LYCRA CROFT
For those wondering exactly what Lara Croft’s beloved lycra actually is, and how many lycans have to die for every pair of leggings, it’s actually a copolymer of polyurethane and polyurea created as a synthetic replacement for natural latex (which originates in rain-forest trees.)
Lycra’s actually the UK, Irish, Israeli and Antipodean name for what’s called Spandex (an anagram of ‘expands’) in the US, and Elastane in mainland Europe. It was invented by DuPont chemists C. L. Sandquist and Joseph Shivers in 1958, originally under the codename ‘K’.
The elasticity and expansion that gave it its American and European names gives the artificial fibres the ability to stretch to up to six times their resting length before tearing, and to return to their original length – and a garment to its original shape – more quickly than natural textiles. This makes it ideal for clothing than can both stretch during activity, and adhere to the body to provide muscular support, and even a level of compression which can assist with controlling circulation, especially at altitude, and thus holding off muscle fatigue for longer. Swimwear – or any other clothing likely to get wet – made of lycra dries far more quickly than other materials, reducing the risk of hypothermia if you still have to wear it after crossing a river.
Though it’s useful stuff, much of its practical value goes unrecognized by most people, as fashion and trends have taken over. In fact over 80 per cent of all clothing now contains some amount of Lycra, for cosmetic fashion purposes.
THE IRISH CROWN JEWELS
WHAT IS IT?
A star and badge, of multiple (394 altogether) diamonds, emeralds and rubies. The Brazilian diamonds used had originally belonged to Queen Charlotte and then George IV, and the regalia were commissioned by William IV. They were intended to be worn by the king, when he was in Ireland, and by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland when the king was at home in England. The police report on their theft describes them thusly:
‘A Diamond Star of the Grand Master of the Order of St. Patrick composed of brilliants (Brazilian stones) of the purest water, 4 ⅝ by 4 ¼ inches, consisting of eight points, four greater and four lesser, issuing from a centre enclosing a cross of rubies and a trefoil of emeralds surrounding a sky blue enamel circle with words, “Quis Separabit MDCCLXXXIII.” in rose diamonds engraved on back. Value about £14,000.’
‘A Diamond Badge of the Grand Master of the Order of St. Patrick set in silver containing a trefoil in emeralds on a ruby cross surrounded by a sky blue enamelled circle with “Quis Separabit MDCCLXXXIII.” in rose diamonds surrounded by a wreath of trefoils in emeralds, the whole enclosed by a circle of large single Brazilian stones of the finest water, surmounted by a crowned harp in diamonds and loop, also in Brazilian stones. Total size of oval 3 by 2 ⅜ inches; height 5 ⅝ inches. Value £16,000.’
There are also five lost ‘collars’ awarded to the members of the Order, when they were made Knights. These ‘collars’ were actually gold and enamelled necklaces with badges of office, valued at £1,050 each.
There are also a few other diamonds which actually shouldn’t have been in the burgled safe to start with, whose value is unclear. The ‘trefoils of emeralds’ are in fact shamrocks made of emerald, this being Ireland.
HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?
Luckily, as you can see above, we know just how much they were worth to start with: a little over £35,000. Today, the star would be worth, in economic terms, £10.16 million. The badge would be worth £11.6 million, and the five missing collars are now worth £762,300 each. That’s a total of just over £25.57 million ($42.5 million) for the set.
THE STORY
In 1903 a new strongroom had been specially built for the regalia in Dublin Castle, directly adjoining the Ulster King of Arms’s library and office, which had just moved from another tower of the castle to the Bedford Tower. The King of Arms was one Arthur Vicars, and he was the chief Herald and Genealogist for Ireland. His ceremonial duties were ‘inspecting, overseeing and correcting, and embodying the arms and ensigns of illustrious persons and of imposing and ordaining differences therein, according to the Laws of Arms: of granting Letters Patent of Arms to men of rank and fit persons’. He was also Registrar of, and Knight Attendant upon, the Order of St Patrick.
The regalia themselves, along with other valuables, were stored in a safe for which there were only a limited number of keys. The plans for the strongroom had been prepared by the Office of Public Works but when the work was completed – and it’s difficult to resist politically incorrect jokes about Irish builders here, perhaps because this occurrence spawned many of them – the door to the new strongroom was made too small to admit the safe that was supposed to be stored in it, and which contained the regalia.
Vicars therefore simply had the safe put in the library in which his own office was located, where he could keep an eye on it. The safe was pretty well guarded, with both police and soldiers on duty 24/7 and a police inspection every night.
As well as the safe in the library there were several bits and bobs in a glass case in the strongroom; three collars and badges belonging to the Knights of St Patrick as well as two silver state maces, the Irish Sword of State, a jewelled sceptre and two silver spurs. Also, there was the gilt crown, an enamelled badge and a gilt collar which the King of Arms would wear on ceremonial occasions. There was another collar and badge in a drawer too. There were only two keys to the safe, and Vicars had both, but a total of seven people had keys to Vicars’s office.
All was well for the next four years, until 15 March 1907, when Lord Aberdeen, the lord lieutenant at the time, wore the jewels for an early St Patrick’s celebration. After that event, they were put back in the safe in Vicars’s office and were shown there to a visitor – John Crawford Hodgson, librarian to the Duke of Northumberland – on 11 June. They were next intended to be worn by King Edward VII at an investiture ceremony on 10 July, when the king was due to invest the second Baron Fitzpatrick into the Order of St Patrick on the first day of the Irish International Exposition.
On 28 June, Vicars found the latch-key of the front door to the Bedford Tower missing from his set of keys and had to be let into the building by a member of the police (the key re-appeared on Monday 8 July). On Wednesday 3 July, the cleaning woman found the front door of the Bedford Tower unlocked at 7 a.m. She reported this to the messenger when he arrived for work who in turn reported it to Vicars. The latter took little interest in the matter.
On Saturday 6 July, the cleaning woman found the door of the strongroom open when she arrived for work. Though the inner grille was locked, the key was in the lock and attached to it was the key of the bookcases and presses in the library. The cleaning woman locked the strongroom door and left the keys for the messenger’s attention. Again the messenger reported the matter to Vicars. Again the latter took little interest in the matter.
On the same day, 6 July, a messenger arrived from Messrs West and Son, jewellers, bringing with him a gold and enamelled collar of the Order of St Patrick which had been worn by the recently deceased Lord de Ros. It was now to be used in the investiture of a new knight. Mahony, the Cork Herald, took possession of the parcel, checked its contents and left them on Vicars’s desk. Later, Vicars asked the messenger to place the contents of the parcel in the safe and even gave him his own keys to open the safe door. The messenger found the safe unlocked and empty and went to tell Vicars of this event. Vicars checked the safe for himself.
The king, needless to say, was extremely annoyed, but went ahead with the ceremony anyway.
The Dublin Metropolitan Police launched an immediate investigation, putting out reward posters giving the descriptions and values mentioned above. Scotland Yard sent over Chief Inspector John Kane to take charge, and he wrote up a report which supposedly names the culprit (or at least who he thought was the culprit), but this report was immediately covered up and buried by the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Vicars refused to resign from his position and blame
d his deputy, Francis Shackleton, brother of the famous Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Kane dismissed this possibility, and a Royal Commission decided that Vicars had not done his job due diligence and fired both him and his staff.
Politicians and commentators of both nationalist and unionist leanings accused one another of being responsible and started working up the most complicated conspiracy theories, but the regalia have not been seen since, and no official judgement has been made on what happened to them.
PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION
The main historical search for the stolen treasure came not in the form of an expedition to dig up possible hiding locations, but in the form of a Vice-Regal Commission of Inquiry in January of 1908.
Lord Aberdeen, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, set this up to ‘investigate the circumstances of the loss of the regalia of the Order of St Patrick’, and ‘to inquire whether Sir Arthur Vicars exercised due vigilance and proper care as the custodian thereof’.
Witnesses were examined, and statements read, all in the actual room from which the regalia had been stolen in the first place. The commission was led by Solicitor-General Redmond Barry, and comprised of Judge James J. Shaw, Robert F. Starkie and Chester Jones. It lasted for a mere week, from 10–16 January. This inquiry had no power to subpoena witnesses or question them under oath, while Vicars and Mahony Sr wanted a public enquiry that would do that. As a result, Vicars refused to attend or answer any questions, as did his clerk, Sydney Horlock, and his typist, Mary Gibbon.
This meant that he looked even more at fault, and the search for what happened was missing the most important witness. They did at least have copies of his statements given to the police during their fruitless investigation.
Mahony, Shackleton and Goldney did all attend, as did Vicars’s secretary, George Burtchaell. Other witnesses included Assistant Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, MV Harrel; Superintendent John Lowe; Chief Inspector John Kane of Scotland Yard; and Sir George C. V. Holmes, Chairman of the Board of Works (who had built the too-small-for-the-safe strongroom).
Chief Inspector Kane told the commission that it was an inside job, and had happened before 5 July.
In 1922, what we now call the Republic of Ireland became an essentially independent country in the form of the Irish Free State, and of course Dublin Castle and all its contents became the new country’s responsibility. In 1927, an Irish government memo was written which indicated that ‘the Castle Jewels are for sale and that they could be got for £2,000 or £3,000’. This may have been an indication that stolen jewels were up for sale, or that a fraud was being perpetrated in their name, or that someone had found them and sought a reward. There’s no sure way to tell, as the memo was declared secret and buried until 1976. Needless to say, the stolen jewels don’t seem to have been bought back at this point.
Also in 1927, however, a Dublin jeweller named James Weldon claimed to have been contacted in 1927 by Shackleton, offering to sell him the location of the regalia. That said, this story was brought up by Weldon’s descendants as a family anecdote, and there’s no written documentation.
In 1983, the Gardai, the Irish police, were given a tip by a woman whose grandfather had been a Republican activist back in the inter-war years. He had told his family stories of how he had been involved in stealing the regalia, and that – having either failed to ransom the jewels, or succeeded in embarrassing the establishment – had buried them in the foothills of the Wicklow (or Dublin, if you’re local) Mountains.
The Gardai dispatched a team to search at the location given, but found nothing.
If you’re thinking that this sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes, you’d be right. In fact, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a good friend – and distant cousin – of Arthur Vicars, so it would be surprising if they hadn’t discussed the case at some point and given some consideration to what Holmes would have made of it.
The fact they doubtless had such conversations is borne out by the publication in 1908 of the Holmes story The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. This is best remembered both for being more of a prototype spy thriller than a detective story, and for the element of a body found on railway tracks after having been placed on a train’s roof (which was actually inspired by another real crime, the unsolved murder of a woman called Mary Money, in 1905).
The theft of the secret plans in the story involves a series of keys all possessed by one man charged with looking after them, and one of the villains being a deputy who is the brother of a famed VIP – in fact a thinly-disguised Francis Shackleton.
A fictionalized account of the case proper – Jewels, by Bob Perrin – was published in 1979. This one also casts Shackleton as the insider, going with the Nationalist conspiracy theory that he had been lured into gay orgies by a cashiered British officer, who persuaded him to make impressions of the safe keys while Vicars was drunk and/or drugged. In the novel the culprits all have unfortunate accidents, with the truth covered up to hide the fact that one of the participants in said gay orgies was the Duke of Argyll, brother-in-law to the king.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
Though called the ‘Irish Crown Jewels’, they weren’t actually crown jewels, but simply expensive jewellery belonging to a chivalric honours roll, roughly equivalent to the Order of the Garter in the UK, founded in 1783. There was, after all, no Irish royal family at the time to have crown jewels.
The regalia were first referred to by the term ‘crown jewels’ in 1905, when the Order’s statutes were revised. After the theft, of course, all the newspapers in Britain and Ireland referred to them as ‘Crown Jewels’ as well, simply because the choice of wording helped the tale sound more shocking and daring – and therefore more worthy of buying a newspaper to read about it.
Oddly enough, the theft of 1907 wasn’t the first time that they’d been, shall we say, inappropriately handled. Arthur Vicars had some subconscious determination to be a walking stereotype, and so was known to drink himself to sleep when he was on night duty. This is not the sort of person you want claiming to be keeping an eye on your best bling, as was proved when on at least one occasion he woke up in the morning to find that he was wearing the star and badge. Some prankster among his staff had taken them out of the safe and put them on him while he was out for the count. Why anyone did this before the invention of mobile phones and Twitter is a mystery, because that gag would have gone viral in an instant.
This regalia was presented to the Order by King William IV in 1831, having been made by the jewellers Rundell, Bridge and Company of London. Members of the Order were titled ‘Knights Companions’ as with the Order of the Garter. The chief herald and genealogical officer for Ireland under British rule, the Ulster King of Arms, was the guy tasked with registering the Order’s membership and looking after its regalia.
In 1905, the statutes of the Order were revised, and it was decided that it would make better sense, security-wise, that the jewels, and the collars and badges of the members, should be moved from their original locations (a bank vault in the case of the regalia, and the castle library in the case of the collars) and secured in a thick steel safe in the strongroom of the Office of Arms, in Dublin Castle.
Arthur Vicars had been serving as Ulster King of Arms since 1893, and had already overseen the switching of the Office’s location from Bermingham Tower to Bedford Tower in 1903. Under him were the heralds for Cork and Dublin – Pierce Gun Mahony and Francis Shackleton respectively – and one Francis Bennett Goldney, who had the rather strange title of Athlone Pursuivant. Mahony was Vicars’s nephew, and Shackleton his housemate, so it’s easy to see how they might have fallen into the job so easily.
Things then actually started to go awry on 3 July, when the office cleaner, a Mrs Farrell, found the door unlocked. She told this to the staff messenger, a William Stivey, who told Vicars. Vicars just shrugged with an ‘oh, really?’ On the morning of 6 July, Mrs Farrell found the doors lying open again, and Vicars again shrugged off th
e news.
In mid-afternoon that day, Vicars told Stivey to put away the collar of a recently deceased member of the Order in the safe and gave him the key. This was a surprise to the messenger, who had never been asked to use the safe before or given a key. Stivey found the safe was already unlocked and ran to tell Vicars, who found that the Order’s regalia and five knights’ collars were gone. It wasn’t just the official treasure that had disappeared, Vicars had been storing his own mother’s diamond jewellery in the safe unofficially, and that had been nicked as well.
The keys to the boxes containing the regalia were kept in the safe with them, which seems a rather unwise decision. Superintendent John Lowe, Detective Owen Kerr and Assistant Commissioner William V. Harrel came from the Dublin Metropolitan Police to investigate.
They determined that the theft had been neat and tidy and had to have taken at least ten undisturbed minutes. Many staff and members of the Dublin Met had keys to the front door, but the only two keys to the safe were held by Vicars. There were also four keys to the strongroom door, and another two to an inner grille, one of which was still in the lock.
Harrel and Lowe then called upon Scotland Yard to help and sent details of the missing jewels around the world. The makers of the safe, Ratner (this was a combination of Ratcliff and Horner, no relation to Gerald Ratner of cheap jewellery store fame), were questioned as were many Dublin locksmiths. The safe hadn’t been forced, and the keys had been used. The thief or thieves had deliberately set out to make the robbery obvious by leaving the doors open.
Bedford Tower was searched, but nothing found, and both the lord lieutenant and Vicars convinced themselves it was all a prank – Vicars openly waited for the jewels to be returned by parcel-post.
By 10 July, a reward of £1,000 was offered for information leading to the recovery of the jewels and the capture of the thief or thieves, but nobody ever tried to claim it. Detective Chief Inspector John Kane of Scotland Yard arrived on 12 July. He believed that the theft was intended to mess up the royal visit and wrote a report identifying the likely thief – but the Chief Commissioner of the Dublin Met refused to accept the identification and the report mysteriously disappeared when Kane returned to London.
Fortune and Glory Page 19
