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Old May 6th, 2015 #1
Karl Radl
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Default Peter Rachman and the Rise of the Jewish Slumlord

Peter Rachman and the Rise of the Jewish Slumlord

By Andy Drylaw


In the annals of the London underworld, few names cast as long a shadow as that of slum landlord Peter Rachman, a racketeer and pimp who ran a squalid empire of overcrowded properties in the run-down Notting Hill area in the post-war period.

His speciality was "sending in the schwarzes" which is a disparaging Yiddish term for Blacks. Rachman would put West Indians and their prostitutes into his London properties to drive out rent-controlled White neighbours with their outrageous and disgusting behaviour. To ensure stubborn tenants got the message, a crew of thugs with Alsatians doled out threats, intimidation and worse.

When his activities were finally exposed by Fleet Street in 1962 the country was horrified at the stories; how his West Indian pimps and their girlfriends would turn quiet buildings into hell holes and how he drove elderly White pensioners away in what must surely have been one of the first planned waves of "White flight" in Britain.

There were lurid weekly newspaper exposes, television investigations and angry debates in Parliament. In those days before political correctness smothered free speech it is bracing to read forthright reporting on how Black behaviour made White lives such a misery.

Then there was the image of Rachman himself. Like a Bond villain, he was balding, corpulent cigar-chomping figure, dripping with gold and driving a Rolls Royce with girls in the back. Originally a Jew from Poland, he had shipped up after the war after escaping — he said — from both a German concentration camp and a Soviet labour camp.

The revelations guaranteed his notoriety but it was another aspect of Peter Rachman's life that ensured his name would live on. For he had a walk-on part in Britain's biggest ever post-war scandal as a sometime boyfriend of the two "good time girls" at the centre of the Profumo affair.

This was a huge spy scare, which ultimately led to the resignation in disgrace of the Minister of War. That Minister was John Profumo. He had been having an affair with one of Rachman’s girls at the same time as a Soviet attaché. In a Britain still reeling from the upper-class treachery of the Cambridge spies Philby, Burgess and McLean only a few years before, this was a particularly explosive cocktail.

The venue for all this was the elegant Cliveden stately home where Lord Astor held exclusive nude swimming pool parties in his magnificent gardens. The stories of low-life behaviour in high-life surroundings transfixed the British public who couldn’t get enough.

It was all a world away from the squalid overcrowded, slums of Notting Hill but it was Rachman’s proximity to this larger story that ensured that he and his posse of prostitutes, West Indian pimps and dodgy Jewish and non-Jewish associates, went into crime legend.

Peter Rachman died of a heart attack aged only 42 in 1962 but would achieve immortality courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary which included ‘Rachmanism’ as meaning slum landlordism with threats and intimidation.

In recent years there has been a concerted attempt to rehabilitate Peter Rachman. Books, a play, and most recently a BBC radio documentary have all sought to absolve his behaviour, because of his experiences in captivity. Indeed BBC radio journalist Joshua Levin said that Rachman had been made a scapegoat “embodying as he did the stereotype of the grasping Jew.” Rachman, insist his apologists, was no worse than any other Jewish landlord.

It is true that Rachman's behaviour was no different from other Jewish landlords. In fact many others were just as bad if not worse.

Walking around Notting Hill it is hard to envisage what it would have been like just after the war. Today it is one of the most affluent and fashionable neighbourhoods in London and only hedge fund bankers, celebrities and senior politicians can afford the property prices.

It is all a far cry from the grim years after 1945. Notting Hill’s grandiose three and four storey mansions had been designed for the large Victorian families of the professional well-to-do, with lots of children and retinues of servants. But the pre-war decline of the upper-middle class and a slump in the London property market meant that it had gone badly downhill. The huge houses had been divided again and again and the properties were teeming with the White working-class poor.

These Whites were often in “controlled tenancies” which meant that their rent could not be raised. For the privileged or aristocratic owners the properties had become more trouble than they were worth and estate owners such as the Duke of Westminster, Campden Estates, Colville Estates and the Church Commissioners were desperate to sell up.

In fact there were legal remedies available to the landlords — but they just did not have the stomach for it. The thought of turning out the poorest families in London — with the attendant publicity — was more than they could cope with.

This meant a huge opportunity for a new breed of unscrupulous landlord — and they were not slow to take advantage.

The hub of the property bonanza was the London Auction Mart in Queen Victoria Street where the “Stamford Hill Cowboy” property rings would congregate. Stamford Hill was the home of London’s Orthodox Jewish and the Hasidim were unmistakeable with their black beards and black hats. In a London crowded with refugees and demobbed ex-servicemen there was a crippling shortage of homes, and many Jewish property fortunes were created.

If his own account is to be believed, Rachman lost his family in the Holocaust and was placed in a concentration camp. He escaped and fled to the Soviet lines where again he was incarcerated in a labour camp near Vladivostock before escaping again.

He ended up with the Polish Army 2nd Corp fighting alongside the British in the Middle East and after a short spell in a re-settlement camp made his way to London and the Yiddish-speaking world of the poor East End.

From hustling stolen goods in the booming post-war black market he moved onto pimping his Irish girlfriend prostitute and then running a flat-letting agency for prostitutes in partnership with two prosperous Jewish brothers from Hampstead, one a solicitor.

As author Shirley Green says “It is a truism that you don’t need money to make money in property, you just need to know someone with money.” It seems the Jewish brothers put up the capital, while Rachman provided the grubby front-of-house skills of property management, rent collecting, and laying down the law to the girls.

Author Shirley Green, author of Rachman — the Slum Landlord Whose Name Became a Byword for Evil, bends over backwards to present him in a sympathetic way. She takes the viewpoints of his criminal associates at face value while pouring scorn on everything that does not tie in with this sympathetic narrative.

This biographer paints Rachman as a kind of Oscar Schindler figure helping West Indians out of sympathy through a shared identity as outsiders. Certainly many of the West Indians quoted by Shirley Green remembered Rachman fondly as providing "a kind of golden age when despite the squalid conditions there was a party every night and a white girl in every bed.” Rachman would say to people “have you got a girlfriend? because he knew most of us were living off our girlfriends earnings."

Ms. Green does at least acknowledge that:

'There would have been an unholy amount of noise that created bad feeling between blacks and their white neighbours. West Indians, an extrovert and music loving people who made a down payment on a record player one of their first priorities and liked their music loud enough to shake the house to its foundations...there should have been an attempt to prevent the catastrophic collision of cultures that arose when an exuberant and outdoor people, met an introvert and indoor people, who valued their peace and privacy.'

Since the first 492 West Indians had disembarked at Tilbury docks in London in 1948. they had been pouring in, in even greater numbers. For many Whites unfortunate to have them as neighbours, this was an unmitigated catastrophe that would rob them of their peace, security and ultimately their homes.

It must have been a life-shortening experience for many of the elderly Whites but we will never know for sure. No one, not least the liberal politicians, do-gooders or subsequent hagiographers, seem remotely interested in asking what happened to them.

Rachman would charge West Indians £6 a week for a flat that a controlled tenant had been paying 25 shillings for previously — an increase of 500%. Occasionally Rachman's mask as a friend of the Blacks would slip. Girlfriend Christine Keeler remembers him telling her to "stay away from those animals" referring to her string of Black boyfriends.

Rachman’s early death freed journalists from the fear of libel and they went to town. A Sunday People expose from 14 July 1962 told how he "built up an empire based on vice and drugs, violence and blackmail, extortion and slum landlordism, the like of which this country has never seen," while a Sunday Times Insight column on July 7 1963 cut to the very heart of the matter with its headline “Landlord Rachman gets rich from racial tension.”

It began:

'During the height of the West Indian immigration in the 1950s there was a simple technique for exploiting racial tensions to make large profits. Property speculators in Paddington, west London, describe it in their Runyonesque jargon: ‘Put in the schwarzes and de-stat it.

‘Schwarzes’ is Anglicised Yiddish for coloured people: the ‘stats’ are statutory tenants, whose rent and tenure of homes were controlled by law (and still are, on low-rated property); to ‘de-stat’ means to persuade controlled tenants to leave — an operation which could increase the value of a property five-fold.

And unscrupulous landlords found that crowding slums with West Indians under conditions that were bound to lead to friction was a certain way of achieving this. The most notorious exploiter was Peter Rachman.'

Most notorious he may have been, but he was far from the only one or even one of the biggest who got his start in the Notting Hill slum Klondike. Another notorious Jewish landlord was the fugitive financier Judah Binstock who fled Britain in 1979. Another was Labour-supporting Jewish businessman Sir Eric Miller who shot himself in 1977 while under investigation for fraud. There were many more.

In her 2009 autobiography, Fleet Street journalist Lynn Barber describes how, as a 16-year old schoolgirl, she was “groomed” by a Jewish property dealer associate of Rachman.

He spoke freely about driving out sitting White tenants by carrying out building works all round them, or taking the roof off, or "putting in the schwarzes" or filling the rest of the house with prostitutes, “that made stats eager to move." The author says he even robbed an old White lady in front of her. He ended up in prison for bouncing cheques.

And in another memoir published last year, former Rachman associate and Jewish Notting Hill property dealer Douglas Villiers (Levy) confirms the thuggery and “schwarzer” stories down to the last detail. Although he is careful to say he only ever bought tenants out legitimately himself.

The Jewish community is uneasy about being reminded about the word "schwarzes" these days. Its use has led to at least one Jewish apology to Blacks and it hardly chimes with the Jewish self-image as defenders of minority rights.

It is interesting to note that while one group of Jews were sending in the despised "schwarzes" to clear working class Whites out of Notting Hill, another was working to criminalise opposition to Black immigration.

A long campaign by Jewish civil servants and left-wing MPs finally bore fruit in 1965 when the first Race Relations Act was passed into law. It came down hard on White protests and was introduced into the House of Commons by the Labour Attorney General, the immigrant Russian Jew Sir Frank Soskice.

So is the Notting Hill story a tribute to the Jewish qualities of hard work, enterprise and a sharp eye for an opportunity? Making money out of slums isn’t rocket science — it just entails a certain brutal coarseness, a willingness to overlook the effects on other people.

Maybe that comes easier when you think of the people involved as an exploitable outgroup.

Is it too much of a stretch to see in the Notting Hill story a microcosm of what was to happen on a national scale? Namely, the dispossession of Whites through the importation of minorities organised and promoted energetically by hostile Jewish ethnic interests?

Apart from the apologists, there has been remarkably little interest in this fascinating figure from the sixties. Surely he deserves to be recognised as a pioneer who introduced into Britain one of the most important social phenomena of the late twentieth century — White flight.

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...of-jewish.html
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