Peter Rachman was a landlord in the Notting Hill area of London in the 1950s and early
1960s, who became notorious for his exploitation of his tenants. The word "Rachmanism" entered
the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for the exploitation and intimidation of tenants.
Career Early life and World War 2
Rachman was born Perec Rachman in Lvov, Poland, in 1919, the son of a Jewish dentist. After
the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Rachman may have joined the Polish resistance. He
was first interned by the Germans and, after escaping across the Soviet border, was reinterned
in a Soviet labour camp in Siberia and cruelly treated. After the Germans declared war on
the Soviet Union in 1941, Rachman and other Polish prisoners joined the 2nd Polish Corps
and fought on behalf of the Allies in the Middle East and Italy. After the war he stayed
with his unit, which remained as an occupying force in Italy until 1946 when they transferred
to Britain. Rachman was eventually demobbed in 1948 and became a British resident.
Business career In Britain, Rachman built up a property empire
in West London consisting of more than one hundred mansion blocks and several nightclubs.
His office was at 91–93 Westbourne Grove, in Bayswater, and the first house he purchased
and used for multi-occupation was nearby in now-fashionable St Stephen's Gardens, W2.
In adjacent areas in Notting Hill, including Powis Square, Powis Gardens, Powis Terrace,
Colville Road and Colville Terrace, he also subdivided large properties into flats and
let rooms, initially often for prostitution. Much of this area, south of Westbourne Park
Road, having become derelict, was compulsorily purchased by Westminster City Council in the
late 1960s and was demolished in 1973–74 to make way for the Wessex Gardens estate.
In order to maximise his rental income from the properties in Notting Hill, he is said
to have driven out the—mostly white—sitting tenants, who had statutory protection against
high rent increases, and then filled the properties with recent immigrants from the West Indies.
New tenants did not have the same protection under the law as had the previous ones, and
so could be charged any amount Rachman wished. Most of the new tenants were West Indian immigrants
who had no choice but to accept the high rents, as it was difficult for them to obtain housing
in London at the time. Indeed, Rachman's initial reputation, which he even promoted in the
media, was as someone who could help to find and provide accommodation for immigrants.
According to his biographer, Shirley Green, parts of the traditional Rachman story, such
as the use of violence to drive away the sitting tenants, may be mythical. More devious methods
may have been used, such as moving the protected tenants in a smaller concentration of properties
or buying them out, in order to minimise the number of tenancies with statutory rent controls.
Houses were also subdivided into a number of flats in order to increase the number of
tenancies without rent controls. By 1958 he had largely moved out of slum-landlording
into property development, but his former henchmen, including the equally-notorious
Michael de Freitas, who created a reputation as a black-power leader, and Johnny Edgecombe,
who became a promoter of jazz and blues, helped to keep him in the limelight. A special police
unit was set up to investigate Rachman in 1959, and uncovered a network of 33 companies
controlling his property empire. They also discovered Rachman was involved in prostitution
and he was prosecuted twice for brothel-keeping. Rachman did not achieve general notoriety
until after his death, when the Profumo Affair of 1963 hit the headlines and it emerged that
both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had been his mistresses, and that he had owned
the mews house in Marylebone where Rice-Davies and Keeler had stayed. As full details of
his activities were revealed, there was a call for new legislation to prevent such practices,
led by Ben Parkin, MP for North Paddington, who coined the phrase "Rachmanism". The subsequent
Rent Act 1965 gave security to tenants, but had the unintended consequence that private
rented housing became scarce. Personal life
According to his biographer, Rachman was an intelligent man with a genial personality.
Though not blessed with conventional good looks, being short, balding and dumpy, he
had the power to charm women and mixed with all classes of society from prostitutes to
the aristocracy. Rachman displayed his wealth flamboyantly, driving a Rolls Royce, chewing
on a cigar and sporting dark sunglasses. Although generally a happy individual, he
was torn between his Jewish and Polish heritage. This confusion of identity was made worse
by the fact that his home town of Lwow was transferred from Poland to the Soviet Union
after World War Two, and, being denied British citizenship, he was stateless. Lwow is now
a major city in western Ukraine, and is known by its Ukrainian name Lviv. The Russian spelling
"Lvov" is sometimes used in the West. Rachman married his long-standing girlfriend
Audrey O'Donnell in 1960 but remained a compulsive womaniser, maintaining Mandy Rice-Davies as
his mistress at 1 Bryanston Mews West, W1, where he had previously briefly installed
Christine Keeler. After suffering two heart attacks, Peter Rachman died in Edgware General
Hospital on 29 November 1962, at the age of 43. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery at
Bushey, Hertfordshire. In popular culture
In Michael Caton-Jones's 1989 film about the Profumo Affair, Scandal, Rachman is portrayed
by Johnny Shannon. In the film An Education, Rachman has a minor
role and is portrayed by Luis Soto. Linda Grant's The Clothes On Their Backs,
Virago Press, features a main character modelled on Rachman.
Harry Starks, the fictional protagonist of Jake Arnott's novel The Long Firm, begins
his career working for Peter Rachman, who is described in the book as a Holocaust survivor,
and is said to hoard bread crusts. Peter Flannery's Singer was inspired, in part,
by Rachman's life. Indie-Pop band Carter USM's hit 1989 single
"Sheriff Fatman" refers to the titular fictional slum landlord as "a born-again Rachman".
Julien Temple's 1986 musical film Absolute Beginners, loosely based on Colin MacInnes'
1959 novel of the same name, features a predatory Notting Hill slum landlord named Saltzman,
who is clearly modelled on Rachman. In the film Saltzman evicts West Indian tenants from
his properties to make way for a redevelopment and gentrification scheme. Perhaps not coincidentally,
the actor who plays Saltzman in the film, Johnny Shannon, is the same actor who later
played Rachman in Scandal. It is also likely not a coincidence that Rachman's one-time
mistress, Mandy Rice-Davies, appears in Temple's film as the teenage protagonist's promiscuous
mother, who runs the boarding house where she resides and often cuckolds her husband
with "gigolo lodgers". In 1973–74, the British rock band the Kinks
released a two-part rock opera, Preservation Act 1 and Preservation Act 2, which chronicles
the rise and fall of a wicked property developer called Flash—a character that is probably
based, at least in part, on Rachman. References
Citations
Bibliography Green, Shirley. Rachman. London: Michael Joseph.
ISBN 0718117395. Williams, John. Michael X: A Life in Black
and White. London: Century. ISBN 1846050952.