HOW MIRROR FOUND
ALL eyes are on bespectacled Dame Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent as they film a movie about an art thief in the frame over a missing masterpiece.
Helen, famed for her many regal roles, dresses down to play the dowdy wife of Kempton Bunton.
The comically named “Robin Hood” thief snatched a portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961.
The case perplexed police, led to the closure of ports and gripped the nation – before the Mirror solved it.
Bus driver Bunton, played by 70-year-old Broadbent, took the 1812 painting by Spanish master Francisco Goya to protest about pensioners being charged for TV licences.
A court heard that the tubby Geordie squeezed through the toilet window of the London gallery to pull off the heist. He held on to the painting for four years.
And just when it seemed the mystery would never be solved,
Daily Mirror from July 1965 reporters from our sister paper the Daily Mirror got a tip-off that the picture was stashed in a luggage locker at a railway station.
The remarkable tale is immortalised in upcoming movie The Duke, with these scenes shot recently on the streets of Bradford.
The painting was valued at £140,000 – or £3.25million in today’s money.
Its theft sparked a worldwide hunt during which trains were stopped, planes and ships searched and hundreds of people interviewed.
Within days Bunton had written an anonymous letter to the National Gallery demanding a donation of £140,000 to charity in exchange for the painting’s return.
Bunton, whose dad apparently named him Kempton after a big win at the races, had overheard security staff talking about the gallery’s alarms and how they were deactivated for cleaners in the morning.
He loosened a toilet window and squeezed his 6ft frame through before swiping the painting – then escaping the same way he came in.
Bunton was furious that taxpayers’ money had gone toward buying the painting – The Iron Duke – to keep it in Britain after it was previously acquired by an American.
He was especially embittered at having served two short stints in jail for refusing to pay his TV licence on a meagre income. After stealing the painting he hid it in the back of his wardrobe at his council house in Newcastle, where wife May – a cleaner – couldn’t find it.
When he finally revealed to her what he had done, she is said to have given the picture a good spray of Mr Sheen because she “didn’t want it returned dirty”.
The masterpiece remained missing until 1965. The Mirror ran a campaign to find it and, finally, Bunton sent an anonymous letter to the paper enclosing a leftluggage ticket for Birmingham’s New Street