Part One: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London

favorite people to read on the internet. Ed, welcome to the show for the first time.

his close friend, the lucky Lord Luken I have? Yeah, this was a big story, right and like.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

its purview. But there's a lot of these because these the guys who are like John Aspinall's friends who will 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 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 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

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 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.

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

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, 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 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, Like that's a dope childhood experiences to have.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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.

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.

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?

an insane system. And thank god we actually have gun 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.

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?

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

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, 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 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. 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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 set up in the exact way that it used to be.

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 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 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.

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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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 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. 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 invented that.

applies to Jesus College, Oxford and was accepted. And again for Americans, Oxford I think is like actually five universities 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.

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.

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, 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 thing in their life that lends them excitement is gambling. That is the joy that these kids have is to gamble.

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.

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 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.

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.

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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 to be honest, like that Bridge British man.

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 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 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 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 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.

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,

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.

money because it's so addictive. So aspinall. The best thing 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 five grand and you make a fucking fortune running chimney game.

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 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.

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 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.

insane hobbies that poor people cannot afford. In John's case 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 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, 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 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 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.

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, 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.

see seven evidence of another seven. One is pregnant. I don't know how they're all male.

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, 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.

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

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 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 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. 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.

Like John Crockford discovers as a teenager he can calculate 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 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, 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 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

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.

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 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, 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.