Nicholas Van Hoogstraten

by Mike Walsh

  Violence had a fascination for Nick Hoogstraten. He became the friend of a tough character called Andrew Emmanuel. Of Greek-Cypriot origin, Emmanuel was known as ‘Mr Wimpy’ because he had a Wimpy Bar concession in the town. Emmanuel had reputedly been a professional wrestler and was a notorious fighter. Aggressive teenage boys, knowing his reputation, often made the journey to his Wimpy bar just to show their mettle by picking a fight with him. Van Hoogstraten would recall how he was there every afternoon, watching approvingly as Emmanuel wiped the floor with the latest young upstart.

  Years later he would concede that he was a violent man himself. ‘I’m probably ruthless and I’m probably violent,’ he told the television programme World in Action in 1988. Whether that trait developed at school, or was a reflection of a violent father, is unknowable. But the mature Van Hoogstraten talked with relish about the impact a single ferocious individual can have if he dives in without worrying about the consequences. He told one of the authors that a small man could rip two large men apart ‘if he lets himself lose it completely’.

  To Nick, Brighton was a place which held out limitless opportunities to make money. It was the hippest spot on the south coast. There were beat clubs everywhere – the Cad-Lac Club, the Bar, the Box, the Mo Club, the Electricity Club and scores more. Even the nineteenth-century Aquarium, where one main attraction used to be the sight of its resident chimps having tea, was now a stage for local pop groups. Teenagers and twenty-somethings flocked to Brighton from miles around to hear the newest sounds. They also came to shop in the trendy new boutiques and dress shops that sprang up in the famous Lanes behind the two piers.

  Nick got into the music business himself. He started by opening a ‘teen club’ in Portsmouth, then he opened a similar club in Brighton and, later, one in Bristol.

  His expanding property business proved handy to him in his role as a club owner. One of the great problems in the pop business at the time was that many of the groups – a lot of them Purple Heart poppers – were so unreliable that they would often fail to materialise for the next night’s gig. Nick ensured that this wouldn’t happen to his clubs. The groups he booked were lodged not in some hotel but in the latest flats in the Hoogstraten property business to fall empty. There he could keep an eye on them. He reminisced about it during a penetrating interview with the journalist Duncan Campbell for the Observer in 1988: ‘There were others around who booked their artistes into a club and beat them up if they didn’t turn up. That was their way of doing things till I came on the scene. The Moody Blues and Small Faces used to come and stay in my apartments in Brighton.’

  Some performers still caused him problems. ‘That skinny geezer, wears tight trousers, what’s his name? Rod Stewart. We had him at our club in Bristol. He was trying to dispute the gate money he was being paid. I said: “Look, you little runt, if you think I’m the sort of person who would get my people to click the clicker wrong, I suggest you make a phone call.” We nearly had to thump him.’

  Nick was a Mod. Not just that, he had to be King Mod. He took to touring the clubs to spot the Mod with the sharpest, newest gear. He would make detailed notes on any really outstanding outfit and take them that night to his personal tailor. The tailor had a day to turn out something on the same lines but better. Nick would wear it the following night at the club or coffee bar or pub in which he’d spotted the outfit that inspired it.

  It was a camp decade, the first in a century and a half when fashionable men could be peacocks wearing silk and satin, and have their hair long and curled. Nick posed and pouted and camped it up with the best of them. There is a whole series of carefully staged photographs of him in his way-out gear looking as arrogant and decorous as Beau Brummel. In some of these shots he exhibits that youthful gawkiness of young men just grown into adulthood, his walk a little ungainly, arms loosely dangled by his side. He decided to cure this. What he required was a role model. He chose Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Napoleon had no doubt stood at a mirror before coming up with that famous pose, right hand inside his coat just about level with his breastbone. This appealed to the young man from Sussex. But he did not want to be seen to copy Napoleon, so he experimented. His great hero, Adolf Hitler, had done the same, hiring a photographer to take pictures of him as he struck different poses.

  Nick came up with a neat solution. He adapted Napoleon’s business with the hand and made it his own. He put his right hand into his jacket at a lower point, approximately across his abdomen. It looked original and allowed him to show off his rings made of gold sovereigns, which he wore like a gilded knuckleduster across his fingers.

  He remained a camp figure long after the sixties were over. In the seventies he took to wearing all-black outfits and tasteful diamond or amethyst rings. In the eighties he had a passion for ankle-length white mink coats.

  Many wondered about Nick’s sexuality – and not just because of his campness. In his twenties he was to establish very close friendships with two tough, handsome young men. People who saw the chemistry between them suspected there was a sexual side to it. His attitude to women added to the suspicions. He was spectacularly misogynistic. Women were ‘filth’, he said, and he treated them accordingly. He slapped them around, just as his father had slapped his mother. He spat on some of them – literally. But they flocked around him. He would go on to have strikingly beautiful mistresses. If there was a gay side to Nick Hoogstraten there was a straight side too.

  For all his trendiness he must have been an odd man out on the sixties music scene, with its dope and acid, booze and heroin. He was a rarity among the pill-popping Mods. He was and is a near teetotaller, he hates smoking and he has always displayed an apparently genuine abhorrence of drugs.

  Maybe it was this that explains what he subsequently admitted was a glorious opportunity missed. It was offered to him during a meeting at Victoria Station with someone from the music business. Nick was asked if he wanted to manage a pop group – the Rolling Stones. He turned the offer down. The Stones at this time were being savaged by the establishment as the standard-bearers of teenage debauchery. This followed a highly publicised drugs bust at Keith Richards’s Tudor mansion in West Sussex early in 1967.

  Many years later, when explaining why he spurned the offer to manage the Stones, Van Hoogstraten didn’t mention drugs. He said that all the percentages and all the paperwork had been sorted out, but when he met the group he changed his mind and pulled out of the deal. ‘They were scruffy buggers… The only reasonable one of the lot was Charlie Watts – the only one you could sit and talk to… I didn’t realise that Mick Jagger was intelligent and worth dealing with… I subsequently found out that Jagger was completely articulate, very straight and very intelligent. It was just an act… It was one of the only mistakes I made.’

  Music was only one of Nick’s ventures. He opened a boutique, Deb, in Brighton’s modish Regency Parade and he sank money into the rag trade. For the boutique’s champagne launch he hired Jimmy Saville, one of the best-known disc jockeys of the day.

  Saville pulled in the crowds. According to the Brighton Evening Argus, ‘wave after wave’ of fans ‘pushed through the portals to claim his scribbled autograph’. But it was Nick, not the disc jockey with his long, flaxen hair, who grabbed the attention of the paper’s reporter: ‘Looking on at the punishment his establishment’s decor was taking was the owner Nicholas Hoogstraten of Furzecroft, Hove – in many ways as remarkable a man as his colourful guest-of-honour. At the age of 21 he is in the tycoon bracket. Deb Boutique is just the latest of a long line of successful business ventures – property dealing companies, interior decorating, a successful teenage club in Portsmouth, a clothing manufacturers… “You name it and I seem to have a controlling interest in it,” said Nicholas.’

  ‘And he isn’t boasting,’ the report added, detailing how the Hoogstraten fortune began with a boy’s interest in stamps. ‘I haven’t really looked back since,’ the young tycoon was quoted as saying.

  By
1966 Nicholas Hoogstraten was a familiar figure in Brighton. Everyone in the Lanes and the beat clubs knew ‘Nick’ with his terrific clothes and his stamps. A contemporary recalls him regularly commandeering a table in a Brighton coffee bar, an intense figure sorting through files of cellophane-wrapped stamps day after day.

  But he was not a friendly figure to strangers. ‘People kept back when he was walking through to his table. There was something about him.’ The air of menace given off by the older Van Hoogstraten was evident to some people even then.

  While Nick’s clubs and his boutique attracted a lot of attention, for the moment he kept a much lower profile about his ventures into property.

  Private landlords had an evil reputation in the early sixties. That was due especially to one man, the former London estate agent Peter Rachman.

  Rachman had become a millionaire by exploiting a lax law and the desperation of black immigrants as they tried to find accommodation in the capital. Rules that had protected tenants’ rights had been largely swept away by the Housing Act of 1957. Meanwhile, to attract cheap labour to run Britain’s public services, the Conservative government encouraged tens of thousands of West Indians to come to Britain. The newsreels pictured them arriving in huge numbers at Waterloo Station looking lost but hopeful. What the cameras didn’t show was that when the new immigrants went knocking on doors around London for rooms, many white landlords didn’t want to know. There was no Race Relations Act then. Until that moment no one had seen the need for one.

  Rachman spied an opportunity. He began buying up old tenanted houses and mansion blocks in run-down parts of Notting Hill and North Kensington. Then he made life so unpleasant for the sitting tenants that they moved out. After undergoing a cheap conversion, which carved the old houses and flats into as many single rooms as possible, the properties were filled with West Indian immigrants. They were charged sky-high rents.

  What made Rachman’s name notorious was his methods of getting rid of old tenants and of getting much higher rents from their replacements. Old ladies who had lived quietly in Powis Square or Lisson Grove for decades suddenly found home life had become a nightmare, with the electricity cut off, or a brick through the bedroom window, or the lavatory blocked and overflowing or holes in the bathroom ceiling, or a new neighbour who partied all night – or all of these.

  On rent days the new tenants were confronted by intimidating toughs. One was called Serge, like Rachman a Pole. He went knocking on tenants’ doors accompanied by a snarling Alsatian on a leash. The dog was called Demon. It was always kept hungry. The new tenants always paid.

  Van Hoogstraten once implied that he’d had dealings with Rachman. It seems unlikely. Rachman died in 1962, a year before the younger man first got into the property business. But there appears to have been one very powerful personal link between them in the shape of a character just as bizarre as Rachman or Hoogstraten. His name was William Bagot.

  Bill Bagot was the slum millionaire the press never found out about. He was to become Hoogstraten’s mentor. But, according to one of Hoogstraten’s former confidantes, he’d also been Rachman’s secret mentor. He’d put up the money for the Polish landlord to buy property.

  Unlike the high living, womanising Rachman or the elegant Hoogstraten, Bagot kept himself in the shadows. He was a Fagin-like figure who built one of London’s biggest bed-sit empires. He was a large Irishman who looked like a down and out. Many knew him as their eccentric landlord who personally collected the rent. Few would have imagined that around Notting Hill and Paddington alone he had 400 houses and was collecting rent from thousands. A council official who investigated him and Hoogstraten in the 1980s saw him at property auctions. ‘He shambled in, never seemed to do any bidding and didn’t seem to talk with anyone. He was dressed like a tramp’.

  Hoogstraten’s ex-architect, Tony Browne, recalls his first sight of Bagot. ‘He was in a shiny old black frock coat and a red waistcoat. He had a gold watch chain across his chest … and as well as the gold I saw a line of something on the waistcoat that looked like silver. When I came closer I could see what it was. The man was running with silver fish. He was filthy.’

  Bagot was a classic miser. He endlessly tramped the streets collecting rents from each tenant rather than pay a rent collector. It was the same with repairs – broken windows, blocked lavatories, leaking pipes – Bagot invariably tried to fix them himself. Hoogstraten, who is so mean that he reuses teabags and relies on ‘bucket-shop’ bargain flights to take him round his world-wide property empire, found Bagot’s stinginess incredible. ‘You know he tarmac-ed his own roofs. He was always covered in the stuff’.

  Bagot had another characteristic of the classic miser, too. He buried his wealth – literally. A fortune in notes and gold coins is thought to have been stashed under floorboards, and behind secret panels and in the gardens of the houses where he lived. As we will see, following Bagot’s death many years later, Van Hoogstraten mounted a frenzied treasure hunt to unearth the old man’s secret hordes.

  Bagot was a batchelor with no family. He lived in Ledbury Road, now the epitome of Notting Hill chic, but in the 1960s a flaking row of stuccoed Victoriana. He would become the pivotal figure in the vast network or property dealing and money lending that Nick Hoogstraten would create. Bagot taught the budding tycoon everything he knew and was soon to be outshone by his hungry pupil. After his death, 30 years later, Hoogstraten cried and described him as his father figure.

  The young Hoogstraten made many of his early London purchases in Bagot country – in places like North Kensington and Paddington. At the time his growing property empire created no waves, no publicity.

  An even more lucrative line was developing still more secretly, and stayed a secret during the years and years in which he was in the headlines. He became a moneylender. He didn’t exact ruinously high interest rates like a conventional loan shark – though some called him just that, a loan shark. His tactic was to lend at relatively modest rates on any venture, however dubious, so long as he was given rock-solid security, and a lot of it.

  People whom every other lender had turned down could expect to get a loan from Nick Hoogstraten provided that the value of the stock or the deeds or whatever security they gave him was higher, much higher, than the loan they wanted. Gradually the word spread that although other lenders may say ‘no’, it would be a ‘yes’ from Nick. He called himself ‘the lender of last resort’.

  Other moneylenders did not want their borrowers to default. Nick counted on them defaulting. When it happened he ‘sequestrated’ the asset they had lodged as security in a flash. There were no delays, no renegotiation, no extra period of grace. ‘I became rich by others going skint,’ he boasted.

  And his riches were flaunted. In the mid-sixties he began to wear expensive rings, he started to buy silverware and he acquired a Rolls-Royce. Louis Yaxley, his parents’ neighbour in Rustington, remembers seeing the Rolls parked outside their home next door. ‘He’d drive up here every Monday. He was bringing his dirty washing for his mother to do.’

  Nick had a black Jaguar as well. Just after midnight one October night in 1966 he was driving home in it from his teen club in Portsmouth, when a police patrol car started to follow him. He was clocked at 46mph in a 30mph zone. When he spotted the police car in the mirror he took evasive action, turning off the main drag into side-streets before re-emerging on to the main road. But the police car was waiting and it followed him. When Nick stopped, the police car stopped. Nick waited for the police driver to get out, then roared off.

  With the police car now in full pursuit, its lights flashing, its bell ringing, Nick finally came to a halt and, like so many people when they are pulled up for speeding, he lost his temper. He stormed up to the now stationary police car screaming obscenities. It took two policemen to arrest him. He was taken to Portsmouth police station, where, it seems, officers had to forcibly restrain him. He later complained that a valuable ring was snatched from his finger and that his watc
h strap was broken during the struggle. The magistrates were not sympathetic. He was fined £2 for using obscene language. It was his first offence as an adult.

  Not for the last time, Nick, always self-righteous, appealed against the conviction. ‘I appealed on a matter of principle,’ he said later. ‘I got a QC, it was in the High Court. It cost me something like £600. My QC said: “You’ve been a policeman all your life. Has no one ever said ‘fuck off’ to you before?” He [the policeman] said it wasn’t what was said, it was the way he said it.’ The appeal was turned down.

  But everything else was going wonderfully for him. In the summer of 1967 Nick announced to the world that he was a millionaire.

  In fact at twenty-two he was ‘Britain’s youngest self-made millionaire’. He celebrated by adding an aristocratic flourish to his name. Nicholas Hoogstraten became Nicholas van Hoogstraten.

  The press took notice. Sub-editors carefully added ‘self-proclaimed’ to the ‘youngest self-made millionaire’ sobriquet. But their news editors took him seriously. Nicholas van Hoogstraten was a figure worth watching, still small beer on the national stage but with news potential.

  The Sunday Mirror sent its reporter Carolyn Martin to interview Brighton’s youthful tycoon. Always studiously polite and with a way of looking piercingly into your face, he seems to have captivated her. The headline to her piece read: ‘Nicky makes a million pounds … at 22’. The article described a diamond ring on Van Hoogstraten’s hand and his ‘staggering’ confidence. ‘When he talks of business he sounds an experienced City gent much more than his 22 years but there is an incongruous childish chuckle and a shy grin when he has made someone laugh. His attitude to the City gents is honest. “They can’t afford to treat me as an impudent long-haired kid because they know I could buy and sell them just like that. My real dislikes are fakes – people, antiques, even mongrel dogs…”’