Most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime, nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is worrying some of us is, ‘Is it too good to be true?’ or perhaps I should say, ‘Is it too good to last?’
HAROLD ‘SUPERMAC’ MACMILLAN, JULY 20 1957
With his enticing dark-haired wife as a siren at the card evenings, in 1957 John Aspinall was back in very serious moneymaking business and John Burke found himself almost constantly whistling the song ‘The Man who Broke the Bank in Monte Carlo’.
The chemmy games, following the caution brought on by the bad luck of an exotic cheque and the press invasion, returned to a reliable routine. The 5 per cent charge, or cagnotte, raked off by Aspinall and ‘Burkie’ on the bank’s winning bets provided steady, tax-free income, as much as £3,000 to £4,000 on a good evening.
John Burke explained: ‘In France, chemmy, from the point of view of the proprietor, was a brilliant game. It is a one-against-one game and probably takes about thirty seconds, and the outcome is that there is one winner and one loser. The winner, if the bank wins the coup, pays the 5 per cent tax on what he wins, and so you can imagine the profits rolling in. For us there was only one possible snag. In France, gambling was legal, and if you lost money you could be sued. Gambling debts had to be honoured, legally honoured, whereas in England of course they weren’t.
‘If you lost money gambling and told the other person to get lost, there was nothing that they could do about it. Even if they were given a cheque, the person who wrote it could plead the Gaming Act and dishonour it. There was no legal redress, which made it none too attractive in England, unless you were dealing with people who would actually pay. And that was our secret weapon. Our players played and paid.’
Towards the end of 1956, John and Jane Aspinall had moved into 93 Eaton Place. Their landlord, the Old Harrovian property developer Douglas Wilson, accepted from them a good rent of £50 a week. They were joined by Bob, the butler, and, later, a capuchin monkey called ‘Dead Loss’. For a time, Aspinall kept a bear in a cage at the back of the flat; one winter he took the bear to St Moritz in a trailer behind his chauffeur-driven Rolls. ‘It got him noticed,’ said John Burke.
Within a couple of years, the animals had all but taken over at Eaton Place. There was Tara, a tigress; and two Himalayan bears, Esay and Ayesha. The Aspinalls’ friends were wary of visiting, the neighbours fretful for their safety. Aspinall knew he needed somewhere in the country. After a wonderful, lucky bet at the Newmarket races, he was able to buy Howletts, an eighteenth-century Palladian house set in thirty-nine acres of parkland, near Canterbury in Kent. He founded his first zoo there in 1958 and from then on met its huge and seemingly always rising maintenance costs.
‘In fact, “Aspers” far preferred animals to humans; he regarded them as equals, loved them like his friends,’ Lady Annabel Goldsmith told The Times after Aspinall’s death on 29 June 2000.
As it turned out, the monkey, the first member of what became Aspinall’s part-famous and part-notorious wild animal collection, was to be less trouble in the early years than another new friend.
To escape press attention after the debacle at Les Ambassadeurs, Aspinall had taken his wife to the South of France. There, in the casinos, they had met the American Eddie Gilbert, a rather mysterious entrepreneur labelled ‘The Boy Wonder of Wall Street’ by Time magazine.
Gilbert was aggressive and arrogant, and laughed at John Aspinall’s stories. A long association of mutual hero-worship began, one that would have long-lasting and remarkable repercussions. The American, even if he did not quite ‘belong’, became one of the set, someone who was promoted and helped by Aspinall as introductions were made during chemmy evenings at 93 Eaton Place. John Burke had rented a flat (for £60 a week) at 60 Eaton Place from the Egyptian Madame Zulificar. He told her the extra large, elegant drawing room was ideal for his needs, for his nocturnal work table which happily seated nine.
They used other venues apart from the Eaton Place apartments to keep the gambling evenings nomadic’ and so somewhat within the 1854 Gaming Act. John Burke says that, despite supposedly ‘authoritative’ reports, they had no arrangement’ with the Mayfair police.
In this way, a steady business built up, around which an eclectic bunch of those given to risk and chance gathered. Mark Sykes shakes his head at the memories. ‘I look back and I’m astonished at what went on. You forget the unbelievable change in lives and the way we lived in forty and fifty years. It was an insane but marvellous time, never been anything like it.’
The pace of life in London, though still snail-like compared with the supermotion of the twenty-first century, was gathering an uneasy momentum, a stretching of the muscles. Almost everyone wanted action, a chance at the jackpot, the bullseye. At Eaton Place, normally at number 93, chemmy for the smart set was quietly fashionable: the gambling was very hush-hush; the atmosphere always convivial. There were girls willing to thrill and be thrilled, the best food – caviar and French pate and that day’s seafood specialities – plus fine wine, and, of course, there was the gambling. Since it was illegal, there was the delicious frisson of risk.
Lucian Freud; Claus von Bülow; Mark Birley and his good friend Geoffrey Keating; Clive Graham; Yorkshire landowner Henry Vyner; Kosoro Ghasghai, a Persian prince who flew from Munich – where he lived in a penthouse hotel suite – for the games; the well-off avant-garde as well as renowned gamblers like Stephen O’Flaherty; all became regulars. It was rare to see the players’ spouses at the games, but Janet Mercedes Bryce, who would later marry the Duke of Edinburgh’s cousin David Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven, attended on 17 November 1960. Why not? It was fun.
The beautiful debutante Theresa Follet used to drive John Bingham, the future Lord Lucan, to the games in her secondhand green Ford Popular. She talked at her home in Switzerland in December 2006 about her gambling evenings: ‘He was not a boyfriend. He lived with his mother in St John’s Wood High Street and I lived with my mother in St John’s Wood. I had a car and he didn’t, so I used to take him. I used to go and pick him up from some awful Victorian building.
‘I found him an extremely nice person and a good friend. I went with him many times to the games when it was all highly illegal. I enjoyed it. I like gambling but I didn’t have the big money to gamble, I just did even-money things but it meant I could play through the evening at Aspinall’s parties. If I won I put a little bit more on, but I had to be careful. One evening I was the only winner in our group, I’ve no idea how, but I remember everyone being cross that I was the winner and everybody else lost. Including John Bingham, who I don’t remember being a very good gambler.
‘I think it probably was considered very racy for me to go gambling, but it was good fun. There was good champagne and food and it made for a lovely evening. It was a very small circle in those days. A lot of my friends at that time wouldn’t have dreamed of going to Aspinall’s. They would rather have died.’
The champagne and the deb delights – equally bubbly – were sideshows, more for hangers-on than the real gamblers. Mark Sykes, who would later run his own games in partnership with Peter Scaramanga, shrewdly pointed out: ‘The reason why people gamble is for utter escape from reality. More than sex, more than booze, more than heroin, it is a complete, utter escape from reality. It takes over. Gambling is as addictive as any drug.
‘Playing all night was normal, but the concentration on the gambling was go great it was as though the players had snoozed the hours away. They’d thought of nothing but the gambling. All their other senses were resting. That’s why you’d often see at eight o’clock or nine o’clock in the morning, after whole nights of gambling, people as fresh as though they’d all slept all night. That’s why.
‘Many people would go straight to their office. There were lots of City folk – stockbrokers were making huge amounts of money in those days. All crooks, of course. But they gambled and they paid up.’
So Aspinall and Burke were on to something which, in their world, supposedly did not exist – a sure thing. And, of course, it didn t. Well, not exactly. Or, more precisely, not yet.
John Burke, who has seen more millions won and lost than most, has thought much about the motivation of gamblers: ‘Is it excitement, greed, sheer pleasure, showing-off or masochism? Gambling is generally asexual. I have seen several masochistic gamblers. Class, the English obsession, is part of the equation. The English upper classes have a strong gambling tradition and the working class enjoy their punting. It is only in some sections of the middle or lower-middle class where there is a puritanical disapproval of gambling, a feeling I believe to be stronger in America than in the UK.
‘Of course, as Damon Runyon so wisely said, “All life is six to five against.”’
Off Sloane Square, it was difficult to calculate the odds. The cavalcade of con men passing through the doors of Martin’s Bank on Sloane Street was not an unusual sight during the summer of 1957, a time of regular and impressive takings for Aspinall and Burke. Yet, despite appearances, the bank did not have such clientele exclusively.
The discreet charm of the confidence man was in the air; it perfumed post-war society. One early afternoon Nancy Gillespie was walking towards Martin’s Bank when a familiar, smiling face appeared. It was the Ceylon-born Charles De Silva, dressed at his sharpest. They chatted amicably for a few minutes and then said goodbye, agreeing to have a drink later. De Silva walked down the steps from the bank to a dark-blue Rolls-Royce, where an equally immaculate chauffeur (both hired for the day) held the passenger door open. The Rolls drove him off at a purr.
As she entered the bank the manager came over and after greeting her said, ‘I see you know the Maharaja?’
‘Charles was a genius,’ recalls Nancy Gillespie, of one of the great con men of the era. ‘Mind you, the manager’s approach was tricky. On one hand I didn’t want to grass on Charlie, but I didn’t want to claim a great friendship either. Because, whatever Charlie was doing there, it was unlikely to be for the good of the shareholders of Martin’s Bank.
‘I said, “Oh, I met him at a drinks party at the French Embassy.”
‘He seemed genuinely pleased at that. Certainly, they cashed my cheque without any trouble, and my solvency wasn’t always a guaranteed sort of thing.’
De Silva was a swindler of the highest order. He worked, mostly, on commission ; he’d put deals together, everything ‘from establishing’ chinchilla farms in Ceylon to selling a (young) women’s reform home on the outskirts of London to Huntington Hartford, then one of the world’s richest men; Hartford had so much money he could, and usually did, buy anything he wanted.
Hartford spent his time with heiresses – Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton; and movie stars – Marilyn Monroe (‘too pushy, like a high-class hooker’, he told Vanity Fair magazine in December 2004) and Lana Turner (‘way past her prime’, in the same interview). The second of his four wives was Marjorie Steele, an aspiring actress. When they married she was 18 years old. Charles De Silva always did his homework. relates the story:
‘Charlie had got himself into the good graces of the governor of this girls’ reform school. Then he arranged to have Huntington Hartford come along for tea. He told him there was an “investment opportunity”, but not to mention to the old bird running the place anything about buying it. Anyhow, they turn up there and have tea and buns.
‘Charlie could see that Hartford needed encouragement and he wandered over to the window, which he had previously found looked out over a tennis court. There were these attractive birds in their tennis skirts skipping around the place. “Oh, do have a look at the property,” Charlie said to his man.
‘Huntington Hartford took a look, finished his tea, left the governor’s office and before they got to the car Charlie had a cheque for a great big deposit on the place. Charlie sold him the reform school – it was astonishing.’
De Silva was so good at his game that he was entertained at 10 Downing Street by Dorothy Macmillan, wife of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In those aspiring post-war days it wasn’t six; but arguably three, degrees of separation. Dorothy Macmillan was sleeping with Lord ‘Bob’ Boothby, who was sleeping with the same boys as Ronnie Kray, possibly amenage too far. Too rich, certainly, for the always cautious Billy Hill, who detested a fuss.
Once, when had treated himself to a new sports car, the two were driving from London to Maidenhead, to a club which Hill owned and McKew ran. The driver was showing off his car:
‘Bobby, why are you going over the speed limit? It just gives them a chance to pull you over and then they’ll want to search your flat. Are we in a hurry?’
Charlie De Silva always was. He never met a person who wasn’t a ‘mark’. There is a story about the dinner where De Silva met the prime minister’s wife. It was a charity affair, and he told Mrs Macmillan, ‘My mother died of cancer. May I give you a cheque for the charity?’
‘You must come and have tea one afternoon,’ she said. He followed through and took a guest, a rich Chinese businessman to whom he later sold the Ark Royal after talking at some length about ‘my friend the prime minister’.
But Charles De Silva could not fool Billy Hill. He tried, and tripped up, as so many did, by being a little too greedy – the mistake of almost all of history’s players of the confidence trick.
De Silva and Hill set out to swindle a couple of chinchilla breeders in Yorkshire. They were told that the government in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was willing to invest £200,000 in chinchilla farms. They, in turn, would hand over cash to De Silva for investment in shipping contracts and other aspects of the hustle, such as moving surplus US Forces cameras from Germany to Switzerland.
It all went wrong. De Silva then involved Billy Hill in a paint-buying scheme – and was found out. Somewhere, £80,000, which Billy Hill believed belonged to him, was missing. Correctly, he blamed De Silva. De Silva said he had given the money to his friend Mark Sykes, and about three weeks later there was an interesting encounter over the matter.
Mark Sykes was enjoying a midmorning cup of coffee outside the Carlton Hotel in Cannes when he saw Billy Hill get out of a cab with Gypsy and go into the hotel. Sykes wondered at the chance of it but did not run over and say ‘hello’. Billy Hill didn’t like surprises. Instead, Mark Sykes allowed Hill half an hour to settle in and then telephoned from a coin box.
‘Could I please speak to Mr Hill?’
‘Who is calling, sir?’
‘Mark Sykes.’
‘Hello.’
‘Oh, Mr Hill. I just happened to be in town and saw you going through the door of the Carlton Hotel. I rang on the chance you were staying there.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘You’d better come round.’
Billy gave Mark a warm welcome. His voice stayed at an even level, but gradually his guest realized that something was seriously wrong.
‘I’m told you have some money for me.’
‘Money?’
‘I’m told by Charlie De Silva that you’ve got eighty grand for me.’
‘What!’
Mark explained that he knew nothing about it. Hill did not seem surprised. This had happened before with Charlie De Silva.
‘I thought if you did have it, it was unlikely you’d be phoning me from a call box and coming over,’ Hill said. He was playing games.
Mark Sykes said: ‘He had a sort of macabre sense of humour, Bill. You’d never at first sight take him for what he was. He had flat, black hair in an old-fashioned way. You would think he was probably a bookmaker or a garage owner, someone like that. With me and the De Silva thing he knew the score from the start, but took his time in sorting it out. I stayed for lunch and then we went to the casino with Gypsy.
‘She was a character. She wore a ring, a sort of diamond-as-big-as-the-Ritz affair. Enormous. Her hands looked like jewellery boxes. There was an argument and she cuffed some chap and the man’s ear came adrift. She cut his ear off. It was colourful. It was all colourful.’
‘She was a tough one,’ said Frankie Fraser, ‘but I think that’s why Bill liked her.’
Billy Hill and Gypsy’s home in Moscow Road was an expensive flat, filled with the best of everything. There were chandeliers in every room – even the loo.
‘Bill had the money to spend and bought the best of everything. The problem was, nothing matched,’ said . ‘It was a nightmare of a place, like the aftermath of one of those dreadful television makeovers that go wrong. Carpeting on the toilet seat, that sort of thing. Billy and Gypsy thought it was smarter than Buckingham Palace.’
One of the great haunts of the 1950s was the Milroy Club, which sat almost next door to the Hamilton Bridge Club on Park Lane. The ground floor was a splendid reception, bar and dining room, with dancing on the first floor. In charge of the music was the bandleader Paul Adam, who was Princess Margaret’s favourite. She would send on requests ahead of her arrival. The band played, as it were, by royal command.
Adam was a charming man, a diplomat with his crowd, and would always play special sequences of music to announce the arrival of a regular. Generally, he was known to be discreet. One evening he and were driving off from the Milroy and stopped in at Moscow Road.
‘We walked in and sat down and I watched Paul’s face light up in amazement. He eyed the walls, the decor of flocked wallpaper and all the terrible, terrible rest.
‘He looked over at Bill and said, “I’ve never seen anything like . . .”
‘I grabbed his arm and pressed on it ever so tightly. He smiled just as tightly and managed, “. . . like a place like this.”
‘Billy said to Gypsy: “See, darlin’, Paul likes it and he knows all about decorations.”
‘I got Paul out of there as fast as I could.’
Billy Hill was not a gadabout. He could sit in Moscow Road and ponder for two, three and four weeks at a time, rarely stepping outside his front door. He liked his associates to visit him at his home, which was a four-minute walk or so from Bayswater Tube.
One afternoon Bobby McKew was driving his E-type Jaguar to Moscow Road: ‘I saw Peter West rushing into the Underground. I was parking the car, and then there he was again, rushing out carrying a couple of bags. I thought he’d done a robbery! When I got to Billy’s flat I told him what I’d seen, and he said in his slow drawl:
‘“Yeah, he’s got a deal going with these stations. He’s buying sixpences off them.”
‘Well, work that out.
‘In those days you paid cash for the Tube, and there was a lot of change around. Peter West toured the Underground twice a week and bought up the sprats [sixpences], giving them the equivalent money. He didn’t cheat. If there was £500 of sixpences he handed that amount of money over. The point was that the silver in the coins was worth more than £500. It was so profitable, it was worth all that trouble – it was worth between 10 and 20 per cent more, melted down. And there was nothing illegal about it – although I don’t suppose you were meant to melt down the Queen’s currency.
‘Bill said to me: “He’s collecting for me.” He knew all about it.
‘Peter West was a very pleasant fellow. He was best friends with Jimmy Goldsmith and he used to go out with birds for Jimmy, one bird in particular. She went to hotels with Peter and people thought she was screwing him. But no, she was screwing Goldsmith.
‘That arrangement, or others like it, went on for years, until Jimmy Goldsmith died. Not much was as it seemed.’