An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (27 page)

In 1959, in order to alleviate Murrayfield’s high leverage, Flack agreed a deal with Cotton involving an exchange of shares between Murrayfield and City Centre Properties. Two years later Murrayfield was completely absorbed into City Centre, by then Britain’s largest property company. Flack, who joined its board, was not disposed to defer to Cotton or Clore: the latter in particu-lar found him too much of a buck.

Mandy Rice-Davies’s claim that she had an affair with Flack surfaced once he was dead and unable to issue denials, but certainly, during 1962, he separated from his wife, with whom he was well-matched in vivacity and louche charm. In January 1963, he crumpled under the buffeting of his clashes with Cotton, and resigned from City Centre Properties. On 22 March (aged forty-seven), he had the death that Clore peculiarly dreaded – by drowning. He was found by his chauffeur immersed in a bath in his flat in Whitehall Court: he had taken barbiturates with alcohol. The coroner’s verdict accepted that he had accidentally fallen asleep while washing. Even if he did not intend to kill himself, there was a despondent rashness about his last weeks. His widow, who inherited his estate (valued at £840,801 in 1963), settled on Cap Ferrat, with a yacht at Villefranche. She felt a rueful tenderness for his memory, and bitterness towards Cotton and Clore for hounding him to perdition.

Flack was a tangle of a man: bumptious, vulnerable and self-destructive. There were anomalies, too, about that great hate-figure of 1963, the slum landlord Rachman, at once a brute and victimised refugee, whose surname inspired a hostile epithet, Rachmanism, but whose villainy came with redeeming traits and extenuating experiences.

Perec Rachman was a Polish Jew born at Lvov in 1919. As a dentist’s son, he had a middle-class upbringing. ‘The Polish attitude to the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish, and can neither swallow nor spit it out,’ recalled a contemporary who fled to Palestine. ‘The fear in every Jewish home, the fear we never talked about, but which we were unintentionally injected with, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enough, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing.’ It was instilled in these children that they must remain polite when insulted by drunkards, that they must never haggle, that their manners should be submissive and smiling. ‘We must always speak to them in good, correct Polish, so they couldn’t say that we were defiling their language, but that we mustn’t speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn’t say we had ambitions over our station.’ There was an obsession, too, with hygiene: ‘even a single child with dirty hair who spread lice could damage the reputation of the entire Jewish people’. This was the mentality in which Rachman spent his boyhood; and against which his adulthood was a furious, wounded, panicky reaction.
³⁶

In 1940, after the German invasion of Poland, Rachman aged twenty-one was forced into a chain-gang building an autobahn
towards Russia. His parents vanished into the oblivion of the concentration camps; years later, in England, when asked what had happened to them, he would shrug silently. After escaping from German captivity, he fled towards the Soviet Union, where he nearly starved to death. He used to say that he survived by stealing a barrel of caviar, which he had to eat long after its richness had sickened him: thereafter the sight of the black fishy eggs made him retch. Another story was that hunger drove him to eat human turds, but he liked to add savagely: ‘I never ate German shit. At least no one can say I ever ate
that
.’
³⁷
Even if one discounts the factual accuracy of these tales, they expressed a psychological truth for Rachman. The caviar and the shit showed what life felt like for him.

After capture by Soviet forces, Rachman was sent to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle. When Hitler sent troops to invade Russia and rid the world of the Jewish-Bolshevik menace, Rachman was drafted into a Polish army corps organised by the Russians, which joined the invasion of Italy in 1943. Rachman worked in the corps’ supply depot, where he proved indispensable in procuring and dispensing soap, cigarettes, chocolate and coffee which could be exchanged by soldiers for the sexual services of Italian women. He learnt passable German, Russian and Italian by 1945, when he began teaching himself English. A Polish second-lieutenant who met him at this time remembered him as a stereotype, ‘always trying to get something out of you – always looking for an opening to do a deal’.
³⁸

Rachman remained with the occupying troops in Italy until December 1946, when he sailed for Britain. He was kept in Polish corps resettlement camps in Scotland during a notoriously harsh winter. In 1947 he was moved to a resettlement camp in Oxfordshire, where he amused his dormitory companions by kissing goodnight at bedtime Rita Hayworth’s face on a wall poster. In 1948 he took his first English job, in Cohen’s veneer factory, earning £4 10s a week. He rented a squalid room in Stepney, and got evening work as a washer-up at Bloom’s, the famous Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. After about eight months he went to work in a tailor’s workshop in Soho, and got better digs at Golders Green. He was eager for social acceptance, but as a middle-class Polish Jew whose upbringing had instilled the notion that he was primarily a Pole and secondarily a Jew, his avidity made him inadmissible in every set. Polish exiles in London certainly rejected him. ‘He spoke the average Polish,’ said Karol Zbyszewski, editor of
Dziennik Polski
, London’s daily Polish-language newspaper, ‘not like most Jews making a hundred mistakes in every sentence.’ After Rachman’s death, Zbyszewski complained that he had been quoted as saying that Rachman had made him feel ashamed at being Polish. ‘I never said such a thing,’ Zbyszewski insisted. ‘I said I was ashamed Rachman
claimed
to be a Pole – because he was not a Pole. He was a Jew, and that’s a very different thing.’
³⁹

Around 1950, Rachman left Golders Green for a Paddington bedsit. He was selling cheap suitcases, uncured sheepskin, and contraband Swiss watches. ‘The best time to catch me in my office is between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.,’ he would tell men with whom he was trying to fix a deal. He gave them the number of a red telephone kiosk on a Paddington street, and ensconced himself inside for an hour each afternoon heedless of angry thumps on the door. In every way he prowled like a fox at the edge of a poultry farm. He was surrounded in Paddington, as before in Soho, by prostitutes whom he used when he could afford them. ‘Women,’ he said, ‘are like food. You are fond of chicken? OK. But eat it every day and you’ll soon be bored. Now try a little duck, and the chicken will taste much better.’
⁴⁰

A brunette called Gloria, whose pimp was a black jazz musician, suggested to him that he should start a flat-letting agency. The idea was that he would rent flats in his own name, and sub-let them to individual prostitutes (two women working together counted as a brothel, but a lone female in a flat was beyond legal reach). Rachman opened a letting agency at the corner of Westbourne Grove with Monmouth Road: his stygian office, beneath pavement level, was reached by descending the narrow stone stairs into a basement. A rent of £5 a week was entered in prostitutes’ rent books, but Rachman took an additional £10 a week in cash. Other landlords in the vicinity used him as letting agent and rent collector; he also emptied pennies from gas meters into a bucket which he carried with him.

In 1954 Rachman formed his first companies, Six Norfolk Square Ltd and Eight Norfolk Square Ltd, in collaboration with the property dealer Cyril Foux, and the latter’s solicitor brother. Cyril Foux was a sharp, natty man, quick-moving but oblique, with a near-spiv moustache and a sardonic attitude to those he thought fools. He had been born in Hackney in 1920, married a girl with rich parents, Leila Leigh, at Hendon in 1951, and acquired smart offices in Maddox Street, Mayfair. Norfolk Square, a short walk from Paddington station, was lined by small hotels of the sort described by Anthony Powell in 1955 as pervaded by ‘an air of secret, melancholy guilt’.
⁴¹

A nearby area of similar dinginess was the Charecroft Estate, terraces of tall mid-Victorian houses abutting Shepherds Bush Green, with leases reverting in the late 1950s and early 1960s (the freeholds were owned by a charity called the Campden Trustees). The premises were packed by tenants paying statutorily controlled low rents, and had a high turnover of landlords who wished to avoid repair bills. A property dealer called Lieutenant Colonel George Sinclair bought a batch of end-of-lease properties on the Charecroft Estate, and sold thirty of them to Rachman. Sinclair had a quaint address: ‘The House Beyond’, The Avenue, Farnham Common, not far from his registered offices in Slough; and a quaint hobby, too, driving carriage and horses.

Victorian speculative builders had erected terraces of houses throughout Bloomsbury, Islington, Kensington, and Pimlico, on sites leased from aristocratic families which still owned swathes of the capital’s land. As with the Charecroft Estate, the lessees granted ninety-nine-year leases to the tenants, which meant that many central London leases were due to expire between 1950 and 1975. The Victorians had envisaged that when their heirs repossessed their freeholds, the properties would have risen in status and increased in value. Instead, as the size of families shrank and servants became scarcer, families moved from big terraced houses to smaller suburban properties. Those people who owned their leases, and stayed behind, sub-let floors to cover running costs. Soon the floors were sub-divided, and surreptitiously sub-sub-let, room by room, turning desirable houses into squalid, even disreputable rooming houses. Freeholders stopped enforcing the terms of leases or resisting sub-letting. Moreover, few landlords could afford proper upkeep of such buildings during the long postwar period of statutory rent control, when the rents of sitting tenants in unfurnished flats and rooms were frozen at 1939 levels. Even if landlords managed to dislodge the sitting tenants, and let furnished rooms at uncontrolled rents, they did not smarten the exteriors of their properties for fear of attracting the interest of tax collectors or other snoopers.
⁴²

One of the Victorian speculative developments, which had been forsaken by the middle classes, was the Colville Estate, comprising five-storey stucco houses with porticos and balustrades built in too northern a district of Kensington to be fashionable. The accommodation, twenty-seven per cent of which had been vacant before the war, was monstrously overpopulated by 1945. ‘There wasn’t a cupboard that didn’t have somebody in it,’ recalled Mark Strutt, who together with a Norfolk baronet had inherited control of the estate. ‘The houses had been sub-let and sub-sub-let without our consent, and they were filled with prostitutes, burglars, murderers and negroes,’ he complained. He and the baronet decided that Colville was ‘
not
an estate that our sort of families should be associated with’, and could not face the outcry that would be aroused if they evicted existing tenants so that the muddle of rented rooms could be converted into proper flats.
⁴³

In 1950 they sold the Colville Estate to a speculator named Benson Greenall, who had been born at Ashton-under-Lyne in 1890, enlisted in the Cheshire Regiment in August 1914, was appointed as a Housing and Town Planning Inspector under the Ministry of Health in 1925, but had become a developer by 1929 when he bought historic Lansdowne House, off Piccadilly, after the death of the old marquess – Dorothy Macmillan’s uncle. He subsequently erected a block containing ninety-five luxury flats, offices, the Austin car showroom, a cinema and restaurant in Lansdowne House’s gardens which dominated the south side of Berkeley Square. He floated Lansdowne House (Berkeley Square) Limited with gratifying profit in 1936. At a time when British taxpayers were being mulcted by their government, it was Greenall who in 1948 pioneered the development of Grand Cayman Island as an offshore tax haven. Noticing that the island, twenty miles by six in area, rising from a gin-coloured stretch of the Caribbean waters, was exempt from taxation, he brought the first bank to Georgetown, established an airfield, built a hotel and launched that most lucrative light industry: tax evasion. His second wife, Melisande Dalrymple, whom he married in 1946, was related to Oscar Wilde.

Greenall bought the Colville Estate for £250,000, which he paid by negotiating a hundred per cent mortgage. As the Labour government had imposed a lending limit of £50,000, he split the estate between five companies, each of which borrowed £50,000 from a clearing bank. Greenall sold his Colville properties in parcels during the next few years: his profits partly funded his pioneering developments on Grand Cayman Island during the 1950s. Years of poor maintenance meant that most Colville lessees were in default of their leases. The new freeholders scared them with Notices of Dilapidations, whereby the law would oblige them to spend thousands of pounds repairing the houses to comply with their leases; then bought back the leases themselves, and thus got control of their properties. Lacking the qualms of the Strutts, Greenall issued notices to quit to unprotected tenants, and sold a hundred Colville houses to George Sinclair, with whom Rachman had dealt over the Charecroft Estate.

Sinclair introduced Rachman to Abraham Kramer, a methodical, quietly spoken solicitor with a practice in Portland Place specialising in property. Kramer controlled money held in trust, which he used to loan to clients to fund their purchases of property from Sinclair. In 1955, at Sinclair’s instigation, Kramer formed a shell (non-trading) company called Rimmywood Investments of which his wife Dorothy was the nominal director. Rimmywood became the vehicle for Rachman’s activities. A mortgage of £9,600 was advanced to Rimmywood by Unilever’s Union Pension Trust, which dealt with Sinclair and Kramer, but never directly with Rachman. He thus acquired four houses in St Stephen’s Gardens, and six in Powis Terrace (‘our driver was shocked by the squalor of Powis Terrace’, Christopher Isherwood wrote after visiting David Hockney there: ‘peeling houses, trashcans spilling over sidewalks, seedy shops run by thin pop-eyed Pakistanis’). Next year, in 1956, Rimmywood acquired four more Powis Terrace houses, and one in Colville Terrace. Also in 1956 Sinclair and Kramer obtained a mortgage of £6,700 from Union Pension Trust for a shell company called Flynbrook Securities, which acquired three houses in Colville Road, and four in Powis Gardens. Some months later Rachman became sole shareholder in Flynbrook.
⁴⁴