Aspinall Lucan

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Why put Aspinall in this blog?

Well, as you will see his Clarmont club dealings with Billy Hill ( see the Billy Hill page) and the millions he cheated the members out of must rank as a ‘heist’

Lucan fled to Australia and started new life as a Buddhist. Neil Berriman discovered just 12 years.

Early life

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, an army surgeon, and wife, whom he married before 1926, Mary Grace Horn (died 1987), daughter of Clement Samuel Horn, of . 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.

.He attended Felsted School in 1939, but after his parents divorced, his stepfather Sir George Osborne sent him to Rugby School. Expelled from Rugby 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 instead. As a consequence, he never earned a degree.

1. The mystery of Lord Lucan, John Aspinall, Howletts and how the murder of Sandra Rivett continues to intrigue nearly 50 years on The Howletts mansion and ground had been owned, since the late 1950s, by John Aspinall - a man who had turned his back on a university.
2. Aspinall himself said in 2000 that Lucan had weighted himself down with a stone and drowned himself in the English Channel. Earlier this year, Lady Lucan gave a television interview in which she.
3. Lucan (TV Mini-Series 2013) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. John Aspinall 2 episodes, 2013 Alistair Petrie. Jimmy Goldsmith 2 episodes, 2013 Paul Freeman. John Pearson 1 episode, 2013.
4. 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. He insisted on treating them not as beasts to be exhibited, but as friends to be pampered.

Gambling impresario

Aspinall became a bookmaker; at that time the only legal gambling in the UK was at racecourses and dog tracks (both cash and credit), credit betting via an account with a bookmaker, and betting on Football Pools. There was no legal casino gambling of any kind. 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. Illegal gambling houses were defined then in British law as places where gambling had taken place more than three times. With his 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.

Aspinall Lucan Ireland

Among the gamblers were the Queen’s racehorse trainer Bernard van Cutsem who brought with him friends including the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Devonshire. The standard bet was £1,000, which would be £40,000 accounting for inflation in 2017 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 £300,000 in 2017, on his first event.

In 1958, he lived at Howlett’s Zoo, Kent and 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; and then returned on another night and lost £300,000, the equivalent of nearly £7.5 million in 2017.
• The founder of the SAS Colonel Sir David Sterling 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 Government passed the 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 (now the Gambling Commission), 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 The club’s original members included five dukes, five marquesses twenty earls and two cabinet ministers.

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.

The club’s former financial director John Burke stated in his book and on a TV documentary that Aspinall employed gangster Billy 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 in a small mangle, and then repacking them.
• Employing card sharps
• Skimming the profits

On the first night of the operation, the tax-free winnings for the house were £14,000, or around £300,000 in 2016’s money, adjusted for inflation.

John Burke quit in late 1965, a year into the scam. He had been tipped off about an investigation but Aspinall was determined to carry on. 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.

The passing of the 1968 Gaming Act boosted profits, and he sold The Clermont in 1972.

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. 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, Aspinall’s presently run by his son.

Aspinall died of cancer, in 29 June 2000, aged 74 and the real truth about Lord Lucan probably dies with him although it is alleged that several Clarmont Club members were involved in Lucan’s escape.

Thirty five years after he disappeared, there are still dozens of theories about what really happened to Richard John Bingham.
From 'Mountain Barry' to London's ultra-rich, the story is populated with rich characters and exotic locations.
The Lucan story began in November 1974 with the murder of nanny Sandra Rivett, beaten to death in the basement of Lucan's London home.
It's just after that when fact becomes harder to separate from fiction.

The 7th Earl of Lucan vanished in 1974 after the murder of his children's nanny at the family's London home.

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Preview: Lord Lucan's Plastic Surgeon

Now new evidence obtained by the BBC's Inside Out South East programme opens up the compelling possibility that Lucan might have had plastic surgery after the murder.
In the film 'Lord Lucan's Plastic Surgeon', reporter Glenn Campbell followed a trail which began with medical files showing that Lucan had once had such surgery in the years before Sandra Rivett died.
He also found a witness who claims she saw Lucan in Uckfield on the night after police said he had officially disappeared.

The last confirmed sightings of him were in Sussex - at the home of friends in Uckfield.
His Ford Corsair was later found in Newhaven, although some doubt that he drove it there.

The aristocratic Lucan moved in high society circles and he was a professional gambler.

His favourite casino was the Clermont Club in Mayfair which was owned by the millionaire John Aspinall.

Writing in 2000 in the Observer the respected columnist Lynne Barber said she believed that John Aspinall had given away a connection to the Lucan disappearance.
She wrote that Aspinall, speaking of the events of November 1974, had described himself as 'more of a friend of his after that than I was '.

To Lynne Barber, it appeared that Aspinall had effectively implied said that he knew of Lucan beyond the date of his apparent disappearance.
She wrote: ' I have always believed that John Aspinall unwittingly admitted to me that he'd seen Lord Lucan after the murder'.

The BBC's Inside Out South East programme has also reported that in 1994, John Aspinall said, 'I would have done for him (Lucan) what he asked' and that if Lucan had requested asylum, 'he would had got it'.

John Aspinall died in 2000, so he can't be questioned any more.

In 2003 the former detective Duncan McLaughlin claimed that Lord Lucan had lived in Goa for 22 years under the assumed name Barry Halpin, or Jungle Barry.

But a BBC Radio 2 presenter, Mike Harding, later said that Barry Halpin, or 'Mountain Barry' was actually a 1960s Merseyside musician and ardent socialist 'who went to live in India because it was cheap, sunny and more spiritual than St Helens.'

Barry Halpin died in Goa, India, in 1996.

In 2007 it seemed to some that yet another answer had finally been found.

Journalists flocked to interview Roger Woodgate, an English expat who lived in an battered Land Rover near the New Zealand town of Marton.

A neighbour claimed he could be the missing peer, but Mr Woodgate denied it.

The 62-year-old said he was ten years younger than Lucan and five inches shorter.

John Aspinall Lucan

Aspinall Lucan Dublin

Most recently, the Namibian reported that a Welsh private investigator was offering half a million Namibian dollars to anyone who could give him evidence about Lucan's time in the country.

The paper said that detective Ian Crosby believed that the peer flew to Mozambique and then moved to South Africa.

If Lord Lucan is still alive, then he would now be 75 years old. His wife, Lady Veronica Lucan, is among a number of people who believe he drowned himself in the English Channel. He was officially declared dead by the High Court in 1999.

On the website of Lord Lucan's alma mater, Eton, there is a brief mention of the 'old boy' whose name still excites interest across the world.
You can find it in the section Famous Old Etonians/Other Old Etonians and it reads: 'Lucan, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of (1934-?): Missing'
At New Scotland Yard, where the last review of the case took place five years ago, the Metropolitan Police say the Lucan story is not yet over.
'If a murder is unsolved it remains open' said a spokesman.

Aspinall Lucan Golf Club