Aspinall's whole life was dangerous and controversial, and in the popular press there was much speculation that he had aided the disappearance of his gambling crony Lord Lucan. But by far the most important part of his career was his work with animals.
Biografi John Aspinall MM Biografi - John Aspinall ialah tokoh populer di pasar judi. Dalam satu waktu dalam kehidupannya, ia ialah seseorang bandar yang sukses dan dikelilingi oleh pro-kontra dengan hukum. Jul 01, 2000 In 1956 Mr. Aspinall married Jane Hastings, a Scottish model, and moved into an Eaton Place apartment, where he built a garden shed housing a Capuchin monkey, a 9-week-old tigress and two Himalayan. John Aspinall, also known as Aspers (11 June 1926 – 29 June 2000) was a British zoo owner and gaming club host. From middle class beginnings he used gambling to move upwardly to the highest echelons of English society in the 1960s. In 1956, he married Jane Gordon Hastings, a Scottish model, and the couple had one son, Damian Aspinall.
He insisted on treating them not as beasts to be exhibited, but as friends to be pampered. He ensured that they should have adequate space to live in the same kind of groupings as in the wild, and took the greatest trouble to reproduce the variety of their natural diet. His gorillas, for example, were given all kinds of berries, and treats such as roast meat on Sundays and chocolate bars.'Aspers' himself, determined to annihilate the gulf between the species, delighted to romp with tigers and gorillas. His keepers, usually chosen without reference to qualifications, were encouraged to behave in a similar manner. In his book The Best of Friends (1976), Aspinall insisted on the individuality of animals: 'There are bold tigers and timid ones, honest tigers and treacherous ones, predictable and unpredictable, noisy and silent, hot-tempered and good-natured.'
He himself was an excellent judge of his charges. A Passion to Protect, a film about his work, showed him having his eyelids delicately picked by the gorilla Djoun; receiving newly-born tiger cubs dumped in his lap by the mother; and being surrounded by an affectionate wolf pack. Of his 30 best friends, he once remarked, more than half were animals. In 1993 he was perfectly happy that his grand-daughter should play with gorillas; indeed, he remarked, 'I'd rather leave them with gorillas than with a social worker.'
While experts were initially skeptical of his approach, they were eventually obliged to admire his remarkable run of breeding successes. Until 1956, no gorilla had ever been born in captivity, and not many more were added in ensuing years. Yet after 1975, gorilla births were common events at Howletts, and eventually passed the half-century mark.
Aspinall also bred hundreds of tigers, including the first Siberian tiger born in Britain. More than 50 other species profited, including the first snow leopard born in captivity; the first honey badger to be bred in a zoo; the first fishing cats in Britain; the first Przwalski's horses for 30 years.
But these triumphs were overshadowed by the deaths of five keepers: two killed by the same tigress in 1980; one crushed by an elephant in 1984; another savaged by a tiger in 1994; and the last trampled by an elephant earlier this year. There were also occasional maulings: of the 12-year-old Robin Birley in 1970; of the model Merilyn Lamb in 1969; of a volunteer at Port Lympne in 1994.
Jane Hastings John Aspinall Sutton
Though Aspinall succeeded in warding off attempts by the Canterbury Council to enforce more orthodox methods of husbandry at Howletts, these accidents evoked criticism which portrayed him as a playboy living out his fantasies. Such attacks were the more virulent because of the provocative manner in which Apsinall set forth his own views. In his mind there had once been a golden age in which animals and humans had been equal. Mankind, though, had launched a vicious campaign against the beasts and Aspinall saw it as a duty to fight for the victims.He castigated the human race as a species of vermin, and positively welcomed natural disasters as a means of reducing the plague of homo sapiens. He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if he could take another 250 million with him. There was something to be said, he felt, for Hitler's ideas about eugenics. 'Broadly speaking,' he said, 'the high income groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance.'
Aspinall's special antipathy was clever women of Left-wing views; they made him fume. His quasi-fascist views earned him obloquy, and tended to obscure the extraordinary nature of his achievement. By 1996 his two zoos contained 1,100 animals, and cost £4 million a year to keep, of which the public contributed a mere £330,000. The task of providing the remaining funds left Aspinall quite undaunted. His panache and self-belief always allowed him to live entirely on his own terms.
John Victor Aspinall was born in Delhi on June 11 1926. His father, supposedly, was Robert Aspinall, a surgeon; his mother, Mary Grace Horn, was sprung from a family resident in India for four generations. John was the second, and very much the favorite son. Later he gave out that, at 26, he had discovered his true father was a soldier called George Bruce, and that he had been conceived under a tamarisk tree after a regimental ball.
John was largely brought up by an ayah, and in early years was more fluent in Hindustani than in English. At six, he was sent back to prep school near Eastbourne. In 1938, Aspinall's mother, now divorced, married George Osborne (later Sir George, 16th Bt), who paid for John to go to Rugby. There he made the rugger XV, but his boisterous bossiness caused the school to suggest in 1943 that he might not want to return for the next term. The most influential event of this period was his reading of Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily, which sparked a lifelong obsession with the Zulus and tribalism.
After Rugby, he spent three years in the ranks of the Marines. Afterwards he went up to Jesus College, Oxford, where he soon discovered that he had a talent for gambling. He risked his entire term's grant (£70) on a horse called Palestine in the 2,000 Guineas; it won, albeit at very short odds.
At Oxford he made friends who would prove vital to his later life, notably the Goldsmith brothers, Jimmy and Teddy, and a fellow gambler, Ian Maxwell-Scott. When his final exams beckoned, Aspinall preferred to attend the Gold Cup at Ascot.
At that time it was not permitted to hold games of chance regularly at the same place. Aspinall therefore began to set up games of chemin-de-fer at a variety of addresses. His charm, admitted even by his enemies, attracted such players as the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Derby, while his entertaining was conducted in the most lavish style. With his percentage of the stakes guaranteed, he was soon becoming rich.
He married in 1956, and went to live in a flat in Eaton Place, in which, quite suddenly, he began to instal various animals. There was a Capuchin monkey, then a nine-week-old tigress called Tara, who slept in his bed for 18 months, and two Himalayan bears. Inevitably, the neighbors were disturbed. Seeking for alternative accommodation, he put down a deposit of £600 on Howletts, a neo-Palladian house with 38 acres. A successful bet on the Cesarewitch enabled him to pay off the remaining £5,400.
The success of the Clermont Club, and investment advice from Jimmy Goldsmith, enabled him to finance Howletts, and to see off the complaints of angry neighbors. 'You are slipshod and impatient,' Lord Zuckerman, the doyen of zoologists, told him. But Aspinall was also irrepressible.
In 1972 he sold the Clermont Club to Victor Lownes for £500,000 in order to devote himself to Howletts. By now he was employing six gardeners and 12 keepers; the weekly bill for food amounted to £3,000. The stock market crash of 1973 left Aspinall more or less bust, forced to sell pictures and jewellery so that his animals could eat. Yet he still managed to pay out £360,000 for Port Lympne and its 275 acres, neglected since the death of Sir Philip Sassoon in 1939.
These were turbulent times for Aspinall. On November 8 1974, the day after Lord Lucan's disappearance, Aspinall's friends - but not, to Private Eye's cost, Jimmy Goldsmith - gathered for lunch at his house in Lyall Street to discuss what should be done. The tabloids suggested, without a shred of evidence, that they were all privy to dark secrets, and that Lucan might have turned up at Howletts and implored Aspinall to feed him to his tigers.
Aspinall declared on television that if Lucan showed up he would embrace him, but this was no more than the tribal loyalty which he demanded from his friends. Those, like Dominic Elwes, who were thought to have broken the code, were ostracised. Elwes made the mistake of selling a sketch of the interior of the Clermont to the Sunday Times, and when he found himself cut off from the company that he adored, committed suicide. At his funeral Aspinall, while praising Elwes's gifts, referred to 'a genetic flaw' - and found himself punched on the jaw after the service.
In 1978 the need for cash forced Aspinall to return to gambling. Within four years the casino he set up in Hans Place was making £8 million a year. He decided to move to larger premises in Curzon Street, and to offer 20 per cent of the shares on the stock market. In 1983, he netted £20 million from their sale.
Aspinall and Goldsmith still owned the remaining 76 per cent of the company, though Aspinall's share was made over for the upkeep of his zoos. When the company was sold in 1987, he realised £23 million. But by 1992 he was in financial difficulties again, having lost large sums in Goldsmith's failed attempt to take over Rank Hovis McDougall. In consequence he opened another new casino in Curzon Street in 1992. Within a year it was flourishing.
In recent years he was dogged by cancer. His courage, doubted by none, was exemplified last year by the manner in which he shrugged off a vicious mugging near his home in Belgravia. John Aspinall married first, in 1956 (dissolved 1966), Jane Hastings, a Scottish model; they had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1966 (dissolved 1972), Belinda 'Min' Musker, a grand-daughter of the 2nd Viscount Daventry; they had a daughter who died in infancy. He married thirdly, in 1972, Lady Sarah ('Sally') Courage, widow of the racing driver Piers Courage and daughter of the 5th Earl Howe; they had a son.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
definition - john aspinall zoo owner
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| John Aspinall | |
|---|---|
| Born | John Victor Aspinall 11 June 1926 Delhi, India |
| Died | 29 June 2000 (aged 74) Westminster, London |
| Residence | Howletts, Canterbury, Kent |
| Nationality | British |
| Other names | Aspers |
| Education | Rugby School |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Bookmaker Gambler Businessman Zoo keeper |
| Years active | 1950s-2000 |
| Known for | Gambling Aspinalls Howletts Zoo Port Lympne Zoo John Aspinall Foundation |
| Political party | Referendum Party |
| Spouse | Jane Hastings (1956-1966) div. Belinda Musker (1966-1972) div. Lady Sarah Courage (1972-2000) his death |
| Children | 2 sons: Damian, Bassa 1 daughter, Amanda 2 stepsons: Jason, Amos |
| Parents | George Bruce, soldier Mary Grace Horn |
| Website | |
| http://www.totallywild.net/ |
John Victor Aspinall (11 June 1926 – 29 June 2000) was a Britishzoo owner and gambling club host. From middle class beginnings he used gambling to move to the centre of British high society in the 1960s.[1] He was born in Delhi during the British Raj, and was a citizen of the United Kingdom.
|
Biography
John Victor Aspinall, known to all his friends as 'Aspers', was born in Delhi, India, on 11 June 1926, the son of Dr. Robert Stavali Aspinall, a British Armysurgeon, and wife, whom he married before 1926, Mary Grace Horn (died 1987), daughter of Clement Samuel Horn, of Goring-by-Sea, Worthing, West Sussex, Sussex.[2] Years later, when he pressed his supposed father for money to cover his gambling debts, he discovered his real father was George Bruce, a soldier.[3]
Sent to boarding school, after his parents divorced, his stepfather Sir George Osborne sent him to Rugby School. Thrown out of Rugby School for inattention, Aspinall later went up to Jesus College, Oxford, but on the day of his final exams, he feigned illness and went to the Gold Cup at Ascot racecourse instead. He consequently never earned a degree.[3]
Career
Aspinall became a bookmaker; at that time the only legal gambling in the UK was on horse racing courses. Between races, he returned to London, and took part in illegal private gambling parties. Aspinall discovered that games of Chemin de Fer, known as Chemie (Chemmy), were legal, and the house owner made a 5% fee for hosting the event.
Aspinall targeted his events at the rich, sending out embossed invitations.[4] Illegal gambling houses were defined then in British law as places where gambling had taken place more than three times. With his Irish-born accountant John Burke, Aspinall rented quality flats and houses, never used them more than three times, and had his mother pay off local Metropolitan Police officers.
Among the gamblers were the Queen's racehorse trainer Bernard van Cutsem,[4] who brought with him friends including the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Devonshire. The standard bet was £1,000, which would be £25,000 accounting for inflation in 2007 figures. Chemie games were quick and played every 30 seconds, with £50,000 changing hands per game. Aspinall made £10,000, a sum equivalent to £250,000 in 2007, on his first event.
In 1956 he married Jane Gordon Hastings, and had one son, Damian Aspinall.
In 1958, he lived at Howletts Zoo, Kent; at this point his mother had forgotten to pay off corrupt police officers, so they raided his game that night. He won the subsequent court case, the outcome of which is known as Aspinall's Law. The win created a vast increase in Chemie games, during which:
- The landowner the Earl of Derby lost over £20,000;[5] and then returned on another night and lost £300,000, the equivalent of nearly £7 million in 2007.[4]
- The founder of the Special Air ServiceColonel Sir David Stirling lost £173,000 on Aspinall's tables, writing out an IOU at the end of the night
In response to Aspinall's legal win, the UK Government passed the Betting and Gaming Act 1960, which allowed commercial bingo halls to be set up, provided they were established as members-only clubs and had to get their take from membership fees and charges rather than as a percentage of the gaming fees. Casinos were required to operate under the same rules, with a licence from the Gaming Board of Great Britain, and to be members-only. The passing of these laws brought Aspinall's Chemie-based 5% business model to a close, and he had to find a new business.
Clermont Club
In 1962, Aspinall founded the Clermont Club in London's Mayfair. The Club was named after Lord Clermont, a well known gambler who had previously owned the building in Berkeley Square.[6] The list of the club's original members reads like a Who's Who of the British aristocracy: five dukes, five marquesses, 20 earls and two cabinet ministers.
Gaming wager sites. But overheads were higher, and under the new laws Aspinall had to pay tax, only making a table charge which produced much smaller revenue for the house.[4]
In Douglas Thompson's book The Hustlers, and the subsequent documentary on Channel 4, The Real Casino Royale, the club's former financial director John Burke and gangsterBilly Hill's associate John McKew, claimed that Aspinall worked with Hill to employ criminals to cheat the players.[5] Some of the wealthiest people in Britain were swindled out of millions of pounds, thanks to a gambling con known as 'the Big Edge'.[4][5] The scheme existed of three parts:
- Marking the cards by bending them over a steel roller in a small mangle, and then repacking them.[5]
- Employing card sharks
- Skimming the profits
On the first night of the operation, the tax-free winnings for the house were £14,000, or around £280,000 in 2007's money.[5]
John Burke quit in late 1965, a year into the scam. [4] He had been tipped off about an investigation but Aspinall was determined to carry on.[7] However Aspinall no longer had someone to deal with 'the dirty end' of the operation. After two years operation the Big Edge was closed. Hill respected Aspinall's decision and the two parted.
Aspinall divorced his first wife in 1966 and on 13 December of that year he married secondly Belinda Mary Musker (b. 27 November 1942), daughter of Major Anthony Dermot Melloney Musker (killed in a motor racing accident on 8 August 1959) and wife (m. 2 November 1940) The Hon. Mary Angela FitzRoy, without issue.[8] The passing of the 1968 Gaming Act boosted profits, and he sold The Clermont in 1972.[3]
In 1972 he divorced his second wife and married thirdly Lady Sarah-Marguerite 'Sally' Curzon (b. 25 January 1945, living in 2003 at 64 Sloane Street, London), daughter of Francis Curzon, 5th Earl Howe, and Sybil Boyter Johnson. She was a widow who had previously married 29 March 1966 the racing driver Piers Raymond Courage. John and Sally had a son Bassa Wulfhere Aspinall (b 1972), who married in 1998 Donne Ranger.[9][10] He also had a daughter, Amanda; and two stepsons, Jason and Amos Courage.[3]
The need for cash to fuel his zoos prompted him to return to running gambling clubs in London, and he set up two new successful ones in Knightsbridge and Mayfair.[3] In 1983, he made $30 million from their sale, but a decade later he was in financial difficulties again, and in 1992 he set up yet another gambling spot, Aspinalls, presently run by his son.[3]
Animal parks
In his years at Oxford, Aspinall had loved the book Nada the Lily by Rider Haggard, about an illegitimateZuluprince who lived outside his tribe among wild animals. In 1956, Aspinall married Scottish model Jane Hastings, and moved into an Eaton Place apartment. In the back garden, Aspinall built a garden shed housing a capuchin monkey, a 9-week-old tiger, and two Himalayan brown bears.[3]
Later that year, with proceeds from his gambling, Aspinall purchased Howletts country house and estate near Canterbury, Kent. He lived in the house and set up a private zoo, Howletts Zoo, in the grounds. In 1973, because of need for further space for his animal collection, Aspinall bought Port Lympne near Hythe, Kent. He opened Howletts to the public in 1975, and Port Lympne Zoo in 1976. Both Howletts and Port Lympne have been run by the John Aspinall Foundation since 1984.
The zoos are known for being unorthodox, on account of the encouragement of close personal relationships between staff and animals,[11] for their breeding of rare and endangered species and for the number of keepers who have been killed by the animals they managed.[12]
Aspinall's pioneering work with wild mammals and his outspoken personal philosophy made him a unique and notable figure. He was the subject of two award-winning documentary films by Roy Deverell, Echo of the Wild and A Passion to Protect.
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Politics
Aspinall ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1997 as the candidate of Goldsmith's single-issue Referendum Party, against Britain's deepening involvement in the European Union.[3]
Personal life
Jane Hastings John Aspinall &
Biografi John Aspinall MM Biografi - John Aspinall ialah tokoh populer di pasar judi. Dalam satu waktu dalam kehidupannya, ia ialah seseorang bandar yang sukses dan dikelilingi oleh pro-kontra dengan hukum. Jul 01, 2000 In 1956 Mr. Aspinall married Jane Hastings, a Scottish model, and moved into an Eaton Place apartment, where he built a garden shed housing a Capuchin monkey, a 9-week-old tigress and two Himalayan. John Aspinall, also known as Aspers (11 June 1926 – 29 June 2000) was a British zoo owner and gaming club host. From middle class beginnings he used gambling to move upwardly to the highest echelons of English society in the 1960s. In 1956, he married Jane Gordon Hastings, a Scottish model, and the couple had one son, Damian Aspinall.
He insisted on treating them not as beasts to be exhibited, but as friends to be pampered. He ensured that they should have adequate space to live in the same kind of groupings as in the wild, and took the greatest trouble to reproduce the variety of their natural diet. His gorillas, for example, were given all kinds of berries, and treats such as roast meat on Sundays and chocolate bars.'Aspers' himself, determined to annihilate the gulf between the species, delighted to romp with tigers and gorillas. His keepers, usually chosen without reference to qualifications, were encouraged to behave in a similar manner. In his book The Best of Friends (1976), Aspinall insisted on the individuality of animals: 'There are bold tigers and timid ones, honest tigers and treacherous ones, predictable and unpredictable, noisy and silent, hot-tempered and good-natured.'
He himself was an excellent judge of his charges. A Passion to Protect, a film about his work, showed him having his eyelids delicately picked by the gorilla Djoun; receiving newly-born tiger cubs dumped in his lap by the mother; and being surrounded by an affectionate wolf pack. Of his 30 best friends, he once remarked, more than half were animals. In 1993 he was perfectly happy that his grand-daughter should play with gorillas; indeed, he remarked, 'I'd rather leave them with gorillas than with a social worker.'
While experts were initially skeptical of his approach, they were eventually obliged to admire his remarkable run of breeding successes. Until 1956, no gorilla had ever been born in captivity, and not many more were added in ensuing years. Yet after 1975, gorilla births were common events at Howletts, and eventually passed the half-century mark.
Aspinall also bred hundreds of tigers, including the first Siberian tiger born in Britain. More than 50 other species profited, including the first snow leopard born in captivity; the first honey badger to be bred in a zoo; the first fishing cats in Britain; the first Przwalski's horses for 30 years.
But these triumphs were overshadowed by the deaths of five keepers: two killed by the same tigress in 1980; one crushed by an elephant in 1984; another savaged by a tiger in 1994; and the last trampled by an elephant earlier this year. There were also occasional maulings: of the 12-year-old Robin Birley in 1970; of the model Merilyn Lamb in 1969; of a volunteer at Port Lympne in 1994.
Jane Hastings John Aspinall Sutton
Though Aspinall succeeded in warding off attempts by the Canterbury Council to enforce more orthodox methods of husbandry at Howletts, these accidents evoked criticism which portrayed him as a playboy living out his fantasies. Such attacks were the more virulent because of the provocative manner in which Apsinall set forth his own views. In his mind there had once been a golden age in which animals and humans had been equal. Mankind, though, had launched a vicious campaign against the beasts and Aspinall saw it as a duty to fight for the victims.He castigated the human race as a species of vermin, and positively welcomed natural disasters as a means of reducing the plague of homo sapiens. He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if he could take another 250 million with him. There was something to be said, he felt, for Hitler's ideas about eugenics. 'Broadly speaking,' he said, 'the high income groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance.'
Aspinall's special antipathy was clever women of Left-wing views; they made him fume. His quasi-fascist views earned him obloquy, and tended to obscure the extraordinary nature of his achievement. By 1996 his two zoos contained 1,100 animals, and cost £4 million a year to keep, of which the public contributed a mere £330,000. The task of providing the remaining funds left Aspinall quite undaunted. His panache and self-belief always allowed him to live entirely on his own terms.
John Victor Aspinall was born in Delhi on June 11 1926. His father, supposedly, was Robert Aspinall, a surgeon; his mother, Mary Grace Horn, was sprung from a family resident in India for four generations. John was the second, and very much the favorite son. Later he gave out that, at 26, he had discovered his true father was a soldier called George Bruce, and that he had been conceived under a tamarisk tree after a regimental ball.
John was largely brought up by an ayah, and in early years was more fluent in Hindustani than in English. At six, he was sent back to prep school near Eastbourne. In 1938, Aspinall's mother, now divorced, married George Osborne (later Sir George, 16th Bt), who paid for John to go to Rugby. There he made the rugger XV, but his boisterous bossiness caused the school to suggest in 1943 that he might not want to return for the next term. The most influential event of this period was his reading of Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily, which sparked a lifelong obsession with the Zulus and tribalism.
After Rugby, he spent three years in the ranks of the Marines. Afterwards he went up to Jesus College, Oxford, where he soon discovered that he had a talent for gambling. He risked his entire term's grant (£70) on a horse called Palestine in the 2,000 Guineas; it won, albeit at very short odds.
At Oxford he made friends who would prove vital to his later life, notably the Goldsmith brothers, Jimmy and Teddy, and a fellow gambler, Ian Maxwell-Scott. When his final exams beckoned, Aspinall preferred to attend the Gold Cup at Ascot.
At that time it was not permitted to hold games of chance regularly at the same place. Aspinall therefore began to set up games of chemin-de-fer at a variety of addresses. His charm, admitted even by his enemies, attracted such players as the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Derby, while his entertaining was conducted in the most lavish style. With his percentage of the stakes guaranteed, he was soon becoming rich.
He married in 1956, and went to live in a flat in Eaton Place, in which, quite suddenly, he began to instal various animals. There was a Capuchin monkey, then a nine-week-old tigress called Tara, who slept in his bed for 18 months, and two Himalayan bears. Inevitably, the neighbors were disturbed. Seeking for alternative accommodation, he put down a deposit of £600 on Howletts, a neo-Palladian house with 38 acres. A successful bet on the Cesarewitch enabled him to pay off the remaining £5,400.
At the end of 1957 the police raided a gambling party he had organized. The subsequent dismissal of the charges was a virtual admission that private gambling would be sanctioned, and indeed the Gaming Act of 1960 opened the door to casinos. In 1962, Aspinall opened the Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square. Though he was in a parlous financial state at the time - and thus allowed Mark Birley to establish the nightclub Annabel's in the basement - he raised £200,000 in loan stock. Membership, limited to 600, included five dukes, five marquesses and 20 earls.
The success of the Clermont Club, and investment advice from Jimmy Goldsmith, enabled him to finance Howletts, and to see off the complaints of angry neighbors. 'You are slipshod and impatient,' Lord Zuckerman, the doyen of zoologists, told him. But Aspinall was also irrepressible.
In 1972 he sold the Clermont Club to Victor Lownes for £500,000 in order to devote himself to Howletts. By now he was employing six gardeners and 12 keepers; the weekly bill for food amounted to £3,000. The stock market crash of 1973 left Aspinall more or less bust, forced to sell pictures and jewellery so that his animals could eat. Yet he still managed to pay out £360,000 for Port Lympne and its 275 acres, neglected since the death of Sir Philip Sassoon in 1939.
These were turbulent times for Aspinall. On November 8 1974, the day after Lord Lucan's disappearance, Aspinall's friends - but not, to Private Eye's cost, Jimmy Goldsmith - gathered for lunch at his house in Lyall Street to discuss what should be done. The tabloids suggested, without a shred of evidence, that they were all privy to dark secrets, and that Lucan might have turned up at Howletts and implored Aspinall to feed him to his tigers.
Aspinall declared on television that if Lucan showed up he would embrace him, but this was no more than the tribal loyalty which he demanded from his friends. Those, like Dominic Elwes, who were thought to have broken the code, were ostracised. Elwes made the mistake of selling a sketch of the interior of the Clermont to the Sunday Times, and when he found himself cut off from the company that he adored, committed suicide. At his funeral Aspinall, while praising Elwes's gifts, referred to 'a genetic flaw' - and found himself punched on the jaw after the service.
In 1978 the need for cash forced Aspinall to return to gambling. Within four years the casino he set up in Hans Place was making £8 million a year. He decided to move to larger premises in Curzon Street, and to offer 20 per cent of the shares on the stock market. In 1983, he netted £20 million from their sale.
Aspinall and Goldsmith still owned the remaining 76 per cent of the company, though Aspinall's share was made over for the upkeep of his zoos. When the company was sold in 1987, he realised £23 million. But by 1992 he was in financial difficulties again, having lost large sums in Goldsmith's failed attempt to take over Rank Hovis McDougall. In consequence he opened another new casino in Curzon Street in 1992. Within a year it was flourishing.
In recent years he was dogged by cancer. His courage, doubted by none, was exemplified last year by the manner in which he shrugged off a vicious mugging near his home in Belgravia. John Aspinall married first, in 1956 (dissolved 1966), Jane Hastings, a Scottish model; they had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1966 (dissolved 1972), Belinda 'Min' Musker, a grand-daughter of the 2nd Viscount Daventry; they had a daughter who died in infancy. He married thirdly, in 1972, Lady Sarah ('Sally') Courage, widow of the racing driver Piers Courage and daughter of the 5th Earl Howe; they had a son.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
definition - john aspinall zoo owner
definition of Wikipedia
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Wikipedia
| John Aspinall | |
|---|---|
| Born | John Victor Aspinall 11 June 1926 Delhi, India |
| Died | 29 June 2000 (aged 74) Westminster, London |
| Residence | Howletts, Canterbury, Kent |
| Nationality | British |
| Other names | Aspers |
| Education | Rugby School |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Bookmaker Gambler Businessman Zoo keeper |
| Years active | 1950s-2000 |
| Known for | Gambling Aspinalls Howletts Zoo Port Lympne Zoo John Aspinall Foundation |
| Political party | Referendum Party |
| Spouse | Jane Hastings (1956-1966) div. Belinda Musker (1966-1972) div. Lady Sarah Courage (1972-2000) his death |
| Children | 2 sons: Damian, Bassa 1 daughter, Amanda 2 stepsons: Jason, Amos |
| Parents | George Bruce, soldier Mary Grace Horn |
| Website | |
| http://www.totallywild.net/ |
John Victor Aspinall (11 June 1926 – 29 June 2000) was a Britishzoo owner and gambling club host. From middle class beginnings he used gambling to move to the centre of British high society in the 1960s.[1] He was born in Delhi during the British Raj, and was a citizen of the United Kingdom.
|
Biography
John Victor Aspinall, known to all his friends as 'Aspers', was born in Delhi, India, on 11 June 1926, the son of Dr. Robert Stavali Aspinall, a British Armysurgeon, and wife, whom he married before 1926, Mary Grace Horn (died 1987), daughter of Clement Samuel Horn, of Goring-by-Sea, Worthing, West Sussex, Sussex.[2] Years later, when he pressed his supposed father for money to cover his gambling debts, he discovered his real father was George Bruce, a soldier.[3]
Sent to boarding school, after his parents divorced, his stepfather Sir George Osborne sent him to Rugby School. Thrown out of Rugby School for inattention, Aspinall later went up to Jesus College, Oxford, but on the day of his final exams, he feigned illness and went to the Gold Cup at Ascot racecourse instead. He consequently never earned a degree.[3]
Career
Aspinall became a bookmaker; at that time the only legal gambling in the UK was on horse racing courses. Between races, he returned to London, and took part in illegal private gambling parties. Aspinall discovered that games of Chemin de Fer, known as Chemie (Chemmy), were legal, and the house owner made a 5% fee for hosting the event.
Aspinall targeted his events at the rich, sending out embossed invitations.[4] Illegal gambling houses were defined then in British law as places where gambling had taken place more than three times. With his Irish-born accountant John Burke, Aspinall rented quality flats and houses, never used them more than three times, and had his mother pay off local Metropolitan Police officers.
Among the gamblers were the Queen's racehorse trainer Bernard van Cutsem,[4] who brought with him friends including the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Devonshire. The standard bet was £1,000, which would be £25,000 accounting for inflation in 2007 figures. Chemie games were quick and played every 30 seconds, with £50,000 changing hands per game. Aspinall made £10,000, a sum equivalent to £250,000 in 2007, on his first event.
In 1956 he married Jane Gordon Hastings, and had one son, Damian Aspinall.
In 1958, he lived at Howletts Zoo, Kent; at this point his mother had forgotten to pay off corrupt police officers, so they raided his game that night. He won the subsequent court case, the outcome of which is known as Aspinall's Law. The win created a vast increase in Chemie games, during which:
- The landowner the Earl of Derby lost over £20,000;[5] and then returned on another night and lost £300,000, the equivalent of nearly £7 million in 2007.[4]
- The founder of the Special Air ServiceColonel Sir David Stirling lost £173,000 on Aspinall's tables, writing out an IOU at the end of the night
In response to Aspinall's legal win, the UK Government passed the Betting and Gaming Act 1960, which allowed commercial bingo halls to be set up, provided they were established as members-only clubs and had to get their take from membership fees and charges rather than as a percentage of the gaming fees. Casinos were required to operate under the same rules, with a licence from the Gaming Board of Great Britain, and to be members-only. The passing of these laws brought Aspinall's Chemie-based 5% business model to a close, and he had to find a new business.
Clermont Club
In 1962, Aspinall founded the Clermont Club in London's Mayfair. The Club was named after Lord Clermont, a well known gambler who had previously owned the building in Berkeley Square.[6] The list of the club's original members reads like a Who's Who of the British aristocracy: five dukes, five marquesses, 20 earls and two cabinet ministers.
Gaming wager sites. But overheads were higher, and under the new laws Aspinall had to pay tax, only making a table charge which produced much smaller revenue for the house.[4]
In Douglas Thompson's book The Hustlers, and the subsequent documentary on Channel 4, The Real Casino Royale, the club's former financial director John Burke and gangsterBilly Hill's associate John McKew, claimed that Aspinall worked with Hill to employ criminals to cheat the players.[5] Some of the wealthiest people in Britain were swindled out of millions of pounds, thanks to a gambling con known as 'the Big Edge'.[4][5] The scheme existed of three parts:
- Marking the cards by bending them over a steel roller in a small mangle, and then repacking them.[5]
- Employing card sharks
- Skimming the profits
On the first night of the operation, the tax-free winnings for the house were £14,000, or around £280,000 in 2007's money.[5]
John Burke quit in late 1965, a year into the scam. [4] He had been tipped off about an investigation but Aspinall was determined to carry on.[7] However Aspinall no longer had someone to deal with 'the dirty end' of the operation. After two years operation the Big Edge was closed. Hill respected Aspinall's decision and the two parted.
Aspinall divorced his first wife in 1966 and on 13 December of that year he married secondly Belinda Mary Musker (b. 27 November 1942), daughter of Major Anthony Dermot Melloney Musker (killed in a motor racing accident on 8 August 1959) and wife (m. 2 November 1940) The Hon. Mary Angela FitzRoy, without issue.[8] The passing of the 1968 Gaming Act boosted profits, and he sold The Clermont in 1972.[3]
In 1972 he divorced his second wife and married thirdly Lady Sarah-Marguerite 'Sally' Curzon (b. 25 January 1945, living in 2003 at 64 Sloane Street, London), daughter of Francis Curzon, 5th Earl Howe, and Sybil Boyter Johnson. She was a widow who had previously married 29 March 1966 the racing driver Piers Raymond Courage. John and Sally had a son Bassa Wulfhere Aspinall (b 1972), who married in 1998 Donne Ranger.[9][10] He also had a daughter, Amanda; and two stepsons, Jason and Amos Courage.[3]
The need for cash to fuel his zoos prompted him to return to running gambling clubs in London, and he set up two new successful ones in Knightsbridge and Mayfair.[3] In 1983, he made $30 million from their sale, but a decade later he was in financial difficulties again, and in 1992 he set up yet another gambling spot, Aspinalls, presently run by his son.[3]
Animal parks
In his years at Oxford, Aspinall had loved the book Nada the Lily by Rider Haggard, about an illegitimateZuluprince who lived outside his tribe among wild animals. In 1956, Aspinall married Scottish model Jane Hastings, and moved into an Eaton Place apartment. In the back garden, Aspinall built a garden shed housing a capuchin monkey, a 9-week-old tiger, and two Himalayan brown bears.[3]
Later that year, with proceeds from his gambling, Aspinall purchased Howletts country house and estate near Canterbury, Kent. He lived in the house and set up a private zoo, Howletts Zoo, in the grounds. In 1973, because of need for further space for his animal collection, Aspinall bought Port Lympne near Hythe, Kent. He opened Howletts to the public in 1975, and Port Lympne Zoo in 1976. Both Howletts and Port Lympne have been run by the John Aspinall Foundation since 1984.
The zoos are known for being unorthodox, on account of the encouragement of close personal relationships between staff and animals,[11] for their breeding of rare and endangered species and for the number of keepers who have been killed by the animals they managed.[12]
Aspinall's pioneering work with wild mammals and his outspoken personal philosophy made him a unique and notable figure. He was the subject of two award-winning documentary films by Roy Deverell, Echo of the Wild and A Passion to Protect.
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Politics
Aspinall ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1997 as the candidate of Goldsmith's single-issue Referendum Party, against Britain's deepening involvement in the European Union.[3]
Personal life
Jane Hastings John Aspinall &
Aspinall claimed that Lord Lucan, whose disappearance had remained a mystery, had committed suicide by scuttling his motorboat and jumping into the English Channel with a stone tied around his body.[13] According to the journalist Lynn Barber, in an interview in 1990 Aspinall made a slip of the tongue that indicated Lord Lucan had remained Aspinall's friend beyond the date of the alleged suicide.[14]. On the 18 February 2012, Glenn Campbell of BBC News reported that John Aspinall's ex-secretary (using the alias of Jill Findlay) had disclosed that she was invited into meetings where Aspinall and Sir James Goldsmith, the multi-millionaire businessman, discussed Lucan.[15] She further said, that on two occasions, between 1979 and 1981, Aspinall had instructed her to book trips to Africa (Kenya and Gabon) for Lucan's children. The arrangement was so Lucan could see his children from a distance, but he was not to meet them or speak to them.
Aspinall died of cancer,[16] in Westminster, London, on 29 June 2000, aged 74.[3][17]
References
John Aspinall Foundation
- ^Wright, Jade, Expect fireworks, Liverpool Echo, 23 February 2009
- ^Charles Mosley, editor, Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), volume 2, page 3032.
- ^ abcdefghiHoge, Warren (2000-07-01). 'John Aspinall, Gambler and Zoo Owner, Dies at 74'. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/01/world/john-aspinall-gambler-and-zoo-owner-dies-at-74.html. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
- ^ abcdefHiscock, John (2009-02-24). 'The Real Casino Royale: gangsters in a class of their own'. London: Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/4735580/The-Real-Casino-Royale-gangsters-in-a-class-of-their-own.html. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
- ^ abcde'Secrets of the Clermont con'. Daily Mail. 2007-07-23. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-470386/Secrets-Clermont-con.html. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
- '^The Times,Woolly' ACT Turned Out To Be ACE Of Clubs, 19 September 1966
- ^Roberts, Glenys. Bent cards, the Chancellor's granny and the Mayfair hustlerDaily Mail 8 July 2011
- ^Charles Mosley, editor, Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), volume 1, page 1046-7.
- ^Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 107th edition, volume 1, page 1046.
- ^Charles Mosley, editor, Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), volume 2, page 1988.
- ^Jonathan Benthall Animal liberation and rightsAnthropology Today Volume 23 Issue 2 p. 1 - April 2007.
- ^Watson-Smyth, Kate (2000-02-08). 'Aspinal Zoo Fatalities'. The Independent (London). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/elephant-crushes-keeper-in-fifth-aspinall-zoo-death-726641.html. Retrieved 2010-05-06.
- ^'Lucan 'committed suicide'. BBC News. 2000-02-13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/641300.stm. Retrieved 2010-05-06.
- ^Barber, Lynn (2000-07-02). 'Lord Lucan's last secret goes to the grave among gorillas'. The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/jul/02/lynnbarber.theobserver. Retrieved 2010-05-06.
- ^'Witnesses reveal Lord Lucan's 'secret life in Africa'. BBC News. 2012-02-18. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17076512. Retrieved 2012-02-19.
- ^'Zoo keeper Aspinall dies'. BBC News. 2000-06-29. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/812032.stm. Retrieved 2009-05-02.
- ^Deaths England and Wales 1984-2006
Damian Aspinall
External links
Jane Hastings John Aspinall Jr
Jane Hastings John Aspinall Greatest Hits
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