Lord Lucan's son, George Lucan, and family friends tell Alice Cockerell what happened that grisly night 50 years ago, on November 7, 1974
The current Earl of Lucan has Lucan fatigue.
It’s fifty years since his father disappeared into thin air or a thick puff of Claremont cigar smoke - but the story has still got legs. A new documentary made by Neil Berriman, the son of the Lucan’s nanny Sandra Rivett, who was bludgeoned to death on 7th November 1974, alleges that Lucan is still merrily living it up in Australia after all these years.
George Bingham, 8th Earl of Lucan, on the other hand long ago abandoned any hope that he will see his father again but says he will never be sure of either his innocence or guilt, “Whether my father had some hand in the carnage that night or himself became a victim of it, I will never know and I doubt anyone else will either."
What plays on his mind is Lucan’s legacy: “On my own memories he was a kind, gentle and loving father, such as is pictured here. Picturing him as such in relaxed surroundings – such images rarely see the light of day, whilst those of him in starched shirts, three-breasted suits and formal wear are too numerous to speak of.”
For half a century it has been a story of rumour, counter-rumour and smear. With the main man missing, perhaps it was always going to be a matter of gossip. His friends, who famously closed ranks and confounded the police, are now keen to talk, but it still makes for a mysterious tale.
There were factions long before the infamous night, when the Countess of Lucan burst into the Plumber’s Arms in Belgravia, accusing her husband, Lord Lucan, of killing their nanny, Sandra Rivett, and attempting to beat her to death.
‘Lucky’ - a cruel nickname for an ardent but ham-fisted gambler (although his female friends tended to pronounce it ‘Lukey’ instead) - existed within the rarefied but paranoid world of the 70s upper-class. During strikes and recession, Lucky and members of his gang like SAS founder David Stirling, Jimmy Goldsmith and John Aspinall sat around chemin de fer tables and talked about forming elite squads to combat what they saw as the coming class-war.
Within his marriage too, Lucky was embattled, having lost the custody of his three children to his hated estranged wife. Veronica, who described herself as having been brought up in the “grinding poverty of the middle classes” had long been left-out by Lucan’s set. “She was a gambling widow,” recalls Emma Soames, the journalist, a granddaughter of Winston Churchill.
Another Clermont Club habitué remembers Veronica convulsively tipping back and forth on what was known as the Widow’s Bench at Lucan's club, as she watched her husband fritter away the family fortune: “'Off her rocker,’ I’m afraid we used to giggle”.
And the narrative of the nuts countess still tends to be the accepted version today. Art-dealer Simon Dickinson remembers, as a young Christie's cub, being sent to Lower Belgrave Street to evaluate items Lady Lucan was thinking of auctioning: “She took me down to the basement to show me the blood stains, then to the dining room where she had draped her husband’s suits over the chairs. Very odd.”
Despite being convicted of murder and attempted murder in absentia, within his gang Lucan has got off much more lightly over the years.
“I used to see him quite often at the weekend at Mickey Suffolk’s house, Charlton Park. He wasn’t talkative. Quite silent and reserved - but he wasn’t haughty, quite endearing in fact,” says Lady Anne Somerset. “He had a car called a DAF. A tiny little runaround that, when he went into the Claremont, he would let me drive around town for some reason.”
Others remember him as “rather dim but certainly not in the least sinister.” The only person I can find who demurs from this party-line is entrepreneur and former owner of the Spectator magazine, Algy Cluff, who remembers Lucan as a dog sadist. Cluff talks about Lucan in the new Oldie podcast. You can listen here.
“I wasn’t really a friend of his so was astonished when the police came and searched my house in Dover after he went missing”, says Cluff, “Because I had known him a bit from power-boating on the Solent, I suppose. I once had to intervene as I caught him giving massive electric shocks to his dog. The poor thing was in very great distress and leaping about a foot in the air.”
What do the surviving gang think happened to Lord Lucan? From the start, the investigating police, known as ‘the nob squad’, were convinced what they called ‘the Eton mafia’ were in smug cahoots and concealed what they all knew to be the truth. And yet, even though the ranks have now largely broken, I get very little agreement on the fate of the missing earl.
The official version has tended to be that he pitched himself off a ferry that left from Newhaven where his abandoned car was found. Anne Somerset certainly thinks that, “as a man who ate a lunch of lamb cutlets at the same table in the same place in the winter and jellied lamb cutlets in the summer, to be eating bush meat in a jungle is implausible.”
The current Lord Lucan agrees and resents the liberty that people have taken with the story of his father, feeling free to spin “any absurd narrative set in the backstreets of Bangkok or Adelaide or Rio with carefree abandon.”
However, one source tells me, “I have a friend who swears blue that Lucan was whisked out of the country by Mickey Suffolk in his little plane” (This is the late Mickey Suffolk, who is the muse for Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rupert Campbell-Black, currently setting the nation’s loins on fire in Rivals on Disney+).
A friend of Lucan’s, Philippe Marcq, would tell anyone who would listen that Lucky somehow made it to John Aspinall’s zoo in Kent where he shot himself before being fed to the tigers. A great friend of Aspinall's puts the kibosh on this: “Aspers loved his tigers far too much to make them eat a man. And too good of a zoo-keeper to introduce them to human flesh.”
More convincing is the theory of Lucan expert James Fox. Fox says, “There is no doubt in my mind that Lucan had an accomplice of some sort. I also think that it could be that he had borrowed a boat, which he had planned to put Veronica’s body in and then scuttle. When the plan went wrong, he scuttled himself instead.” It is true that Lucky was a better sinker of boats than sailer of them, having consigned two power boats to the bottom of the sea before giving up the sport.
Another source says, “Yes, that’s it. In fact, his mother, the Dowager, once almost half laughed to me that John wasn’t especially good at many things but sinking boats was one of them.”
Emma Soames says, “I think he might have got to France, then turned around and got a ferry home but was pushed overboard by one of his fed-up friends. Though thinking about it, I might have seen that in a film. I do know he’s feeding the fish somewhere, though”.
And so the rumours continue to eddy and flow. Is Lucan, who will be 90 next month, as Neil Berriman alleges, evading justice in a Brisbane suburb? Or might he right now be cashing in his sand dollar chips, preparing to leave his desert island to come home and finally clear his name?
