by Adam Sisman
In such society David learned that early sophistication which can pass for maturity. He could be relied upon to look after his elders, often staying up late into the night to serve the drinks, jumping to his feet when Ronnie tapped on his empty glass with his fingernail. ‘Get your old man another glass of Drambuie, old son, there’s a good fellow …’
Ronnie encouraged his guests to entertain the gathering with witty anecdotes and quickfire gags. (‘What’s a Grecian urn?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Forty bob a week.’) Knowing David to possess a precocious talent for storytelling and especially for mimicry, his father would make him perform before the assembled company. (‘Son, come over here. Tell these people that story you heard the other day.’) The professional funny men present did not always appreciate being upstaged by this young amateur. After one of David’s comic turns, the comedian Jack Train, famous as ‘Colonel Chinstrap’ in the 1940s comedy ITMA, muttered sotto voce, ‘I could tell that story and make it funny.’
By his own admission, David was a show-off. Half a lifetime later, in an attempt to explain why he felt the need to make people laugh, he quoted Frankie Howerd: ‘All my life I’ve been terrified of ridicule.’ It might seem odd for someone who felt this way to want to perform, but he provided an explanation. ‘If you’re growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength, you have an undefended back.’17
Though he had never progressed beyond the rank of private during his short army career, Ronnie allowed himself to be known as ‘Colonel Cornwell’ (or Cornhill) in the shadier parts of the West End in the years after the war. With characteristic cheek he affected to be embarrassed by this title. ‘Colonel?’ he would say. ‘What’s all this about Colonel? Don’t be so damn foolish. We’re all civilians now.’18
After the war Ronnie had resumed trading as R. Cornwell & Co., operating from an office at 91 Regent Street, W1. Later, as his business empire expanded, he would move into 51 Mount Street, in the heart of Mayfair, taking over more and more of the building until eventually he occupied it all, from attic to basement. His practice was essentially the same as it had been in the 1930s, but on a larger scale. He began with a spectacular coup: he bought a property company for £90,000 and sold it again for £105,000. There was no need for him to raise the purchase price, as both the purchase and the sale took place on the same day. Ronnie had only to produce the deposit of £1,000 to make an instant profit of £15,000. This provided him with the capital to start buying property to rent, usually in blocks ranging from three or four houses to as many as a hundred at a time. Having bought a block of houses, his usual practice would be to create leases and then sell them on at a profit to one of his companies, while retaining the freeholds and selling these separately. The company would then mortgage the property, raising capital that could then be used to fund further purchases. Following the principle of his first big strike, he would try to set up these transactions in advance, so that they took place simultaneously. Between 1945 and 1950, he acquired approximately 4,000 houses, in more than 180 transactions. By October 1951, he had accumulated a personal fortune estimated at £191,000 – the equivalent of £13 million in today’s money.
One problem was that the government, as part of its programme of austerity, had set a limit on borrowing of £50,000, beyond which any transaction required Treasury consent. To breach this limit without such permission was a criminal offence. In 1947 Ronnie was twice convicted (in seven cases) of exceeding these limits without consent, and fined accordingly. To overcome this obstacle he created an empire of separate companies with such names as Universal Trading Corporation Limited, supposedly independent of him, using a system of trusted nominees, just as he had done before the war. One of his confederates, Arthur Lowe, was later shown to be a director of no fewer than fifty companies forming part of the Cornwell group.
An underlying principle of the operation was that when the time was right the houses would be sold, either to the existing tenants or to new buyers for development once vacant possession had been obtained. This proved more difficult than anticipated, some tenants having to be ‘persuaded’ to move to other premises. Ronnie took the view that sooner or later there would be some increase in rent, and therefore some appreciation in the value. Things did not work out that way. Moreover, the rents often proved insufficient to meet the outgoings. Ronnie had personally guaranteed all the mortgages, the guarantees eventually totalling almost £1.5 million.
Whatever difficulties might lie ahead, Ronnie was determined to enjoy himself while he could. He ordered gin by the crate, and Trumper’s hair-lotion in cartons of two dozen each. He opened an account at Harrods. A Bentley was delivered, after one of Ronnie’s companies (Woodville Developments Limited) had paid a £500 deposit. In the late 1940s, he ran a small farm in Hampshire, and though it was soon disposed of, the concept of owning a farm would remain in his mind as an ideal, a haven when other forms of business became too difficult.
Soon after the end of the war Ronnie returned in triumph to St Moritz, then rapidly regaining the glamour of its 1920s heyday. An habitué of postwar St Moritz, the Earl of Kimberley, remembered it as ‘a wonderful place to be: lush, smart, fashionable, full of beautiful people, a magnet for the rich and famous, a marvellous playground, the glossiest of social life. And, oh yes, a paradise for philanderers and affairs.’19
Ronnie brought with him a riotous group of jockeys and other sportsmen and women, members of the Court, their friends and their friends’ friends. Once again, he was welcomed by Herr Badrutt, who had been persuaded to grant unlimited credit to his English guests. There would be no difficulty with currency restrictions, because Ronnie had contrived that the other members of his party could settle their bills with him in pounds, which he would then exchange for Swiss francs via a helpful contact at the Embassy in London.20 Though illegal, such arrangements were common for wealthy Britons. As Kimberley explained, there were ways around currency difficulties ‘if you knew the ropes – via head porters at top London hotels’.
As he had done before the war, Ronnie enjoyed himself in uninhibited style, donning a false wig and beard for a party in which all the men were required to wear at least a moustache. He was generous with the hotel’s credit, even endowing a Cornwell Cup for Curling, which he presented with some ceremony.21 And while Ronnie was sliding curling stones across the ice, David learned to ski.
Ronnie always kept a lookout for possible ‘marks’, and he soon got alongside the free-spending Kimberley, who was induced to cash several cheques for him. Predictably these bounced when the Earl later presented them to pay a currency fine. Back in London, Kimberley sought out Ronnie at his West End office, which he would later portray as having ‘brass plaques right down to the jambs on each side of the main entrance, with Cayman Islands and other dodgy tax haven addresses’. He found Ronnie nursing a glass of brandy and smoking an enormous cigar, his feet up on his red-leather desk, playing centrepiece to a quartet of telephones, red, white, blue and green. ‘You owe me five hundred quid,’ Kimberley told Ronnie, threatening to have him beaten up if the money was not repaid. The Earl’s posthumously published memoirs do not reveal the outcome.22 Possibly Ronnie was induced to open the office safe, which often held surprisingly large amounts of cash.
Frank Cornwell had died suddenly in 1946, leaving a considerable sum, though much less than he might have done had he not been repeatedly required to bail out his son. Ronnie and his sister Ella were joint executors of their father’s will. Ella struggled to resist pressure from her brother for access to funds from their father’s estate: David’s cousin can remember his mother collapsing in tears after one of their executors’ meetings.
Earlier that year Jean had given birth to her first child, a son whom they named Rupert. In December, she and Ronnie sailed on the Queen Mary to New York, where they were photographed sitting alongside Sugar Ray Robinson in his Harlem nightclub. This
was at a time when, because of currency restrictions, the average Englishman had about as much chance of going to America as he had of visiting the North Pole.23 As so often with Ronnie, the trip was not purely for pleasure: he was developing a business connection, having set his sights on expansion into the New World. He aspired to be a tycoon, with interests spanning the globe, though in reality his business empire consisted of little more than short-term fixes and one-off deals, many of them shady in character. Some of his enterprises had an element of the absurd. At some stage, for example, he bought the patent in a device for peeling oranges, a strange-looking instrument shaped like a dagger. Another bizarre money-making scheme was to corner the market in Christmas crackers by buying up surplus stock in January, when the price was at its lowest. In those days crackers were sold from barrows in the street. Ronnie stored his stock in a cellar and waited until December, before placing an advertisement in a London evening paper. The next day the street outside his West End office was thronged by clamorous barrow boys, to the astonishment of the passers-by. David helped his father to complete the transactions on the doorstep.
As quickly as money came his way, Ronnie found ways to spend it – on racehorses, for example. Typically, he sought the advice of the greatest jockey of them all, Gordon Richards, in deciding which horses to buy, and hired another former jockey, Billy Griggs, as trainer. He named his first horse Prince Rupert, after his infant son: subsequent horses were named Dato, after his sons David and Tony; Rose Sang, after his redheaded daughter Charlotte, born in 1949; and Tummy Tunmers, after the house he moved to in the late 1940s. Ronnie had his own colours, chosen by Jean: red, with white chevrons and striped sleeves, and a red and white quartered cap. Gordon Richards rode for him on a number of occasions, as did the young Lester Piggott; David remembers coming across the apprentice jockey dressed in Ronnie’s colours at Chester, reclining in the straw of a horsebox and reading the Beano.
Keeping racehorses was an expensive pursuit, but it had its compensations. Years later, Jean would list for her daughter some of the pleasures of being married to Ronnie: ‘putting on my mink coat, while your father dressed in top hat and tails; climbing into the Bentley while the chauffeur held the door open for us; being driven to Ascot; admiring our horse in the ring and chatting to the jockeys; the excitement of watching our own horse race, and the glamour of the owners’ enclosure …’ From time to time Ronnie was able to defray some of his expenses by manipulating the odds. In 1947, for example, David was despatched to Newmarket, where Prince Rupert was running, with a briefcase containing several hundred pounds in cash. Before the race the horse was backed from 33–1 to 100–9, which suggested to informed observers that a great deal of money had been placed on him in the on-course market. After Prince Rupert had won the race by a neck, David collected his winnings and left the course with a briefcase stuffed with banknotes. On the train back to London he was accosted by a bookie. ‘Are you Ronnie Cornwell’s boy?’ David admitted that he was. ‘Well, watch it, son.’ David handed over the briefcase to his father at the Mount Street office. Ronnie carefully counted the cash before locking it away.
Around this time Ronnie moved again, to Tunmers, a 1930s mansion set in nine acres of land adjoining a golf course in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire. Tony knew this as ‘the beautiful house’, as it seemed to have everything the heart could desire. Ronnie soon settled comfortably into the local community, becoming vice-president of the South Buckinghamshire Liberals and president of the Chalfont Cricket Club, for whom he recruited Learie Constantine as an occasional player. He cultivated business contacts in local golf clubs. Ronnie became a member of the committee of the Albany Club Sports Society, which in 1949 presented a cheque for £8,000 to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as patron of the National Playing Fields Association. In Pathé News footage of the presentation ceremony, Ronnie can be seen in the background, apparently trying to elbow his way alongside the future Queen’s husband.
One summer holiday Ronnie despatched his sons on a commercial mission to Paris. They were to call on the Panamanian Ambassador, to whom Ronnie had apparently been shipping bottles of unbranded Scotch whisky under diplomatic protection. The Ambassador, he explained, forwarded the bottles to his own country, again under diplomatic protection, now bearing whichever labels he considered most suitable, for sale at a fat profit. As the scheme had been running for some time, Ronnie indicated that there should be a substantial sum of money to be collected, of which the boys could help themselves to the first £50 to spend as they liked in Paris. And while they were there, he continued, they could collect his golf clubs, which he had left at the George V hotel.
Tony and David called on the Ambassador, a middle-aged playboy, who took them to dinner in a nightclub, where he and his glamorous wife sang Russian love songs; but no money was forthcoming. On the contrary, the Ambassador claimed to have paid Ronnie upfront for the whisky, and to be still waiting for the first consignment. The boys apologised and left. Next day they set out on their second errand. At the George V they discovered that Ronnie had left the golf clubs there as surety for an unpaid bill, a detail that he had failed to mention in his briefing: the manager refused to release the clubs until the account was settled. It was a bad moment for the boys, who feared for their own liberty. From a telephone box they called Ronnie’s Mayfair office (now at 13a Old Burlington Street), only to hear him explain down the line that it was all a misunderstanding. Now almost penniless, the brothers eked out the remaining three days in Paris alongside the vagrants under a bridge over the Seine, subsisting on baguettes and cheap red wine.24
In May 1948 Ronnie threw a party at Tunmers for the touring Australian cricket team, known as ‘the Invincibles’ because they were seemingly unbeatable. Their arrival in England had been keenly anticipated, especially as their captain Don Bradman had made it known that this would be his farewell international tour. For English cricket enthusiasts this would be the last opportunity to watch the batsman widely acknowledged to be the greatest ever. ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow expressed a widespread sentiment when he wrote in his newspaper column, ‘We want him to do well. We feel we have a share in him. He is more than Australian. He is a world batsman.’ As well as Bradman, there were plenty of other star players in the Australian team, including several outstanding batsmen, the vice-captain Lindsay Hassett, Arthur Morris, Sid Barnes and Neil Harvey, and the fiery fast bowling attack of Bill Johnston, Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall. The tour party docked at Tilbury in mid-April to a resounding welcome. On landing, Bradman announced a gift of 17,000 food parcels from the state of Victoria to the people of Britain, where rationing would continue until 1954. Despite their on-field dominance and a succession of one-sided victories, the touring team attracted record crowds and unprecedented media interest. Bradman received hundreds of personal letters every day, and one of his dinner speeches was broadcast live on radio, causing the BBC to postpone the news bulletin. Ronnie had 5,000 tulips planted in the garden at Tunmers in anticipation of the Australians’ arrival.
The party was a riotous success. For Tony and David one highlight was witnessing the handshake between Don Bradman and Gordon Richards, the greatest of all batsmen and the greatest of all jockeys. Frolics continued late into the night, with Hassett (who had taken a shine to Jean) performing an impromptu striptease on the kitchen table. Several of the Australians stayed overnight, and Ronnie took them off to play golf the next morning.
For the Cornwell boys, this had been an unmissable opportunity to meet the uncrowned champions of world cricket. Afterwards, when David casually mentioned at Sherborne that the entire Australian team had been guests at his house, the other boys were open-mouthed. In normal circumstances boarders were not allowed home in term-time, but David had obtained a special dispensation to come up to London at the weekend in order to attend the party. Ronnie wrote to Canon Wallace beforehand expressing his gratitude ‘for the concession you make in this case’, and promising that D
avid would return to Sherborne by the four o’clock train on Sunday.25
It is possible that this dispensation annoyed Thompson, especially as Ronnie seems to have gone above his head in writing directly to the headmaster; and it followed recent friction between the two men over David’s absence from school. There had been a skirmish between them when it seemed possible that David might not return by the start of the spring term. Boarders were required to begin each term on a Friday. A letter from Ronnie explained that David and his brother had been ‘invited to stay with friends in Basel for a matter of ten days or a fortnight’, and referred to the possibility that David might return to school a day late for the new term, that is on the Saturday. In fact these ‘friends’ were business contacts, the father a manufacturer of soaps and other chemical products whom Ronnie was cultivating. Thompson had replied by telegram, insisting that David return on time, and followed this up with what seems to have been a stiff reprimand. A second, apologetic letter from Ronnie three days later contained an assurance that David would return ‘strictly in accordance with school requirements’. He wanted Thompson to know that the holiday had been arranged without consulting David or his brother, ‘but simply with a desire that they should avail themselves of an invitation they received from friends in Switzerland’. Evidently Thompson wrote again to express his high hopes for the boy, because Ronnie wrote a third letter a few days later, affirming that he too hoped that David would ‘justify all the potentialities that you feel’.26