Kempton Bunton

The National Gallery burglary

Motive Bunton was a disabled, retired bus driver who earned £8 a week in 1961 (equivalent to £ in ). In that year, Charles Bierer Wrightsman, a rich American art collector, who made his money in the oil business, purchased Goya's painting Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from John Osborne, 11th Duke of Leeds for the sum of £140,000 ($390,000) . He had plans to take it to the United States. The British Government decided to buy the painting, for the same sum, to prevent the painting leaving Britain. The move was reported to have enraged Bunton, however, who objected to the television licence fee, considering that television should be made available to everybody who needed it. He had campaigned for free television licences for pensioners and had been imprisoned several times for refusing to pay for a licence. Bunton was sentenced to and served three months in prison. In 2012, following a Freedom of Information request by Richard Voyce, and with the assistance of Sarah Teather MP, the National Archives released a confidential file from the Director of Public Prosecutions in which it was revealed that Bunton's son, John, had confessed to the theft following his arrest in 1969 for an unrelated minor offence. John Bunton said that his father had intended to use the painting as part of his campaign and that it would ultimately have been returned to the National Gallery. He said that both he and his brother, Kenneth, had been ordered by their father not to come forward despite the trial. Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions, reviewed the case and concluded that prosecutions either against John Bunton or against his father would be unlikely to succeed and no further action was taken against either.

In a direct response to the case, Section 11 of the Theft Act 1968 was enacted, making it an offence to remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access.

Bunton's wife Dorothy Clasper Bunton (née Donnelly) died in 1974. Bunton himself died in Newcastle upon Tyne in April 1976, aged 71. His death went largely unreported and there were no obituaries in the major newspapers. In 2015, the comedy drama Kempton and the Duke by David Spicer was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

The story of the theft and the subsequent trial of Bunton was dramatised in the film The Duke, starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, which premiered in UK cinemas on 25 February 2022. Coinciding with the release of the film, Christopher Bunton revealed previously unknown details about his grandfather's theft, including the family's side of the story.