Lord Lucan helps Agatha Christie win Quote of the Day

Lord Lucan is everywhere this week, because it's 50 years since he murdered his children's nanny, attacked his wife and then disappeared.

The new Fortean Times has an article on the affair, which quotes the reaction of Agatha Christie:

“ I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?”

Christie may seem like a figure from an earlier era, but she did not die until 1976. And Lord Lucan died in 1974.

Or did he?

Six of the Best 917

The Liberal Democrat leadership election should not be delayed until May 2021, says Hermione Peace. And she's right.

"Whole streets in the City were shuttered and even the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall were all but deserted." Gillian Darley takes us to London in the devastating plague year of 1665.

Tom Hartley, a psychologist, explains how one terrifying, exciting night of delusions, hallucinations and paranoia has informed his view of mental illness.

Charlie Pullen looks at the experimental schools of the 1920s: "Strange new schools sprang up, old schools broke with convention and adopted new procedures, the new methods of teaching or of school organization were bruited abroad, new educational societies were formed. It was a period of intense and feverish activity."

"His son George Bingham is ‘quite certain’ there was no intruder, a view he shares, he says, with his close family. He has said he wants to believe his father is culpable; it is too painful otherwise to think he abandoned his children for no apparent reason." Rosemary Hill on the murder of Sandra Rivett and the disappearance of Lord Lucan.

Andy Miller reviews a new book on the Kinks.

Les Taylor regains the Ashes in 1985

I have been feeling guilty about this exchange:

It's Alan Bennett meets Murray Bennett. 

Reader's voice: Who is Murray Bennett? 

Liberal England replies: An obscure Australian spinner Les Taylor caught and bowled in 1985 to regain the Ashes. 

Persistent reader: Who is Les Taylor? 

Liberal England replies tetchily: Really, if you are not prepared to do the reading there's no point in your coming to these seminars.

Guilty because it was all a long time ago and millennials can only acquire information visually. (Some scientists believe this is due to advanced avocado poisoning.)

So here is Taylor dismissing Bennett at The Oval to regain the Ashes for England.

Cricinfo remembers him thus:

Les Taylor was one of the last of a breed - an English seamer from down the mines. Tall and muscular, he used accuracy and movement off the seam to good effect, and although he was 23 before he made his Leicestershire debut, he quickly established himself in the side. In 1981 he took 75 wickets, but threw in his lot with Graham Gooch's rebel tour to South Africa when overlooked by the selectors. On that trip he was the leading bowler with 11 wickets at 18.72. 

He made his England debut in 1985 after serving a three-year ban, playing the final two Tests of the summer. He did enough to win selection for that winter's tour of the Caribbean, but so rare were his outings in the West Indies that he was dubbed "Lord Lucan" by sections of the media. 

To me his immaculate grooming recalls, not the fugitive peer, but a Leicestershire miner out on the pull on a Saturday night in Coalville or Ashby.

Yes, it was all a long time ago.

Police to reopen Jeremy Thorpe case

From ITV News:

An investigation into the alleged involvement of the former leader of the Liberal Party in a plot to kill is to be reopened. 

Avon and Somerset Police has passed the files from the original investigation about Jeremy Thorpe, former MP for North Devon, to colleagues in Wales. 

The alleged hit man Dennis Meighan told The Mail on Sunday that he met representatives of Thorpe in 1975. He claims they wanted Norman Scott, said to have been the MP's gay lover, silenced. 

However a few days later Mr Meighan says he backed out of the plot and told the police. But he alleges that all mentions of Jeremy Thorpe in his police statement were removed. He believes that someone in Whitehall covered up his claims. He was never called to give evidence at Mr Thorpe's trial along with three other men accused of attempting to murder Scott. All four men were acquitted at the high profile trial.

First Lord Lucan and now this. Seeing the scandals of my teenage years being recycled makes me feel young again. Can John Stonehouse be far behind?

The odd thing about this is that Meighan's story was known at the time of the Thorpe trial. As I blogged in December 2014:

Here is Auberon Waugh writing in the Spectator on 5 June 1981. Among six questions that remain to be answered about the affair, he lists:

Why Denis Meighan, the man who sold Newton his gun, was not allowed to mention Newton's offer of £1,000 to do the job - of murdering Scott - for him.

So it may be that the police are concerned about something else.

And I think I know what it is.

One of Thorpe's co-accused was a nightclub owner from South Wales by the name of George Deakin.

As I revealed earlier in 2014, he was the uncle of the guitarist in Black Lace.

You know: "Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple, shake the tree."

Lock them up, I say. Lock up the whole bloody family.

Lord Lucan, John Aspinall and George Osborne

Embed from Getty Images

A new theory about what happened Lord Lucan after he murdered Sandra Rivett in 1974 emerged this week.

According to the Daily Mail, he shot himself and was then fed to a tiger at John Aspinall's zoo in Kent.

I don't believe a word of it, but the Lucan story has always fascinated me.

The best picture of John Aspinall is to be found in John Pearson's The Gamblers, but a few quotes will suffice.

Here is the Daily Express from 2013:

"Aspinall was a total crook," says Sir Rupert [Mackeson] now. "He started in the days when gambling was illegal away from racecourses. His mother Lady Osborne was a real force behind the operation." 

Aspinall and his mother were charged with "keeping a common gaming house" but were acquitted on a technicality in 1958. ... 

Aspinall opened the Clermont in 1962 after gambling had been legalised and its founder members included five dukes, five marquesses and nearly 20 earls. 

Aspinall was determined to relieve the bluebloods of their money and use the funds to finance his private zoo where he bred tigers. 

"He employed crooked dealers and used a wide range of techniques for cheating," says Sir Rupert. "He encouraged rich people, young aristocrats and in particular rich divorcees, to come to his club. A lot of people were ruined. Lucan lost a fortune and so became a house player for Aspinall."

Some of the money Aspinall fleeced from the aristocracy went to fund his zoos and wildlife breeding projects. But lest you feel too warm to him about that, read this anonymous blog post:

Both Howletts and Port Lympne seemed to attract human disaster. Aspinall's daughter-in-law, Louise, was bitten by a tiger cub and needed 15 stitches. A boy of 10 had his arm ripped off by a chimpanzee at Port Lympne, and was awarded £132,000 in damages. Bindu, an English bull elephant, crushed a "bonding" keeper to death at Howletts and later Darren Cockrill, who was crushed by an elephant at Port Lympne in February 2001. 

In 1994, the local council banned the keepers from entering the tiger cages after one of their number, Trevor Smith, was killed at Howletts.

My reason for writing about Aspinall, beyond the Lucan and tiger story, is his mother. Because Lady Osborne is also the grandmother of George Osborne.

Her first husband was Dr Robert Aspinall and John was the child of that marriage (though John is said to have discovered in later life that he was not Robert's son and to have found and supported his real father).

Her second was Sir George Osborne. They had four children together, and George Osborne is the son of the third of them.

He was famously christened Gideon, but changed his name to George, in honour of his grandfather who was dead by then, at the age of 13.

So that is my Trivial Fact of the Day.

It also explains why you can find headlines like:

Lord Lucan 'told George Osborne's grandmother he was planning to kill his WIFE days before he murdered his nanny and then drowned himself days later'

The Gamblers by John Pearson

The disappearance of Lord Lucan reminds me of that odd era when Britain faced power cuts, glam rock ruled the charts and retired Colonels drilled their private armies to be ready when the balloon went up.

Lucan, if you don't know the story, had planned to murder his wife, only to murder his children's nanny instead. (In this telling of the story, as in every other, the nanny Sandra Rivett receives little consideration.) He then disappeared, and sightings of him are reported every now and then even today.

John Pearson's idea of how Lucan hoped to get away with the "perfect murder" of his wife is convincing: his account of what may have happened to him is less so. Or rather, though it is a plausible narrative, there is precious little evidence to support it.

But the book is equally memorable for its first two-thirds, which tell us about the London gambling circle in which Lucan moved. Its big characters - John Aspinall, James Goldsmith and Lucan himself - are well drawn; Aspinall emerges as a thoroughly evil man.

What was most damaging though was the absurd ethic to which they all subscribed: a gentleman was someone who would gamble everything, lose and act as though nothing had happened. I am reminded of the equally destructive idea of the alienated romantic artist.

Lord Lucan, I presume?

It must be Forgotten News Stories of the 1970s week.

One of the most-read posts on this blog yesterday was the one about Joyce McKinney and the 'Manacled Mormon'. Now the Lord Lucan case has been remembered too.

On Monday the South East edition of the BBC Inside Out programme will cover claims that Lord Lucan was smuggled out of the country after he murdered the family's nanny. A woman who worked for Lucan's friend John Aspinall will say she used to arrange for his children to fly to Africa so that the peer could view them "from a distance".

The programme will be shown only in the South East, but it will be available on the BBC iPlayer.

Is this Lord Lucan?

Probably not:

Mr Woodgate ... pointed out he was five inches shorter than Lord Lucan and, at 62, is 10 years younger than the aristocrat would be now.