‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in London were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.’1 Muriel Spark’s evocation of the damage, dejection and deadly drabness of London could have been applied to the capital for a dozen years after 1945. It was a period when to pinch and scrape suggested respectability. Only head waiters and car dealers fawned on the nouveau riche. But when Spark recalled those years – she wrote in 1963 – the war ruins and shabbiness seemed historic. So, too, did the accompanying beliefs that discomfort was virtuous, mortifications were character-building and that millionaires ought to be quietly ashamed.
After 1957, Londoners had made a dash for modernity. Property developers like Charles Clore and Jack Cotton transformed the centre of the capital with a brutal phallic modernity that provided both the aesthetic and the ecology of the Profumo Affair. Cotton lived on the new arterial dual carriageway, Park Lane, with its onrush of traffic like lancers riding pell-mell into battle. Clore had a house in the parallel Park Street, a narrow one-way thoroughfare in which cars idled and edged forward, like infantrymen fidgety in their trenches, then advanced in tense rushes when the traffic lights at the corner with Oxford Street turned green, as if hurtling across no-man’s land while being raked by machine-gun fire.
Mayfair, Marylebone, Soho and Notting Hill provided the terrain of the Profumo Affair. Its protagonists were Londoners. Lord Astor lived in Upper Grosvenor Street, two minutes’ walk from Clore and three from Cotton; Stephen Ward and Perec Rachman lived a few minutes apart in nearby Marylebone mews; Jack Profumo lived by the Regent’s Park; Christine Keeler shifted between Notting Hill and Marble Arch. Both Keeler and Rice-Davies had come to London to find money, excitement and the main chance, and to discard poverty, monotony and futility. The nebulous sexual market in which they were players had its counterparts in the London property market, and the rough new world of contested takeovers. ‘The lasting damage to British society,’ recalled a beatnik who became a hippy, ‘was not committed by the hairy evangelists of permissiveness, but was the work of the property developers.’2
Isabel Quigly saw the film The Seventh Veil twice – once in London, and then a hundred miles away in the country. In one sequence the heroine was urged by a dissolute painter to elope with him to Italy. ‘Do you mean to get married?’ she asked. ‘Oh,’ replied the artist, ‘I never thought of that!’ The London audience heard this dialogue without a snigger, Quigly recalled, but in the country it provoked ‘a long gasp, followed by such a cackle of outrage, mixed with a sort of whistling admiration at the sheer metropolitan coolness of it, as drowned the dialogue for the next five minutes’. England, overall, had a morbid fear of London. The dominance of London in national anxiety about morality intensified during the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation year of 1953. Purity campaigners insisted that landmark London required special protection from unruly or dangerous sexualities, namely street prostitution and male homosexuality. Sunday newspapers warned that ‘immorality’ in the capital incited misbehaviour across the country. London’s supposedly expansive, invasive turpitude dominated successive moral panics and press stunts about vice. The report in 1957 of the Wolfenden committee devised the basis of nationwide legislation on prostitution solely from the experience of central London streets and backstreets.3
During 1943–44, Patrick Abercrombie, Professor of Town Planning at London University, devised detailed plans for the systematic redevelopment of the capital to repair the effects of wartime bombing, to obliterate mouldering slums and to deter the jumbled sprawl associated with speculative profiteering. These comprehensive plans expressed both progressive hopes and social anxiety: planners wanted to regulate, control and repress the burgeoning, undisciplined development of London and keep it on clean lines; they believed that rebuilt, sanitised townscapes, with tight planning regulations, would create paragons of clean living. Spurred by Abercrombie, Westminster City Council proposed in 1946 to demolish 130 acres of Soho, rebuild and rezone it to meet the needs of impatient motorists, disperse its denizens, and concentrate the remnants of its population in salubrious, purpose-built blocks of flats. This plan envisaged the demolition of the Royal Opera House in contaminated Covent Garden, and its relocation in the hygienic purlieus of Belgravia.4
Planning was enshrined in statute by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. This was the brainchild of Lewis Silkin, the first Minister of Town and Country Planning to hold Cabinet rank. He had been born in Poplar, a few months after Jack the Ripper’s murders in nearby Whitechapel, the son of a Lithuanian-born shopkeeper who taught Hebrew. Though he won a mathematical scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, his headmaster decided that the son of East End Jews was unsuitable for university education, and kiboshed his chance. Instead, Silkin went to work in the East India Docks before mustering the funds for a year at London University. Music and country rambles were his abiding loves in youth: he used to stride through the countryside singing aloud with joy of life. He became a solicitor’s clerk, and then a solicitor. As chairman of the London County Council’s housing committee in the inter-war years, propelling schemes for the rebuilding of slums, he loathed the way that individuals made money out of property development. His aim was to remove the profit motive, and to bestow the ownership of development rights on local communities, rather than landowners or companies.
Few MPs understood what they voted through in Silkin’s Town and Country Planning Act, which stripped development rights from landlords, and vested new powers in local planning author-ities. During the 1950s the Labour Party propounded that housing was ‘no longer a proper field for the profit motive, and must be regarded as a social service’. Local authorities, Labour proposed, should be empowered to acquire properties for ‘structural rehabilitation’.5 The act contained an item called the ‘Third Schedule’, which allowed owners of existing buildings to make minor improvements without paying the charge levied on all other building work to discourage promiscuous development and prevent the waste of scant resources.
Macmillan, who was appointed Minister of Housing by Churchill in 1951, rejected Silkin’s creed of idealistic dirigisme as cumbersome and restrictive. His Housing, Repairs and Rents Act of 1954 abolished the development charge, but left the Third Schedule, which permitted buildings to be extended by up to ten per cent of their cubic capacity. This had few implications when developers were busy rebuilding bombsites. After 1957, however, they began demolishing older office blocks and erecting replacements with low ceilings, fewer corridors and stairwells, and open-plan offices. The developers not only exploited Schedule Three to achieve ten per cent greater cubic capacity, but arranged their amenities so that the working interiors far exceeded this percentage.
‘Plot ratios’ – devised in the 1940s with the intention of setting limits on the density of workers in given areas – were another factor. A plot ratio was the relationship between the area of the site and the gross floor area of the building. A developer could have a ratio of 1:1 by covering the entire site by a one-storey building. Alternatively the development could be set back from the road, so that not all the site was covered, but with more storeys rising skyward – an objectionable prospect to Silkin, who disliked the dehumanising scale of tower blocks. Developers cared only to cram as much onto sites as was permissible under plot ratio rules. The London County Council planning department, staffed by guileless milk-and-water idealists focussed on improving the housing stock, was startled by this red-blooded grasping. Entrepreneurs who resented any authority over them, and behaved to officials like quick, clever schoolboys making fools of fretful, unimaginative schoolmasters, enjoyed foiling the regulations and baffling the planners’ intentions. Plot ratio was described by one player as ‘a commercial joke and a commercial jackpot’.6
The lifting of building restrictions in 1954 by Macmillan ignited a London property boom which thundered on until 1964, when the incoming Labour government reimposed strict controls. Twenty-four million square feet of new office space was built in central London in the decade from 1954. Jack Cotton estimated in 1961 that the best office sites in Manhattan commanded just over £2 per square foot, while the best sites in the City of London were worth £3. Hence the spires and pinnacles, in cheap, flimsy materials, that soared in the age of I’m All Right Jack. The boom brought princely wealth to Cotton, Clore, Max Rayne, Max Joseph, Felix Fenston, Harry Hyams and others. It needed men who were traditionally disempowered but bursting with retaliatory initiative to see the possibilities, put together the deals, change England’s urban environment forever, and act as forcing agents of change in the Macmillan era. The property developers were an assault echelon on the status quo as well as the literal demolishers of old England. The governmental throttling of supply and demand, which Silkin had enacted, created conditions in which these men became as rich as Greek shipowners or Texan oilmen. They aroused intense resentment. ‘If you’re making pots of money, you’re exploiting somebody,’ said a Tyneside miner and union official in 1963. ‘You can disguise it any way you like, it’s exploitation.’7
Local authorities ladled out planning consents for office blocks, shop developments and town centre schemes. Tenants were eager for space. Money was loaned on easy terms for the borrower: long-term rates were five or six per cent at a time when inflation was running at three or four per cent. Borrowers did not have to part with any equity. The return on cost of new properties was seldom less than ten per cent. The value of a completed building was not based on its building cost, but on a calculation involving the annual rental income from the tenant of the completed building, the length of the lease, and rent review provisions. These calculations could double the value of the property over its building cost. Private companies owning new buildings could be floated on the Stock Exchange with immense profit to their promoters. There was a bull market in the City which ran from 1958 until 29 May 1962 – the Flash Crash, when the plunge on Wall Street was the worst on any day since 1929. During those easy years investors could sell shares half an hour after buying them, and keep all profits tax free. There were some fifty property companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1958 (often family-owned urban estates); two years later there were about two hundred, most of which scarred the country with coarse architecture.
The developers hired architects with proven ability to obtain – swiftly – the planners’ agreement to schemes with maximum possible density. About ten architectural practices were adept at the necessary negotiations and exploitation of loopholes. Foremost among these was Richard Seifert’s firm. The property boom of the Macmillan era can be measured by the fact that he had twelve employees in 1955 and about two hundred in 1966. His buildings had the disposable modernity of sputniks and moon rockets, as their names showed: fourteen-storey Planet House in Chiltern Street, near Baker Street station, completed in 1960; eleven-storey Orbit House in Blackfriars Road, completed in 1962; the oval Space House in Kingsway, completed in 1963 for Hyams, but left vacant for years; Telstar House in Eastbourne Terrace, Paddington, completed in 1963, but vacant for years. The office complex at Euston Station, which necessitated the demolition of Euston Arch; the Royal Garden Hotel ruining the approaches to Kensington Palace; Centre Point, creating motor-traffic canyons and killing pavement life on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street; the Park Towers Hotel in Knightsbridge wrecking the scale of Lowndes Square. These were Seifert buildings which exploited the plot ratio formula in order to soar high.
Sir Mortimer Warren of the Church Commissioners admitted that most of the office blocks with which he was involved with Max Rayne, including Telstar House, looked as if they had been designed by accountants. On one occasion when Felix Fenston approved a development, his architect noticed that in studying the plans he had been holding them upside down. When Clore was asked of which development he was proudest, he named an ugly block in Southwark Bridge Road because it was ‘one of the largest office developments in London’ which had been ‘built in record time’, for Ernest Marples’s Ministry of Transport. He scoffed at ‘architectural triumphs which end in bankruptcy’.8
Seifert’s activities showed that vital forces – individuals little interested in community discipline or collective virtue – were pitted against the orderly plans of men like Abercrombie and Silkin. The defeat of the pure-minded planners was like a parable of London sexual life, with the purity campaigners fighting a failing battle with the libertines. ‘Kiss Goodnight, Sweetheart!’ was the way that a jovial cockney called Joe Levy, one of the great estate agents turned property developer, used to show that he was calling a deal off. In 1939, when the leading prewar developer Jack Phillips, a desperate gambler, was going broke, Levy and his brother took over his estate agency. He also adopted Phillips’s business credo: ‘If you can’t make a damned good living within three square miles of Piccadilly Circus, don’t try in this profession. And never go into a back street.’9 This advice for estate agents worked as well for sex workers.
A new generation of agents and property developers dominated the London scene from the late 1940s. Although most had prewar experience of the property market, they retained the eager pliancy of young men. Few of the agents who diversified into property development had sat the examinations of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Indeed, the established chartered surveyors of the period, accustomed to prewar conditions of static or falling values, kept their minds fixed on present stability, and were poor judges of future possibilities. Traditionally they lived by their fees, and did not sully themselves with the profits of property development.
The first developments by Levy and his brother (in 1937) were three depots for the Dunlop Rubber Company in Mile End, Brixton and Greenwich; £50,000 for this project was loaned to them by Robert Clark, a Paisley-born mogul of the film industry. The Levy brothers both served in the fire service during the war, working three days at a stretch, with two days off. On their free days they did plenty of buying and selling as the bombs fell. After the war they resumed dealings with Robert Clark, and together formed a development company called Stock Conversion, which undertook a vast scheme on Euston Square which had been rejected by Clore – with whom they did many early deals. ‘You never know,’ Levy joked of his alliance with Clark, ‘what can happen when a Scotsman and a Jewish boy get together. Why does it work so well? Because they would go blind watching one another if they weren’t together.’10 There were no grudges among Levy’s business collaborators: he made fortunes for them. His last years were devoted to the charitable foundation that he established with his profits.
One of Levy’s lucrative connections was with the Italian-born Charles Forte. Forte opened his first milk bar in Regent Street in 1935, and began serving a novelty called milkshakes. Further milk bars followed in Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Leicester Square. During the depths of postwar austerity, Forte began collaborating with Levy, who taught him the technique of buying and leasebacks of property. At Levy’s prompting, he bought the Lyons tearoom at Rainbow Corner on Shaftesbury Avenue, near Piccadilly Circus, with a £35,000 loan from Prudential Assurance. By leasing part of the site to himself at rent of £4,000 a year, and leasing the rest to other tenants at £8,000, he achieved an annual income of £12,000. Thereafter he enlarged his fortune by property deals as well as catering, and became known as a property financier as much as a restaurateur. In 1950 he leased the Criterion building on the south side of Piccadilly Circus at an annual rent of £12,000, used its Marble Hall as a cafeteria, serving Chicken Maryland, ice gateaux and the like, and leased back other parts of the building. In 1953 – again advised by Levy – Forte bought the Café Monico site at Piccadilly Circus. A year later he bought the Café Royal building in Regent Street. Journalists nicknamed him ‘Mr Piccadilly’. In 1958, Forte bought his first hotel, the Waldorf, for £600,000, which he raised by selling his lease of the Monico site to Jack Cotton for £500,000. He then arranged a sale and leaseback deal with Prudential Assurance on the Waldorf.
By 1960, Forte was a top table guest at Cotton’s famous annual luncheon at the Dorchester hotel. He did several property deals with Isaac Wolfson, from whom he bought a store at Oxford Circus in 1961. Anthony Sampson noted the retreat of industrialisation under Macmillan and the ascendancy of the property men: ‘The era of Nuffield and de Havilland is being succeeded by the era of Charles Forte and Jack Cotton.’ Forte was ‘one of the most respected businessmen in England’, reported the Daily Express in 1963 when he bought 1,200 acres at West Horsley in Surrey from the Bowater paper-making family. ‘Now he has joined the landed squirearchy.’11
The leading London developers were driven by ‘a profound psychological and social need for acceptance’, according to Charles Gordon, who was a journalist on the Investors’ Chronicle before becoming a consultant to the Clore-Cotton conglomerate. Their decisions were often the result of a defiant impulse that hid anxiety or lack of social confidence: they wanted to impress or annoy authority figures, ex-partners, competitors, unappreciative parents and resented siblings; big money for them was protective. Clore once asked his friend George Weidenfeld during a dinner, ‘What do you really think of all these people I’ve got here? What do they think of me in the West End?’ When Weidenfeld replied that some admired him but others could not quell their prejudices, Clore raised his voice defiantly: ‘To hell with them! Who needs them? They’re all bastards and bitches!’12
Developers hid their insecurities in schemes that were big enough to justify them doing whatever they wanted. The London property man was an ‘insecure animal whose main drive is vanity and whose main passion is a worship of prestige’, Gordon judged. ‘His headlong quests for creating wealth, implementing deals, mergers, takeovers, is really a quest for approbation, not for money and possessions per se, not for power per se, but for approbation from people mostly as insecure as himself.’ This was also the view of the psychiatrist Bernard Camber, who treated one or two developers and used to give them books by Alfred Adler, inventor of the ‘inferiority complex’.13
The social exclusion of Jewish East Enders, exemplified by the sabotage of Silkin’s Oxford scholarship, and Judaism’s prized sense of difference, contributed to these feelings. The murderous savagery of the Holocaust mattered more. Many developers were lavish benefactors of the state of Israel. For them the days of submission and propitiation were over. They neither made apologies nor offered truces. They had the intractable anger that was voiced by the author Frederic Raphael in 1963: ‘We tried being patriotic, we tried being philanthropic, we tried being everything, and it didn’t do us a damned bit of good. If they want to kill us, they’ll kill us. What does it matter what we do? We’ll do what we want to do and be damned to the lot of them.’14
The Macmillan years were characterised by an unprecedented consumer boom and retailing convulsion. England ceased to be a nation of shopkeepers, and became a nation of multiple retailers. Grocery shops provided self-service counters, supermarkets proliferated and retail chains came to dominate high streets. Some developers, such as Wolfson and Clore, were retailers too. They were aggressive modernisers overturning the habits and values of traditional business.
Margaret Stacey noted that, during the 1950s, in the Profumos’ nearest market town, Banbury, traditionally minded shopkeepers did not open branches in the town’s outlying districts, where there were only ‘corner shops’ or Co-op branches. Banbury’s drapers, ironmongers and grocers had capital for expansion, but not the urge. They were sure of their social position and neighbours’ approval. They felt no compulsion to make a show. Their reputation in Banbury as ‘nice people’, in Muriel Spark’s phrase, mattered more than making as much money as possible. In delegating to branch managers they would forfeit personal contacts, which they prized, between ‘gaffer’ and employee, and between shopkeeper and customer. If the expansion failed, the shopkeeper’s business would succumb, and he would lose his standing in the town. If he prospered, he would outclass his peers, and be cast adrift socially: his acceptance in richer strata would be slow. It was men with these gently self-limiting values whom Wolfson and Clore, mercenary rebels or freebooters, were putting out of business.15
Anthony Sampson in 1962 named five men as the foremost corporate raiders whose takeovers had made them ‘the heads of colossal empires’ within the previous ten years: Isaac Wolfson, Charles Clore, Hugh Fraser, Cecil King and Roy Thomson. Of these, Wolfson, though he was at Cliveden during the weekend when Profumo met Keeler, had no part in the Affair. Cecil King, however, figured in it. Clore was the ‘Charles’ who featured in Stephen Ward’s trial. Although Keeler later denied that she had sex with him, a different tale was told in order to convict Ward. Walter Flack, Clore’s co-director at City Centre Properties, was also numbered among Rice-Davies’s protectors. Perec Rachman, who kept both Keeler and Rice-Davies, is the third property dealer who featured in the Profumo Affair – most infamously of all, as it proved.
Charles Clore’s parents had shifted to London to escape the anti-Semitism and russification of their native Latvia. He was born in 1904 in Mile End. He nearly drowned as a small boy, and thereafter was scared of getting out of his depth: literally, for the swimming pool at his country house was only chest deep and he always donned waterwings in it. Figuratively, too, he kept on land that was under his control. He stood apart as a child, always neat and unruffled, never joining the boisterous street games of his East End boyhood. When young he worked in his father’s textile business and lived with his family at 18 Elm Park Avenue, Tottenham. In 1928 he became licensee of the Electric Palace Cinema in Cricklewood, and two years later of the Super Cinema in Walthamstow.
Next he became licensee of the Prince of Wales Theatre, which had a prime site between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. In 1934 he was nominally responsible for staging a revue there, Sourire de Paris, a licentious slapstick in which plumbers interrupted a honeymooning couple, and men shoved a pretty girl behind a curtain and emerged flourishing her corset and knickers. The reactionary prudes of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department insisted as conditions of the revue being staged on the non-suggestive pronunciation of the surname Winterbottom, and the deletion of a scene in which a man blew a raspberry at his wife, together with all mention of the Marquis de Sade. After the play had opened, the official censor George Titman attended a perform-ance. ‘It was a tawdry and vulgar entertainment and quite unworthy of a West End Theatre,’ he reported; a comedian produced ‘a very decided “raspberry”, made with his hand and mouth … I consider it gross impertinence to include this filthy noise’. At the Lord Chamberlain’s instigation, Clore was convicted on 21 February 1934 and fined £16 with nine guineas costs, for breaching the censorship regulations. ‘The average Englishman finds vulgarity and filth repugnant,’ fumed the magistrate who fined Clore after warning that the reputation of all London theatres was injured by this ‘disgusting stuff’. Although Titman privately wrote that ‘during these proceedings, Mr Clore has behaved in an exemplary manner, and I believe his concern at being in conflict with the Lord Chamberlain to be genuine’, the affair of the blown raspberry was preserved in Metropolitan Police files, where it was treated as if Clore had been convicted of obscenity. A few months later, Scotland Yard received an anonymous letter denouncing Clore for ‘attempting to procure chorus girls … for immoral purposes’, but detectives found no evidence to support this allegation.16
Clore in 1939 led a syndicate that paid £250,000 to buy the London Casino, a cabaret restaurant with a revolving circular dance floor, in Old Compton Street, Soho (now the Prince Edward Theatre). Reporting this deal, The Times described Clore as ‘a well-known dealer in property’. In official papers he called himself, on the basis of owning the Token Construction Company, a government building contractor. His purchase for £120,000 of the Dowager Countess of Seafield’s 50,000-acre Balmacaan estate in Inverness-shire led to parliamentary questions in 1943, and a request by the Secretary of State for Scotland for a confidential Scotland Yard investigation of this ‘land speculator’. The request was handled by Sir Norman Kendal, Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, who shortly before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 had cancelled an official visit to the Nazis which would have included a lecture on policing methods by SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and a tour of the Dachau facilities. (‘I am more sorry than I can tell you to miss seeing you and all my other friends,’ Kendal wrote to Heydrich’s deputy, ‘but we must hope for better luck some other time.’) Little surprise, then, that Kendal characterised Clore to the Chief Constable of Edinburgh, for the Secretary of State’s information, as ‘an unscrupulous Jew upon whose word no reliance whatever can be placed’, and reported a hotchpotch of hearsay, before concluding, ‘anyone having any dealings with him must keep both eyes wide open’.17
After D-Day in 1944, Clore began buying commercial sites. His company directorships proliferated. He was targeted in further anonymous letters to Scotland Yard and the Director of Public Prosecutions (‘Clore is a Jew of the worst type who flagrantly flouts the laws and traffics generally in black market business,’ began one denunciation, eighteen months after the enormity of the Holocaust was known); but police enquiries found no grounds to prosecute him.18
It was Clore in 1953, rather than, as has been claimed, Siegmund Warburg in 1958, who masterminded the first-ever hostile takeover, in which a controlling shareholding in a public company was bought on the open market with the intention of ousting the company’s management and board. Clore’s target was J. Sears’ Tru-Form Boot Company, which owned 950 footwear shops, and several factories. Stealthily, he bought Sears shares, through nominees, and accumulated a secret ‘warehoused’ holding. Then, without prior consultation with the Sears directors, at a time when their company’s shares were valued at about fourteen shillings, and yielded an income of about fourpence a share, he offered forty shillings in cash for each share, combined with an alternative offer whereby the shareholders could retain twenty per cent of their equity interest. Shareholders who took this option did well. There was a furious battle, with much retaliatory newspaper comment, all of which Clore relished. The Sears directors tried to rally their shareholders’ support with the assurance that over £6 million could be raised by selling properties. As the properties were valued in Sears’s books at £2.3 million, irritated shareholders voted for Clore, who got control of seventy per cent of the equity. He sold the freeholds of the shoe shops to insurance companies at a large capital profit, but continued to sell shoes from them. After the Sears deal, Brendan Bracken traduced Clore as one of ‘the invading Israelites’.19
Contested takeovers suited the brutality of Clore’s character. ‘The phrase “takeover bid”,’ said the Labour politician Anthony Crosland in 1954, ‘conjures a picture, half-glamorous and half-repellent, of tough, astute and immensely rich financiers coolly gambling on the Stock Exchange for stakes that are measured in millions of pounds.’ It was a moot question, thought Crosland, whether to call such men the ‘apotheosis of the spiv’ or the ‘best type of merchant adventurer’. Either way, they repudiated traditional notions of respectability and trampled accepted codes of behaviour. Their bounds seemed illimitable. In 1963, in a satirical song about parvenus, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann sang: ‘Hell has just been taken over by a friend of Charlie Clore.’20
The developers were proud of being danger men. They were not public school boys trained by rules about the number of buttons that might be fastened on a blazer, or to venerate spurious traditions. They scorned, and in turn were despised by, the old guard. ‘For a long time there has been no fundamental change in the board,’ Sir John Hanbury-Williams, chairman of Courtaulds, mused in 1952. ‘There has been a Gentlemen’s Club atmosphere in the Board Room, and it is true to say that over the years this has spread to all Departments of our business. It is, in fact, part of the goodwill of the Company, which we must safeguard.’ Similarly, the financial coordinator of Shell who emphasised that profit was the prime end of business was told to ‘tone it down a bit’. One of ICI’s divisional chairmen said proudly: ‘We think of ourselves as being a university with a purpose.’ Another senior ICI man had an alternate corporate ideal: ‘We are very similar to the Administrative Class of the Civil Service.’ The military baronet who was Director General of the Institute of Directors described his organisation with satisfaction in 1962 as ‘a gigantic Old Boy network’. Men who thought like this were as much Clore’s prey as the Banbury shopkeepers.21
Clore acquired other shoe retailers, such as Dolcis (250 shops bought for £5.8 million in 1956), combining these into the British Shoe Corporation, which in the 1960s controlled almost one-quarter of the British retail shoe trade. His other acquisitions included the Mappin and Webb jewellery group in 1957 and Lewis’s Investment Trust (controlling Selfridges) in 1965. His property company, City and Central Investments, spent years acquiring land near Park Lane and obtaining planning permissions to build a skyscraper hotel, for which in 1960 Clore signed a contract with the American hotelier Conrad Hilton. One passer-by, who blanched at the hotel’s execrable design, commented in 1963: ‘I resent belonging to a society which gets, for instance, such things as London’s new Hilton hotel.’22
Early in Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, Clore and his wife were launched in London Society by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, who oversaw the guest list of their first ball and coaxed the smart and worldly to accept Clore’s invitations. ‘They liked “Charlie boy” for his malapropisms and social gaffes, and they liked him even more when his French wife … left him to stand on his own unsteady social feet,’ wrote his friend George Weidenfeld, who ‘watched the interplay between the newly risen tycoon and his socially unassailable mentors with fascination and amusement. I loved Charlie Clore for himself and because he provided priceless anthropological source material.’ Soon, according to Beaverbrook, Clore ranked with Niarchos and Onassis, the Greek shipowners, as the social leaders on the French Riviera – besought at parties from Monte Carlo to Cannes. When approached in 1962 by the Society magazine Queen for a profile, he allowed them to photograph the prize cow of his Berkshire farm, but refused to be quoted: ‘I haven’t got a bad eye at ping-pong,’ was almost his only on-the-record remark. He had an imperious presence. ‘All his life,’ wrote Charles Gordon, ‘he had the feeling of divine right, that he was superior.’ His privileges had to be indisputable: he was resolved never to make amends. If he suspected that his staff served him less than the best, they were given a drubbing. It was unforgivable to serve him with pears for dessert: pears were ‘provincial – his most pejorative word’; for him only the choicest, out-of-season grapes would satisfy. ‘He worshipped at only one altar: money,’ Gordon continued. ‘His grasping for it was a form of gluttony, an appetite that was never satisfied.’23
Clore declared that he was always unhappy and had never known anyone who could truthfully say they were happy. His sexual pride and possessiveness were outraged when his wife left him in 1956. Thereafter he embarked on a libidinous rampage that lasted almost until his death. ‘His virility and his appetite for women unnerved many of his social and business acquaintances, leading them to accept a subordinate status in their personal relationships and therefore inferior terms in their business transactions with him,’ Gordon said. ‘He would always win. He would always get what he wanted. Not only all the money in the world, but all the girls in the world. Girls were for his pleasure, the taller and younger the better, and every night if possible, right into his seventies until his final illness. In his prime it was any girl of any social level. All that mattered was availability.’ Some businessmen, who wanted to make deals with him, procured girls for him. ‘His sexual will was indomitable. Some women were attracted by it; others fought it and succumbed; others were repelled by it.’ Dinner parties were ruined by his relentless groping of women sitting beside him, whom he had first met only an hour earlier. ‘He couldn’t wait; he had to have it now. He hadn’t the slightest concern for the sexual niceties.’24
Henry Fairlie egged Macmillan to recommend Clore for a life peerage in 1961: ‘I would not be the only one who would attend the House of Lords if it was known that Lord Clore was to take part in the annual debate on the Budget.’ But when Simon Raven in 1962 decried the ‘money-grubbing’ modernisers and ‘hatchet-faced middlemen guzzling smoked salmon in Quaglino’s’, who wished to replace ‘complacency, nepotism, charm, the amateur spirit’ with barbarisms like ‘technical efficiency, professionalism, smart sales talk’, he showed the forces arrayed against Clore.25
Clore liked to move among the gentile aristocracy. Lord Fermoy, whose granddaughter became Diana, Princess of Wales, was his first ornamental ‘guinea-pig’ director – of a company underwriting capital issues formed in 1937. He regarded the Fermoy class, as he did most people, with contempt. When he went to Deauville for the August races he could be seen scrutin-ising the banquettes in the bar of his hotel to find someone who wanted to be seen having a drink with Charlie Clore. There was always someone who would buy Clore’s drinks, consult his views, nod keenly at his gruff, disobliging remarks, and (if his stooge were accompanied by a young second wife) tolerate her being undressed by Clore’s sharp, cold eyes or groped by his small manicured hands. He said that he would never marry his long-term companion, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, because what he liked best about her was her title. He cherished his East End accent, and liked to disrupt smart dinners with the remark: ‘I’m just a little Jewish boy who has learned one or two things in life.’26
Clore was the embodiment of the modernisation crisis in Macmillan’s England. That he was a breaker as well as a builder was shown by the scuppering of two men, Jack Cotton and Walter Flack, after Clore agreed in 1960 to merge his City and Central Investments property portfolio with their City Centre Properties.
Jack Cotton was born at Edgbaston in 1903. His father was an import-export merchant trading in silver plate cutlery, and treasurer of Birmingham’s chief synagogue. When he passed the examinations of the Auctioneers’ Institute, his mother lent him £50 with which, on his twenty-first birthday, he opened his own estate agency in Birmingham. Cotton acted as a middleman between farmers and speculative builders interested in suburban ribbon development around Birmingham in the early 1930s. His first great development was peculiarly satisfying: the demolition of King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, where as a pupil he had been victimised, and its replacement by an office block. Cotton had completed his education at Corinth House, a special boarding house for Jewish boys at Cheltenham College. The housemaster, Daniel Lipson, was elected in a famous by-election of 1937 as the Independent Conservative MP for Cheltenham after members of the constituency party refused to endorse the candidature of a Jew; he was accepted as a Conservative by the Prime Minister, Chamberlain, but Cheltenham Conservative Association continued to refuse him membership.
During the war Cotton served in the Home Guard and was employed by the government in factory building. He was a British delegate of the World Jewish Congress in 1945, and visited the USA to promote emigration to Palestine. In the early months of peace, he was expelled from the Auctioneers’ Institute after a dodgy deal. He left Birmingham, separating from his wife around the same time, and moved into suite 120 at the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane. Cecil Beaton described the Dorchester’s habitués around this time as ‘Cabinet Ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty; actresses (also); déclassé Society people; cheap musicians; and motor-car agents.’ So, too, did Elizabeth Bowen’s lover, Charles Ritchie: ‘In the Dorchester the sweepings of the Riviera have been washed up – pot-bellied, sallow, sleek-haired nervous gentlemen with loose mouths and wobbly chins, wearing suede shoes and checked suits, and thin painted women with fox capes, long silk legs and small artificial curls.’ It was a rendezvous of new-money millionaires, and old. Associated with the Dorchester, too, were the ‘Hyde Park Rangers’, as Park Lane street-walkers were known. They warmed themselves on cold nights by an air vent known as ‘the hotplate’ at the hotel’s rear.27
Cotton could stroll along any street in central London, or provincial high street, and value each site. He took fast decisions which investors trusted. He imbued confidence in nervous money men. When his schemes grew too big for his company City Centre Properties to finance alone, he entered development partnerships with Legal and General Assurance and Pearl Insurance – collaborations that were widely copied. Cotton was the first developer to realise that pension funds were better partners than insurance companies because their investment managers could take a longer view. The pension funds of ICI, Imperial Tobacco, and Unilever had all financed his developments by the early 1960s.
When Cotton’s daughter married a stockbroker in 1957, he rented a special train to carry guests from the ceremony in Birmingham to the reception in London. Newspaper headlines about ‘The Mink and Champagne Express’ stood above tales of his ostentatious hospitality. Cotton relished the attention, which felt like a tribute to him. Thenceforth he was always available to journalists, and thrived as a capitalist for the headlines. In 1958 he had an attack of mumps which left distressing after-effects. To compensate for his diminished potency, Cotton became ‘over-assertive and hyper-active’, said Gordon, who saw him often. ‘His constant search for new partners, his striving for new associations, new friends, new projects, his accelerating all-consuming obsession with publicity were part of his attempt … to find a substitute for his loss of virility.’ Cotton was racked by Clore’s sexual arrogance. His envy of other men’s potency gnawed at him. He became obsessed with size. As he admitted in 1962, ‘I feel I’m growing smaller as I grow older.’28
Buildings erected by City Centre Properties had to be big and obvious. His most enduring monuments were phallic eyesores like the Big Top shop complex in Birmingham or the misnamed Campden Hill Towers at Notting Hill Gate. There was monotony, Cotton felt, in districts where buildings were the same height. He thought his developments brought thrills to the skyline. ‘Have you been through Notting Hill lately?’ he asked an interviewer. ‘Well, go and look. There you get an example of broken skyline with a very tall block of flats and lower units near it, and your eyes travel up.’ A man who lived in the shadow of this development recorded how his house shuddered as for months the mechanical pile-drivers slammed down every few seconds. Cracks appeared in several rooms: it was like being under German aerial bombardment.29
Cotton lived with the ex-nanny of his children. He treasured a small, ginger teddy bear in a striped blazer inscribed: ‘I may look busy. I am the boss.’ He collected miniature bottles, and laughed uproariously at the Crazy Gang. Paintings by Renoir and Fantin-Latour hung on the walls of his Dorchester suite. An Osbert Lancaster cartoon in the Daily Express of 1962 featured a caricature of a Jewish plutocrat, clutching a cigar and sitting beneath a picture of an ugly skyscraper resembling the Hilton hotel: ‘Withdraw that offer for Berkeley Square and buy a Renoir – quick!’ he barks into his telephone. The Dorchester suite became a haunt from which Cotton’s truer friends were expelled by sly sycophants, who plied him with booze in the hope of tempting him to market tips. Solitude was intolerable to him. His armada of vehicles was headed by a monarchical Rolls-Royce, with the number plate JC1, and descended to a shooting brake, JC9. He trademarked his spruce, gleaming appearance by sporting a bow tie which matched the folded handkerchief in his breast pocket; there was usually a red carnation in his buttonhole from the greenhouses at his Marlow-on-Thames home. His exuberant showmanship reminded one interviewer of an impresario. Another journalist, who found Cotton’s accent ‘hard to place’, likened him to a leading actor: ‘pink face, sensitive nose and mouth, and dark hair that tends to curl’.30
City Centre Properties retained its name after its merger in 1960 with Clore’s City and Central Investments (the new company had an inflated stock market valuation of £65 million). Cotton remained chairman. Hitherto his staff had comprised a few accountants, clerks, and typists. He kept the details of his business in his head, or in a few files which were heaped on a spare bed in his Dorchester lair. The suite was littered with maps of London, newspaper cuttings and surveyors’ reports. It had a private telephone switchboard, a pretty telephonist and vivacious secretaries. These methods proved too haphazard for an expanded dominion in which Clore was the other potentate. After hammering by Clore and sniping from institutional shareholders, Cotton relinquished City Centre’s chairmanship in July 1963.31 His shares in the company (held by family trusts) were sold in November for £8.5 million to a consortium headed by Wolfson. A month after leaving City Centre’s board in 1964, Cotton died of a heart attack in the Bahamas. He had outlived by a year his own victim, Walter Flack.
There was nothing stifled or cloistered about Flack. He had been born in 1915 to parents who wished him to become a solicitor. Having failed to matriculate at secondary school, he talked his way into a Mayfair estate agency which trained several eminent developers, including Harry Hyams and Maxwell Joseph. He was inordinately proud of reaching the rank of sergeant during the Second World War. After demobilisation, he returned to his old firm, but was sacked after a row with its senior partner, who objected to the smoke from his long, curly pipe. Flack set up as a property developer on his own account, and in 1958 paid £11,000 for a shell company, Murrayfield, which acted as the vehicle for his schemes. He recruited as its non-executive chairman his wartime commander, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, whom he revered. He was so proud of his association with ‘the Auk’ that he commissioned a bronze bust of the Field Marshal which was put on a pedestal in the bow-fronted, ground-floor window of Murrayfield’s offices in St James’s Street. The bow window and bust were the reasons for his eccentricity in locating his offices in the middle of clubland.
Murrayfield specialised in provincial shopping centres. Its schemes required long preliminary negotiations with councillors and council officials. As most of the councils which launched major redevelopments of their town centres in this period were Labour-controlled, Flack cultivated Sir Frank Price, the influential Labour leader in Birmingham, whose contacts proved invaluable to Murrayfield. The company’s first major development was a shopping centre in Basildon New Town, Essex. The Basildon worthies liked Flack’s scheme, but asked if he had the financial clout to put it through. Flack rose from his chair, paced back and forth across the council chamber in frowning thought before exclaiming to the committee: ‘I’ve got the answer: I’ll give you my personal guarantee!’ The worthies were charmed by this performance, and settled terms with Flack.32
A City editor’s profile in 1963 catches the man. ‘Walter Flack loved to be known as Sergeant Flack, a rank he gained with the Eighth Army. He told me once: “It is a very respectable rank, cock.” He formed the Sergeants’ Club – a drinking and dining get-together of sergeants who made a big postwar success. Sergeant Flack was its chairman.’ He also gave an annual ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ party for old-age pensioners at a Westminster pub, where he sometimes served behind the bar for fun. His wife Louise, an intense and vivid woman, ‘had married him long before he reached the big time. It was she who kept him “ticking”, for he had the moody up-and-down temperament that often goes with brilliance.’33
Flack brandished his confidence, and tried to keep his insecurity hidden in a lead-lined box. He had the mannerisms of a cheeky errand boy. His smile was wide, but his gaiety was disarming. He was both direct and sly. He told stories with the timing of a musical-hall comedian. ‘He was sometimes so winning it was dangerous to be in his company, safer to write a letter or to negotiate with him on the telephone,’ Gordon recalled. ‘Even that provided no immunity from his powerful wheedling charm.’ Flack loved cricket, and was a voracious, self-improving reader, who took up new interests with ephemeral zest. Heraldry became one of his fleeting enthusiasms: in 1961 he obtained a grant of armorial bearings from the College of Arms featuring a heraldic version of bricks and mortar with the motto ‘Bien Bâtir’ (‘Good to Build’). His steam-yacht Isambard Brunel was named after one of his heroes. People either liked his gusto, or mistrusted him as too bouncy. He had a streak of malice, and could be cruel. This side of his temperament did not fit with the rest of him; he wore it, said Gordon, like somebody else’s overcoat. Flack drank alcohol too deeply (the whisky sometimes started at ten in the morning), and became envenomed when drunk.34
Flack liked lording it in pubs, but hunted people with titles. In 1961 he invited Gordon for what he called a ‘tayte-a-tayte’ in Murrayfield’s offices, with the bronze statue of Auchinleck confronting passers-by. Flack was beaming with pride as he introduced Gordon to the other men collected in his shiny mock-Regency room: Dickon Lumley, young heir of Lord Scarbrough, the Lord Chamberlain; Anthony Berry, a Tory parliamentary candidate and son of Lord Kemsley; a stockbroker, Rupert Loewenstein – ‘Prince Loewenstein, he underscored’; and then Flack swelled, his waistcoat with its gold watch-chain bulging round his plump girth, his voice resembling a music-hall compère announcing his star act, as he introduced Archduke Otto von Habsburg, son of the last Emperor of Austria. ‘You know the Prince, of course,’ he said to Gordon.35
In 1959, in order to alleviate Murrayfield’s high leverage, Flack agreed a deal with Cotton involving an exchange of shares between Murrayfield and City Centre Properties. Two years later Murrayfield was completely absorbed into City Centre, by then Britain’s largest property company. Flack, who joined its board, was not disposed to defer to Cotton or Clore: the latter in particu-lar found him too much of a buck.
Mandy Rice-Davies’s claim that she had an affair with Flack surfaced once he was dead and unable to issue denials, but certainly, during 1962, he separated from his wife, with whom he was well-matched in vivacity and louche charm. In January 1963, he crumpled under the buffeting of his clashes with Cotton, and resigned from City Centre Properties. On 22 March (aged forty-seven), he had the death that Clore peculiarly dreaded – by drowning. He was found by his chauffeur immersed in a bath in his flat in Whitehall Court: he had taken barbiturates with alcohol. The coroner’s verdict accepted that he had accidentally fallen asleep while washing. Even if he did not intend to kill himself, there was a despondent rashness about his last weeks. His widow, who inherited his estate (valued at £840,801 in 1963), settled on Cap Ferrat, with a yacht at Villefranche. She felt a rueful tenderness for his memory, and bitterness towards Cotton and Clore for hounding him to perdition.
Flack was a tangle of a man: bumptious, vulnerable and self-destructive. There were anomalies, too, about that great hate-figure of 1963, the slum landlord Rachman, at once a brute and victimised refugee, whose surname inspired a hostile epithet, Rachmanism, but whose villainy came with redeeming traits and extenuating experiences.
Perec Rachman was a Polish Jew born at Lvov in 1919. As a dentist’s son, he had a middle-class upbringing. ‘The Polish attitude to the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish, and can neither swallow nor spit it out,’ recalled a contemporary who fled to Palestine. ‘The fear in every Jewish home, the fear we never talked about, but which we were unintentionally injected with, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enough, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing.’ It was instilled in these children that they must remain polite when insulted by drunkards, that they must never haggle, that their manners should be submissive and smiling. ‘We must always speak to them in good, correct Polish, so they couldn’t say that we were defiling their language, but that we mustn’t speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn’t say we had ambitions over our station.’ There was an obsession, too, with hygiene: ‘even a single child with dirty hair who spread lice could damage the reputation of the entire Jewish people’. This was the mentality in which Rachman spent his boyhood; and against which his adulthood was a furious, wounded, panicky reaction.36
In 1940, after the German invasion of Poland, Rachman aged twenty-one was forced into a chain-gang building an autobahn towards Russia. His parents vanished into the oblivion of the concentration camps; years later, in England, when asked what had happened to them, he would shrug silently. After escaping from German captivity, he fled towards the Soviet Union, where he nearly starved to death. He used to say that he survived by stealing a barrel of caviar, which he had to eat long after its richness had sickened him: thereafter the sight of the black fishy eggs made him retch. Another story was that hunger drove him to eat human turds, but he liked to add savagely: ‘I never ate German shit. At least no one can say I ever ate that.’37 Even if one discounts the factual accuracy of these tales, they expressed a psychological truth for Rachman. The caviar and the shit showed what life felt like for him.
After capture by Soviet forces, Rachman was sent to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle. When Hitler sent troops to invade Russia and rid the world of the Jewish-Bolshevik menace, Rachman was drafted into a Polish army corps organised by the Russians, which joined the invasion of Italy in 1943. Rachman worked in the corps’ supply depot, where he proved indispensable in procuring and dispensing soap, cigarettes, chocolate and coffee which could be exchanged by soldiers for the sexual services of Italian women. He learnt passable German, Russian and Italian by 1945, when he began teaching himself English. A Polish second-lieutenant who met him at this time remembered him as a stereotype, ‘always trying to get something out of you – always looking for an opening to do a deal’.38
Rachman remained with the occupying troops in Italy until December 1946, when he sailed for Britain. He was kept in Polish corps resettlement camps in Scotland during a notoriously harsh winter. In 1947 he was moved to a resettlement camp in Oxfordshire, where he amused his dormitory companions by kissing goodnight at bedtime Rita Hayworth’s face on a wall poster. In 1948 he took his first English job, in Cohen’s veneer factory, earning £4 10s a week. He rented a squalid room in Stepney, and got evening work as a washer-up at Bloom’s, the famous Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. After about eight months he went to work in a tailor’s workshop in Soho, and got better digs at Golders Green. He was eager for social acceptance, but as a middle-class Polish Jew whose upbringing had instilled the notion that he was primarily a Pole and secondarily a Jew, his avidity made him inadmissible in every set. Polish exiles in London certainly rejected him. ‘He spoke the average Polish,’ said Karol Zbyszewski, editor of Dziennik Polski, London’s daily Polish-language newspaper, ‘not like most Jews making a hundred mistakes in every sentence.’ After Rachman’s death, Zbyszewski complained that he had been quoted as saying that Rachman had made him feel ashamed at being Polish. ‘I never said such a thing,’ Zbyszewski insisted. ‘I said I was ashamed Rachman claimed to be a Pole – because he was not a Pole. He was a Jew, and that’s a very different thing.’39
Around 1950, Rachman left Golders Green for a Paddington bedsit. He was selling cheap suitcases, uncured sheepskin, and contraband Swiss watches. ‘The best time to catch me in my office is between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.,’ he would tell men with whom he was trying to fix a deal. He gave them the number of a red telephone kiosk on a Paddington street, and ensconced himself inside for an hour each afternoon heedless of angry thumps on the door. In every way he prowled like a fox at the edge of a poultry farm. He was surrounded in Paddington, as before in Soho, by prostitutes whom he used when he could afford them. ‘Women,’ he said, ‘are like food. You are fond of chicken? OK. But eat it every day and you’ll soon be bored. Now try a little duck, and the chicken will taste much better.’40
A brunette called Gloria, whose pimp was a black jazz musician, suggested to him that he should start a flat-letting agency. The idea was that he would rent flats in his own name, and sub-let them to individual prostitutes (two women working together counted as a brothel, but a lone female in a flat was beyond legal reach). Rachman opened a letting agency at the corner of Westbourne Grove with Monmouth Road: his stygian office, beneath pavement level, was reached by descending the narrow stone stairs into a basement. A rent of £5 a week was entered in prostitutes’ rent books, but Rachman took an additional £10 a week in cash. Other landlords in the vicinity used him as letting agent and rent collector; he also emptied pennies from gas meters into a bucket which he carried with him.
In 1954 Rachman formed his first companies, Six Norfolk Square Ltd and Eight Norfolk Square Ltd, in collaboration with the property dealer Cyril Foux, and the latter’s solicitor brother. Cyril Foux was a sharp, natty man, quick-moving but oblique, with a near-spiv moustache and a sardonic attitude to those he thought fools. He had been born in Hackney in 1920, married a girl with rich parents, Leila Leigh, at Hendon in 1951, and acquired smart offices in Maddox Street, Mayfair. Norfolk Square, a short walk from Paddington station, was lined by small hotels of the sort described by Anthony Powell in 1955 as pervaded by ‘an air of secret, melancholy guilt’.41
A nearby area of similar dinginess was the Charecroft Estate, terraces of tall mid-Victorian houses abutting Shepherds Bush Green, with leases reverting in the late 1950s and early 1960s (the freeholds were owned by a charity called the Campden Trustees). The premises were packed by tenants paying statutorily controlled low rents, and had a high turnover of landlords who wished to avoid repair bills. A property dealer called Lieutenant Colonel George Sinclair bought a batch of end-of-lease properties on the Charecroft Estate, and sold thirty of them to Rachman. Sinclair had a quaint address: ‘The House Beyond’, The Avenue, Farnham Common, not far from his registered offices in Slough; and a quaint hobby, too, driving carriage and horses.
Victorian speculative builders had erected terraces of houses throughout Bloomsbury, Islington, Kensington, and Pimlico, on sites leased from aristocratic families which still owned swathes of the capital’s land. As with the Charecroft Estate, the lessees granted ninety-nine-year leases to the tenants, which meant that many central London leases were due to expire between 1950 and 1975. The Victorians had envisaged that when their heirs repossessed their freeholds, the properties would have risen in status and increased in value. Instead, as the size of families shrank and servants became scarcer, families moved from big terraced houses to smaller suburban properties. Those people who owned their leases, and stayed behind, sub-let floors to cover running costs. Soon the floors were sub-divided, and surreptitiously sub-sub-let, room by room, turning desirable houses into squalid, even disreputable rooming houses. Freeholders stopped enforcing the terms of leases or resisting sub-letting. Moreover, few landlords could afford proper upkeep of such buildings during the long postwar period of statutory rent control, when the rents of sitting tenants in unfurnished flats and rooms were frozen at 1939 levels. Even if landlords managed to dislodge the sitting tenants, and let furnished rooms at uncontrolled rents, they did not smarten the exteriors of their properties for fear of attracting the interest of tax collectors or other snoopers.42
One of the Victorian speculative developments, which had been forsaken by the middle classes, was the Colville Estate, comprising five-storey stucco houses with porticos and balustrades built in too northern a district of Kensington to be fashionable. The accommodation, twenty-seven per cent of which had been vacant before the war, was monstrously overpopulated by 1945. ‘There wasn’t a cupboard that didn’t have somebody in it,’ recalled Mark Strutt, who together with a Norfolk baronet had inherited control of the estate. ‘The houses had been sub-let and sub-sub-let without our consent, and they were filled with prostitutes, burglars, murderers and negroes,’ he complained. He and the baronet decided that Colville was ‘not an estate that our sort of families should be associated with’, and could not face the outcry that would be aroused if they evicted existing tenants so that the muddle of rented rooms could be converted into proper flats.43
In 1950 they sold the Colville Estate to a speculator named Benson Greenall, who had been born at Ashton-under-Lyne in 1890, enlisted in the Cheshire Regiment in August 1914, was appointed as a Housing and Town Planning Inspector under the Ministry of Health in 1925, but had become a developer by 1929 when he bought historic Lansdowne House, off Piccadilly, after the death of the old marquess – Dorothy Macmillan’s uncle. He subsequently erected a block containing ninety-five luxury flats, offices, the Austin car showroom, a cinema and restaurant in Lansdowne House’s gardens which dominated the south side of Berkeley Square. He floated Lansdowne House (Berkeley Square) Limited with gratifying profit in 1936. At a time when British taxpayers were being mulcted by their government, it was Greenall who in 1948 pioneered the development of Grand Cayman Island as an offshore tax haven. Noticing that the island, twenty miles by six in area, rising from a gin-coloured stretch of the Caribbean waters, was exempt from taxation, he brought the first bank to Georgetown, established an airfield, built a hotel and launched that most lucrative light industry: tax evasion. His second wife, Melisande Dalrymple, whom he married in 1946, was related to Oscar Wilde.
Greenall bought the Colville Estate for £250,000, which he paid by negotiating a hundred per cent mortgage. As the Labour government had imposed a lending limit of £50,000, he split the estate between five companies, each of which borrowed £50,000 from a clearing bank. Greenall sold his Colville properties in parcels during the next few years: his profits partly funded his pioneering developments on Grand Cayman Island during the 1950s. Years of poor maintenance meant that most Colville lessees were in default of their leases. The new freeholders scared them with Notices of Dilapidations, whereby the law would oblige them to spend thousands of pounds repairing the houses to comply with their leases; then bought back the leases themselves, and thus got control of their properties. Lacking the qualms of the Strutts, Greenall issued notices to quit to unprotected tenants, and sold a hundred Colville houses to George Sinclair, with whom Rachman had dealt over the Charecroft Estate.
Sinclair introduced Rachman to Abraham Kramer, a methodical, quietly spoken solicitor with a practice in Portland Place specialising in property. Kramer controlled money held in trust, which he used to loan to clients to fund their purchases of property from Sinclair. In 1955, at Sinclair’s instigation, Kramer formed a shell (non-trading) company called Rimmywood Investments of which his wife Dorothy was the nominal director. Rimmywood became the vehicle for Rachman’s activities. A mortgage of £9,600 was advanced to Rimmywood by Unilever’s Union Pension Trust, which dealt with Sinclair and Kramer, but never directly with Rachman. He thus acquired four houses in St Stephen’s Gardens, and six in Powis Terrace (‘our driver was shocked by the squalor of Powis Terrace’, Christopher Isherwood wrote after visiting David Hockney there: ‘peeling houses, trashcans spilling over sidewalks, seedy shops run by thin pop-eyed Pakistanis’). Next year, in 1956, Rimmywood acquired four more Powis Terrace houses, and one in Colville Terrace. Also in 1956 Sinclair and Kramer obtained a mortgage of £6,700 from Union Pension Trust for a shell company called Flynbrook Securities, which acquired three houses in Colville Road, and four in Powis Gardens. Some months later Rachman became sole shareholder in Flynbrook.44
Next, he took over the shares in Rillianwood Investments, a company holding twenty tail-end leases in Wymering Mansions, a run-down Edwardian mansion block on the Paddington side of Maida Vale (it was to be from there, in 1966, that Harry Roberts set out to steal a get-away car for a robbery, and ended up shooting dead three policemen at Shepherds Bush). Other Rachman companies bought further houses in Colville Terrace, Powis Terrace and Powis Square. By the end of 1956, Rachman controlled thirty houses near Shepherds Bush Green, twenty flats in Wymering Mansions, and thirty houses in Notting Hill.
Rent control and security of tenure only applied to ‘stats’ – statutorily controlled sitting tenants of unfurnished lettings. Tenants of furnished flats and rooms (with their narrow beds, chipped washstands, cupboards with wobbly legs standing on worn linoleum floors) had no protection, and could be given a month’s notice to quit. In consequence, Rachman let his flats and rooms furnished whenever possible. Rents became decontrolled once ‘stats’ vacated their homes: rents far above 1939 values could then be levied on new tenants. Rachman’s preferred technique for dislodging ‘stats’ was what he called ‘putting in the schwartzers’.45 He hired black thugs to intimidate white tenants, or occasionally deployed white hooligans against black tenants, and obtained vacant possession by coercion. Bullies with Alsatians would wrench the doors of communal lavatories off their hinges, sever gas, water, and electricity supplies, break into flats, smash furniture, rip up floorboards, remove roof tiles, and conduct interminable, filthy building work. Deafening music would be played to stop tenants from getting a night’s sleep. Once properties were vacated, Rachman would ‘sweat’ them, either by overcrowding them with Caribbean immigrants, or by leasing them at high rents to brothel keepers or shebeens. His profiteering from racial tensions, and that of many other unscrupulous landlords, contributed to the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.
Rachman was able to collect £10,000 a year in rent for a house which cost him £1,500. By 1959 he controlled about eighty houses. The muddle of interlocking companies fronted by nominee directors made it impossible to identify the beneficial owner of a property, which frustrated the serving of sanitary notices or certificates of disrepair. Companies were wound up, and properties reassigned to other companies, in order to keep a defective drain festering and drive out the statutory tenants. The Metropolitan Police, Ministry of Housing, council officials, public health authorities, and rent tribunals all tried to catch him in legal nets, but their meshes were too wide.
Before the Race Relations Act of 1965 outlawed discrimination on the basis of skin colour and ethnicity, immigrants faced cards in rooming-house front windows specifying ‘No Coloureds’. They were expected to apologise for causing embarrassment. ‘I find it most strange,’ wrote a refugee from South African apartheid in 1962, ‘that I am expected, on the telephone, to say that I am sorry that a landlady is sorry that she does not take Coloureds.’ Those landladies who said, as if bestowing a royal favour, ‘I don’t mind Coloureds’, nevertheless imposed humiliating rules on their tenants, such as a maximum of two visitors at a time.46
Rachman was exceptional in letting rooms to black people who could not otherwise find accommodation. He charged £6 a week for a flat for which a statutorily controlled tenant paid only £1. Sometimes he was patient with black tenants who fell into rent arrears; perhaps he felt affinities with them. Like Rachman, they belonged to a minority which was apprehended as anti-social by the majority. In reaction, like him, some chose to be seen and heard flouting the manners of the host community and to sail as close-hauled as possible to the law. ‘To the West Indian he was a saviour, and people still have a lot of respect for him,’ Rachman’s biographer was told by a Caribbean social worker whom she interviewed in the 1970s. ‘He was a swinging guy,’ said a Jamaican. ‘He liked us, and we liked him.’ He would offer ‘a tenner’ to West Indian men loitering on the Notting Hill streets if they would clear a house of ‘stat’ tenants for him. ‘He had his strong-arm men like everybody else,’ said one of his enforcers, ‘but basically he was a good bloke. While he was alive, I never heard anything against him, and when he died I was sad.’47
Rachman was short, chubby-faced, plump and balding. He wore tinted spectacles, which gave him a sinister look. A gold bracelet, which was locked to his wrist, was supposedly inscribed with serial numbers of his Swiss bank accounts and safe combinations. He always had a roll of banknotes in his pocket and sported Churchillian cigars. Despite his silk shirts, cashmere suits, and crocodile shoes, he looked sloppy. In his early years in England, when he was poor, he impressed several acquaintances with his thoughtful kindness. Later, although he was moody, people often found him polite, reasonably intelligent and mildly amusing. In prosperity his fleet of motor cars included a red Rolls-Royce saloon, and a blue Rolls-Royce convertible, in which he liked to drive about London showing off flashy blondes.
The Kenco coffee house in Queensway, rather than his basement office, was where Rachman spent his mornings seeing contacts and making cash deals. He would lunch in an expense account Mayfair restaurant, such as the Coq d’Or or Les Ambassadeurs, with a blonde. During his afternoons he played chess at a Polish restaurant, Daquise, near South Kensington station, or sat in the Kardomah coffee house in the King’s Road, ogling the passing Chelsea girls. He diversified into club management, first with a basement gambling club at the New Court Hotel in Inverness Terrace, Paddington; then with the El Condor nightclub (later renamed La Discotheque) in Wardour Street, Soho; and finally the 150 Club, a decorous gambling den in Earls Court Road. In the evenings he would make a round from the New Court, via El Condor, to the 150.
Contamination was Rachman’s obsessive fear. The world seemed to him a mire of dirt and effluent. People, too, were filthy in their secretions. Memories of the lice that infested him during the war, disgust at the cockroaches, ants, fleas and worms with which the planet teemed, drove him to take three baths a day, with a bottle of the disinfectant Dettol poured into the steaming water each time. Unless he scrubbed, the creepy-crawlies would take over. He drenched himself in eau de cologne, and wore silk underwear to counteract memories of the coarse soiled rags of the Soviet labour camp. He never drank alcohol, would request mineral water when he ate out, refused to drink from glasses in case they were dirty and swilled his water straight from the bottle. He accused a waiter who touched the rim of a bottle of mineral water while opening it of trying to poison him. Before eating in a restaurant he would inspect its kitchen, and yell reproaches if he thought that the cutlery was unclean. The Spanish au pair at his Hampstead Garden Suburb house had to sterilise cutlery after each meal. Rachman would rinse and re-rinse plates himself before he would let meals be served to his guests; plates reached the table dripping wet. To the end of his life, as security against starvation, he hoarded snacks under his bed and stockpiled his homes with food.
Servility combined with aggression in Rachman’s character. He was both affectionate and mistrustful. He oscillated between raucous generosity to his intimates and pre-emptive inhumanity against strangers. He liked the company of handsome wrestlers as much as he did decorative blondes, for he longed for rough and tumble. He said: ‘If you have one true friend you are lucky. If you have two you are very lucky. If you tell me you have three you must be a liar.’48 Serge Paplinski, who had been dragooned into the Polish partisans at the age of thirteen and had a murderous wartime history, was spotted by Rachman on a London street sometime after his expulsion from St Martin’s College of Art in Soho. Rachman counted Paplinski as one of his two true friends. Paplinski was debonair, affectionate but scatterbrained: Rachman’s decision to employ him to keep his business records and manage the Monmouth Road office ensured that both records and office were chaotic.
Denis Hamilton, Diana Dors’s husband, was Rachman’s boon companion. Hamilton’s sexual dissipation so delighted him that – in addition to his London base, flat 609 in Clive Court, a Maida Vale block of mansion flats which was five minutes’ drive from his office – he occupied an annexe in Hamilton’s house, Woodhurst, near Maidenhead. Shaken by Hamilton’s death in 1959, Rachman left Woodhurst, and replaced the Clive Court flat with Bishopstone, a sham-Georgian house in Hampstead Garden Suburb’s opulent Winnington Road – two minutes’ walk (although it is doubtful if he ever walked) from the Malibu-style house that Cyril and Leila Foux built in the grounds of her parents, the Kennedy Leighs. Rachman furnished Bishopstone with gilt furniture, including a piano which he prized in the belief that it has been owned by the Polish wife of Louis XV. He took boyish delight in the gadget that opened his garage doors electronically, and in his refrigerator where he kept his tennis balls cool. He also took over a small, modern, ugly house in Marylebone – 1 Bryanston Mews West – from Cyril Foux in 1959. The two-way mirror from Woodhurst, through which voyeurs enjoyed the action in Hamilton’s spare bedroom, was moved there. Mandy Rice-Davies later smashed it; but it was repeatedly mentioned by the prosecution at Stephen Ward’s trial as if Ward had installed it.
In 1959 three West Indian tenants, including Michael de Freitas (the future black activist and murderer, Michael X), had their rents reduced by the West London Rent Tribunal: de Freitas from £8 to £4; the others from £6 to £3, and £3 to £2. Thereafter, there was an outpouring of applications to rent tribunals from tenants of Rachman and other landlords. He neither appeared nor was legally represented at any of the hearings. The complaints of Donald Chesworth, Labour member for North Kensington on London County Council, about Rachman’s housing rackets were handled gingerly by the Metropolitan Police: Detective Superintendent George Taylor noted that Chesworth ‘was of “Left Wing” tendencies and a “Fellow Traveller”.’49
Ten cases of intimidation were submitted to the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, which judged that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. The DPP seemed reluctant to support tenants against landlords, reckoned that the threats were ‘quite trivial’, and was contemptuous of the testimony of sex workers. Serge Paplinkski’s threats against May McCash (alias Mary Scott, who had convictions for brothel-keeping and soliciting) were judged ‘not very severe, merely telling her that they would cut off the electricity and strip the house of wallpaper’. Rachman’s warning to June Hilton, alias Bury, ‘that he could be “naughty”,’ was not taken seriously given that she had forty-three convictions for prostitution. As to Chesworth’s motives in organising the tenants, the DPP dismissed these as ‘political’.50 The police investigated whether Rachman was committing the criminal offence of living off immoral earnings: an officer disguised as a coster trundling a barrow kept watch on suspect houses; but no charges were brought.
None of this rattled Rachman, but he felt insecure as a ‘stateless person’, and was distraught when in April 1959 his application to become a British subject was rejected by the Home Office. As he desired the security of a British passport he transferred the Monmouth Street letting agency to young Etonians, Julian March Phillips de Lisle and Anthony Sykes, who were to be pilloried by the Daily Mirror in the summer of 1963. He sold most of his tenement houses: two of the exceptions, 23 Nevern Square and 5 West Cromwell Road, were both mortgaged through Cyril Foux, whom he joined in several property syndicates. Rachman bought and sold the Streatham Hill Theatre, and moved on to the Golders Green Hippodrome. ‘He was carving his niche,’ said an estate agent who often saw him. ‘Lots of top-drawer people ate well at his expense. Everyone says that if he’d lived, he’d have ended up being knighted.’51
The jeweller Kutchinsky supplied Rachman with a cache of 22-carat gold watches. Spotting a pretty woman in a club or restaurant, he would beckon her over, and slip a watch onto her wrist. He liked to be ‘blown’ in offices, for this avoided the intimacy of bedrooms: oral sex, he believed, reduced the risk of venereal infections. Like Clore, he preferred sex to be perfunctory, yet performed in such a way that tribute was paid to his wealth. In 1959, after acquiring his Bryanston Mews hideaway from Cyril Foux, he decided to keep a mistress there, as a status symbol as much as to relieve his satyriasis. That summer he installed seventeen-year-old Christine Keeler, gave her a sports car, and treated her as if she was a mechanical dummy. After lunch, he would tug Keeler into the bedroom, and, without preliminaries, make her sit astride him with her back towards him so that she never saw his face. ‘Sex to Peter Rachman was like cleaning his teeth, and I was the toothpaste,’ she memorably said.52
Rachman was invited to Stephen Ward’s cottage on the Cliveden estate once. Keeler claimed that during the weekend, he accompanied her and Ward to see the big house. She said that he stood on Cliveden’s famous terrace, raised his arms above his head and with clenched fists cried: ‘This is what I want! This is what I want!’ Ward, she said, turned to her and sneered: ‘This is something he can never buy – not for all his money.’53 Histrionic tales like this say more about the taste for lurid racial stereotypes than the reality of Rachman. In contrast with Keeler, Rice-Davies, whom he kept during 1961–62 in Bryanston Mews, spoke well of him.
Rachman died in November 1962, and in July 1963 became a national hate-figure, vilified above all by Labour MPs and the Labour-supporting Mirror newspapers. Flack survived him by five months; Cotton died early in 1964. In the spring of that year, a columnist on the Financial Times, who was a Labour supporter, noted one unifying opinion shared by every party member from Konni Zilliacus on the left to Douglas Jay on the right, which he summarised as: ‘Moneymaking is an unpleasant business. At best it is distasteful, more usually it is morally repugnant, and at worse it is close on criminal.’ Rachman’s activities intensified Labour’s hostility to both money-making and regulatory de-control. ‘Slick talk about Conservative freedom,’ wrote Marjorie Proops of the Daily Mirror during the 1964 general election, ‘means freedom for the Rachmans of this noble land.’54
Clore, Cotton and Flack, as much as Rachman, were the targets when, in the summer of 1964, shortly before the general election, a trade unionist caught a national mood by decrying the land deals of ‘super spiv tycoons’. ‘Curbing the racketeer,’ Harold Wilson promised, three weeks before he became Prime Minister, was a Labour priority: ‘the squalid property deals which merely produce vast profits and ultimately send up the prices of people’s home have no place in a New Britain.’ None of the Labour leaders, though, admitted that socialist regulation had inadvertently created the chance for this massive money-making. Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.55