Part One: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London

Robert sits down with Ed Zitron to talk about Lord Aspinall and his gambling buddies, who ruled London high society with an iron fist and also did a murder.

 

(2 part series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the
only podcast around. If you're listening to another podcast, I'm sorry,
but you have lost your mind and are are hallucinating

(00:22):
whatever crazy characters. There's no such thing as Joe Rogan,
not a one in the real world. Just me and
of course Sophie, My producer and our guest for today.
Ed zitron Ed is a tech industry journalist and columnist
with the newsletter Where's Your ed At? One of my

(00:43):
favorite people to read on the internet. Ed, welcome to
the show for the first time.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
What's up? Happy to be here. Yeah, now, Ed.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Have you ever hallucinated a podcast?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
I mean I've recorded quite a few and forgotten them
almost the imediately, So that's just called a podcast that's
broadcasting just experience amnesia in real time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Fact, we'll have a We'll have people come on our
subreddit sometimes and be like you should do this guy,
and I'll be like, oh, yeah, that'd be a great topic.
And then someone will post like, no, they covered in
three years ago, and I'll go, oh, yeah, I remembered
that for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
That's generous. Sometimes it's like, hey, remember that thing you
said in the podcast that you recorded yesterday.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
It's like, absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
I will read my work back sometimes in like laugh
at my own jokes. That's one of my favorite tricks,
just because I'm like, this guy's great. That. Yeah, I
don't remember writing these words.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Much funnier than me. Geez got to get him on
the show Ed Elephant in the Room. You live in Vegas,
but but you come from a little island across the sea.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
That that that?

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you feel about the British aristocracy?
I feel terrible about them. I do not like them.
I think we give them more than one pounds, so
that's too many.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah. I do not see what they do other than
take up press and get away with dressing up like Nazis. Yeah,
and also being related to them in some cases. And
I find them a frustrating group, and I find the
lionization of them disgusting.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh, although you're gonna be your opinions, you're gonna love
this episode. Then this is going to be a slow burn.
The first episode is largely going to be setting stuff
up for our listeners, not going to be as much
bastardury until we really hit episode two, in which case
it's going to come out hard and fast. But there's
a lot you have to establish in this episode because
we're talking about have you ever heard of a guy

(02:48):
named Lord John Aspinall I've not. Have you heard of
his close friend, the lucky Lord Luken I have? Yeah,
this was a big story, right and like.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
The well, my parents in their house they have this
weird space above their washing machine and for years we've
referred to it as Lord Lucan's house because in England
it's like held Lord Lucan go spoiled the episode, Yeah,
ruined the whole episode, given it a way, but.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, no, that's a beautiful piece of dry humor. No
we can. I mean we'll say up front, right like
Lord Lucan is a guy who committed a terrible murder
as he's lord obviously and then disappeared, and we will
be talking about what happened and how it relates to
our subject today. Who is his buddy and the guy
who kind of robbed like the the generation of the

(03:39):
British aristocracy who came of age in like the forties,
robbed them all blind because he was a casino maven.
That's Lord Aspinall. And he also helped invent the modern
zoo in a pretty irresponsible way but still zoo's. So
this is gonna be a fun episode. But uh yeah,
I feel like we can get started now. He's not

(04:00):
a dude. I think most Americans will have heard of.
So a lot of what we'll be doing is kind
of setting stuff up, which means we get to talk
about the public school system in the UK, which will
be fun.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Also, all these people are fascists, like straight up Hitler
loving Nazis, as you alluded to at the very start
of this.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yeah, but most of England. That's the thing that I
think that people don't realize about. I say, this is
a British Jew. I think people don't realize around like
the horrors of the Holocaust and such. It wasn't like
it was great being Jewish anywhere. Yeah, it's And so

(04:38):
it's like when you find out, oh, someone in British
history was a fascists, you need to go the other
way around, Like who wasn't he has like nine people who.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Was on the right side of that, certainly not John
Victor Aspinall, who was born in Delhi then part of
the British Raj. On June eleventh, nineteen twenty six. His
mother was a lady named Mary Grace Horn. She was
the daughter of a highly regarded colonial official named Clement Horn.
Clement built bridges in India, right, like that was his job.

(05:11):
So they're not aristocrats, right, but they are like upper
middle class kind of verging on rich, and within sort
of the colonial system. They have a lot of clout.
Now that's not the same as sort of being somebody
who's considered in like the ruling class back home, right,
but it's you know, a pretty significant position over in India.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Now.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Mary's father was the kind of dude who was pretty
openly disappointed in her for being born a girl, not
an uncommon situation in this time. And she grew up
knowing that she was going to be basically a child
in her father's control her whole life until she married.
So as soon as she gets a chance, she jumps
out of home and she marries this guy, Robert Aspinall,

(05:54):
who is a surgeon who joined the Foreign service to
see the world. Their marriage wasn't great. They don't actually
really like each other, but they have a kid together
named Chip, and after having Chip, Mary starts cheating on
him straight away. She meets a young military officer, a lieutenant,
and the two of them conceive their second child. Are

(06:14):
subject for today, John aspinall underneath the shade of a
tamarind tree, which is kind of romantic. That's a romantic
tree to have sex under. I feel like a tamarind
tree makes.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
A nice romantic tree to do it.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, I know, redwood is probably top of it.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
I would say the smells are great, mmm, but no
fruit anyway, no fruit.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, John's a tamarind baby.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Now.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
I got two big sources for this series one both
of them are biographies of John. One of them is
this fawning nineteen eighty eight book by Brian Masters that's
literally titled The Passion of John Aspinall.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
What it's like the eighties as well. So like very
history has already described this guy as a monster.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
I'm guessing yeah, yeah, well yeah, he's a monster. And
literally the only he did two things. One of them
was run a zoo that killed a shitload of people,
and the other of them was run a massive gambling hall.
Like one thing I'll give the us and I won't
give us much, But when when we have people who
build casino empires, we're pretty open about like, yeah, he
was just a gangster, Like, yeah, that dude was a

(07:25):
fucking gangster.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah yeah. But also we lionize pieces of ship all
the time. We just don't shure it as directly as
we do back home.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
No, we'll lionize. Yeah, we lionized them for being gangsters,
you know, Alex Jones being like Trump is mobbed up
and then you should definitely vote for him.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, yeah, God. I do think that England makes a
special kind of bastard though, because you look in American
history you've got tons of monsters, and as this podcast
that's told, I'm sure, but England makes a certain piece
of shit. Yeah, really, we brew them special. Yeah, it's
not just enough to defraud people and kill people. It's

(08:05):
we need to do so with a little bit of
mustard on it. And what better way than a fucking zoo.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, yeah, that is zoo. And that's it I've been
wanting to talk about. There's there's an Adam Curtis documentary
called The Mayfair Set that covers a number of the
people will be talking about. It's kind of going in
some different directions because it's it's a lot broader in
its purview. But there's a lot of these because these
the guys who are like John Aspinall's friends who will

(08:30):
talk about are like sponsoring coups in a bunch of
different countries, and I want to be able to talk
about more of them, but like, you have to get
this grounding in sort of the social society that they
come from before you can you can explain much about
like why they got to do the things that they
got to do. So Aspinall is kind of the center
of all that, and that's why we're starting with him

(08:52):
this week. The other biography I read about him, it's
a two thousand and seven book called The Gamblers by
John Pearson, and yeah, the it's a lot better. Pearson
wrote a biography of Ian Fleming. He's like as a
professional like journalist as well as a biographer, and he
does a lot better job of being kind of critical
to the subject. But yeah, Masters' book doesn't mention the

(09:14):
fact that Mary had her son sort of out of wedlock,
because that wasn't really known at the time. But by
the time that Pearson writes his book, the evidence we
have suggests that, you know, doctor Aspinall learned pretty quickly
that John is not his biological son, and to his credit,
I guess he doesn't tell him or seem to have

(09:34):
taken it out on him in any way. But that's
not really a grand gesture because the Aspinall family follows
this kind of fine upper class tradition of not raising
their kid, right Like, he doesn't disown his son for
not being technically his son. But he also has nothing
to do with the raising of either of these kids
because from their earliest days, John and Ship are raised

(09:56):
by a local Indian nanny and they actually kids considered
themselves Indian as their mother did. Their early contact with
with the UK was was pretty much non existent.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Just because they were raised in India.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, in India, born in Delhi, raised, yes, yes, and
there their first language is Hindi, right, like that's what
they're they're speaking that before they really get fluent in English.
So it's not like necessarily and this is you read
biographies of like British kids born in India in this
time and that's like a pretty common experience. So Master

(10:34):
says this about John as a young child. Quote, he
said whatever came into his head, even as an infant,
he was agreeable company lively and affectionate and very attractive
with the shock of blonde hair. There grew between Miss
Aspinall and her son a powerful bond, uncommonly close and confidential,
which was never to be impaired in any fraternal quarrel,
no matter how mild an. Irrespective of the justice of

(10:55):
the case, Mary always took John's side. And this is probably,
i mean, it's theory by some of the people writing
about them, this is because she hated her husband, so
she's going to like prefer the kid that she didn't
have with him. But yeah, she was something of a
wild woman at her time, very independent. She was also
an inveterate gambler. So when John spent time with his mom,

(11:15):
some of the first experiences he would have had as
his mom playing poker or other games of chance with
her friends, wagering money on them. Childhood was also characterized
by regular close contact with exotic animals. He's got a
great uncle over there. Like you know, if you're part
of the ruling colonial class in India, you get to

(11:37):
spend a lot of time with elephants. And so he
had an uncle who would hold these garden parties and
just bring out his elephants and the kids would like
feed them sugarcane and get lifted into the air by
them by their trunks. And one of John's first experiences
would be being awed by what he called the power
and gentleness of these elephants, which sounds pretty cool, right,

(11:58):
Like that's a dope childhood experiences to have.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, yeah, she compared to the average British childhood. Yeah
time where it was just like being hit with a cane. Yeah,
being hit with a cane, learning to be racist the
British way, Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
And don't forget dying in a coal mine.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, dying three, which was considered old. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
So another of his mom's his mom has some boyfriends
during this period of time. I don't think John knows
that they're her boyfriends. They're just like friends of hers.
But one of these guys who he comes to like idolize,
has two pet tigers, which is why John idolizes this
guy because got pet tigers. So he gets to like
play with these guys tigers. Now, this idyllic childhood doesn't

(12:43):
last long because, as I noted, parents don't raise their kids.
And when John was six and Chip was I think
like a year or so older, the Aspittalls decide it's
time for their kids to get out of India and
go off to a boarding school. This was the fashion
at the time. It was also a social necessity. Again,
they're not aristocrats, but they're wealthy and they want to

(13:06):
be in the aristocracy. And if you're going to do that,
if you want to fit in with those people, you
have to go to the same schools they do, which
are our public schools.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
But ideally your child is put aside so that you
can focus on being rich. Yeah, you also don't want
to deal with them. Yeah, you want to have a child,
but you don't want to have a child, yeah at
that time in history.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, you want to know them when they're a cute baby,
and then when they're eighteen and have graduated, Yeah, just
in time for you to hate them. Yeah, yeah, for
you to really grow to resent them. We are talking
about like very fancy boarding schools here like that. That's
like we're talking about Eton, which is where the basically
the ruling class has sent their boys for forever.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yes, and I think he's going to go to John's
going to go to a school called Rugby, which is
named that because that's where rugby comes from, Like it's
the it was where Yeah, rugby got sort of started off,
I guess, which I hadn't realized came from an institution initially,
but yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah, I mean the country.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
I like rugby, though I don't know. I wouldn't play it,
but I feel like it's more more honest than football, Like,
let's get those pads on.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Out of there. Are you talking about American football? Yeah,
I was going to say, yeah, I was. I was
a large boy in a British private school known for
sports and drama, and let me tell you, that's the
worst place in the world to be overweight. And that
was pretty how I was like three hundred and fifty pounds.
And had I grown up in America, I always think

(14:43):
I would have made an offensive lineman, a deeply offensive person.
I'm very hard to move, would have been great. But no,
I was in England where I was just called various
insults around my size and the speed I moved at
it wasn't enjoyable at all. Ah. Nevertheless, I'm I've learned
absolutely nothing from that, so just other than that the

(15:04):
self loathing, but that's what being British is. That's the
core of it. I mean, yes, that's the British identity
is hating oneself.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah that's uh. I guess the American identity is loving
oneself and then hating everybody who's similar to you.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yes, yeah, exactly, or having no loyalty to anyone, including
yourself somehow.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah yeah, yeah, deeply deeply betraying your past self in
the hope that it will benefit your future self something
like exactly, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, there we go. So, yeah,
he goes to this fancy this fancy like boarding school,
and this is this is the this is like the
tradition for kind of the ruling class. Like if you

(15:48):
are like, part of why you go to a school
like eton is so that you can learn how to talk.
There's like accents that are kind of associated with the
very oldest of these schools and how to fit in
with the people who are kind of ruling the empire.
And part of the way in which kids, these children
who go to these schools are molded into that tradition

(16:09):
is by basically a system of hazing, right, Like that's
a huge and how you makes these kids and this
brings us to a difficult topic to discuss. That's going
it's going to sound like I'm using a slur here.
I'm probably not. We'll deal with that because the kind
of tradition that rules both the school that John Aspinall

(16:32):
is going to go to and eaten all of these
schools that like produce upper class you know, ruling types,
is called fagging. Now I have to again go in
to explain where this comes from, and I'm going to
quote from the online Etymology Dictionary here. Hey everyone, Robert here,
I didn't make this clear. The definition I'm quoting from

(16:53):
is the definition of the slur, because that relates to
what we're about to talk about. American English slang probably
from earlier contemptuous term for women fifteen nineties, especially an
old and unpleasant one, and reference to faggot a bundle
of sticks as something awkward to be carried compare baggage
worthless women fifteen nineties. It may also be reinforced by

(17:15):
Yiddish fagel homosexual literally little bird. It may also have
roots in British public school slang, which is the term
that we're talking about here, a junior who does certain
duties for a senior. So the term fagging is to
refer to this relationship in these public schools where junior
students are made to act as servants for senior students,

(17:38):
and the use of the actual word they use both
comes from the fact that because the original word means
a bundle of sticks, especially like in the eighteen hundreds,
part of what these these younger kids are doing for
older kids is like stoking the fires in their rooms
and stuff. And it also comes from these kind of
derogatory terms for women, and it may come from this

(17:59):
Yiddish term for homosexual as well. And there's a couple
of reasons for this. One of them is that there's
not uncommonly sexual relationships often with a lot of coercion
between seniors and juniors. So you know, this is a
messy tradition. Americans will be familiar with the bones of

(18:21):
this if they've read the Harry Potter books, because the
system of like prefects and head boys and shit and
like the Magic School in that book series is a
sanitized version of how culture works in these like boarding schools,
right like that is like rallying kind of adds girls
to the mix and removes the hazing and the sex abuse.

(18:42):
But she's writing about the same kind of system which
I had only started to realize like a year or
so ago when I started reading about how some of
these schools worked. It's pretty wild. I don't think most
people are kind of aware of how this stuff started.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Outing is like a big part of school in England,
and teachers do not And really, I finished two thousand
and four, Christ wonder if when I graduate secondary school
bullying has always been a big deal. It's always fucking happened,
And the teacher's like, well, you know it's bad, but

(19:19):
what are we meant to do about it? Stop the child? Now?
Absolutely not. Then you're like and eventually, just there was
a period of time where I was bullied so consistently
I just stopped showing up to school and they called
my parents and my parents are just like, is he
still being bullied?

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Well?

Speaker 2 (19:32):
And then and that actually stopped it for a little bit.
But it's just I genuinely think England to its bones
is just they think abuse is good. I think England
British school systems like we have prefects so that we
have miniature fucking police walking around the school. It's just
an insane system. And thank god we actually have gun

(19:55):
control in England because the anger and resentment in young
kids in England is brewing constantly because teachers are fucking
useless and so if they create little monsters in England,
that's why. It's because it's part of British blood. You
must be subject to abuse from school. That is, they
genuinely think that, they believe that to this day.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
I mean that is actually literally what I'm about to
read from this and this is from like a nineteen
sixty one study, because like the system arises that part
of the idea is that we are we are molding
the minds who are going to run the empire, right,
and if you're going to lead, you need to learn
how to follow. So that's why we set these kids
underneath each other, right, so they can learn how to

(20:37):
exist within this hierarchy. There is this belief that putting
them in this system will make them more compassionate because
they'll have been sort of governed cruelly by kids who
are older, which is insane. The idea that like, well,
if we let kids abuse each other, it'll make them
kinder adults. Why would you think that?

Speaker 2 (20:56):
But that is.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
I'm going to read this quote. This is from a
n A nineteen sixty one study by Paul Nash in
a History of Education Quarterly, and he's writing about again,
it's hard to read this sometimes because the name of
this system that I've described is called the prefect fagging system.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
There's like a little dash between the two of them,
which I know, guys, but like this is what it's called, right.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Under the prefect fagging system, senior boys are given a
major role in governing the school, wielding discipline and carrying
out responsibility. They are called variously prefects, monitors, or prey posters,
chosen according to many criteria, including physical and intellectual prowess.
The principal consideration in their selection, apart from seniority, has
traditionally been character Usually the prefects are members of the

(21:40):
sixth form, and while in some schools all members of
the six they're granted privileged status. The two bodies are
not customarily identical. At the other end of the scale,
new boys entering the school begin by serving as fags
for senior boys. Their duties consist of almost anything the
fag master cares to impose, from cooking and running errands
to blacking shoes and kindling fires. And since public school

(22:03):
kids these are like the future ruling class. This is
like you're training these kids to follow and part of
the goal here, there's this real system, especially in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, there's this particular
understanding that smaller boys are weaker and less valuable, right,

(22:23):
and they need to get used to the idea that
they should be subservient to larger and better bred boys. Right.
There's some flexu if you're a small boy whose dad
is a really highly placed member of the aristocracy, you
can get some sort of like wiggle room there. But
that is how it works a lot of the time,
quote with teacher authority unable or unwilling to protect the

(22:45):
rights of the weaker. Life for the small boy in
the early nineteenth century public school was frequently one of
servitude and fear. The Westminster Review complained that the experience
of starting off as a fag and graduating without any
reference to merit to a point of having fags of
his own, courage the public school boy to see life
in terms of tyrants and slaves. Fag masters often treated
their fags with great cruelty and imposed unreasonable tasks upon them.

(23:09):
When James Gaskell was a fag at Eton, he was
sent by his fag master out of bounds on errands.
If seen by a master, he was reported to Doctor
Keat the headmaster and flogged. One sixth form boy at
Eton in Coleridge's time ordered his fag to eat a
tallow sandwich by way of acquiring an extra relish for
his own cold mutton at the sixth form supper table.
And what that means is that like they had mutton sandwiches, right, yeah, Yeah,

(23:32):
he just pulled all the fat off of his took
the other boy's meat and gave him a sandwich that's
just like stringy bits of fat in a Yeah, it's
this is hazing, this abuse, right.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
It's disgraceful because there are people to this day who
would hear the system and be like other than the name,
which is of course we can't say anymore. Yeah, which
we stopped saying that in twenty eleven. Yeah, it's going
like being in a British private school. I'm not saying
that you had like institutional abuse, but also you had

(24:03):
a great deal of ignorance from it. Toward it even
and there was genuinely I still believe to this day
there is still this instinct within British schooling, private and public,
but especially private, that boys must be made to learn
about the real world by giving them this very bizarre
prison system that they will never participate in again. But

(24:23):
the other thing you say about, like compassion, Back when
I was bullied in school, that was kind of the thing. Oh,
it would make you a stronger person. And when we
tell them, when we tell them you talk to the teacher,
which I never wanted to happen, they will feel bad
and be more compatterent. No, they will be angry they
got in trouble and bully you more. It's just the
actual way to deal with it is just to kick

(24:44):
the little fuckers out of school. By the way, you'll
be a bully. You don't go to school anymore. But
this is back in the time when England did not
care about this stuff. Yeah, this is back when England
was like, this is just how we make a little
army of fascists.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, And this is like this is both if you
kind of are reading through the height of the empire
and then sort of its dissolution and you come across
these stories of some of these really crazy decisions people
will make about what to do had to crack down
on things. Well, it's being made by kids who went
to these schools and who were brought up in this system.

(25:19):
This does explain a lot, yes, And while this school,
this system was very much supported by the men who
controlled the government at the time, the system we're talking about,
this prefect fagging system is not certainly, not nearly to
the same extent. This has largely been dismantled, which doesn't
mean there's not still abuse and bullying. It's just not

(25:40):
set up in the exact way that it used to be.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Right.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
But you know, while this is kind of supported by
the people in power at the time, there are regular controversies.
By the time that John is going through it, right,
it's one hundred and fifty or so something like that
years old by the time he is in school. This
kind of starts in the early eighteen hundreds, and there
are some controversies because obviously, not every kid is going
to survive a system like this, right, and it's there's

(26:08):
also difficulty because since these prefects are being relied upon
to manage large chunks of how these schools work. These
kids who are made prefects actually have a lot of power,
and they often clash with the headmaster and with the
school administration because like you actually can't force them to
do some things, because you're reliant upon them to run

(26:29):
the school, and because not just that, the other dynamic
is that you may want to punish some of these kids,
but if their dad is like the prime Minister, you're
going to have some trouble.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, you can't do anything. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
So obviously, as I noted, bullying and abuse is extreme
in the system, and often sexual. Now, some of this,
to be fair, is just boys who are close in
age who are like engaging in consensual relationships. But that's
not the only thing that happens. And because these boarding
schools are also so oh like locked down socially, boys

(27:02):
are trained not to complain, not to respond to abuse
with anything, but like you know, going along with it.
It presents an opportunity for some of the adults in
this system who are pedophiles, and pederaste is very common
in this system. Suicides are not unknown. In nineteen thirty,
Charles Fairhurst, a fourteen year old boy, killed himself during

(27:25):
break because he decided he couldn't run, and I think
he's an Etonian. He just couldn't return to the school,
and his dad said that he had done it because
of the fagging system. Right that nineteen sixty one article.
I think it is a pretty good overview, but it
also avoids discussing some of the more prurient details, which
is like the rampant molestation of kids under this system.

(27:47):
Masters and Pierson both avoid this topic while talking about Aspenall.
But I found a good twenty fourteen article by a
survivor of abuse in these schools, Alex Rinton, who discusses
his experience in the sixties and seventies. One of us
new boys I still don't know who had complained about
the regime and dormitory five to his parents. This was
the cardinal sin. What happened in school stayed in school.

(28:08):
Billy punished us all we didn't tell tales again. Some
of the key locations have shrunk absurdly small. The brick
Chapel where Billy gripped the Bible and harangued us with
the backing of his three trusteest prefects, Jesus, the Holy
Ghost and God just as tiny now as the assembly room,
where daily one hundred and twenty boys aged seven to
thirteen were ranked on wooden benches. Here the diatribes, the

(28:29):
mass punishments and the public humiliations happened. This is where
he would detail who had cried under the cane the
previous night. Jones and Smith took it like gentlemen, but
Rinton blubbed like a baby. Rinton recalled vividly how he
used to look at the picture of the Queen in
their playroom and beg in his mind for her to
visit and save them all from this horrible system. As
per usual, the Queen did nothing. Rinton would go on

(28:51):
to experience as well sexual abuse at the hands of
a teacher, and yeah, it's a pretty awful story. It's
one of those things you will encounter stories like this
from some pretty famous people. Over in Britain. Richard Dawkins
has talked, and it's often kind of odd. He's talked
obliquely about the sexual abuse he encountered, calling it mild

(29:15):
pedophilia and saying I am very conscious that you can't
condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,
which I think she can.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
In this tis done right now.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
Yeah, the physical abuse is also something that some people
will talk about. Eddie Izzard specifically has talked about this
quite a lot. Quick update as of June of twenty
twenty three, Eddie Izzard has made it clear that she
prefers to go by Susie, although she says you can't
go wrong by still calling her Eddie or using other pronouns,

(29:48):
but I'm still going to re record this bit. Izard
has spoken about how she was sent to a boarding
school at age seven, shortly after her mother's death. She
cried relentlessly for about a year. Quote my housemaster help
me along with beatings when he could fit them in.
And because John Aspinall is I think one of the
people who grows up sort of taking a weird degree

(30:09):
of pride and going through this system, he doesn't complain
about this experience, and there's certainly not complaints baked in
Like his biographers don't talk about this as abusive, but
they do talk about the abuse that Aspinall suffers in
this system. It's just sort of normalized. It's like, well,
this is just part of what you go through here.

(30:30):
This paragraph from the master's book is typical John's first
year was spent in Cottonhouse, where he shared rooms with
John Straddling Thomas, later to be a Tory MP, a knight,
and a government whip. Within days, he was almost constantly
being whacked by Head of House Hardy for minor but
regular infringement of rules. Far from being abashed, John would
show off the strokes he had received, throwing Hardy into

(30:51):
a fury of indignation, eventually announcing that he would whack
aspinall no longer, Hardy sent him to the butler Ellsworthy,
who devised devilish schemes for punishment, such as moving hundred
weeks of coke, cleaning the floor beneath it, and moving
the coke back again. Anyway, I guess we'll go to
ads right now and we're back. Yeah, and you'll hear

(31:16):
A lot of the punishments are like weirdly collective, Like
all of the kids have to paddle you like you
run down a gauntlet or like down a staircase as
they hit you and stuff. It's a yeah, A lot
of thought goes into how to hit kids.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Deep sadism runs through a lot of what a lot
of British history, a lot of the world's evils come
from England, and a lot of what England taught was
a form of punishment driven success that you could It
was very much a freedom through work. Yeah, I mean
eugenics comes from England. The Eugenics Club was formed in England. Yeah,

(31:53):
England has and to this day, i'd argue I realized
my experience with the school system in England. It still
as they can't physically abuse you anymore. They certainly can't
sexually abuse you apparently, but they can certainly mentally abuse you.
That is very fucking common. And what infuriates me about
this is hearing this stuff and this is horrifying and

(32:14):
it's terrible. But England has not advanced as far beyond
this as they really would love to pretend. I am
still scarred from my time in the British private school system. Yeah,
like I have friends who are still fucking mentally scarred
from it. And it wasn't anything physical. It was the
aiding and a betting of abuse by teachers. Teachers helped

(32:35):
teachers would join in. And it's funny because they'll now
claim England's like this progressive nation, and to an extent
we are, But then you really look at long and
hard at what we do in our school system here.
If bullying happens, but parents are litigious, parents will do
Like there is genuinely a sense of oh that you

(32:56):
don't really want that smoke. As a school in England,
it's like, oh, boys will be born boys? You have
any idea? How many fucking times about that? Upon must
sudden rant this subject? No, no, no, no no.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
I mean that's the that's the point of it, right, Like,
that's this is stuff.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
I don't think.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
It's certainly not widely known over here about like the
way that because there's I think part of it is
because when most Americans encounter information about these schools, it's
through like fiction. And I'm not just talking about Ralling here,
but like her books are based on the fact that
like for generations there have been a lot of like
fictional stories about British boarding schools that have been very

(33:33):
popular reading around the world, right, Like it's a genre.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
If Harry Potter was an accurate telling, Harry would have
been a mass murderer.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
He was a.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Viciously bullied kid at a boarding school constantly and the
institution did nothing. He'd have fucking killed someone. He had
magic like, yeah, that'sd by his professors. Yeah, he's professor
physically abused him and it's like like any of them
and he and he loved it and he was, oh,

(34:05):
it's this lovely kid. No, he would have been a
violent like he would have been made violent by a
violent system, like a lot of school boys in England.
And it's just I remember reading it while I was
in school and being like, this is fucking stupid. I
don't even mean the magic. I mean the fact that
he's just like, oh I can shoot, my one can shoot.

(34:26):
We all have guns and we're not using them. Not
a single truly violent child in there. Yeah, and no,
it would have been horrifying. It's just it's so stupid
because England could actually deal with this by having laws
and regulations that stop this sneak, could have punishments for

(34:46):
teachers to aid in the bet in this instead you
get the occasional limp piece in the newspaper with another
school does not stop bullying, and nothing goddamn happens. So, yeah,
this this sounds awful. They have improved the physical side
in the Yeah, Pederasti's side kind of Yeah, disgusting country.

(35:09):
I'm so glad I left. Yeah, now I live in America,
a normal country. Finally. Yeah, good news about that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
So you know, this is John's experience here. He's one
of these kids he has targeted a lot early on
his attitude. He's kind of this naturally rebellious person. And
I will say, to his credit, John is one of
these kids who, despite what he goes through, doesn't seem
to be like mentally or physically aggressive to others. One

(35:38):
of his classmates later said he was never cruel throughout
his time there, and there are very few people about
whom one can truthfully say that. So like most kids
who go through this turn out worse than he did.
So I'll give him credit for that.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
That takes something. And yeah that's something.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, that's that's for sure something. So John Aspinall's mother
is again usually noted as sort of like favoring him,
but if this is true, she still didn't prefer him
to not having a kid around, because once he and
Chip are off in these boarding schools, they don't really
see their mom or their dad very much during summer break.

(36:15):
He doesn't live with his parents. He lives with this
like family of farmers that his parents pay to take
them in.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Which is very common during that time. They just like
ship the fucking kid off, ship one way or the
other way, right, Yeah, yeah, you don't have a kid,
so you raise it.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah, anywhere but here. And this is good for John actually,
because he loves animals, so he spends a lot of
time on this farm getting to take care of and
raise animals. He kind of idolizes this farmer who helps
to raise him because he's really good with animals, and
this is just kind of John's passion from an early age.
He also spends a lot of time with his grandparents,

(36:53):
who are are pretty strict authoritarians. And yeah, he basically
just does not see his parents, and he kind of
grows up very independent and notably unwilling to take any
shit from adults. Like that's a thing that people will
notice about John from a pretty young age. He has
his own ideas about the world and he's not really

(37:14):
willing to bend on them. As a teenager, he is
a member of it's like the Cadet Training program or
something at his at his boarding school, it's basically an ROTC. Yeah, yeah,
although they do I was a ROTC and we didn't
like do anything like we marched around and shit. But
like apparently his ROTC equivalent, they like do wargames and

(37:39):
stuff where they will like do fake attacks on like
houses and buildings and stuff. John recognized this as kind
of like LARPing and refuse to participate during these actions.
He would like go to sleep nearby. He'd just be
like napping with his other boys, because he was like,
this is pointless, I'm not going to do it, which
you have to spec.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Like yeah, yeah, but also was that not a time
when that might actually have happened. Conscription was a real
threat at those times. It's it's just very weird that
like the one time, like he wasn't actually correct in that.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
No, you were right because a lot of his his
well they're all a little old because he's going to
join the military, like in forty five is when he's
going to start.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yes, but they could have, like they they very were
in England, loved wars.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
We were going to have a few rules one, yeah,
they he very well could have, but he doesn't. He
was kind of indifferent in athletics. He was not particularly
interested in dating. From what I can see, he probably
would have been considered kind of a nerd for his day.
Now there's not a lot of great, you know outlets

(38:49):
for that as there are today. So the kind of
nerd he is is he he spends all of his
time reading colonial adventure stories by guys like h writer Haggard.
John's face book by Haggard was called Naa the Lily,
And it's this book about the Zulu king Shaka, who
was this like very good military commander who leads this

(39:09):
kind of uprising war against the British Empire in Africa,
kind of his winning for a while before you know,
tragically loses, and it's one of these things that happens
a lot in the history of the Empire. Well, they'll
they'll have this local like leader who fights against them,

(39:29):
kind of comes close to winning and then gets massacred
along with all of his people and then has turned
to a hero. Right like afterwards, like people like within
the empire will be like, oh, what a noble man
that we kill. That's a real shame that we had
to wipe that dude.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
Out only had been born somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yeah, quote Aspinall, and this is from a masters' book.
Aspinall continued this tradition and throughout his school days, enthralled
other boys so much with Zulu lore and accounts of
battles and personalities that even the those who can remember
nothing else about him recalled the Zulu obsession. He even
went so far as to claim his mother was a
Zulu princess, and some of the younger boys, perhaps unaware

(40:08):
that his blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin were
inconvenient evidence, believed him.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
So there we go.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
That's good. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean it's kids stuff too.
I guess lying about who your family is so that
you sound cooler. It's this weird mix of like.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
Back then, you could probably make up anything. Yeah, it's
a lot easier. It wasn't really an Internet for some much.
To know, check just have to be a complete fantasist.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
You'd have to go to the library to prove that
this kid's life in Scott's time.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
For that, I will not be doing that. No hazing
to see too. Yeah, I've got kids to hit. As
they grew nearer to adulthood, John started to show an
aptitude for making money as well. He and his brother
started dealing guns. While they are like teenagers and Jesus Christ,
it's easier back then, right, I don't think there's like
laws really about it. So they're just like buying old

(41:02):
these are hunting weapons. They're buying old hunting weapons and
like fixing them up and selling them for a profit.
They're also like doing hunting and stuff and kind of
basically selling the game. They get to rich people who
don't want to be arced to do it themselves. But
when I have like a trophy and kind of in
the middle of doing all this, the two boys basically

(41:24):
invent the entire modern industry of internet scams and analog
form And this is fascinating. I think you're going to
enjoy this. Chips was the more resourceful entrepreneur of the
two at this stage. It was he who made the money,
John who did his bidding. John was too dreamy and idealistic,
too much the romantic to grasp the practical steps towards profits.
One of chips ruses was to advertise in The Times

(41:45):
inviting interested parties to send in one pound in return
for which they would receive enlightenment on the mysteries of
how to make soap. Hundreds of letters arrived at prep school.
They were answered with a page copied from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
That's like he's running like a kind of a chat
GPT scam, right, they're just copying directly from the encyclopedia.

(42:06):
I I approve all like British scams in that era
because it was such a rotten country, such an inherently
corrupt institution. It was such a Britain was such a
natural scammer. The things they did, the things the British
Empire did in every other country were so disgusting that I,
of course we can have this happen. Of course we

(42:27):
invented that.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, it is. It is a weirdly modern scam though,
like it's it's just like this is you know, they
would have they could have gotten so much further with
it if they'd had the internet, you know, chat GPT
would have really been a wonder to these Kidsins. Yeah,
early Crassensteins. So after graduating, yeah Krassenstein, Yeah, Crassen's Steen. Yeah,

(42:53):
that's probably right.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
So after graduation.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Stems he joins the Royal Marines. He's got to do
his time in service, which I think is about three years.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
He gets really lucky.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
He comes in right at the end of World War two,
and he doesn't have to do any of the war part,
which is great. You would prefer to avoid that if
at all possible. Not a great war to have to
fight in. So he demobilizes in forty eight and then
applies to Jesus College, Oxford and was accepted. And again
for Americans, Oxford I think is like actually five universities

(43:25):
when people refer to Auxford's a couple of different schools there,
and they're all nice, right, They're all like side of pristigeous, no,
but Jesus is like sort of the least of the
prestigious of them, at least at this time.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
I don't know where it stands today, maybe that time,
but it's still everywhere is good.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Now, everywhere's yeah, these are all very good, right, And
so he goes there, but he doesn't fall in love
with it, right. He kind of is is disillusioned very
early on part of it because he doesn't know what
he wants to do. At this point. He thought he
wanted to be a writer, and then he thought he
wanted to be a journalist, but he doesn't actually like

(44:04):
to write, and he's like, wow, this is a hard
job and it doesn't make much money.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
So he would be a perfect modern journalist. Then, yeah,
he'd be a perfect modern journalist.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah, so he drops that ambition pretty quick, and he
just decides to dress like Oscar Wilde for a while
and try to build a reputation as a poet.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yeah, he's got this like purple velvet suit he wears everywhere.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Just a dandy now, uh huh, andandy pilt.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
And he gets away with that for a while, but
he like doesn't actually like writing poems or making art
in any way. And you know, you can only kind
of keep up that lie so long before you get
kind of bored of it. And while this is going on,
well he's kind of finding himself in Oxford. His mother
was off partying and eventually she hooks up with another
army officer. His luck would have it, this guy, Colonel Osborne.

(44:53):
Like they marry, she becomes lady or she becomes you know,
missus Osborne, and then he inherits a baronetcy, which which
is like I believe that's kind of on the lower
end of the aristocracy, like a baron.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
It's baron.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, maybe the middle class of the aristocracy.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
I don't know, any kind of aristocracy. We have to
explain why it's good. Is not great?

Speaker 1 (45:14):
No, no, no, But this works out great for John
because he inherits a baronetcy. His mom is now the
Lady Osborne, and this kind of lifts them all up, right,
so he gets to be on more of an even
footing with the other with the kids at Oxford who
are like members of the of the nobility. And this
is why he's as an adult, is going to be

(45:35):
Lord aspinall right, because he this baronetcy goes to him eventually.
That makes socialization at Oxford a lot easier. And he
falls in with a crowd of wealthy young men who
are real aristocrats with family fortunes that gave them basically
endless trust funds. They are all his friends at school
or all these rich boys. None of them have ever
had to do anything on their own, and their whole youth,

(45:57):
as we've talked about, was this mix of like psycho privates,
school bullying and these you know, outside of that when
they're with their families, these kind of interminable rituals that
you have to carry out as members of the aristocracy.
So these are rich kids, they are kids who have
suffered some psychic damage as a result of their education,
and they are permanently bored, right, and so the only

(46:18):
thing in their life that lends them excitement is gambling.
That is the joy that these kids have is to gamble.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah, beautiful, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Great situation and this is yeah, so John learns to
play poker with them, and he does not have He's
one of these kids, not the only one. This is
a period where kind of the upper crust is opening
up a little bit and there's some room for these
kids who are born to just rich families to kind
of move in and out of it. And John is

(46:50):
one of these kids who is kind of welcome in
these circles, even though he doesn't really have a family fortune.
But the fact that he's not rich. He's rich compared
to like a normal person, right, but he's not rich
by the standards of these guys. He's certainly not rich
enough to gamble like they do.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Right. So we actually this is like the beginning of
new money.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah exactly. He is one of the first new money
people to really like ascend, right. But he doesn't have
that money at this point, which means he has to
actually be good at gambling, right. He can't just waste.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
Money for simple weeks.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
Yeah, exactly, and this is from Pearson's book The Gamblers.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
He said later, from the first time I settled down
to play, I felt at home as I never had before.
The excitement invigorated him, the risk challenged him, and he
relished the company of gamblers, which came as a relief
from those earnest Welshmen back in college. Later he used
to claim that gamblers formed a superior race to passive,
tedious humanity, and he rather shocked the journalist Compton Miller

(47:48):
by telling him he regarded people who don't gamble as
emotional cripples. To be able to count himself among the
emotionally elect must have been more satisfying than dressing up
his Oscar wild or studying Beowulf for Chaucer, and nobody
could doubt his dedication to his chosen field of studies.
Soon most of his waking hours were spent gambling in
one way or another. The stakes rose, some of his

(48:09):
early partners, like John Lawrence, the future Lord Oaksy, became
worried and dropped out. It was getting too hot for
me to handle, and it was obvious that John was
heading for the dangerous world of big time gambling.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
I just think it's marvelous. You found another kind of
British eugenics. Yeah, yeah, gambling, superio. They found another way
to be xenophobic. Yeah, innovats us.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
It is really innovative. And you know, I mentioned that
Adam curtis documentary The Mayfair Set, which is about Aspinall
and his friends. Curtis will draw a direct line with that
between a lot of these guys who are sponsoring coups right,
who are doing shit, who are like behind a lot
of like the military actions in the Suez Crisis, These
guys who build private armies and use them to like

(48:52):
change the nature power and at they're all gamblers. They
all gamble with Aspinall, and He's like, gambling is crucial
to understanding why the people who are running a lot
of foreign policy for the Empire in the like latter
half of the twentieth century do the shit that they do, right,
because they're gamblers like that, they're willing to kind of
take these big wild risks of chance.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
They don't fear losing, Yeah, or at least they the
idea of risk for them is a little more valuable.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, they fear losing less than they fear not rolling
the dice. Yes, I think is probably an accurate way
to see it. So aspinall is a pretty good gambler naturally, right,
And when he does lose, you know, because these games
are all between very rich people, there's like IOU systems, right,
so you can kind of float for a while if

(49:42):
you have a couple of bad nights by kind of
like rolling those IOUs forward until you win some So
he's able to kind of hang on. There's some like
tight moments there, but he's he's able to hang on.
But he realizes, like, I don't want to just be
gambling like this and potentially lose eventually. The real way
to like get ahead and to kind of build a
place for myself in the society is to start hosting games. Right,

(50:05):
So he starts to draw a network of close friends
to him who he uses as almost like this is
almost like a corporate enterprise, except for it's just purely
bonds of friendship here, right, friendship and sort of like
mutual need. The first guy that he kind of attracts
to him as this fellow Lord Maxwell Scott, and I say, Lord,
he is the Lord Maxwell Scott he's also like eighteen

(50:28):
at this point, right, these are all still kids, and
Maxwell Scott is so addicted to gambling. He's one of
these guys who he's got perfect noble credentials. Right, so
he's really good at making friends. He can make all
of these connections to other members of the aristocracy. He's
inherently welcome at every party. Right, There's no event that's
closed to this guy because of how highly placed he

(50:49):
is within the system. But he is a god awful
gambler who is terribly addicted to it. Not only does
he play games of chance, he said to gamble, Like
people will see like a crow flying in the air,
and he'll bet on them as to whether or not
it's going to like land in which tree it's gonna
land on. He'll put money on this shit, or like
which drop of rain is going to make it to

(51:11):
the bottom of a window first. Like he's that kind
of like there's nothing going on in this man's soul
other than the momentary thrill of placing a wager.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
It's like a cartoon character. Yeah, it is really. I
love that love I love that there are guys like
this that existed in history. Just just completely insane dibshits.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Yeah, guys like living versions at the success memes that
you find on Instagram posted exclusively from like India and
the Philippines.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
By the way, India gets a huge version of the
of these, like this boarding school system with like kind
of carbon copied over to it. That's a British another story.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Disgusting.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah, so between the two kingdom Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Hey,
it's we all come from horrible countries here. You know,
this is a this is a safe place to work
through it. I come from Oklahoma, boy, Like I can
tell you some stories. Speaking of Oklahoma. This show was

(52:17):
sponsored by the state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma, we banned something
else completely an a dye today.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
I don't know. I'm angry about the law. That was
not a good one, not a good one.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah. But you know what's illegal in Oklahoma right now?

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Not much abortion? Yeah. Well, oh no, a lot of
stuff is illegal. It's just not the kind of stuff
that should be illegal. Books.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Yeah, books, Yes, we have definitely been banning some books
back in my old home state.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
Come to Oklahoma, you can also leave.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Yeah, come to Oklahoma a great place to exit.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
Anyway. Here's some other ads we're back.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
So the second friend that he draws that Maspinal draws
to him is this guy Dominic Elways. Elways is a
mediocre gambler, but he's incredibly handsome and charming with the ladies. Right,
So between Maxwell Scott and Elways, aspinall can get all
of like the really rich kids to his parties, and
he can get women to his parties, right, which is

(53:25):
sort of like the two ingredients in this social set
for being able to have a good gambling party.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
I should also note, as a fun aside, this is
just like in Pearson's book, which is Pearson as a
journalist is very much kind of close to this community.
So while he's sort of critical about them, you get
these lines from him where it's like, oh, you just
come from a different world. And as like a fun aside,
Pearson's like Elways's friends had a term for him NSIT,

(53:52):
which means not safe in taxis, and this is like
portrayed as a funny anecdote. What that means is that
like you can't put Elways in a taxi with a
young woman or he will just assault her, right, Like
that's that's what that's what that means, Yeah, that's that's
not just English, I'll give you that, but yeah, that
is particularly this kind of guy, Like that's what it

(54:14):
means to be a ladies man at this period of time. Yeah,
so that's cool. John seems to have decided that the
life of a gentleman gambler was the life that he
wanted to live. So he drops out of Oxford. He
actually on the day of his exams, like he's so
close to graduating that it's like exam day, and instead
of going to take them, he fakes an illness so
he can gamble on horse races, which I do respect

(54:38):
to be honest, like that Bridge British man.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
That's commitment.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Yeah, so the boys start, you'll learn more at the
horse trap.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
He doesn't understand.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
So the boys start renting rooms at the Ritz Hotel
and hosting poker parties. These are very popular parties, but
they're also expensive because like aspinall, he gets a little
bit of a cut from like each pot, but he's
also he has to pay for food, and he has
to pay for alcohol, and like these are very rich people.
So that's not cheap food and alcohol, right, You're not
throwing together some ham sandwich isn't beat you know.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Like appealing to the upp across you actually had to
like make an effoot.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
Yeah, so they have trouble breaking even Aspinall is often
reliant upon his rich friends in order to like keep
floating the games to the next week. And he's like,
this is not gonna wor I'm not gonna get rich
doing this shit, right, And so while he's kind of
trying to puzzle this out, he comes upon a new
game of chance that is going to open the world
up to him. And this game is called Shamanda Fair.

(55:44):
Have you have you heard of Shamanda Fair.

Speaker 2 (55:47):
No?

Speaker 1 (55:48):
I learned about it from a Warren Zevon song. But
it's remarkable. It's the heroine of games of chance. That's
how it's described by some people who were both heroin
addicts and gambling addicts. Right, And I'm gonna explain this
because I don't think it's widely known anymore. But yeah,
the way he finds out about shamand A Fair is
his friend Elwiz kind of wangles him in invitation to

(56:10):
this regular game held by the vicar, who's this guy
who pretends to be a vicar but is really just
a degenerate gambler, dressing like a religious figure in order
to make people trust him so he can take their money.
And aspinall has known this guy for a while, but
he comes to his house to this shamand a Fair game,
and he's like, your house is much nicer than it
should be. Where are you getting all this money? And

(56:32):
the Vicar's like, well, there's this new game that's blowing up,
and if you're the dude running the house that night,
you make crazy money off. And it's called shamand a fair. So,
as I noted earlier, the guys who are gambling in
this right are these rich kids, most of whom inherited
huge fortunes from their parents who died during the war years.
And in this period of time, this is like the

(56:54):
early fifties the English aristocracy, there are historic levels of
cash on hand, what's called ready cash. So you've got
all these young people who have not really been seasoned
by the world, who are very naive, and who have
what seemed to them to be endless piles of liquid assets, right,
and they have this kind of equally historic desire to

(57:16):
throw this money away to feel alive for a second.
And so The most popular games among the aristocracy are
not things like poker where there's skill involved, right, where
you're actually you're competing, right, You can be good at
poker and it matters, you know, Yeah, there isn't.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Exactly You're not losing because you were bad.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
You're losing just the roll of the dice whatever, and
because that's more thrilling, right, you want to hear chance? Yeah,
So the games that are like popular among these kind
of self destructive rich kids are are the ones that
have the purest amount of chance in them. And Shamanda
Fair it's beloved and its addictive because it's the most

(57:53):
random game around and it's very fast. Now I'm not
going to go through the rules of Shamanda Fair here
because silly, and also I don't really I'm not a
game of chance guy, but the point about how it
works is that it's very fast and it's very random.
Within these games, the standard bet is one thousand pounds,
which is about twenty five thousand dollars in modern money,

(58:15):
and these games are played every thirty seconds. So these
people are putting down twenty five grand in modern money
every thirty seconds, or so, right it is they are
they love this because it is the fastest way to
light money on fire. Like that's why shimand affair is beloved, right,
just another.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Form of doing drugs.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
It is, it is, And in fact, one of the
people that Pierson cites is like a member of the
aristocracy who was a heroin addict who is like describes
it as the heroin of gambling. And another guy says, famously,
you don't give up on Shemy, which is kind of
the nickname for this game. Shemy gives up on you, right, Like,
you never quit this game, you just run out of
money because it's so addictive. So aspinall. The best thing

(58:57):
about this from his perspective is that if you are
the house, the house gets paid twenty percent of the
pot in each game. Right. That was just sort of
the cultural sort of understanding about how this was going
to work. And the idea is this compensates the host
for running the game. But because every member, everyone who's
putting into a pot is putting the equivalent of twenty

(59:17):
five grand and you make a fucking fortune running chimney game.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
So wait, is the So does the person running the
game get a is they like a vig?

Speaker 1 (59:27):
Yeah, that's the vig right, that's like you get twenty
percent of the pot automatically goes to the house.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Oh boy, I gotta run one of these. Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
It's actually explicitly illegal in UK law to do this
now air where it's extremely illegal to run any kind
of gambling yourself. Yeah, that's a shame. Thank god, we
can go to Caesar's palace and anyway. I don't know,
at least it's democratized, right, They're they're robbing everybody here.

Speaker 2 (59:58):
I don't know. I guess it's better the way that.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
He's doing it because the only people in these games
are rich, right, I will say Aspinall's version of running
a casino is much more ethical than any other version.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Yeah, it's the only time where that's the case, where
like excluding people is fine because the people you're excluding
are poor and can't afford to gamble like this. So
I'll give him that. So Aspinall he brings in his
you know, they start making money with these games. He
brings in his mom to curate the meals because she's
you know, knows some great cooks. Maxwell Scott, being this

(01:00:29):
kind of impeccably mannered guy, picks the wine and John
sort of in order to dress this up, they're going
they're running it out of different houses each week. But
he has to like make it look nice. So he
needs some fine art. These pieces like originals by like
guys like Panini and Cantiletto. And he's able to get
fine art by sort of going to different art dealers

(01:00:49):
and saying, I'm totally gonna buy this piece, but I
need to take it home and try it out for
a couple of days. Right, And because he's a lord
and you know, in good with the aristocracy, all of
these places are like, well, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Well you need to try a piece of artwork at home.
That's how that works.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
Yeah, take it for a spin, Jesus Christ. So his
first few games are hits and he just starts making
piles of money. Right now, none of this is strict.
This is a legal gray area at the time. Right,
England's gambling laws make it a crime to run a
casino or gambling house. You can't do that legally, But

(01:01:31):
private homes are allowed to host gambling games, right you can't.
I think it's if you do it more than two
or three nights in a row it becomes illegal. So
basically every week they switch locations, right, and that way
they're not running a gambling hall. Right, these are independent games.
Well this is this man's game this week. But they're
all run by Aspinall right, and he's using kind of

(01:01:54):
his buddy Maxwell Scott, who is this guy that any
anybody who's rich in fan knows Maxwell Scott. So he
can just go to all these other people with mansions
and be like, hey, you want to host a game
this week? You know, I think they're usually kicking them
a little bit of the Big Two, but the money
is crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
They are making.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Aspinall's generally making something like thirty pounds a night off
of these games, which is this period of time an
insane amount of money. Now his expenses are high too,
but he's still making a lot of money, and in
very short time he is rich. And the best thing
about being rich is you can get totally devoted to
insane hobbies that poor people cannot afford. In John's case

(01:02:36):
being this kind of lifelong animal lover, the insane hobby
he chooses to get into is adopting exotic animals and yeah, perfect,
Oh it's going to be good gets so British, Yeah,
and that is legal at this point. It's like not
till seventy six that the UK makes it illegal to
just like buy lions or whatever. Like, yeah, in part

(01:02:58):
because of this guy. But I'm going to read another
quote from the gamblers here. Aspinall never said what took
him to mister Palmer's pet shop in North London in
early nineteen fifty seven, Still less, what made him buy
a small capuchin monkey. If you live in Eaton Place
and want an unusual pet to amuse your guests, you
could do worse than a capuchin monkey. They're small and
affectionate and have a zany sense of humor all their own,

(01:03:19):
Livelier than a Pekinese and more affectionate than a Siamese.
They take their name from the monklike hood around their head.
This particular monkey was a great success with gambling friends
who visited the house. One of them christened him Dead Loss. Thereafter,
he was always known as Debdi Deddy's popularity turned Aspinall's
thoughts to other animals. Like many people with childhood memories
of Teddy bears, he seems to have regarded bears as

(01:03:40):
friendly creatures, and from mister Palmer bought a pair of
young Himalayan bears he called them Esau and Ayesha, took
them home to eat in place, and for a while
did his best to make them socialize among his guests.
Legend has it that a shortsighted peer once mistook Esau
for another member of the House of Lords. But Himalayan
bears are not as sociable as they appear, and before

(01:04:01):
long Aspinall reluctantly confined them to a cage that he
constructed in the garden. This did nothing to deterear him
from trying to make friends with other wild animals. Rather
the reverse, and his problems with Esau and Ayisha seem
to have convinced him that if only he had bought
the two bears young enough and brought them up to
have no fear of him, this would have been quite possible.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Yeah, that's that's the problem, mat that's the problem. You
didn't get those bears. Yeah, I got the pet. He
tried to bring it back, got pet shown it. Told
you need to get early.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Yeah, that is his his his. The only thing he
learns out of any time, like the reason why he
has to cage them is that they attack people, and
the only lesson he learns from this is like, these
bears would be my friend if I'd gotten them younger, right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
Of course, that would That is the that's the lesson
I've learned.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
Yeah, and he's from this. Pearson will kind of note
that if you are running a gambling operation like this,
if you're sort of the master of the casino, it's
kind of like being a cult leader, right, in part
because people are really reliant upon you, especially the ones
who are gambling too much, and that sort of deranges John.
Like he's already grown up in this very rarefied, strange

(01:05:10):
world of high society. He's become more deranged by being
this kind of gambling maven, and something strange starts to
happen to him as he starts get it. Taking on
these exotic pets, he becomes so fascinated by them that
he starts to grow irritated and enraged by the pedestrian
pets that middle class people have. It makes him angry
to see someone with a dog or a cat, right,

(01:05:32):
and he starts to hate people who have less and
extends this to their pets. He hates animals that aren't exotic, right.
He thinks it's disgusting, which is fascinating. Mentally, what's going
on there is fascinating. I don't know how else to
describe it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Love that this is such a British story. We hate
in a completely different way, so that the average person, our
brains are capable of loathing someone for the petsiest threes
they yeah, you piece of shit I have. I can't
go to three rooms in my house due to the

(01:06:09):
pumas plural. Yeah, I get bitten by a bear every
single day. You cowered. There are eighteen timer and monkeys
in my garden. I can account for eleven, but I
see seven evidence of another seven. One is pregnant. I
don't know how they're all male.

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
So, because he's so angry at the idea of normal pets,
in order to like both trump all of the cat
and dog owners in the world, he buys a tiger
cup named Tara, and he raises her like a kitten.
She sleeps with him in his bed. He'll take her
on walks at night, and one evening a family's dog
attacks Tara, or perhaps he says that the dog attacked Tara.

(01:06:51):
We don't know that, we have no idea who attacked.
To trust him, yeah, perhaps Tara attacked him, but whatever
the case, says, his cat kills this dog with a
single bite. Obviously it's a tiger, Like, of course, this
is how it goes. Sure, So aspinall this, I think
this dog is like gotten out of someone's yard, right,

(01:07:13):
So aspinall it finds himself in the dead of night
with his tiger and this like mauled corpse of a
family's dog, and he just hurls it down the basement
stairs of a stranger's house.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
That's like, that's how I'm gonna deal with this problem.
Where this shit goes?

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's just quite an amazing guy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Trust me, how animals work.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
This is what you do, this is where you put them.
So in short order, it becomes obvious to him that, like,
I want more wild animals than he's living in London, right,
he already has. He has a tiger and two bears
and several monkeys. That's too many animals for a house
in the middle of London. Yeah, that's fine. It's getting
a bit crowded. So he buys this kind of decrepit

(01:07:55):
country mansion on a bunch of acreage called Howlits, and
he pays a lot of money. He has rebuilt and refurbished,
and he starts setting up habitats for his bears and
for Tara, and soon more animals will join them. And
we're going to tell that story and what happens next
in part two. But before we kind of move on,
I want to tell another story that kind of sets
up and explains a bit what's happening with his gambling

(01:08:18):
halls in this period of time. And to do that,
we've got to pull back a century or so to
the early eighteen hundreds and discuss John Aspinall's predecessor, right,
the gambling maven, who comes a generation before him and
kind of sets up the board for him. So, after
kind of in the early eighteen hundreds, after eighteen twelve,
you've got this situation that's a lot like the UK

(01:08:39):
after nineteen forty five, and that you've had this long
series of wars. They've devastated the whole country, right, But
the aristocracy, a lot of the sons of the aristocracy
have died in this war, and suddenly there's this period
of peace, and so you have this generation of aristocratocrats
come of age. A lot of them have lost their
parents in these conflicts, which means they have all of

(01:09:00):
this money and there's no war to fight, right, so
they're all bored as fucking hell. And that creates the
situation about a century before Aspinalls rise, where gambling is
going to flourish, right, because there's all these rich kids
with ready money looking for an adrenaline fix. John is
going to be the guy to take advantage of this
in the late forties and fifties and a century earlier.

(01:09:21):
His predecessor is this dude named William Crockford. One thing
they have, they have a couple of things in common.
One is that, you know, John is the son of
a doctor and the daughter of a colonial officer. They're comfortable,
they have money, but they're not the ruling class. Crockford
is like a fishmonger by trade, right, which is he's
a business owner.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
He comes from like he inherits this business, I think
from his dad, which means he's kind of solidly middle class,
maybe upper middle class.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
So these are both guys who come from this position
of like they have a degree of economic privilege, but
they're not. They're not inherently, like naturally going to ascend
to the ruling class. They have to work for that, right,
and they both pick gambling as their way to get there.
Like John Crockford discovers as a teenager he can calculate

(01:10:07):
odds in his head, making him a good gambler, and
he starts out just sort of gambling, but by the
eighteen hundreds he's made enough money that he buys this
sort of facility in an upscale neighborhood and he starts
catering just to the rich. And he's kind of the
first guy to do this. Prior to Crockford, most gambling
halls had been disreputable places where violence was common. Crockford

(01:10:29):
locks doesn't allow the poor in doesn't even allow you know,
people who aren't aristocrats with money in other than himself generally,
because he wants to create a safe place where the
very rich can throw away their fortunes and splendor. And
there's differences between the periods. The gamblers of Crockford's day
like stuff like poker, where there's an element of skill involved,

(01:10:49):
right because and he recognizes that this is not because
there's a big difference in odds, but they want this
illusion of control, which I guess shows a difference between
these two generations of of the ruling class that I
think is kind of interesting, and Crockford kind of culminates
in eighteen twenty eight, starting this place called Crockford's, which
is frequented. Lord Wellington, the guy who defeats Napoleon is

(01:11:12):
a regular there. Lord Byron is a regular there. Like,
that's the kind of people who are sort of yeah,
very much so, and yeah, it's one of those things.
A big part of why Crockford he makes a decision
early on. I don't want to host small businessmen or entrepreneurs,
common people who have fortunes because they're smart, right, I
just want to host idiots who inherited all of their

(01:11:33):
money because they will gamble it all away. We don't
know how much money Crockford ultimately fleeced out of the
rulers of the British Empire, but it's generally agreed upon
that he helped kind of clear out a generation of wealth,
bankrupted a number of families, and altered the map of
British power.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
The aristocrats who like become wealthy and powerful after this
point are sort of the people who weren't gambling it
all away at Crockford's, Right, that's going to be the
case with Aspinall, Right, he's kind of clearing the way
for a new generation of people. And in the folks
that kind of get rich and take the reins of

(01:12:10):
power often don't come from the same sort of like
rarefied noble house backgrounds right before. This is new money, right,
That's what Aspinall is going to clear. I think it's
just interesting to talk about Crockford because this is apparently
kind of a pattern. Right, every one hundred and fifty
years or so, you'll have this gambling freeze that kills
a chunk of the old aristocracy's wealth and kind of

(01:12:31):
facilitates the transfer of that wealth to new men, to
these business moguls and stuff in the gamblers Pearson Wrights quote.
More and more people were becoming vastly richer in that
prosperous decade. As city institutions like the Stock Exchange and
Lloyd's opened their boardrooms previously reserved for members of the
upper classes to the sharper offspring of the growing meritocracy,

(01:12:53):
takeover bids and property speculation offered others golden opportunities for
acquiring a moderate amounts of wealth. A new class of
moneymen was now appearing, and the richer they became, the
more of them attempted to assume the habits and pretensions
of the vanishing ancient aristocracy. In the early forties, George
Orwell wrote that no country under the sun is more
obsessed by class than England.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
It still was.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
Class obsession had been endemic among the English for so
long that it wouldn't go away, And in the sixties
the very rich appeared, if anything, to be more class
obsessed than ever, as they infiltrated one by one the
former strongholds of the old nobility. And that's who John
is going to be, right, He is a new money
guy who is not just infiltrating but going to shape

(01:13:37):
kind of the next generation of power brokers, right in
part by like who his casino robs and who it
transfers money to.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
It almost feels like it's just a chain of exploitation,
Like the British aristocracy exploited England, exploited overseas, and now
someone found a way to exploit them.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is beautiful. That's exactly what's happening.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Yeah, it's England.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
It's a nice circle. So that's what we're going to
end for today in part one and in part two
we're going to have some more gambling and a whole
lot more Zoos stories and then kind of end on
a murder.

Speaker 2 (01:14:14):
So that's all exciting. That's good.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
Yeah, Well pull little Cliffinger there, Robert, little Cliffhanger there.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Ed, you got any pluggables to plug here? Just read
my newsletter it where's your ed don't eh? And if
you need public relations services, EZPR dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Please excellent ezpr dot com and where's your head at
It is one of my favorite people to read on
the tech industry. And uh yeah, we will be We
will be back on Thursday with a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (01:14:46):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast