Bassa Wulfhere Aspinall’s life was all mapped out when he was six months old. His father, John, took him from his mother and handed him to Juju, a gorilla.
Cradling him in her huge, hairy arms, 180lb Juju promptly shimmied to the top of her enclosure, so she and her gorilla pals at Howletts Zoo could all have a good gawp.
‘They congregated and inspected me, looked in my nappy, then brought me down to my mother and handed me back,’ says Bassa, now 49 and an artist living in South Africa. ‘If she’d dropped me, I’d have been killed. But of course she didn’t.’
Instead, he went on to share his nursery, his cot and sometimes even his bottle with three baby gorillas from West Africa and the Congo.
His playmate was an elephant called Assam. He was cheered on at school sports days by his mother and two tiger cubs on leads.
‘My father used to walk a tiger on a leash at 3am in Eaton Square in London [until it killed a neighbour’s Alsatian with one swipe of its paw],’ he says.
‘Like other people might have a dog or a cat, we had lynxes, wolves, tigers, gorillas. They became my family.’
Every holiday was animal-related.
49-year-old Bassa Aspinall ran away from his birthright - the family's Aspinall Foundation - and ended up in South Africa working as an artist, telemarketer, wannabe gangster, hotelier, businessman and husband
Bassa went on to share his nursery, his cot and sometimes even his bottle with three baby gorillas from West Africa and the Congo. Above: An 18-month-old Bassa plays with Juju the gorilla at Howletts Zoo
‘All my friends were going to the South of France or skiing or to Cornwall and I’d be dragged off to Sumatra to find the Sumatran rhino,’ he says.
‘I dreaded to hear where we were going for the next summer holidays. Not the bloody Galapagos Islands again!’
Every job he had as a teenager was carefully curated: ‘He forced me to be a tiger keeper and a gorilla keeper!’
That was because Bassa — younger son of the notorious casino owner and conservationist John Aspinall and his third wife, Lady Sarah — was earmarked to run the family wild animal business, the Aspinall Foundation.
Instead, it was Damian, the elder son from their father’s first marriage, who ultimately took control of the enterprise.
And in recent months he has run into some controversy over his management of certain aspects of it.
‘My father was obsessed with me being the animal heir and he could be very, very forceful,’ Bassa tells me. ‘He pushed and pushed and pushed.’
So hard that Bassa rebelled, ran away to South Africa at the age of 19 and has spent the past 30 years doing anything and everything — telemarketer, wannabe gangster, hotelier, businessman, husband, father of four and, lately, self-taught pop artist — except working with animals.
The closest he gets to them now is in his huge paintings, up to four metres square: he paints subjects ranging from film icons to rhinos and cheetahs, and six of his works will be on display at StART art fair at the Saatchi Gallery in London next month.
By his own account, Bassa is introverted, antisocial, doesn’t give interviews (until now), has no involvement with the Aspinall Foundation, only occasionally sees his half-brothers from his mother’s first marriage, and has no contact with Damian.
Which seems a terrible shame, as they all shared so much. Not least the pressure of growing up in the very choppy wake of their father.
It was John Aspinall who founded the toffs’ favourite casino, The Clermont Club. And also John who may — or may not — have helped his old pal Lord Lucan evade justice after he murdered his children’s nanny in 1974.
‘Dad lived his life the way he wanted,’ says Bassa. ‘He was like a CEO of a company. An alpha male who didn’t want our noise and energy around all the time, so in London they would live in the big house and we’d live 50 yards away in a mews house with a nanny.’
It is well-known that ‘Aspers’, as he was known to his chums, was an extraordinary force.
Charismatic, deeply sexist, clever, ruthless and with a tendency to bullying, he was obsessed with conservation, telling people he would happily sacrifice not only his life but the lives of all his family if he could save just one species.
But Bassa insists
