John Aspinall (zoo owner)

John Aspinall's Grave and Memorial

John Victor Aspinall (11 June 1926–29 June 2000) was born in Delhi, India but was a United Kingdom citizen. He was a zoo owner and a gambler. He was also a self-declared misanthrope and reputed co-plotter of an extreme right-wing conspiracy against Britain’s Labour government.

Biography

John Victor Aspinall - known to all his friends as "Aspers" - was born in India on June 11, 1926, the son of Robert Aspinall, a British Army surgeon. 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 who had sex with his mother, Mary Grace Horn, under a tamarind tree after a regimental ball.

Sent to boarding school, after his parents divorced, his step-father Lord Osboune 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 race course instead. He consequently never earned a degree.

Career

Aspinall became a bookmaker, in the UK at a time when the only legal gambling 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 were legal, and the house owner made a 5% fee for hosting the event: Aspinall made £10,000, a sum equivalent to £250,000 today, on his first event. Illegal gambling houses were defined 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 Lady Osbourne pay off the local Metropolitan Police.

In 1958, his mother had forgotten to pay-off the Metropolitan Police, so they raided his game that night. He won the subsequent court case, the outcome of which is known as "Aspinall's Law," and without which the National Lottery could not take place. The win created a vast increase in Chemie games, during which the founder of the SAS Colonel Bob Sterling lost £173,000 on Aspinall's tables; he wrote out a IOU at the end of the night.

Clermont Club

In 1962 he founded the Clermont Club in London's Mayfair, which he sold in 1972. 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 criminal Billy Hill's associate John McCue, claimed that Aspinall worked with Hill to employ criminals to cheat the players. Some of the wealthiest people in Britain were swindled out of millions of pounds, thanks to a gambling con known as "the Big Edge." The scheme existed of three parts:

• Marking the cards by bending them over a steel roller, and then repacking them
• Employing card sharks
• Skimming the profits

Animal parks

In his years at Oxford, Aspinall had loved the book Nada the Lily by Rider Haggard, about an illegitimate Zulu prince 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 tigress, and two Himalayan bears.

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,, for their breeding of rare and endangered species and for the absurd number of keepers who have been killed by the animals they're supposed to manage.

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."

Personal life

Aspinall was a close friend of James Goldsmith and Lord Lucan, and held both eccentric and extremely right-wing views. He once stated that Britain was in need of "a Franco-ite counter-revolution." The three were known to discuss the possibility of violently overthrowing the elected governments of Harold Wilson and, later, James Callaghan with a coup. He also expressed the wish that "3.5 billion people should be wiped out" of the world's population "within the next 150-200 years" mirroring the views of some extreme Greens. Unlike them, however, he added he would be happy to join them.

He 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.. According to the journalist Lynn Barber, in an interview in 1980 Aspinall gave a slip of the tongue that indicated Lord Lucan had remained Aspinall's friend beyond the date of the alleged suicide .

Death

Aspinall died of cancer in Westminster, London, aged 74.

External links

• Zoo website