WALKING WITH TIGERS
Born Sarah Marguerite Curzon, the only child of the third marriage of Francis, the Fifth Earl of Howe, and his wife, Sybil Boyter Johnson. She was always known as ‘Sally’.
Her father had served in the First World War. Afterwards, he became a Conservative MP and motor racing driver. Known as the ‘Old Man of Racing’, he later won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1971.
Sally was educated privately by a governess before being sent to a finishing school.
In her late teens and early twenties, Sally became a model and wore mini-skirts created by designer Mary Quant.
She started dating Eton-educated Piers ‘Porridge’ Courage, the heir to the brewing company. He was also obsessed with motor racing and took up the sport professionally. Sally said, “Piers was hungry for success. So was Daddy. Daddy did it the amateur way. Piers was there at the start of the modern sponsorship era.”
Piers and Sally were married in 1966. It was considered the highlight of the London social season, and the couple were the toast of the town, filling all the gossip columns.
They were to have two sons – Jason and Amos. Patrick Litchfield photographed the family at home.
Piers was offered a contract by the Williams Formula One team. He turned down Ferrari to accept this.
Her close friend, furniture designer Tessa Kennedy, invited Sally to a party at a country house in Kent called Howletts. It was owned by gambling tycoon John Aspinall.
When introduced to Aspinall, he asked her what her husband did for a liVing. When told he was a racing driver, Aspinall said, “Real men don’t race, but gamble.”
In 1970, Piers and Sally’s close friend, Bruce McLaren, was killed whilst testing a Formula One car at Goodwood.
Sally consoled Bruce’s widow, Patricia. She thought to herself, “That won’t happen to me. Piers will be OK.”
Two weeks later, at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, on lap 23, Piers lost control of his car and crashed into a bank. It turned into a fireball that burned for over an hour. Piers was killed instantly.
A distraught Sally was led from the stands. She returned to London, a widow with two small children. She found, to her surprise, that she had been left with a mountain of debts.
Sally had to go back to work as a model but also ran an upmarket florists.
She was unexpectedly contacted by John Aspinall. He had been recently divorced from his second wife, Belinda Musker, after the death of their infant daughter. (With his first wife, Jane Gordon Hastings, he had two children; Damian and Amanda).
Feeling lonely, Aspinall said, “I needed a woman. I knew Piers had just been killed so I asked her out to lunch.”
He wooed her by sending Sally a lorry full of flowers. Her housekeeper told her, “It’s like a jungle.”
Sally and John started dating and were married soon afterwards.
They had one son, named Bassa Wulfhere (after the grandfather of King Alfred the Great. John believed Anglo-Saxon names were truly English. He didn’t want his son to have a ‘foreign’ name).
John Aspinall was twenty years older than his new wife and was a larger-than-life character. He had taken the British government to court about the restrictive gambling laws and had won. Consequently, he owned the first licensed casino in Britain, the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, London.
He was a professional gambler himself, being part of a four-strong group of friends, with tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, nightclub owner Mark Birley and aristocrat Lord Lucan. The others nicknamed him ‘Aspers’ – and that is what Sally always called her second husband.
Aspinall also owned a wildlife sanctuary based at Howletts. It was particularly renowned for the gorilla breeding programme. The aim was to return as many animals into the wild as possible.
Sally threw herself into the upkeep of the zoo. In her first year, she brought up three baby gorillas, a tigress cub and a litter of wolves.
As a baby, their son, Bassa, was once handed by John, to a gorilla named Juju, who took him to the top of a very tall tree, to show to the other primates. “They congregated and inspected me, looked in my nappy and then brought me down to my mother and handed me back. If she (Juju) had dropped me, I’d have been killed. But of course, she didn’t.” No damage was done.
Their house in Belgravia was full of animals.
Sally was often seen taking a tiger for a walk in the area. There was only one biting incident. “The man was wearing a big coat my tiger didn’t like.” She got the big cat to release his victim by hitting him (the tiger) on the nose.
John would also take the tiger for a walk in Eaton Square at 3 a.m. This continued until it attacked a dog. “It killed an Alsatian with one swipe of it’s paw.”
Bears occasionally lived in their London home – and Sally was known to take new-born tiger cubs into her bed and bottle-fed baby cheetahs.
Their son, Bassa, complained that his mother turned up at his public-school sports day in an open-topped sportscar, with two Siberian tigers in the back seat.
Bassa grew up to have a difficult relationship with his father but was very close to Sally. “I was showered with love and I had my mother to protect me.”
John gave public support to his friend Lord Lucan, when the latter was accused of murdering his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett. He always claimed Lucan was innocent, but was also the first to claim his friend was probably dead. There was always a suspicion (never proved) that Aspinall helped his friend to escape.
Being a gambler, John’s fortunes always fluctuated. He lost all of his money in the 1974-5 economic crash. They lost everything. He sold the Clermont Club and all the pictures and antiques, as well as Sally’s jewellery. John also re-mortgaged their home(s).
Sally was philosophical about this. “We went bust several times. 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. He never garaged his money.”
It took four years for John Aspinall to fully recover financially. During this period, Sally worked tirelessly at the zoo.
When John was back on his feet, he bought another safari park / zoo, at Port Lympne, eighteen miles away from Howletts.
In 1984, as a romantic gesture, John bought Sally’s ancestral home, Keddleston Hall, and gifted it to her. He said, “She is a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable.”
In 1987, on the advice of financier and friend, James Goldsmith, he sold the house for a profit – days before another financial crash.
In 1993, John was diagnosed with jawbone cancer.
Tragedy struck Sally again in 1995. Whilst celebrating former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s birthday, at Claridge’s, her eldest son, Jason (aged 28), was involved in a serious accident when his motorbike hit a car.
The police were too afraid to interrupt the party, so Sally did not learn of the accident until she got home.
Jason was permanently disabled from the waist down and had to use a wheelchair.
John’s health deteriorated and Sally became his full-time carer for seven years. He died in 2000, leaving Sally with an inheritance of around £90 million.
Sally said of him, “Aspers was my man, my dominant male. I don’t believe in this feminist stuff.”
Sally immediately moved into a cottage on the Howletts estate and spent her time working in the gardens there – and at Port Lympne.
John’s son from his first marriage, Damian Aspinall, took over the running of the zoos. He married actress Donna Air, who became great friends with Sally.
Sally’s son Jason worked in property. Like his father, Piers, he was obsessed with motor racing and had a specially designed automobile to enable him to race.
Younger son Amos caught the wildlife ‘bug’ and now runs a gorilla orphanage in the Congo.
Bassa moved to South Africa to become an artist. Sally moved out there in 2019 to be close to Bassa and his wife, Donne.
Sally’s great niece, Cressida Bonas, dated Prince Harry for a while – prior to his marriage to Meghan Markle.
It was reported (although never confirmed) that in her later years, fraudsters cheated Sally out of millions of pounds.
Sally died aged eighty. Her son, Bassa, said she deeply loved both of her husbands, but, “I think part of her died with Piers.”
He added, “She was a very tough, wonderful woman who survived many tragedies and kept her strength.”
RIP – Remained Incredibly Positive
