Peter Rachman

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Peter Rachman (1920 — 1962) was a London landlord in the mid-20th century, active in the Notting Hill area in the 1950s and 1960s. He became so notorious for his exploitation of tenants that the word "Rachmanism" entered the OED as a synonym for any greedy, unscrupulous landlord.

Rachman was born in Poland in 1920, the son of a Jewish dentist. He was not interned by the Nazis, but did spend time in a Soviet labour camp before fleeing to the United Kingdom. Rachman soon built up a property empire in north London consisting of more than one hundred mansion blocks and several nightclubs.

His modus operandi was to evict the sitting tenants of the properties he purchased using violent methods (as they had statutory protection against high rent increases) and then to pack the properties with recent immigrants from the West Indies. New tenants did not have the same protection under the law as the sitting tenants had possessed following the relaxation of rent controls by the Conservative government in 1957, and so could be charged any amount Rachman wished. Most of the new tenants were Afro-Caribbean immigrants who had no choice but to accept the high rents as it was difficult for them to obtain housing in London at the time due to the colour bar.

Rachman did not achieve general notoriety until after his death in 1962, when the Profumo affair of 1963 hit the headlines and it emerged that Mandy Rice-Davies had been one of his mistresses and that he had owned the infamous mews house in Marylebone where Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler had plied their trade.

As full details of his activities were revealed, there was a call for new legislation to prevent such practices led by Ben Parkin, MP for North Paddington, who coined the phrase "Rachmanism".