An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (26 page)

Henry Fairlie egged Macmillan to recommend Clore for a life peerage in 1961: ‘I would not be the only one who would attend the House of Lords if it was known that Lord Clore was to take part in the annual debate on the Budget.’ But when Simon Raven in 1962 decried the ‘money-grubbing’ modernisers and ‘hatchet-faced middlemen guzzling smoked salmon in Quaglino’s’, who wished to replace ‘complacency, nepotism, charm, the amateur spirit’ with barbarisms like ‘technical efficiency, professionalism, smart sales talk’, he showed the forces arrayed against Clore.
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Clore liked to move among the gentile aristocracy. Lord Fermoy, whose granddaughter became Diana, Princess of Wales, was his first ornamental ‘guinea-pig’ director – of a company underwriting capital issues formed in 1937. He regarded the Fermoy class, as he did most people, with contempt. When he went to Deauville for the August races he could be seen scrutin-ising the banquettes in the bar of his hotel to find someone who wanted to be seen having a drink with Charlie Clore. There was always someone who would buy Clore’s drinks, consult his views, nod keenly at his gruff, disobliging remarks, and (if his stooge were accompanied by a young second wife) tolerate her being undressed by Clore’s sharp, cold eyes or groped by his small manicured hands. He said that he would never marry his long-term companion, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, because what he liked best about her was her title. He cherished his East End accent, and liked to disrupt smart dinners with the remark: ‘I’m just a little Jewish boy who has learned one or two things in life.’
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Clore was the embodiment of the modernisation crisis in Macmillan’s England. That he was a breaker as well as a builder was shown by the scuppering of two men, Jack Cotton and Walter Flack, after Clore agreed in 1960 to merge his City and Central Investments property portfolio with their City Centre Properties.

Jack Cotton was born at Edgbaston in 1903. His father was an import-export merchant trading in silver plate cutlery, and treasurer of Birmingham’s chief synagogue. When he passed the examinations of the Auctioneers’ Institute, his mother lent him £50 with which, on his twenty-first birthday, he opened his own estate agency in Birmingham. Cotton acted as a middleman between farmers and speculative builders interested in suburban ribbon development around Birmingham in the early 1930s. His first great development was peculiarly satisfying: the demolition of King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, where as a pupil he had been victimised, and its replacement by an office block. Cotton had completed his education at Corinth House, a special boarding house for Jewish boys at Cheltenham College. The housemaster, Daniel Lipson, was elected in a famous by-election of 1937 as the Independent Conservative MP for Cheltenham after members of the constituency party refused to endorse the candidature of a Jew; he was accepted as a Conservative by the Prime Minister, Chamberlain, but Cheltenham Conservative Association continued to refuse him membership.

During the war Cotton served in the Home Guard and was employed by the government in factory building. He was a British delegate of the World Jewish Congress in 1945, and visited the USA to promote emigration to Palestine. In the early months of peace, he was expelled from the Auctioneers’ Institute after a dodgy deal. He left Birmingham, separating from his wife around the same time, and moved into suite 120 at the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane. Cecil Beaton described the Dorchester’s habitués around this time as ‘Cabinet Ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty; actresses (also);
déclassé
Society people; cheap musicians; and motor-car agents.’ So, too, did Elizabeth Bowen’s lover, Charles Ritchie: ‘In the Dorchester the sweepings of the Riviera have been washed up – pot-bellied, sallow, sleek-haired nervous gentlemen with loose mouths and wobbly chins, wearing suede shoes and checked suits, and thin painted women with fox capes, long silk legs and small artificial curls.’ It was a rendezvous of new-money millionaires, and old. Associated with the Dorchester, too, were the ‘Hyde Park Rangers’, as Park Lane street-walkers were known. They warmed themselves on cold nights by an air vent known as ‘the hotplate’ at the hotel’s rear.
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Cotton could stroll along any street in central London, or provincial high street, and value each site. He took fast decisions which investors trusted. He imbued confidence in nervous money men. When his schemes grew too big for his company City Centre Properties to finance alone, he entered development partnerships with Legal and General Assurance and Pearl Insurance – collaborations that were widely copied. Cotton was the first developer to realise that pension funds were better partners than insurance companies because their investment managers could take a longer view. The pension funds of ICI, Imperial Tobacco, and Unilever had all financed his developments by the early 1960s.

When Cotton’s daughter married a stockbroker in 1957, he rented a special train to carry guests from the ceremony in Birmingham to the reception in London. Newspaper headlines about ‘The Mink and Champagne Express’ stood above tales of his ostentatious hospitality. Cotton relished the attention, which felt like a tribute to him. Thenceforth he was always available to journalists, and thrived as a capitalist for the headlines. In 1958 he had an attack of mumps which left distressing after-effects. To compensate for his diminished potency, Cotton became ‘over-assertive and hyper-active’, said Gordon, who saw him often. ‘His constant search for new partners, his striving for new associations, new friends, new projects, his accelerating all-consuming obsession with publicity were part of his attempt … to find a substitute for his loss of virility.’ Cotton was racked by Clore’s sexual arrogance. His envy of other men’s potency gnawed at him. He became obsessed with size. As he admitted in 1962, ‘I feel I’m growing smaller as I grow older.’
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Buildings erected by City Centre Properties had to be big and obvious. His most enduring monuments were phallic eyesores like the Big Top shop complex in Birmingham or the misnamed Campden Hill Towers at Notting Hill Gate. There was monotony, Cotton felt, in districts where buildings were the same height. He thought his developments brought thrills to the skyline. ‘Have you been through Notting Hill lately?’ he asked an interviewer. ‘Well, go and look. There you get an example of broken skyline with a very tall block of flats and lower units near it, and your eyes travel up.’ A man who lived in the shadow of this development recorded how his house shuddered as for months the mechanical pile-drivers slammed down every few seconds. Cracks appeared in several rooms: it was like being under German aerial bombardment.
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Cotton lived with the ex-nanny of his children. He treasured a small, ginger teddy bear in a striped blazer inscribed: ‘I may look busy. I am the boss.’ He collected miniature bottles, and laughed uproariously at the Crazy Gang. Paintings by Renoir and Fantin-Latour hung on the walls of his Dorchester suite. An Osbert Lancaster cartoon in the
Daily Express
of 1962 featured a caricature of a Jewish plutocrat, clutching a cigar and sitting beneath a picture of an ugly skyscraper resembling the Hilton hotel: ‘Withdraw that offer for Berkeley Square and buy a Renoir – quick!’ he barks into his telephone. The Dorchester suite became a haunt from which Cotton’s truer friends were expelled by sly sycophants, who plied him with booze in the hope of tempting him to market tips. Solitude was intolerable to him. His armada of vehicles was headed by a monarchical Rolls-Royce, with the number plate JC1, and descended to a shooting brake, JC9. He trademarked his spruce, gleaming appearance by sporting a bow tie which matched the folded handkerchief in his breast pocket; there was usually a red carnation in his buttonhole from the greenhouses at his Marlow-on-Thames home. His exuberant showmanship reminded one interviewer of an impresario. Another journalist, who found Cotton’s accent ‘hard to place’, likened him to a leading actor: ‘pink face, sensitive nose and mouth, and dark hair that tends to curl’.
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City Centre Properties retained its name after its merger in 1960 with Clore’s City and Central Investments (the new company had an inflated stock market valuation of £65 million). Cotton remained chairman. Hitherto his staff had comprised a few accountants, clerks, and typists. He kept the details of his business in his head, or in a few files which were heaped on a spare bed in his Dorchester lair. The suite was littered with maps of London, newspaper cuttings and surveyors’ reports. It had a private telephone switchboard, a pretty telephonist and vivacious secretaries. These methods proved too haphazard for an expanded dominion in which Clore was the other potentate. After hammering by Clore and sniping from institutional shareholders, Cotton relinquished City Centre’s chairmanship in July 1963.
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His shares in the company (held by family trusts) were sold in November for £8.5 million to a consortium headed by Wolfson. A month after leaving City Centre’s board in 1964, Cotton died of a heart attack in the Bahamas. He had outlived by a year his own victim, Walter Flack.

There was nothing stifled or cloistered about Flack. He had been born in 1915 to parents who wished him to become a solicitor. Having failed to matriculate at secondary school, he talked his way into a Mayfair estate agency which trained several eminent developers, including Harry Hyams and Maxwell Joseph. He was inordinately proud of reaching the rank of sergeant during the Second World War. After demobilisation, he returned to his old firm, but was sacked after a row with its senior partner, who objected to the smoke from his long, curly pipe. Flack set up as a property developer on his own account, and in 1958 paid £11,000 for a shell company, Murrayfield, which acted as the vehicle for his schemes. He recruited as its non-executive chairman his wartime commander, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, whom he revered. He was so proud of his association with ‘the Auk’ that he commissioned a bronze bust of the Field Marshal which was put on a pedestal in the bow-fronted, ground-floor window of Murrayfield’s offices in St James’s Street. The bow window and bust were the reasons for his eccentricity in locating his offices in the middle of clubland.

Murrayfield specialised in provincial shopping centres. Its schemes required long preliminary negotiations with councillors and council officials. As most of the councils which launched major redevelopments of their town centres in this period were Labour-controlled, Flack cultivated Sir Frank Price, the influential Labour leader in Birmingham, whose contacts proved invaluable to Murrayfield. The company’s first major development was a shopping centre in Basildon New Town, Essex. The Basildon worthies liked Flack’s scheme, but asked if he had the financial clout to put it through. Flack rose from his chair, paced back and forth across the council chamber in frowning thought before exclaiming to the committee: ‘I’ve got the answer: I’ll give you my personal guarantee!’ The worthies were charmed by this performance, and settled terms with Flack.
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A City editor’s profile in 1963 catches the man. ‘Walter Flack loved to be known as Sergeant Flack, a rank he gained with the Eighth Army. He told me once: “It is a very respectable rank, cock.” He formed the Sergeants’ Club – a drinking and dining get-together of sergeants who made a big postwar success. Sergeant Flack was its chairman.’ He also gave an annual ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ party for old-age pensioners at a Westminster pub, where he sometimes served behind the bar for fun. His wife Louise, an intense and vivid woman, ‘had married him long before he reached the big time. It was she who kept him “ticking”, for he had the moody up-and-down temperament that often goes with brilliance.’
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Flack brandished his confidence, and tried to keep his insecurity hidden in a lead-lined box. He had the mannerisms of a cheeky errand boy. His smile was wide, but his gaiety was disarming. He was both direct and sly. He told stories with the timing of a musical-hall comedian. ‘He was sometimes so winning it was dangerous to be in his company, safer to write a letter or to negotiate with him on the telephone,’ Gordon recalled. ‘Even that provided no immunity from his powerful wheedling charm.’ Flack loved cricket, and was a voracious, self-improving reader, who took up new interests with ephemeral zest. Heraldry became one of his fleeting enthusiasms: in 1961 he obtained a grant of armorial bearings from the College of Arms featuring a heraldic version of bricks and mortar with the motto ‘
Bien Bâtir
’ (‘Good to Build’). His steam-yacht
Isambard Brunel
was named after one of his heroes. People either liked his gusto, or mistrusted him as too bouncy. He had a streak of malice, and could be cruel. This side of his temperament did not fit with the rest of him; he wore it, said Gordon, like somebody else’s overcoat. Flack drank alcohol too deeply (the whisky sometimes started at ten in the morning), and became envenomed when drunk.
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Flack liked lording it in pubs, but hunted people with titles. In 1961 he invited Gordon for what he called a ‘
tayte-a-tayte
’ in Murrayfield’s offices, with the bronze statue of Auchinleck confronting passers-by. Flack was beaming with pride as he introduced Gordon to the other men collected in his shiny mock-Regency room: Dickon Lumley, young heir of Lord Scarbrough, the Lord Chamberlain; Anthony Berry, a Tory parliamentary candidate and son of Lord Kemsley; a stockbroker, Rupert Loewenstein – ‘Prince Loewenstein, he underscored’; and then Flack swelled, his waistcoat with its gold watch-chain bulging round his plump girth, his voice resembling a music-hall compère announcing his star act, as he introduced Archduke Otto von Habsburg, son of the last Emperor of Austria. ‘You know the Prince, of course,’ he said to Gordon.
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