17 hours ago
Lady Sarah Aspinall, model who married into a zoo empire and took her tigers for walks in Belgravia
Lady Sarah Aspinall, who has died aged 80, was a model in Swinging London whose marriages brought her into contact with two wildly contrasting – albeit comparably dangerous – worlds.
The first was Formula One, as wife of the driver Piers Courage; the second was the care of large wild animals, as wife of the casino-owner and conservationist John Aspinall, who praised her as 'a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable'. In the first year of their marriage she reared three baby gorillas, a tigress cub and a litter of wolves.
Of these two milieux, motorsport was the more natural for Lady Sarah (Sally) Curzon, born in Edinburgh on January 25 1945, the only child of the 5th Earl Howe's third marriage, to Sibyl (née Boyter). Lord Howe, better known as Francis Curzon, was the grand old man of British motor racing who had won Le Mans in 1931 with Sir Tim Birkin, and advised his daughter 'never to take notice of safety nets'.
Tales of these dashing 'Bentley Boys' had ignited the schoolboy imagination of Sally's first husband Piers 'Porridge' Courage, who resisted his father's wishes for him to succeed as sixth-generation chairman of the Courage brewery, and emerged instead as a formidable talent on the racetrack, driving for his friend Frank Williams's Formula One team and even turning down an offer from Enzo Ferrari.
Courage's 1966 marriage to Lady Sally, a saucer-eyed beauty in the Twiggy mould who had modelled mini-dresses for Mary Quant, made them the pin-ups of motorsport – 'like something out of F Scott Fitzgerald,' as the car-maker Charles Lucas put it.
In June 1970 Lady Sally Courage was filling in her husband's lap charts at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. A fortnight earlier, their friend Bruce McLaren had died at Goodwood. Consoling his widow, Lady Sally had thought: 'That won't happen to me. My Piers will be OK.'
By lap 23 Courage was missing and a plume of black smoke had appeared from the dunes. The tannoy broadcast the mistaken report that Courage had been seen walking; in fact, his car was a magnesium-fed fireball, setting alight the nearby bushes and defeating the firemen who tried to extricate the driver. In all likelihood the 28-year-old Courage had been killed before the 20 gallons of fuel erupted, his helmet ripped off by a flying front wheel.
The stricken widow returned to London with their two infant sons to face a mountain of debts; later that season Jochen Rindt, the leading driver, was also killed at Monza, subsequently becoming Formula One's only posthumous champion.
John Aspinall, meanwhile, had been amassing a fortune – and an equivocal reputation – as owner of London's most rarefied casino, the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, 'piledriving through the British aristocracy and separating younger sons from more money than they ought perhaps to have had access to,' in the words of his biographer, Brian Masters. 'Parents and trustees viewed Aspinall's arrival on the London scene as comparable with the disembarkation of Lenin at Helsinki station in 1917.'
When one habitué of the Clermont declined Aspinall's offer to lunch because he was on his way to Piers Courage's wedding to Lady Sally Curzon, Aspinall had ordered the 'social climber' to tell 'that racing driver that real men don't race but gamble'.
Aspinall, who kept tigers and Himalayan bears at his house in Belgravia, saw the world of human relations as an extension – and not a particularly impressive one – of the animal kingdom. 'I know women will eventually revert to the role of female gorillas,' he once observed.
He was ambitious to breed: his first wife had given him a son and a daughter, but his second wife had drifted from him in grief after their infant daughter died of a rare heart defect.
'I needed a woman,' he recalled. 'I looked in my telephone book to see who I knew. Couldn't be the wife of a friend, since among my group it is taboo to steal a friend's female. I saw Sally's name and knew that Piers had just been killed in a Formula One race, so I asked her out to lunch.'
His courtship proceeded with alpha-male vigour. 'There's a lorry outside filled with flowers,' her housekeeper told her. 'Except it's a jungle.'
After 18 months together they married in 1972, christening their son Bassa Wulfhere after the grandfather of Alfred the Great (Bassa) and an army of wolves (Wulfhere), in line with Aspinall's ideological preference for English names over those of Roman or Jewish derivation.
That year Aspinall sold the Clermont Club to funnel money into his zoo at Howletts, his Palladian house in Kent. Almost immediately the Aspinalls were ruined by the stock market crash of 1973, and Sally had to sell her jewellery to keep the animals in feed.
But marriage to Courage, who had fixed his engines with chewing gum when cut off from his family's money, had acclimatised her to a precarious life. During her marriage to Aspinall 'we went bust several times,' she recalled. 'I was quite used to it. John took the view that objects and pictures were for the good times, and in the bad times, they went.'
Their marriage was a remarkable success, lasting three decades until his final illness in 2000, during which she nursed him devotedly. Lady Annabel Goldsmith judged Sally to have been Aspinall's soulmate, recalling one visit when John told her that Sally was 'busy upstairs with the 'baby'. Somewhat baffled, I went upstairs and found her in the bedroom with a tiny baby gorilla in an incubator and a paediatric nurse from University College Hospital.'
Sally walked their tigers around Belgravia at night, with only one biting incident, provoked, she said, by 'wearing a coat that my big tiger didn't like. I banged him on the nose and he stomped out furiously.' In 1973 they gambled on expanding to a second zoo at Port Lympne; by 1991, more than a thousand animals were housed between the two premises.
She imbibed his philosophy: 'Aspers was my man, my dominant male,'' she observed after his death. 'I don't believe in this feminist stuff. Being 20 years older than me, he knew where he was going. He took you along because he was so exciting, whether you agreed with him or not. He respected the matriarch's role.'
He also admired her capability as a hostess, an inherited Curzon trait, while she credited 'Aspers' with making her grow up: 'He would look through people almost like a pane of glass, while accepting them for what they were. He knew me so well. He also respected me and loved me.'
As a romantic gesture, in 1984 he bought the Earl Howes' ancestral house in Curzon Street as grander premises for his club Aspinall's; less romantically, a few years later, on James Goldsmith's advice, he sold it at a massive profit days before the 1987 crash.
Lady Sarah Aspinall entered a familiar nightmare in 1995 when she was told that her son Jason Courage, an aspiring racing driver, had been knocked off his motorcycle; he was paralysed from the chest down, but learnt to race using hand controls. Amos, her other son with Piers Courage, ran a gorilla orphanage in the Congo and became director of overseas operations of the Aspinall Foundation. Bassa Aspinall, her third son, rebelled against his father's ambitions and became an artist in South Africa.
Her three sons survive her.
Lady Sarah Aspinall, born January 25 1945, died June 17 2025
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