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You May Never See Us Again

The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession

Jane Martinson

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To Mum and Richard always

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

—The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

No Man Is an Island 1

1. Early Years 7

2. A King’s Ransom 26

3. Hitting the Big Time 53

4. How to Buy an Island 80

5. Ritz and Glamour 98

6. Bing-Bang-Bong 112

7. ‘Why then do you want to own newspapers?’ 135

8. The Neighbours from Hell 160

9. Power to the People 181

10. The Midas Touch 190

11. Bugged 213

12. There’s No Money, Your Honour 240 Epilogue: The Crash 265

Author Note and Acknowledgements 299

Notes 303

No Man Is an Island

The island of Brecqhou is isolated and often dark, an unlikely Eden jutting out of waves sometimes so stormy they can bend steel, with winds that can make squalls out of dust. Around its coastline are the remains of old shipwrecks left to the will of the elements, and the sea creatures that occasionally rest on its craggy edges.

All other guests are invitation-only.

It was on this secluded isle, safe inside his vast neo-Gothic castle, that Sir David Barclay withdrew from the world and its prying eyes. When COVID-19 came to Europe, the secretive billionaire hunkered down in the fortress he had built on the rocky outcrop in the middle of the English Channel. It was on Brecqhou that he and his wife found shelter from the pandemic.

David had built Fort Brecqhou with his twin brother, Sir Frederick, almost thirty years before, ordering 90,000 tons of concrete and steel, Spanish granite and Italian marble to be shipped across a choppy sea to their barren rock of an island. A Chinook helicopter airlifted cranes and diggers while thousands of men worked day and night – under oodlights stronger than any lighthouse – to build the 100-foot-high walls, gilded turrets, battlements and crenulated ramparts of the castle. At the time, it was the largest private house built in Britain for at least two centuries.1

Trespassers were not welcome.

The walls and towers stood as monuments to the success of the brothers, a paean to a career in which they had built one of Britain’s most successful business empires from scratch. Inside the castle, no expense had been spared. Frescoed ceilings, marble columns – a grand rococo style with a personal touch. David liked

to say that the island showed what could be done with ‘barren rock, devoid of roads or any kind of infrastructure and little water supply’.2 The brothers would spend many happy days with their families there.

Admission to Fort Brecqhou was through great oak doors as thick as ships’ hulls, etched with the clan motto – Aut agere aut mori, ‘Either do or die’ – though the brothers’ connection to their Scottish ancestry was slight. Inside their fortress, David and Frederick had branded everything – from the glistening tableware to the wrought-iron balustrade – with their specially designed coat of arms or their entwined initials, D&F. Yet by the time David sought refuge in this island hideaway, these engravings, once so symbolic of their symbiotic relationship, would only serve as a visual reminder of the fact that Frederick had not set foot on the island for more than ve years. The twin he had shared his life with for eight decades haunted the fortress as a calligraphic ghost.

The great Gothic arches of the Royal Courts of Justice are older than those of Fort Brecqhou, and grander. Each day, the public go through security machines and sip liquids to prove they are safe, as they le in to watch justice be done at the biggest law courts in the land.

On an unusually hot Monday in the heatwave of July 2022, Sir Frederick Barclay, rarely seen in public and hardly ever alone, joined them.

Dressed in a well-tailored jacket with a polka-dot pocket square, a matching silk tie and sharply creased trousers, this octogenarian knight of the realm cut an unusual and solitary gure. After nearly fty years together, thirty-four of them married, his wife had left him. A few years after he was banished from Brecqhou, she had waited for him to leave for a dance class and simply walked out of their £30 million mansion a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. One half of Britain’s most successful self-made business double act was standing trial for failing to pay a penny of a £100 million divorce order.

Seated alone on the bench – apart from those he had paid to be there – Frederick told the judge that it wasn’t that he wouldn’t pay, but that he couldn’t. Once one half of a partnership said to be worth £6 billion, he now had no money.

His wife could not have left him at a more di cult time. Frederick had already split from his brother by March 2019, but it was not until later that year that he discovered a far bigger betrayal: his nephews, his twin’s sons, had been spying on him and his only child, a daughter, planting listening devices in a private room they used to talk in at the Ritz Hotel. And then they cut o his funds, he said.

At the start of 2020, after a career in which he and his brother had often turned to the law to protect their privacy, Frederick’s response was to direct his legal repower at his own blood. This would turn out to be a pivotal moment, and the ensuing courtroom drama would eventually rip down the curtain on this most private of families. Indeed, within a few short years, the curtain had begun to look like a fabric of lies.

It wasn’t meant to end like this.

Born just ten minutes apart in October 1934, identical twins David and Frederick had been inseparable as they went about building a multibillion-pound empire from nothing. They lived, worked and laughed together; their habit of dressing identically meant outsiders had to rely on the fact that they parted their hair on di erent sides to tell them apart. They were mirror twins, one left-handed and one right.

They had worked side by side, beginning as painters and decorators before going on to buy property, ships, shops and casinos, as well as some of the world’s best-known luxury hotels and biggest-selling newspapers. The nancial fortress they built around their complex array of businesses was almost as impregnable as the physical monument of Fort Brecqhou, and a complex administrative spider’s web spun across several o shore islands meant that nobody could see inside anyway.

The brothers enjoyed decades of great success, building an empire which would make them billions of pounds. Yet, as 2020 came around and the world entered a pandemic, that empire looked to be under attack from within, as a row over money and succession became public.

Family feuds, especially over inheritance, are as old as Cain and Abel, but the shock over this very public argument was intensied by the fact the two men and their families had once been so close, and entirely reclusive, employing phalanxes of lawyers to guard their privacy as ercely as barons once guarded their efdoms. ‘We are private about everything we do,’ David once said. ‘It stems from our philosophy of not talking about ourselves, or claiming how clever we are, or boasting about how successful we have been.’3

Success was not the whole secret, however. In the wake of the family fallout, stories of nancial mismanagement and subterfuge lled the pages of the newspapers – all except their own Daily Telegraph. More and more money lined the co ers of yet more lawyers, as the brothers refused to speak to one another.

Frederick’s decision to sue his nephews marked not just the start of an annus horribilis for the Barclay family but the beginning of the end of their empire. As 2020 drew to a close, David accepted an invitation to a Christmas party at his son Howard’s grand terraced house in Belgravia, ying to London from Brecqhou in his private helicopter in order to attend. Long fearful of his health, there were unlikely to have been any strangers there. It is not known how many of his four sons or nine grandchildren attended the gathering, but it would be one of the last times that he would see many members of his family.

David’s death was sudden and shocking, coming a few weeks later, on 10 January 2021. Despite the increasing isolation of his nal months, the primary cause was pneumonia brought on by COVID-19.

In keeping with so much of his life, the details of David’s passing were kept a secret. His rst name was listed as ‘Sir’ on the death certi cate and his sons even sought to keep the location of his burial out of the public domain. Having died at his home in Belgravia, David’s body was own back to Guernsey, and from there to a blustery Brecqhou, where he had long before overseen the creation of a beautiful chapel and lled it with the icons of his latterly acquired Catholic faith. The small funeral service was said to have been presided over by a leading cardinal. Frederick did not attend. He took the unusual step of making a public statement instead: ‘It was a great journey in everything that we did, the good, the bad, the ugly . . . We were twins from the beginning until the end. He was the right hand to my left and I was the left hand to his right. We’ll meet again.’

1. Early Years

It all began in a small two-bedroom top- oor at in Shepherd’s Bush on 27 October 1934. It was the coldest October recorded in the twentieth century, a time when snow fell in the South of England and freezing fog turned London day to night.

By the time the twins were born, their parents, Beatrice and Frederick, already had three young children: Pauline, Lillian and Andrew. The family of seven squeezed into a home which today would be advertised as a small one-bedroom at, just 700 square feet – a quarter of a tennis court – and so close to the railway line that the windows rattled every time a train passed by. Their parents went on to have three more boys, Douglas, Graham and Lawrence, with Beatrice caring for six boys under the age of fourteen by the end of the Second World War.

Beatrice Cecilia Barclay (née Taylor) loomed large in the life of her sons – they named their beloved yacht Lady Beatrice after her, and some of her grandchildren have her name – but she left very little by way of a public record. She was eighteen and pregnant when she married a thirty-three-year-old travelling salesman called Frederick Hugh Barclay in 1925. They both lied about their ages on the marriage certi cate – she added a few years, he took some away. The bride’s father, a solicitor’s clerk called Henry Joseph Taylor, had died a few years before, and her only witness was a Louisa Jane Harris. The groom’s younger brother, an earlier David Rowat Barclay, was the other witness.

Beatrice’s new husband, the rst Frederick Hugh Barclay, had been born in Glasgow in about 1891 and at some stage moved south with his family to Birmingham. According to the 1911 census, the then nineteen-year-old was living in a large house in

Moseley with his parents, older siblings, and two lodgers, including a journalist from London. But it was their father’s earliest years, spent in Scotland, that would form part of the treasured Barclay family history.

These Scottish Barclays worked in ‘markets’, selling everything from the relatively new product called margarine to confectionery. The twins’ grandfather had previously been a master baker, and their father would work selling cakes or sweets in one form or another for most of his career.

A small man, even for the times, Frederick Sr was just ve foot three and weighed 114 pounds (just over eight stone) when he enlisted in the British Army in 1916. A hernia and a speech impediment are mentioned on his sign-up papers, but neither were enough to stop him being sent to France in August of that year, where he survived the trenches for sixteen months. He was sent home in December 1917, after which he spent a month in Glasgow general hospital being treated for gas poisoning. His request for a pension on the grounds of ill health was rejected in March 1919, as many were in a post-war society without enough money to pay for all its injured former servicemen. By the time his rst child, Pauline Frederica, was born in 1925, Frederick Sr had moved the family south to London, where they would all more or less remain.

Two more children – Lillian Rosetta and Andrew, known as Roy – arrived before Beatrice found herself pregnant with the twins in 1934, while the family were living in a at on Sinclair Road. Although this part of west London had been a uent before the First World War, with residents able to a ord live-in servants for their four-storey white stucco houses, by the 1930s many of those families had moved out of the city, avoiding the smog and ‘pea-soupers’ caused by coal- red furnaces and the railways. As the wealthier families left, most of the houses in the neighbourhood were divided up into ats or cheap lodging houses for a more transient population. During the Great Depression in the

1930s, the area became home to many migrant workers – mostly Irish labourers – who needed cheap lodging.

Unemployment and hardship caused by the slump meant that a quarter of the British population were existing on a poor subsistence diet. Although London escaped the worst ravages of the Depression, life for the fast-growing Barclay family – supported by a man whose work was largely dependent on consumer spending – cannot have been easy.

At some point in 1939, an again-pregnant Beatrice took the children to Dorchester in Dorset, presumably for safety.1 She gave birth to another son, Vivian, in September, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. Frederick Sr, who possessed an ability to turn his hand to many things, remained working in Hammersmith, this time as a pastry cook.

It wasn’t long before the family returned to Shepherd’s Bush, to a at on the other side of the railway line, just as fears started to escalate that both the railway and the local Osram light bulb factory made the area a target for the German Luftwa e. As such, the sound of bombs falling in London were among the twins’ earliest memories – along with the time they saw a woman suspected of being a German spy being apprehended outside.

At some point, the twins – not yet ve when the war started – joined the almost 1.5 million children evacuated from their city-centre homes to rural areas believed to be safer, in their case Coventry. Beatrice stayed in London, giving birth to two more sons and also su ering the loss of two-year-old Vivian in 1942. Though Beatrice is sometimes reported to have had ten children, only eight survived.

The twins were often unhappy as evacuees. Although they were unlikely to have been staying close to Coventry’s city centre, Frederick recalled being ‘bombed out of our beds’, while David’s obituary mentioned ‘unpleasant experiences and the loneliness of being separated from his family’.2 Being sent far away does not seem to have made them feel any safer. While Shepherd’s Bush

was hit when the Blitz began in earnest in 1940, its local pavilion destroyed by deadly doodlebug raids, Coventry was hit even harder. In October, the Luftwa e launched forty-one raids on Coventry, mainly targeting the bicycle factories that had turned to manufacturing light aircraft and munitions.

The worst of it came on 14–15 November, with a ten-hour raid considered to be the most concentrated bombardment of an English city during the war. In one night, two-thirds of the city’s buildings were destroyed or damaged – factories, o ces, churches, and thousands of homes. Some 600 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. All utilities were destroyed, including the water mains in the city centre, meaning that water had to be boiled for a long time after. The devastation was so bad that Hitler’s sidekick Joseph Goebbels used the term coventriert to describe later vicious attacks on enemy cities. King George VI visited the city the day after this raid. He later wrote that the town which had once been one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe looked ‘just like Ypres after the last war’.

There is much that is lost of the Barclays’ early years, but what is certain is that the experience never left them. Eighty years later, Frederick still used the stress he had felt as a yardstick for measuring his su ering during his divorce; he would say he could survive anything because he had lived through the war.

There were, however, a few positive memories from life as evacuees. At one point they lived with an elderly Christian schoolteacher whom David, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist, subsequently credited for introducing him ‘to a life of faith’.3 Among the few stories to have survived their wartime experience was one in which the impoverished boys far from home discovered their entrepreneurial drive. The Telegraph obituary of David Barclay talks of the brothers ‘earning a few pennies in a scheme looking after the bicycles of farmers going to market’ in 1944, when they were nine. They could also be boisterous; a childhood neighbour called Shirley Hedges accused the twins of stealing

her tortoise at some point. ‘When the tortoise vanished someone said it was the Barclay twins so I went up there shouting. Their mum came out. There was talk about the tortoise having been sold for half a crown, but I got it back.’4

The Second World War ended on 2 September 1945, when the twins were almost eleven. The following year their uncle David Rowat died, aged just fty-three; and then, a year later, their father died in traumatic circumstances. Still working as a commercial traveller, Frederick Sr was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital on 4 December 1947 for an appendectomy. According to the death certi cate, signed just ve days later after an inquest which would be considered unacceptably speedy today, the ftysix-year-old died of respiratory failure following pentothal anaesthesia. He died while on the operating table waiting for routine surgery after being given too big a dose of a drug similar to one subsequently used for euthanasia in the Netherlands. The word ‘misadventure’ was added to the cause of death.

The shock must have been awful for the thirteen-year-old twins and their siblings. Beatrice, having just turned forty, found herself in the ruins of post-war London, a single mother of eight children. Even though the boys helped out, their older sisters fell under the greatest pressure to support her – by 1950, Lillian had married Louis Barnham and had a son of her own, Gerald, who lived with the extended family until he was ten.

Like many large working-class families living in London at the time, the Barclays were incredibly close. Tracked down by The Times in 2004, Gerald described it as ‘a loving family’, before refusing to say more as he was ‘worried about the consequences’.5 The twins were particularly close to their brothers on either side, Roy and Douglas, but their early years were a time when identical twins – even rarer than they are today – were treated almost as a single entity, like a two-headed hydra. It was common for twins to dress in the same clothes and they were most often considered somewhat strange and interdependent.

It was also a time when music, dancing and movies meant that being a teenager, even a relatively poor one, had its bene ts. According to Shirley Hedges, the Barclay twins acquired a reputation for snazzy dressing with matching jackets and Brylcreemed hair, and they shared a love of ballroom dancing. David later said that he had learned to dance in a school hall after work; in 1948 a future dance champion named Bob Burgess opened the Olympia Ballroom near Shepherd’s Bush, where he gave lessons three times a week and demonstrations on Sundays. The twins were fourteen and had just started work, and Burgess later told the Mail on Sunday that they were among his rst members: ‘Their brothers and sisters came too, but the twins stuck at it.’

Although few people would be able to tell them apart, there were already di erences between the brothers. ‘Fred loved dancing. He still does,’ said Burgess in 1992. ‘David came for the social life.’ While Frederick went on to win awards for ballroom dancing and danced regularly into his eighties (according to Burgess, who became a family friend, David met his rst wife, a trained dancer and model, at a dance).6

The story of how the Barclay brothers made a fortune is not just a rags-to-riches success story, but the story of modern Britain.

A few years after their father died, when they were still teenagers, the twins left school and started work. One of their rst jobs was at the General Electric Company (GEC), then still operating a lamp-making factory in Hammersmith; they also worked at Schweppes, the drinks company. The twins had always helped their mother with painting and decorating as they moved between ats in Shepherd’s Bush – rst on Sinclair Road and later Addison Gardens – and they used this experience as a springboard to work in property.

Born in time to take advantage of post-war reconstruction e orts meant to solve the desperate shortage of homes and o ces, the Barclays were not alone in seeing property as the best

and quickest way to make money. Like nancial markets in the 1980s and technology at the turn of the twenty- rst century, property was the get-rich-quick scheme of the age. It would de ne much of British society for generations to come.

The lives of the Barclays can often seem shrouded in mystery, as though covered with the pea-soup smog of their London childhood, but their start in business – never spoken about, and with the actors and accounts lost or unclear – is possibly the murkiest period of them all. It was once said that their complex nancial arrangements were ‘like knitting fog’, but stitching together their earliest forays into business is harder still.

They were more likely to mention their lack of much formal education rather than their start in business. In the 1980s, when an unsuccessful takeover bid for an establishment rm saw them take the unusual step of agreeing to publicity, David told the Guardian’s Geo Gibbs that they had been educated ‘in the school of adversity’. Frederick joked that they’d had to set up their own business because ‘we are probably unemployable – we are the only people on the top oor not academically quali ed’.7

John Peyton, the Old Etonian member of the Hussars who became a Conservative peer and chair of the Barclay brothers’ charitable foundation in the 1980s, traced their attitude to money back to their hard-scrabble start in life. ‘They were once very poor themselves,’ he told Bloomberg in 2004. ‘They don’t waste money; they spend it with care.’8

Their beginnings also made them hard-nosed, according to Frank Kane, a business journalist who got to know them well after they supported his seriously ill child for several years. In a positive pro le, he wrote: ‘It has to be understood at the outset that they are asset-traders, cost-cutters, tough negotiators and opportunity takers. In the hard-nosed business world the Barclays inhabit, these are compliments, and it is doubtful they would be where they are today – from humble origins in workingclass west London – without these attributes.’9 Yet the twins

never talked much about how they went on to make so much money, a code of omertà combined with sparse public records helping to spark rumours and conspiracies as they became very successful men.

Peter Rivett, writing in a David Barclay-commissioned book about Brecqhou – a hagiography of the Barclay stewardship which at times reads as though Mr Collins is describing Lady Catherine de Bourgh – rebukes those who describe them as ‘reclusive’, an adjective which he says carries a ‘slightly sinister air’. In a chapter titled ‘But Who Are They?’ he writes: ‘The fact is that David and Frederick Barclay are private people who see neither need nor duty to parade themselves in public. As a result, little is known about them. This book cannot add much to that which is already in the public domain and this is how they wish it.’10

This desire for privacy, sinister or not, started early. Their Who’s Who entry only o ers ‘former estate agent’ for Frederick before starting with ‘joint proprietors’ of the Cadogan Hotel in 1968–78 for both men. Yet the twins had worked throughout the 1950s, running an array of businesses, nearly all in property, most with di erent names and addresses, which they never subsequently talked about.

After nding work at GEC and Schweppes ‘rather tame’, the twins ‘went to work in the construction industry and learned a basic knowledge of all building trade experience which allowed them to build, restore and repair numerous properties over the following 40 years’. Then, just like that, they became estate agents and ‘opened their own o ce in 1961’ – even though, by then, Frederick and their younger brother Douglas had already been declared bankrupt.11

Frederick and Douglas had followed their father into the confectionery business at some point, by renting a shop called Candy Corner at 64 Richmond Way. By 1960, the two brothers found themselves unable to pay their landlord, a man named William

Davies, the several hundred pounds they owed him, breaching the terms of their lease. He seized the shop and issued bankruptcy proceedings on 10 October.12 The reasons are unclear; the ‘failure of a sub-lessor’ has been mooted, as has other members of the family using the till like a source of ready cash. The only o cial notice found Frederick ‘guilty of misconduct in relation to his property and a airs’ but added no further details.13

At the time, there was no automatic discharge, and bankrupts could be saddled with the burden of insolvency for years – even for life. The o cial London Gazette notice which announced the bankruptcy lists several other ventures for the brothers, then still in their mid-twenties.14 There was an eponymous building and decorating business called Barclay Brothers, as well as the Peter Howard Agency, a furnished accommodation bureau. Among their various ventures, Frederick is also understood to have worked for an alcoholic Polish estate agent and to have made him so much money that the man o ered him a stake in his rm, though there is no record of either the man or the business.

David is not named in the notice, although Frederick and Douglas are described as having worked ‘formerly in partnership with another’ as the ‘Barclay Brothers’. The business address for the rm of builders and decorators is 39 Addison Gardens;15 we know for certain that David had lived at 39a Addison Gardens ve years earlier, when he got married.16 Frederick was also in partnership with ‘unnamed others’ in running the Peter Howard Agency, the address for which was given as 171 Holland Road, W14 – not only Douglas’s address at the time, but also that of David’s rst wife back in February 1955. By 1960, Frederick had left Shepherd’s Bush and was living in Holland Park, a twentyminute walk away and possibly the furthest he would live from his twin brother until the split sixty years later.

So, while David’s name was missing from the bankruptcy notice for the shop, his erstwhile home address and that of his wife were used for two other businesses linked to his brothers’

enterprises. This brief paragraph was to provide the rst clue to the use of interlinking companies based on home addresses – connected to close associates – that would continue to be a feature of the Barclay way of doing business. It would also not be the last time David’s wife would be linked to his business a airs. It’s important to note that bankruptcies at the time were rare, and still carried the pre-entrepreneurial stigma that existed before the Thatcher government changed the law decades later and introduced a more forgiving, exible approach. The stigma would have been particularly di cult for David, given the fact that by 1960 he was actually quite famous – or at least his wife was.

Zoe Margaret Newton had been born in Cornwall but moved to London soon after the war, where she trained as a dancer. Blonde, beautiful and just four foot eleven, she was eighteen when she was chosen as the National Dairy Council’s milk girl, becoming the gurehead for the ubiquitous advertisements that encouraged ration-hit Britain to drink home-grown milk. When she married David in 1955 at Kensington’s Anglo-Catholic St John the Baptist Church, the twenty-year-old David gave ‘interior decorator’ as his occupation, while Zoe, who had made the cover of the Picture Post magazine that year and could be seen on billboards across the whole of Britain, left her profession blank. Already known as the ‘drinka pinta milka day’ girl, Zoe’s big blue eyes and el n features had appeared on top of a huge tiger’s head on the cover of the popular magazine. In the centre spread she toasted shelves of milk with a glass of red wine. Michael Cole, then a reporter at the Acton Gazette, remembered her as ‘more famous than the Queen at the time’. There are pictures of the couple on their honeymoon, looking like Hollywood stars of the age. In one, David wears wide-legged trousers and a boxy double-breasted jacket while gazing up at a grinning Zoe. Both seem to be standing on a pile of rubble as workmen look on. In another, they are both happy and handsome, sitting by a re.

The fame made David uncomfortable. Zoe gave a ‘frank interview’, according to the Mail on Sunday, in which she admitted Frederick was always with them and that she could not always tell the twins apart. The piece also mentioned that this most private of men slept in a circular bed with pink covers. Although Zoe was making enough money for them both, in his rst public quotes David sighed: ‘It’s embarrassing. Very embarrassing, you know. It means that you cannot live comfortably in your own sphere of life when you are both so . . . famous.’17

Such fame meant that David must have been relieved not to have joined his twin brother in his rst and most public misstep with the Candy Corner bankruptcy – an early venture into retailing they were not to repeat for decades. Instead, the brothers moved to focus entirely on property, doing so well that by June 1966 they were able to discharge Frederick’s bankruptcy. How they did so is perhaps the true heart of their origin story.

It is no surprise that the wheeling-and-dealing Barclay brothers saw the local property market as the fastest way to make money in the 1950s – so did almost everyone else. London was full of buildings that had been either destroyed, damaged or left to decay in the years since the war. Some people made their fortunes and reputations largely by buying commercial property, but many more made money in a residential housing market that was undergoing enormous upheaval. Photos of North and West Kensington in the 1950s show once-grand terraced houses looking grubby and neglected. Many of the early Victorian properties had been given century-long leases due for renewal in the 1960s, which had discouraged renovation. Slum clearance often led to new o ce space rather than new houses, putting even more pressure on those who needed a home. And there were lots of people who did: the post-war servicemen looking to marry and raise a family, refugees from the war, and immigrants from the West Indies arriving to help with the post-war recovery e orts.

West London, home ground for the Barclays, was the epicentre for this explosion in demand and desperate supply squeeze. Considered among the outer edges of respectability in the fties, West and North Kensington now count among the city’s most expensive real estate markets. One of those who made money at the time, Herbert Mortiboy, told the Sunday Times why Notting Hill was such a great place to start: ‘I came in, like most property millionaires, after the war when the market was wide open and prices at the bottom . . . There’s more money to be made in the dust-hole than there is in Piccadilly.’18

Homes in post-war London were largely owned by private landlords, but wartime legislation ensured security of tenure and a cap on rents. Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s Rent Act in 1957 ended these controls and allowed landlords to charge whatever they wanted to new tenants, believing this to be a way of resolving the problem of housing shortages by allowing more people to make money. Instead, almost overnight, slum landlords took over, using means fair and foul to evict protected tenants and replace them with those so desperate for somewhere to live that they would pay wildly in ated prices to share appalling living spaces – among them, black people su ering from racist ‘no blacks’ landlords, and prostitutes who had been kicked o the streets by di erent legislation. Even before the 1957 Act, however, only tenants of unfurnished accommodation enjoyed the bene ts of cheap and stable rents and security of tenure. Tenants of furnished accommodation – most often those who had arrived with little more than the contents of a bag they could carry – enjoyed no such protection. With no rights and a market undergoing a revolution, these tenants could be charged as much as the landlord could get away with, and were evicted if they didn’t pay. Prices skyrocketed, with slum landlords charging as much as £3 a week in 1960 – 60 per cent of an average workingclass wage – for a double bedroom with a toilet and kitchen shared between as many as twenty people.19

The Peter Howard Agency – the furnished accommodation bureau run by Frederick ‘in partnership with others’ and listed at an address once used by his brother’s wife Zoe – is the only evidence that the brothers operated at this less than salubrious end of the market. There is no evidence at all of any unlawful or even wrongful behaviour. What is clear is that nancial institutions – and indeed anyone with cash to spare – were more than willing, in this rising market, to nance anyone improving properties and increasing pro ts. There were 100 per cent bank mortgages available for those able to turn rental accommodation that may have housed a few low-paying tenants into something closer to a human factory farm, where the chickens paid a fortune for the privilege of living in a shed. In the subsequent parliamentary debate on what became a housing scandal, the then Labour MP Harold Wilson read out an advert, in a tone of distaste, ‘whereby a young man, who was clever enough to get into the property market, is to be a quarter-millionaire as a result of getting large loans from an insurance company’. He suggested exorbitant rents and desperate conditions were behind these riches.20

The Barclays were far from alone in looking to hit gold in a west London property scene that allowed anyone with an ability to do up houses and increase rents to make a fortune. A young Michael Heseltine was another of those who did. In his autobiography, Life in the Jungle, Heseltine records how he made his rst fortune in the 1950s property boom before going on to become a Conservative cabinet minister and peer.21 In the mid-1950s he used £1,000 from a Post O ce Savings Account set up by his grandparents (worth about £29,000 today) and a small mortgage to buy a short thirteen-year lease on the Thurston Court Hotel in Notting Hill. Along with his business partner, Ian Josephs, he served notice to the existing tenants so that Josephs’s father could renovate, after which they were able to charge some £2–3 per tenant per week, bringing in an agreeable £30 per week. A year later they sold the property for such a pro t that they ‘doubled

their money’. ‘It seemed too good to be true,’ recalled the future Lord Heseltine. ‘We seized the opportunity.’ The pro t allowed the pair to take out a £23,000 mortgage – worth some £670,000 today – which they used to buy a forty- ve-bedroom cross between a boarding house and hotel which they called the New Court Hotel.

Heseltine’s account o ers a fascinating insight into the area around Bayswater, near Olympia, at almost the exact time and place when the Barclay brothers were also young men on the make. This model of turning large properties into many-roomed boarding houses or hotels proved a hugely successful one for the Barclays a short while after, by which time Heseltine had already started in politics. ‘All human life was there,’ Heseltine wrote of the small number of long-term residents, the smattering of commercial travellers, and the American serviceman who came for the weekend and at one point ‘ ung a naked prostitute’ across the hallway. He managed to sell the New Court Hotel on almost immediately for a pro t in 1957. By a strange twist of fate, it somehow ended up in the hands of a man whose career would become as notorious as Heseltine’s became illustrious.

Perec (known as Peter) Rachman was a Polish Jew who had arrived in London just after the war. He built up a slum empire in the 1950s that proved the model for landlords who terrorized poor and vulnerable tenants while using a chain of companies to avoid any redress. ‘Rachmanism’ is a word de ned as ‘the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords’ by the Oxford English Dictionary. According to Shirley Green, whose biography of the slumlord is one of the best guides to the period, Rachman ran a ‘perfectly respectable’ gambling club in the New Court Hotel, which he bought in 1957 – the same year Heseltine is said to have sold it via Lieutenant Colonel George Sinclair.22 In his autobiography, Heseltine mentions meeting Rachman at the time, although he mainly dealt with ‘one of his managers’.23

A penniless refugee in 1946,24 Rachman proved the adage that

you did not need money to succeed in property – just access to people with money. Borrowing from banks, building societies and anyone with ready cash, Rachman bought run-down old houses, many of which were still governed by statutory controls, and used thugs known as ‘the Heavy Glove Men’ as well as Alsatian dogs to force out existing tenants. He also hired black men to threaten white residents and white ones to threaten the black ones, increasing tensions and feeding into the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.

Although his empire was mainly based around Paddington and Notting Hill, Rachman started as a at-letting agent in Shepherd’s Bush in 1954,25 and it was his purchase of thirty slightly shabby end-of-lease houses on Shepherd’s Bush Green that started him on his way to becoming a professional landlord. The fact that the most notorious landlord in Britain started his career and lived mostly within a thirty-minute walk of the Barclay brothers has served to sharpen the focus on the brothers’ early years, but there is no evidence that the Barclays ever met him, let alone copied his dubious methods.

However, Rachman provides a well-documented example of how property speculators were able to exploit legislative loopholes that existed until the early 1960s. Under the Companies Act of the time, businessmen could set up a series of interlinked companies for as little as £19 each (about £500 today). Appointing close associates as nominee directors – easily controlled via undated letters of resignation – these companies could then be used both to conceal bene cial ownership and to borrow more money from banks or building society managers with set individual limits. This kind of web is still commonly found today with the use of o shore interests.

Rachman was not alone in spotting loopholes in the Companies Act. A Sunday Times investigation subsequently read out in parliament stated: ‘As with most property concerns, Rachman operated through an interlocking chain of limited companies,

usually with his own nominees as directors.’ Companies were wound up and the properties reassigned to other companies, which meant that when o cials wanted to serve notices – whether for sanitary problems, certi cates of disrepair or even compulsory acquisition – they struggled to nd the right people to serve it on. Nominee companies allowed the freehold to be separated from any leases, with the assets of some subsidiary companies ‘an under-lease on one house or even of just one selfcontained oor’.26

In 1959, the police uncovered a complex network of thirtythree companies Rachman had set up to control his property empire. He was also able to collect £10,000 a year in rent for a house that had previously been subject to rent control and had cost him just £1,500. By the time Rachman died of a heart attack in 1962, he had acquired more than 150 run-down mansion blocks and several nightclubs, and was said to have made a million pounds, which after the relaxation of exchange controls he had been able to send to Swiss bank accounts, thereby avoiding tax. His empire had proved so successful he had caught the attention of two brothers prepared to bene t from illegal rather than legal means. Gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray used Rachman to branch out from their criminal stranglehold of east London. Through him they were able to buy a gambling club in Knightsbridge called Esmeralda’s Barn.27 Decades later, with the Krays long in prison, the club became part of the Berkeley Hotel.

In her biography of Rachman, Shirley Green argues that he was a scapegoat at a time of political crisis, pointing out that his behaviour as a slum landlord only caused a scandal after his involvement in what became known as the Profumo a air was made public. Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were said to be two former mistresses of Rachman who had lived in one of his grander houses in Marylebone. They were at the centre of the a air, with Keeler accused of sleeping with both a Russian spy, Yevgeny Ivanov, and the cabinet minister John Profumo. The

Profumo scandal turned attention onto the housing scandal; a BBC documentary and several media reports highlighted the state of the housing market ex post facto. In July 1963, Harold Wilson started a debate in parliament on ‘the consequences of the Rent Act 1957 and property pro teering’ that was subsequently credited with helping elect him as prime minister, thereby ending thirteen years of Conservative rule.

Wilson’s new Labour government passed a Rent Act, which o ered both security and ‘fair rents’ to tenants. The new prime minister said of the Profumo scandal: ‘Sometimes one turns over a stone in a garden or eld and sees the slimy creatures which live under its protection.’28

Throughout this tumultuous period, the Barclay brothers’ business continued to make money, rst by turning rooms into boarding houses, then by turning those boarding houses into hotels. They did so with several di erent companies. On 23 May 1962, while Frederick was still banned by bankruptcy rules from acting as a director, David registered Hillgate Estate Agents. Hillgate’s articles of association included twenty-one business objectives, ranging from estate and insurance agenting – with all the building, decorating and repair work that entailed – to mortgage brokering and moneylending, issuing loans ‘with or without security’. As it happens, Hillgate still survives today, with David’s two eldest sons as the sole directors,29 although hundreds of other Barclay-owned companies have been folded, renamed or mothballed. A year after founding Hillgate, David founded Ilkent Properties and Ilkent Holdings. The Barclays were shrewd and hard-working, but they also bene ted from the most astonishing boom in London property prices. A £5,000 investment in 1961, adjusted for nothing more than in ation, was worth just over £111,000 by 2019. David once told a journalist that a property he had bought in 1961 for £5,000 was valued at £25 million by 2019.30

Many of the people who worked with the brothers speak of them having a sharp sense of humour. One story is both funny

and telling for what it says about their desire to do deals. Once, Frederick was working alone in the estate agency when a woman came in looking for a property, any property, on a particular road in Notting Hill, as she needed to live near her elderly father in order to look after him. Although there was nothing listed, Frederick immediately told her that he had the perfect place, and showed her a small property with no obvious sign it was up for sale. The woman was delighted and paid over the odds to be able to move in so quickly. Frederick had just sold his brother David’s house without telling him rst. Years later, when Frederick was asked if David had minded, he would say, ‘Of course not, because the price was so good.’

Those with enough money, such as Heseltine years before this, soon discovered that even more money was to be made turning houses into hotels at a time when demand was booming. In 1964, David set up Primary Holdings Ltd and bought the leasehold for 3 Westbourne Terrace in London’s Paddington,31 a relatively seedy part of London at the time. The brothers renovated the house and turned it into the Hyde Park North Hotel, their rst notable hotel launch. David and his wife Zoe then formed another company, Highgrange Investments, in the same year.

In 1966, while the brothers were still just thirty-one, Frederick’s bankruptcy was discharged. But the public scandal over Candy Corner would irk the brothers for decades to come. It also seems to have exacerbated their liking for privacy. In 1967, after company law changed to require small private limited companies to make company accounts public, Hillgate was almost immediately re-registered as an unlimited company (such companies, common in the Barclay empire, are subject to more limited disclosure rules).

Meanwhile, Zoe had given up her high-pro le modelling career and had had children. Aidan Stuart was born in early 1956, followed by Howard Myles in 1960, then Duncan Hugh less than fteen months after that. One consequence of Frederick’s bank-

9781405958905

YOU MAY NEVER SEE US AGAIN JANE MARTINSON

You May Never See Us Again

About the Author

You May Never See Us Again

PENGUIN BOOKS

No Man Is an Island

1. Early Years