10

‘Tyger, Tyger…’

ONE MORNING IN the spring of 1970, Annabel Birley took her three children off on a secret excursion. They were in the middle of the Easter holidays and were beginning to get bored in London. Annabel knew quite well that, because of the rift between Aspinall and her husband, Mark might not approve of her taking their children to Howletts, but the children had been nagging her to take them just the same, and when she spoke to Aspinall on the telephone, he had joined them in their pleas. So on Easter Monday, having told Mark that she was taking the children to the New Forest for the day, they took the train to Littlebourne instead. The next stop after Canterbury, Littlebourne is the nearest station to Howletts. When they arrived, Min Aspinall was there to meet them with her car.

At Howletts the Aspinall family was out in force to greet them, Aspinall himself, his two children Amanda and Damian and his two half-brothers, James and Peter Osborne. The children were excited to see each other again, and they could hardly wait to visit Aspinall’s famous gorilla colony. Housed in a huge cage, which he called his gorillarium, they were the largest breeding colony of gorillas in captivity. As usual when Aspinall was present, the whole party entered the cage, and while the children played with the baby gorillas, he made a great performance of wrestling with the big silverback male. Aspinall and the gorilla were old friends, and there was apparently no danger for anyone. In spite of this, Robin Birley didn’t seem particularly at ease with what was going on.

After seeing the gorillas, Aspinall was anxious to take them all to see one of his young female tigers called Zorra. Annabel was not so keen on this and wouldn’t let her daughter, India Jane, enter the cage with the other children. Like Damian and Amanda, Rupert was used to the animals, but Robin was nervous, though Aspinall persuaded him to approach the tiger and stroke her. Aspinall turned his back for just one moment. In that split second the tiger, sensing Robin’s fear, rose on her hind legs, put her front paws on his shoulders and pushed him to the ground. Snarling, she took the boy’s head in her mouth.

Seeing what was happening, Aspinall leapt towards the tiger, and with a show of strength somehow prised her jaws apart. By doing this he undoubtedly saved Robin’s life. Min Aspinall, meanwhile, was tugging at the tiger’s tail trying to prevent its rear claws tearing at the boy’s body. Somehow, between the two of them they made the tiger drop her prey.

Rigid with fear at the nightmare taking place before her eyes, Annabel watched as James Osborne rushed forward and picked up her son, who was still conscious. Rupert and India Jane were terrified and screaming. As James carried Robin out of the cage to safety, Annabel could see that the lower left-hand side of his face was crushed past recognition, his mouth had disappeared and part of his jaw was hanging by a thread.

Min drove Annabel and Robin at top speed to the casualty department at Canterbury Hospital. That night the surgeons performed a nine-hour operation on the twelve-year-old boy to save his life. It was only now, as Annabel waited, not knowing if her son would live or die, that the magnitude of what had happened hit her, and she collapsed. She felt totally responsible. Later that night she had to face her husband who had rushed down from London when he heard the news. As she wrote later, ‘He was very, very angry.’

Her misery apart, it still seems unbelievable that two supposedly responsible adults like Aspinall, and Annabel herself could ever have permitted young children to enter a cage with a grown tiger in the first place. Were they mad? Were they wildly irresponsible? Or were they simply very stupid?

In fact all three of them had reasons of their own. The story behind these reasons is extraordinary, and the outcome of that day is more extraordinary still. But first, the story.

It starts in 1957 when Aspinall first discovered Mr Palmer’s pet shop in Regent’s Park Road and bought Dead Loss the capuchin monkey. There in that stuffy little shop, amid the smell of birdseed, catshit and the musk of monkeys, Aspinall was not just purchasing a pet. He may have been unaware of it, but he was also acquiring an alternative existence. From that day on he started living two separate lives.

One was the life of the most successful gambler in London, who would soon be revelling in the luxury and the acclaim that centred round the Clermont Club. The other was that of a man increasingly obsessed with wild animals.

After 1976, the Wild Animals Protection Act placed serious restrictions on the trade in and ownership of wild animals, making it virtually impossible for anyone to act as Aspinall had in 1957. Then there was still a relatively free trade in wild animals, and Mr Palmer had no problem finding him companions for Dead Loss the monkey. First came the two Himalayan bears, Esau and Ayesha. Aspinall never had trouble from the police over the bears when he started keeping them in his ground-floor maisonette in the middle of Belgravia. Nor, strangely enough, did he have any complaints from his neighbours. Trouble only started when he tried to treat his bears like human beings.

Despite their cosy image, bears are not cosy animals. Even today the only way that Turkish gypsies have of turning their Anatolian mountain bears into pets, with whom they dance and wrestle to earn money from the tourists is to break their ribs and extract their claws and teeth while they are cubs. This was not what Aspinall had in mind for Esau or Ayesha, and rather than get rid of them he confined them to a cage in his back garden.

He had bought the bears when they were still quite young. This convinced him that, if only he had a chance to bond with a wild animal in infancy, the close relationship he longed for could continue when the animal was fully grown. Once more, Mr Palmer came to his assistance when he found him his tiger cub, Tara. Tara had been born nine weeks earlier in Edinburgh Zoo and Mr Palmer charged Aspinall £200 for the privilege of owning her.

It says much for John Aspinall’s growing passion for wild animals that Tara continued sleeping every night in the Aspinalls’ bed for the next eighteen months. It must have come as a relief for Jane when he eventually bought Howletts.

A year-and-a-half ’s close contact with his adolescent tigress had convinced him that, as usual, he was right, and although at Howletts Tara had to sleep in a comfortable cage near the house, he and his tigress appear to have developed the sort of closeness he had always wanted with a wild animal. Whenever he found himself at Howletts he would always visit her, groom her, feed her and play with her. He claimed he could communicate with her, and grew to love her as he loved few human beings.

While he was settling Tara into Howletts and building a den for Esau and Ayesha, he was also making friends with another creature who would play a crucial part in his life with animals – the gorilla. This began at London Zoo when, like many visitors, he became fascinated by the zoo’s star attraction of the day, the famous old silverback male gorilla, Guy. Impressed by his dignity and pitying him for what he felt must be his boredom, he began visiting Guy regularly. Soon, thanks to a friendly keeper, he was permitted to make Guy offerings of vegetables and fruit. According to Brian Masters, it was then that he formed ‘the romantic, absurd notion that one day he would count an adult, male gorilla as his friend.’

Once he had moved to Howletts this notion was absurd no longer. Soon after moving in, Aspinall paid £1,700 for a young male gorilla called Kivu. Like many gorillas captured in the wild, Kivu had been badly treated by his captors and Aspinall understood that what he needed was, above all, tender loving care. Who better to provide it than his mother-in-law, the widowed Mrs Hastings who was living in a cottage on the estate? She soon became devoted to Kivu and, following her son-in-law’s example with Tara, Mrs Hastings would sometimes share her bed with him at night. Sadly even this was not enough. Kivu was suffering from the primate’s equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder after losing his own mother. He sank into melancholy, and died a few months later.

Kivu’s death affected Aspinall profoundly, but he also saw it as a challenge. Within a month or two he bought a pair of gorillas, a male called Gugis and a female called Shamba. This time he was determined to succeed, and hoped that, given time, Gugis and Shamba would become one of the very first pairs of gorillas to breed in captivity. His enthusiasm for his animals did not stop there. Discovering that wolves were once indigenous in Britain he bought a male and a female, hoping they too would breed and he could have a wolf pack of his own at Howletts.

But already he was having fresh problems with his two brown bears when he tried to let them wander freely around the grounds. After complaints from neighbouring farmers, he realised that Esau and Ayesha had to be enclosed, but even when they were, he went on trying to make friends with them. It wasn’t easy. Once, when he thoughtlessly entered the bears’ enclosure while they were copulating, Esau understandably took offence and came at him with a speed and fury he never expected. He was lucky to escape with his life. So was Lady Osborne when she tried to make friends with the fully grown male wolf. She was rescued just as he was about to bite her throat out, but like her son, she emerged unfazed from the experience.

Although in terms of friendship both the wolves and the bears had proved a disappointment, Tara the tiger and the gorillas Gugis and Shamba, more than made up for this. All those months of bonding evidently worked. The trust between Aspinall and Tara seemed stronger than ever, while his relations with the two gorillas had achieved a point of almost casual sociability. He played with them, wrestled with them and brought the finest food down from the Clermont for them. Unlike some of the gamblers at the Clermont, his animals never bored him and he studied them and tried to understand them. Slowly he started to believe that he was entering their private world. There were times when he felt he was becoming some sort of wild animal himself.

‘Sometimes when I’m pleased to meet a friend, I find myself purring like a tiger. When I make love I even grunt like a gorilla,’ he wrote.

The sense of power and empathy he felt he had with wild animals could be dangerous. James Osborne remembers one night on safari in the Serengeti when a large male lion started roaring angrily outside the camp and they had to physically restrain Aspinall from going out to reason with him. Undoubtedly along with the sympathy he felt for all wild animals went an element of sheer bravado. Just as the essence of gambling lies in taking risks, so his greatest admiration went to those who faced the greatest dangers. In himself he was always challenged by the need to overcome whatever fear he may have felt in the presence of a wild animal.

He was lucky in possessing such a dominating personality. The same charisma that appeared to work so well with his gamblers also worked with animals. He unquestionably had a remarkable way with them and, natural exhibitionist that he was, could rarely resist showing it. Several times he took Tara to the Clermont where she used to pad up and down the grand staircase. When Gugis developed a hernia, rather than leave him to the mercy of the local vet he drove him up to London in his Rolls and had him operated on at once in a Harley Street clinic. The operation was successful. Afterwards he drove him back to Howletts.

Howletts rapidly became a rich man’s private zoo. With money flowing in from the profits of the Clermont, he began acquiring more and more animals and he was now able to expand the place beyond his wildest dreams. A mate was found for Tara, and five new tiger cubs, including Zorra, were soon playing around the house.

As Howletts started to develop, one gets a glimpse of what really lay behind this whole extraordinary creation. At school and then at Oxford, Aspinall had shown signs of the strong influence of the two writers he read in adolescence, Oscar Wilde and Rider Haggard. Predictably Wilde’s influence faded, but Haggard’s stayed with him throughout his life. From Haggard’s Zulu king Shaka, he acquired some of the unfashionable traits which never left him – aggressive male chauvinism, glorification of danger and pride in separation from the common herd.

But another book he read in childhood was possibly the greatest influence of all, certainly as far as Howletts was concerned: Kipling’s Jungle Book. There were obvious similarities between Kipling’s hero, the orphan Mowgli, and the young Aspinall: both were lost boys, separated from English families in India, and one can understand the impact on Aspinall when he read of Mowgli finding himself a family among the creatures of the jungle.

It seems as if at Howletts Aspinall was doing something similar. Not only was he busily inventing yet another self, but with his animals he was clearly trying to create his ideal family. As with Mowgli, his first real friendship with an animal had been with a monkey. His efforts to improve on this with Esau and Ayesha were a failure, but with Tara he did something that not even Mowgli could do. In the Jungle Book Mowgli’s greatest enemy, feared by all the other creatures of the jungle, is Shere Khan the tiger. In the end, Mowgli triumphs by outwitting him, but with Tara during those early months of bonding, Aspinall turned his tiger into a close and trusted friend. Once Tara had mated and produced her cubs, this family of tigers became part of his own extended family. Something similar developed from the empathy he formed with his gorillas, their children, and the rest of the great gorilla colony he formed at Howletts.

To have stayed true to Kipling, he should have been able to establish something closer still with Mowgli’s greatest friends and protectors in the jungle, the wolves, and it must have been a bitter disappointment when his attempts to befriend his own two wolves failed so disastrously. But his relationships with his tigers and gorillas more than made up for this, particularly when he could teach his own children, Damian and Amanda, to treat the tiger cubs and the young gorillas like siblings.

Not all the members of the Clermont Set were so understanding over the Aspinalls’ behaviour with their wild animals. Jimmy Goldsmith refused outright to have anything to do with them. According to Taki, ‘Whenever he went to Howletts, Jimmy used to hurry past the cages without so much as a sideways glance at any of the animals. He told Annabel, “However friendly you become with a wild animal, if it is frightened or distracted you can never trust it.”’

Mark Birley felt the same, which may have been why the surprise trip had seemed particularly exciting for the children. With the Aspinall family out in force to greet them, one can also understand why Annabel showed such trust in them. She had previously entered the tiger’s enclosure herself, and if Aspinall and his children had no fears about entering Zorra’s cage that April morning, why should she?

At the same time, one can also see what a disaster the accident with Robin and the tiger was for Aspinall. Too many accidents had been occurring recently at Howletts. During the last year, two keepers had been killed, and a month or two before a young model was badly mauled by a tiger and nearly lost her arm.

Because of this, what happened to Robin placed Aspinall in a dilemma. From the start, he had always encouraged his keepers to enter the cages just as he did himself to form friendships with the animals. The whole idea of Howletts was that, unlike what went on in other zoos, friendship and trust could grow between human beings and wild animals. If pity or remorse for Robin forced him to go back on this and admit that he was wrong, this could destroy the whole purpose of Howletts, and everything it stood for.

Rarely can Aspinall have needed quite so much of his famous self-control as in the days following the accident. At the Clermont, some of those who knew what had happened were shocked that he seemed to give no indication of being in the least concerned, and it was several days before he visited the badly injured boy in hospital. Four or five days after the accident, when he finally did turn up at Canterbury Hospital, what happened next seems quite bizarre even for Aspinall.

Robin had come through the operation better than expected, but although his life was not now in danger, it was clear that he would need several years of intensive and painful surgery to rebuild his face. Annabel spent the next few days doing her best to comfort him and one by one the members of the family came to visit him in his small private room. But the one visitor he longed for most was Aspinall.

According to Robin, when he finally appeared he seemed ‘distinctly subdued and tense’ which in itself was most unlike him. In an attempt to lighten the atmosphere Aspinall lifted up his hands to show the damage Zorra’s teeth had done to them. This clearly made little impression on Robin. Some desultory conversation followed, and Aspinall must have realised that the occasion called for something more dramatic than mere words.

Without the slightest show of embarrassment, he proceeded to take off all his clothes, turned his back on Robin, and then did what he called ‘a ball swing’. According to Robin, he had ‘unusually attenuated’ testicles. In the jungle, male gorillas wishing to show submission to another male apparently do so by exposing the most vulnerable part of their anatomy. By now doing the same, Aspinall was saying sorry in the only way he could.

Apparently it worked. Although Robin’s face was swathed in bandages, and he couldn’t hope to smile, he said later that ‘the performance cheered us both enormously’. From then on Robin found it impossible to feel angry with him. ‘Aspinall never apologised for what had happened, and I didn’t want him to,’ he told me. ‘Even then I knew that once I started blaming him, I’d lose him, and that was something that I couldn’t bear to contemplate. He was a great joy in my life. He was funny and a wonderful storyteller, and I loved him. It was as simple as that. So there could obviously be no question of suing him for what had happened.’

Because of the loyalty and love his injured son so obviously had for Aspinall, even Mark Birley, although still understandably furious and bitter with both Aspinall and Annabel for what had happened, felt obliged to go along with it all for Robin’s sake. Having been told he would have to endure many more operations in the future, he would obviously be in need of all the love and support that they could give him.

In the years ahead Robin would have his periods of deep depression, but in the midst of them he knew that Aspinall had no time for people who felt sorry for themselves, so he told himself that self-pity was out of the question. Remembering this period he says, ‘I suppose the truth is that Aspinall never had much time for the misery of others. His attitude was that if you fuck up you get on with life, so I did my best to do the same.’

So it was that because of Robin’s devotion to Aspinall nobody around him dared to rock the boat by blaming him for the disaster. Annabel even wrote effusively to him several times to thank him for saving her son’s life, and the bonds within the Clermont Set weren’t threatened as they could so easily have been. Certainly it seemed Aspinall’s magnetic power was stronger than ever. When I asked Robin’s father, Mark Birley how this could have happened he replied, ‘Aspinall had great charisma – unfortunately!’