This, then, is the myth. Is it the truth? No, not quite.
Walking through the same door every day, sticking together around the same tables; there is, undoubtedly, something silly about this. It does, indeed, make these men seem like the scions of privilege that they were, joshing together about the night when so-and-so threw such-and-such at backgammon, gasping in appalled admiration when old Lucky loses yet another three thousand that he doesn’t have and doesn’t bat an eye (there’s breeding for you). It takes the concept of men showing off to each other to a parodic level. Surely there was more to life than this? Yes, but there had been more to the Clermont too.
In so far as the myth is true, it portrays the club only in its darker, declining years. In its golden heyday the Clermont was about far more than gambling. It was cosmopolitan, alive: like all the best clubs. What is rarely acknowledged is that it was fun. And the Lucan set were fun, some of them. They attacked life with a kind of laughing vigour. They didn’t fret about alcohol units or body mass index or midlife crises. ‘They were manly,’ says Marilyn Lownes, and one knows what she means. ‘Some of them were amazingly funny,’ says Stuart Wheeler. ‘They could be terribly witty. It was a gang. Not a violent gang – on the whole. I enjoyed all those people, enjoyed being in their company.’
Certainly the mythical image of the reactionary group in their Mayfair fortress, wallowing in their ‘fetid, self-deluding, pseudo-Nietzschean atmosphere’, makes little sense when applied to the Clermont as it was in the 1960s, when (in a manner of speaking) everybody went. It is quite true, however, to say that by the early 1970s the Lucan set had begun to turn inwards. The state of the nation had infused them with fear, and they used the club to keep it at bay. ‘There didn’t seem much point in any form of economy,’ says Daniel Meinertzhagen, meaning that gambling made as much sense as anything else at the time. But the set was not alone in feeling alarm. So did most people. And one must be honest: how in heaven would contemporary Britain cope with the three-day week, the six-month wait for a phone connection, the sudden power failure cutting off Grand Auto mid-Theft? Thirty-three per cent basic rate tax? Inflation moving towards 20 per cent? Good God, we would all be looking for somebody to sue. In the everyday world, life went on stoically amid the financial Blitz, but the ‘mustn’t grumble’ phlegmatism was, in its way, as much a façade as the gamblers’ mask. Beneath both lay volatility. The IRA’s bombs were an external expression of that fundamental disorder. Rightly or wrongly, logically or illogically, there was a sense that the future might drag the country, corpse-like, to extreme left or right, and rip its serene, flawed, ancient traditions to shreds.
From the Clermont viewpoint, there were insults on top of injuries. The top rate of tax, 98 per cent in 1974, was 75 per cent even under the Conservative administration. (No wonder they all liked gambling so much: tax-free!) There was the spectacle of the union ‘barons’, men with giant sideburns and faces like weapons, wielding the power that had once belonged to their kind; backed by that class traitor, Tony Benn, ‘the most hated man in Britain’,15 the former Viscount Stansgate who sought a joint government by the Labour Party and the trade unions. There was the prime minister Harold Wilson, suspected of Communist leanings. This was not mere Tory romancing: MI5 had opened a file on Wilson as early as 1945. Lord Kagan, one of Wilson’s own set, was close to a KGB officer at the Soviet embassy. Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, suspected that Wilson was a KGB plant.16 James Goldsmith, honoured in the same 1976 resignation list as Kagan, thought so too. ‘Jimmy never had any judgment politically,’ Woodrow Wyatt later told Annabel Goldsmith. ‘[He] was always writing me daft memoranda saying in ten years or five years, or whatever date he had chosen, the apocalypse would come, chaos and anarchy would reign...’17
But this, sane as it sounds, was said in 1986. Thirteen years earlier things were rather more hysterical. A group called Unison, which could not know that its name would later be given to Britain’s largest trade union, was set up by a former deputy director of MI6. It was a vigilante organization, designed to protect the country against a Communist takeover or a general strike. Unison was joined by an ex-NATO commander, General Sir Walter Walker, who then formed a group of his own. He claimed to have some 100,000 members, and was openly supported by the Admiral of the Fleet, several former MPs and the former Goon, Michael Bentine. In an interview, he stated that Britain ‘might choose rule by the gun [i.e. a military government] in preference to anarchy’. Utterly absurd though this now seems, the fact that it could be said at all suggests an acute, pervasive level of anxiety. Then came Colonel David Stirling, Clermont gambler and founder of the SAS. Stirling formed GB75, a patriotic group that again would act as a private army in the face of civil unrest. The virulent right-wing views of some of his followers made Stirling uncomfortable (according to the myth, he would have concurred in them), and he disbanded the organization. Nevertheless he did seek to infiltrate the trade union movement, hoping to destabilize it from within. This operation was backed and funded by James Goldsmith (the knighthood from Harold Wilson was truly a superb irony).18 The private army, with which Stirling’s brother Bill was also involved, was joined by Dominick Elwes and by Michael Stoop, who was soon to lend his battered Ford Corsair to his friend Lord Lucan.
What the other members of the Clermont set thought about the Stirling army is not known. Doubtless they were in favour, in principle. ‘It was that moment, when everything was really going up the spout,’ says the then girlfriend of one of the set, ‘and there was that sort of talk, a lot of Harold Wilson was a Communist. And the country was absolutely going to the dogs, there’s no doubt about it. Anybody who was successful at all either paid 98p in the pound or left.’ The plan for a private army, albeit that it was abandoned, certainly supports the idea that the set harboured extreme views. So too does the fact that Greville Howard, who was on the fringes of the circle, had gone to work as Enoch Powell’s private secretary. (Later he worked for Goldsmith; his politics moderated thereafter, although remaining on the right.) But resentful murmurings and alcohol-fuelled rants, which were the more usual thing, do not equate to neo-fascism. At a time when government ministers themselves were in a state of high alert – ‘I know we are heading for catastrophe,’ wrote Roy Jenkins, the then Home Secretary – it would have been amazing if the same apocalyptic prophecies had not been made at the Clermont.
The truth about the myth is that it only describes a part of the Clermont set. What is meant by ‘the circle’ is actually John Aspinall, James Goldsmith and Lord Lucan. The rest are caught up in the image of blistering upper-class arrogance. When they are seen as individuals, the story changes.
Aspinall and Goldsmith were arrogant, beyond doubt. They were the successes. They embodied the ethos of the Clermont as described by Dominick Elwes, being ‘concerned with power and success and to a certain extent survival. Anybody who has fallen by the wayside is dismissed.’19 And it was quite true that Aspinall and Goldsmith eventually left the rest behind. They had first met in Aspinall’s lodgings at Oxford. Goldsmith, aged sixteen and just out of Eton, having won £8,000 at Lewes racecourse, marched into a chemmy game brandishing fivers. That set the tone: here were the two alpha males, the two great stags clashing antlers. They recognized each other as such. When Aspinall lost his fortune on the stock market in 1973, Goldsmith bailed him out, exacting the price of his friend’s art collection. They opened a new casino in 1978, in the former Curzon House Club, and this time Aspinall made real money. The business was floated in 1983, and sold four years later for £90 million. Aspinall used his realized holding, some £20 million, to start a trust for his zoos. He lost a vast sum, again, when he backed a couple of Goldsmith’s failed takeover bids. So in 1992 they opened another casino, again on Curzon Street, on the site of the old White Elephant where Lord Lucan, twenty-five years earlier, had celebrated the birth of his son with Charles Benson. (‘He was happy as Larry,’ Benson later said.)
Adventurer men are arrogant, perf
orce. They are not ‘nice’: how can they be? Success of that kind goes with ruthlessness, a near-excess of personality, an almost manic energy. When Aspinall was in hospital, fighting angrily against the cancer that would kill him in 2000, an exhausted nurse said to his third wife: ‘Lady Sally, I feel that Mr Aspinall would make a speedier recovery at home.’ It also goes with a kind of chippiness, which both men had. ‘Jimmy thinks every morning he has nothing,’ said his sensible French associate, Madame Gilberte Beaux. The Goldsmiths were Frankfurt bankers, regarded as poorer cousins to the Rothschilds, and the sense of this ancestral inferiority drove him to the wild frontiers of capitalism. He also saw himself as a stateless, rootless person; half German Jew, half French Catholic. On Coronation night in 1953, the twenty-year-old Goldsmith fell madly in love with Isabel Patiño, the daughter of a Bolivian millionaire. Her family objected to the marriage: ‘It is not the habit of our family to marry Jews.’ Goldsmith replied: ‘It is not our habit to marry Red Indians,’ then eloped with Isabel to Scotland. They married in 1954. Five months later his sweetly pretty wife died of a brain haemorrhage, hours after giving birth to a daughter, and Goldsmith fought a long battle for custody of the baby. One might say that this incident hardened him thereafter. ‘How long does it take to get over it?’ asked a friend. ‘I don’t think you ever do,’ he answered. Yet even before this Goldsmith had shown his venomous toughness. At Eton, where he had staged his first coup by selling off an entire stock of Latin cribs at double the price, he offered a selection of records as a leaving present to his loathed housemaster, then smashed them all in front of him.
He was a brilliant businessman, worth some £1.5 billion when he died in 1994. He took over companies with heedless, untrammelled vigour. He offered to buy the infamous Slater-Walker Holdings when his friend, occasional Clermont gambler Jim Slater, lost almost everything in the early 1970s; yet Goldsmith himself was more than an asset stripper, as Slater had been. His career zigzagged like a dodgy ECG, but his triumphs were always greater than his disasters. His Cavenham Foods business was one of the world’s largest companies before he liquidated it in 1987, having seen the great market crash rolling tsunami-like towards him. Almost in passing he bred one of the best racehorses of the early twenty-first century, Montjeu, named after his Burgundian château. He wanted power as well as money, however. Above anything, he longed to own newspapers. He tried to buy the Observer, then the Beaverbrook empire. He started a magazine, Now!, but this collapsed after two years. Woodrow Wyatt had asked him what Now! was going to be like. ‘And he produced a copy of L’Express which he owned and said, “Like that.” I looked at it and said “But this will never do, Jimmy. It’s all in French.” For some time he didn’t understand the joke…’20
Perhaps his yearning to be a press baron, to control the show, was connected to his apparently paradoxical hatred of journalists. He launched an extraordinary series of libel actions against Private Eye, which in December 1975 cast aspersions on his dealings with Slater-Walker and, more damagingly, suggested that he had ‘obstructed’ the course of justice in the Lucan affair. The case, which could have resulted in jail for the magazine’s editor Richard Ingrams, lasted several months. ‘From time to time,’ wrote Ingrams, ‘he looked across at me, nodding and grinning, as if trying to convey a message of some kind.’ Eventually Goldsmith withdrew the charges: ‘He was advised that if he wanted to be a newspaper proprietor, it didn’t look good to send editors to prison.’21 Private Eye paid costs of £30,000 over ten years, which might just about have kept Goldsmith in socks.
There was something of the 3rd Earl of Lucan about James Goldsmith: that relentless insistence on his own righteousness. Strictly speaking, he had had a case against Private Eye, which had made unproven allegations of aiding a criminal (as the inquest into Sandra Rivett’s death had judged Lord Lucan to be). But he pursued it with an unseemly ferocity. He was prescient in his misgivings about the anti-democratic powers of the European Union, but the Referendum Party that he formed shortly before his death in 1997 (for which Aspinall stood as a candidate) conducted its business with alienating aggression. His private persona was not very different. At dinner in the Clermont one night, he grew impatient with the waiter who had delayed (probably about two minutes) bringing his smoked salmon; Goldsmith fetched the whole fish himself, then gnawed it from the bone, very much like one of Aspinall’s wild animals. He would walk into the club, see up to eight people playing backgammon and declare: ‘Right, take you all on.’ ‘I knew Jimmy quite well,’ says Stuart Wheeler:
He gambled in his business life tremendously, and very successfully. We didn’t meet very often – but there was he, extremely rich, and me not at all at that time, and he would toss a coin and I would call. If I got it wrong, I’d pay him £1,000, which was much more in those days than it is now. And if I got it right, he would pay me £1,100. So it suited me, because I was getting the right odds, and it suited him because he enjoyed seeing me scrabble on the floor to see if I’d won or lost, knowing it was quite important to me. He liked that kind of thing. He had this place in Mexico – it amused him to offer somebody £1,000 to swim across the river that had crocodiles in it. That sort of thing would amuse him. I don’t think anyone did it, but…
‘He was a bully,’ says Marilyn Lownes. ‘But he was the richest. They looked up to him because he had the money – they bowed to Jimmy.’
‘Of course I was terrified of Jimmy Goldsmith,’ says the then girlfriend of one of the Lucan set. ‘He was very, very scary. I mean, if you went to dinner he held court. I wouldn’t have dared say anything, I don’t think most people would. He had a court, definitely. There were all these funny people, sort of hangers-on… And a lot of people wanted to be friendly with Jimmy Goldsmith. He had money, and I imagine a lot of people at the Clermont didn’t have much money.’
Yes, indeed: what wouldn’t Lord Lucan have done for Goldsmith’s kind of money? What wouldn’t most of the Clermont set, for that matter? Several became ‘house players’, perforce, sitting in on a game in order to attract the real gamblers: working for Aspinall, in effect.
It is interesting that the mythical arrogance of the circle was displayed, most potently, by the two members who clung only tenuously to the upper rungs of the social ladder. Theirs was the arrogance of money, of course. So much more real, by this time, than that of class. The arrogance of class was bred in the bone, but it was also on the defensive; it could not afford to swagger like Jimmy Goldsmith; it had to charm and cajole and self-deprecate. It certainly could not, as Jonathan Miller did, make casually snobbish reference to the ‘parvenus’ who would have been shocked by Kait Lucan. The liberal intelligentsia could get away with this kind of thing. The Clermont set would have been slaughtered for it. Of course these gamblers probably all were arrogant in their way, shuddering when somebody wore brown shoes in town or something, but then the intelligentsia would shudder at Mantovani or the suburban mindset, so that was really no different. Outside Aspinall and Goldsmith the arrogance of the set was a powerless thing, a function of words and attitudes.
And it did not equate to some nameless ancestral evil: Lord Lucan aside, the men were public schoolboys, not aristocrats (although in some cases they were related to them). What is extremely telling is that, as individuals, they are always portrayed quite favourably. Only as ‘the set’ do they become something ghastly. Daniel Meinertzhagen, a charming and courteous man who lost an inheritance from the Lazard banking family, is rarely mentioned at all. Michael Stoop, a man in his fifties with a fine war record, was complimented in his 2012 obituary for being ‘less cliquey’ than the rest (whoever they might have been). Stephen Raphael, also older and very close to Lucan, almost a replacement father figure, was a family man. Charles Benson, ‘always spectacularly broke’,22 worked for the Daily Express. Not long before the murder of Sandra Rivett he became ‘the Scout’, the paper’s racing tipster, and in the week of the inquest gave four winners on the first day of Royal Ascot. ‘Hats off to the Sco
ut!’ proclaimed the front page of the Express, alongside the headline ‘Contract to Kill: Inquest is told of claim by Lady Lucan’. Benson was a hugely convivial person, with a circle of friends stretching way beyond the Clermont (it was he, for instance, who invited Jagger). Bill Shand Kydd, on the outside of the set but a good friend of Lord Lucan, is held in the highest general esteem, not least for the way in which he coped with the fallout from the death of Sandra Rivett: ‘Bill was fantastic in the aftermath,’ says Lucan’s Eton friend. He took on the welfare of the Lucan children, and later showed staggering, good-humoured courage in the face of a 1995 riding accident, in which he fell on his head ‘like a dart’ and was left paralysed. (‘When they told me, I turned to my wife and said “Well, I’ve never done anything by halves, have I?”’23)
Dominick Elwes, who took a fatal overdose of Tuinal in September 1975 at the age of forty-four, is always favourably portrayed. It was said, for instance, that he was sent by the set to visit Veronica Lucan in hospital because he was ‘the nicest person present’.24 Elwes was a painter, the son of a painter, and the nephew by marriage of Nancy Mitford. He is mentioned occasionally in her letters; she saw in him a resemblance to her feckless husband, Peter Rodd (Prod). She also contradicted the view of Elwes as a wholly likeable character. In 1952 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh:
Dominick Elwes came to see me – it all took me back to my early married life – the looks, the get-rich-quick line of talk. Only whereas old Prod is good at heart I feel this boy is really bad. I took very much against him… I skilfully parried the question of an advance, which loomed throughout the interview. Got a gushing letter thanking me for my ‘hospitality’ (a glass of Dubonnet if that) & promising to come again very soon. He doesn’t know how thoroughly inoculated I am!
Later that year, again to Waugh, she wrote:
I’m frightened of Dominick Elwes. I see him as one of those youths who murder old ladies (me). He met an old pal of mine the Marquis de Lasteyrie & talked a great deal about his darling aunt & then said ‘I want to go to Venice, do you know anybody there?’ to which Lasteyrie, who saw through him like a glass, replied ‘Is not Venice itself enough without knowing people?’
A Different Class of Murder Page 13