An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (28 page)

Next, he took over the shares in Rillianwood Investments, a company holding twenty tail-end leases in Wymering Mansions, a run-down Edwardian mansion block on the Paddington side of Maida Vale (it was to be from there, in 1966, that Harry Roberts set out to steal a get-away car for a robbery, and ended up shooting dead three policemen at Shepherds Bush). Other Rachman companies bought further houses in Colville Terrace, Powis Terrace and Powis Square. By the end of 1956, Rachman controlled thirty houses near Shepherds Bush Green, twenty flats in Wymering Mansions, and thirty houses in Notting Hill.

Rent control and security of tenure only applied to ‘stats’ – statutorily controlled sitting tenants of unfurnished lettings. Tenants of furnished flats and rooms (with their narrow beds, chipped washstands, cupboards with wobbly legs standing on worn linoleum floors) had no protection, and could be given a month’s notice to quit. In consequence, Rachman let his flats and rooms furnished whenever possible. Rents became decontrolled once ‘stats’ vacated their homes: rents far above 1939 values could then be levied on new tenants. Rachman’s preferred technique for dislodging ‘stats’ was what he called ‘putting in the
schwartzers
’.
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He hired black thugs to intimidate white tenants, or occasionally deployed white hooligans against black tenants, and obtained vacant possession by coercion. Bullies with Alsatians would wrench the doors of communal lavatories off their hinges, sever gas, water, and electricity supplies, break into flats, smash furniture, rip up floorboards, remove roof tiles, and conduct interminable, filthy building work. Deafening music would be played to stop tenants from getting a night’s sleep. Once properties were vacated, Rachman would ‘sweat’ them, either by overcrowding them with Caribbean immigrants, or by leasing them at high rents to brothel keepers or shebeens. His profiteering from racial tensions, and that of many other unscrupulous landlords, contributed to the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.

Rachman was able to collect £10,000 a year in rent for a house which cost him £1,500. By 1959 he controlled about eighty houses. The muddle of interlocking companies fronted by nominee directors made it impossible to identify the beneficial owner of a property, which frustrated the serving of sanitary notices or certificates of disrepair. Companies were wound up, and properties reassigned to other companies, in order to keep a defective drain festering and drive out the statutory tenants. The Metropolitan Police, Ministry of Housing, council officials, public health authorities, and rent tribunals all tried to catch him in legal nets, but their meshes were too wide.

Before the Race Relations Act of 1965 outlawed discrimination on the basis of skin colour and ethnicity, immigrants faced cards in rooming-house front windows specifying ‘No Coloureds’. They were expected to apologise for causing embarrassment. ‘I find it most strange,’ wrote a refugee from South African apartheid in 1962, ‘that I am expected, on the telephone, to say that
I
am sorry that a landlady is sorry that she does not take Coloureds.’ Those landladies who said, as if bestowing a royal favour, ‘I don’t mind Coloureds’, nevertheless imposed humiliating rules on their tenants, such as a maximum of two visitors at a time.
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Rachman was exceptional in letting rooms to black people who could not otherwise find accommodation. He charged £6 a week for a flat for which a statutorily controlled tenant paid only £1. Sometimes he was patient with black tenants who fell into rent arrears; perhaps he felt affinities with them. Like Rachman, they belonged to a minority which was apprehended as anti-social by the majority. In reaction, like him, some chose to be seen and heard flouting the manners of the host community and to sail as close-hauled as possible to the law. ‘To the West Indian he was a saviour, and people still have a lot of respect for him,’ Rachman’s biographer was told by a Caribbean social worker whom she interviewed in the 1970s. ‘He was a swinging guy,’ said a Jamaican. ‘He liked us, and we liked him.’ He would offer ‘a tenner’ to West Indian men loitering on the Notting Hill streets if they would clear a house of ‘stat’ tenants for him. ‘He had his strong-arm men like everybody else,’ said one of his enforcers, ‘but basically he was a good bloke. While he was alive, I never heard anything against him, and when he died I was sad.’
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Rachman was short, chubby-faced, plump and balding. He wore tinted spectacles, which gave him a sinister look. A gold bracelet, which was locked to his wrist, was supposedly inscribed with serial numbers of his Swiss bank accounts and safe combinations. He always had a roll of banknotes in his pocket and sported Churchillian cigars. Despite his silk shirts, cashmere suits, and crocodile shoes, he looked sloppy. In his early years in England, when he was poor, he impressed several acquaintances with his thoughtful kindness. Later, although he was moody, people often found him polite, reasonably intelligent and mildly amusing. In prosperity his fleet of motor cars included a red Rolls-Royce saloon, and a blue Rolls-Royce convertible, in which he liked to drive about London showing off flashy blondes.

The Kenco coffee house in Queensway, rather than his basement office, was where Rachman spent his mornings seeing contacts and making cash deals. He would lunch in an expense account Mayfair restaurant, such as the Coq d’Or or Les Ambassadeurs, with a blonde. During his afternoons he played chess at a Polish restaurant, Daquise, near South Kensington station, or sat in the Kardomah coffee house in the King’s Road, ogling the passing Chelsea girls. He diversified into club management, first with a basement gambling club at the New Court Hotel in Inverness Terrace, Paddington; then with the El Condor nightclub (later renamed La Discotheque) in Wardour Street, Soho; and finally the 150 Club, a decorous gambling den in Earls Court Road. In the evenings he would make a round from the New Court, via El Condor, to the 150.

Contamination was Rachman’s obsessive fear. The world seemed to him a mire of dirt and effluent. People, too, were filthy in their secretions. Memories of the lice that infested him during the war, disgust at the cockroaches, ants, fleas and worms with which the planet teemed, drove him to take three baths a day, with a bottle of the disinfectant Dettol poured into the steaming water each time. Unless he scrubbed, the creepy-crawlies would take over. He drenched himself in eau de cologne, and wore silk underwear to counteract memories of the coarse soiled rags of the Soviet labour camp. He never drank alcohol, would request mineral water when he ate out, refused to drink from glasses in case they were dirty and swilled his water straight from the bottle. He accused a waiter who touched the rim of a bottle of mineral water while opening it of trying to poison him. Before eating in a restaurant he would inspect its kitchen, and yell reproaches if he thought that the cutlery was unclean. The Spanish au pair at his Hampstead Garden Suburb house had to sterilise cutlery after each meal. Rachman would rinse and re-rinse plates himself before he would let meals be served to his guests; plates reached the table dripping wet. To the end of his life, as security against starvation, he hoarded snacks under his bed and stockpiled his homes with food.

Servility combined with aggression in Rachman’s character. He was both affectionate and mistrustful. He oscillated between raucous generosity to his intimates and pre-emptive inhumanity against strangers. He liked the company of handsome wrestlers as much as he did decorative blondes, for he longed for rough and tumble. He said: ‘If you have one true friend you are lucky. If you have two you are very lucky. If you tell me you have three you must be a liar.’
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Serge Paplinski, who had been dragooned into the Polish partisans at the age of thirteen and had a murderous wartime history, was spotted by Rachman on a London street sometime after his expulsion from St Martin’s College of Art in Soho. Rachman counted Paplinski as one of his two true friends. Paplinski was debonair, affectionate but scatterbrained: Rachman’s decision to employ him to keep his business records and manage the Monmouth Road office ensured that both records and office were chaotic.

Denis Hamilton, Diana Dors’s husband, was Rachman’s boon companion. Hamilton’s sexual dissipation so delighted him that – in addition to his London base, flat 609 in Clive Court, a Maida Vale block of mansion flats which was five minutes’ drive from his office – he occupied an annexe in Hamilton’s house, Woodhurst, near Maidenhead. Shaken by Hamilton’s death in 1959, Rachman left Woodhurst, and replaced the Clive Court flat with Bishopstone, a sham-Georgian house in Hampstead Garden Suburb’s opulent Winnington Road – two minutes’ walk (although it is doubtful if he ever walked) from the Malibu-style house that Cyril and Leila Foux built in the grounds of her parents, the Kennedy Leighs. Rachman furnished Bishopstone with gilt furniture, including a piano which he prized in the belief that it has been owned by the Polish wife of Louis XV. He took boyish delight in the gadget that opened his garage doors electronically, and in his refrigerator where he kept his tennis balls cool. He also took over a small, modern, ugly house in Marylebone – 1 Bryanston Mews West – from Cyril Foux in 1959. The two-way mirror from Woodhurst, through which voyeurs enjoyed the action in Hamilton’s spare bedroom, was moved there. Mandy Rice-Davies later smashed it; but it was repeatedly mentioned by the prosecution at Stephen Ward’s trial as if Ward had installed it.

In 1959 three West Indian tenants, including Michael de Freitas (the future black activist and murderer, Michael X), had their rents reduced by the West London Rent Tribunal: de Freitas from £8 to £4; the others from £6 to £3, and £3 to £2. Thereafter, there was an outpouring of applications to rent tribunals from tenants of Rachman and other landlords. He neither appeared nor was legally represented at any of the hearings. The complaints of Donald Chesworth, Labour member for North Kensington on London County Council, about Rachman’s housing rackets were handled gingerly by the Metropolitan Police: Detective Superintendent George Taylor noted that Chesworth ‘was of “Left Wing” tendencies and a “Fellow Traveller”.’
⁴⁹

Ten cases of intimidation were submitted to the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, which judged that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. The DPP seemed reluctant to support tenants against landlords, reckoned that the threats were ‘quite trivial’, and was contemptuous of the testimony of sex workers. Serge Paplinkski’s threats against May McCash (alias Mary Scott, who had convictions for brothel-keeping and soliciting) were judged ‘not very severe, merely telling her that they would cut off the electricity and strip the house of wallpaper’. Rachman’s warning to June Hilton, alias Bury, ‘that he could be “naughty”,’ was not taken seriously given that she had forty-three convictions for prostitution. As to Chesworth’s motives in organising the tenants, the DPP dismissed these as ‘political’.
⁵⁰
The police investigated whether Rachman was committing the criminal offence of living off immoral earnings: an officer disguised as a coster trundling a barrow kept watch on suspect houses; but no charges were brought.

None of this rattled Rachman, but he felt insecure as a ‘stateless person’, and was distraught when in April 1959 his application to become a British subject was rejected by the Home Office. As he desired the security of a British passport he transferred the Monmouth Street letting agency to young Etonians, Julian March Phillips de Lisle and Anthony Sykes, who were to be pilloried by the
Daily Mirror
in the summer of 1963. He sold most of his tenement houses: two of the exceptions, 23 Nevern Square and 5 West Cromwell Road, were both mortgaged through Cyril Foux, whom he joined in several property syndicates. Rachman bought and sold the Streatham Hill Theatre, and moved on to the Golders Green Hippodrome. ‘He was carving his niche,’ said an estate agent who often saw him. ‘Lots of top-drawer people ate well at his expense. Everyone says that if he’d lived, he’d have ended up being knighted.’
⁵¹

The jeweller Kutchinsky supplied Rachman with a cache of 22-carat gold watches. Spotting a pretty woman in a club or restaurant, he would beckon her over, and slip a watch onto her wrist. He liked to be ‘blown’ in offices, for this avoided the intimacy of bedrooms: oral sex, he believed, reduced the risk of venereal infections. Like Clore, he preferred sex to be perfunctory, yet performed in such a way that tribute was paid to his wealth. In 1959, after acquiring his Bryanston Mews hideaway from Cyril Foux, he decided to keep a mistress there, as a status symbol as much as to relieve his satyriasis. That summer he installed seventeen-year-old Christine Keeler, gave her a sports car, and treated her as if she was a mechanical dummy. After lunch, he would tug Keeler into the bedroom, and, without preliminaries, make her sit astride him with her back towards him so that she never saw his face. ‘Sex to Peter Rachman was like cleaning his teeth, and I was the toothpaste,’ she memorably said.
⁵²

Rachman was invited to Stephen Ward’s cottage on the Cliveden estate once. Keeler claimed that during the weekend, he accompanied her and Ward to see the big house. She said that he stood on Cliveden’s famous terrace, raised his arms above his head and with clenched fists cried: ‘This is what I want!
This
is what I want!’ Ward, she said, turned to her and sneered: ‘This is something he can never buy – not for all his money.’
⁵³
Histrionic tales like this say more about the taste for lurid racial stereotypes than the reality of Rachman. In contrast with Keeler, Rice-Davies, whom he kept during 1961–62 in Bryanston Mews, spoke well of him.