Barry will be laughing in Heaven.. he and Lucan were total opposites; JUNGLY'S NIECE SAYS GENTLE SOCIALIST WOULD HAVE LOATHED KILLER LORD.

Byline: DAVID EDWARDS 

TO the regulars at Bob's Inn, he was the man who could always be found slumped in a corner, an empty glass at his bare feet.

The old man with the careworn face and long wiry beard had chosen the tropical paradise of Goa as the perfect place to drink himself to death.

Despite having an incredible musical talent, Barry had shunned offers from record companies eager to sign him up in the 70s and instead settled for a life away from the limelight.

Until now, that is. Years after his death, a new book has claimed that the man known as Jungly Barry was, in fact, Lord Lucan.

This week Duncan MacLaughlin, a former Scotland Yard detective, produced a photograph of a bearded man sitting in shorts in Goa, India, which he claimed was Lucan, who went missing in 1974 after his nanny was found beaten to death.

Last night, Barry's only surviving relative spoke exclusively to the Daily Mirror and laughed at the idea.

Niece Eileen Vincent reveals the full story of a British eccentric whose own life is almost as extraordinary as that of the missing peer. Yet the worlds they inhabited were poles apart.

While Lucan was a calculating, arrogant bully and heavy gambler, Barry was a committed socialist who hated materialism and dedicated his life to music and teaching.

And although Lucan was known in London society for his colourful lifestyle, Barry lived and died a virtual celibate.

"The irony is that Barry never wanted fame, even though he could have had it through his music," says Eileen, a nurse who now lives in North Carolina, America. "He was approached frequently to record music and he just wasn't interested.

"He would be cracking up about all this. In fact I'm sure he's up there in heaven having a good belly laugh.

"Barry could not have been more different from Lord Lucan. Barry would have hated even to bump in to anyone like Lucan in the street."

Born in 1938, in St Helens, Merseyside, his father William was a haulage contractor while his mother, Eva, tended to the chickens on a small-holding behind their home.

Barry's early years at Merton Bank Farm were happy, although having two older sisters made him a shy child.

Eileen says: "Barry and his family were working class through and through and proud of it."

Childhood neighbour Beryl Anders, now 62, recalls: "Barry would always keep himself to himself and chose his friends carefully. I suppose he was naturally suspicious of people, perhaps because he was the youngest of the family."

St Helens was famous for its chemical and glass industries and as the town prospered after the Second World War, the family's fortunes grew as they moved to a larger home in Hawes Avenue.

Barry attended Cowley Green School in nearby Hard Lane and, after finishing school, spent two years with the RAF on National Service.

From there, he moved from home for the first time to take up a teacher-training course in York.

Eileen says: "Becoming a teacher was a natural were beginning to make him stand out - although he was always smart in a shirt and tie.

Barbara Bryant, 52, who was a pupil of his and now teaches at the school, says: "He was like your original beatnik, which was exciting to us and he would go into monologues about the places he had been."

ANOTHER former pupil, Barbara Evans, 53, who also now teaches at the school, says: "His methods were different. He had the children tramping through a tin bath to make papier mache."

Fellow teacher Irene Smith says: "He had a great sense of humour and musical talent - he used to play the six-string banjo and the tinwhistle. I envied him for having the nerve to live as he wanted to. He was a big man, well-educated with a rich voice."

While Lord Lucan enjoyed a life of privilege after his schooling at Eton, Barry could not have been more different.

Growing up against the grim backdrop of post-war Britain convinced him that socialism held the key to the world's inequalities.

Why, he reasoned, should people like Lucan - who admitted to despising the common man - be able to enjoy vast riches while so many in St Helens struggled to earn a living?

Eileen says: "We used to debate endlessly about politics because Barry was a man who cared passionately about people and the world. I can remember him getting on at me as a little girl because I stood on a spider."

Aside from politics, Barry's two other abiding passions were for travel and folk music.

Eileen says: "Periodically my uncle would go off on a trip and leave Merton Bank but would always come back. He was quite a wandering spirit and followed the beat of his own drum.

"He would often go to Ireland because he was very worried that the Irish culture was changing at such a rapid pace that the traditions of its music were being lost.

"He didn't make records but he loved to go and tape people singing old Irish songs."

In 1971 Barry left England for Australia where he spent three years travelling and teaching Aborigine children in Alice Springs.

It was in Perth that he met Timothy Hingston, now 47, who says: "Barry and I used to go camping with female friends - and if he fancied a pee in the night, he would do it in the tent. I don't think that is the behaviour of an aristocrat."

It was during his travels that he first visited Goa in 1974, a bastion for the kind of hippy liberalism which Barry was to embrace.

It was there, in the sweltering Indian heat, that he chose to spend the last 22 years of his life smoking marijuana and enjoying the local tipple of feni, made from cashew nuts.

Barry rarely returned to England but made the journey in 1976 when his mother died and again in 1995 when he was suffering heart problems.

Eileen, 44, says: "When he came back in the 90s he was very sick but still had the charm and the twinkle in his eye. But he had lost an awful lot of weight and was short of breath.

"After he went back to Goa I didn't see him again. He was a free spirit and family connections weren't that tight.

"I got a phone call saying he had died in 1996. It was very sad but Barry certainly lived the life he wanted."

On January 13, 1996, Barry Halpin was cremated, an event which drew little attention save for a small ad in St Helens' local paper.

But all that changed this week when his picture was flashed around the world amid claims that this was the missing Lord, who was last seen 29 years ago in Uckfield, East Sussex.

It's a claim which David Jordan, who spent six months with Barry in Goa, is unable to take seriously.

He says: "Barry went round in grubby shorts, a pair of flip-flops and some outrageous tie-dye shirt a back-packer had given him and certainly didn't act like a lord.

"I first came across him holding court at Bob's Inn. But he was clearly on a mission to drink himself to death.

"He used to sleep in a fisherman's shack on the beach or wherever he collapsed after his last drink."

David, 42, who met Barry in 1992, says: "I remember him saying: 'Everyone has something to hide. No one here wants to talk about their past.' For anyone who wanted to vanish Goa was the perfect place to hide.

"It's cheap and about the closest thing to paradise anyone can find. There are a lot of weird and wonderful people out there."

For Barry, Goa provided the peaceful, idealistic society he craved - far from Britain and the aristocracy he so despised.

How ironic then, that it was Britain's continuing obsession with a member of that very aristocracy which this week robbed him of the anonymity he had so loved.

-Additional reporting by Richard Smith

[e-mail] step for Barry. He always loved children and one of my earliest to the cinema in St Helens when I was five to see Pinocchio.

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Barry took up a teaching post at Merton Bank Primary School at the end of the 50s, just around the corner from his first home. By then, his long hair and dark beard concerning the revolution in Mexico. I was only about 15 but he expected me to read and digest it so he could test

CAPTION(S):

WORKING CLASS: Barry with his niece Eileen and her dolls; COLOURFUL LIFE: Photo that started the controversy and at a school concert; WORLDS APART; There is a resemblance between teacher Barry, left, and Lord Lucan as young men but they lived opposite lives - one a socialist and the other aristocrat