The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped! Read online

  When 1965 rolled around, it was looking like Kelly would get his wish. The authorities were no closer to retrieving the painting or identifying who had taken it.

  Chapter 8: WAITING GAME

  On August 31, 1961, ten days after the theft of the Goya, Kempton Bunton sent his first ransom note to Reuters. This was the letter informing the authorities that “The picture is not, and will not be for sale—it is for ransom—£140,000—to be given to charity.” Bunton would later anoint this letter “Com 1” and explain that com was short for communication. Bunton fully expected that the proposed ransom would be paid in short order. When he learned through the media that the authorities had no intention of yielding to the ransom demand, he realized that “a lengthy battle lay ahead.” This prospect troubled him. He had hidden the painting in the London apartment where he was staying temporarily, but he did not wish to leave it there for long. For one thing, who knows what cleaning his landlady might choose to do? Worse, he had only a few shillings on hand and could not afford to remain in London for a prolonged period. Indeed, the need for thrift produced unforeseen problems. His fingernails needed trimming for him to find work at a bakery, which he decided was the best short-term solution to poverty. Precisely because of his impoverished state, he planned to do the trimming with a scissors borrowed from (and then returned to) the shelves of Woolworth. Alas, a Woolworth employee caught Bunton in the act and forced him “to pay 2/6 of my dwindling money” for the self-manicure. The man who allegedly got away with stealing a Goya worth £140,000 got nabbed briefly for borrowing a scissors.

  Bunton soon landed a job at a bakery in Camden and hoped to put away some money and make a quick getaway to Newcastle—a plan made necessary by the “very dangerous situation with that ‘thing’ which I had locked in a wardrobe, plus the feeling of being 300 miles from home.” But the job at the bakery, like so many of Bunton’s employment stints, ended in a fight with his boss. This one culminated in the boss asking rhetorically, “If you don’t want the job, why the [hell] did you take it?” With that reasonable question ringing in his ears, Bunton, “without a word to anyone, walked out into the lonely, darkened, miserable streets of London.” (This grim description echoes Stephen Sondheim’s “No Place Like London” from the 1962 musical Sweeney Todd, in which the eponymous character declares, “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit . . . and it goes by the name of London.”) He now needed money more desperately than ever but nevertheless remained confident that “if I kept my head, and did not panic, I would get the cursed Wellington up to Newcastle.”

  Ungainfully unemployed, Bunton turned his attention to planning his exit from London. From media reports in the wake of his initial ransom offer, he concluded that “no quick fund was to be started” and “a long fight was in the offing.” Accordingly, he “began to prepare the Duke for his journey North.”

  Publicity about the theft of the painting had died down to the point that when Bunton scouted out the Kings Cross railway station, he found an almost normal atmosphere. The police presence, vastly beefed up in the aftermath of the theft, was substantially reduced. Only days before, police at rail stations had inspected all sizable parcels, but no longer.

  Bunton still had to secure The Duke before he could return to Newcastle. He purchased several feet of plywood and, with a Woolworth handsaw, cut it down to size and made a casing. He then added brown paper and string for the safe transport of the picture. He also took precautions with his travel plans, buying a rail ticket on a Thursday night for a Friday-morning ride, “which would save me from hanging around the ticket office next day with a suspicious looking parcel.”

  Bunton left London still optimistic, believing that a fund for the collection of The Duke was only a matter of time and that, as a result, “40 or more aged and needy folk would benefit each and every week with a free TV license.” On his last night in London, he imbibed freely, drinking to “the smashing possibility that Wellington’s portrait might bring more happiness into the world than ever he himself had.” Bunton congratulated himself on the “perfect plan.” He still viewed the affair melodramatically, with the police “doing their utmost to stop thousands of oldies from seeing and enjoying the personalities of the world.”

  Come Friday morning, three weeks to the day after the kidnapping of The Duke, Bunton took a cab to a pub near Kings Cross Station and began the countdown before he would have to “walk the gauntlet past at least a couple policeman” with the Goya in hand. He recognized that a more prudent man would have allowed more than three weeks to elapse from the time of the theft until his escape, but prudence was not his strong suit. And, at least on this occasion, recklessness did not prove his undoing. “Five hours later the train slid into Newcastle and I brazenly marched past the throng of people, ticket men, policemen.”

  The end was almost in sight but still difficult to reach. Lacking money for a cab, Bunton lugged The Duke onto a trolley bus and rode the last three miles home—very close to home anyway; the nearest bus stop was actually eighty yards from his house. Arriving at 12 Yewcroft Avenue, Bunton rushed up the stairs and “Wellington was pushed under my bed. . . . I did not expect any complaint from him.” He started downstairs, but his wife, emerging from the kitchen, stood on the stairway staring inquiringly.

  Mrs. Bunton posed no major problem, however, because “nobody ever lied to his Mrs better than me at that period.” Bunton felt guilty about keeping his wife in the dark about his amazing caper, but “one just can’t trust gossipy old women.” Exhausted but semitriumphant, Bunton went to sleep knowing that two immediate tasks lay ahead: finding a suitable “resting place” for The Duke and devising a plan for his successful ransom.

  Task number one was accomplished the next day, as the ever-resourceful scofflaw placed a piece of hardboard over the canvas and fit it into the top cupboard in the smallest bedroom in his modest three-bedroom house. To guard against “the wife nosing around,” he filled the cupboard with several pieces of junk and manuscripts of the various radio and television plays he had written in his spare time. “I knew my wife would not disturb these, and thus felt reasonably safe.” Whereas once they had only gathered dust, now Bunton’s works of fiction protected a more eminent work of art.

  As for task number two, a plan to land the ransom, Bunton took stock. While his scheme was off to an inauspicious start, he still felt he was dealing from a position of strength: “My first ‘Com’ letter had brought no reaction as regards to a fund—well, best play a waiting game. The portrait was safely cached, and I could afford to play a waiting game—let the art world worry for a change.”

  In September Bunton took a job driving a taxi for a company in Byker, a suburb of Newcastle. All went smoothly enough for a few months, but Christmas Eve brought a life-changing event. Bunton experienced a close call on the road, the essence of and fallout from which he described as follows: “I was not hurt, but have never driven a car since that incident . . . because I shall never forget a bus that raced headlong for me, the night I thought I was about to die.”

  The incident connects to the kidnapping of The Duke of Wellington in two respects. First, under oath several years later, Bunton would offer a somewhat different version of events. It is not the only discrepancy between his memoirs and his trial testimony, and it suggests the need for skepticism toward both. Second, apropos of fate throwing near death in his face, he remarks (in his memoirs), “I wondered if that cursed Wellington had anything to do with it.” He had The Duke, but perhaps we should say it had him.

  In mid-February 1962, less than two months after the incident that ended his driving career, Bunton again took stock. Six months had elapsed since his first ransom letter to Reuters; it was time to try a second. He decided it would be safer to post from London than Newcastle, and he took the train there on a Saturday. In a quiet pub, he scrawled out his second note “in similar vein to number one,” again using handwritten block letters. Bunton posted the letter and immediately returned to N
ewcastle because “London somehow was depressing to me.” He had traveled six hundred miles in a day at nontrivial expense to post the ransom note. “I remember vowing to myself to find a better way if more letters were to be posted.”

  As days went by, the exorbitant effort gnawed at Bunton less than the lack of a return on the investment. Silence, rather than any sort of publicity, greeted the second ransom note, prompting him to make another resolution: “The letter I had taken so much trouble to post had been stifled, by whom I knew not, but blaming Reuters [I] decided there and then to transfer my custom to another agency.”

  Bunton ended up doing more than just boycotting Reuters. He put the custom of sending ransom notes in abeyance, deciding to take a page from the playbook of his adversaries: “Everyone it appeared, the Gallery included, was lying doggo, and I remember deciding to play the same game.”

  Bunton’s memoirs communicate a righteous indignation toward the various parties that ignored him—police, media, National Gallery. How could everyone now be indifferent toward a painting for which the government had forked over substantial taxpayer money? “Worse still, not an article published taking my side.” That may be Bunton’s single-most puzzling assertion. Assuming for the sake of argument the validity of his belief that forcing the elderly to pay for television constituted a moral outrage, no one had any way of knowing that the painting had been stolen to support that cause. How could anyone take Bunton’s side without knowing what side they were taking? He didn’t see it that way. Rather he discerned in the nonresponse to his deed “a lack of feeling, [a] stone wall attitude that embittered me” but also shored up his resolve. “I vowed that in the end, Wellington would be the instrument for good.”

  Eventually the war of silence with the authorities wore Bunton down. He determined to write Com 3, albeit with a wrinkle. Perhaps Reuters and the police had ignored his previous letter because they did not believe it came from the actual thief. Com 3 would prove his possession of the Goya. And so, he writes in his memoirs, “releasing the Duke from his prison, [I] unpacked him and detached the small label [from] the back of the picture, after which I again re-packed and sealed in the hideaway.”

  To be sure, Com 1 described identifying marks and labels on the back of the painting. But now Bunton went further: Com 3 included a label. It wasn’t the only tactical adjustment. Still livid at Reuters for ignoring Com 2, he sent Com 3 to the Exchange Telegraph. And this time he did not travel all the way to London to do the deed, though he remained prudent enough not to post the letter from Newcastle (for that “might well link me to ‘that crackpot’ who had worked the TV license affair”). A few bus trips and a hitched ride later, he found himself in Morecambe, where he deposited the letter. It took him a while to hitchhike home, “but nevertheless I was back in Newcastle before midnight, and not a query from wifey.”

  But, as it turned out, no success either. Com 3 elicited no more response than Com 2, prompting Bunton to renew his resolution to win a war of inaction: “I also would go to sleep—the next move would have to come from the enemy.” However, in their dueling hibernations, the enemy again outlasted Bunton. Come December 1963, “I decided to send Com 4. It was the only way to have any chance of succeeding.” He took a lift from Newcastle to Birmingham, where he posted his latest effort to catch someone’s attention.

  Com 4 also failed to trigger any response. Shortly thereafter, however, something written by Bunton, albeit unrelated to both the theft and the BBC licensing fee, did capture someone’s attention. On a whim he had written a seven-hundred-word reflection on the previous month’s assassination of US president John F. Kennedy and sent it to the Sunday Mirror. According to Bunton, the newspaper promised to run the piece and make payment for it. The article never ran. That is a familiar tale for freelance writers and in Bunton’s case notable only because it fueled his paranoia.

  “The only reason I can think of [for the piece not running],” he writes in his memoirs, “is the fact that when the editor learned the article had been done by the chap who was known as a TV rebel, he had put his foot on it.”

  Bunton’s growing frustration contributed to him lying low in 1964. The year “passed without any action from me. . . . The first dawnings of defeat had begun to glow.” Admittedly he had in his possession only a “hunk of wood,” but others valued it and yet made no effort to retrieve it. That was the inexplicable reality that became ever more apparent: England flipped over the prospect of losing this painting but refused to do anything to bring about its return.

  Accordingly, in the spring of 1965, Bunton decided to make one last attempt—Com 5. This time he showed a greater ability to improvise. He lowered his demands from £140,000 to £30,000 and proposed that the money be raised by exhibiting the painting. But the new approach appeared to produce the same result—”total failure, the same inertia from the public and authorities alike, a blank.”

  Actually, the situation was even worse than Bunton realized. The initial response to Com 5 was not “blank”—it was an explicit rejection. Bunton apparently did not read the London Times, which reported that the authorities remained unwilling to negotiate a ransom. It is just as well that Bunton steered clear of the Times. Following Com 5, the paper assembled a team of handwriting experts and psychiatrists to analyze the letter and evaluate its author. Based on the experts’ assessment, the newspaper declared that the author of the various ransom notes was likely a “slightly built, well-educated man, probably over 35 years of age, living alone with his fear and mild paranoia.”

  Paranoia seems a plausible assessment, and Kempton Bunton was indeed over thirty-five, but otherwise the experts missed. He lived with his wife, had received little formal schooling, and tipped the scales at nearly 250 pounds.

  Chapter 9: THE DUKE RETURNED

  As the standoff continued throughout 1964, the thief made good on the threat in the December 31, 1963, letter (Com 4) to “sleep for a year”—fifteen months in fact. He awoke from his slumber to offer a final ransom note, a letter posted in Darlington on March 15, 1965, and (like the two previous ransom notes) sent to the Exchange Telegraph. Under the heading “5th & Final Com 5,” it read as follows:

  Goya’s Wellington Is Still Safe.

  I have looked upon this affair as an adventurous prank—must the authoritys [sic] refuse to see it that way? I know now that I am in the wrong, but I have gone too far to retreat.

  Liberty was risked in what I mistakenly thought was a magnificent gesture—all to no purpose so far, and I feel the time has come to make a final effort.

  I propose to return the painting anonymously if the following plan is agreed.

  The portrait to be put on private exhibition at a 5[-shilling] view fee for 1 month, after which it would be returned to the Gallery. A collection box to be placed at side of picture for good people to give extra if so inclined. The effort to be conducted on a voluntary basis by Mr. Hendee-Wheeler or others having facilities for same. The affair to be a true charity, and all moneys collected, minus nothing for expenses, given to the place I name—a committee of 5 may redirect if they so wish. The matter to end there—no prosecutions. No police enquiries as to who has committed this awful deed.

  I feel that many helpers would give their services free for such an exhibition, and that this troublesome episode Can end on a happy note.

  I do not think the authorities need fear the feat being emulated by others—the risk is great—the material reward nil.

  This message gave the authorities hope. While calling this missive his “final effort,” the writer of the note made no threat to harm the painting. And notwithstanding his impressive persistence, he sounded worn down, as if he finally recognized that his scheme had failed.

  And it had failed, as was apparent from an article in the Times two days later. Under the title “LD. ROBBINS SAYS GOYA OFFER AUTHENTIC,” the Times recorded a statement by the chairman of the gallery trustees, Lord Robbins, replying to the latest ransom note. Robbins tried simultaneou
sly to appeal to the thief’s ego and to reassure him that he could return the painting without fear of repercussions: “I should have thought that a man of this degree of ingenuity would have had the imagination to realize that, if the picture were returned, the probability of further search for whoever temporarily appropriated it would be virtually nil.”

  At the same time, Robbins wished to be unmistakably clear that the man who had “temporarily appropriated” the painting should drop all his demands. He urged the man to “do the sensible thing and return the picture without trying to make a bargain.” He explained that no bargain was possible because it would “place all the treasures committed to our care at risk and create an intolerable precedent.” He might have added that negotiating with the blackmailer was barred by law.

  And yet, miraculously, if Com 5 could not and did not move the authorities, its author had finally found a formula that moved someone. The Daily Mirror, a brashly populist tabloid, saw an opportunity to exploit the thief’s apparent desperation.

  A few years earlier, the Mirror had published its credo: “We believe in ordinary people . . . so we strive to smash every artificial barrier to full expression of the moral qualities of the British people.” Now the Mirror, under the direction of its charismatic new editor, Leon (Lee) Alexander Howard, and its longtime chairman, Cecil Harmsworth King, would not so much smash as circumvent an artificial barrier to recovering the Goya—the law banning ransom negotiations.

  It is no surprise that King, the scion of an influential publishing family, would become the driving force behind the Mirror’s involvement in the search for The Duke. King tended toward megalomania—for example, long insisting that the Mirror had brought down Winston Churchill after World War II. He had joined the Mirror in 1926, as advertisement director, and worked his way up, becoming chairman in 1951. The paper prospered under King’s tutelage, as his philosophy, succinctly described in his 1969 memoirs, dovetailed with the comparative advantage of a tabloid: “People buy the Mirror not for the day’s news, but to be entertained. . . . Maybe you can insert in the sugar coating a pill of news. . . . But that is not what the paper is basically for.” What was the paper for? In the words of the prominent Irish historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, who chronicled King’s tenure at the Mirror, “bite-sized news, crime, sensationalism, astrology, sentiment, social conscience and sex.”