Lord Lucan knew my father – but was he the same man afterwards?

July 21, 2010 - PRLog -- Night Publishing has just released Carolyn Allen's book 'Knifing the Famous!', one chapter of which is about whether her father, John Watson, who was a top British plastic surgeon who had trained in reconstructing the faces and bodies of pilots brutally burnt while being shot down in flames during World War II – the so-called ‘Guineapigs’, operated on Lord Lucan a second time just after the murder of Lucan's children's nanny in November 1974, and just before Lord Lucan disappeared seemingly forever.

The Lucan case is a cause célèbre in the UK in that he was a high living, high-gambling aristocrat - known as ‘Lucky Lucan’ - who had a difficult relationship with his wife and, one night, their children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was found murdered. The speculation was that Lord Lucan murdered her after mistaking her for his wife.

Over the thirty-five years since Lord Lucan’s disappearance, there have been supposed sightings of him throughout the world. British MP John Stonehouse, who was also thought to be dead, was arrested in Australia in the belief that he might have been Lord Lucan. There was also a New Zealander with an aristocratic British accent, Roger Woodgate, and, more, bizarrely, ‘Jungle’ Barry Halpin who was a folk musician who had decided to live in Goa because it was a more spiritual place than St. Helens in the UK.

The theory discussed in Carolyn Allen's book is that Lord Lucan went to her father John Watson who altered his appearance before he fled the country. Among her father’s secret papers, Mrs. Allen discovered the surgical notes of a previous operation her father had conducted on Lord Lucan after a boating accident, and John Watson himself refused to either confirm or deny that he had operated on Lord Lucan a second time.

The book is also an intriguing account at many other levels, as John Watson also claimed to have spirited the secret daughter of 'Prague Spring' leader Alexander Dubcek out of the country during a surgeons' conference in Prague, and had Lady Churchill, the Kray Brothers (London gangsters) and a member of the Royal Household as clients. His anecdotes of the ‘Forgotten War’ of World War II out in India, Burma and the Far East will be of particular interest to those researching how soldiers actually lived on a day-to-day basis in that theatre of the war.

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