A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  Through 1868 Hastings flailed like a man in quicksand, just as Lucan would a century later: pawning, mortgaging, selling, borrowing from a moneylender. He was hooted as a defaulter by the bookmakers, to whom he owed some £40,000. It was said that ‘the once magnificent plunger could not now go beyond a pony [£25], and even when he ventured that modest sum he was brutally told by the bookmaker with whom he made the bet, “Now, mind, I’m to be paid this.”’4 Hastings died at the age of twenty-six, cause unknown. One could only say that gambling had killed him, and that he had somehow wanted it to do so. The embodiment of etiolated aristocracy, he seems to have felt that nothing was worth pursuing except the end of everything. It was as though he did not know how to live up to what he could have been. So he played the endgame of gambling what he did not have. It was an escape: from everything. Although it took all that he had, in a strange way it demanded nothing from him.

  Gambling is not, of course, merely an aristocratic pleasure. Nor is there necessarily anything louche about it; to many people it is a perfectly normal thing to do, something that puts a bit of savour in the stew of life. There are many ways of being a gambler, just as there are of being a drinker. And not all gambling is foolish, by any means. A person who can assess risk, or better still has inside information, is as likely to win at gambling as at many other kinds of financial scheme or job. When Lord Lucan’s old friend says that ‘he thought he could outwit the competition’, there is a kind of logic to that idea. As Dostoevsky wrote in The Gambler: ‘One must win at gambling if one can only remain calm and calculating. That’s all it is. If one does that, then one cannot lose – one has to win.’ Not win every time – that isn’t possible – but win overall. The passage continues, however: ‘But how can the person who knows this secret find the strength and understanding to use it well?’ And therein, for a gambler like Lucan, lies the problem.

  Gambling does not have to be an addiction, any more than drinking does. It can be a habit, but a harmless one; as drinking can. It is perfectly possible to gamble every day, even to lose every day, and, so long as this is affordable, there is no issue. It is merely a pleasure, incomprehensible to some; like drinking. But what begins as pleasure can become, for those whose personality is made that way, an addiction of a different kind, what a racing man of the nineteenth century called ‘the pace that kills’.

  Gambling is a pleasure. There is no feeling quite like it. Even the hard-headed, the people who will restrain themselves to one enormous as-near-as-dammit-certainty bet in a year, are doing it for the pleasure. There are different ways of feeling this: some like the conviviality, some the self-absorption, some the simple fun. Some are entranced by the atmosphere. Some are showing off. Some enjoy the helplessness, the sense that fate is carrying them away from the responsibility of living. Any of these can be part of the pleasure. Always, though, a gambler is making a secret communion with the future: treating the future as something that they can manipulate, a moment that they can control and own. Beneath it all, this is the real joy of gambling. The future becomes yours. You make of it your own plaything. You feel it becoming a possibility, then – the purest sensation of all – feel the smooth little slip in time when you know that possibility must become certainty. When the other cards are being played and you know that your own must be the winner. That is what John Bingham would have felt, in the merry-making days at Harringay, when he watched a dog come round the bend, paws outstretched lovingly towards him; when he had asserted the belief that something would happen, and it did. Such power! Such happiness!

  But the superman surge of strength has its opposite: the sensation of weakness, manifested physically by Lord Hastings in the stands at Newmarket, when the future doesn’t do what has been asked of it. Then comes danger. This is the moment of crux. The desire to recapture strength can become a need. In Lord Hastings it was more powerful than his desire to live. Unless a gambler can accept the natural to-and-fro of win and loss, addiction will follow: addiction of the gut-gripping kind. Equally dangerous is the fact that, for a gambler of the besotted kind, every day is a new day, in a way that it isn’t quite for other people. Every evening begins a new story. If it ends badly, another one will start tomorrow. So there is no need to stop, because there is always a new beginning. Anything could happen. Anything is possible. It is delusional, and it is also true.

  A professional, which is what John Bingham decided to become after resigning from Brandt’s, is a subspecies of gambler. Although there are people with the self-restraint to make a success of it, they are rare. More usually the delusions are strongest with this type of gambler, because he believes that he is in control.

  In fact John Bingham could never have become a professional gambler. That was not the aristocratic mindset that he had chosen to enter. It would have been too much like the man who left Brooks’s with everybody else’s £12,000: bad form. As Stephen Raphael had taught him, he did have control when he played bridge at the Portland Club, or poker at the Hamilton Club. When he played blackjack, which he believed gave the best odds of success, he had a degree of control. When he climbed the golden staircase at the Clermont to play chemin-de-fer, a game of almost pure chance, with an incredibly high return and an equally high risk, he had scarcely any control at all.

  The only truly ‘professional’ gambler is the connoisseur of probability, who makes a few per cent per annum, never loses more than he has chosen to lose and walks away when he has won. Calm and calculating, as Dostoevsky had it. Of course his gambler, like Dostoevsky himself, is the very opposite. This is Alexis Ivanovich playing at roulette, the least controlled game of the lot:

  I think about four hundred friedrichs d’or came into my possession in some five minutes. I ought to have left at that point, but a strange sort of feeling came over me, a kind of desire to challenge fate, a longing to give it a fillip on the nose or stick out my tongue at it. I staked the permitted maximum – 4,000 gulden – and lost. Then, getting excited, I pulled out all I had left, staked it in the same way, lost again, and after that left the table as if I had been stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me…

  And then Alexis needs to win. Has to win. And that, for the gambler, is the most dangerous state of all. All gambling is working at play, but gambling to win is work, pure and simple. Eventually Lord Lucan would realize as much. By then he would be trapped, at the Clermont, in the aristocratic ideal of the gambling earl: a pointless way of being what had become pointless.

  Happily for John Aspinall, who gathered in the greater part of the wages that Lucan worked to earn. Aspinall began life as a gambler, and understood the breed as well as he understood the tigers that he would rear at his private zoos in Kent. Tigers, although vulnerable as a species, are predators, and Aspinall understood that too. At the same time one has to say that he didn’t force anybody to gamble their money away. The choice was theirs. But Aspinall knew how to make that choice seem a desirable, even an inevitable one.

  With the Clermont Club, which he opened in 1962, he created a world unto itself where, as he himself put it, ‘gentlemen could ruin themselves as elegantly and suicidally as did their ancestors three hundred years ago’. It was fantastically clever. In an age that threatened egalitarianism, he created a kind of superb bunker against the times. He also, more subtly, created a stage set. He understood that too much reality is bad for gamblers, and that what they crave is a deliberately heightened atmosphere: an objective correlative, as it were, to the tumult within. Most of the Clermont regulars, who were far from stupid, would have realized perfectly well that John Aspinall had created a construct, a fine replica of the eighteenth century, where the ghosts of the Earls of March and Barrymore (who squandered a £300,000 inheritance) could rise into the air and command them to lose like gentlemen. But that was how they liked it. As surely as racecourse gamblers thrill to the sounds of hooves and bookmakers, so the Clermont gamblers swooned a little as they stepped into the entrance hall, and felt the onrush of that sublime
dramatic tension.

  Aspinall, born in 1926, was of uncertain origins, conceived out of wedlock under a tamarind tree in Uttar Pradesh. ‘You must be one of Polly’s’ was his father’s greeting when Aspinall tracked him down. Although his mother later married a baronet – Lieutenant Colonel Sir George Osborne – there was perhaps a sense in which Aspinall relished both joining, and undermining, a class slightly higher than his own. His confidence was immense, but also aggressive. He felt most comfortable with the fabulous wildlife that he bred at Howletts and Port Lympne zoos: tigers, gorillas, black rhinos, elephants, cloudy leopards. There have been five fatalities at the zoos, but there is no denying the immense value of Aspinall’s conservation work, nor his extraordinary bond with some of these magnificent creatures.

  His passion for wildlife has been deemed to sit alongside a contempt for people, or at least those people who did not, in his view, match up to the splendour of animals. It probably did give him a kick to suck money from the foolish rich and recycle it into Bendicks mints for his gorillas (‘If I give them cheap chocolate, they know’). But the connection between his zoos and his casinos was simpler, really. Both needed a man of his boldness behind them. He was a force, an adventurer. There are still men in this country like John Aspinall, but most of them were born somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

  His charm is rarely disputed. He was great fun. Nevertheless, says one of the Clermont gamblers, ‘Aspinall was a completely amoral man. He really was, by definition.’ ‘I sort of quite liked him,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘He was an amusing character and everything, but people say he was very ruthless about allowing young men to gamble far more heavily than they could afford, on the basis that their parents would cough up.’

  He was William Crockford, in fact, the man who established London’s first gaming club in the 1820s, where the Duke of Wellington was a founding member. Crockford’s later moved to Carlton House Terrace, behind Pall Mall. Lucan would sometimes attend with his friend from Eton, who says: ‘I was never trusted to gamble at the Clermont [Aspinall knew exactly what every member was good for]. Crockford’s was a smaller market – relatively small. Huge, from my point of view. My salary was £750 a year in the 1950s – not really even a living wage. So the gambling had to be kept under control. But in John’s case it just wasn’t kept under control.’

  Crockford, the son of a fishmonger, collected debts with the glee of an illegal car clamper, and cheated with a bare-faced rapacity. He was despised by the aristocracy, but in the late Georgian era he held them in his thrall. So too, in the 1960s, did a villain called Charlie Taylor. He would spend evenings collecting clueless young lords for his own games, rounding them up from the chemin-de-fer table at Crockford’s, where, as his grand-daughter later wrote, ‘he had already nobbled the croupier (a batch of cards was inserted into the dealer’s shoe, who then dealt them in the order in which Charlie had memorised them). Unsurprisingly, Charlie kept winning, thereby dragging his upper-class marks into his debt. They didn’t care…’5 William Crockford would have approved. Taylor was a man after his own heart. Many years later it was alleged that John Aspinall had, throughout the 1960s, played a similar ongoing trick at the Clermont. His former associate, an Irishman called John Burke, claimed that the cards in the chemmy games had been minutely bent by a machine.6 The bends denoted whether they were high or low, a key factor in a game where the winning card is the one closest to a value of nine (‘J’ai neuf’ is the cool cry of triumph). Readers trained in spotting the bends were then seated at the tables; although the scam was not flawless, the bends being so tiny, it was said to have given the Clermont a 60–40 edge. It was also said that on the first night it was tried, it earned a clear £14,000 for the club.

  The man who in the mid-1960s lost £50,000 in one night at chemmy, ten losing hands in succession, says:

  I’m not saying that game was fixed, because I was a very small fellow. But when I went in that night I’d had twelve winning nights in a row. So I had accumulated quite a bit of money. I went in, and they hadn’t started the game – and it was interesting, because Ian Maxwell-Scott was sitting at number one, which he never did normally, Aspinall was at number two and Lady Osborne was at number three or something. And when I sat down, I thought to myself, I’ve never seen you all congregate like this… So I did wonder if that was a bent shoe. And when Andrew Devonshire and John Derby and Bill Stirling were playing for megabucks, it looked very much as though they were taken for a ride. And we all thought so at the time, that it was very odd how they would consistently lose.

  Conversely Lady Annabel Goldsmith, whose second husband James was a Clermont gambler, firmly denied the allegations against Aspinall.7 And Victor Lownes, head of the British arm of the Playboy business that bought the Clermont in 1972, says: ‘I’ll tell you, nobody ever said anything against his operation to us when we inherited it. I sent people over from the Playboy to run it – but we kept most of the staff on, and nobody ever told us anything about any bent cards or anything.’

  John Burke’s story of Aspinall’s ‘Big Edge’ therefore remains uncorroborated. In a sense one might say that Aspinall had no need to do it, because as everybody knows the house always wins. Yet he most definitely cheated on one occasion, during a 1967 chemmy game in which the players included James Goldsmith, Cubby Broccoli, the 18th Earl of Derby, Lord Lucan, Bill Stirling (brother of David) and an American billionaire named Emmett Blow. This time the cards were falling the other way, with Lord Derby up by more than £1 million. Suddenly Blow blew: he vomited prodigiously over the table. As cloths were wielded the players sat stunned, waiting to recommence, when Aspinall marched towards them in the manner of Marcadé at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Blow, he announced, was dead. The game was fini. There was nothing to do but descend the little spiral staircase at the back of the entrance hall that took one down to Annabel’s nightclub, and obliterate thoughts of the splendid game cut down in its prime. On the handkerchief-sized dance floor at Annabel’s was Emmett Blow, jigging away in the fullness of health. Aspinall was superbly unabashed. ‘When a man is down £1.5 million, he must take desperate measures,’ he declared.8

  It was, of course, the other players who owed Lord Derby: Lucan had retired owing £15,000; Blow himself owed £100,000. The point was that they would not have to pay immediately, and Aspinall would. And it was not so easy, he would have said, holding on to cash. He could not take a cut of the game unless he himself won (later it became illegal for proprietors to play). He could only charge a ‘table fee’. Furthermore his earnings were taxed, as they had not been in the fiery, pre-Gaming Act days, when he had amassed great mountains of unkoshered notes by staging chemmy games in private houses.

  It was in the 1950s that Aspinall changed guise from gambler to ringmaster. At Oxford he had cut his finals to attend the Ascot Gold Cup, at which he won, but having lost £300 at his first evening of chemin-de-fer he realized that the surest means to riches was to run the game himself. He wasn’t the only person doing this, but nobody did it better. The then Lord Bingham was not a habitué of Aspinall’s illegal parties, although naturally he knew about them. He was busy bobsleighing and boating, out in the good fresh air. Only later did he fully enter that closer, closeted world.

  The chemmy evenings began at the Ritz, where Aspinall was living hand to mouth with his fellow Oxonian Ian Maxwell-Scott. The first proper party, at which Maxwell-Scott provided the booze and Lady Osborne (‘Al Capone with a shopping basket’9) cooked game pie, was held in a Brook Street flat with a Canaletto on the wall, hired from a nearby gallery: such was John Aspinall’s chutzpah. The parties quickly became the hottest ticket in London. The way to evade the 1845 law against ‘gaming houses’ was continually to move venue, so Aspinall and his friends would dash from place to place (always within the sacred postcodes), just as people today would use social media to dictate where, on a given night, a club will be enjoying its brief, bright, firefly life as the acme of hipness. There was a sense of being i
n the know that was quite irresistible, and that Aspinall would have got an irresistible buzz from controlling. One can imagine the ringing phone, the self-important hushed delivery of the message – ‘Aspers is at Sloane Court West tonight’ – and then the descent of the gorgeous prey into the hands of their shaman. Did Lord Derby and co. know about the dark underside of these gambling evenings? Aspinall himself was prey to protection racketeers, who hovered around the stately venues with their glinting grins and their ‘Now then, Johnny boy, let’s have a little bit of what you’re having…’ Men like Charlie Taylor and the Krays would have respected him; they had seen the same gap in the market, after all. Aspinall was no upper-class mug, to use gambling parlance. He was as tough as they come. If the story of the ‘Big Edge’ is true, then the idea was given to him by Billy Hill, one of the worst mobsters in London. So Aspinall would have known that there was no defence against men of this kind, who had high-end police in their pockets. Anyway he could afford to spare them something. In three nights of parties he earned £20,000, and moved to Eaton Place with a tiger, a Himalayan bear and a capuchin monkey. In 1956–7, he made £350,000, and opened his first zoo at Howletts.

  Then he began staging parties at his mother’s flat at Hyde Park Street. This was a mistake; it lay within the jurisdiction of the Paddington police, less inclined to turn a blind eye than their counterparts in SW1. Or perhaps Aspinall didn’t care. In January 1958, he was finally caught in the act by an inspector who had ‘clung to the grille’ outside the dining-room window, there to observe the cards rippling sweetly from the chemmy shoe. The policeman accused Aspinall of keeping a ‘common gaming house’. Aspinall replied: ‘What right have you to come breaking in here like this and start searching people?’ His mother, still more in character, suggested that there had been nothing common about the house until the inspector arrived. Among the guests present – ‘all intimate friends of mine,’ declared Aspinall – were a young scion of the Hoare banking family, a relation of the Devonshires, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, John Burke and Aspinall’s stunningly beautiful model wife, Jane (whom he would later divorce, alleging that she had made free with one of his chimpanzee keepers).