A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Then came London, and those strange, meandering years that most girls lived through while waiting for somebody to marry them. The 1950s did not expect its young women to make careers, although some did; it expected them to become wives, whether or not this was the right thing for them to do. Marriage was simply what happened. The walk up an aisle was, for good or ill, a slow glide toward destiny. Choice was theoretically, but rarely practically, available. ‘I would have loved to read history at university but my family didn’t have the money and there were no grants,’ Veronica was later to say. ‘I did what was expected of girls – marry as high up the social scale as possible.’2

  In fact, like her future husband, she should have put her intelligence to use in a profession. Instead she took a job as a house model and helped to run a company that printed stage scripts. She lived in a bedsit in Gloucester Place. It sounds lonely, and probably was. In 1957 her mother asked Christina to give Veronica a room in her own newly rented flat, on Melbury Road off High Street Kensington. There Veronica would lie in bed, rocking herself for comfort.

  She had, as it happens, already been thwarted in her female destiny: she had fallen in love with an older man, and suffered the shock of reading in the paper that he was engaged to another girl. She had two more particular boyfriends, one of whom remained very fond of her. But through no fault of her own it was an inconclusive, unstable life, drifting through Holland Park without aim or anchor. She was now in her middle twenties. In those days the prospect of ‘the shelf’, and being deemed to be on it, carried a very real humiliation. Yet she would probably have married soon enough, and perhaps that would have been a success.

  Instead a very different series of events was set in motion, when another girl living at Melbury Road began seeing a rich man named Hans Heyman, whom she later married. Heyman was a friend of Bill Shand Kydd: also rich (from the family wallpaper business), dynamic and shrewd and sensible, a dashing amateur rider and a damn good catch in his own right. In January 1963, after a short courtship, he married Christina at the church of Holy Trinity, a sober building at the end of a leafy lane leading off the Brompton Road. Veronica was chief bridesmaid, trailing like a demure little girl in the wake of her sister. She would hardly have been human if she had not taken pleasure in entering the same church just a few months later, wearing the diamond tiara of the noble Lucan family: walking slowly towards her fate, her happy ever after.

  It is very easy to see why Veronica Duncan wanted to marry Lord Bingham. Why he wanted to marry her is harder to explain. There is a no mystery quite like a marriage, and often the mystery begins with why it happened in the first place. One could ask the same question about any of the marriages that ended in mayhem and catastrophe: why did Dr Crippen marry his wife, or Edith Thompson her husband? Did they not foresee the potential for unhappiness? But with the Lucan marriage it is different, in that the young Lord Bingham was so absurdly eligible. ‘He had’, says Bill, ‘a lot going for him.’ How many potential wives did he meet in the course of his carefree twenties? Hundreds, surely. Yet when Veronica came into his life, something about her made him say yes, I’ll have this one.

  It was later said that he had no real interest in women, which was true: his was a man’s life. It was also said that he didn’t like women. That is untrue. Public schools can nurture an inability to see women as people (although that mindset is more widespread in society at large than anybody cares to admit), and a man of Lucan’s type would tend to commune obliquely, through charm or contempt, because oblique communication is what men like that do. Nevertheless there is no substance to the idea that he saw women ‘as an inferior race’:3 a later description highly convenient to the myth. Christina Shand Kydd, Caroline Hill and her sister-in-law Juliet found him extremely good and courteous company. This was in contrast to Veronica’s later remark: ‘If your husband is someone who only knows how to talk to men, everything goes wrong.’4 Greville Howard’s then fiancée, Zoe, says: ‘He was very sweet. We all went on a boating holiday, before I got married, and I remember John saying to me you really mustn’t marry a gambler [sic]. He meant that gambling wasn’t a good thing, and we should try and steer Greville off gambling. Which was quite interesting. He was very nice, always, to me.’ Lady Annabel Goldsmith stayed in Mexico with Lucan in 1973 (the holiday that provided the snapshots for the Sunday Times Magazine) and spent hours talking to him. She later wrote: ‘I gradually discovered the gentler side to Lord Lucan. By the end of the holiday I had found a new friend.’5 Lucan was at ease with these confident women, more so than with girlfriends. ‘The police asked me, “Was John a crumpet man?”’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen. ‘I mean to say… But the answer is no, he was a type more suited to men’s clubs. He was impeccable in his behaviour towards women, but he wasn’t a ladies’ man.’

  If he had been, he would not have contracted a marriage in the almost desultory way that he did. He had to marry, to get an heir. The time had come. But because he didn’t really want to do it, he did the next best thing and chose a girl who, pretty though she was, looked as if she was hardly there.

  Some years later, Veronica suggested that the then Lord Bingham had proposed because he associated her with good fortune. ‘He’d sometimes phone me late at night and say, “Wish me luck, I’m about to plunge into a game.” For a gambler to ask one particular person for luck was a great compliment. It meant since he’d met me he had been winning. Otherwise I don’t think he would have asked me to marry him.’6

  At least as reassuring, however, was the fact that Veronica was Bill Shand Kydd’s sister-in-law. She was in the family, so to speak. Later still she offered a different view of his proposal, saying that Lucan married her because he ‘was always on the lookout for rich connections. He was always looking for people [i.e. Bill] who might underwrite his precarious financial position.’7 But Lucan himself had perfectly good expectations at the time, and anyway it is frankly incredible that he would have viewed Bill as that kind of touch. He looked up to his friend; he viewed him as strong, relaxed and resilient, all the things that he himself longed to be. It was to Bill that he would turn, on the night of Sandra Rivett’s murder. If Bill had chosen Christina as a wife, that would have been the right thing to do, because Bill did everything right. Therefore the sister, by implication, would be all right also.

  Yet it was, as his schoolfriend says, ‘a very odd choice’. In fact Veronica was nothing like Christina at all. Very possibly this glamorous younger sister, with her open manner and easy self-assurance, was part of the problem. ‘I don’t know whether she was jealous. Perhaps – because I was happy in my life. And had always been happy. As a child, I was the happy one and she was the troubled one.’ Even Christina’s height would have been an issue, as Veronica was said to believe that her own smallness was a sign of inferiority. But this air of acute vulnerability probably led John Bingham to believe that she would never pose any threat: neither to his elected lifestyle, nor in any other way. ‘I think we as a family thought he felt sorry for Veronica,’ says Jane. ‘I think that can happen. People were surprised at his choice, that’s very true. Maybe he just felt he needed a wife. But I can’t explain it any more than that – he was sorry for her.’

  Why, though, did he need to marry a woman for whom he felt sorry? Why do people marry, not the person who might augment their life, but one to whom they feel comfortably superior, or who will impress others, or any of the reasons that lead to disaster?

  ‘I’ve always thought’, says Christina, ‘that he saw in her something of himself. He also had had quite a lonely childhood, and Veronica came across very much as a waif and stray – very shy, slightly sort of a loner. And I think he felt that they had that in common.’ One is reminded a little of the young Lady Diana Spencer, fixing doe eyes upon the heir to the throne, flattering his sense of his own position while appearing to divine, as nobody else could, the real man within. ‘There was a deep feeling between them,’ says Christina. ‘There definitely was, and not one that you an
d I can possibly completely understand.’

  It is an unrecognized truth about Lord Lucan that he had little self-confidence. His noble demeanour somehow bespoke uncertainty. His arrogance was worn like a shield. He was, as Bill Shand Kydd later said, ‘cripplingly introverted’.8 Behind the façade was a lack of assurance; that was why the façade was so perfect. The life of a young lord had been glorious fun, but it was defined by youth. It could not go on indefinitely. As he reached his thirties he could still have made a productive future for himself. He was not yet an addict. He could have chucked what Bill Shand Kydd calls the ‘lunatical’ notion of gambling professionally, and done it for fun instead. As Veronica herself later said, ‘if he had put the same energies into any other profession he would have been very successful.’9 He had a decent brain, good friends, humour, looks, style: the absolute lot. Yet in the space of a couple of months, between his wedding in November 1963 and the death of his father in January 1964, he took a wrong turn that would never thereafter be righted.

  Of course very few people get all that they should from their lives. It needs some luck, for one thing (he would have known about that). But there was such a disconnect, in this case, between what could have been and what was. ‘If he gave me advice,’ says his old friend, ‘it was very good’; John Bingham would not have been the first person to see another person’s life more clearly than his own.

  It was a kind of inadequacy, really, that made him try to recreate the world of his forebears while shirking what underpinned it. He had been insecure since childhood; it made him feel good to stride into a casino and be fêted, to know that he would be missed if he did not turn up at the Clermont. (‘No Lucky tonight? Not the same without him, eh?’) ‘He was terribly well treated there,’ says Bill Shand Kydd. ‘Aspinall thought of him as a very valued asset.’ And it made him feel good to marry a woman who would, or so he believed, feel grateful to him. Her social ‘inferiority’ made him feel that he had something worth having. Other women, who had more in their own right, might have demanded more. She would not. She understood him. With her, he would be free to live the life that he wanted, rather than the one that he could have had.

  He was right, and also very wrong. There was far more to Veronica than that, as the people around him realized. Her fragility was not merely that of size and shyness; its roots were deep. Ten years after the wedding, in a letter to his wartime American benefactress Marcia Brady Tucker, Lucan referred to ‘Veronica’s psychiatric record going back to 1962’, although in fact it had begun much earlier. He probably did not know this; it is unlikely that the couple compared notes about their troubled childhoods. ‘But’, continues Christina, ‘it wasn’t particularly fair of us to put him off in any way, or vice versa, because she was very happy. It was a wonderful thing, really, because she had been very lonely and unhappy, and he came along and it seemed like a dream come true.’ Veronica herself would later say ‘I lost most of my friends when I married’,10 but it is hard to think that she had any such regrets at the time.

  On her wedding day, in her doll-size wild silk dress, she looked as sweetly delicate as a Lladró; her husband looked impressive, as always; yet the pair have an air of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, a dead-eyed embodiment of immaculate Englishness.

  ‘I don’t remember much about the church,’ says Jane, ‘except that I was very pregnant.’ Her parents had only been given the briefest notice of the engagement to Veronica. ‘And I don’t know what miserable thoughts they had, because we didn’t in those days talk that openly – and by then I was living in America. But my mother was very good with everybody – she would put on a good face, and be as nice as possible, in order to try and make her son’s life easier.’ After the ceremony the couple drove in a blue Bentley coupé to the Carlton Towers hotel, where the reception party guests included Lord Bingham’s uncle by marriage, Earl Alexander of Tunis, and the Duke of Gloucester’s wife, Princess Alice. Among the four small bridesmaids was a descendant of the 3rd Earl of Lucan’s loathed brother-in-law, Lord Cardigan. For their honeymoon, the Binghams flew to Paris and caught the Orient Express to Istanbul.

  Just two months later, on 21 January 1964, the 6th Earl of Lucan died. He left an estimated £50,000 (the equivalent today of around £1,000,000) together with trusts that would supply his heir with a guaranteed income, some £12,000 a year by the time of his disappearance (today around £125,000). There was another trust for an heir’s school fees, and a marriage settlement, again controlled by family members. Pat, putting personal considerations above political principle, had taken the decision to secure a financial bulwark against his son’s own nature. As had been done in the case of Earl Ferrers in the mid-eighteenth century, the ancestral legacy was tied firm to its moorings; or so Pat would have hoped.

  It was a peculiarly unlucky blow of fate that killed Pat from a stroke at sixty-four, an age so much younger than almost all his forebears. His good, useful life was over, which was a waste in itself. And the inheritance would be wasted by a man who knew how to live up to what it signified, but not the thing itself. If the money had come to the 7th Earl a few years later, he might still have been forced to earn a proper living. Instead it poured into his hands just as the Clermont Club was getting into its glittering stride, and over the next ten years it would be turned into its equivalent in gambling chips. The idea that a flight from reality meant freedom would prove the greatest illusion of all.

  Whether Lord Lucan would have visited the Clermont (and other clubs) with such obsessive regularity had he married elsewhere, is a question central to this story. The answer, almost certainly, is no. Part of the mystery of marriage is what it does to the characters of those involved. If a good marriage brings out the best in a man and woman, then it is also true that a bad one brings out the worst. That, by degrees, is what happened to the Earl and Countess of Lucan. Their alliance was an extreme example of a familiar phenomenon, in which two people who, if they had never met, might have led perfectly reasonable lives, together set off a malign chemistry that in the end destroys them both.

  ‘It’s obvious that they should never have got married,’ says Stuart Wheeler, who observed the couple at the Clermont and took in their situation with shrewd eyes. ‘I think we all felt exactly that,’ says Jane. ‘It was a tragedy.’

  In the myth of the Lucan marriage, Veronica is unequivocally construed as the victim of her husband. He tried to send her mad, he badmouthed her, he was violent towards her, he kidnapped her children, he plotted to kill her, he attacked her. She was an entirely innocent party, like the poor pale wife in Gaslight, like the incarcerated Countess of Ferrers; and like them she survived, as the good should do, to testify against evil.

  For forty years Veronica’s version of the Lucan marriage has been the accepted one; to question it is to ally oneself with the powerful, the arrogant. Nobody objects to the idea that Dr Crippen had a difficult marriage, even though he too was a killer. But Lord Lucan? No. If the marriage was problematical then that was his fault, just as it was the fault of Prince Charles, or any other apparently dominant male with a wife who can command sympathy. In truth it is rarely quite that simple. In the case of the Lucan marriage, it was very complicated indeed. And the real myth, according to Christina Shand Kydd, ‘is that he didn’t love Veronica. He did. But he was increasingly unable to cope.’

  Lucan’s sister Jane sees him clearly; she is not deluded about his flaws, nor about the inherent difficulties of having to live with him. She was supremely unimpressed by his lifestyle, his materialism, his stubborn refusal to make the most of his qualities. Nevertheless she says of his marriage: ‘It was awful to see him take the wrong path.’ In the spring of 1964 the Lucans went to New York and stayed with Jane (by then a doctor) and her husband. She recalls:

  They came over for the World’s Fair. We have a tiny apartment, very unlike what they were used to. And I can see Veronica ironing her wig. In those days people did iron wigs [they also wore them more habitually than today].
But they had to come home from the fair in a taxi – couldn’t take the subway because she was claustrophobic or something.

  A couple of months earlier, Lucan had spent a long weekend at Miami Beach with Bill Shand Kydd, to see Sonny Liston fight Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali). ‘And Veronica came to stay with me,’ says Christina, who then goes on to describe an incident in which her sister took exception to a remark made by the family nanny.

  There was the most appalling scene… Veronica stormed out of the house, and walked home to Park Crescent. I pleaded with her not to go, and not to be so silly, but that was the sort of thing that, you know… And when the men got back, I told Bill what had happened. John came round that evening, and absolutely flew at Bill, saying I won’t have your wife belittling my wife because she’s jealous of this, that and the other. And when he’d finished, Bill looked at him and said OK, John, now it’s my turn to come round to your house and tell your wife what I think of her. And there was a slight silence, and then John said, Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea. And they sort of made it up. Between the rest of us it did last, for a longish time, until we went to do a power boat race in Miami in April [Lucan’s new boat failed when in second position, and he gave up the sport thereafter]. Veronica treated us as if the row had never happened.

  But John was fiercely loyal to her, at first.

  The title, of which Christina was allegedly ‘jealous’, was deeply treasured by Veronica. ‘I had a handle to my name,’ she was still proudly declaiming twenty years after Lucan’s disappearance. When a £19,000 lease was taken on 46 Lower Belgrave Street in July 1964, the countess life began in earnest. Veronica redecorated the house repeatedly over the next three years, very nicely (her graphic design training), with heavy reds in the ground-floor rooms, blues and pale yellow in the marital bedroom. A portrait of the 3rd Earl of Lucan glared across the drawing room. There was also a painting of Lavinia Bingham, wife to the 2nd Earl Spencer. Later these would hang in Veronica’s mews house at Eaton Row behind Lower Belgrave Street, along with the portrait of the 7th Earl in his ermine robes, painted by Dominick Elwes.