How landlord Rachman’s name became a household word for the worst reasons

Long before Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant made Notting Hill a globally familiar name for romantic comedy lovers, the West London enclave had become one of the capital’s most desirable and expensive neighbourhoods.

But go back to the 1950s and you would find nothing romantic or comic about the area, and it was desirable only for the very poor, notably the first wave of immigrants from the Caribbean, lured to Britain to work in the public services.

With nowhere else to go, they crowded into the rundown terraces of Notting Hill and Paddington, at the mercy of the men who ran the rental market there. But most of them didn’t want to rent to black people. One who didn’t mind was Peter Rachman, who became notorious as the king of the slum landlords and who became one of those rare individuals whose name becomes a household word.

Thus Rachmanism was born in the early 1960s after his dealings were exposed by the press, initially by the Sunday Times and then in parliament by the new leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, who seized the opportunity to denounce a man whose deeds were indefensible.

He is buried at Bushey Jewish cemetery, his tombstone bearing the words “Deeply Mourned”, which was stretching the truth to say the least

By then, Rachman was dead, of a heart condition at the age of 42. He is buried at Bushey Jewish cemetery, his tombstone bearing the words “Deeply Mourned”, which was stretching the truth to say the least. A year later a memorial notice appeared in this newspaper.

Rachman packed a lot into his short life. He was born Perec Rachman in 1919 in Lvov, then in Poland and with a large Jewish community, now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. It was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and occupied by the Germans in 1941, leading to the mass murder of most of the Jewish population, including Rachman’s parents. He himself escaped that fate by being condemned to forced labour by the Russians, being released in 1941 to join General Anders’s Polish army in Tashkent and ending up in England in 1946 having served in the Middle East and Italy.

After a series of dead-end jobs he found work in a Bayswater property letting firm and soon set up on his own. As Neil Root puts it in this well-researched if sometimes repetitive and lightly-edited biography, his traumatic early life equipped him well to prosper in the largely unregulated and corrupt property market of the time: “He lived for the day, saw his opportunities and grabbed them.”

His m.o. was simple: buy up cheap, rundown properties and let them to immigrants at well above the going rate. If they complained about the appalling state of their homes, Rachman would send in his heavies to throw them out. If they tried to get a reduction via the rent tribunals, he or his goons would “persuade” them to withdraw the application.

To keep the authorities (far from diligent anyway) off his track, he hid the real ownership of most of his properties via cronies and front companies. Many of his tenants were prostitutes and he took a share of their earnings, but the police could never prove it.

As he prospered he branched out into Soho nightclubs, which attracted the attention of the Kray brothers, always keen to extend their protection racket further afield from their East End stronghold. To buy them off, Rachman set up a nightclub whose entire takings went to the feared twins. The range of his contacts was extensive: he had affairs with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, central figures in the Profumo affair, and early on in his career had a fleeting encounter with the young Michael Heseltine, who was also involved (legitimately) in the West London property business, though Root has the future politician graduating from Pembridge College, Oxford, a seat of learning I have been unable to identify.

The only people who tried to expose Rachman during his lifetime were the local paper, a London county councillor and Ben Parkin, the constituency MP. As Rachman started feeling the heat, he sold his Notting Hill empire to concentrate on more ambitious property schemes, in Britain and the US, but he died before anything came of them. It took seven years to sort out his liabilities as he had never paid any tax.

Although some of Rachman’s early backers were, like him, Jewish, Root doesn’t labour the point. His purported sympathy for the immigrants he housed might have been connected to his own tribulations as a young man, though that would have been small consolation to the tenants thrown out of their miserable lodgings in the middle of the night.