Perth Voice Interactive

RACHMANISM is alive and well in Perth, according to a local man who personally knew the world’s worst slum landlord.

Peter Rachman was a Notting Hill landlord in the 1950s and 1960s, infamous for exploiting tenants with derelict dwellings and high rents. The word “Rachmanism” is now in the Oxford dictionary to describe, “the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords”.

East Perth’s Bill Bradbury lived in some very dodgy flats in the UK in the ‘60s. He met Rachman twice.

“I met him because I used to go in the jazz clubs a lot.

“It was one of those handshakes where the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you think, ‘there’s something rotten and putrid about this handshake’.

“He’s not the type of person you’d put on your Christmas card list. He was a sleazy bastard in every sense of the word.”

Mr Bradbury owns his Goderich Street apartment but says renters in his building are scared of raising a fuss, even when maintenance is badly needed.

“The management are not listening to me. Their place [above] is leaking and water’s coming into the wall and it’s coming into my electrical system.”

He’s been trying to get his neighbours’ property managers to fix it for six weeks. He says he’s been playing “Russian Roulette”, risking electrocution every time he steps into his shower.

Mr Bradbury says in recent years his block has “become a very sleazy rooming house”.

“I saw seven grown men in a one-bedroom flat. The floor was paved with mattresses.”

This week workers were finally booked in to service Mr Bradbury’s apartment, after he’d gone to Perth city councillor Rob Butler for help.

The property manager told the Voice his firm had got onto the problem as soon as it was told. He says claims of Rachmanism are “absolute rubbish”.

“I was there in the ‘60s as well and I’m a real estate agent,”the agent said. “Rachmanism was the most terrible thing. These were people who abused tenants and forced them out with the most abusive and terrible things like turning their heating off… this was a gangster who used to go around houses with dogs to force people out.”

He says Perth’s nothing like that: “Quite the opposite, tenants today are heavily protected.

“Talking about Rachmanism is like describing someone as a nazi because they’ve done something you don’t like.”

by DAVID BELL