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You're listening to Luke's English Podcast.
For more information, visit teacherluke .co .uk.
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to the podcast, and I hope you're doing fine today.
Here's a brand new episode, and I'm joined by Alistair Budge, who is a returning guest on the podcast.
He was on the show last year in episode number 825.
of course you remember that everyone that was the one where we talked about Alistair's time travel story called Pioneers of the Continuum and video viewers you can actually see I'm wearing the official t -shirt a Pioneers of the Continuum t -shirt that Alistair generously gave to me Pioneers of the Continuum
is a sort of time travel adventure story that Alistair wrote and published as a podcast series and asked me to narrate I'm the narrator of episode one you can find a link in the description if you'd like to listen to it everyone so anyway last time we talked about Pioneers of the Continuum we also talked
about Alistair's experience of living in Malta and we talked about sort of things like English immersions the ways that people learn English in Malta also other stories like playing the bagpipes in in france busking in the street playing the bagpipes that was episode number 825 now alistair is back
on the podcast today uh because well i thought it would be interesting to explore some things that alistair talks about in his i guess his main podcast his first podcast which as many of you may know is called english learning for curious minds um okay listeners do you know this podcast do you listen
to it alistair is the host of this show english learning for curious minds in that podcast uh alistair basically covers lots of really interesting true stories he finds subjects and uh explores them in a lot of depth does a lot of research and then produces podcast episodes that kind of explore these
subjects in in detail and Nefer learners of English.
So I thought it would be interesting to have Alistair back on the show to talk about one of these many, one of the many subjects that he has researched while making episodes of his podcast.
So hello, Alistair, how are you doing today?
I am doing wonderfully.
Thank you so much for having me back on the show, Luke.
It's a pleasure. And well, first of all, you're in a different place now because last time I spoke to you you were in malta that's when uh you were on the podcast last time but you've you've moved to a different country and everything now where are you yeah i'm actually in west sweden which is a very
different part of the world uh compared to malta yeah okay and uh well what brought you to sweden the same thing that brought me to malta initially my uh wife my wife's job um so she works at the university and she was offered a job in Gothenburg which is uh the second largest city in Sweden and we
lived in Malta for seven years it's a very small place Malta um and seven years in a very small place with uh yeah two small children thought it's probably time to a time to go somewhere slightly different somewhere somewhere slightly bigger somewhere that you can't walk from one side to the other in an hour
or so um so yes and you certainly can't walk from one side of sweden to the other in an hour no so how is sweden then is it is it very different to malta yes i think if you want a one -word answer to uh is it very different to sweden to malta yes it is is very different um in many many ways i mean it's
going from one tiny rock in the middle of the mediterranean through to a huge um kind of country for full of beautiful wilderness in northern europe uh it's it's a very different experience we've only been here for a couple of months so i am still getting my bearings really trying to figure sweden out
um but so far so good i'd never actually been here before i never even yeah i never got anywhere close to sweden so the first time that i arrived in sweden was was also the time that i moved here with with my family so it was a bit of a on one level a sort of uh leap into the unknown but on another
level i feel i don't know if you'd agree with me uh on this or not but sweden feels kind of familiar to some extent um i feel like as a brit it seems like a kind of a a known unknown if that makes sense something yeah somewhere even if you haven't been there you sort of got a general sense of what it
might be like even if that sense is wrong um and yeah there's definitely been some some surprising things but lots of things feel uh kind of familiar in a way that they didn't necessarily feel so familiar going to malta at the start i feel like we've got quite a lot in common with the swedes to an extent
and um you know like we're not that far away from each other like geographically but also kind of culturally to an extent but then again it is not the same so yeah some things must be familiar and strangely familiar and feel quite you feel like you've got a lot in common with with the people and the culture
and then there must be other things that that just don't quite seem normal i suppose for for a brit yeah it's certainly i mean there's lots of things that are absolutely wonderful about sweden um that i've seen so far I mean, there's been a few examples of things that exist in Sweden that I've just
found myself thinking, like, why does that not work?
Why does every country not have that?
So I'll give you one very basic example that I hope you will hear and think, that is a good idea.
and this is not a kind of complicated thing to do or you know expensive uh in terms of i don't know government has to pay lots of money for it um in uh the way that you send a letter in sweden uh is you don't have to go to a post office and buy a stamp or whatever you there's actually an app for the equivalent
of the royal mail um or la post or whatever um where you can buy a stamp on the app and my friend told me this like how do you buy a stamp on the app like i don't have a my phone doesn't come with a printer or like i don't want to have to go and print it out and this seems very unusual yeah but you
buy a buy postage i guess on the app and then you're given a a series of I think it's nine letters or numbers that you just write on the corner of a letter and that is your postage and it's valid valid for like I don't know seven days or something and clearly they've got a way of scanning that and sort
of checking that there's valid postage and things like that so that was the kind of thing that I I saw I was like that it's just it's just an all -around good idea yeah I'm just trying to think what's the flaw in that in that idea and I can't think of it really unless someone else sees the code written
on a letter and they're like ha I'll take that code and I'll post it first I don't know yeah I'd imagine that I don't know it's maybe you see someone in a cafe writing down the code and you think ah I know I'm just gonna write a quick letter to someone and put that code put that code in first um which seemed
like an unusual crime to commit yeah i think so kind of a stupid crime really isn't it sort of a pesky yeah person stealing postage codes overlooking over people's shoulders and someone's writing a letter quickly write down the code on this envelope and quickly send this postcard before they get to the postbox
yeah also presumably by the time someone gets to gets to writing on the code, they're very close to posting it.
So they've finished writing the letter, they're folding it up.
So you'd have to be very fast to go and buy a postcard, write down whatever you wanted.
So I think that's not a huge problem here.
I don't know that for a fact, but I would imagine that that kind of postage fraud is not of major concern for the Swedish government.
Maybe it is. Well, anyway, very interesting that you just noticed this little detail it's interesting these things that happen when you go and live in a different country you notice these little things and they can strike you as being kind of big things in a way and yeah that does sound like a very
good idea that uh the rest of the world could easily implement and it could everyone could save a lot of time and effort by you know just getting rid of stamps completely pity though because stamps are rather beautiful things but anyway anyway we mustn't get sidetracked by stamps and postage codes in sweden
um although it is interesting that you're living in a different place and you know uh you know i wish you all the best with uh adjusting to a new culture again so um tell me about your podcast again so it's called english learning for curious minds how many episodes have you got at this point it'll
be in a few months it'll be 500 i think um so So it's quite a lot.
And some people ask me, you know, I'm going to run out of stuff to talk about.
And actually there was a comment from someone I did an episode on OnlyFans, the kind of history of OnlyFans, which is the kind of adult subscription marketplace.
I think that's what it calls itself.
anyway it's a place where you can pay to uh you know access pictures of people not wearing many clothes and yeah um and i did an episode on that and someone commented that man you really have run out of topics haven't you so um well it's i'm surprised they weren't asking when you're going to set up
your only fans i mean you know that's the option that we all have isn't it as content creators that when we finally run out of ideas we can just be like right you know what i'm just going to set up an only fans charge a lot of money and for the three people who will sign up for it you know it'll it'll
be worth it start with pictures of the feet and just move upwards they take one look at my feet and then they unsubscribe instantly i think um so you did an episode about only fans um you've done episodes on a variety of different things so many different things i can say also just on the episode about only
fans that i deeply regret having done that because when i as soon as i published it uh all of them the numbers on spotify and other places just completely went down really i think i got sort of shadow banned or something um for mentioning only fans so right i was talking to someone else the other day
and they suggested that in fact the way that people get around these things is by referring to it in slightly different terminology which i should have probably done but i i'm not a only fans user so i was not aware of of what i should have done so possibly that the the platforms might have kind of um
suppressed your show because they were concerned that you were trying to sell your only fans to people i i believe that's what happened yeah because they just uh i was asked is there only fans that in did you put the words only fans everywhere anywhere i said well yeah like probably like 20 times um
you know it's in the title that's in the description it's linking to uh you know leonardoenglish .com forward slash only fans i think something like that so that was a lesson learned.
Okay well now of course the algorithm is processing automatic subtitles for this episode right now so maybe the same thing is going to happen here but this episode is going to get shadow banned as well because the internet is just convinced that you're trying to sell your only fans to the world.
You've got no choice.
You're just going to have to do it now.
That's obviously the only thing you can do.
Yeah. Destiny. Anyway, so I thought that you could come back on the podcast so we could talk about one or more of the subjects that you've covered in your episodes and so many different subjects.
It was difficult to choose which one.
We've ended up going for the story of Lord Lucan.
We did mention it in passing last time you were on the show, and we thought that this time we could give it a lot more time and talk about it in a lot more detail.
It's a fascinating story.
And I should say, just to give context at the beginning, basically, listeners, the story of Lord Lucan.
This is a very sort of British story, a completely true story.
And in a nutshell, it's the story of an aristocrat who in the 1960s, is this right?
Did this happen in the 60s or 70s?
1970s the story takes place from the 60s to the 70s yeah okay so so yeah took place a few decades ago but a british aristocrat who probably we're not sure it's an unsolved mystery right it's still unsolved which is one of the fascinating things about it and one of the reasons why people continue to
talk about it and continue to be fascinated by it so it's a british aristocrat a member of the aristocracy who was involved in a murder, a very nasty murder.
He was involved in this murder and he disappeared, right?
Now, people suspect that he committed the crime, but then he disappeared and he's never been seen since.
Although there are lots of different theories and lots of different witness accounts or witness testimonies from people who say that they have seen him but none of those none of those uh things have been confirmed so it's an unsolved mystery so the aristocracy is one thing and it's probably worth mentioning
what this is so listeners you know we've got the royal family in the uk but that royal family is at the very top of a system which is a very traditional system and a system which continues to this day so we've got the royal family but there are also various other people who are connected to the royal
family in some way like other families other sort of aristocratic families there's a whole network of aristocratic families okay this is probably a good way this is probably a good point at which i can hand over to you alistair can you tell us more about the story who was lord lucan what happened um
how did everyone react to it yeah go ahead sure uh so that's a really good bit of background i think for people um i kind of so let's talk about the the protagonist our our main guy um lord lucan so he he was born just before the war um world war ii um and And his early life was in many ways kind of typical
of British aristocrats of his time.
He was born in London, but he lived a very different life from most normal Londoners.
So when there was the Blitz and most children in London were sent out, evacuated, so that they weren't going to be, they weren't in danger when there was the bombing of London.
he wasn't just sent to the countryside like most other children he was sent all the way across the atlantic and he lived with some american millionaire uh kind of swanning around having a a wonderful time and then uh it came back to the uk again he lived in a kind of parallel world compared to most
people he went to eton which um people may be aware is uh is a very famous and expensive um uh private school where um prince william and prince harry both went it's the kind of traditional place where young uh young aristocrats go yeah um and it's all importantly all boys yeah so he went to eaton yeah
very typical for an aristocrat to do a british aristocrat is to go to one of these very exclusive schools you mentioned that eaton is a is a private school actually we describe these schools as public schools which is fairly sort of counterintuitive because you you would imagine a public school means
one that's provided you know we've got public schools private schools and then state schools and state schools are the ones that most let's say i don't know normal people go to like most people go to state schools these are the ones that are paid for by the government right and then private schools
are ones that essentially you have to pay for you you have to pay to attend a private school and then what we call public schools are essentially private schools but they're just the most exclusive and most sort of high -level ones and as you said William and Harry both went to Eton and also lots of other
high -profile members of the establishment let's say you know sort of aristocratic people but also maybe yeah sort of the sons of the most powerful people richest people in the country yeah and it's an all -boys school it's an all -boys school and they they all wear kind of long black coats so if you if you
picture a kind of british aristocrat um who is 16 years old and dress him up in a bit like a penguin really a sort of long black tails that is the official school uniform of uh of eton um and especially when um lord lucan was there it was very much you know the sons of the uh the british aristocracy
right um now it's slightly different it's it's more on merit and they have scholarships and things like that it's more international but back then um so we're talking in the in the 1950s it was very much sort of the the the sons of the most um the most titled people in the country not necessarily the the richest
people in the country we're not talking about the sons of businessmen necessarily um it's really very much based on on class um so that is the environment in which this this man is growing up and even at Eton he got a bit of a reputation for being a rule breaker someone who was not so keen on studying
and he you know developed three of his main vices that would stick with him for his entire life really smoking drinking and gambling and there were you reports from his schoolmasters complaining about the fact that he wouldn't go to class because he'd been up all night gambling with his with his friends
he'd he bunked off school he decided not to go to class because he wanted to put a bet on a race at ascot and things like that um so he yeah he he's already this kind of character who loves gambling which will be important doesn't like rules or perhaps we can say doesn't think that the rules apply to
him um and yeah that's that's our that's our guy um richard john bingham uh and then after school uh when he finishes he i guess like lots of like lots of his friends from the school would have joined the army but we're not talking about uh you know someone who is coming in at a low level as a as a private
kind of fighting on on the front lines or that would be called to fight up on the front lines he comes in as a sort of as an officer type figure so his his days are much more likely to be spent uh yeah well probably actually let's not talk about his days his evenings would be spent in you know the officer's
mess the kind of dining canteen gambling and drinking and smoking and kind of living the kind of life of an aristocrat while pretending to be a soldier really yeah so as as someone in that privileged position yeah he would have joined the army as you said but yeah exactly not in not as a not as a private
who would have been you know marching up and down and being shouted at um but yeah it's it's extraordinary really that that that kind of level of privilege existed and arguably still exists that because he's because he was who he was because he had this title you know because he was from an aristocratic
family he was essentially just allowed to kind of yeah become an officer and not really do anything not really kind of do any actual soldiering yeah it's just it's just crazy really um well you say it's kind of great and arguably still exists i mean prince william harry um prince william harry they
both went into the army you know doing a similar kind of thing the um uh prince andrew uh the duke of york was was doing a similar kind of thing as well it's it might seem strange for people who are not so familiar with the uk and the kind of things that royals or aristocrats do but it's quite a well
-trodden path for someone to go and be a soldier be an officer in the army for a certain period where you kind of learn a bit of you know learn a bit of order and kind of that kind of stuff yeah um but as you might imagine it didn't last long in the case of lord lucan because even if he was having a lot
of fun and gambling and that kind of stuff he didn't like the um he didn't like the the structure of the army um and uh then so what happened next oh yeah let me tell you a little bit more about what he looked like because this is kind of kind of important um he was very tall he was uh well very tall
he was six foot four which is about one meter 95 i think um someone with a calculator can probably do the exact calculations but he was but he was quite tall um he was very handsome and he had a big bushy moustache so he he's the kind of person that you would recognize if you saw him on the street which will be
important uh for later on in our story right anyway so he's a tall dark and handsome guy if you found the exact uh the exact centimeters yeah so so uh as we say six foot four which is the kind of the british way of describing someone's height means six foot four inches is uh 193 centimeters basically
okay that was two centimeters off but roughly he was tall at least i hope you'll forgive me forgive the um addition of two centimeters to lord lucan's height um anyway so um we so he he quits the army and he becomes a banker for a little bit um a merchant banker um which today we'd probably call investment
banker but he's not you know he's not the kind of person working you know 18 hours a day in some some large skyscraper in in the city of London he's there sort of shaking people's hands and going for large lunches and kind of doing business with his friends but throughout the whole of this throughout
the time in the army and also throughout the time that he was working in this bank he was still a huge gambler and the sums were getting larger and larger and larger and he would you know he'd wage of vast amounts of money um playing baccarat and um bridge and all those kinds of stuff um he was apparently
a very skilled gambler but if if uh as with any gambler you know you you don't uh it even if you're very skilled you normally end up losing quite a lot of money yeah because the house always wins ultimately the house always wins and he he kind of had this reputation as as a big you know a big player
uh someone who would spend a lot of money and would constantly have to be bailed out by his friends they would have to say oh don't worry i'll cover for lord lucan um and he'd kind of oscillate from having lots of money to having no money at all and not being able to repay his debts um he really seemed
to be this character who um he did everything by extremes right he wasn't the kind of person who'd say oh tonight i'll just stay in and watch some tv or something like that it would always be i'm going out and i'm gonna i'm gonna make a lot of money so i think what we should talk about next is his um
is his wife so we now we are in the late 1950s in London.
So I was going to say, he sort of occupies the kind of James Bond -ish kind of world, doesn't he?
Exactly. So it's what he's doing with his life is really kind of going from private members club to private members club, going to dinners, driving around in a soft top Aston Martin.
So a, you know, an expensive sports car.
He's very good looking um and he he can be found kind of going around europe um sort of if you imagine a james bond film from the 1960s that is essentially his life that's what he's doing it's like james bond on a day off you know like normally in a james bond film you we discover him at the beginning
of the film and he's not doing it if those movies were at the beginning he's not working he's just driving around maybe like doing a bit of gambling picking up some girls or whatever and then and then like the government gives him a job and he off he goes and he sort of like does all the james bond
spy stuff um but this is lord lucan's life looks like james bond when he doesn't have a job it's just james bond you know between movies let's say yeah and and the um one anecdote that i saw in an interview with his wife um who we'll talk about in a minute um which she was describing the time that they
they met um or rather they they they got together and i think they were having a a lunch um and he had offered to drive her home after the lunch in his acid martin of course and i guess i would want to imagine they'd been sort of exchanging a few glances and um and that kind of stuff and then he uh
he drove her home i think he asked her if she'd like to come upstairs for a cup of tea or something and apparently they just went upstairs he picked up the phone and said you know boys i won't be coming to the club this evening yeah okay so this gives us an idea of the sort of person that he was and the life
and world that he lived in you were about to tell us about his wife before i did i mentioned james bond yeah yes so he he met his wife i think in 1957 uh it was a whirlwind romance um and kind of her role really as far as he saw it um was to you know to sort of to provide children because of course
if you're a aristocrat then you need to have an heir a male heir for the um the title to pass down um and really to sort of get out of the way and let him continue to live his playboy lifestyle and what a what a different world uh and yeah just gives you an idea of what it must have been like for women
in that society where basically first of all you just get picked up by some guy who calls his friends i won't be coming to the club tonight guys and she's like uh excuse me do i not get any say in this and then yeah her job is just to give him children and just stay out of his way yeah yeah and there's
um there was an interview with her where she describes their honeymoon and they you know they went on this I think it was to Venice Monte Carlo somewhere like that but you know very expensive um honeymoon presumably going to lots of lovely places and apparently he just didn't talk to her for the entire
trip and this was not like he was upset with her that she'd done anything wrong then she she asked him you know why why why will you not talk to me and he essentially said like husband doesn't need to talk to his wife you don't need to be we don't need to talk um you you know you are there serving a purpose
um and your purpose is to produce children and to not interfere with what i want to be doing which is going to the going to the club with uh with my boys um and uh you know gambling and just to to add also So I realized when I said going to the club with my boys, someone in 2024 might listen to that and think
that he's going to, I don't know, like a nightclub instead of disco and just dancing and stuff.
No, what this would mean is he would be there in his black tie, dressed up like James Bond, and he would drive down in his Aston Martin to his private members club.
And the club he would go to is one called the Claremont Club.
I'll tell you about this club in a minute.
but he would be there until late in the evening just gambling really gambling drinking um and kind of speaking with other men of a similar kind of class and background and stuff this is not the kind of club that anyone could just walk into um you had to you had to be recommended by someone and in fact
the the Claremont club this club that he um he kind of adopted as his own um was owned uh or opened by a guy called someone aspinall i can't remember the the um the first name anyway um was opened by this slightly eccentric aristocrat of course who had his own zoo with tigers and other kind of exotic
animals and this will be important for later on but um aspinall got this sort of reputation as someone who would always be at the claremont club um And he was, it seems like he was, he loved being there, even though he would lose lots of money.
But he was also used a little bit as a way to kind of attract people to the club because they come, they see Aspinall, you know, putting down bets of what would be hundreds of thousands of pounds in today's money.
And he was kind of used by the club to attract people, other high spenders in.
anyway um so where were we he's we get to the um where are we uh the early 1960s and you have um you have lord lucan married now um and he has three children um so his his wife has has done what she was brought in to do really if we have to be so um crude and business -like about it yeah um uh but he
he has not changed his habits he's not kind of settled down or anything like that um and he's still he has lots of financial problems because he's gambling so much i mean we think of him being this hugely rich man which of course he was but he's spending money just as quickly as he as he brings it in um
and one evening apparently he has this huge win he wins um i think it was 20 000 pounds back then which is the equivalent of something like 200 000 pounds in today's money you know a very very large amount of money um and he decides uh he says why am i why am i working in a bank for uh you know what's
obviously a good salary but nothing compared to what i can win in in an evening at the card table so he quits his job um and he's essentially a professional gambler now, which his wife didn't like.
So I imagine most people's partners wouldn't like it if they were professional gamblers, because your income is as variable as variable can be.
And she wanted a more traditional life, as I imagine most people would, but he was not prepared to give it to her and then a year later um I think a year after they were married his father died now this is important because it means that he inherits the title of being Lord Lucan so before he was just
oh sorry I was just going to ask you a question sorry to interrupt you that I'm wondering if other people are thinking this too so his title at this point becomes Lord Lucan even though his name is Richard John Bingham Bingham is his surname but he becomes lord lucan why was his title lucan rather than bingham
so the uh um i don't know exactly where the lucan is i would imagine it's a it's a place a small place what is traditional um for titled aristocrats in uk is you you know you have your name and then you'll be the duke or the Earl of a different place which normally would it's normally linked to some
kind of historical connection with that place so for example Prince William is he the Duke of which one is the Duke of Cornwall I always get confused one is well they've all changed haven't they they all change maybe we can use Downton Abbey as an example right right?
Downton Abbey could be a useful example we could also refer to the royal family but in Downton Abbey you've got the Earl of Grantham who is the main character you know the the the main lord of of this house called Downton Abbey his name is Robert Crawley so that's his actual name Robert Crawley people
would call him Lord Crawley and his title was the Earl of Grantham and I suppose Grantham was the place, right, where Downton Abbey was located.
Yeah. So Prince William, this is from Wikipedia.
William, Prince of Wales, has received numerous titles, decorations and honorary appointments, both during his time as Duke of Cambridge and Prince of Wales.
OK, so previously William was the Duke of Cambridge and Kate was the Duchess of Cambridge.
But now they, you know, since the Queen died, and the order changed, and Charles became King, and Camilla became Queen.
William became the Prince of Wales.
And I guess that means that Kate is the Princess of Wales.
Anyway, the point is that a person's title in the aristocracy is connected to a location, it's connected to a place.
And And so Lord Lucan, the Lucan part of that title refers to a place and his actual name was Bingham.
So there we go. So I guess the point is that if Luke and I are trying to figure out how these titles work, it really makes little sense.
It's a very confusing element of the aristocracy, which doesn't make a huge amount of sense anyway.
um but yeah so so lord lucan um or rather bingham now becomes lord lucan right and he he also has this nickname of lucky lucan which he got after this huge gambling win that allowed him to um quit his job um and then when his father dies he gets the title he becomes lord lucan or lucky lucan and he
also inherits a lot of money um which clearly he was he was very happy about um because it meant he could uh he was able to gamble more um and as you might imagine he did not decide okay that's enough i'm gonna live a good honest life um now a more traditional life perhaps i should say he just starts
gambling more and more and more um and as this is all happening his relationship with his wife is just breaking down it seems like it was never really a happy one to begin with if you look at photos of them they're always kind of looking cross with each other or just grumpy they're never very close
um and she yeah she starts to kind of loathe him and the feeling seems to be seems to be mutual um she is also she was diagnosed with um i think postnatal depression after the birth of her third child and this sort of spirals into um it's a serious what we'd now call i'm sure mental health problems
um she's clearly very unhappy with her life and with him um and both she and he are also very absent parents for their three children um if people listening or watching this have seen mary poppins the the disney disney i think it's disney yeah disney um disney film they'll know that mary poppins is the nanny
um to two children of the banks is i can't remember what their names are anyway there's a sort of aristocratic man and his wife um and they have a nanny mary poppins who looks after the children and um at this time uh this kind of um time even in the 20th century mid -20th century the way in which the parenting
would have worked for people like the Lucans would be that the nanny basically did everything and then the mother and father would perhaps sort of say hello to the children at breakfast and they would maybe kind of pat them on the head before they went to bed it was not a particularly close relationship
in terms of hands -on time with the children i imagine lord lucan and probably even lady lucan were not doing huge amounts of nappy changing or or dealing with anything to do with the children that was outside very strict um very strict hours so they they have a nanny um and even they um they would go
on holiday without the children there's an interview with lady lucan where she describes how they would go to monte carlo and go to venice and the interviewer says oh yeah what happened to the children and she says they would just be left with a nanny um a completely matter -of -factly as if there was you
know nothing that was in any way unusual about this because in the circles that they moved in there wasn't anything unusual about that that was that was how children were brought up there there was a nanny and the nanny did all of those um kinds of things maybe on a on a language note for people who don't
know what a nanny is it's a kind of live -in babysitter so someone who's typically a um a young woman who would go and live with the family um permanently um and would do all the stuff with the children and yeah the nanny will become a crucial part of the story later on her name by the way was sandra rivet
yeah it's probably worth mentioning her name and um there is actually a new amazon prime documentary film about her life yes they in fact they they actually had multiple different nannies and the sandra river only appears slightly later on oh really um yeah she's she was only with the family i think
for nine weeks i see before the events that we'll talk about they'd had the children otherwise grew up with with nannies yeah um and then when the relate when the parents relationship completely broke down there was a sort of messy separation there was a battle over the custody of the children and it
seems like when um when this relationship really broke down and lord lucan moved out it only seemed like it was then that they the two parents decided okay we actually like we want to start looking after our children and be slightly more active with our parenting.
But of course, there was this battle over who was going to have custody of the children.
And it seemed like it was a very messy court battle.
They hired expensive solicitors, expensive lawyers.
There was all sorts of stuff that was aired, that Lady Lucan talked about in the courtroom.
You know, even kind of sexual habits and things that Lord Lucan took huge offense to thinking this is this private business.
It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be talked about publicly.
And Lord Lucan had done lots and lots of nasty things in terms of having Lady Lucan followed.
And it was just a very nasty breakup and also very expensive.
uh i think it cost the i think it was 20 000 pounds um back then so we're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds in in um in 2024 money and in the end the judge ruled that lady lucan should have custody of the children but with the condition that they hire a nanny because she was deemed to not be mentally
stable enough to look after three children on her own right and she hadn't really had any experience doing it um because she because there has always been another nanny yeah um anyway so so they hire this this young um lady called sandra rivet um who is uh yeah is a not an aristocrat um she's just a normal
a normal um former hairdresser i believe um and so you have this situation where uh lady lucan and the three children and the nanny are living in this large house in an area of london called belgravia which is now one of the most exclusive most expensive um areas of london i i looked um earlier and a house
there is kind of between like six and 10 million pounds now um it's a huge amount of money um and it would only really be affordable for someone who was you know a very successful banker or had their own large company or something like that it's it's probably even out of out of reach for someone like
lord lucan today um yeah it's not far from buckingham palace it's just a few streets away from from buckingham palace yeah and and importantly these kinds of houses um i can actually give you the address because you can look it up on on the street view it's um on lower belgrave streets but they tend
to be tall and thin so they will normally have kind of four or perhaps five stories and they'll go they'll go up like this yeah for people who are watching on youtube just showing how a house goes up yeah basically um alistair is just demonstrating with his hands a kind of a tall narrow building four
or five stories four or five floors but exactly quite quite narrow yeah typically with a kitchen at the bottom which will be kind of sunk a little bit below the street and this this will also be important for for later on yeah um and uh lord Lucan has moved out he's in a in a small house nearby um and if we
can try and I guess try and think a little bit more about uh his mental state or what's going on at the time uh he's the kind of person who clearly has been very used to just getting his way throughout his life you know he's he's never had to deal really with the the real world he's uh always been given
lots of money lots of titles um sure he's he's lost gambling a bit but clearly he's a complete addict um and he's life has always kind of gone his way really and then suddenly he's lost his wife he's lost custody of his children um and he's also faced with this huge legal bill um for um for the court
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So, that is where we are at the moment.
And we are now in 1974.
So, London in the 1970s.
um and Sandra Rivett the the nanny has just joined and by by all accounts she was a a very good nanny a very kind uh completely innocent person um and on the evening of the 7th of November 1974 uh the family the Lucan family minus Lord Lucan of course they are at home it's a Thursday evening i believe
and lady lucan is um is upstairs watching tv with her eldest daughter and she uh she normally always goes down to make a cup of tea before before bed it's about nine o 'clock in the evening um and instead uh sandra rivet the nanny offers to make one for her So she says, of course, that would be lovely.
And so Sandra goes downstairs all the way down to the basement where there's the kitchen.
And then Lady Lucan is upstairs with her daughter thinking, you know, where's the you know, where's my tea?
And then, you know, five minutes goes by and 10 minutes goes by and there's still no tea.
um and she thinks you know this is unusual and she calls down and says you know sandra but there's there's no sound so uh she she goes down the stairs and we're probably talking i don't know five or six different flights of stairs here because she's right at the top and she's going all the way down
this very tall house and as she gets to the bottom she tries to turn on the light but the she flicks the switch and nothing happens so she thinks this is unusual it was it was working earlier on and she keeps on going down and then as she she's going down the stairs she feels a huge smack on the head
and there's someone there who is fighting her seems to have some kind of weapon some stick or pipe of metal something like that and uh it seems to be attacking her and so she fights back she's uh she she's a small um kind of skinny lady but she's clearly fighting for her life and she's kind of putting
her fingers down this this man's throat she grabs him by his testicles um and manages to push him off yeah and it's then that she she looks at him and she sees lord lucan she sees her um her husband yeah and she says well you know what are you doing and he says i've killed the nanny by the way i should say
this yeah this is all this is her account okay this is her account yeah this is her account of what is happening uh which is the only account we have so i will i will tell it with that um yeah that information yeah um so he he apparently is covered in blood and said i've killed the nanny and she um
she kind of thinks on her feet she thinks quickly and she she says okay no worries we can we can we can sort it she probably didn't say no worries sorry no worries um no but she the point is that she decides okay i will um uh i'll sort of pretend to go along with it right i suppose i'll help you clear
up this mess yeah she's afraid for her life here so she's trying to find a way to make sure that he doesn't kill her because she's he's just attacked her so she's in panic panicked survival mode at this point and so she quickly comes up with a plan which is like oh okay i'll help you i'll help you yeah
and she's also been beaten pretty badly she's been hit around the head she must be in a lot of pain but she's still um you know she's still thinking clearly enough to try and figure a way out of this situation.
And she's small. He is a large man.
And so she's presumably thinking there's no way that I can fight him off, that I can get out of here.
Also, I'm at the basement.
I'm on the bottom floor.
So she suggests to Lord Luke and she says, let's sort this together.
Let's go and clean up the body and then we'll go and dispose of it.
Yeah. so uh um they go and they put the body of they find the body of sandra rivet the nanny who has been beaten to death and they put it in a postage sack so a one of those bags that is normally used for letters yeah they manage to get the body into the sack and then he says let's you know let's go
upstairs um and kind of get you cleaned up and he says he asked her if she has any um sleeping pills and i asked her to take some sleeping pills um and she thinks what he wants to do is for her to either fall asleep so that he can suffocate her or kill her or something like that um on on the bed um
and she says you know no problem here we go i'm gonna take them and he and she encourages him to go to the bathroom to wash his hands um so she's kind of on the bed pretending that she's going to be his accomplice here he goes to the bathroom starts washing his hands and you can kind of imagine the scene
he's there covered in blood yeah and presumably very flustered um and the the water's running so he there's background noise yeah and that she sees this as her opportunity to hurry down the stairs as fast as possible and she runs out of the house um and she goes straight out of the house uh and runs
all the way to a um a pub nearby and yeah it's about nine o 'clock on a Thursday evening at 10 o 'clock by this time um and you can imagine the scene that there's a whole lot of people in the pub uh presumably a different type of person in the pub in 1974 than would be in a pub in belgravia now we're
talking about just normal people who are just having a few drinks um maybe playing darts or that kind of stuff not the sort of aristocratic set that um lord lucan would normally be socializing with these are just like you're sort of ordinary locals exactly i'm sure lady lucan and lord lucan never ever
went to that pub despite living you know a few hundred meters from it um for for 10 years so uh she runs runs into this pub kind of covered in blood uh and sort of shouts i help my my husband attack me um and you can imagine a lot of people kind of drinking drinking their pints looking around and being
very surprised to see someone like lady lucan in that pub obviously covered in blood because they would know her as well they would they'd probably know who she was or at least some of them might um they might do they'd certainly be surprised at how she would talk because she was sort of my husband has been
attacking me or something like that she'd like she sound like a character from the crown uh yeah kind of thing yeah help help my husband's been attacking me yeah what's that um what's what's going on what's this commotion of the other side of the bar help help someone's helped my husband's been trying
to attack me yeah um so uh the gun the police are called and then um they go to the house and they they find the uh you know they find the body of this poor nanny sounds rivet yeah but no sign of lord lucan no sign of anyone else right i just needed to say at this point because i've been listening very
closely to the story and i'm wondering what the audience are thinking and i've got a funny feeling that there are lots of people out there listening at this point going why but why why why did he do it why did he kill the nanny and why did he attack his wife and is this maybe too early to answer this question i
think it's just the right point to just to give some ideas about why um why why someone might have done it but um because maybe let's not let's not point the finger at lord lucan just yet although there'll be plenty of time for finger pointing finger pointing uh in a minute um because again that's just
based on the wife's testimony at this point that the him him confessing him being there him saying i killed the nanny him essentially confessing to his wife it's still not entirely proven so these are i guess still allegations at this point because this isn't it's never actually been proven in a court
of law or or decided yeah so the um the wife's theory about why um why he uh yeah why he killed the nanny was because he was trying to kill her he was not the nanny was a complete innocent bystander in the whole the whole event um she she normally didn't work on a thursday evening it was her day off
um so he would have assumed that the nanny would not be in the house he knew that his wife always made a cup of tea before she went to bed and so he also had the keys for the for the house of course um so what people think happened is that he let himself in quietly he removed the light from the um from the socket
so that it would be dark in the kitchen yeah and that explains why when she tried to turn it on there was no light yeah um and then he hid and lay in wait and then when he saw a woman coming down the stairs he just assumed it was his wife because it was the most likely thing, right?
He's, uh, he's always been a person who dealt with probabilities, right?
He's thinking, it seems very unlikely that it's going to be anyone other than my wife because the nanny doesn't work on Thursdays.
He didn't realize that her hours had changed.
And so she, she was working that evening.
Um, and it also was just unusual for her to be coming down in in the night so the the theory about why it could have been lord lucan was because he um he was furious about his wife winning the battle of the custody of the children yeah um he he just he wanted the children back he was very annoyed with her
for having aired some of the more intimate details of their marriage in public.
And he also, if we go back to, you know, his time Eton in the army, when he was just breaking all the rules and, you know, not going to lessons and stuff like that.
Clearly, he was the kind of person who thought that normal rules didn't really apply to him um and if he could if he could um if he could kill his wife and could dispose of her body um if there was no evidence then he would get away with it that she would just be a disappeared woman do you think do
you think that he would have got away with it because there's a there's possibly a chance that he actually would have done if he hadn't made such a mess of it if assuming that it was him right um if he had actually managed to kill his wife there's i think there's quite a good chance that he would have somehow
got away with it because of the you know the just the sheer injustice of that world and the way that someone like him essentially in it almost is above the law or at least um has everything on their side in the sense that the entire establishment you know is kind of in um he's going to have his back
you could imagine that someone else could get charged for it that he would somehow find a way that he'd have a connection to some judge somewhere you know the kind of the corruption of that kind of uh level of prejudice could could result in him getting away with it yeah i think he certainly thought
he would get away with it i think this was not a um this was not a crime committed out of anger or without um prior thought or consideration about what would happen um he had brought a um a postal sack yeah um so he brought some a way to carry the body um he'd also as we'll find out uh later he'd also borrowed
a friend's car so there would be no way that the you know the body could be traced back to his own car um and he was a um one of his kind of vices or um james bond -esque hobbies was he would race power boats um and so he it was what people think is that he was planning to um to drive kill kill the wife
then drive down to the coast get in one of these boats and then dump the body in the uh in the english channel yeah so that is the theory and if that had happened um and there was nothing to tie him to the to the crime scene then he probably would have got away with it or even if there was some sort
of evidence given his his his strong connections and his status as a as a as an aristocrat in all probability he would have got away with it yeah the poor nanny as well i mean first of all like the the two women completely just the victims of this horrendous situation but that poor nanny it's just heartbreaking
i say i say poor women um certainly the nanny because she seems to be completely innocent party i mean i don't know what lady lucan was like and we're just taking her version of the story but in any case um lord lucan does seem to be the the villain here uh despite the fact that this is called the story
of Lord Lucan. He seems to be the bad guy protagonist.
And you could equally kind of tell this story from different points of view.
In fact, that seems to be what this latest Amazon Prime documentary seems to do, because there's this new Amazon Prime documentary, which might not be available everywhere, but it's called The Murder of Sandra Rivett.
So clearly they've taken a slightly different point of view and focused on the victim um which um you know it's it's always the case in these sorts of stories that it's like with jack the ripper or something we always talk about you know the the perpetrator and make them the center of attention and perhaps they
don't deserve that you know considering what they do yeah yeah i think you're completely right um I guess the problem is that for Sandra Rivett, she presumably thought she was just going to have a nice, normal nanny job.
She was not saying she's not kind of telling people about all these funny things that were going on.
I don't know much about her backstory before she became a nanny to the family.
I would imagine it's just a very normal life, you know, without anything that is not, of course, not without anything that's noteworthy.
But she's not, you know, she's not inheriting a title.
She's not living in this completely bizarre bubble that Lord Lucan and to a certain extent Lady Lucan lived in.
So it is unfortunate that she's often an afterthought in the whole story.
And, yeah, hopefully that new documentary will be – I'll certainly watch it.
I think it could be interesting.
So let's get back into the story then.
So where we left it was that Lady Lucan runs into this pub covered in blood.
She's probably hysterical.
she's telling everyone that her husband has tried to kill her and then afterwards she says oh and he's killed the nanny as well so so clearly the nanny to her was an afterthought um uh compared to her own her own attack so yeah poor poor sundra rivet um anyway the the police are called um and of course
lord lucan is the main suspect because there's a witness saying it was lord lucan um and he had a clear motive as we talked about um so they they try to go and find him and they can't find him um but it turns out that he has made a few phone calls directly after the the murder one of which was to his mother
where apparently he sounded completely incoherent um and he incoherent meaning that she couldn't really understand what he was talking about that's interesting i wonder what his state of mind was because clearly i mean if we again if we assume this main version of events and we assume that he's done
it um uh the motives being essentially sort of like uh revenge like not not uh it's premeditated it's fully premeditated because as you mentioned he had the sack and he prepared all these things he had the weapon he did the the light bulb and all those things but um yeah a kind of like um dark motive
in the sense that it's like pure hatred and revenge for the things that she said during the during the separation trial and the fact that she'd won the case and got custody of the kids and he's like the things didn't go his way and he just thought right well I'll just make them go my way it's interesting
to think about the extent to which it was kind of revenge against her versus practical this is the way that she's going to get out of the way um that i can be that i can sort the problem and clearly uh it is an unacceptable way to sort the problem by killing someone but um it sounds like at this stage
lord lucum was uh you know he just felt like he was completely above the law yeah um and that if he wanted to get rid of his wife he tried to do it the um the legal way you know through the law courts yeah um also multiple times he tried to get her sectioned um which means that he had tried to get her
committed to um a mental facility i don't know what is the political correct way of of saying that but he tried to get a there's a um an act uh a law a british law called the uh maybe there's multiple laws but there's something called the mental health act um and i think people are sectioned under the mental
health act um where people kind of people in white coats come and say all right you know luke come with us um you're not deemed to be um capable of being a you know fit and active member of society um by the way i just gotta change the subject very very slightly to say um i always recommend people watch
peep show um are you a peep show fan yeah yeah definitely of course do you know the one where um uh the two characters keep on trying to get each other sectioned i don't remember that held back it's it's it's such a good episode jeremy and mark jeremy and mark yeah um anyway that is that is a funny
story uh and this is this is not a funny story so but anyway that is an expression though to get to be sectioned which involves that person being essentially obliged to go into care because of the condition of their mental health yeah they're taken away and put into care and it's something that lord
lucan had tried multiple times to have done to his wife so when trying to think about his what might have been his mental state that evening you know he's in his mind he's tried everything to to to get the situation back as he would as he would like it to be back with his children and i was trying to
i was sorry i was trying to say that he was incoherent on the phone to his mother and obviously acting in an extreme way that maybe, I mean, we talked about his wife's mental health, but maybe Lucan at this point was, I don't know, I wonder what state of mind he was in considering his lifestyle, considering
the amount that he drank, the stress that he'd been under with the separation from his wife and all the rest of it three kids he was probably um losing it too right yeah and i think he probably thought that he had this master plan of um i'm gonna kill the wife and it's all gonna be perfect and presumably
he had um presumably he just imagined what this future would be like the following day but poor sandra rivet had come down instead and now he had this huge problem of you know the murdering of an innocent person i don't know if he was so concerned with with sandra rivett herself it was probably more
the like oh god this is really this is messed up my plan because now there's my wife and um what do i do now i've got no idea yeah and the one thing that his mother did say um that she that he told her in the phone call was something about the fact that he'd interrupted another man attacking his wife
and then she had mistakenly thought that it was him but actually it was another man um so it might sound a little bit implausible but um but that was what he would claim um and then it turned out also that evening he'd tried to call his mother, spoken with her briefly, and then he'd driven to first
a friend's house. And the friend wasn't there, but the friend's wife was.
And he'd stayed up with her and tried to explain what had happened.
And he repeated this story that he was walking past the house um and he had seen another man attacking his wife in the basement so basement being right under the under street level yeah and so he got into the house and then he had um he'd rescued his wife from this other man but she'd thought that the man who was attacking
him was the husband um and that all the stuff that i told you earlier about him saying i killed the nanny that was not something that he had done apparently so in his account he interrupted someone else killing the nanny and then attacking the wife but there's someone else was nowhere to be seen there
was no sign of a break -in no no nothing so it's the police almost immediately said you know that's just not that's just not true clearly untrue yeah yeah and there was this huge hunt for lord lucum they and apparently initially the police thought that he would you know present himself at the at the station the following
day with a solicitor to say you know this is what's happened and this is my lawyer and so on but then days went on and on and on and on and there was no sign of lord lucum um and clearly he was uh you know he was the main suspect in the murder um people were looking all over for him there was a big
there's a manhunt but no one saw him and no one reported seeing him and remember he's a big guy he's very conspicuous he's very easy to to see he's very handsome he's got this big bushy mustache and presumably he would also have been in in a slightly strange state at the time um and then And three weeks
later, there is a breakthrough when the police found the car that he had driven in the port of New Haven.
It's on the south coast, basically opposite from France.
For the French listeners, if you know where Le Havre is, it's right on the south coast.
Not far from Brighton.
And it's a kind of fishing town, that kind of stuff.
there would be a little beach um and lots of boats would set off from there so um one uh they found this car um and in it it didn't look very good for lord lucan because they they found a uh a lead piping uh bloody lead piping that's a kind of metal bar or metal pipe made of heavy metal lead if people
are familiar with the board game cluda um which i think is it has different names of different languages i can't remember yeah in the states and in canada they call it clue in the uk we call it cludo uh it might be it might have different names in other other countries but it's this classic kind of murder
mystery board game which has these different characters it all takes place in a sort of downton abbey style country manor house uh there's a victim and there are weapons including a dagger a pistol and a lead pipe a piece of lead piping yes exactly and the you know the objective of the game is to see
who killed um um who killed so who was the murderer where did it take place and uh with what so with this you know very real um murder mystery there there was the murder weapon the the lead piping which is also a weapon in in the game they found the murder weapon um they found traces of blood i think
what's all over the car um and it it was lord lucan's car but still no sign of lord lucan at all um so people started wondering you know what's what's happened to him um they thought But because the car was parked near as near or I should say as close as you can get to to France, they thought, has he
got on a boat and sailed over to France?
Has he you know, has he killed himself in some way?
Is he being is he being hidden by one of his wealthy aristocratic friends?
um and this was in 1974 and still to this day nobody has found out where lord lucan is or was or maybe i should say where no one there's been no further trace of lord lucan um so it appears he just drove his car down to the south coast abandoned the car and just disappeared and no one we think no one
has ever seen him since or certainly there's the police never caught him yeah so to this day there has been no official sighting of him um but of course it was huge news at the time for the entire three weeks um after the murder there was you know it was all over the the news there was this big hunt
for lord lucan um and i think people sort of assumed that he would he would turn up that he you know that um he would hand himself in or that there would be some kind of clue that he was living in the larger state of some some you know aristocrat in scotland or something like that um but he didn't um
and then there was this car this kind extra clue um that was the fact it was so close to the sea got people asking questions about what might have happened because it's perfectly possible that he could have got on a boat and sailed to france um at that uh you know from new haven to france i guess it's
five hours or so even on a relatively small boat and he was well known to be you know to know his way around boats he he sailed boats um he sailed speed boats um and he probably had a boat in new haven um the theory is that what his what his plan was was kill the wife put her in the postage sack take
her down in the car um that was a friend's car so it wouldn't be linked to him um down in the car to new haven put her into a boat and then take her out to sea and dump her with some, you know, some weights or something so that nobody would ever find her.
But of course, you know, the wife escaped.
So ever since then, people have been wondering what happened to Lord Lucan.
And I can even remember when I was growing up, so I was born in 1987.
So this is 13 years after this all happened.
But still, I can remember in the newspapers and on the news and things, there'll be some little segment about Lord Lucan being spotted in Goa or in Australia or South Africa or all over the world.
There were sightings of Lord Lucan.
Yeah, me too. Me too.
I'm 10 years older than you and it's exactly the same.
Lord Lucan is a name living in the UK that just pops up sometimes.
And I remember hearing my mom and dad talking about the story.
I remember just, you know, when you're a kid, you just pick up on these things.
You know, like it would be mentioned on the radio or it would be mentioned on TV or there'd be a story in the newspaper and it would get my parents talking about it.
And they would talk about it.
They'd speculate about it and stuff.
And so it's kind of like part of common culture, just the name Lord Lucan, the disappearance, the mystery of Lord Lucan.
Where is he? People make jokes about it.
Oh, you know, Lord Lucan, you know, people sort of mention it in passing.
You'll be in the pub with a few people and someone will start talking about it or make a comment about it.
So it's something that in the UK is like really, really well known.
Yeah. And it seems like it was, you know, every year there was a new sighting of Lord Lucan.
And I read a few articles with journalists talking about this phenomenon, I guess, of people just reporting sightings of Lord Lucan.
and they were always happy to go and go and investigate them because the journalist was happy to go uh if you know your boss says uh you know luke can you go and spend five days in goa all expenses paid whatever just you gotta go around and ask locals in bars have you seen lord lucan you're probably
going to say that's better than going to report on you know a power station in Aberdeen yeah yeah because you get a free trip to to to India and you get to spend time at the beach and you get to travel around and meet people and sort of visit all the local places yeah definitely yeah and and and of course
it sold a lot of papers because in popular culture people wanted to hear about what Lord Lucan might be doing and even if it even if the story was completely implausible people like the idea that um even though clearly it's a horrible heinous crime and this poor innocent young woman was killed i think
there is something that people sort of latch on to this idea that he's kind of got away with it and he's now you know is he flipping burgers in uh arkansas or is he has he had plastic surgery and he's now working in and a game reserve in botswana or is he a is he a hippie living in goa there was one
um i think one of the the more famous sightings was of this guy who was called jungle barry is that ringing any bells yeah just only because i read about this again recently um and kind of looked at some of the different theories and different, you know, so -called sightings.
Yeah, that he lived as a hippie in India and his nickname was Jungle Barry.
This is from the Daily Mirror, I'm reading now.
Former Scotland Yard detective Duncan McLaughlin claimed in 2003 that Lord Lucan had lived as a hippie in India until his death in 1996.
He claimed Lord Lucan had lived under the name Barry Halpin and was known as Jungle Barry.
A photograph claiming to show a bearded, disheveled Lucan in 1991 also bared a strong resemblance to the missing peer.
That's another word for a lord.
It eventually emerged that Halpin was very real, but he was from St.
Helens in the north of England and was a well -known figure on the Merseyside folk music scene of the 1960s.
So, yeah, so the idea was that this this guy called Jungle Barry, this kind of hippie living in India, people got the idea that this was actually Lord Lucan in disguise.
But until Jungle Barry was identified as someone from Liverpool or something like that.
Yeah, definitely not Lord Lucan.
But that's just one of many of those of similar theories and sightings.
do we know more um well we know that in 2016 he was officially declared dead um lord lucan because there was no trace of him and the the police's conclusion was that he he committed suicide um in the in the channel um the english channel the stretch of water between I mean, what he probably did, there's
two theories about how he could have done it.
One is that he got in the boat and essentially he did to himself what he was planning to do to his wife, which was, you know, weigh himself down and just sink to the bottom of the sea and that he would have cut a hole in the boat so it went down as well.
But the other thing, too, was that they found in the car, I think, an empty bottle of vodka, which indicates that he probably drank the whole bottle and then was not in a good state of mind to be making rational decisions so that maybe he did that because that was the only way he could decide to kill
himself. or some other idea that he got on a ferry and maybe threw himself um off the ferry into the propellers so he was like chopped up into little bits and stuff i know that's not a very nice thing to be saying on a family -friendly podcast but um that is that's what his wife thinks um wow and yeah
there's been no trace at all not even i don't know a stray foot or a little bit of his moustache or anything that has that has appeared um and another theory also i i mentioned earlier that one of his friends was this guy called aspinol um who has this zoo and it's still a zoo today i believe um like
a private zoo and had tigers and one theory is that he drove to his friend's zoo shot himself and said feed me to the tigers sorry to laugh about that's not really something to laugh about but it sounds quite ridiculous yes it does sound ridiculous um why though why would why would he have done that why
would he care whether his body was was discovered or not though i would imagine that he um uh i imagine it's maybe there's some shame that he wouldn't want people to think that he has killed himself um maybe he thinks that it implies that he was guilty it seems very likely that he was yeah but perhaps
in his um slightly deranged state of mind he thought well people will probably um people will think that it was me if they see that i've killed myself if i just disappear then maybe there's some air of mystique which clearly there is yeah yeah yeah i see so yeah i can see the the reasons why he would want
to disappear or at least cover up for for a suicide um and yeah either sinking to the bottom of the english channel jumping off the back of a ferry into the propeller god uh or being eaten by tigers blimey with all these things i guess these things sound probably far more glamorous is not the right
word but exciting or um adventurous than what is most likely the you know the truth which is that he probably just threw himself into the into the sea and weighed himself down so that he wasn't washed up on a on a beach somewhere found by a french fisherman i've got a few other theories which are quite
quite sort of uh interesting so one is that he lived in the New Zealand outback, so he lived in the countryside in New Zealand with a goat called Camilla.
So, again, according to the Daily Mirror, local residents deep in the New Zealand countryside claimed in 2007 that a British expat called Roger Woodgate could be Lord Lucan.
He was said to have an upper -class English accent and a strong resemblance to the fugitive pier as well as a pet possum and a goat called camilla i don't know how the possum and the goat uh you know helped to identify him as lucan but apparently there was um an upper class english guy living out in the in the new
zealand countryside and other locals decided that they were going to try and tell the the uh police that this was lord lucan camilla is not i imagine an unusual name to call your goat i don't have a a goat but i i imagine calling a goat i imagine most goats are not called camilla yeah i agree and i
don't know if that's any kind of connection to queen camilla in fact i i thought i thought that rang about one of his um one of his children um was called camilla okay but yeah why would you then call a pet goat your goat after one of your children.
I mean, that's a very loose connection.
But in the end, it seems that Mr.
Woodgate, this guy, Mr.
Woodgate has continually denied the claims ever since and points out that he is five inches shorter and ten years younger than Lord Lucan.
So, I think that probably clears that up.
Five inches shorter, that's, you know, that's about 12 or 13 centimetres and 10 years younger.
There's others. He was captured by police, but turned out to be a Labour member of Parliament who faked his own death.
Australian police swooped just months after Lord Lucan's disappearance and arrested a man they announced that they believed was the missing Lord.
But the arrest took a more incredible twist when it emerged they'd actually found dead labour mp john stonehouse alive and well stonehouse had faked his own drowning off the coast of miami earlier that year because of financial problems he was deported back to the uk and the search for lord lucan continued
so that's funny that they actually the the police in australia caught a guy and they thought it was uh lucan but it was another guy who'd faked his own death um yeah a british politician the story about him being fed to tigers after he shot himself and a few other sightings including an ex -nazi colony
in paraguay as a sheep station in the australian outback backpacking on mount etna working as a waiter in san francisco people seeing him in a private hospital in johannesburg in 1995 uh and and so on yeah he gets around or at least sightings of him um yeah are all over the place and i i i um i was reading
an article i mentioned it before before we started um an article about journalists talking about this huge chase for lord lucan um and one journalist talks about some advice he received from his more senior editor about you know this chasing um of lord lucan um and the editor said to him laddie so young
young man you don't ever want to shoot the fox once the fox is dead there's nothing left to chase so uh essentially meaning that there were it was a lot of fun for these journalists to continue chasing lord lucan they had no interest in proving that he was dead or proving that this person wasn't him
they wanted to continue this cycle of people wanting to call and say excuse me i'm just in the west of sweden and i think just seen just seen lord lucan over there um so that a whole lot of journalists could get on a plane and go and have a little bit of an adventure looking looking for him investigating
the story and clearly the the editors were happy because it would sell lots of papers as well yeah the media has always loved this story because it's just like kind of it just keeps going and people the public are interested in it and it's a story that you know people are always willing to read about and stuff
and you know a new amazon on prime documentary about it and now an episode of luke's english podcast as well so it's it is a story that sort of is quite compelling and so yeah you can imagine that the newspapers are quite happy to continue sort of drip feeding this story uh into the into their newspapers
because and they're quite happy to uh let the story continue yeah because it sells papers and so on they can't have much more than 10 years more of it because he was he was born in 1934 so he would be 90 now um and i think you can't continue to say you've got sightings of him you know as a hippie in on a beach
in goa or working in a restaurant unless you're talking about what is essentially a 90 year old man um yeah so i wonder how long i wonder when i wonder when the last sighting of lord lucan will be i wonder i wonder too so listeners if if you feel that you've seen lord lucan so a uh a man who's about 190
centimeters tall um probably about 90 years old um so he It probably isn't 190 centimetres in height anymore.
With an upper -class English accent and a moustache, let us know.
And indeed, if you are Lord Lucan and you're listening to this, then, you know, hand yourself in to the police.
Do the decent thing.
But in fact, in reality, the truth is probably far less interesting, or glamorous or exciting than any of these theories and as you said before he probably killed himself when he realized what he'd done and realized the situation he was in um when the truth you know dawned on him um or or he disappeared
he somehow successfully faked his death and using his connections maybe he was able to disappear but i expect that would be very a very difficult thing to do yeah it's fun to it's fun to talk about what could have happened um but yeah i think that the truth is perhaps less less interesting than the speculation yeah
indeed well there you go so that was an episode we've we've done a lot much longer version than the original episode of your podcast here in this conversation going into lots of detail and stuff about it but if people want to listen to the original episode because that episode has got a transcript and and and stuff
like that so they could they could find that original episode for the kind of shorter version um which has a transcript and so on they can find it you remember which number that is when it was published it's 354 354 okay listeners episode 354 of english learning for curious minds and of course all the other
episodes around about 500 other episodes on all sorts of other interesting topics that you could explore english learning for curious minds you can get it where you get your podcasts is that um is that the best way for people to find it just that or is is your website another way that people can yeah
i mean that um it's it's all over the place now i guess um on podcast apps um instead of putting some on youtube if you're the kind of person who likes youtube um or on the website which is leonardo english .com yes and and not all episodes contain murder so yeah it's not all grisly murder stuff there
are all sorts of other uh interesting subjects too uh alistair thank you very much for sharing that story with us it's been fascinating and I've really enjoyed finding out more about the story of Lord Lucan it's always been something I've been interested in and as I said after having heard his name
mentioned so many times after seeing his picture in the newspapers, hearing my parents talking about him, I was always interested in doing a podcast episode about Lord Lucan, it was always one of those things that I had in this long list of episode ideas so it's nice to have been able to do that and you
know thanks for helping to make that happen today well it's a it's a pleasure to be invited all right okay everyone great well leave your comments listeners what do you think have you got any ideas what are your thoughts in relation to this story uh you can leave your comments in the comment section as
usual but uh Alistair great have a lovely day now and uh good luck with the all the new episodes of the podcasts which are going to be coming out and so on what about um pioneers of the continuum the uh the time traveling story is there going to be like a second series of that or something oh good question i
get asked that quite a bit um there's no immediate plans for for a kind of season two because it finishes in a quite a difficult way to continue um it was meant to be a standalone thing but but there may be more like that in the future yeah okay and maybe we You can put a link to Pioneers of the Continuum.
I put it on YouTube as well.
So if people like YouTube, I know that people do like YouTube, but for those of you who love YouTube, then you can listen to it on YouTube as well.
Yeah, you'll find a link for Pioneers of the Continuum as well in the episode description.
Okay, Alistair, brilliant.
Thanks a lot. Have a lovely day and speak to you again soon in some way.
You too. Thanks so much, Luke.
Bye. Cheers. Okay, so that concludes this episode.
That is the end of this little journey into the world of true crime podcasting on Luke's English podcast this time.
Thanks again to Alistair for preparing this episode and telling the story.
Obviously, a lot of work was put into researching it.
And just the way he told the story, he clearly took time to set it up and give us all the details in the right order.
So thanks again to Alistair.
As we just mentioned, you'll find links to other stuff in the episode description, including English Learning for Curious Minds, the podcast and episode 354, which is the shorter version of this story on Alistair's podcast.
Also Pioneers of the Continuum, that time -travelling story that Alistair wrote, which I recorded the voice for for episode one.
And Alistair's website, leonardoenglish .com, where you can find other learning English materials.
OK, all right. Well done for getting this far, everybody.
I'm recording this outro bit on Wednesday, the 17th of September.
No, Wednesday, the 17th of July.
I'm recording this on Wednesday, the 17th of July.
I think this episode has been published right at the end of July.
So anyway, I hope that you're I was going to say I hope your summer is going well.
But, you know, you might be listening to this at another time in the year completely.
So basically, I hope your day is going well or if it's nighttime, I hope your night is going well.
Whatever it is that you're in right now, I hope it's just going well.
And thank you for listening all the way up until the end of this podcast.
All right. I'll speak to you very soon.
OK, I'll speak to you soon on the podcast.
No more rambling at the end here.
that may be what i'll be doing in the next episode probably right probably is uh okay have a lovely afternoon morning evening or night and i will speak to you next time but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye thanks for listening to luke's english podcast for more information visit teacherluke
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