soon to relinquish ‘this inven- ' tion for the tonier “Aspers”, . found his Damascus vision in Balliol College, Oxford, when in 1948 he gained admittance to the biggest poker school in town. Having cunningly scraped acquaint- ance with its mentor, a Catholic aris- tocrat called Ian Maxwell-Scott, the new-minted Aspers found a game “distinguished by very high stakes and very poor players”. The rest is gam- bling — and social — history. By the 1960s, Aspers was boss of the Clermont Club, in a William Kent house in Berkeley Square, handling the highest stakes in Europe and possibly the world. Its 600 members included five dukes, five marquesses, nearly 20 earls, a member of the royal family _(Prince William of Gloucester) and a brace each of Packers, Goldsmiths, Arab princes and US ambassadors. _ Albert Broccoli, producer of the Bond films, was another firiture at Berkeley Square. Robert Harling, one "of Ian Fleming’s boon companions, justly said of the William Kent rooms, “If one must losea million, this is the place to do so in style.” Below was Annabel's, the basement area Aspers planned for his own night- club until his American backer, Eddie ’ .0 I he young John Aspinall; then I, I |calling‘ himself “Jonah”, but THE PASSION OF JOHN ASPINALL by Brian Masters Cape £12.95 pp360. David Leitch Gilbert, went to prison for business fraud. Under erstwhile chum, Mark Birley — they quarrelled over the use of the wine cellar — Annabel’s became “without risk of exaggeration, the best- 'known and most chic discotheque in the world”. The twin clubs served as high temple to what Time Magazine christened Swinging London, while F1eming’s Bond, transmogrified by Broccoli for worldwide film consumption, stood for the new English hero: gambler, licensed killer and womaniser. Sean Connery may have been strikingly inauthentic cast as an upper-class spy, but no more than Aspers in his role as part Regency beau, part entrepreneur. While music, fashion and, not least, tax-breaks for US movie companies, conspired to make London briefly the world’s most extravagant capital, Aspers must have thought himself in a paradise oddly like Balliol, only with the stakes multiplied many, many times, and the players even worse. Yet they felt better losing at authentic Re- son m‘ Mum, the Lady Lady 05 commonest soubriquet. The t extend mercy to big losers, especi ly youngsters with trustees, but Enforcer, was forever “Al Capone with a hand-bag”. _ Lady 0, as upwardly mobile as Aspinall: from amble to orilas gency tables, where Brumrnel and Scrope-Davis wrote a few markers in their time. Aspers di ' y pouched 20% of “the drop”, as total casino stakes are poetically called, like a chief- tain accepting his just tribute. My firstforay there was for a Sunday Times Insight investigation of an age- ing _Wilson era industrialist, known familiarly as “lired the Spread” for his engaging’ _habit of betting thousand 911.19% 9!!’ CV¢1y"nQfl}bCf at r_o_u., -letf-V. :i\I'If:ft\‘ mo ‘Cir losing streak. Fuelled by brandy from the liveried footman at his elbow, he kept losing until dawn, when they bore him off like a dying bull. It was a -vi- gnette from Genet, not Fleming: prim- itive cruelty in fancy dress. Never far away was Aspers’ mum, “Lady 0'’, a steely figure whose philos- ophy made her a premature Thatcher- ite, though to read Brian Masters she sounds more like a c.onimoner’s Queen , er. Iris odd that an author who% onuiniin-tour‘ AF HA1-.\;I’r4Avtnnt‘c-iin fifth": Becky Sharp, had married a providen- tial baronet encountered on the boat home from India. He found her sob- bing on the deck, having recently di- vorced her doctor husband. It emerged much later that Aspers had been fa- thered not by the doctor but a passing Indian Army general at a Raj ball. This is all amazing stuff, but there is too little of it. Instead we follow Aspers’ progress from punters to gorillas, his politics ever farther right, his share of the drop rising to a cool £20m when Aspinall Holdings was oversubscribed 57-fold in 1978. ~ He was able, then, -to support two zoos, employing 130 people and sup- porting 67 different species of animal visited by 200,000 people annually. There have been troubles and even a fatality, but the animals, like the old Clerinont members, may congratulate themselves on inhabiting the world’s best-fed zoo. The dietary emphasis is another leg- acy from Lady 0, whose food hall catering skills sustained the 19505 “floating chemmy parties” which first launched Aspers. later she kept the Clermont menu up to scratch so that the hard-core Aspers circle, notably the luckless Lucan, would idle there for hours, feeding their angry stares with subsidised caviare, convinced that an inborn gift for shouting at servants would one day sweep them to power. Masters addsnothing to the'mystcry of what -happened when »“I;.ucky" 5.-...- . .'.4....a;....1....’.:.. ........A.‘-..- :5\(>n (‘ant .