The story of the beast of Bodmin Moor

An article in Metro, the free newspaper that’s somehow always more interesting when you read it over someone’s shoulder, caught my eye earlier this year: “Roaming leopard snared by Cornish sheep farmer” ran the headline. A farmer down in Cornwall had set some traps for foxes after one of his sheep was killed. To his surprise, when he went to check them he found a clouded leopard, an animal usually found in the foothills of the Himalayas. It had escaped from someone’s garden in the vicinity of Par, a fishing-village on the south Cornish coast. Its owner had kept it in an enclosure – legally, for he apparently has a licence allowing him to keep dangerous wild animals, but evidently his security arrangements were lacking somewhat.

This got me thinking about one thing and one thing only. I take tour groups down to Cornwall, and one of the stories I like to tell when driving along the A30 is the tale of the ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’, a modern-day local legend which would really be an urban myth were it not for the decidedly rural setting.

It’s one of many ‘phantom cat’ stories concerning alleged big cat sightings, of which there have apparently been over 2,000 in Britain since the Sixties, about one-fifth of them in the South West. On the other side of the Tamar, Exmoor and Dartmoor both have their own ‘beast’ stories but it’s the Bodmin Moor one which seems to get the most attention. The story would appear to have originated in the Seventies, not long after the closure of Plymouth Zoo whose owners are reputed to have released a couple of their pumas into the wild.

From then on, farmers attributed any dead livestock they found to some kind of wild animal of the large feline variety, and a rash of photographs appeared which purported to show a big cat of some sort out on the moor, rather like those photos taken at Loch Ness that claim to show ‘Nessie’. Most of these photos were of poor quality and may well have been doctored (this in the days before digital cameras and photoshopping) but some nevertheless made their way into the newspapers. The tabloids in particular were rather taken by any story they could find about what was dubbed the ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’, especially during the summer ‘silly season’ when there wasn’t much by way of real news and which also happened to be when most of the photos were taken by holiday-makers. It was even reckoned that trainee reporters were sent down to Cornwall as part of their on-the-job training, just to see if they could get a new angle on the ‘beast’ story. The media’s fascination with this was satirised in an episode of the Nineties TV sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey, when one of the reporters went out of his way to fake some video footage of a big cat on the moor in order to boost his network’s viewing figures.

By the mid-Nineties, the volume of tabloid stories about sightings of the alleged beast was getting out of hand. In 1995, the government (in the form of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries & Food) conducted an official investigation, which looked into several livestock disappearances that had been reported and examined the photos that had been taken. The men from the Ministry concluded that there was no real evidence for any wild cat on Bodmin Moor.

But the story didn’t end there, for a week after the report was published the skull of a big cat was found by the River Fowey, which rises on the moor! This was sent to the Natural History Museum for examination, and they came to the conclusion that it was the skull of a leopard … which had died somewhere in East Africa in the early twentieth century, and had most likely been imported into Britain as part of a leopard-skin rug. Although it could’ve just been thrown away, the fact that it was found so soon after the Ministry’s report means that it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility to suppose that it might have been planted by a journalist, looking for one last ‘beast’ story.

And, thanks to some idiot who perhaps shouldn’t have been keeping a big cat in his back garden, the story briefly surfaced once again earlier this year.

The new pound coin

As of last month, we have had a new coin to deal with. I have only received one of the new pound coins in my change once so far, and I haven’t spent it yet as it’s a pretty good conversation-piece because not everyone else has seen one yet, but since the old one is scheduled to be phased out by October it’s clearly something we’re about to see a lot more of. This is the future, so let’s get used to it.

The new pound coin is bi-metallic – just like the £2 coin, the euro coin, the Canadian ‘toonie’ and the old French ten-franc coin which was, prior to the euro, worth (roughly, depending on exchange rates) £1. The reverse shows plants representing the four Home Nations – the rose of England, the leek of Wales, the thistle of Scotland and the Shamrock of Northern Ireland – bound by a crown, while below the Queen on the obverse there’s a little hologram which, depending on the angle at which you’re looking at it, shows a little £ sign or a number 1. 

This is intended to make the new coin really difficult to forge; the main problem with the old one is that forgery’s relatively easy, with it having been estimated that between one in eight and one in ten pound coins currently in circulation are forgeries (knowingly passing on forged money is a criminal offence, but most people who end up with one that they reckon might be a fake probably don’t bother to look too closely as proving the coin in question to be a fake would render it worthless, leaving you out of pocket if you try to be honest).

The new one is ever so slightly bigger than the old one (by less than a millimetre, noticeable if you have one of each to compare and contrast), and a little bit lighter (using the digital kitchen scales, I can confirm that the new one weighs in at nine grams, while the old one is ten). 

It’s also twelve-sided, another anti-forgery initiative although for older Britons this could make it slightly reminiscent of the old threepenny bit (which was also twelve-sided); Private Eye has already got in with a joke about how the new pound coin has the same spending power as three old pence did back in the day, so no-one else has to.

In terms of British currency, the pound coin is a relatively new thing (not counting gold sovereigns), having first been introduced in 1983, a year after the 20p coin (pound coins were intended to replace pound notes, which were phased out by the Bank of England in 1988 although they continue to be issued in the Channel Islands and by one of the Scottish banks that’s allowed to print money). Although they were only introduced last month, the new ones all bear the date ‘2016’, which should confuse any future historians who feel inclined to study the history of post-decimal British coinage. Actually, coins being minted before they enter circulation (done by the Royal Mint in order to ensure that there are enough of them) are nothing new. The bi-metallic £2 coin was first minted in 1997 prior to its introduction the following year, and going a bit further back the old 10p and 5p coins had been minted in decimal form since to 1968, and the old 50p coins since 1969, even though decimalisation didn’t come about until 1971 (it’s worth noting, though, that the pre-1990 5p and the pre-1992 10p coins were the same size, and the same value for that matter, as the old shilling and two-shilling coins, which continued to appear in change until the sizes of said coins were reduced in the early Nineties).

The ongoing story of the missing Earl

Over four decades after his disappearance, the seventh Earl of Lucan is still capable of generating newspaper headlines. This week it was announced that, as he is not known to have been alive for at least seven years, a death certificate has been issued under the terms of a recent law called the Presumption of Death Act; he had previously been declared dead for inheritance purposes in 1999. This has duly prompted The Times to (finally) publish his obituary, and it means that his son can now be referred to as Lucan’s eighth Earl. The story, though, does not end here.

The saga surrounding the Lucan case has many classic ingredients – a brutal murder in a domestic setting (of the sort that Orwell identified as being so fascinating to the English), a dramatic disappearance and, of course, that old British obsession that is the class system. Also involved in the saga are high-stakes gambling, a messy legal case, some tigers, various exotic locations, a fugitive MP and the whiff of an upper-class cover-up. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a subject of ongoing fascination and speculation for the press and public over the course of many years.

Lucan was as upper-class as they come – his ancestors included the man who issued the order for the Charge of the Light Brigade and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. A tall, distinctive-looking man with slicked-back hair and a luxuriant moustache, he worked for a merchant bank and had a taste for gambling – initially for fun, but he left his job and became a professional gambler after a big win (which led to his nickname ‘Lucky’ – although in the long run he lost more than he won). Leading an extravagant lifestyle at the higher end of Sixties London society (he was a member of the Clermont Club, a potent mixture of aristocracy and new money), he was once rated as one of the best backgammon players in the world and is said to have been considered as a possible James Bond (the story goes that he was offered a screen test but turned it down).

He married Veronica Duncan in 1963 and although they had three children the marriage was not a happy one. By the early Seventies the couple had separated, and Lucan lost custody of the children in an acrimonious and costly legal battle which came at a time when his gambling debts were spiralling out of control. He took to spying on his estranged wife in an attempt to find something with which to discredit her, and on the night of Thursday 7^th November 1974 the family’s nanny, 29 year-old Sandra Rivett, was murdered at the Countess’s home in Belgravia.

The unfortunate Mrs Rivett really had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; she had been working for the Countess for several months and usually took Thursdays off, but that week she changed her hours and had taken the Wednesday off instead. Shortly before 9pm, she asked the Countess if she would like a cup of tea and headed to the basement kitchen to make one; there, she was bludgeoned to death with a piece of lead piping and her body hurriedly placed into a canvas mailbag.

When the Countess went to find out what was taking Mrs Rivett so long, she was herself attacked by the killer but she was able to escape and run, covered in blood and presumably in shock, to a nearby pub for help; she identified her estranged husband as her attacker. The general consensus was that Lucan had mistaken Mrs Rivett for his wife, and the evidence against him was so compelling that later, at the inquest, the jury would take the unusual step of naming him as the killer. By then, though, he had vanished. The last confirmed sighting of Lord Lucan was when he drove to the house of two of his friends in Sussex in the early hours of 8^th November; he told them that he happened to have been walking past the Countess’s house when he heard a fight taking place inside; he had gone to her aid, but been accused of hiring a hitman to kill her (he also stated this in a letter that he wrote to his brother-in-law). His car was found abandoned in the Channel port of Newhaven.

Many believe that Lucan took his own life there and then – probably by drowning, either by jumping from a cross-Channel ferry or by borrowing a boat, taking it out to sea and deliberately sinking it. There’s also a more outlandish suicide theory – that after speaking with his friends and deciding that there was no way out, he was left alone in a room with a gun. After he shot himself, his body was fed to the tigers at the zoo owned by his high-rolling friend John Aspinall (who’d founded the Clermont Club). This story has featured in the papers recently – an old member of the Clermont Club who had been told this story years ago finally broke his silence – but it was suggested at the time of Lucan’s disappearance by Aspinall’s mother (who, in one of those familial coincidences that so abound among the upper classes, also happened to be the current Chancellor’s grandmother). This was denied by Aspinall himself, though, who said that his animals were only fed on the best cuts of meat and wouldn’t have wanted to eat “stringy old Lucky”.

Then there’s the theory that he used his powerful connections to disappear abroad – and this is where the story has ran and ran, “increasingly slipping the bonds of fact for the realms of fantasy” (to quote the obit in yesterday’s Times). Sightings of the missing Earl have abounded over the years, although one of the earliest took a turn for the bizarre when an Englishman was arrested in Australia on suspicion of being Lord Lucan in December 1974. He turned out to be John Stonehouse, the Labour MP and Czech spy, who had faked his own death the previous month; interesting times, the Seventies (Stonehouse, by the way, was returned to Britain and eventually sent to prison for fraud, with his spying activities being covered up at the time and not publicly revealed until many years after he had actually died).

The continuing sightings over the years that followed made Lord Lucan the most famous British fugitive from justice. He was ‘seen’ in Colombia (that one turned out to be an American businessman) and Paraguay (hanging out with ex-Nazis!), hiking on Mount Etna and working as a waiter in both San Francisco and Greece. For years, a homeless British expat in New Zealand had to deny claims that he was the Earl (despite being several inches shorter). It has been alleged that he was flown out of England in an aircraft piloted by the racing driver Graham Hill. It was claimed that people working for his friends took him to Switzerland, where they deemed him to be a liability and killed him. In 1982 a self-styled bounty hunter claimed that he’d tracked Lucan down to Cuba, although a tabloid newspaper subsequently found out that he was a hoaxer. A Rolex watch believed to have been the Earl’s surfaced in South Africa, lending credence to apparent sightings in a hotel bar in Bostwana and in a clinic in Johannesburg.

It was also claimed that he lived out his days on a beach in India. This was the pet theory of an ex-Scotland Yard detective who in 2003 published a book, Dead Lucky, which claimed that a British hippy known as ‘Jungle Barry’ who had died in Goa in 1996 was the missing Earl. It was, however, quickly established that said hippy was in fact a distinctly un-aristocratic pub musician from St Helens.

In 2004, thirty years after Mrs Rivett’s murder, the police released a computer-generated image of how Lord Lucan might have looked had he still been alive (by which time he would have been 69); this featured in a Channel Four documentary, The Hunt for Lord Lucan, which suggested that the 1974 murder enquiry had been flawed – the crime-scene had been contaminated, and the investigation had proceeded from the start on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt despite concerns over the Countess’s reliability as a witness – and featured an interview with the Earl’s son who claimed that his mother had been mistaken in identifying his father as the man who attacked her. The Countess, who refused to be interviewed for the programme and was by that time estranged from her children, stuck by her original story and has always believed that her husband drowned himself; in a rare newspaper interview, she claimed that her husband was “not the sort of Englishman to cope abroad”.

Claims of some sort of cover-up have continued. In 2012 a former personal assistant to Aspinall claimed in an interview with the BBC that she was involved in helping Lucan to set up a new life in the West African state of Gabon, and that Aspinall and the businessman James Goldsmith (another Clermont member) later arranged to have two of Lucan’s children sent out there on false passports so that the fugitive Earl could see them, albeit from a distance (the children denied this, and it is worth noting that this claim was only made in public after both Aspinall and Goldsmith had been dead for several years; the latter was notoriously litigious and won a libel case against Private Eye in 1976 after the magazine had alleged that he and Aspinall had met after Lucan’s disappearance to discuss how they could hamper the police enquiries). At the same time, one of the detectives who worked on the Lucan case during the Eighties claimed that there had been two very credible sightings of Lucan in that decade (one of them in Africa) but he was denied the funding to follow them up.

Detectives who’ve been involved in the case have published books on the subject over the years, with titles like Looking for Lucan and Lucan Lives. In the case of the latter, the author had once been convinced that Lucan had drowned himself (and had publicly said so in 1975) but later, in the course of his working on the book, he visited Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa in a bid to track the missing Earl down. It is perhaps with studies like this in mind that the eighth Earl once commented that: “I get a little tired when former Scotland Yard detectives at the end of their careers get commissions to write books which happen to send them to sunny locations around the world.”

Despite his having been declared to be the killer of Mrs Rivett by the coroner (a highly unusual occurrence which later led to a change in the law preventing killers from being named at inquests, for fear of prejudicing any future trial), the fact remains that Lucan never stood trial. The murder of Mrs Rivett has, therefore, never been solved. Most studies of the case, though, have worked on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt (although there has been a book with the intriguing title of Lucan: Not Guilty which makes the case for the defence).

One aspect of the story that always seems to have taken a back seat is the victim herself; for all the talk of the upper-class fugitive Earl not much is said of the working-class murdered nanny. The publicity surrounding the issuing of the death certificate has been unusual in that for once, a relative of hers has featured prominently. Neil Berriman, Mrs Rivett’s son (he was given up for adoption some time before the murder, and only learned who his mother was when he was an adult), has stated that he believes that Lucan planned to kill the Countess but hired a hitman to do it; the hitman, not Lucan, killed the wrong woman. He also claims to have seen a police document stating that Lucan was alive as recently as 2002 (the eighth Earl, by contrast, believes that his father died soon after the murder).

The story doesn’t end here. Mr Berriman, who has declined to produce the police document to which he referred, has stated that there are unnamed individuals “withholding evidence and not telling the truth … I do feel and hope that the Lucan mystery will be at a possible end in 12 to 14 months time through new evidence and lines on enquiry.” It seems that, even though Lucan’s family has now got legal closure with the death certificate, the saga surrounding Lord Lucan and the murder of Sandra Rivett has not finished yet.

Paris: A personal reaction

Cities across the world held impromptu vigils to show solidarity with Paris last night, and London was no exception. While landmarks such as Tower Bridge and the Eye were being lit up in the red, white and blue of the French tricolour, thousands of people descended on Trafalgar Square to light candles at makeshift shrines, wave home-made banners (“nous sommes Paris”, “London stands with Paris”) and break out into a chorus of ‘La Marseillaise’ every five minutes or so.

It struck me, briefly, that the notion of singing the French national anthem in a public place named after a British victory over France might be a bit surreal. But that thought was brief, for there were much bigger forces at work, big enough to make quibbling over a name seem a little silly, if not downright petty. There are times when national differences fall aside before common values, and in the twenty-first century the wake of a terrorist attack – or rather, series of attacks – is such a time. Liberté and egalité are not so much French values these days as fairly universal values in the Western world, and the worldwide vigils were a chance for people everywhere to show a sense of fraternité with the people of Paris. Fittingly, the National Gallery and the fountains were lit up in the French colours too, and I even spotted a couple of bottles of vin rouge being passed around; very French.

I have a habit of following rolling news and social media somewhat obsessively when major events unfold, and that’s what I’ve been mainly doing since Friday night. Usually it’s with a sense of mild fascination or curiosity, wondering what’s going to happen next, but on Friday night it was with a mounting sense of horror as the news of multiple attacks filtered through and the number of dead rose into three figures. It’s quite possible that a contributing factor here was that Paris is a city that Allison and I love to visit – we were last there in June. We walk a lot when we go to Paris – it feels a lot more compact than London – and to judge by the map we’ve been within a couple of blocks of some of the places where the attacks took place; we like to stay in the 11^th and have been to a few of the cafés and bars in the Canal Saint Martin area. This felt a little too close to home for comfort. Going along to a vigil in Trafalgar Square may seem like a small gesture but it felt like the right thing to do.

I’ve done plenty of reading up as well as watching the news, and here are the best pieces that I have found (with hyperlinks). The sense of immediacy and perspective on show here are much better than anything I could come up with.

In Paris, a Night Disrupted by Terror (Pamela Druckerman, New York Times) Personal account of the night by an American journalist who lives and works in Paris – a “perfectly normal dinner party” is interrupted by news of the attacks. Guests get text-messages asking if they’re OK. The writer’s husband is actually at the Stade de France (he ended up getting interviewed on Dutch radio) while another couple try to contact their teenage children. Things really hit home when she sees a map of Paris on TV showing where the attacks happened – “My home is on the other side of those two sites … it’s not just Paris that’s in the news – it’s my Paris”.

Murdered for Being Parisian (Judah Grunstein, The Atlantic) Highly erudite account from a Parisian – I had to look up what ‘desuetude’ means – which quickly focusses on the “democratization of the carnage”. “Last time,” the writer says (referring to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January), “the victims were targeted for who they were or what they’d done. This time the bullets were not aimed, but fired at random … This time it is the nation and its people themselves in the crosshairs”. These are times, he notes, when even going out onto the streets buy a cake becomes in its own way an act of defiance. The writer goes on to consider the question of ‘self’ and ‘other’ which ties in the recent refugee crisis by referencing Parisians opening their doors to help those unable to get home (the #portsouvertes phenomenon that for a few hours gripped Twitter) – “When thousands of Parisians become refugees in Paris … there’s no longer really a “here” or a “there”, no longer a host and a refugee”.

‘Crimes’ Jihadists Will Sentence You To Death For (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic) Ties in the Paris attacks with the bombing of the Russian plane in Egypt two weeks ago, and other Islamist attacks over the years, by giving a “partial, and only partial” list of aspects of modern life that Islamist militants find intolerable to the point of killing people for partaking in them. My one quibble is the writer’s use of the term “medieval values” when talking of the extremists; sadly, religious extremism is in its own way a very modern phenomenon (for more on this, try to get hold of a copy of John Gray’s Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern – a short but nevertheless excellent and thought-provoking read).

After Paris, Europe may never feel as free again (Nick Cohen, Observer) Nick Cohen is a writer who I find always has something useful to say, and who usually seems to be a few steps ahead of everyone else (for example, people have only recently started to notice his excellent book What’s Left?, which was published eight years ago). He argues that, thus far, the threat posed by Islamism hasn’t really changed Europe. “From Nigeria to Afghanistan, a clerical fascist doctrine that mandates mass murder and self-murder has pushed whole regions into civil war. Yet divinely sanctioned violence has failed to engulf our continent … In spite of all provocations, we are what we once were”. Cohen, though, feels that the Paris attacks will change this; he cites the closing of international borders, which had already started in some parts of Europe as a consequence of the refugee crisis, as evidence of this.

France will not let these horrific attacks break the Parisian spirit (Mathieu Vaillancourt, Independent) As with the Grunstein article above, this one looks at how ordinary people became the targets although the focus here is on hope that Parisian life will continue unbowed. “Like Londoners or New Yorkers, Parisians are strong and stubborn people. They will proudly continue their daily lives … This is how terrorism and fanaticism will lose the propaganda battle that is being waged by extremists.” Paris, of course, has a long history of violent upheaval and there are monuments to aspects of this all over the city; in a sense this is another bloody chapter in its notably bloody history. I was especially taken by the last paragraph with its call for people to continue to visit Paris. I’ve read similar articles recently in the wake of the Sharm el-Sheikh bombing and the same thing was said after the massacre in Tunisia in June. Mass travel abroad is a relatively recent phenomenon in the wider history of mankind and it is in its own way a major means of reducing barriers (and increasing understanding) between different peoples and cultures – which is probably why the Islamist militants hate it.

The strange relationship between Islam, violence and French football (Freddy Gray, The Spectator) It somehow seems odd bringing football into this, but then one of the venues attacked was the Stade de France during an international football match. As such, it’s worth noting that football is – or at least was once considered to be – one of few areas where Muslims could be seen as successfully integrating into French culture, which might explain why Islamist extremists would choose to attack it (and it could have been a lot worse, for according to some reports one of the bombers had a ticket but had been turned away; worth bearing in mind that President Hollande was at the game). Sticking with the Stade de France for a minute, I found one of the most moving scenes on Friday night was the footage of fans singing ‘La Marseillaise’ as the (eventually) left the stadium – maybe it’s because I associate the song with that scene in Casablanca, but it’s always struck me as a particularly stirring song of defiance in the face of adversity. It later transpired that one of the French players lost a cousin in one of the other attacks, and when the German team were told that they couldn’t leave the stadium due to safety concerns the French team insisted on staying with them; as was the case with the Parisians who opened their doors to strangers, a crisis can bring out the best in people. Incidentally, the friendly between England and France on Tuesday is going to go ahead despite obvious security concerns; life, as has been mentioned above, must go on. There have already been calls for the English fans in attendance to show some fraternité and sing along to ‘La Marseillaise’ before the kick-off. I hope they do – it’s already been sung by thousands under Nelson’s Column, so why not at Wembley? These are, after all, times when national differences fall aside before common values.