ASPINALL, Lady Sarah (Sally) Marguerite (Lady Sarah Marguerite nee CURZON) 1945-2025
Richard R
From the Telegraph of 21 June 2025: ASPINALL Lady Sarah Aspinall died peacefully at her home in Cape Town on 17th June 2025 aged 80. Adored wife to John Aspinall and Piers Courage, sister to Frances, Anne and Susie, beloved mother to Jason, Amos and Bassa, and devoted grandmother. Sally, as she was affectionately known, was also a great friend to many and will be buried at Penn Church in Buckinghamshire with her father the late Earl Howe. Funeral details to follow with a memorial in London later in the year.
She was d of 5th Earl HOWE 1884-1964 and his 3rd w (her 2nd h) Sybil Boyter 1900-99 d of Capt Francis JOHNSON 1859-1940 and Marguerite Lucie MATHISON 1876-1966. She m 1st 1966 Piers Raymond 1942-1970 s of Richard Hubert COURAGE 1915-94 scion of that brewing and gentry family of Edgcote and Jean Elizabeth Agnes WATSON 1918-77, and had two sons. She m 2nd 1972 as his 3rd wife John Victor 1926-2000 s of Robert Stivala ASPINALL 1894-1954 [?scion of that gentry family of Standen Hall] by his 20 June 1923 m (Mussorie, Bengal, India) to as her 1st h Mary Grace HORN 1904-87 (Lady Osborne, wid of Sir George Osborne 16th Bt) and had a further son.
colinp
Lady Sarah Aspinall, model who married into a zoo empire and took her tigers for walks in Belgravia
Her first husband was the racing driver Piers Courage, who was killed in a ball of flames at the Dutch Grand Prix in 1970
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 [….]
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.” [….]
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 […]
As a romantic gesture, in 1984 he bought her family’s 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