Vincent Poklewski Koziell
Aristocratic Polish refugee from the Nazis, bon vivant and raconteur who during a picaresque life was always determined to have fun
VINCENT POKLEWSKI KOZIELL, who has died aged 88, was born into an noble Polish family and arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee from Nazism. To earn his keep he sold vacuum cleaners in Wandsworth, washing machines in Glasgow and houses in Sardinia. He worked as a butcher in the Bronx, joined the “Mad Men” advertising world of 1950s London, ran a nightclub in Mayfair and later moved to Ireland where his house was burnt down by the IRA and a mushroom growing business failed, but he found his niche as a company director.
Throughout these ups and downs, as revealed in his book of reminiscences, The Ape Has Stabbed Me, published in 2014, he was always determined to have fun, exemplifying, as the writer Philip Marsden put it, “that wonderful Polish quality of polot, meeting danger and adversity with the courage not just to survive, but to survive in style”. A review in the Spectator, however, detected “a charitable, kindly, sensitive man, hidden behind a mask of totally ruthless frivolity”.
Vincent’s father, Alfons (“Alik”), came from a family of Polish nobility who lived in a part of Poland that was occupied by Russia from the early 19th century until the end of the First World War. His great-grandfather, also Alfons, became an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur in Siberia (where he had been dispatched after picking a quarrel with a St Petersburg princeling), eventually becoming the largest supplier of vodka in Siberia.
Among other assets he ended up with 2,500 square kilometres of land and a series of gold, sapphire and asbestos mines in the Urals, and established schools, hospitals and churches for Polish exiles who had served time in the gulags. He was so rich that his children (including Vincent’s grandfather, also Vincent) were known as the “Siberian Rockefellers”. A great uncle Stanislaw was one of Fabergé’s best customers.
Vincent’s mother Zoia was born a de Stoeckl, an Austrian family in Russian service. Her grandfather, Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, had been a diplomat in the Imperial Russian embassy in Washington, and was responsible for selling Alaska to the Americans in 1867.
Her father moved to Paris where he became Comptroller of the Household to the Grand Duke Michael of Russia, who had been exiled for contracting a morganatic marriage. In 1909 he moved to St Petersburg as equerry to the Grand Duchess George. Zoia’s Irish-born mother Agnes, who would publish several books of fascinating memoirs, became known in the family as “Auntie Ag of the Courts of Europe”. Zoia became a great court favourite and maid of honour to the last Empress of Russia.
The Poklewski Koziell wealth disappeared overnight in the Russian Revolution, when many members of the family escaped to Britain via Japan. Alik, who had served in the Imperial Guard, went off with his regiment in the White Army and when the fighting was finished made his way to England, where he met Zoia de Stoeckl at a weekend party of Lady Cunard’s.
For a time Alik worked as commercial counsellor at the Polish embassy in London, where Vincent, the younger of their two sons (another had died in infancy), was born on June 30 1929. Finding it difficult to make ends meet on £350 per annum, however (in Russia he had had an annual allowance of £50,000), Alik moved to Poland to run a mining and smelting business in Katowice, Silesia, leaving his wife and two sons in the care of his mother-in-law, who was living in reduced circumstances in a semi-detached house in Edgware.
In 1933 the family joined Alik in Poland, where they remained until the outbreak of war in 1939. The highlights of Vincent’s life there were frequent visits to the vast zamek (castle) of Lancut belonging to Count Alfred Potocki, a close family friend, where he enjoyed himself driving a miniature Rolls-royce, took part in shooting parties and picnics, processed to Mass behind the castle’s liveried brass band, and sat alongside the count as he drove his four-in-hand at breakneck speed through surrounding villages, with two grooms hanging on behind blowing their horns to warn anyone in the way.
The Lancut establishment included more than 50 indoor staff and numerous log carriers, gardeners, coachmen, stable lads and chauffeurs, and in 1938 Vincent’s parents brought their friends, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, to stay, Princess Marina having known Zoia since they were young girls living in Paris. By the following summer, however, war was imminent, and with German divisions massing on the border a few kilometres away from Katowice, Alik sent his family back to London by train, a week before the invasion.
Ladycross, the Sussex prep school to which young Vincent was dispatched, came as a terrible shock: “Not having as yet heard of concentration camps, I thought that I was quite simply in prison, and on punishment rations at that.” The headmaster administered enthusiastic discipline with a leather strap known as the “tolly”. On unannounced days, when he took Latin lessons, “one could always tell when one of these lessons was going on from the steady sound of the thwacks, like a threshing shed at harvest time”. Vincent, however, kept other school bullies at bay by bribing them with gobstoppers, smuggled in by his mother in books of history, hollowed-out, to pass matron’s customs inspection.
In the meantime, his parents had been taken under the wing of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and moved into a “courtesy” cottage on Coppins, the Kents’ estate at Iver, Buckinghamshire. During school holidays young Vincent attended many grand lunches and dinners at Coppins, where the guest list included Winston Churchill and Chips Channon, and members of the Royal Family, including Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, with whom he played charades. Vincent would become one of the present Duke of Kent’s closest friends.
He went on to Downside, which “except for the dreaded wartime food, and the totally unnatural concentration on sports” came as a welcome relief after Ladycross. Having failed to win a scholarship to Cambridge, and after also failing the medical for National Service in the Army, he found a job as a three-pounds-a week office boy in the Hammersmith branch office of Electrolux, from where he had to ask for a day off to attend the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip of Greece. He was soon promoted to sales representative and, after “endlessly vacuuming a carpet on a raised stand at the ideal Homes exhibition at Olympia and other similar venues”, sold built-in refrigerators for council flats, then washing machines for commercial laundries.
His evenings and weekends were spent either at Coppins or with his older brother Alex (who would die aged 41 having “overtaxed his liver with a final bottle of champagne”) in the bars and nightclubs of Mayfair and Soho or at debutante dances and country house parties – which were “delightfully free apart from the laundry bill”. Resigning from Electrolux, he was invited by a friend to join him in setting up a chain of supermarkets and, after pawning a pair of Georgian candlesticks, set off aboard the Queen Mary to learn the ropes with the A&P grocery chain in New York.
The supermarket venture in Britain never did get off the ground, but instead he got a job with the advertising firm of Coleman Prentice & Varley, where he lasted three years before his lack of professional skills caught up with him. The end came after he attended a fashion show given by one of his clients, a lingerie company catering for the fuller figure, and found himself unable to suppress his giggles when a woman “with the biggest tits I have ever seen” thundered down the catwalk “with a bra that must have been designed by the engineers who built the Forth Bridge”.
While working at CPV, he took over the management of a struggling Polish basement restaurant-cum-nightclub called Chez Sophie, “the sort of place where you took your girlfriend rather than your fiancée”. “Sadly the takings were not too good as most of my friends signed their bills and failed to pay”, and he eventually resigned.
In 1958, against the advice of family and friends, he married Natalie Potocka, a member of a leading Polish family, but “after one year of turmoil, madness and troubles, as well as my wife’s tendency to be unable to confine herself to the marital bed” he ended it by supplying evidence of his “adultery” with a woman hired for the purpose by his wife’s lawyer.
At about the same time he was offered a job in a private bank by a Romanian friend, and having swotted up with Teach Yourself Banking, turned up for work at offices near Trafalgar Square, where apart from his friend, an accountant and a secretary, he was the only employee.
His first pay cheque bounced, but over five years of “riding a shaky financial surfboard on top of a high wave”, his boss introduced him to a variety of exotic locations and establishments around the world, “where I was able to fill in the gaps in my education that were not catered for by the monks at Downside”.
As a schoolboy Vincent had stayed at Luttrellstown Castle, near Phoenix Park, Dublin, the home of Aileen Plunket, a member of the Guinness family who entertained there on a vast scale. He became a devoted member of the Luttrellstown “set” and it was there, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1960, that he met his second wife, Annabel de las Casas, a 25-year-old widow with a small son.
In the early 1960s Vincent became involved in developing beach side leisure complexes in Sardinia, and after his marriage to Annabel, with whom he had a son and two daughters, he built a house there at Porto Rafael, where they lived for a time.
In 1965 they bought a Georgian house close to the centre of Dublin, where Vincent became a director of Brown Thomas, an Irish department store owned by the family of an old Downside chum, and joined the Kildare Street Club for boozy lunches, becoming club chairman after its merger with the University Club.
He became involved in various other enterprises, including a delicatessen which paid him dividends in fivers smelling of smoked salmon, a short-lived mushroom business, and a dry cleaning company of which he was briefly chairman. The Poklewski Koziells were also granted a life lease by Harry Erne, owner of Crom Castle, on a tumbledown Victorian vicarage in Co Fermanagh, which they set about restoring, only for the IRA to burn it down during the Troubles.
In the mid-1970s they bought Stacumny House, a large Georgian house near Celbridge, Co Kildare, but in 1977 Annabel died of cancer aged 42 and Vincent was left struggling to run the house, while organising the education and clothing of four children as well as juggling business and charity work.
In 1980 he married Vicky (née Vigors), whom he had met in Jamaica at the house of his friend Nigel Pemberton, after her separation from her husband Ivor, 3rd Viscount Wimborne. They began their marriage the way they meant to go on with a massive party at Stacumny. For Vincent’s 60th birthday in 1989, Vicky and the children organised a memorable party at nearby Castletown House, followed by a large “hangover lunch” at Stacumny (attended by Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall among others) at which he was presented with a huge birthday cake, out of which popped a strip-o-gram girl brandishing a whip.
Among other charitable activities, Vincent Poklewski Koziell served as chairman of the Irish Cancer Society and established its home care service (similar to the Macmillan Nurses in England). In later life he bought a house in France and helped his friend Galen Weston establish a residential polo, golf and tennis club in Florida, before finally retiring to a house in Harrington Gardens, Kensington.
He is survived by his wife Vicky, by the two daughters, son and stepson of his marriage to Annabel and by the stepson of his marriage to Vicky.