London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good evening to you, one and all. It’s Friday, November 29th, 2024.
It’s London, so the hand I’m holding, as always, is loaded.
It’s a seven no trumps hand. And the first card I’m going to play carries all before it. It’s the immortality card. Let me explain.
If you’ve got a name that’s become a common noun that’s a form of immortality. Some examples: Wellington boots, after the Iron Duke, the Duke of Wellington. Or the American Civil War General Joseph Hooker. No prizes for guessing this one, General Hooker was very partial to ladies of easy virtue, they flocked to him, and in no time at all our rich language had yet another word for prostitute. A pungent London one is crapper. After the English plumber Thomas Crapper, who made any number of water closet improvements. The floating ballcock, for example. And the U bend plumbing trap in those all-important pipes. Thomas Crapper has a great cameo role on Stephanie’s Classic London Mews walk, which is running this weekend. Suddenly there it is, underfoot, his name. It’s a delightful moment because you’d never spot it without Stephanie there to point it out. The whole subject of names that become common nouns, it’s like an artillery shell that explodes and sends countless bits of shrapnel streaking across our verbal landscape. Including the word, shrapnel – it comes from the 19th-century British army officer Henry Shrapnel. And we have the 4th Earl of Sandwich to thank for, you guessed it, the sandwich. The 4th Earl famously couldn’t tear himself away from the gaming table. The baptismal moment for the humble sandwich was the time our gambling Earl spent twenty-four hours at the gaming-table without other refreshment than some slices of cold beef placed between slices of toast.
Or spare a thought for those Yale students tossing that pie tin around back in the 1870s. The pie tin was from William Frisbie’s Frisbie Pie Co. and it was almost like that touching of fingertips moment in Michaelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam. Yes, it was the conception moment for the frisbie.
Well, there are any number of them. Dunce, boycott, Macintosh, Zeppelin, Bunkum. I’m partial to Algorithm – Google and other algorithms. The word stems from the name of a ninth-century Persian mathematician.
But the name we’re going to focus on today, is Rachman. Or Rachmanism. Which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the extortion or exploitation by a landlord of tenants of dilapidated or slum property.”
And we’re stopping there today because the owner of that name, the slum landlord Peter Rachman – that great hate figure of the early 1960s – breathed his last on this day, in 1962.
He wasn’t old. 42. But he’d lived hard and fast. He’d been gambling at the 150 Club in Earl’s Court. He was driving home. He lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He got to St John’s Wood and was suddenly taken so ill he had to stop the car. There he was, hunched over the steering wheel. He eventually made it home. A couple of days later he suffered a heart attack. An ambulance took him to Edgware Hospital. Where the killer stroke came – a second massive coronary thrombosis, which killed him.
And so his physical life ended. His name of course lives on.
But what an extraordinary life. That life is the tale that’s worth recounting. And no question about it, he was a scoundrel. But maybe given the hand he was dealt we can understand, perhaps even forgive. In the words of the great Richard Davenport Hinds, Peter Rachman was both a brute and a victimised refugee. And his villainy came with redeeming traits and extenuating experiences. He was a Polish Jew. His father was a dentist. So he had a middle-class upbringing. But it was a middle-class upbringing that was shot through with deep, profound anxieties and fears. In the words of a contemporary who fled to Palestine, “The Polish attitude to Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish, and can neither swallow nor spit it out. The fear in every Jewish home, the fear we never talked about, but which we were unintentionally injected with, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enough, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing. In the words of Richard Davenport Hines, “it was instilled in these children that they must remain polite when insulted by drunkards, that they must never haggle, that their manners should be submissive and smiling. ‘We must always speak to them in good correct Polish, so they couldn’t say that we were defiling their language, but that we mustn’t speak in Polish that that was too high, so they couldn’t say we had ambitions over our station.” The poor kid. And his people. Your heart goes out to them.
Anyway, come the war and the German invasion of Poland Peter Rachman is forced into a chain gang building an autobahn towards Russia. His parents disappear into the concentration camps. He escapes. Heads toward the Soviet Union. Nearly starves to death. He would later say he survived by stealing a barrel of caviar. He survived on it but it made him retch. There was also a story that hunger drove him to eat human turds.
Years later Peter Rachman would say ‘I never ate German shit. At least no one can say I ever ate that.’
Again, Davenport Hines is incisive here. He says, ‘the caviar and the shit showed what life felt like for Peter Rachman.’
Soviet forces captured him. He was sent to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle. He was drafted into a Polish army corps organised by the Russians. Took part in the 1943 invasion of Italy. And then came to Britain. Rented a squalid room in Stepney. Worked as a washer-up at Blooms, the famous Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. From there it’s a tailor’s workshop in Soho. And eventually he gets into property. And he’s away. There was rent control. Rents were frozen at 1939 levels. The way to make money was to get those tenants out. And Rachman was ruthless about same. He called it “putting in the schwartzers” – black thugs to put the frighteners on the white tenants. Scare them out. And white hooligans against black tenants. He had his hard men sever gas, water, and electricity supplies. Break into flats and smash the furniture. Play deafening music so the tenants couldn’t sleep.
If he could get the rent control tenants out – and he did – he could overcrowd the properties and charge much higher rates.
Basically, Peter Rachman profiteered from racial tensions. He and other unscrupulous landlords contributed to the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.
And he was as flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Wasn’t any Apollo He was short, chubby-faced, plump and balding. Wore tinted spectacles. And it almost goes without saying, silk shirts, cashmere suits and crocodile shoes. The gold bracelet on his wrist was inscribed with the serial numbers of his Swiss bank accounts.
Drove a red Rolls-Royce saloon and blue Rolls-Royce convertible.
As for his sex life, well, does it come as any surprise that he was a player in the Profumo affair. He bedded the two girls who had starring roles in that tawdry affair: Mandy Rice Davis and Christine Keeler. Christine Keeler was 17. He kept her in his Bryanston Mews hideaway. He treated her like a female sex doll. No wooing. No foreplay. He simply tugged her into the bedroom and made her sit astride him with her back toward him so that she never saw his face. Christine Keeler said, “Sex to Peter Rachman was like cleaning his teeth, and I was the toothpaste.”
No surprise then that he became a national hate figure. In the words of an outspoken trade unionist, Rachman and his ilk were super spiv tycoons.
He crossed over on this day in 1962. And on balance I’d say we’re probably better off without him. But knowing his background, knowing what he went through as a child and a young man, well, that has to bring to mind that wise old Chinese saying, “to understand all is to forgive all.”
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature
walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size
walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it,
London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science:
you get what you pay for.
And just as surely,
you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started
we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question:
Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world
you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep
the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you,
not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured –
a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following,
a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases
distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated –
Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa –
both of them CBEs –
are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z,“internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star team of guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former Museum of London archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes
criminal defence lawyers,
Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors,
a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament,
every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning
one and all. See ya next time.