John Aspinall The Gambling Showman Who Built Zoos for Tigers and Dukes
- Sep 16, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 2
Picture a man who could ruin a duke at the card table on a Tuesday, praise Adolf Hitler at dinner on a Wednesday, then spend Thursday morning in his garden with his arm around a gorilla like it was the family dog. That was John Victor Aspinall, known to friends as Aspers, and he spent seventy four years making it almost impossible to tell where his charm ended and his menace began.
Supporters remember him as a swashbuckling conservationist who poured a card sharp's fortune into saving endangered species. Critics remember a man who fleeced Britain's wealthiest families out of their inheritances, ran a casino built on a rigged deck, said appalling things about Jewish people for sport, and got three of his own zookeepers killed by animals he insisted on treating like pets.
A secret hiding in plain sight
Aspinall was born in Delhi in 1926, during the last stretch of the British Raj. His mother, Mary Grace Horn, was married to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Aspinall, an army surgeon of Maltese descent, and for decades that was the official story of his parentage.
It wasn't true. Years later, when Aspinall went to his supposed father for help covering a gambling debt, he learned that his real father was Captain George Bruce, a soldier of Nordic descent his mother had been with after a regimental ball, reportedly under a tamarind tree beside a lake in Uttar Pradesh. Once he found out, Aspinall tracked Bruce down living out his final years in an old people's home and quietly paid to support him for the rest of his life, a small act of loyalty from a man not otherwise known for them.
His mother divorced Robert Aspinall and remarried Sir George Osborne in 1938, becoming Lady Osborne, a title she'd later put to unusual use bribing London police on her son's behalf.
Aspinall was expelled from Rugby School for what his masters called simple inattention, and at Jesus College, Oxford, he skipped his own final exams to go watch the Gold Cup at Ascot instead. He left without a degree and without, it seems, much regret.
Fleecing dukes in rented flats
By the 1950s, Aspinall had found the thing he was actually good at. British law defined an illegal gambling house as any address where play happened more than three times, so he and his accountant John Burke simply rotated through rented London flats, staying one step ahead of the statute. When police did take an interest, Lady Osborne herself allegedly handed out the cash to make them lose interest again.
The games drew in the wealthiest men in Britain, and the losses were staggering. Edward Stanley, the 18th Earl of Derby, dropped £20,000 one night, came back for more, and lost £300,000 in a single sitting on his return. William Stirling, older brother of SAS founder David Stirling, wrote out an IOU for £173,500 rather than walk away. These weren't men blowing off steam. Some of them were signing away family estates.
Aspinall wasn't the only Briton to build an empire this way. New York had its own version a generation earlier in Arnold Rothstein, the gambler credited with helping build the city's organised underworld around the same instinct: find rich men who can't stop playing, and let the table do the rest.
The Clermont Club and the rigged deck
The 1960 Betting and Gaming Act legalised casinos in Britain, so in 1962 Aspinall went legitimate, at least on paper, and opened the Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square in Mayfair. Its members list read like a page out of Debrett's: dukes, marquesses, cabinet ministers, and a young aristocrat named Lord Lucan, who'd go on to vanish in 1974 after murdering his children's nanny.
Beneath the chandeliers, the Clermont was reportedly running one of the most patient cons in British gambling history. According to Aspinall's own former financial director John Burke and journalist Douglas Thompson's book The Hustlers, Aspinall partnered with career criminal Billy Hill on a scheme known as the Big Edge once the legal casino's modest table charge stopped covering his zoo expenses.
Low cards were bent slightly across their width in a small mangle before being repackaged, high cards were bent lengthwise, and Hill's card readers, planted at the tables by Aspinall himself, could tell a high card from a low one well enough to run a 60-40 edge over the house's own members.
The scam reportedly ran undetected for more than two years and only stopped when Burke decided to retire and Aspinall judged it too risky to keep going without him. Burke later summed up the whole operation bluntly: "Rotten from top to bottom." Aristocrats who thought they'd found a glamorous private club had, by some accounts, been playing a game they could never have won.
A tiger cub in his bed
The animal obsession started before he owned a single acre of Kent countryside. In 1956, living in a flat on Eaton Place with his first wife, Aspinall converted the back garden shed into a menagerie: a capuchin monkey, two Himalayan brown bears, and a nine-week-old tiger cub. A second cub, a tigress he named Tara, slept in his own bed for eighteen months. Once his gambling money started rolling in properly, he needed somewhere with more room than a Belgravia garden shed.
A country house full of tigers
That somewhere was Howletts, a country estate near Canterbury he bought in 1956 and started filling with big cats and primates. In 1973 he added Port Lympne too, a mansion built between 1911 and 1913 for Sir Philip Sassoon that had sat abandoned since the Second World War after passing to Sassoon's cousin Hannah Gubbay on his death in 1939. Aspinall spent a decade restoring it, opening Howletts to the public in 1975 and Port Lympne the year after.
His method was to let keepers build real physical closeness with dangerous animals rather than keep them at arm's length behind bars, and on the conservation side, it worked. Howletts ran one of Europe's most successful captive gorilla breeding programmes of its era. On the safety side, it worked a lot less well.
On August 21, 1980, a Siberian tigress named Zeya attacked 29-year-old head keeper Brian Stocks as he entered her enclosure, apparently reading his presence as a threat to her cub. Fellow keeper Bob Wilson ran in and beat the tiger back with a broom long enough to drag Stocks's body out, saving no one, since Stocks had already been fatally mauled. A month later, on September 22, the same tigress killed Wilson too, instantly. Aspinall shot Zeya after the second death, calling her simply "a man-killer." In February 1995, a young tiger named Balkash fatally mauled a third keeper, 32-year-old Trevor Smith, severing an artery in his neck while he cleaned the animal's enclosure. Aspinall's broader philosophy never wavered: "If you can't trust an animal, you don't deserve to keep it," a line that by then had cost at least five people their lives across his two parks.
Provocation as a hobby
Aspinall didn't limit his appetite for risk to cards and cats. He was open about admiring Adolf Hitler and made antisemitic remarks in private company on more than one occasion, and people who knew him disagreed on whether he meant it or just enjoyed the reaction. Journalist Lynn Barber, who interviewed him in 1990, put it simply: "He enjoyed being outrageous. He thrived on people's horror."
Loyalty, or something like it
No scandal stuck to Aspinall longer than his friendship with Lord Lucan. Lucan was a Clermont regular and part of Aspinall's inner circle right up until the night he beat his children's nanny to death in the belief she was his wife, then disappeared. Aspinall's public line was that Lucan had drowned himself off a boat. Privately, rumours never stopped that he and fellow financier Sir James Goldsmith had quietly helped Lucan get out of the country, and Aspinall's own former secretary later claimed she'd arranged trips abroad so Lucan could watch his children from a distance without being seen. Whether that loyalty crossed into helping a killer escape justice has never been settled.
The last act
The zoos were a money pit, and Aspinall was perpetually broke despite the fortunes that had passed through his hands. He sold off his casino interests for a reported $30 million in the 1980s, then found himself in financial trouble again within the decade.
In 1997 he tried politics, standing in Folkestone and Hythe for Sir James Goldsmith's single-issue Referendum Party, campaigning against Britain's membership of the European Union. He lost to the sitting Conservative Michael Howard, but took 8 percent of the vote, one of the party's better results nationally for a single election that mostly ended its brief existence.
He died of cancer on 29 June 2000, aged 74.
What's left
Aspinall's son Damian now chairs the Aspinall Foundation, which still runs Howletts and Port Lympne and has spent decades turning his father's captive breeding programmes into an actual rewilding operation. The foundation says it has released more than 300 animals back into the wild, including over 70 gorillas, 26 of them born at Howletts or Port Lympne, as part of a partnership with the governments of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville running since 1987. In 2013 that work produced a genuine world first: the first baby born in the wild to a gorilla that had itself been born in captivity and released. Supporters point to that as the one unambiguous good to come out of his life.
Critics see something else: parks built on money taken from ruined gamblers, a philosophy that got keepers killed, and a man who reportedly told biographer Douglas Thompson's source exactly what he was. "He was a manipulator, a showman. He ruined more lives than he saved." Both things can be true of the same man, which is more or less the point.
