>>5248335 (PB)
lot of tunnels below from WW II
connecting Buck palace
to VVhitehall Gov offices
Boodles (Churchill's club) & VVhite's Club (Pedovores)
>The Gamblers tells the story that brings the two characters together. It begins, as much as anything else, as a social history, a picture of a small segment of society during a period of great change, in the 1950s and 1960s. Great Britain over the years has had a mixed relationship with gambling; some things are legal, some aren’t and some change. Post second world war, as the country slowly pulled itself out of the grimness and austerity, the operation of casinos was freed up and a little of the atmosphere of the Regency period could be found in Mayfair and Belgravia. Having started his career as a gambling promoter earlier, by the time the law was changed, John Aspinall was poised to cement his position as the gambling-master to the higher echelons of society. The result was the Clermont Club, opened by Aspinall in 1962. Pearson runs us entertainingly through the early lives of those who became the central characters of the so-called Clermont Set. Aspinall, Goldsmith, Mark Birley (best known for opening Annabel’s in the cellars of the Clermont), Dominick Elwes and - last but not least - Lord Bingham, soon to become the seventh Earl of Lucan on his father’s death. That’s the first half of the book - that’s the civilisation he refers to as gone with the wind. Certainly from 2015 it’s difficult to recognise some of the attitudes of the protagonists, but I would rather argue that it was such a small sub-set that we are really talking more about the rich being different than we are about the end of a civilisation. A very, very small group (at least partly made up of landed aristocrats determined to gamble away their houses and estates) is not a picture of changing society; but Pearson is good on the impact of a gambling addiction on those who suffer it. Goldsmith took his touch from the chemin de fer table to the boardroom as a corporate raider - very high stakes gambling - but the rest of them largely fell by the wayside in one way or another. And watching over it all was the enigmatic, brooding, one would probably say malevolent, character of Aspinall. Pearson does a good job of analysing the characters of all the main protagonists, but Aspinall is the dominant figure.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/497216.The_Gamblers
>5249969