Lucan - ITV1

[Amandine29]

Anyone watching?

Damn - tonight it's clashing with The Great Train Robbery!

I know

So it's The Great Train Robbery from 8 - 9.30 and then over to ITV+1 at 10 for the 2nd part of Lucan for me.

The Monastry Farm on BBC2 that also clashes will have to be an Iplayer viewing tomorrow.

I've just watched a bit & I quite like CE's crap posh tbh.

Aspinall wasn't posh was he, in the way that Lucan was?

Lucan is certainly portrayed as horrible!

Watching this I see an abuser. He was emotionally financially and physically abusive if what is portrayed here is correct.

2red, yes, I think the wife is a bit too sympathetically portrayed from how she probably was in real life where things are rarely black and white with one parent bad and the other good.

Yes it's impossible to know what's real.

But I'm guessing also a product of his time and class.

His arrogance, disbelief that he couldn't just lock his wife up/have his kids.

Made me laugh in the first one, something the Jane Lapotaire character said about the police(?) or was it others not of their class not understanding about people who don't have to work for a living!!

Surely what wasn't understood was how people with money could be twatty enough to gamble it away!

Aspinall had the measure of him in that reespect.

And yes the wife was maybe easily stressed/high maintenance or just didn't hide her feelings well as was probably expected by a wife of a Lord iyswim.

Yesterday there was a video on my Facebook newsfeed of a young man being reunited with a gorilla that he'd helped raise for five years before releasing it in the wild. Just looked at it again and the young man is Damien Aspinall so I'm assuming that's his son. Makes sense he'd be somehow involved in the welfare of gorillas.

Was the schoolboy son of Jimmy Goldsmith, who complained about his father being upset about the adverse publicity, Zac Goldsmith the Tory MP? I think Goldsmith was a vile, arrogant man and Aspinall was the same.

No, Goldsmith had more kids with other women. This was 1974, before Zac G was born.

I thought it was one of the Birley brothers (sons of Annabel Birley later Goldsmith) that complained about their mother's portrayal in the magazine?

The 70s were very different times when the 'upper class' / rich / famous were treated differently by the Police, the public and by the Press. We saw that with Saville too.

I thought the drama was excellent. They should, as somone suggeste upthread, make a drama on the life of Aspinall and of Goldsmaith. Annabelle Birley/Goldsmith (after whom the nightclub was named) could probably warrant a film in her own right too.

I watched James Goldsmith giving a lecture a few months before he died. He was a brilliant speaker and just had this aura of power about him - difficult to explain, but very memorable.

I just watched it. Nothing about Aspinall's secretary's suggestions of arranging the Africa trip and the like.

It would seem unlikely Aspinall would kill his friend.

He was declared probably dead in 1999.

"He was not pronounced dead so we could pay for the children's education, that was the reason it took so long. If his body was found my son would have been the Earl of Lucan and we would have to pay death duties. We would not have been able to pay for the children's education. They were only four, seven and 10 so there was a lot of time ahead."
Dowager Countess of Lucan..

"More recently, responding to claims that the two eldest Lucan children were sent to Gabon in the early 1980s so that their father might secretly watch them "from a distance",[136] George Bingham denied ever visiting the country. He told the Daily Mirror that he had "spent time in Namibia and South Africa" and that he has "a sworn affidavit from the Metropolitan Police and every member of my family, mother excepted, attesting to their belief that my father is dead."[141] His mother dismissed the claims as "nonsense", reiterating that in her opinion "he was not the sort of Englishman to cope abroad". "
Wiki above

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/lord-lucan-son-george-bingham-1311717

I could buy the explanation that was posited last night.

Anyone who keeps animals native to Africa probably has very good connections in Africa. So I could buy that theory too.
When I was younger I would have believed my parents if they told me I was in x country when in fact we'd visited y country. Too young to understand.
A piece of paper saying the Met and the rest of the family believe he's dead is of no importance at all.
Death duties - he was supposed to be almost bankrupt so it's surprising to see the children's school fees used to explain why they didn't seek a Coroner's declaration. I would have expected the funding for school fees to have been in trust and therefore ringfenced against his gambling.

So, what is anyone's opinion on whether or not he is/was guilty?

It would be one heck of a coincidence to just be walking by, wouldn't it?

And although they were divorcing-why would Veronica want him to be known as a murderer?

I'm not sure why Aspinall would want to kill him?

I think he was guilty - definitely.

What they were suggesting last night was that Aspinall belived it would all blow over and Lucan could get the Police to believe the intruder did it, however when Veronica named Lucan as the killer at the inquest Aspinall then realised that Lucan couldn't be rehabilitated.

So what to do with Lucan if he can never come back to England?

No suggestion at all that Aspinall wanted to kill Lucan - just there was no option.

Yes, that makes sense.

It doesn't really add up that he would leave the kids unnecessarily, does it?

Uncles it was more about his wife not having them.

How sad that his wife didn't end up with them either!

Didn't Princess Diana's mum marry a Shane Kydd?

Diana's Mum was Francis Shand Kydd as she married Peter Shand Kydd after her divorce from Diana's father.

Peter SK was the brother of William SK mentioned in the drama.

Circles within circles - impenetrable.

Putting Sandra's body in the mail bag (?) showed that it was obviously planned and with the intention of getting rid of the body, rather than a disturbed burglar for example.

And if Lucan had hired someone-why would he be anywhere near??!!

Oh he did it alright. And professing how much he loved his children....he didn't take them into account at all in his plan to kill their mother while they were in the house.

I believe he got away with help from his friends, and that his children did have contact with him when they became older. If he was in Africa, he could have hidden fairly easily, and his friends were the sort who would have been likely to own large farmsteads in one of the Southern African countries where he could have laid low for years.

That's why I think his children have taken a fairly soft approach on him, they don't blame him for the murder do they?

If, as the programme suggested, Aspinall was the 'leader' of this group and counselled Lucan , it's difficult to believe that Lucan didn't contact him on the night of the murder. He even found time to contact the friend who had lent him the car he used that night.

Gorillas don't come from Lee-on-Solent. They come from African countries that have very little infrastructure and (in those days) poor communications with the rest of the world. Just what's needed to hide away.

They didn't mention the watch that is supposed to have belonged to Lucan and which surfaced a few years ago in a South African pawn shop.

Was the watch found after the book it was based on was published?

It seems so, from what I can see watch reports are only from 2012, and the book must have come out before then.

If there is an Aspinall drama it should definitely have Christopher Eccleston, and go on for weeks and weeks...

I think the book is called The Gamblers. There are sections of it on googlebooks.

It definitely pre-dates the watch find.

If you're interested in the wider story I can recommend 'Annabel' the autobiography of Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart/Birley/Goldsmith. She was close to Lady Di in her later years.

I would love to see Christopher Eccleston playing Aspinall in a drama-documentary of his life. Think it would be riveting. He really owned that role last night.

Trouble is the people being portrayed are mega-rich and probably too litigious for a drama to be filmed.

The school fees point seems to make sense. Death duties since the 1930s ruined many a rich family as they were so high. I think higher than the current 40%. I suspect LL did not have that much left and to lose a large percentage in death duties would have meant they would be unable to pay school fees for the children. I am not sure everyone had bothered by the 70s to put family money into trusts. If it were in a trust LL would not have been gambling it away.

It might even have been 75% if were very wealthy (1975 rates):

"The UK introduced estate duty in 1894 as a tax on property passing on death. By the time estate duty was replaced by capital transfer tax, it had been extended to embrace gifts made by the deceased in the seven years before death. Estate duty was widely criticised as a voluntary tax – because it could be avoided by giving away property and living for seven years. Note though that no spouse exemption was introduced until 1972 and even then it was limited to £15,000.

Labour replaced estate duty with capital transfer tax in 1975 “to make the estate duty not a voluntary tax, but a compulsory tax as it was always intended to be.” CTT was based upon the fundamental premise that all gifts of property, whether made on death or earlier, should be cumulated together and progressive rates of tax applied to the ever-increasing cumulative total. It was intended as a cradle to the grave tax with
the passing of a taxpayer’s property on death being merely the final gift.

The reservation of benefit rules were not required because all lifetime gifts would be charged to CTT (although at lower rates). Importantly it extended the spouse exemption to cover all gifts between spouses without limit. The tax was highly progressive and the top rate of tax for cumulative transfers over £2m was 75%. "