A woman showering at a Red Cross decontamination centre 1939

Artists throughout centuries have often used mythical, historical or anthropological subjects as an excuse to portray the human nude, usually women of course. Carl Mydans – the Life magazine photographer – in rather an original way, used a WW2 Gas Decontamination centre in Westminster as his excuse. Great photos that they are.

Red Crosses in Mustard gas decontamination gear in 1939 probably before WW2 began.

As the inevitable war with Germany came closer, the British government was terrified with the thought of gas or chemical weapons being used. The horror of the First World War meant that most countries, including Britain and Germany, were signatories to the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925 which banned the used of chemical and biological weapons (although not the stockpiling of them).

The huge distrust of a re-armed Germany, however, meant that gas decontamination centres were set up all over London before the war. Seven of them in Westminster alone. The centres were often built in swimming baths and the only one in the West End of London was at the Marshall Street Baths in Soho. In the end chemical weapons were left unused throughout the duration of the war. It was said that Hitler was briefly blinded by mustard gas in the First World War and for this reason he was reluctant to use them.

This was what all the fuss was about. A Canadian soldier from WW1 suffering from Mustard gas poisoning

The Marshall Street Baths, which are just about still there after they were closed down in 1997 by Westminster council, were built between 1928 and 1931. They were paid for by public funds for the general health and well-being of local people. The building consisted of a main pool lined with Sicilian marble and a ’second class bath’ which measured 70ft by 30ft situated behind it.  The whole complex had a child’s welfare centre, a public laundry and public  bathing facilities.

When the baths were built a private tap or toilet was a luxury in Soho and private bathrooms were practically unheard of. Many Soho houses didn’t have electricity until well after the war and extraordinarily the last Soho house to convert from being gas-lit wasn’t until 1986.

Judith Summers in her book on Soho described children going for their weekly visit to the Marshall Street Hot Baths – a ritual that would have been the same for children all over the capital.

For many children this was not so much a chance to get clean as a social outing. Armed with their soap and towel, they would all set off together in a big gang, often at four o’clock on a Friday after school. Once inside, they would pay 2d or 3d for a Ladies or Gents Second Class bath. There were also First Class baths, which had the added luxury of providing the bather with a towel to stand on.

They waited on the old wooden benches until a bath was free and, after the attendant called out, ‘Next, please,’they would each go into a cubicle, while the woman set the small brass clock on the door and ran the bath from taps in the corridor outside. Her young customers were rarely satisfied with the temperature of the water, and their hackles still rise when they talk about her today.

Marshall Street baths was right in the middle of London’s theatre-land and was often used for rehearsals and training for any of the productions that used water. On November 4th 1934 the pantomime impresario Julian Wylie held auditions for a new huge production of Cinderella that was to be put on at Drury Lane theatre.

Auditions for Cinderella at Marshall Street Baths 9th November 1934

Julian Wylie, so as to professionally inspect the proposed chorus line, got as close to the edge as he dared. It was all to much though, and he died a few days later.

“It was a production worthy of Drury Lane. One of the scenes was a vast lake, into which marched an army of girls, entering the water and walking-down, down, down until they were entirely submerged and lost to sight beneath the surface of the lake. It was an exciting scene and provided some thrills at rehearsals too.”

Unfortunately, and after he had chosen all the chorus girls that were happy to get wet and just before the first performance of the pantomime, Wylie died. It was said, and I suppose there are worse ways of going, that he died as a result of an addiction to large quantities of ice-cream. I kid you not.

The programme for the Aquashow at Earls Court in 1948

In 1948 more rehearsals took place at the Marshall Street baths, this time for a massive production that was to be put on at Earls Court called the Aqua-show. It starred the erstwhile Tarzan and ex-Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller but also the 24 year old British Olympic ice-skater, dancer and actress called Belita. Born in Nether Wallop in Hampshire, her real name was Gladys Olive Jepson-Turner but known to everyone as ‘Belita – The Ice Maiden’

Belita and Johnny Weissmuller rehearsing at Marshall Street Baths February 1948

Johnny and Belita at Marshall Street. Weissmuller won five gold medals at the Olympics in 1924 and 1928, broke sixty seven world records and retired apparently never losing a race.

Although a trained ballet dancer, she took up professional ice-skating in America ostensibly for the money (probably on the advice of a very controlling mother). She was lured to Hollywood and appeared in several highly-profitable but low-budget films such as Suspense, Lady Let’s Dance and Silver Skates. She also became famous for her underwater swimming and performing in the first ever (and last?) underwater ballet.

Silver Skates released in 1943

Belita in Suspense released in 1946. The director asked to her perform this particular move twice. She refused.

Belita in Gene Kelly's Invitation To Dance, 1956

In the early 1950s there seemed to be a fashion for theatrical shows on ice and she became famous for her appearances in ice show spectaculars at the Empress Hall in London, starring with Max Wall, Norman Wisdom and Frankie Vaughan. She also had her own show, Champagne on Ice, put on at the London Hippodrome. After retiring, Belita died in the South of France in 2005.

photograph by David Warwick, 2005

photograph by David Warwick, 2005

In 1997 Westminster council decided to close down the historical Marshall Street baths for safety reasons. Originally they were going to demolish it completely but after being dissuaded, it is now due to be re-opened as part of a leisure centre, street-cleaning depot and an apartment block but with only the main pool remaining.

Marshall Street, July 2009

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June Christy with Stan Kenton – Angel Eyes

Billie Holiday – I’ll Be Seeing You

Frank Sinatra – Fools Rush In

Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames at The Flamingo Club

It’s not widely known but Georgie Fame was slightly connected to the Profumo affair, the political scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo the Secretary of State for War in October 1963 and ultimately the  fall of the Conservative government, a year later, in 1964.

In 1962 Georgie Fame had started a three year residency at The Flamingo Club – famous for its weekend all-nighters where it stayed open ’til six in the morning on Friday and Saturday nights. It was situated at 33 Wardour Street, a building which also housed the Wag Club during the eighties and nineties, and is now the Irish-theme pub O’Neills.

The police outside The Flamingo in Wardour Street

The Flamingo Club which originally specialised in modern jazz was opened by Rik and John Gunnell in 1959. The club quickly became popular with West Indians and also black American soldiers that were still stationed in quite large numbers just outside London and who had few other places to socialise. Georgie Fame once recalled:

“there were only a handful of hip young white people that used to go to The Flamingo. When I first went there as a punter I was scared. Once I started to play there, it was no problem.”

Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames

Fame, who was born Clive Powell but was instructed to change his name as part of Larry Parnes’ stable (he was originally Billy Fury’s pianist), often employed black musicians, one of which was the strikingly named ‘Psycho’ Gordon – a Jamaican who come to the UK in the late 1940s.

Psycho Gordon often brought to The Flamingo Club his brother ‘Lucky Gordon’ a part-time jazz singer and drug dealer. Lucky had also been a boyfriend of  the infamous Christine Keeler and it was at one of the hot and sweaty ‘all-nighter’ Flamingo sessions in October 1962 when Gordon bumped into another of Keeler’s black lovers – Johnny Edgecombe.

Gordon and Edgecombe started arguing and it soon developed into a vicious knife fight. The fracas ended with Edgecombe badly slicing the face of, this time a rather unlucky, ‘Lucky’ Gordon. No one knew, least of all the two protagonists, but the fight started a slow-burning fuse that eventually caused the explosion that became the most infamous political scandal of the twentieth century.

Aloysius 'Lucky' Gordon the sometime lover of Christine Keeler

Gordon was treated for his wound at a local hospital but a few days later in a fit of jealousy, and rather unpleasantly, he posted the seventeen used stitches to Keeler and warned her that for each stitch he had sent she would also get two on her face in return.

Meanwhile a scared Edgecombe, along with Keeler, went into hiding from the police. Keeler even bought a Luger pistol in a bid to protect herself from the dangerous and still threatening Gordon.

On December 14th 1962 Keeler finished with Edgecombe, after finding him with another lover, saying that she would testify that it was he who had attacked Lucky Gordon at The Flamingo two months previously.

Keeler went to visit her friend Mandy Rice-Davies at Stephen Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews with Johnny Edgecombe following her there in a taxi. When Keeler refused to speak to him he angrily shot seven bullets at the door of the flat. Frightened, the girls called Ward at his surgery and he in turn called the police who soon came and arrested Edgecombe.

Lucky Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe

Before Edgecombe’s trial, Keeler was whisked off to Spain, one assumes because somebody, somewhere, thought various people would be badly compromised if she was allowed to talk in the witness box. Conspicuous by Keeler’s absence Edgecombe was found not guilty, both for assaulting Lucky Gordon and the attempted murder of Keeler. He was, however, found guilty of possession of an illegal firearm, for which he got seven years and served five.

Christine Keeler in Spain

On April 1st 1963 Christine was fined for her non-appearance at court and Lucky Gordon was bundled away by the Metropolitan police, shouting “I love that girl!” Not long after Keeler bumped into Gordon back at The Flamingo Club and again he had to be dragged away from her by other West Indian friends of hers.

The police struggling with Lucky Gordon 1st April 1963

In June 1963 Gordon was given a three year prison sentence for supposedly assaulting Keeler and in the same month Stephen Ward was arrested for living off Christine’s immoral earnings.

By now the whole story involving Profumo and the Russian attache/spy Ivananov was emerging, drip by drip. The chain of events that started with the fight of Keeler’s jealous ex-lovers at The Flamingo Club eventually caused the infamous resignation of the Secretary of State for War John Profumo, the suicide of high society’s favourite pimp, portrait painter and osteopath Stephen Ward, and ultimately, it could be said, the fall of the Conservative government.

Christine Keeler outside the Old Bailey 1st April 1963

Christine Keeler with friend 25th April 1963

Stephen Ward unconscious after his suicide attempt. He died a few days later.

In December 1963, after a drunken tape-recorded confession that she had lied about Gordon assaulting her, Keeler pleaded guilty of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice at Lucky Gordon’s trial. Her barrister had pleaded to the judge before sentencing:

“Ward is dead, Profumo is disgraced. And now I know your lordship will resist the temptation to take what I might call society’s pound of flesh.”

It was to no avail and Christine Keeler was sentenced to nine months in jail which ended what her barrister termed, a little prematurely:

“the last chapter in this long saga that has been called the Keeler affair.”

Lucky Gordon after his release from prison

Christine Keeler arriving at court, October 1963

29th October 1963

Just before Christine Keeler’s trial Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames recorded a live album entitled Rhythm and Blues at “The Flamingo” and it was released in early 1964. The following year Fame had a number one hit with his version of ‘Yeh Yeh’.

After the publicised trouble at The Flamingo, American service men were banned from visiting the club. However, drawn by the weekend all-nighters and the music policy of black American R ‘n’ B and jazz, The Flamingo Club was already becoming the favourite hang-out for  London’s newest teenager cult, the Mods. But that’s a different story…

"What if I sit astride the chair? It might just work."

Skatalites – CHRISTINE KEELER

Georgie Fame – Night Train (recorded at The Flamingo)

Derrick Morgan – Fat Man

Derrick and Patsy – Hey Boy Hey Girl

Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland – Turn On Your Lovelight

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles – I Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying

Kim Weston – Looking For The Right Guy

John Lee Hooker – Tupelo

Brenda Holloway – I’ll Always Love You

Marvin Gaye – Pride and Joy

Buy some Georgie Fame stuff here

Dancing in a Soho carpark in 1956

I’ve updated Soho and the 2 i’s coffee bar story with tons more great pictures from the fifties, originally from the Picture Post in 1956, of teenagers in Soho and Soho generally. I’ve also added some more music, plus a recording of a sketch with Peter Sellers playing a Larry Parnes type character.

“The woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.” -- Sir Maurice Hill

Jessie Matthews as a boy in 'First A Girl'.

Jessie Margaret Matthews was born on March 11 in 1907, in a small, cramped and overcrowded flat above a Butcher’s shop in Soho’s Berwick Street. She was the sixth of eleven children and her father was a costermonger in the market for which Berwick Street is still famous. Twenty years later, with elocution lessons removing her natural cockney accent, the saucer-eyed actress was to take the West End by storm.

She would become Britain’s biggest film star by far and before the Second World War she was one of the most famous women in the country. Today, except for a blue plaque on the Blue Post pub on the corner of Berwick Street, she is almost completely forgotten.

Early 20th century views of Berwick Street

Jessie aged 16 appearing in the Music Box revue

Already a star in the West End, Jessie Matthews was booked to perform in the 29 year old Noel Coward’s new revue This Year of Grace which would open in London on 22nd March 1928. Her co-star in the production was a bespectacled and short comic actor called Sonnie Hale who was married to the regally beautiful blonde actress called Evelyn Laye. Laye was seven years older than Matthews and was an extraordinarily popular West End singer and actress at the time.

Already a West End star, the 17 year old Evelyn Laye in 1917

Evelyn Laye

Evelyn Laye and Sonny Hale at their wedding in 1926

At the end of 1927 Evelyn Laye held a small supper party for her close friends, including the actress Ruby Miller and the young actor Frank Lawton, at Soho’s recently opened Gargoyle club. After one of the rehearsals for This Year of Grace her husband brought along his young, pretty and dangerously charming co-star (the Sunday Times’ theatre critic James Agate would later describe Matthews as ‘the rogue in porcelain’).

Matthews was already married at this time, unfortunately to a womanising debt-ridden actor called Henry Lytton Junior. She had married Lytton, who was from a famous theatrical family to seek stability in a life which must have seemed completely unreal to her at her young age. His family also offered social advantages to the young actress that her working-class upbringing would have lacked.

Their wedding occured only eighteen months after she had been initially courted and then raped at the age of sixteen by a louche, handsome Argentinean friend of the Prince of Wales called Jorge Ferrara. He must appeared utterly sophisticated and seemingly from another world when the extremely innocent Matthews met him on a ship to New York where she was to appear on Broadway as an understudy for Gertrude Lawrence.

When Jessie returned to London she had a secret and illegal abortion from which she never really recovered psychologically (and maybe physically as she suffered from miscarriages though out her life). She made fourteen films during the thirties and maybe had as many breakdowns. She later wrote in her autobiography; “All my life I have been frightened.”

Unfortunately the stability she sought in her marriage started to crumble after just eight months when Lytton, who had not only had been sleeping with chorus girls behind Matthews’ back (indeed he’d been having an affair with one girl in particular from the very week they had been married), had started to become increasingly envious of her growing success.

Jessie and Henry Lytton Jnr performing together in Charlot's Revue in 1925, two months before they married.

At the Gargoyle club, situated in Meard Street -- a stone’s throw from Berwick Street -- a friendly Laye (at least on the surface) genially greeted Matthews when she arrived with her husband. The two women would have previously met at theatrical parties but they didn’t know each other well and sitting at the table facing each other, observers of the two well-known actresses would have noted how they contrasted in looks and temperament.

The blue-eyed blonde Laye was tall, cool and sophisticated but maybe slightly aloof (Sonnie would later say that she was sexually frigid), although certainly not classically beautiful, Matthews’ brown pageboy fringe and huge sparkling eyes contributed to a sexual attractiveness and zest for life that most men found utterly irresistible.

They both had one thing in common, however, and that was their love for, it has to be said less than Greek, Sonnie Hale.

The 20 year old starlet Jessie Matthews in 1927

The 'less than Greek' Sonnie Hale in 1926, the year he married Evelyn Laye

Jessie in 1926

Early in the new year of 2008 Evelyn Laye had travelled up to Manchester where Coward’s This Year of Grace was previewing and on arriving she accidentally caught her husband and Jessie holding hands. The co-stars rather to0 quickly and expeditiously unclasped the hands on seeing her. Laye pretending to joke, asked whether they were in love with each other,  to which they laughingly assured her that the idea was absurd and foolish. It was, as Sonnie pointed out, less than a month to their second anniversary.

Although genuinely upset and confused, Jessie and Sonnie were lying. They had been lovers for several weeks.

This Year of Grace opened to rave reviews both for Jessie and for the writer Noel Coward (it resurrected his career). The Sunday Express ironically ranked Jessie Matthews with Evelyn Laye as ‘the brightest female stars on our English light musical stage’. This would have really rankled Laye, who saw herself as London’s reigning stage beauty, and it only got worse when Room With A Veiw a song from This Year of Grace became a huge hit that summer and it would have been played on every radio show and in every night club.

A few weeks later Evelyn Laye found passionate and rather explicitly detailed love letters, albeit in an ill-educated childish scrawl, from Jessie to her husband. After confronting Hale with them, he admitted his love with Matthews, and it wasn’t long before Laye moved out of the Hale home in Linden Gardens and moved into a small flat in South Audley Street in Mayfair.

Evelyn appearing in Ziegfeld's production of Bitter Sweet in 1930

On the 2nd June 1930 the decree nisi granted, in absence to Jessie Matthews against Henry Lytton, was made absolute. Five weeks later in the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, Evelyn Laye’s divorce petition came before Sir Maurice Hill -- a judge who was close to retirement but particularly averse, in almost a prehistoric fashion, to divorce.

Evelyn Laye wasn’t present as she was filming One Heavenly Night in Hollywood, however, and against all advice, Jessie Matthews decided to attend. She realised her mistake when her letters to Sonnie were read out in open court:

‘My Darling, I want you and need you badly, all of you, and for a very long time. I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs, which you love so much, are waiting for you also.’

At one point Jessie Matthews fainted during the reading of one letter and had to be helped outside but this didn’t help with the brutal severity of the judge’s final comments:

‘It is quite clear that the husband admits himself to be a cad, and nobody will quarrel with that, and the woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.’

Evelyn Laye in One Heavenly Night 1930

Evelyn Laye and John Boles in One Heavenly Night

Evelyn Laye in 1933

Jessie and Sonnie Hale on their wedding day.

Jessie Matthews and Evelyn Laye, not surprisingly, hardly spoke to each other again -- quite difficult, one suspects, in the relatively small world in which they lived and worked. In January 1931 Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews married at Hampstead registry office.

After all the scandal that the relationship had caused it wasn’t a particularly long and happy marriage and Jessie had many affairs including Salvador Dali during a holiday in Barcelona, and the bisexual actors Tyrone Power and Danny Kaye.

It was while she was performing with Kaye in a disastrous Broadway musical that Matthews had the worst of her breakdowns and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and the hospital reported to Hale that she was ‘on the edge of madness’.

When Jessie returned to Britain she found out that Hale had fallen in love with the nanny who had been employed to look after their adoptive daughter and a year later they were divorced.

Jessie Matthews in a blonde wig appearing in Evergreen 1930

Jessie Matthews never retained the popularity of her pre-war years. Her style of dancing and singing appeared old fashioned not helped by the cut-glass accent caused from her elocution lessons from when she was a teenager.

By 1970, when she was awarded an OBE, she had become, if not fat, slightly more rotund and matronly than in her lithe graceful days as an actress and dancer during the twenties and thirties. Around this time Evelyn Laye, seeing her perform at an all-star charity gala, said waspishly:

‘Oh look, the dear little boobs have become apple dumplings.’

Evelyn Laye married again in 1936 to the handsome young actor Frank Lawton who ironically had been at the late supper at the Gargoyle club where Laye and Matthews had first formerly met. They were happily married until Lawton’s death in 1969 and Evelyn continued to work in the theatre until well into her nineties.

Evelyn Laye and her second husband Frank Lawton

Evelyn Laye in One Heavenly Night

Jessie Matthews in Evergreen

Jessie Matthews in First a Girl

A lot of the information for this post has come from the biography of Jessie Matthews by Michael Thornton which although out of print can be found here.

Two songs made famous by Jessie Matthews sang by two of her contemporaries:

Noel Coward -- Room With A View

Al Bowlly -- Over My Shoulder

Jessie Matthews DVDs and music can be bought here
Evelyn Laye music can be bought here, alas copies of her films seem to be short on the ground, although apparently her acting style, like Jessie’s singing, has dated somewhat. It’s safe to say that her extraordinary beauty certainly hasn’t.

The 2 i's Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street

Quickly other coffee bars sprung up around Soho, often providing live music, these included the Top Ten in Berwick Street and the Heaven and Hell bar in Old Compton Street, but the most famous of all, and next door to the Heaven and Hell, was the 2 i’s at number 59.

Almost over night young people, who now for the first time were starting to be known as ‘teen-agers’ had somewhere to go they could call their own. The coffee shops were unlicensed and there was nothing to stop teenagers coming to Soho to listen to music, live, or on the jukebox. If you were young, Soho was suddenly the place to be.

Gina Lollobrigida in 1953

The Moka coffee bar in 1953, seemingly offering a free electric shave

Skiffle band playing on an old bomb site in Soho 1956

'teen-agers' in Soho 1956

Soho Square 1956

Lonnie Donegan September 1956

The Two i’s was bought in 1955 by an Australia wrestler called Paul Lincoln (Dr Death when in the ring – and one of the sport’s first masked wrestlers,cleverly enabling him to fight twice on the same bill, and thus doubling his fee). The name of the bar came from the two brothers called Irani he had bought it from.

The 2 i’s wasn’t a particularly busy place initially and it was quickly losing money, but this all changed when Lincoln started to put on skiffle groups that were becoming popular with teenagers, especially after Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line had become a hit. Skiffle was suited totally to the new coffee shops due to the minimal, cheap and un-amplified instruments the bands used and thus able to fit into the tiniest, sweatiest cellar.

When a skiffle group called The Vipers came to play one night at the 2 i’s, a friend of theirs called Tommy Hicks helped them out with some vocals and so impressed a watching record producer from Decca that it was Hicks who was signed to his label. Hicks was quickly taken on and managed by a former shopkeeper called Larry Parnes, who persuaded him to change his name to Tommy Steele. The name stuck and a hit single called ‘Rock with the Caveman’ soon followed and literally within days Tommy Steele became Britain’s first genuine teenage pop idol.

Tommy Steele 25th February 1957

Tommy Steele at the Bread Basker 1957

Tommy Steele performing in Soho 1957. How young he was is written all over his face.

Steele’s overnight success made the basement of the 2 I’s coffee shop the most famous music venue in the country. It was only a small place though, and like the other Soho venues was usually very hot and sweaty, with a small 18 inch stage at one end, one microphone, and some speakers up on the wall.

Clutching their guitars, teenagers, from all over the country, started coming to the 2 I’s, or even Soho in general, to try and find fame and fortune. Cliff Richard and the Shadows (initially the Drifters) all met by being regulars at the cafe. Bruce Welch of the Shadows once said:

“The Two I’s was the place to be discovered. If it was good enough for Tommy Steele it was good enough for us.”

Larry Parnes, considering himself an ‘impresario’ and known to many as ‘Mr Parnes, Shillings and Pence’, started to manage other singers and after the success of Steele insisted on creating cartoonish pseudonyms, thus Reg Smith became Marty Wilde, Ronald Wycherley became Billy Fury and Clive Powell became Georgie Fame. Joe Brown, however rejected his Parnes’ name of Elmer Twitch (not surprisingly) and solely, it seems, had a music career with the name with which he was born.

Billy Fury and Larry Parnes

Joe Brown

Mr Parnes Shillings and Pence

Clive Powell aka Georgie Fame

Reg Smith aka Marty Wilde and a young Kim Wilde

Roy Taylor aka Vince Eager

Larry Parnes wasn’t known as the ‘beat svengali’ for nothing, and his relationship with his proteges was ‘fatherly’ at the very least. Vince Eager at one point was wondering why he hadn’t received any record royalties:

“You’re not entitled to any,” Larry Parnes told him. “But it says in my contract that I am,” Eager protested. “It also says I have power of attorney over you, and I’ve decided you’re not getting any,” Parnes replied.

Parnes’ power in the music business swiftly declined with the rise of the Beatles (indeed he rejected them as a backing group for Billy Fury at one point) and, always happier with family entertainment, he went on to produce theatre shows. However the mid to late fifties was an incredibly exciting and creative time for British music and the attraction of rock ‘n’ roll brought talented (and, to be fair, not so talented) teenagers from all over the country to try their hand at a new musical fashion.

It seemed, at last, that anyone from any backgrould could make it. Only Punk, perhaps, echoed the musical ‘can do’ atmosphere of this period, just two decades later.

Frith Street in 1956, known as Froth Street in the heyday of the coffee bars

Leon Bell and the Bell Cats and some hand-jiving kittens

Doing what teenagers do best, hanging around. In Soho

The skiffle group City Ramblers in 1955

Bill Kent entertaining the ladies at the 2 I's coffee bar

It’s now over fifty years since the heyday of the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street. A lot of the Soho cafes, like everywhere else, are either closing down or becoming part of the ubiquitous Starbucks chain. Starbucks, of course, branched  last year and started their own record label featuring cutting edge artists such as Carly Simon and James Taylor.

The ubiquitous coffee chain also signed Paul McCartney, who fifty years ago was inspired by the skiffle boom created by the Soho Coffee shops to join John Lennon’s skiffle band The Quarrymen and we all know what happened to them.

The Quarrymen in 1958

A long way from the Moka coffee bar and Gina Lollobrigida

The 2i's today, November '09

“Corruption on a scale that beggars description.”

People looking at the Lennon exhibition at Eugene Schuster's London Art's gallery in 1970

A police at duty outside Lennon's Bag One exhibition at London Arts gallery 1970

“I understand that HM the Queen has some highly erotic work by Fragonard”.

The cover of the infamous schoolkids issue of Oz

“[this] case stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and draw and write what we please”.

“dealt with homosexuality, lesbianism, sadism, perverted sexual practices and drug taking”.

Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis

The wig-wearing Oz editors celebrating the quashing of their conviction in November 1971

The extremely unintelligent future multi-millionaire publishing magnate Felix Dennis

The home secretary Reginald Maudling

The Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, asked Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, at the time in charge of the Obscene Publications Squad, exactly why the porn barons in Soho seemed to be operating with somewhere close to impunity. Fenwick explained to Maudling;

“It is an unfortunate fact of life that pornography has existed for centuries and it is unlikely that it can ever be stamped out.”

Maudling was shocked with this explanation, or what was rather a lame excuse, and he quickly initiated a major corruption inquiry. The Government and the judiciary were slowly coming to the conclusion that there was more than the odd bad apple in the Metropolitan police.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner in 1972

In 1972 Maudling appointed Robert Mark to be the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. To the old guard he was a provincial outsider. Mark had the reputation as a ‘Mr Clean’ and had nicknames such as ‘The Manchester Martinet’ and ‘The Lone Ranger from Leicester’.

In Soho at the time it was impossible not to notice the porn shops, they had proliferated greatly in the last few years, and unusually for stores at the time they were open seven days a week. The windows were filled with garish displays of soft-core magazines and books but with notices implying, often correctly, that there was a wider range of harder material to be found inside.

Soho in the early seventies

In the same year as Mark’s appointment the Sunday People exposed a connection between James Humphreys (who openly ran two strip clubs and was one of the biggest operators of pornographic bookshops in Soho) and Commander Kenneth Drury. They had both enjoyed a luxurious two week holiday in Cyprus accompanied by their wives, all paid for, of course, by the Soho pornographer. Drury was hopelessly compromised and with concocted a story that he was in Cyprus looking for the train robber Ronnie Biggs.

James Humphries in January 1974

James Humphries after his arrest, January 1974

Humphreys quickly realised the danger of appearing as a police informant and announced that Drury had set up the whole thing. After a police raid at his house a diary of Humphrey’s was found in a wall safe and it unbelievably detailed payments to seventeen different policemen. The policeman included senior policemen such as Bill Moody -- Head of the Obscene Publications Squad but also, incredibly, his superior Commander ‘Wally’ Virgo -- a man who had overall control of nine squads including the Flying, Drugs and the Porn Squad.

It was estimated that James Humphreys and his fellow porn barons were paying an extraordinary £100,000 a year to corrupt policemen to enable them to continue selling porn unimpeded. Indeed it came to light that Humphreys had been so worried that Drury’s expensive lifestyle would give everything away, he had supplied him with expensive slimming drugs and a rowing machine to keep his weight down.

Commander Kenneth Drury - the most senior policeman ever to be convicted

The delicately balanced house of cards the corrupt policemen had built, soon came tumbling down. Initially there were just the usual discrete early retirements and resignations but eventually there were two major corruption trials and George Fenwick, Bill Moody, Wally Virgo and Kenneth Drury were all given between ten and fourteen years in prison in 1977. Mr Justice Mars Jones after Fenwick’s trial said:

“Thank goodness the Obscene Publications Squad had gone. I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.”

After the second trial Mars-Jones said it revealed:

“corruption on a scale which beggars description.”

'See any porn constable?'...'Nope'.

“There will always be sex, always always always.”

To some Paul Raymond was at the vanguard of the newly liberated post-war Britain but to others he was just a man who became filthy rich peddling filth. He was eventually known as ‘The King Of Soho’ and it was exactly fifty years ago when Raymond’s Revuebar opened on April 14 1958 in the former Doric Ballroom in Soho’s Walker’s Court. It was London’s first legal nude show with dancers who could actually dance. Before this date, especially at the notorious Windmill Theatre down the road no exposed flesh was allowed to jiggle, wiggle or shudder but Paul Raymond had the simple idea of making his Revuebar a member’s only club and charged a mere guinea for life membership. It became the first location in Britain with a sign legally offering STRIPTEASE, thus it became an infamous Soho landmark.

Cha Landers performing at the Revuebar in 1960

Within two years The Revuebar, according to The Spectator, included amongst his members “ten M.P.s, eight millionaires, more than 60 knights, 35 peers, and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill.”

However in 1961 a judge labelled it “filthy, disgusting and beastly” and fined Raymond £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house. Apparently the judge was particularly shocked that the members of the audience were actually allowed to ring Bonnie Bell the Ding Dong Girl’s bells (her costume consisted of nothing but three bells) and that Julia Mendez the Snake Girl was wont to swallow her snake in public.

The Beatles at the Revuebar in 1967

Paul Raymond was actually born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925, and was brought up in a strict Irish Roman Catholic family in Liverpool. Academic studies were not exactly his forté and he preferred studying at the university of life. During the war, he was sent down the mines as one of the ‘Bevan Boys’ – teenage National Service conscripts ordered to work as miners. This had been completely against his will and before his medical he consumed vast quantities of saccharin in sliced bread in a vain attempt to feign a heart murmur. Quinn only lasted two weeks and subsequently enlisted in the Royal Air Force, where for two years he was a drummer boy with a military band.

After the war he bought a mind-reading act from a clown called Ravel and teamed up with a girl called Noreen O’Hagan. By the time she discovered she was pregnant, Raymond had already moved to London to make his fortune, arriving, apparently, with just 1s 6d (7.5p) in his pocket. He quickly shed his Geoffrey Quinn persona and changed his name to Paul Raymond and in 1952 he married a young choreographer of showgirls called Jean. They went into business together with a touring variety show that featured naked girls all of whom, of course, had to stand absolutely still (I’m not sure where Jean’s choreography was useful here?). It was rumoured that Raymond would surreptitiously supply pea-shooters to some of his customers so that a well-aimed missile might produce some exciting jiggles for the rest.

Paul Raymond with his family in 1960

Not long after opening the Revuebar in Soho, it was profitable enough to provide the money to start producing sex magazines and he eventually published Men Only, Escort, Club International and Razzle. By 1970 Raymond completely dominated the market, saying “There will always be sex – always, always, always.” There was always property as well, and because at the time Soho was run down and seedy, the land was relatively cheap, and Raymond was astute enough to start buying up freeholds in the area. By the time he finished he was said to own an estimated 100 acres of prime real estate in central London with an estimated value of between £600 million to £2 billion. He is said to be the only person to have built a significant private London estate in the 20th century.

As Paul Raymond’s porn, and subsequently his property, empires helped the money pour in, Raymond grew his hair, sported heavy gold jewellery and wore a fur coat, seemingly whatever the weather. His affairs became more public especially his relationship with the former swimmer and soft-porn actress Fiona Richmond. Fed up with the public aspect of the affair, Jean, after an acrimonious and bitterly-fought case, divorced him in 1973. Richmond at the time was appearing in Raymond’s magazines and films such as Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid but also starring at the Whitehall Theatre (which Raymond now owned) in farces such as Yes, We Have No Pyjamas.

Fiona Richmond

Paul Raymond in 1981, on what must have been a very hot day

Paul Raymond and his daughter Debbie 1988

In 1992 Raymond’s daughter Debbie, a tough-talking, chain-smoking and hard-drinking woman, was being groomed to take over Raymond’s entire company and was already editor-in-chief of his magazine division when she tragically died of a heroin overdose at the age of just 36. Debbie had been the only thing that mattered in his life other than his wealth and the distraught Raymond became a complete recluse hardly ever leaving his apartment which overlooked Green Park behind the Ritz. He eventually died in March 2008.

Still the Revuebar but no longer Raymond’s in 2008

Walker’s Court in 2008

Soft Machine fans in 1967

I’ve got an old and trusty blackened wok at home bought over 20 years ago for £4.50 in a Chinese Supermarket called Loon Fung situated at 44 Gerrard Street – the main thoroughfare of Europe’s biggest Chinatown in London’s West End. I, and I’m sure most of the, it has to be said, slightly grumpy staff certainly didn’t know the extraordinary musical history the building had. Incidentally the original Chinatown in London was actually at Limehouse in the East End but for various reasons the Chinese community slowly de-camped to the West End centring around a few streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue. After the war it was a particularly seedy area at the edge of Soho but the rents were practically at peppercorn rates which suited the new Chinese restaurants that sprang up around the area.

Gerrard Street in the late sixties

In 1967, after being a bit of a dingy old strip joint, 44 Gerrard Street became known as Happening 44 – a trendy psychedelic club run by Jack Braceland, one of the earliest light show artists in the UK who’d worked on some of the early shows of Pink Floyd amongst others.

His light shows featured hand-assembled wet slides and Aldis projectors. His company called Five Acre Lights was actually named after a psychedelic nudist colony he ran with his wife at Five Acre Woods near Watford – which in reality, was a number of caravans in a sea of mud and a club house that featured a ‘trip machine’ and where Pink Floyd once played a gig on Guy Fawkes night in 1966. Braceland was a middle-aged, slightly weird beatnik character but for the relatively short while Happening 44 existed, it featured such bands as the Social Deviants and Soft Machine.

Soft Machine in 1967

Happening 44 also put on some of the earliest gigs of Fairport Convention – the folk-rock band that would soon become one of the most influential bands in the country. The band had recently placed adverts in the Melody Maker, presumably read by Jack Braceland, which read:

‘Friday; Fairport Convention stays home tonight. Saturday; Fairport stays home again, patiently waiting for bookings’.

Alas Happening 44 closed down within a few months of opening and Jack Braceland went back to his Watford nudist colony, and presumably his ‘trip machine’, and was never really heard of again.

Soft Machine 1967

Fairport Convention in 1967/68

Mick Mulligan and George Melly – Photograph by Terry Cryer

In the early fifties and fifteen years before Happening 44, 44 Gerrard Street housed The West End Jazz Club run by George Melly and the trumpeter Mick Mulligan, and it was here that the first ‘all night raves’ were held and, improbably, also where the term ‘all night rave’ was coined.

The word ‘rave’ (as in to ‘live it up’) was invented by Mulligan and took several forms: other than the verb ‘to rave’, there was the noun meaning a party where you raved, and finally a ‘raver’ – someone who raved as much as possible. A newspaper at one point called Mick Mulligan the ‘King of The Ravers’. George Melly wrote once that the original all night raves that had attracted beatniks, Soho layabouts and art school students, were an enormous social success but a financial loss.

In his autobiography Owning Up Melly described the end of a typical rave: “At seven a.m. the band played its final number and we’d all crawl up out of the sweat-scented cellar into the empty streets of a Sunday morning in the West End. Hysterical with lack of sleep, accompanied by a plump art student, her pale cheeks smeared with the night’s mascara, I’d catch the Chelsea bus and try to read the Observer through prickling red eyeballs as we swayed along Piccadilly, down Sloane Street, and into the King’s Road. Then a bath, one of those delirious fucks that only happen on the edge of complete fatigue, and a long sleep until it was time to get up and face the journey to Cook’s Ferry or whatever jazz club we were playing that evening.”

All all-night ravers, from whatever era, need a drug that keeps them awake. The drug of choice that allowed George and his fellow ravers to last the course was Benzedrine taken from broken up inhalers.

The Benzedrine inhaler was intended as a decongestant, but you could break it open, remove the paper strip inside and soak the strip in a cup of coffee or tea. This was called a ‘B-Bomb’ and the preparation got so popular the manufacturers had to withdraw the inhaler from over the counter use in the early fifties.

By the mid-fifties 44 Gerrard Street had become a folk club originally called The Good Earth but after the success of Lonnie Donnegan’s Rock Island Line it became the 44 Skiffle Club run by John Hasted – one of the earliest champions of skiffle which he saw as a form of teenage urban folk music. The house band was known as John Hasted’s Skiffle and Folksong Group and featured the young folk singer Shirley Collins. It’s easy today to be bemused about these clubs based around, as in George Melly’s case trad jazz and with Hasted skiffle and folk music, but these were the first youth movements based around music in this country. It wasn’t rock and roll that was the soundtrack for the first teenagers. Not in London anyway. Nor were they the first drug-takers in the capital.

The 43 Club – Useful For Early Breakfasts

At number 43 Gerrard Street in the 1920s there was situated an infamous nightclub run by an Irish woman called Kate Meyrick. She was famous back in Ireland for being the first woman to ride a bicycle, but in London she was well-known for running a string of nightclubs and evading the strict licensing laws whilst doing so. The most famous of which was the ‘43 Club’ in Gerrard Street. It attracted bohemians like the artists Augustus John and Jacob Epstein and writers such as JB Priestley and Joseph Conrad as well as a good sprinkling of gangsters and aristocrats.

Tallulah Bankhead who often performed in London during the 1920s described the club as “useful for early breakfasts” and when asked “what time breakfast would be then?” she replied “about 10pm”. Tallulah Bankhead often admitted to her liking of cocaine and the ‘43 Club’ was said to be the centre of drug dealing in the West End of London – the advantage for dealers, during the many police raids on the club, of a hidden escape route to Newport Place was obvious.

Corrupting The Womanhood of this Country

The most notorious cocaine dealer in London during the 1920s was a man known as ‘Brilliant Chang’ – his name is still used as slang for cocaine to this day.

In 1918 a popular young actress called Billie Carleton was found dead in her bed by her maid after attending the Victory ball at the Albert Hall. At her bedside was a gold box containing cocaine given to her by her boyfriend , the costume designer Reggie de Veuille. He had bought the drug from a Scottish woman called Ada and her Chinese husband Lau Ping You. Ada and de Veuille (the prosecution attempted to paint the worst possible picture and described him as ’somewhat in foreign appearance and accent with an effeminate face and mincing little smile…’) were sentenced to five and eight months hard labour respectively but Lau Ping You escaped with just a £10 fine. The involvement of a Chinese man, however, whipped the press into a frenzy and the newspaper Pictorial News ran a series of pieces on the East End’s ‘Yellow Peril’. Very soon another Chinese man called ‘Brilliant’ Chang was brought to the forefront. Chang was a former Limehouse marine contractor but now ran a restaurant called ‘Shanghai’ in the same part of the East End. Limehouse was London’s original Chinatown but although the population reached its peak just after the First World War the population was probably only around 300 people.

The original Chinatown in Limehouse during the 1920s

The Pictorial News said that Chang ‘dispensed Chinese delicacies and the drugs and vices of the Orient.’ The paper continued that Chang ‘demanded payment for his drugs in kind’ and further enlightened its readers advising that women ‘who retained sufficent decency and pride of race’ turn down ‘this fellow with lips thin and cruel tightly drawn across even yellow teeth’. This description of Chang seems to have come directly from a Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novel – literature that didn’t exactly help the Chinese immigrant community’s cause and stoked Londoners fears of drugs, foriegners and crime – “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

In 1922, Freda Kempton, a young nightclub dancer was found dead after an overdose of cocaine and the press soon found out that Chang had been with her the night before. He told the Coroner at her inquest ’she was a friend of mine but I know nothing about the cocaine. It is all a mystery to me.’

According to the coroner there was no proof that he was linked to the death , but the police were convinced that he was. They raided his restaurant in 1924 and found a large quantity of the drug. He was jailed for 18 months and subsequently deported. The judge told him ‘It is you and men like you who are corrupting the womanhood of this country.’ While The Empire News wrote ‘Mothers would be well advised to keep their daughters as far away as they can from Chinese laundries and other places where the yellow men congregate.’

The Daily Telegraph reported a few years later that Chang had gone ‘blind and ended his days, not in luxury and rich silks, but as a sightless worker in a little kitchen garden.’

The womaniser and drug dealer ‘Brilliant’ Chang

In the thirties, probably encouraged by the atmosphere of ‘yellow peril’ hysteria whipped up by the popular press, the local council decided to clear the ’slum area’ around Limehouse and many of the Chinese shops, restaurants and gambling dens were swept away. This, and the extensive bombing of the area during the Second World War encouraged the gradual migration of Chinatown from the East End to the West End.

Kate Meyrick, meanwhile, after several spells in Holloway prison due to repeated licensing laws offences and the bribing of policemen, died in 1933 – dance bands in the West End, apparently, fell silent for two minutes in tribute.

Mills Brothers – Chinatown, My Chinatown

Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson – Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine

George Melly – September Song

Fairport Convention – Time Will Show The Wiser

The Move – Chinatown

Down the way from the Tottenham Court Road
Just round the corner from old Soho
There’s a place where the publishers go
If you dont know which way to go
Just open your ears and follow your nose
Cos the street is shakin from the tapping of toes
You can hear that music play anytime on any day
Every rhythm, every way
You got to a publisher and play him your song
He says i hate your music and you hair is too long
But I’ll sign you up because I’d hate to be wrong

Mick Jagger in the cramped recording studio December 1963

In February they started recording their future single ‘Not Fade Away’ a cover of Buddy Holly’s original. They were in the middle of a gruelling tour and the group were tired, fractious and hardly speaking to each other – they’d almost given up working out how to record the song. Their manager Andrew Oldham phoned his friend Gene Pitney – the American music star, who was currently in London, for inspiration. Gene Pitney had written He’s A Rebel for the Crystals, Rubber Ball for Bobby Vee and was currently having a huge hit in the UK and the US with 24 Hours From Tulsa. Gene Pitney in London February 1963

Gene Pitney and the producer Phil Spector suddenly turned up at the studio along with several bottles of inspiring brandy. Unsurprisingly the mood turned much for the better and the recording of Not Fade Away and its subsequent b side ‘Little By Little’ were at last recorded. Phil Spector is listed as playing the maracas on both the recordings but his instrument was actually an empty cognac bottle hit with a Half-Crown coin.

It’s worth noting that Phil Spector in early 1964 was at the absolute height of his fame and in the preceding year had produced ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals and ‘Be My Baby’ and Baby, I Love You by The Ronettes – undoubtedly some of the greatest pop records ever made. The self-confidence of twenty year old Andrew Oldham who had decided upon himself to produce the Rolling Stones’ first recordings must have been phenomenal. Oldham himself said of his early career as a producer – “I didn’t have to be technically proficient. I didn’t play an instrument, wasn’t an engineer or a technician, but I had a vision,”. Soon after Keith Richards and Mick Jagger returned Gene Pitney’s favour and wrote That Girl Belonged To Yesterday for him. It was their first song to become successful in America and it was Pitney’s endorsement that certainly didn’t hinder them finding favour there.

Andrew Loog Oldham in Denmark Street 1964

Denmark Street had, since the late 19th century been a musical street with music publishers finding a place next to London’s West End theatres. Both the UK’s famous music magazines, Melody Maker at number 19 and the New Music Express at number 5, started publishing in there. At number 20 Elton John, then in 1965 simply plain old Reg Dwight, worked as an office boy for one of the large music publishers Mills Music. He was paid just £5 per week and he wouldn’t have even vaguely dreamt that within just eight years during 1973 he would apparently be responsible for an incredible 2% of the World’s entire record sales. A few years before superstardom Elton also recorded at Regent

Sound studios when he made an unknown number of soundalike recordings for Woolworth’s own label Embassy Records. These included very reasonable covers of tracks such as Mungo Jerry’s In The Summertime and Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours. In 1965, hopefully given a cup of coffee by the shy bespectacled office gopher, the American folk-singer Paul Simon walked into Mills Music one day proudly presenting two new songs he had recently written, The Sound of Silence and Homeward Bound. Unfortunately homeward bound was exactly where the man responsible for listening to new music sent him when he rejected the songs for being uncommercial and complicated. We can only hope that occasionally he and the man at Decca records who first auditioned The Beatles would meet up at their local pub, shake their heads sadly and wonder what might have been. Simon, after the rejection, decided to start his own publishing company called Charing Cross Music and has subsequently, and sensibly, kept the rights to all his music ever since.

At number 9 in the Street, and around the same time in the sixties, the Giaconda Cafe was a mod hang-out and this was where David Bowie met his first backing band – the Lower Third, and it was where he met Vince Taylor, the failed ‘leather rocker’. Vince’s real name was Brian Holden and he is known mostly these days for recording, as Vince Taylor and his Playboys, Brand New Cadillac, a song later of course covered by The Clash on London Calling. He had moved to France earlier in the decade and had become a leather-clad rocker and Elvis-like hero to French audiences. Taylor eventually became the inspiration for Bowie’s famous alter ego – “I met (Vince Taylor) a few times in the mid-Sixties and I went to a few parties with him. He was out of his gourd. Totally flipped. The guy was not playing with a full deck at all. He used to carry maps of Europe around with him, and I remember him opening a map outside Charing Cross tube station, putting it on the pavement and kneeling down with a magnifying glass. He pointed out all the sites where UFOs were going to land. He was the inspiration for Ziggy. Vince Taylor was a rock n roll star from the Sixties who was slowly going crazy. Finally, he fired his band and went on-stage one night in a white sheet. He told the audience to rejoice, that he was Jesus. They put him away.” By June 1972, the month that Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album was released, Vince Taylor had managed to almost rebuild his career in France and brought out an album called “Vince is Alive, Well and Rocking in Paris” sadly not many people noticed he was still alive, let alone well and rocking, and after spending much of his life in prisons, psychiatric institutions and pretty much continually ‘out of his gourd’ he died in 1991 in Switzerland at the age of 52.

In the seventies the Giaconda snack bar had become a punk hang-out with groups such as The Clash and The Slits wasting their hours drinking tea. A few doors down from the cafe the Sex Pistols rehearsed and lived in a grotty flat above a shop at number 6 (they eventually left after struggling to find the measly £4 weekly rent). To this day Denmark Street is still obviously part of the music industry but is now almost completely dominated by musical instrument shops (an exception is the excellent but tiny 12 Bar Club music venue) and the Giaconda Cafe is now just an average Indian Restaurant called Spice Spice. Although possibly I’m wrong and it’s so good they named it twice.

I’m not sure if Denis Nilson, the infamous serial killer who murdered at least fifteen men in his flat in North London, had a musical note in his body but for some time in the late 1970s and early 80s he worked at the Job Centre at 1 Denmark Street. In 1980, which would have been right in the middle of his killing spree, he offered to help with the food for the office Christmas party and brought along a huge saucepan. Former colleagues only realised during the trial that this was the same saucepan that had been used to boil the heads of several of his victims.

Vince Taylor And His Playboys – Brand New Cadillac

Elton John – Bitter Fingers

Rolling Stones – Little By Little