ROSEMARY ABERDOUR
PARTY-MAD “Lady” Rosemary Aberdour lived lavishly in 1980s London.
The rent on her penthouse apartment beside the Thames was £2,500 a week even then. Her extravagances included a personal staff of five, £50,000 on flowers, £100,000 for two yachting holidays in the Caribbean and more than £200,000 at a jeweller’s.
She hired drag queens from a West End cabaret for a Valentine’s Day party and spent £50,000 creating a Chinese temple for a birthday party at The Savoy.
She once hired a helicopter to fly her secretary and herself to a party in Wales. She sent her chauffeur to Harrods to buy fillet steak for her labrador dog, Jeeves, and hired a car and driver to take him for walkies – in Scotland.
But Aberdour was no Lady. She was a bookkeeper from Essex who had invented her title and an aristocratic family history.
As deputy director of the London-based charity National Hospital Development Foundation, she had stolen and squandered over £2.7million.
When one of her forged cheques was discovered in 1991, the 30-year-old conwoman fled to Brazil, but was persuaded to return by her faithful fiancé, who she later wed.
In court the following year, Rosemary Aberdour was sentenced to four years in prison. Her lawyer said: “She spent all the money on a grand scale. It was like the compulsion of a gambler.
“The so-called friends, who sponged off her ill-gotten gains, have evaporated like the bubbles in the champagne.
‘’The cars and the jewels have gone back to their rightful owners. The pretty balloons have long since burst and the party’s over.”