by Mike Walsh
Left on her own, Mrs Lamont was now to endure nearly a decade of harassment from Van Hoogstraten’s men. Nothing violent. Nothing that major. Just the drip, drip, drip of nasty little happenings to make life horrid. Her son Alan recalls: ‘To make sure she didn’t get any sleep the music was played continually. They must have used looped tapes or something, because whether they were holding a party or not the music just went on and on. It never stopped. When that didn’t shake her, other things started to happen. The cable to her television aerial was cut again and again. Rubbish was thrown into her basement area. The gas flue was blocked. Rubble was dumped all over the garden that she loved. A huge dustbin full of rubbish was set alight outside her door.’
Alan is one of the country’s most admired cartoonists. A gentle, softly spoken man, he phoned the managing agents – Van Hoogstraten’s office – to complain. ‘This rough voice said my fucking mother was the trouble round here. Everybody knew she was a fucking troublemaker. I said that I would report him to the police and he said you can fucking well do that, you fucking fuck.’
‘So I did phone the police. They were less than helpful. They said that Van Hoogstraten always knew what he could get away with. If his people were making threats I wouldn’t be able to prove it.’
Mrs Lamont went to the council’s harassment office. ‘He huffed and puffed and did nothing,’ says Alan. ‘He would come round and noted this and that and said to us do this and do that but nothing would ever happen. He, like everyone, was really too intimidated by the thought of Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Nearly everybody in the town was frightened of him.’
Life became even worse for Violet after her son complained. Every time she went into the garden there was abuse from the floor above. A hole was made in her bathroom ceiling directly above the bath, ostensibly during plumbing work in the room overhead. It was left there so that the bath was open for inspection from the room above. Each time Violet started to run the water she would hear heavy footsteps on the holed ceiling above. The waste pipe outside was broken and her kitchen swamped in sewage. Then one day she found her water turned off. One of her sons came by to turn it on from the mains. Immediately the flat was flooded. A Water Board official was called in. He was astonished to find that someone had twisted the ballcock and diverted the overflow from Violet’s water tank so that it flowed back into the flat. Once the water was turned on a flood was inevitable.
Some members of Violet’s family wondered if the elderly lady might be paranoid, making it up – until they visited what had been a lovely flat.
By 1984 her beloved home was in such a bad state that an environmental health officer ruled that it was unfit for human habitation. He was going to slap a closure order on the flat. No doubt this was just what the landlord wanted. Now the tenant would have to move out.
Violet Lamont had other ideas. She went to a firm of solicitors. They wrote a timid letter to Van Hoogstraten’s office. It was ignored. Alan says that privately they told her they didn’t want to upset Van Hoogstraten. It might result in a brick being thrown through their office window. Other local solicitors were approached and they too didn’t want to know about taking on Van Hoogstraten. Finally the local Tory MP, Tim Sainsbury, intervened, and a woman solicitor who wouldn’t be intimidated took up the case. The unfitness order was never issued and – after a prolonged struggle – a judge instructed the landlord to make the place fit to live in again.
Violet had won. The harassment died down. She kept her home. Van Hoogstraten personally never put in an appearance. But Alan thinks he must have developed a grudging admiration for the old lady. She died of cancer in 1996.
Closure orders, like the one the environmental health officer wanted to issue on Mrs Lamont’s home, should be bad news for the bad landlord – in theory. Van Hoogstraten proved that they could be quite the opposite, a handy means to get an awkward tenant out. Just allow the place to deteriorate – or help the process by smashing the house up – and the council will solve your problem by telling your tenants that they can’t live there any more because it’s unfit for them to do so. This happened time and time again in the Van Hoogstraten empire.
It happened to Madge and Fred Mahood. They were the last tenants remaining in a large, ramshackle corner property, 222 Dyke Road, Brighton. The Mahoods were in their eighties when Van Hoogstraten bought the house. They had lived in the ground-floor flat there since 1962. When they refused to leave, Van Hoogstraten tried to take out an eviction order against them. That failed, so the house was deliberately turned into a slum. The landlord claimed that he had spent £14,000 on the flat in 1983. But lead was stripped from the roof. Windows were broken. Gutters were blocked. Upper-storey windows were boarded up. Water streamed through the roof. The ground-floor walls ran with damp. By 1988 it was a notorious Brighton eyesore.
Fred Mahood was so ill that he was moved into a nursing home. Madge Mahood stayed put. ‘It’s a terrible place to live and I’m going mad,’ she said. ‘But I can’t leave now. This is my home. Where would I go?… Why should I move just so that a man like Van Hoogstraten can make money.’ One night she awoke to find a man climbing through her bedroom window. She shouted and he disappeared. She was certain – though there was no proof – that the intruder was one of Van Hoogstraten’s men.
Brighton Council was urged to slap a purchase order on the house. But Van Hoogstraten announced publicly that he would want £500,000 for the property. The council balked at that. They did exactly as he hoped – and imposed a closure order. A council official suggested that it was all for Madge Mahood’s own good. ‘It was felt that Mrs Mahood’s place of residence was unfit for her or anybody else,’ he told the press. ‘It is unlikely that she would have enjoyed another winter there.’ So finally Madge had to leave. Van Hoogstraten had won.
Hove Council was no better than Brighton Council at standing up for Van Hoogstraten’s most vulnerable tenants. John Whittington was one of them. A seventy-five-year-old, partially blind and with a bad heart, he and his wife Emily lived in a first-floor flat in Denmark Villas. Van Hoogstraten bought the house in 1979. As at 32 First Avenue and 222 Dyke Road, the other tenants swiftly disappeared and the place rapidly deteriorated. A reporter who visited the Whittingtons’ home in August 1980 wrote that the walls of the flat were green with mildew and rain poured through the ceiling.
John Whittington, who was becoming increasingly frail, called in the council’s environmental health department. They declared the house to be unfit and took out a court order requiring the landlord to repair it. Van Hoogstraten’s company Hamilton Prior ignored the order. A second order was obtained – and that was ignored too. So John Whittington decided to withhold his weekly rent until the repairs were carried out. Hamilton Prior’s response was to go for an eviction order.
‘We will be taking out a possession order against them,’ warned one of Van Hoogstraten’s managers, Ron Dedman. ‘They would have to pay the rent even if the roof was falling in.’
The council’s response? To warn the Whittingtons that because of their unpaid rent they might not only lose their home, but could also lose their place on the council’s waiting list for a house. They had been on the list for five years. A housing official explained: ‘By withholding rent Mr Whittington may be seen as being made homeless voluntarily.’
At the time John Whittington was so ill that his doctor warned that he would die within six months if he wasn’t found somewhere else to live – or the roof was repaired. ‘Our life is a nightmare,’ his wife said. ‘We can’t afford to live anywhere else and we can’t live here.’
The Whittingtons left. The house was boarded up and left to decline until Van Hoogstraten decided the time was ripe to sell it. He would send in the repair men to deal with any serious structural problem, but no more. The place could rot until he was ready. The same happened with some fifty other of his properties on the coast. He became known for his eyesores and, ever conforming to type, he revelled publicly in the outrage they caused.
Periodically someone on Brighton or Hove Council would suggest that the local authority might take over these wasted assets, but it was never considered worthwhile. Van Hoogstraten laughed when, in 1982, a Brighton councillor suggested a compulsory purchase of one of his boarded-up buildings in Ditchling Road. ‘If they think this place is bad they should see some of my other properties in Brighton… It will stay like that until somebody makes me an offer I can’t refuse.’
How did Van Hoogstraten see himself at that time, this thirty-seven-year-old tycoon who had been in jail and had come out seemingly intent on making ordinary people hate and fear him?
Here are extracts from a ‘My kind of day’ newspaper feature on him published on 30 July 1982, when he was still struggling with the Inland Revenue as well as planning his massive spending spree:
‘I get up at about 7.30, which I regard as rather late. I don’t have anywhere where I really call home. I was living in Paris for a long time and for tax reasons my official home is in Liechtenstein, but you can’t live there. It’s really plastic.
‘I like to be able to smell fish and chips when I walk down the street. I have property in some very seedy areas of London but even there the place has got character and atmosphere.
‘I would never eat breakfast in bed. I’ve got silk sheets and it would really mess it all up… I don’t drink alcohol except a bit with meals and I don’t smoke. Often I’ll have a business lunch which I like because often someone else pays for it. If I don’t go out I’ll just have a salad sandwich on brown bread and yoghurt. Then it’s back to business.
‘I don’t have a desk to go to. So I just work wherever I am.
‘I’ve got a Cadillac, a Rolls-Royce and a Corvette here, a Rolls in Paris and another one in Geneva… I hate sports cars and I hate the people that drive them. They’re all flash Harrys.
‘I used to take the train up to London but then they started putting the prices up so I stopped.
‘I have a guardian, too, who comes around to protect me. No, they’re not former SAS men. We do rather better than that. They’re just to protect you from the idiots who try to mug you for £10. I don’t really have any enemies. If I did I’d be dead.
‘Sometimes photographers try to take pictures of me without my permission. We rip the film out of their cameras, smash the cameras and spit on them.
‘I’m very frugal but I do like properly cooked plain English food. The French and Italians seem just to eat chopped-up rubbish covered in sauces.
‘I’ve been in prison twice but I have absolutely no complaint about the food. I thought it was perfectly OK.
‘I don’t really like restaurants because the food is rarely as good as home cooking. They’re full of smoke and there’s probably some riff raff at the next table. I’m a terrible snob.
‘I don’t read much, although when I was in prison I read books on company law and a lot of history books.
‘I was brought up a strict Roman Catholic and I believe that there is an ultimate supernatural force. But all organised religions are man-made and were invented by some man who was a bit cleverer and they are just used as a way of keeping the population under control.
‘I have my own religion which is power. I control the lives of hundreds and thousands of people just by making decisions about whether to buy or sell a particular business.
‘I believe that might is right. The clever and the strong will always survive.
‘I believe that all property is theft. If you go back in history all land and property is owned by someone because they nicked it from someone else.
‘It doesn’t take much to make money, but it takes a lot to keep it. I don’t gamble because someone who wins money by gambling or on the pools is just the same as he was when he was poor. I’ve known bank robbers flying high when they’ve got £30,000 or £40,000 from a job. Then I’ve seen them two years later when they’re broke and having to think of doing another one.’
Such reflections only hinted at the paranoia and explosive violence of the man. Tony Browne was given a glimpse of the paranoia the first time he encountered Van Hoogstraten. It was 1980 and Browne and a group of fellow students were all looking for a flat, so they made an appointment with Select Management, one of Van Hoogstraten’s management companies. They turned up at a house in the Avenues to be greeted by Van Hoogstraten himself.
Browne remembers vividly what happened, and no doubt his mates remember it too. ‘We were ushered through a series of steel doors into a dark, dusty room filled with very ornate furniture which was mostly hidden by stacks of files. He sat us all down on this long leather chesterfield. He then went and sat behind this big gilt desk and started ranting and raving. He said he was taping what we said and that if we later came out with anything that contradicted what was recorded there would be some kind of vengeance.
‘He then asked each of us in turn what we did, what we were studying. The first one said he was a student of English literature. Nick, as I later came to know him, exploded at that. He called him a parasite who was obviously of no use to society whatsoever. He moved on to the next one. What do you do? He was a drama student. There was even more apoplexy at that. And so it went on. He was verbally assassinating each of us in turn until he came to me. And he said: “What do you do?” I said: “Well, er, architecture.” He went: “Ah. Something useful.” I was only to discover years later that he meant something useful to him.’
Other students who were looking for accommodation went through the same grilling. One who, like Browne, did become a tenant and then went on to work for Van Hoogstraten as a rent collector, recalls how the tycoon loved to have a go at the students he employed. ‘He’d compare himself with us. Here we were with our university degrees. He’d got no qualifications at all at school and here we were working for him.’
Working for Van Hoogstraten was, predictably, a rollercoaster ride. The inner circle called him Nick, the others Mr H. He always paid the wages on time. He was almost always studiously formal and polite. If you made a mistake and admitted it quickly he was understanding. But the slightest hint that you were ‘taking the piss’ – on the fiddle or lying to him or disobeying him – and all hell would break loose. Browne witnessed it time and again. The last incident was just before he and Van Hoogstraten finally parted company in 2000.
‘He found out that some workers in one of his hotels had been using the hotel phone to make overseas calls. There were five workers who might have done it. They were all foreign students working in the hotel as domestics. He lined them up and marched up and down in front of them asking questions until he found out the truth. Two of them had been at it. Nick just started hitting them… Slap, slap, slap around the face, right in front of the others. Everyone was petrified and nobody dared to intervene.’
It was a bully at work.
The climate of fear around Van Hoogstraten on the south coast grew and grew as he expanded during the property boom. By the middle of the eighties he owned an estimated four to five hundred properties in Brighton and Hove and many locals had a friend or a relative who had been one of his tenants or knew someone who had been.
Others only had to read the local newspapers regularly to be taught that a very nasty character indeed was living in their midst apparently unstoppable.
During that period Van Hoogstraten seemed to be Teflon man. Occasionally a tenant might lay charges against him or against one of his lieutenants, but he or she would always think better of it. In April 1981 a student alleged that she had been unlawfully evicted from a Van Hoogstraten flat in First Avenue. Hove Council followed up by trying to serve a summons on Van Hoogstraten. But neither the council’s bailiffs nor the detectives it hired could track him down. An order for Van Hoogstraten’s arrest was issued. Then, unaccountably, all the witnesses against him abruptly disappeared too. The case was dropped. A year later much the same happened. Again it was a First Avenue tenant, again illegal eviction, again the witnesses vanished, again the case was dropped.
‘We are unable to make contact with the witnesses… The council has no alternative but to withdraw the case,’ magistrates were told.
The landlord’s attitude to his tenants was quixotic. Some he got to know and talked to. At times he bragged that this or that tenant had been with him for years and was as happy as could be. In 1988 he told us that one of his very first tenants, a Mrs Knighton from that terrace of houses in St Magdalene Street that he had bought in 1963, was still his tenant there nearly thirty years later. And he directed the Observer’s Duncan Campbell to a woman in Fulham who glowed with praise about him as a landlord. A health service administrator, she had been his tenant for a decade. She told Campbell that she’d always found Van Hoogstraten ‘a very polite and personable young man. There are some tenants who expect their landlords to wet-nurse them.’
However, the hate he exhibited publicly towards tenants – ‘scumbags’, ‘dog’s meat’, ‘filth’ – was quite genuine. He tried to justify it many years later by saying he was referring to tenants who tried to blackmail developers by demanding huge sums in return for quitting their controlled tenancies. That did happen, but not to Van Hoogstraten. No, the roots of his animosity lie elsewhere. Tony Browne, who observed his reaction to tenants over a period of twenty years, says there is a simple explanation. Van Hoogstraten’s loathing springs from what Browne says every landlord experiences – the careless damage and destruction which tenants tend to leave behind them.
Perhaps Browne is right. Perhaps a broken window back in 1962 or a wall smeared with excrement explain this lifelong detestation. Yet the tenants who most raised Van Hoogstraten’s wrath weren’t the dirty or the destructive. They were those who had the nerve to take him on.