Aspinall Lucan
4/1/2022 admin
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Tragedy for Aspinall clan as rock wife Amanda dies four years after filing for divorce
When Amanda Aspinall married pop star Daryl Hall, it was seen as the perfect match of English society and U.S. showbiz.
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. 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. Shirley Robey, who worked for Lucan's casion owner John Aspinall claimed in 2012 she overheard conversations with Lucan's friend Sir James Goldsmith, father of Zac Goldsmith in the early 1980s.
Lucan fled to Australia and started new life as a Buddhist. Neil Berriman discovered just 12 years.
However, less than four years after Amanda filed for divorce, she has been found dead at the age of 61. She is understood to have suffered a heart attack.
‘The whole family is deeply shocked,’ a friend of the Aspinalls tells me.
‘The death was very sudden.’
Amanda was the daughter of late gambling tycoon and animal park owner John Aspinall, a close friend of the fugitive Lord Lucan. Her mother was Aspinall’s first wife, the late Scottish model Jane Gordon Hastings.
Daryl Hall is seen at Los Angeles International Airport on December 30, 2013 with Amanda Aspinall. He and Amanda lived for a time in London’s Chelsea
In 2009, Amanda married Hall, 72, who is in one of the most successful duos in pop history, Hall & Oates, with more than 60 million albums sold. He and Amanda lived for a time in London’s Chelsea and he seemed to enjoy her social connections, boasting in an interview in 2012 that his wife was related to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
‘I travel in unusual circles,’ Hall said. ‘George Osborne and his wife, Frances, are my cousins.
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Ronnie Wood’s ex-wife Jo falls for top…
My haven, Chemmy Alcott: The 36-year-old sports presenter,…
Share this article
‘But I’m not gonna talk politics with George.’
Amanda had two children, March and Orson, with her first husband, Cosmo Fry, a hotelier and heir to the Fry’s chocolate dynasty. Their children, who are now grown-up, became so close to Hall that her daughter, March, joined her in performing backing vocals on two songs on his 2011 solo album, Laughing Down Crying.
‘I have an English family and I’ve lived in England for years,’ Hall said the following year.
‘They’re extraordinary people, and I have a great family.’
However, Amanda filed for divorce in August 2015 in Connecticut, where the couple lived at the time with her children, reportedly claiming that the marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’ in court documents. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was eight years old and they underwent a bitter divorce on the grounds of her mother’s adultery.
Her father, known as Aspers, was one of society’s most mercurial characters and established the Clermont Club in Mayfair, where ‘Lucky’ Lucan and Sir James Goldsmith gambled.
Aspinall won custody of Amanda and her brother, Damian, and forbade them from seeing their mother again. The casino, and the safari parks he set up in Kent, are now run by Damian.
Best known as the ‘responsible adult’ in charge of Bungle, George and Zippy on Rainbow, TV presenter Geoffrey Hayes had a secret child in real life.
The will left by Hayes, who died last year aged 76, reveals that he had a son, Anthony, from whom he was estranged.
Best known as the ‘responsible adult’ in charge of Bungle, George and Zippy on Rainbow, TV presenter Geoffrey Hayes (pictured) had a secret child in real life
He wrote that Anthony will receive nothing from his £98,000 estate, ‘as sadly I have no ongoing relationship with him and have not seen him for many years’. Almost all will go to his widow, Sarah, with whom he had a son, Tom.
Despite his convincing portrayal of a flamboyant alcoholic in Withnail And I, Richard E. Grant never drinks. He is, though, a devotee of illegal substances.
‘I still smoke dope,’ the 61-year-old actor admits. ‘I love marijuana — it makes me laugh.’ So now we know why he included tones of cannabis in his men’s fragrance, Jack.
The smart set’s talking about… Granola heiress Angelica O’Donnell
With her kinsmen including the celebrated photographers Lord Snowdon and Patrick Lichfield, Angelica O’Donnell was always likely to make a name for herself.
And the daughter of food entrepreneur Lucy O’Donnell — who created upmarket granola brand LoveDean — is wasting no time, having established her own children’s fashion line by the tender age of 18.
Angelica O’Donnell (pictured) had established her own children’s fashion line by the tender age of 18.
It’s called Beany Baby clothes and is not the first time that Angelica’s tried to make money. ‘When I was a child I used to breed and sell tadpoles,’ she tells me.
‘I saved up to buy a lobster I called Lobby.’
Sadly, that enterprise ended in disaster. ‘I was deeply hurt when I woke up one day to find Lobby had eaten all my beloved tadpoles.’ Having left £38,790-per-year St Mary’s School Ascot, to which she won a coveted art scholarship, Angelica is to study international relations at St Andrews University. First, though, she’s travelling to Costa Rica to help save endangered turtles.
The trip will, however, mean she’s away from her Eton-educated boyfriend, George Agnew, 19.
His family is just as distinguished — his father is cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew, who was responsible for causing radio’s most prolonged fit of giggles.
It came after Aggers remarked on a curious dismissal during a match between England and the West Indies, in which Ian Botham’s inner thigh had brushed his stumps, dislodging a bail: ‘He just didn’t quite get his leg over.’
Source: Read Full Article
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.Aspinall Landscaping & Nursery Route 5 13037
He insisted on treating them not as beasts to be exhibited, but as friends to be pampered. He ensured that they should have adequate space to live in the same kind of groupings as in the wild, and took the greatest trouble to reproduce the variety of their natural diet. His gorillas, for example, were given all kinds of berries, and treats such as roast meat on Sundays and chocolate bars.'Aspers' himself, determined to annihilate the gulf between the species, delighted to romp with tigers and gorillas. His keepers, usually chosen without reference to qualifications, were encouraged to behave in a similar manner. In his book The Best of Friends (1976), Aspinall insisted on the individuality of animals: 'There are bold tigers and timid ones, honest tigers and treacherous ones, predictable and unpredictable, noisy and silent, hot-tempered and good-natured.'
He himself was an excellent judge of his charges. A Passion to Protect, a film about his work, showed him having his eyelids delicately picked by the gorilla Djoun; receiving newly-born tiger cubs dumped in his lap by the mother; and being surrounded by an affectionate wolf pack. Of his 30 best friends, he once remarked, more than half were animals. In 1993 he was perfectly happy that his grand-daughter should play with gorillas; indeed, he remarked, 'I'd rather leave them with gorillas than with a social worker.'
While experts were initially skeptical of his approach, they were eventually obliged to admire his remarkable run of breeding successes. Until 1956, no gorilla had ever been born in captivity, and not many more were added in ensuing years. Yet after 1975, gorilla births were common events at Howletts, and eventually passed the half-century mark.
Aspinall also bred hundreds of tigers, including the first Siberian tiger born in Britain. More than 50 other species profited, including the first snow leopard born in captivity; the first honey badger to be bred in a zoo; the first fishing cats in Britain; the first Przwalski's horses for 30 years.
But these triumphs were overshadowed by the deaths of five keepers: two killed by the same tigress in 1980; one crushed by an elephant in 1984; another savaged by a tiger in 1994; and the last trampled by an elephant earlier this year. There were also occasional maulings: of the 12-year-old Robin Birley in 1970; of the model Merilyn Lamb in 1969; of a volunteer at Port Lympne in 1994.
Aspinall Lucan Dublin
Though Aspinall succeeded in warding off attempts by the Canterbury Council to enforce more orthodox methods of husbandry at Howletts, these accidents evoked criticism which portrayed him as a playboy living out his fantasies. Such attacks were the more virulent because of the provocative manner in which Apsinall set forth his own views. In his mind there had once been a golden age in which animals and humans had been equal. Mankind, though, had launched a vicious campaign against the beasts and Aspinall saw it as a duty to fight for the victims.He castigated the human race as a species of vermin, and positively welcomed natural disasters as a means of reducing the plague of homo sapiens. He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if he could take another 250 million with him. There was something to be said, he felt, for Hitler's ideas about eugenics. 'Broadly speaking,' he said, 'the high income groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance.'
Aspinall's special antipathy was clever women of Left-wing views; they made him fume. His quasi-fascist views earned him obloquy, and tended to obscure the extraordinary nature of his achievement. By 1996 his two zoos contained 1,100 animals, and cost £4 million a year to keep, of which the public contributed a mere £330,000. The task of providing the remaining funds left Aspinall quite undaunted. His panache and self-belief always allowed him to live entirely on his own terms.
John Victor Aspinall was born in Delhi on June 11 1926. His father, supposedly, was Robert Aspinall, a surgeon; his mother, Mary Grace Horn, was sprung from a family resident in India for four generations. John was the second, and very much the favorite son. Later he gave out that, at 26, he had discovered his true father was a soldier called George Bruce, and that he had been conceived under a tamarisk tree after a regimental ball.
John was largely brought up by an ayah, and in early years was more fluent in Hindustani than in English. At six, he was sent back to prep school near Eastbourne. In 1938, Aspinall's mother, now divorced, married George Osborne (later Sir George, 16th Bt), who paid for John to go to Rugby. There he made the rugger XV, but his boisterous bossiness caused the school to suggest in 1943 that he might not want to return for the next term. The most influential event of this period was his reading of Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily, which sparked a lifelong obsession with the Zulus and tribalism.
After Rugby, he spent three years in the ranks of the Marines. Afterwards he went up to Jesus College, Oxford, where he soon discovered that he had a talent for gambling. He risked his entire term's grant (£70) on a horse called Palestine in the 2,000 Guineas; it won, albeit at very short odds.
At Oxford he made friends who would prove vital to his later life, notably the Goldsmith brothers, Jimmy and Teddy, and a fellow gambler, Ian Maxwell-Scott. When his final exams beckoned, Aspinall preferred to attend the Gold Cup at Ascot.
At that time it was not permitted to hold games of chance regularly at the same place. Aspinall therefore began to set up games of chemin-de-fer at a variety of addresses. His charm, admitted even by his enemies, attracted such players as the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Derby, while his entertaining was conducted in the most lavish style. With his percentage of the stakes guaranteed, he was soon becoming rich.
He married in 1956, and went to live in a flat in Eaton Place, in which, quite suddenly, he began to instal various animals. There was a Capuchin monkey, then a nine-week-old tigress called Tara, who slept in his bed for 18 months, and two Himalayan bears. Inevitably, the neighbors were disturbed. Seeking for alternative accommodation, he put down a deposit of £600 on Howletts, a neo-Palladian house with 38 acres. A successful bet on the Cesarewitch enabled him to pay off the remaining £5,400.
At the end of 1957 the police raided a gambling party he had organized. The subsequent dismissal of the charges was a virtual admission that private gambling would be sanctioned, and indeed the Gaming Act of 1960 opened the door to casinos. In 1962, Aspinall opened the Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square. Though he was in a parlous financial state at the time - and thus allowed Mark Birley to establish the nightclub Annabel's in the basement - he raised £200,000 in loan stock. Membership, limited to 600, included five dukes, five marquesses and 20 earls.
The success of the Clermont Club, and investment advice from Jimmy Goldsmith, enabled him to finance Howletts, and to see off the complaints of angry neighbors. 'You are slipshod and impatient,' Lord Zuckerman, the doyen of zoologists, told him. But Aspinall was also irrepressible.
In 1972 he sold the Clermont Club to Victor Lownes for £500,000 in order to devote himself to Howletts. By now he was employing six gardeners and 12 keepers; the weekly bill for food amounted to £3,000. The stock market crash of 1973 left Aspinall more or less bust, forced to sell pictures and jewellery so that his animals could eat. Yet he still managed to pay out £360,000 for Port Lympne and its 275 acres, neglected since the death of Sir Philip Sassoon in 1939.
These were turbulent times for Aspinall. On November 8 1974, the day after Lord Lucan's disappearance, Aspinall's friends - but not, to Private Eye's cost, Jimmy Goldsmith - gathered for lunch at his house in Lyall Street to discuss what should be done. The tabloids suggested, without a shred of evidence, that they were all privy to dark secrets, and that Lucan might have turned up at Howletts and implored Aspinall to feed him to his tigers.
Aspinall declared on television that if Lucan showed up he would embrace him, but this was no more than the tribal loyalty which he demanded from his friends. Those, like Dominic Elwes, who were thought to have broken the code, were ostracised. Elwes made the mistake of selling a sketch of the interior of the Clermont to the Sunday Times, and when he found himself cut off from the company that he adored, committed suicide. At his funeral Aspinall, while praising Elwes's gifts, referred to 'a genetic flaw' - and found himself punched on the jaw after the service.
In 1978 the need for cash forced Aspinall to return to gambling. Within four years the casino he set up in Hans Place was making £8 million a year. He decided to move to larger premises in Curzon Street, and to offer 20 per cent of the shares on the stock market. In 1983, he netted £20 million from their sale.
Aspinall and Goldsmith still owned the remaining 76 per cent of the company, though Aspinall's share was made over for the upkeep of his zoos. When the company was sold in 1987, he realised £23 million. But by 1992 he was in financial difficulties again, having lost large sums in Goldsmith's failed attempt to take over Rank Hovis McDougall. In consequence he opened another new casino in Curzon Street in 1992. Within a year it was flourishing.
In recent years he was dogged by cancer. His courage, doubted by none, was exemplified last year by the manner in which he shrugged off a vicious mugging near his home in Belgravia. John Aspinall married first, in 1956 (dissolved 1966), Jane Hastings, a Scottish model; they had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1966 (dissolved 1972), Belinda 'Min' Musker, a grand-daughter of the 2nd Viscount Daventry; they had a daughter who died in infancy. He married thirdly, in 1972, Lady Sarah ('Sally') Courage, widow of the racing driver Piers Courage and daughter of the 5th Earl Howe; they had a son. Source: telegraph.co.uk