lord Peter Wimsey, Princes William and Harry, nineteen prime ministers, Lord Lucan and several of his Clermont Club set – James Goldsmith, Charles Benson, Daniel Meinertzhagen – although those friendships came later. His oldest living friend, who became a successful and esteemed man, who gambled in a far merrier, less destructive way than the Clermont circle, was a contemporary of ‘Bingham’, as he still calls him, and their closeness began at school. ‘I don’t know why he became such a friend of mine, but he did. I think we sort of had the same attitude to getting by at Eton. I suppose we were out to enjoy it. And enjoy it in spades. Racing was obviously a component part…’

  Windsor racecourse is very near to Eton, one might say dangerously near. ‘Windsor, yes. We usually saw a master in the distance – had to duck out of sight, you know. But I think our respective housemasters thought we were quite sort of amusing. We weren’t dull. Bingham was very good value. He was game for anything.’

  He became the school bookmaker. In other words he ran a book, taking other boys’ bets, which would then be relayed to ‘the town bookmaker, a slight hero of ours’. These were the days before betting shops, legalized in 1961 under the same law that allowed John Aspinall to open the Clermont; the days of bookies’ runners, who would go into pubs and factories and collect people’s fancies; the days of on-the-hoof betting, when bookmakers were not allowed to have offices, although of course they did. Gambling was not illegal in itself, only gambling premises (the intention being to shoo it on to racetracks). It must have been much more fun before it became what it is now, a cautious corporate business. And John Bingham wanted fun. ‘We had a very good time.’ He played cards, smoked, drank gin: ‘He was much more adventurous than me,’ says his friend. ‘He would go up to London, and go to a nightclub or whatever.’ But he stood out against getting involved in a sweet coupon racket, planned, in the dying days of rationing, with the dogged precision of Just William and his gang. ‘Bingham never thought it would work. He thought we were vulnerable. It was about the only wise thing he ever did.’

  Notwithstanding his activities, for any of which he could have been expelled, John Bingham became captain of his house. He had entered a world where a different code applied: where gentlemanly style was the best card in the pack, the one that trumped all his parents’ values. As the 11th Duke of Devonshire would later recall, describing his father’s complaints about his poor Eton school reports to a fellow company director: ‘The man said: “But you surely wouldn’t like your son to have good reports, would you?”’8

  So Lord Bingham stood very firmly against his parents’ efforts to remove him from Eton after a year, and send him to a local grammar. From their point of view he no longer needed to be at the school, as he was obviously no longer unhappy; but the reasons for this buoyancy had started to make the Lucans feel that he should leave. ‘They were sort of wringing their hands,’ as Jane puts it.

  Kaitilin, in particular, was fiercely opposed to gambling. It was something for nothing: a reprehensible thing in her eyes and, of course, much of the appeal in a gambler’s. Another attraction for John Bingham was the fact that it was so reprehensible to his parents. ‘And yet he was very fond of them,’ says Jane. ‘They just disagreed, violently.’ His rebellion was not intended to hurt, but it became absolute when his own creed proved to deliver such an intensity of pleasure. Eton had revealed itself to be where he belonged; far more than in that peculiar family house, now replaced with a flat in Regent’s Park, but still bustling drearily with Labour Party activity. Gambling was bound up with this rebellion. It was glamorous, anti-socialist, a symbol of life as something thrilling and theatrical, rather than earnest and real. The driving principle of his parents’ existence was public service. So John Bingham rebelled against that too. He turned away from his father’s conscientiousness, from his grandfather’s godly sense of duty: from noblesse oblige. His driving principle? ‘Well, money, I think. He really wanted to be rich. To do the lovely things of life.’

  Before that there was National Service, a duty of a kind. The service had become law in 1948, a de facto conscription for all fit young men; it was ‘like the steam train, the Teddy boy, and Mrs Dale’s Diary [an omnipresent radio programme], simply a part of the fabric of everyday life’. A standing army was deemed necessary, given that the Second World War had been instantly replaced with the Cold War, and the still enormous British Empire was revving up fractiously for independence. Every eighteen-year-old, unless in an exempted profession, had to join up for a period of two years. The last of them did not leave until 1963. Youth crime immediately increased; this led to a call for the restoration of National Service that has never quite gone away.

  It was said that ‘basic training was a great, if short-lived, equalizer of young British males whatever their social origin. It was designed to be “intentionally brutal” for eight to twelve weeks’,9 the usual drills and plank-like beds and gratuitous abusive shouting. John Bingham, accustomed to boarding school, bred into the military, probably found this easier to take than some. Anyway it was a given that the War Selection Board would very soon deem him officer material. While some public schoolboys refused to put themselves forward for elevation, on the grounds that the whole system was ridiculous, he was not of their number. He strode, with his guardsman’s bearing, into his father’s old regiment, graduating in 1953 from the officers’ training school at Eaton Hall in Cheshire (the Duke of Westminster’s property) as a second lieutenant in the Coldstreams. He was then posted to Krefeld in West Germany, where the British Army of the Rhine was stationed as a defence against the Soviet threat.

  He also played a great deal of poker in the officers’ mess. He joined the bobsleigh team. For the first time he went to casinos, which were legal in Germany. A fellow officer recalled:

  He was always getting dressed up for dinner and going out to the best hotels when really the rest of us were quite happy to stay in and eat the most filthy food. Quite often he’d hire a car – it was the sort of thing that only John would do – and insist that we all put on our dinner jackets and motor down to the casino at Bad Neuenahr. On one occasion he actually hired a little plane and took three of us to the casinos at Trouville. There he was: sort of devastating to look at and always immaculately turned out.10

  One of the most superficial, but in fact most important, things about John Bingham was becoming ever more apparent by the mid-1950s: his looks. It is hard to emphasize enough what a determinant factor these were in his life. That formal, well-grown, highly masculine handsomeness may not be to contemporary taste, which prefers the idiosyncratic, the feminized, the wafts of hair tumbling over puppy-dog eyes. Nevertheless he was, objectively, a remarkable physical specimen. As his future wife Veronica would later put it: ‘When he woke in the morning and shaved, he must have looked in the mirror and thought: “I am vastly good-looking and I am a Peer of the Realm.”’11 ‘Impressive,’ says his Eton friend. ‘Impressive fellow.’ A girl who worked as nanny for his friends, the Maxwell-Scotts, in the late 1960s recalls: ‘I thought he was extraordinarily good-looking. He was striking. He looked really scrubbed up all the time, and he was attentive and he gave you eye contact. He stuck out. Not in a sexual way, but I just thought he was a really attractive man.’ His looks were already on the turn by the time of his disappearance: men of nearly forty did not, in the 1970s, seek to resemble teenagers, and the boozy, smoky, sedentary lifestyle did not help. In youth, however, he must have been extraordinary to behold. The Lucans are a handsome family, but with the 7th Earl all the elements came together to create something unusual, one of those rare people who look as though an invisible line has been drawn around them, marking them out as unnaturally perfect. That was why the film director Vittorio De Sica saw him instantly as an image on the screen, why Cubby Broccoli saw him as a natural James Bond. ‘He really was Marcello Mastroianni,’ says his sister, ‘he looked seriously like him.’ Mastroianni with the Italian filtered out, replaced
by essence of earl.

  But the looks, which gave John Bingham style, assurance, an awareness that he could attract, a separateness that intrigued both women and men, also worked against him. They made him seem far more profoundly confident than he was. They made him seem arrogant. Later, they would make him an object of loathing.

  In the 1950s, however, Lord Bingham could bestride the world of pleasure, living the kind of life of which people feel that they should disapprove, but which few young men would not want to have: Made in Chelsea for the Macmillan era.

  To his uncle John Bevan, a stockbroker, he wrote:

  I am perfectly happy now (this is to say I am not unhappy), but I know that with £2 mil in the bank I should be happier still (who wouldn’t?). It wouldn’t be a case of ‘buying happiness’, but motor cars, yachts, expensive holidays and security for the future would give myself and a lot of other people a lot of pleasure. These are some of my carrots, and I’m certainly not ashamed of them.

  As it was, these things had to be paid for, and for the one and only time in his life he had a proper job. His future wife, Veronica, later said that the intention had been to send him to Oxford, ‘but his parents were only going to give him enough money to go through university as an average student… so he decided against going there’.12 This statement is unconfirmed. What definitely happened is that Kait Lucan pulled some strings, desperate to jerk her son back to the path of righteousness, and in 1955 he began work at William Brandt’s, a small merchant bank in Fenchurch Street. He wrote to his uncle:

  I have come into the City in an attempt to make my pile. I don’t know whether I shall succeed because, in my opinion, it’s not just a question of staring at ledgers. In my opinion the formula for success is as follows:

  a) 60% luck

  b) 20% industry

  c) 20% Gambling ability

  Mr Niarchos [the oil magnate] does not agree with me: he believes his success is only 40% luck and 60% hard work. Obviously, there are other requirements, such as an ability to get on well with people, honesty, trustworthiness and all the usual virtues. But taking these for granted, all I ask now is ten times my ration of good luck! It’s impossible to qualify for this unless full use is made of (c) on the ‘nothing venture, nothing win’ theory. Nothing has been ventured in this family since our great-grandfather ran up a grocer’s bill of £4,000.

  There is something faintly silly about this letter. There is also a kind of uncertainty beneath the pompous, jocular tone: a suggestion that John Bingham is trying to defend what he knows to be folly.

  A view of his three-year career at Brandt’s, expressed in 1975, by which time people were being as rude about him as possible, was that ‘he believed that through eugenics he must be a success, but in fact he was rather a failure. He had, of course, no economic training, but in those days there was some pretty low-grade thinking in the City.’13 Actually John Bingham had a flair for banking. His uncle, who observed him with fond but clear eyes, thought he could have made a success at it. Even his use of language at Eton, his assessment that the sweet coupon racket was ‘vulnerable’, implies a financial brain. He would have needed that in gambling, otherwise he would have got through his money infinitely more quickly than he did: folly though it may be, it requires quite a lot of brains. Gambling is all about calculation of risk. Banking is all about gambling. Economic training, as has become grimly clear in the last few years, is not always enough.

  His friend from Eton was in the money markets at the time, ‘went round to all the banks with my top hat on’, and the pair would meet once a week at Fuller’s, next door to Brandt’s.

  We talked about everything under the sun. He had endless schemes, some of which were good, some of which were not. And he talked about things like cornering the silver market. He thought he could do that. He knew a lot about silver. In fact I used to get him to lunch to talk about silver, he was that good on it.

  He was intensely amusing, he was very bright, he knew about markets – I mean, what else do you want, to make it in the City? He had it all. But anyway, he threw all that away…

  Before he did, however, he used his £2,500 salary to enjoy himself. And what the patrician Lord Bingham liked more than anything was to go greyhound racing at Harringay. The dogs, popular in the mid-twentieth century to a degree that can hardly now be conceived, was fundamentally a working-class sport, but never only that: the Duke of Edinburgh owned a dog that won the Greyhound Derby. In fact it attracted all classes (not so much the genteel middle), who mingled with a worldly ease that horse racing, ever self-important, has never quite managed. Greyhound racing at the old Olympic stadium at White City was as smart as you like, run by ex-military types, commanding an implicit respect. It was fun, it was adult; and it was gambling, of course. The Clermont regular Charles Benson was at White City all the time in the 1960s and 1970s. Ian Maxwell-Scott, a director of the Clermont, backed himself to win an alcohol-fuelled race around the dog track. John Bingham went occasionally with his Old Etonian friend.

  By contrast, the Harringay track in North London was majestically downmarket: a purposeful spotlit theatre of punters clasping their snippets of inside information, fences sidling up to racegoers and offering a glimpse of the diamond in their pocket, bookmakers with country houses in Totteridge, villains drinking convivially with a couple of Scotland Yard policemen. ‘Harringay was our place,’ says the Eton friend. ‘We went there Mondays and Fridays, then worked on Saturdays – the banks were open on Saturday in those days. There was a bloke called Trevor, he was a tic-tac man,14 and he used to give us a lift home.’

  Bingham had a couple of dogs, as did I. Anyway, one night, we had three runners between us. I had a very good railer, you know, liked the inside of the track. That won at 6/4. He had a hurdler, that won at 11/4. And then we had his dog Sambos Hangover. I remember it was 963 yards, a marathon – the dog was 100/7. And our trainer, Morse, said: ‘The favourite in that race has just been given a bucket of water, and has absolutely no chance. And therefore, you know, Sambos Hangover might get a place.’ So we did a win treble with Croydon Turf. And we made 300 and something pounds, which was big money in the middle fifties. We were very, very excited. And I remember John going up and being cheered by the bookmakers, you know – it was an absolute skinner for them – and just sort of bowing, left and right, taking the applause.

  This was a very long way from Belgravia: not merely in mileage. It was further still from the serious-minded Lucans, with their pamphlets and causes, and further yet from the unbelievably correct 5th Earl of Lucan, whose idea of a decent bet was probably half a crown on Jack Hobbs to get a century at The Oval. His wife Violet, the dowager countess, summoned her grandson to her London flat to deliver a lecture. Yet one has the powerful sense that this was the future Lord Lucan at his happiest: carefree, comfortable with himself, surrounded by people who demanded nothing from him, Sebastian Flyte cut loose from Brideshead Castle. ‘We had no money,’ says his friend, ‘and we had great fun.’ The acquaintance who subsequently said that Lucan ‘wanted to save England for grouse moors and stately homes’ should have thrown in Harringay as well.

  After he left Brandt’s in 1958, his life became more glamorous, which he also craved; but the tension between duty and pleasure had gone, and with it the necessary sense of structure that he had found at Eton. It was claimed by the former policeman Roy Ranson that John Bingham resigned because ‘one of his closest office rivals was promoted over his head’. This is corroborated by John Bevan. There is no evidence for Ranson’s assertion that ‘the bank’s management were worried about [him]’; he would not have been the only posh young City boy whose attentions wandered from his work. Nevertheless he had, as Christina Shand Kydd says, quite quickly become ‘bored out of his mind’. He had gone in to make his pile. Where was it? Two thousand five hundred pounds a year was a very good wage in the 1950s, the value of an average house, but he wanted more. Certainly he wanted a more than average house. He wanted Eaton Square, b
ut with proper furniture. His father, with his refusal to manage his money properly, to avoid the earl’s curse of death duties, seemed unlikely to deliver. But gambling? That held any and every kind of promise. ‘The sort of gambling we’re talking about was tied up with an easy life,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘Very different from going into a betting shop, you know.’ Lord Bingham became friendly with the stockbroker Stephen Raphael, an older man who, says Christina, ‘became his mentor. He very much took John under his wing. And taught him everything he knew about how to gamble.’ This was fatal, really, since it gave an appearance that gambling could be managed, manipulated; which it can, but only up to a point. ‘It became his job,’ says his sister Jane. ‘I don’t know that he knew it was ridiculous. I think he was very confident of his skills.’ He was a modern figure, in a sense: in search of instant gratification, excitably bypassing the processes of cause and effect. In another sense he was as modern as Stonehenge. The paradox therein would eventually prove impossible to reconcile.

  It is usually claimed that he left his job because of one, incredible win of £26,000, but this merely confirmed a decision that had already been taken. His Eton friend recalls:

  He said, ‘I can make £2,500 every night, or lose £2,500 every night – there’s absolutely no point in going on working for William Brandt.’ We tried very hard to persuade him not to leave. But he couldn’t see that any of us would get to the top, in the City. Least of all him. The City was very difficult to break through, but so is everywhere. You’ve just got to be patient, find a way. He thought it was not worth it. He thought that he could outwit the competition at gambling instead. I just think he was very short-sighted. Because he had the whole world at his feet, really.