Ezekiel Elia Shahmoon was a merchant from an Iraqi family who became wealthy through gold and silver trading. He purchased Trosley Towers in 1935 following the death of Sir Philip Waterlow and had it demolished the following year. It is believed that he intended to build a replacement property but was prevented from doing so by a change in business fortunes and the advent of WW2. The estate was subsequently acquired by the Government for the creation of the Officer Cadet Training Unit during the war, and was later sold to Croudace Homes Ltd., which developed part of the estate into Vigo village in the 1960s. Ezekiel Shamoon continued to live in North Lodge, Harvel Road, until his death aged 81 in 1972.

His parents were Elia Rahmin Shahmoon (b. 1865; d. 1954) and Sarah Somekh (b. 1873; d. 1967). He was the first of eight children, with three brothers and four sisters. The family were part of the Jewish population of Baghdad, which had grown rapidly in the late 1800s. During his childhood, the Jewish population of Baghdad reached 50,000, a quarter of the city’s population.

In 1907, Ezekiel (17 yrs) and his brother Salomon ‘Charlie’ (14 yrs) left Baghdad and went to Bombay. After a short time in India, the two brothers moved on to Shanghai, China, where they lived with their uncle, Sassoon Somekh, their mother’s brother, and their aunt Rebecca. Ezekiel’s father also had business interests in Shanghai, where there was a large Jewish Community.

Ezekiel Shahmoon started his career as an office boy in China, and he and his brother became wealthy after WW1 began in 1914 by selling food to Europe, making business deals (including interests in rubber), and trading gold and silver on the Stock Market. By this time, they had been joined by their brother, Ezra. One newspaper reported that in 1917, he had brokered a £4m deal with the British Government.

Very sadly, his sister Rahel became ill at her wedding a short time after the photograph was taken and died within a week. As a lasting tribute, her father raised funds and added them to her dowry to rebuild a property (formerly the Taawen School) in the centre of the Jewish quarter of Baghdad, with modern classrooms, a science lab, a gymnasium, a stage, and a beautiful Synagogue. It was called the Rahel Shahmoon school and was inaugurated in 1924 by Chief Rabbi Hakham Ezra Dangoor on the occasion of Elia Shahmoon’s first visit to his school following his return from Shanghai.

By this time, Mr Shahmoon had a business address in London (9-13 King William Street near Cannon Street) but lived at 68 Peking Road, Shanghai. He was described in various travel documents as a French citizen, with his race and religion listed as ‘Hebrew’.

He travelled on at least one occasion from Shanghai to London via Vancouver, Seattle, and New York, and by 1925, he was described as a China Merchant trading as Shahmoon’s Stock, with an address at 165 Fenchurch Street, London, EC3.

Early in 1934, Mr Shahmoon was included on a US list of ‘Hoarders of Silver’ as he owned more than 50,000 oz of silver. He had eight long futures contracts to buy silver at a future date at the price on the day the contract was issued, so he was hoping for a rise in silver’s price. On August 9, 1934, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that all privately owned silver (not coins) in the US should be surrendered to the Treasury in return for a payment of 50¢ per troy ounce.

A major aim of the 1934 silver nationalisation was to mobilise idle silver bullion holdings to produce more silver coins for monetary circulation. It is not known how this affected Mr Shamoon’s finances, but it does show that he was a major player in silver trading. His address at the time was The Dorchester Hotel, London.

In April 1937, the following newspaper article about Mr Shahmoon was published:

GOOD DEED WENT WRONG – Business Deal Costs £100,000
Mr Ezekiel Elia Shahmoon, once an office boy, now a London millionaire, stood in a Regent Street shop recently, smoking a cigar and watching the wreckage of a good deed that had cost him £100,000.
Two and a half years ago, Mr Shahmoon, a forty-three-year-old bachelor, puffing gently at an earlier cigar, went into a West End furniture showroom to buy his sister a present.
He liked the two young salesmen who served him and offered to put up money for a business for them. And so the firm of Leander and Co. Ltd, luxury furnishers, of Regent Street, was born.
Two and a half years later, Mr Shahmoon, from a dais in the company’s showrooms, watched the staff sell off the stock. At a meeting of the firm’s creditors a few days previously, it was said he had agreed to forgo a claim of £55,9951 so that the other creditors could have 20s in the pound.
“Oh, I don’t mind the £100,000 so much,” he said to a reporter. “What does upset me is that I messed up another big deal to start this business. Just before the firm started, I was holding a million pounds worth of silver. I knew it would go up. I sold my holdings so I’d have the liquid capital to start Leander and Co. Then silver went up, and I lost the chance to make about £300,000 in profit. I’m a retired man, really. I made my money abroad. This furniture business was just a mistake. The two young salesmen have now gone off to start on their own. I gave them a chance because I know what it’s like to struggle for success,” said Mr Shahmoon. “I’m a Frenchman. I started as an office boy in China. When I was twenty-seven, I put through a £4,000,000 deal with the British Government. I got out of a big rubber deal because of this business. That cost me a lot of money. I could have sold these premises at £10,000 profit before I opened the business. I didn’t do it. What am I going to do now? Oh, I’ll go on collecting china. That’s been my hobby for twenty-five years. I’ve got one of the finest collections in the country. When this is all cleared up, I’ll go on holiday for three months.”
1. The company had assets of £57,886 and liabilities of £72,057 (including £55,995 owed to Mr Shahmoon). He had offered to forgo up to that amount to ensure creditors were paid in full, and a separate newspaper article said he had received several marriage proposals as a result.
2. 22 Regent Street, London – premises previously occupied by Elkington and Company, famous jewellers and specialists in old English silver.

Shortly before the period that he was involved with Leander and Co Ltd. Mr Shahmoon bought Trosley Towers and some of its properties. The previous owner of the estate was Sir Philip Waterlow, who had died in 1931. In the years following his death, the estate was sold into various ownerships. Some of the houses were bought by tenants; one of these was Pilgrims House, with six acres of land, at the bottom of Vigo Hill, which was purchased for £600. Trosley Towers itself and the woodlands were sold to Mr Shahmoon in 1935.

Mr Shahmoon told a local resident that he had intended to live in Trosley Towers but had been away for a long time with an illness. He and his brothers had moved away from Trosley Towers in March 1935 and, on his return in February 1936, he found that the property had been stripped of all its lead and was in such a poor state that the best course of action was to demolish it. This he carried out after April 1936 at a cost of £2,000. It is believed that Mr Shamoon planned to build a new house on the site with a golf course, but this never materialised. He did, however, create the Trosley Construction Company and built a large stable block at the rear of Hamilton Lodge. One story suggests that the stables were constructed to accommodate the Shah of Persia’s racehorses on his visits to England. The stables at Hamilton Lodge stood until about 1960, when they were demolished and the rest of the site cleared to make way for the development of Vigo Village.

Although Trosley Towers had been demolished, a number of discrete properties remained, occupied by Mr Shahmoon and members of his extended family. This was at a time of great threat to Jewish people in Europe and beyond, and it is conceivable that many members of his family had fled their homes in Baghdad and Shanghai and come to join Mr Shahmoon in England rather than be caught up in an impending catastrophe.

The 1939 Register records:

North Lodge – 6 people, including:
Ezekiel E Shahmoon – dob 11/11/1890 – Single – General merchant (mainly china)
Sassoon Somekh – dob 28/6/1868 – Widowed – Bullion Broker (China – Retired) (this is Ezekiel’s uncle [his mother’s brother] who had previously lived in Shanghai).
Kate Gubbay – dob 7/9/1903 – Married – Independent means (Ezekiel’s oldest sister)
Also resident were Mr Shahmoon’s butler and housekeeper.

Central Lodge – 7 people, including:
Ezra Shahmoon – dob 10/1/1896 – Married – Bullion Broker at Shanghai (Ezekiel and Salomon’s brother who had joined them in Shanghai in about 1916).
Lydia Shahmoon – dob 6/12/1908 – Married – Unpaid Domestic Duties (Ezra’s wife).

South Lodge – 5 people, including:
Flora Solomon – dob 1904 – Married – Private means (one of Ezekiel’s sisters).
Shadol Solomon – dob 30/8/1901- Married – Private means (Flora’s husband).
Audrey Solomon – dob 19/4/1937 – Single – Private means (Flora and Shadol’s daughter).

Hamilton Lodge – 9 people, including:
Mozelle Bekhor – dob 7/6/1909 – Married – Unpaid Domestic Duties (Ezekiel’s youngest sister).
Albert Bekhor – dob 24/5/1908 – Married – London Stock Exchange Statistician – ARP Warden, Marylebone (Mozelle’s husband).
Sarah Shahmoon – dob 11/10/1873 – Married – Unpaid Domestic Duties (Ezekiel’s mother)
Abdullah (Albert Elia) Shamoon – dob 25/9/1909 – Single – Private Means – Ambulance Driver, Wrotham (Ezekiel’s youngest brother)

Sassoon Somekh died at North Lodge in 1944. All the other members of the family moved, many of them to the United States of America and Canada. A number of them joined Solomon ‘Charlie’ Shahmoon (Ezekiel’s brother and business partner in Shanghai) in New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York.

Like many others, Mr Shahmoon’s business ventures and finances were severely damaged by the outbreak of war, and by the end of 1940, he was the subject of a Receiving Order. In 1941, the Court awarded 5 Shillings in the pound to all unsecured creditors, and an order of bankruptcy was made against Mr Shahmoon in July 1941.

The whole area was still occupied by Mr Shahmoon when it was leased by the army in 1942, and Hamilton Lodge became the HQ of the Army’s Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU). In the late 1950s/early 1960s, an investment company associated with Croudace Ltd purchased 165 acres of land from Mr Shahmoon for £65,000 (equivalent to £1.3m in 2020). This formed the area now occupied by Vigo Village and Trosley Country Park.

Mr Shahmoon continued to live at North Lodge and died there in 1972, aged 81. He had never married. Probate was granted the following year on an estate of £43,870.

In 1994, Grisell Pasteur, who lived in Fairseat from 1935 to 1995, recalled her memories of Mr Shahmoon, as follows:

“When the war came, he [Mr Shahmoon] removed all the stock from Regent Street, which was things like lampshades, glass jars, cigarette boxes, all the sort of things rich people buy as presents. He removed all the contents of the Regents Street shop and put them into the stables that he’d just built with a green roof, on the Harvel Road. It had a green roof, and there were about six stalls for horses. He was going to have a horse-training establishment on the golf course. That was one of his plans because I remember, it was just beside the footpath, so of course, when we walked through there to get out onto the Downs, the boys were with us, and they came rushing back and said ‘Oh, everything’s in the stable, we’ve just seen a lampshade. Can we go and look?’ Well, there was nobody there, so we went and looked. But it was all in boxes, you know, with a little bit of shavings around it, and obviously it had been hurled out and brought down by some lorry or other. He never did build his golf course (horse training establishment). Then he was going to have a deer park, I think he thought that would be less trouble, but that didn’t come to anything. And I think he gave up after that when he found the OCTU [Officer Cadet Training Unit] camp on his doorstep. I used to go and visit him and sell him a Saving Stamp now and again. He had some grandchildren, and I said it was his duty to buy a few Savings Stamps. If he didn’t want them himself, he could give them to his grandchildren! “