English Country House Eccentrics by David Long

Author:David Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752478210
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

HOWLETTS, nr Canterbury

Gambler, zookeeper, self-confessed misanthrope and a would-be right-wing revolutionary, more than a decade after his passing there is still something of the Regency about John Victor Aspinall (1926–2000) and his commitment to a style of life which had disappeared long before he arrived in London from India and began to make his mark.

Today he is most commonly associated with gorillas and big cats, having established families of both at Port Lympne and Howletts, the private zoos he established at his two country houses in Kent. The money to do this came from gambling rather than any inheritance, the man he assumed was his father having been an Army surgeon and his actual one a brother officer with whom his middle-class mother was having an affair.

The gambling started early, and at Jesus College, Oxford, the rakish Aspinall skipped his finals to be at Ascot where he won a tidy sum. Before long he was running illegal games in London, moving from one prestigious address to another to stay ahead of the authorities. When the law changed to allow private clubs to operate, he opened the Clermont in Berkeley Square which quickly became the headquarters of a new ‘Mayfair Set’. Attracting five dukes, a similar number of marquesses and another two dozen peers, members included some 600 high-rollers in all, including Aspinall’s friends Sir James Goldsmith and the ill-fated 7th Earl of Lucan (q.v.).

When the latter disappeared, apparently after bludgeoning his children’s nanny to death having mistaken her for his estranged wife, Aspinall lost no time in showing where his loyalties lay. Showing scant sympathy for the nanny, and none at all for the wife, he was happy to tell the press that ‘Lucky’ Lucan had done the right thing. ‘A very brave thing’, he called it, going out like a gentleman by deliberately scuttling his speedboat off Newhaven and ‘down he went’.

It wasn’t that the tall, rangy club proprietor liked Lucan particularly, or simply that his personal code meant he would always stick by his friends. Mostly he felt only contempt for humanity – certainly that section of it which wrote for and read the tabloids – and he subsequently admitted that of his thirty best friends at least half were animals. Here he was happy to put his money where his mouth was, and spent literally tens of millions on the establishment and upkeep of his two zoos.

His commitment to the two zoos was total – reportedly barely a quarter of the annual running costs were recovered in ticket sales – but so was his belief in his animals. When asked whether his own children were safe playing with them, he memorably replied in his booming, patrician voice that he would ‘rather leave them with the gorillas than with a social worker’; similarly when he fell ill with cancer in his seventies, he seriously considered allowing one of his tigers to finish him off. (Aspinall was also more than once quoted as saying he would be entirely happy to sacrifice his own children if this would help save another species from becoming extinct.

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