Lady Sarah Aspinall obituary: model married to zoo and casino owner

Times

4 hours ago

On June 21, 1970, Lady Sarah (Sally) Courage was sitting in the Williams pits at Circuit Zandvoort, timing her husband, Piers, as he roared past on lap 23 of the Dutch Grand Prix. Driving a new car for the Williams team, he was in seventh place, but as he approached the sharp Tunnel Oost corner, either his steering wheel or the front suspension failed and instead of turning left he went straight on. The car hit a bank and disintegrated, the fuel tank exploded and a wheel bearing flew back with such force that it knocked his helmet off and killed him instantly. The car was still blazing an hour later as Sally was helped away from the track. Piers's body was still in it. He was 28, and Sally, the mother of two boys aged three and one, was a widow at 25.
The Courages had been a glamorous young couple. Before her marriage Sally had been a model. The dashing Piers was a member of the Courage brewing family. Their wedding in 1966 had been one of the highlights of the social season. The photographer Patrick Lichfield, who shot her for Vogue at home with her children, included her in his list of the ten most beautiful women.
Now with two small boys to bring up on her own, Sally went back to modelling and ran an upmarket flower shop. Then she began seeing John Aspinall, who was nearly 20 years older than her. Larger than life, he won a court case that led to liberalisation of British gambling laws and opened Britain's first licensed casino, the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square. It became the centre of what later became known as the Lucan set after Lord Lucan, who dined there on the night he tried to murder his wife (he killed the nanny by mistake) and disappeared. To the end of her days, Sally maintained that Lucan almost certainly killed himself that same night, drowning himself in the sea off Newhaven, where his car was found the next day.
Aspinall had a passion for wild animals, which he bred at his wildlife sanctuary, Howletts, in Kent. Sally had met him in 1967, before Courage died. Her friend Tessa Kennedy, the interior designer, drove her down to Aspinall's neo-Palladian manor on the Howletts estate, which she was decorating at the time. When Aspinall suggested a walk in the woods, Sally found herself accompanied by both adult and baby gorillas, one of which clambered on to her shoulders. After Courage's death, by which time Aspinall had divorced his second wife, he began courting her seriously. In 1972 they married and she moved into Howletts, where she bottle-fed baby gorillas abandoned by their mothers and often shared her bed with a tiger cub.
For more than 20 years, zoological societies had dismissed Aspinall as an eccentric collector of animals. They changed their views after his gorilla breeding programme was successful. By the time Sally came into his life, he had more than 1,000 animals and 80 breeding species. His long-term objective was to return species to the wild, particularly captive-bred gorillas and tigers.
Sally's affection for the gorillas was tested when Aspinall persuaded her to take their six-month-old baby, Bassa, into the enclosure and lay him gently on the floor for the gorillas to inspect and sniff. To her horror, a huge female called Juju suddenly picked Bassa up and swung up to the top of the cage, where he was passed around from one hairy arm to another. It was some time before Juju swung down again, and put the baby gently back where she had found him.
Aspinall, a professional gambler, led a rollercoaster life, well off one day when the roulette wheel ran for him, poor the next after a bad run. He owned shares in companies run by his best friend, Jimmy Goldsmith, worth between £2 million and £3 million. In the financial crisis of 1974-75 the shares collapsed and Aspinall, who had borrowed heavily to pay for them, 'lost everything'.
He sold his club for a miserable £500,000, mortgaged his London house and sold his wine, his books and his furniture, and when that wasn't enough he sold Sally's family jewellery. Goldsmith bailed him out almost weekly, but it was four years before Aspinall's finances recovered.
His wife stood by him without complaint. One of Aspinall's early biographers, Brian Masters, wrote: 'Lady Sarah Aspinall is the perfect example of a primate female, ready to serve the dominant male. Hence the marriage is hugely successful.' Sally didn't disagree. 'Aspers was my man, my dominant male,' she said. 'I don't believe in any of this feminist stuff. He always respected me and loved me. I'm a very lucky woman. I've been blessed.'
Sarah Curzon was born in Edinburgh in 1945, the daughter of Francis Curzon, Fifth Earl Howe, a Conservative politician and racing driver who was five times British champion and winner of both Le Mans and the Mille Miglia. Her mother was Sybil Boyter Johnson, Curzon's third wife. Sally, as she was known, was educated privately by governesses, followed by a finishing school.
She later became a superb hostess at her and Aspinall's sumptuous Herbert Baker-designed home south of Cape Town. Goldsmith, Henry Kissinger, Jacob Rothschild, Kerry Packer, Conrad Black, FW de Klerk, Margaret and Denis Thatcher and many others visited them there. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was such a regular visitor that Aspinall built him his own cottage in the extensive gardens, which, much to Buthelezi's amusement, he called the Kraal (Afrikaans for cattle enclosure).
Tragedy was never far off. On October 15, 1995, Sally's 28-year-old son Jason Courage was riding his motorbike (at 33mph according to the police report) when a car made an illegal right turn in front of him and he went into it. Jason was paralysed from the mid-chest down. He kept the full use of his arms and could swim, ski and propel himself to Chelsea's home games, which he seldom missed. After a stint in the City, he now runs an investment fund.
A few years later, Aspinall developed cancer of the jaw and he died in 2000, aged 74. Sally, who had nursed him night and day, was with him to the end. After Aspinall's death, she moved out of the main house in Howletts to a cottage next to the original gorilla enclosure, and devoted herself to running the extensive gardens at both Howletts and Port Lympne. An inteprid traveller, she often stayed in Cape Town with her youngest son, Bassa, an artist, or visited her son Amos in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was working on a project to rehabilitate gorillas to their natural habitat.
Lady Sarah Aspinall was born on January 25, 1945. She died on June 17, 2025, aged 80