In early May 2016, a story appeared in a number of British newspapers detailing a wager placed by Lord Lucan, the infamous peer on the run following the murder of his children’s nanny in 1974. That the bet – a £2,000 wager on an amateur golf tournament – was significant was in large part because it was the last the peer placed before he absconded. Study the lord’s gambling life and you might conclude that the wager was every bit as significant for being successful.
Yes, for a man nicknamed ‘Lucky’, Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, was for the large part a mug punter. He owed his sobriquet to an exceptionally good night at a casino in Le Toquet in the early 1960s where he scooped £26,000 – an extraordinary sum of money at the time – playing chemin de fer. Though champagne flowed that evening, most of the time Lucan hit the casino, it hit back – hard.
Born into incredible wealth in 1934, the future Lord Lucan’s love of gambling first took hold at Eton where he developed a passion for horseracing. Poker then replaced the ponies when Bingham performed his National Service. His army days behind him, he took up a post with a leading merchant bank in London only to find the buttoned-down world of finance a poor substitute for the excitement of the city’s gambling dens.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.