[BITList] Monte Carlo mountebank

[John Feltham]

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Zaharoff,  Basil  [formerly Zacharias Basileios Zacharoff]  (1849-1936), arms dealer, was born on 6 October 1849 at Mugla, Anatolia, the only son and eldest of the four children of Basilius Zacharoff (d. 1878) of Constantinople, a notary, commodity dealer, and importer of attar of roses, and his (reportedly blind) wife, Helena Antonides (d. 1879). Afterwards he lied promiscuously about his antecedents: sometimes he claimed a Polish father and French-Levantine mother; he bamboozled the British ambassador at Paris into believing that he was an Oxford University-educated Russo-Greek; when intriguing in Romania he persuaded the British minister at Bucharest 'that he was born at Jassy of a Roumanian mother nee Mavrocordato, and that he has revisited Roumania since his early youth'  (Sir H. Dering, dispatch 580, 31 Oct 1922, TNA: PRO, FO 371/7698). Supposedly when young he worked as a brothel-tout and as an arsonist for the Constantinople firemen, who made money on salvage.

Masquerading as a Russian officer called Prince Gortzacoff, General de Kieff, he went to London, where he married, on 14 October 1872, Emily Ann Burrows (b. 1845?), daughter of John Burrows, builder, of Bristol. He was the first man extradited from Belgium to Britain under a new treaty in 1872 and was prosecuted for embezzlement of merchandise worth £1000 and securities exceeding £6000. Released on his own recognizance of £100 after offering compensation, he fled in 1873 to Cyprus, where (using sundry aliases) he set up as a storekeeper and boldly unscrupulous contractor. He settled in the USA in 1881 and became interested in ranches and railroad-building. Exposed after a bigamous marriage to an heiress, Jeannie Frances Billings, in New York in 1885, he assumed the name of Basil Zaharoff.

Known to intimates as Zedzed, Zaharoff began selling armaments for the Anglo-Swedish firm of Nordenfelt in Greece in 1877, and he developed the notorious systeme Zaharoff in which he played off one country against another to create a demand. Having sold one of the world's first submarines to Greece in 1885, he sold two to Turkey in 1886. (These prototypes proved too unsafe to use.) Quick-firing guns were, however, his chief commodity in the 1880s and 1890s. Bribery was a formal preliminary rather than a determinant of the arms trade in the markets where he concentrated. A brilliantly adaptable linguist, he had a truly cosmopolitan outlook. Having engineered Nordenfelt's merger with the rival company of Hiram Maxim in 1888, he visited Russia to sell the new Maxim machine-gun, and then Chile, Peru, and Brazil in 1888-9. When the Vickers steel company acquired the Maxim-Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company, he was retained by the new combine in 1897 and for thirty years acted, in the phrase of its financial comptroller, Sir Vincent Caillard, as 'our General Representative for business abroad'  (Caillard to Sir A. Chamberlain, 23 April 1925, TNA: PRO, FO 371/10604).

Maxim-Nordenfelt had a Spanish light-armaments works called Placencia, of which Zaharoff became a director in 1896; from this starting point he 'created' Vickers' business in Spain  (Zaharoff to G. Sim, 18 Feb 1929, CUL, Vickers MSS, Vickers microfilm R333). Vickers not only sold weaponry to the Spanish armed forces but in 1909 formed a new naval arsenal in collaboration with the state. Zaharoff's connection with Spain was intensified by a long-standing amour with a royal duchess, the paternity of whose three daughters was attributed to him. In Russia too he did much business. During 1902-4 Vickers, Sons, and Maxim paid him a total of £109,000; in 1905, at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Vickers disbursed £86,000 to him in commission. He exercised limited, mercenary influence at the Spanish and Russian courts before 1914 but had no political importance in London or Paris. T. P. O'Connor described his first meeting with 'Zed' in 1913: 'there entered with brisk step a very tall thin man with the air of a great fencer, with a long thin face, a slight grey moustache, and eyes of blue grey, steely almost in their strength, their penetration, and their courage'  (Fyfe, 236-7). Osbert Sitwell found him 'both evil and imposing about his figure' and likened him to a vulture:

the beaky face, the hooded eye, the wrinkled neck, the full body, the impression of physical power and the capacity to wait, the sombre alertness. ... He was in outlook merely a super-croupier. And once ... I heard him introducing himself to a millionaire friend of mine with the startling phrase, 'I am Basil Zaharoff: I have sixteen millions!' (Sitwell, 267-8)

Zaharoff was a mountebank who indulged in self-mystification and encouraged fabulous rumours. He lived sumptuously in Paris (with a famous set of gold dinner plate afterwards sold to King Farouk of Egypt), took French citizenship in 1908, and became a shareholder in the Banque de France. As early as 1891 he founded the Express Bank, a bureau de change in place de l'Opera in Paris, and in 1918 he jointly formed the Banque de la Seine, which dabbled in Mesopotamian oil diplomacy (and set up the Banque Commerciale de la Mediterranee at Constantinople in 1920) but was wound up in 1925.

Zaharoff's international mischief-making was as much egotistical in motive as commercial or political. In 1912 he instigated an offer of the Portuguese throne to Prince Christopher of Greece, to whom he confided: 'I have been lucky all my life; if I hadn't been, I should have been murdered long ago, or else serving a life sentence in some prison'  (Prince Christopher, 115). Zaharoff was used by the British government to induce neutral Greece to join the allied cause in 1915, and with the cognizance of David Lloyd George he was sent to Switzerland to bribe Enver Pasha and other Turkish leaders with £10 million in gold to declare an armistice in 1917. His reports of this expedition are melodramatic if not mendacious. He was created GBE in 1918 and GCB in 1919: George V, who detested him, resented his use of titles, which, as a French citizen, were only honorary. For some years Zaharoff subsidized the Greek politician Eleutherios Venizelos, who in turn helped him in dealings with foreign powers, but ultimately the two men quarrelled. He was believed to have financed the Greek expedition which landed at Smyrna in June 1919, and was reviled for his part in promoting the Graeco-Turkish War which ended in such bloody humiliation in 1922. Like his interventions in oil diplomacy, his influence has been exaggerated.

Zaharoff was indubitably impressive. His poses convinced so worldly an Englishman as Viscount Bertie of Thame, who wrote:

He owns half the shares in Vickers Maxim, is the largest shareholder of the Monte Carlo Casino and has big holdings in American Railways and Steel Trust shares; I am told on excellent authority that he is worth over ten millions sterling. He is a personal friend of Walter Long, Bonar Law and Steel-Maitland and knows most of the present British Cabinet. He is said to have many of the leading French politicians in his pocket. I have known him for over ten years. I believe him to be a very just man though hard. He is anti-semitic and his numerous enemies accuse him of being a poseur and to be prone to exaggeration. ... I have a great personal regard for him. (Lord Bertie of Thame, memorandum on Zaharoff, 24 June 1917, TNA: PRO, FO 800/175)
Most of these claims were bogus or overblown: his holdings in Vickers were small; though he had apparently made financial loans to the casino, his syndicate only took control in 1923 and reduced its investment by 1926. He had some small French newspaper interests. Together with Steel-Maitland and Sir Leander Jameson he briefly had a financial stake in the Sunday Times before it was bought by William Berry in 1915; during 1922 he teased Sir Campbell Stuart with a plan to buy The Times after Lord Northcliffe's death. The ambassador to Berlin, Edgar Vincent, Viscount D'Abernon, told Stresemann in 1923 that Zaharoff 'was the modern Monte Christo, and was, or had been, fabulously rich. Everything he touched had turned to gold'  (Viscount D'Abernon, 2.282). Zaharoff donated £28,000 to the Sorbonne in Paris to found a chair of aviation (1909) and endowed similar chairs at Petrograd and the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London (1919). To celebrate the armistice he endowed with £25,000 the Marshal Foch chair of French literature at Oxford University, and received an honorary DCL in 1920.

In 1924 Zaharoff finally married his mistress, Marie del Pilar Antonia-Angela-Patrocinio-Simona de Muguiro y Beruete (1868-1926), recently widowed by the death of Francisco Maria Isabel de Borbon y Borbon, duke of Marchena, and in that year created duchess of Villafranca de los Caballeros in her own right. After her death, which made him dangerously ill, he adopted her two surviving daughters, who inherited his fortune. Later in the 1920s gout restricted his travelling and he became very deaf.

An unauthorized biography by Richard Lewinsohn issued by Victor Gollancz in 1929 excited the interest of other investigative journalists. As part of the campaign against private manufacturers of armaments, radicals such as Fenner Brockway in The Bloody Traffic (1933) attacked Zaharoff and his fellow merchants of death as fomenters of war. After reading the Union of Democratic Control's pamphlet, The Secret International, Zaharoff wrote that '25 of the facts and 75 of the conclusions are incorrect, yet many of its allusions are correct'  (Zaharoff to Sir M. W. Jenkinson, 28 July 1932, CUL, Vickers MSS, Vickers microfilm R338). His reputation became an embarrassment to Vickers, particularly during the deliberations of the royal commission on the private manufacture of and trading in arms (1935-6).

Zaharoff died of heart failure on 27 November 1936 at the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, Monaco, and was interred in a mausoleum in the grounds of his chateau at Balincourt, Arronville, near Pontoise (Val-d'Oise), France. There are disobliging allusions to him in Ezra Pound's Cantos, and he is the anti-hero of Michael Edwardes's novel The Man from the other Shore (1981).

Richard Davenport-Hines 

Sources  CUL, Vickers MSS + Parl. Arch., Lloyd George MSS + TNA: PRO, Foreign Office MSS + A. Allfrey, Man of arms (1989) + R. Lewinsohn, The man behind the scenes: the career of Sir Basil Zaharoff 'The Mystery Man of Europe' (1929) + D. McCormick, Pedlar of death (1965) + R. Neumann, Zaharoff the armaments king (1938) + H. Fyfe, T. P. O'Connor (1934) + O. Sitwell, Great morning (1948) + Prince Christopher of Greece, Memoirs (1938) + E. Vincent, Viscount D'Abernon, An ambassador of peace, 2: The years of crisis: June 1922 - December 1923 (1929) + C. Trebilcock, The Vickers brothers (1977) + J. D. Scott, Vickers: a history (1962) + M. Edwardes, The man from the other shore (1981)
Archives CAC Cam., papers | Col. U., Rare Book and Manuscript Library, corresp. with William Shaw + CUL, Vickers MSS + NA Scot., Steel-Maitland MSS + Parl. Arch., Lloyd George MSS + Wilts. & Swindon HC, Long MSS FILM BFI NFTVA, documentary footage
Likenesses  photograph, 1924, Societe des Bains de Mer, Monaco; repro. in Allfrey, Man of arms · photograph, 1924?, Hult. Arch.; repro. in McCormick, Pedlar of death · photographs, 1924-8, repro. in Lewinsohn, The man behind the scenes, facing pp. 82 and 200 · photograph, c.1925, BL; repro. in Allfrey, Man of arms · three photographs, repro. in McCormick, Pedlar of death, facing pp. 97, 145, 193 [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £193,103 17s. 7d.: administration with will, 15 Feb 1937, CGPLA Eng. & Wales