Benny Hill in his sixties heyday.

“The notion that Benny was a lonely man is so depressing and wrong. He just liked his own company. He was very happy walking alone, living alone, eating alone, taking holidays alone and going to see shows alone. I often wonder whether he needed anybody else in his life at all…except perhaps a cameraman”. – Bob Monkhouse

On Easter Sunday morning in 1992, and just two hours after he had been speaking to a television producer about yet another come-back, 75 year-old Frankie Howerd collapsed and died of heart failure.

Benny Hill, seven years younger than Howerd, was reported in the press as being “very upset” and saying, “We were great, great friends”. Indeed they had been friends, but Hill hadn’t given a quote about his fellow comedian, he hadn’t even been asked for one – he couldn’t have been – because he was already dead.

The quote about Howerd had come from Hill’s friend, former producer and unofficial press-agent Dennis Kirkland who had not been able to get in contact with Hill for a couple of days and was starting to worry.

It wasn’t until the 20th, the day after Howerd had died, that a neighbour noticed an unpleasant odour coming from Flat 7 of Fairwater House on the Twickenham Road in Teddington.

Benny Hill at home in 1991. Exactly where he was found a year later slumped on the sofa watching TV

Fairwater House on the Twickenham Road in Teddington

The neighbour contacted Kirkland, who was a regular visitor to the Teddington apartment block, and it wasn’t long before the television producer was climbing a ladder and peering through the window of Hill’s second floor flat. Inside he saw his friend surrounded by dirty plates, glasses, video-tapes and piles of papers slumped on the sofa in front of the TV. He was blue, the body had bloated and distended, and blood had seeped from the ears. It was later established that Hill had probably been dead for two days.

Frankie Howerd and Benny Hill had both been part of a big wave of ex-servicemen comedians that came to prominence after the second world war. This amazing generation of performers, in some form or other, would eventually almost take over light-entertainment, initially on the radio and subsequently television, in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

Benny Hill,  although he was still known by his original name Alfie Hill, had first come to London during the war. He arrived at Waterloo station on the Southampton train in the summer of 1941 just after the blitz had come to an end and he had given up his milk-round and sold his drum kit for £8 to fund this next stage of his life. He had no other plan in his head but to succeed as a comic performer on the London stage and had three addresses of variety theatres in his pocket. He was just seventeen.

Young Benny Hill

More by luck than judgement and after a week or two of sleeping rough in a Streatham bomb shelter, the naive Hampshire boy managed to get a dogsbody job from a kindly agent. Hill remembered this in 1955:

At the Chiswick Empire they did not want to know about Alf Hill. I had much the same reception at the “Met”, but at the Chelsea Palace I was lucky enough to arrange to see Harry Benet at his office the next morning.

Harry Benet offered Hill £3 per week to be an Assistant Stage Manager (with small parts) for a new revue called Follow the Fan. Years later Hill would often joke that although he was no longer an ASM he still had small parts!

12 months or so later Hill, now eighteen, had become eligible for conscription. He was having the time of his life, however, and he naively thought that by travelling around the country (he was now with Send Them Victorious, another revue) he could pretend he had never received the OHMS manila envelope ordering him to enlist.

The ruse worked until November 1942 when the revue was at the New Theatre in Cardiff for the last engagement before the pantomime season. Two military policeman had come to find him at the theatre and Hill was forced to ‘give himself up’ and put in jail for two days. Within a month Hill found himself a private in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a driver/mechanic.

He couldn’t drive and knew nothing about engines and Alfie Hill played no useful part in the war. After VE day and when he was in London on leave he applied to be part of the services’ touring revue called Stars in Battledress.

Benny Hill in the army

There was one problem, Hill didn’t have ‘an act’ and he had 24 hours to create one. For inspiration he walked to the Windmill Theatre in Soho as it was the only place in London where you could see comedians during the day.

He noticed one Windmill comic in particular, a man called Peter Waring whose scripts were written by Frank Muir, at that time still attached to the RAF. Hill would later say:

Waring was the biggest influence on my life. He was delicate, highly strung and sensitive…when I saw him I thought, ‘My God, it’s so easy. You don’t have to come on shouting, “Ere, ‘ere, missus! Got the music ‘Arry? Now missus, don’t get your knickers in a twist!” You can come on like Waring and say, “Not many in tonight. There’s enough room at the back to play rugby. My God, they are playing rugby.

The Windmill Theatre on Great Windmill Street in 1940

Archer Street, which is on one side of the Windmill Theatre, in the late-forties. Musicians and performers looking for work would meet up with small-time agents here.

Windmill Theatre

The Windmill Theatre on the corner of Great Windmill street and Archer Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue, was a magnet to many of the new wave ex-servicemen comedians, of which there were many. The theatre was infamous for its risque dancing girls and nude tableaux andthere weren’t too many patrons who were there for the jokes.

The theatre had been bought in 1930 by a 70 year old ‘white haired, bright eyed little woman in mink’ called Mrs Laura Henderson whose late husband “had been something in Jute”. At the time it was a run-down old cinema called the Palais de Luxe (actually one of the first in London) but she had the building extensively rebuilt, glamourously faced with glazed white terracotta and renamed it the Windmill Theatre.

Under the careful guidance of her manager Vivian Van Damme, a small neat man who more often than not would be smoking a cigar, the theatre slowly became a success. The ‘Mill’, as it became known in its heyday, started to present a non-stop type of revue that was a winning combination of brand-new comedians, a small resident ballet, a singer or two and, of course the infamous static nude tableaux. The terrible title of the show assimilated the word ‘nude’ and ‘revue’ and was called Revudeville.

Revudeville cover

Vivian Van Damm

The elderly Vivian Van Damm showing Benny Hill how its done.

Van Damme, amusingly known as V.D. to everyone backstage, had an astute judgement of both English sexual taste and of what the Lord Chamberlain – the national theatre censor – would allow. “It’s all right to be nude, but if it moves, it’s rude,” said Rowland Thomas Baring, 2nd Earl of Cromer who was the Lord Chamberlain at the time.

On the Sunday night before a new show opened Van Damme would invite the Earl of Cromer to a special performance. To make the Lord Chamberlain’s mood amenable to what he was about to see V.D. made sure there was generous hospitality before the curtain was raised. It was said that the Lord Chamberlain never delegated his responsibilities on these occasions.

During the war the Windmill Theatre became one of the first theatres to re-open after the Government initially ordered compulsory closure of all the theatres in the West End (4-16 September 1939). It stayed open throughout the rest of the war with five or six performances a day and open from 11am to 10.35 at night.

Windmill Girls

Windmill Girls

Windmill Girls

Once the audience arrived in the morning some of them would stay and watch all the six shows throughout the evening and night. Des O’Connor, just one of the comedians who got an early break at the Windmill, was on his fifth show of the day when he completely dried up. Somebody, who had been at all the previous shows that day, shouted out: “You do the one about the parrot next!”

During the latter performances the audience that were sitting in the back of the stalls would wait for those in the front rows to get up and leave. When they did the men at the back would quickly leap over the seats to get to the front. This was known as the ‘Windmill Steeplechase’.

During the worst of the Blitz it was sometimes too dangerous to expect people to get home and the stagehands and performers often sheltered in the lower two floors underground. Around 1943 the theatre created its famous motto – “We never closed” – although to a lot of people this quickly became “we never Clothed”.

Life magazine featured the Windmill Theatre and its girls during the war.

Windmill Girls sleeping in the basement of the theatre during the Blitz

Windmill girls in the dressing room

In fact the ‘Mill’ became internationally famous for staying open for business despite the constant threat of the German bombers. Extraordinarily, this reputation of defiance, together with Van Damme’s tasteful’ girl-next-door version of English femininity, made the Windmill theatre a major symbol for London’s ‘Blitz Spirit’ all around the world.

This indestructible gesture of defiance was summed up at the theatre when one naked young woman broke the ‘no moving’ rule by brazenly raising her hand to thumb her nose at a V1 bomb that had exploded nearby. She earned herself a standing ovation.

Piccadilly Circus, about a hundred yards from the Windmill, in the black-out during the Blitz

Benny Hill, who by now had changed his name (Jack Benny was one of his favourite comedians), had two auditions at the Windmill. On both occasions, and after barely finishing his first gag, Hill got a dreaded ‘Thank you, next please’ from Van Damm somewhere in the darkness of the stalls.

He wasn’t the only comedian who would later go on to become a huge star but be rejected by the Windmill theatre. Both Bob Monkhouse and Norman Wisdom also failed to get past the one-man Van Damm judging panel.

The list of comics that did perform at the Windmill, however, is extraordinary, and included Jimmy Edwards, Tony Hancock, Arthur English, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine, Bruce Forsyth, Dave Allen, Alfred Marks, Max Bygrave, Tommy Cooper and Barry Cryer.

There was a comedy revolution taking place. Performers, who in a sense had wasted years of their young adulthood to the war, were desperate to make up for lost time and they had a connection with each other like no generation since.

For Hill, after failing his second audition at the Windmill, it was back to the working men’s clubs in places like Dagenham, Streatham, Tottenham, Harlesden and Stoke Newington. In those days the Soho agents never actually mentioned money and used to show the amount that was to be paid by laying fingers on the lapels of their jackets. One finger, one pound, two fingers meant two pounds – but it was nearly always the former for Benny in those days.

However his act was getting more and more polished and in 1948, in some rehearsal rooms across the road from the Windmill Theatre on Great Windmill Street, he had an audition as Reg Varney’s straight-man in a revue called Gaytime.

There were two people auditioning for the part but after Hill had performed an English calypso (this would have been pretty rare just after the war) which he sang to his own guitar accompaniment:

‘We have two Bev’ns in our Caninet/Aneurin’s the one with the gift of the gab in it/The other Bev’n's the taciturnist/He knows the importance of being Ernest!’

After his act, Hill was told by Hedley Claxton, an impresario who specialised in seaside shows, that he had got the job. The other contender for the role that afternoon in 1948 was a young impressionist from Camden called Peter Sellers. In 1955, Hill astutely told Picturegoer: “Watch Peter Sellers. He’s going to be the biggest funny man in Britain.”

Hill and Reg Varney’s double act was a success and they were signed up for three seasons of Gaytime and subsequently a touring version of a London Palladium revue called Sky High.

Gaytime with Reg Varney and Benny Hill. Twenty years later Varney would be the first person to use the first ever cashpoint machine in Enfield.

Around this time Hill appeared on BBC radio a few times but struggled to make his mark. A damning BBC report on Benny Hill, dated 10 October 1947 says:

Ronald Waldman: The only trouble with him was that he didn’t make me laugh at all – and for a comedian that’s not very good. It’s a mixture of lack of comedy personality and lack of comedy material.

Harry Pepper: I find him without personality and very dully unfunny.

In the early fifties, unlike many performers and agents who either feared it or thought it would be a flash-in-the-pan, Benny realised that television would be massive. He knew, however, that it gobbled up material and could end the career of Variety artists who had successfully performed the same material all their lives. So Hill started to write hundreds and hundreds of sketches and eventually submitted them in person to the same Ronald Waldman who had said just three years before written ‘he didn’t make me laugh at all’.

This time Waldman, now BBC’s head of light entertainment, was actually very impressed and offered Benny Hill his own show right there and then.

‘Hi There’ went out on the 20^th August 1951 at 8.15pm. The 45 minute one-off show featured a series of sketches wholly written by Benny Hill and was relatively well-received. It wouldn’t be until four years later that Hill had his own series and in January 1955 the first ever ‘The Benny Hill Show’ was broadcast on the BBC. Hill was always an uncomfortable performer on stage and the new medium of television utterly suited his “conspiratorial glances and anticipatory smirks” to camera and after a shaky first episode the rest of the series was a huge success.

Benny enjoying his new found success. He had paid his dues though.

Benny with his dancing girls on the first ever Benny Hill Show on the BBC

Plus ça change...still surrounded by his dancing girls over thirty years later.

Benny Hill never looked back and was a mainstay of British television for the next thirty five years. Initially his shows appeared on the BBC and then subsequently on Thames Television from 1969 when the new London weekday franchise needed some high-profile signings.

The ‘cherub sent by the devil’, as Michael Caine once described Hill, eventually became a huge star all over the world. It seemed at one point, just as many in the UK were starting to find his comedy rather old-fashioned and sexist, that the rest of the world thought Benny Hill was British comedy.

Twenty years after Hill made his first series for Thames Television their new Head of Light Entertainment John Howard Davies invited him into the offices for a chat. Benny assumed that they were meeting to discuss details of a new series – he’d just gone down a storm in Cannes.

Davies thanked him for all his series he had made for Thames and then promptly sacked him. Hill never really recovered from the shock and considering what he had done for the company over the last two decades he was treated badly. It was only three years later that he was found dead in his apartment a stone’s throw from the Thames Television studios in Teddington.

Benny and yet more women. Again.

There is no doubt that Benny Hill had a strange relationship with women. He was very confused about the accusations of sexism in the latter part of his career. He felt that his comedy hadn’t really changed and he’d been doing almost the same thing for decades. This was true, he literally had been telling the same jokes for decades always happy to recycle his own material, but society around him had moved on and an elderly man surrounded or chased by very scantily-clad women made for uncomfortable viewing.

It appears that hill never really had a proper relationship during his lifetime. The closest he got to marriage was with a dancer from the Windmill Theatre called Doris Deal around the mid-fifties. He took her for meals in London, they held hands, and it was assumed they were seeing each other, but when Hill had procrastinated a little too long and told her he wasn’t ready for marriage she promptly left him.

There were other close albeit non-romantic relationships with women through the years including a young Australian actress called Annette André whowould eventually star in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). He may have even proposed to her but if he did she said she pretended not to notice.

It seems that Benny Hill, famous throughout the world by surrounding himself with young women, either was scared of intimate sexual intercourse or, as some un-named sources have implied, that he was impotent. It was probably a combination of the two.

Benny Hill out with friends in 1955, his girlfriend Doris Deal is front left

Benny Hill and Bob Monkhouse. Two people who failed their Windmill Theatre audition.

He wanted his women to be more naive than he was, women who would look up to him. He also said it was fellatio he wanted, or masturbation. “But Bob, I get a thrill when they’re kneeling there, between my knees and they’re looking up at me. And I want them to call me Mr Hill, not Benny. ‘Is that all right for you , Mr Hill?’ That’s lovely, that is, I really like that,” I asked him why and he said, “well, it’s respectful.”

Benny Hill and an uncomfortable-looking Jane Leeves (of Frasier fame) once a Hill's Angel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLBVTRooZHc

Clips from BBC Benny Hill shows from the sixties.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkv9dbLW4WM

An interview with Benny Hill from early in his career.

Benny Hill Entertains

Hmm.

Windmill Theatre today. Is it not possible to get rid of the black cladding?

The Whitehall theatre is now a lap-dancing club. The sign outside says ‘Probably the most exciting men’s club in the world…’ I haven’t been there, but I’m sure it’s safe to say, it almost certainly isn’t.

When I was a lad and crazy to get into showbiz I used to dream of being a comic in a touring revue. They were extraordinary, wonderful shows. There were jugglers and acrobats and singers and comics, and most important of all were the girl dancers. My shows are probably the nearest thing there is on TV to those old revues. – Benny Hill, 1991

Benny Hill – Lonely Boy

Benny Hill – Bamba 3688

Benny Hill – What a World

Buy Benny Hill’s Ultimate Collection here (only £2.49!)

Donald Duart Maclean and Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess

Guy Burgess woke at around 9.30 on the morning of Friday, 25 May 1951 in his untidy musty-smelling bedroom. Next to his bed was an overflowing ashtray and lying on the floor was a half-read Jane Austen novel. He had got in the habit of rising relatively late since his return from America three weeks previously where he had been second secretary at the British embassy in Washington. 

Burgess had left in disgrace, and at the British Ambassador’s behest, after several embarrassing incidents which included being caught speeding at 80 mph three times in just one hour, strangely pouring a plate of prawns into his jacket pocket and leaving them there for a week and, perhaps more importantly as far as his job was concerned, being rather too casual with confidential papers. He was drunk nearly continuously and thoroughly disliked by most of the people with whom he came in contact.

Now back in London Burgess was living in a small three-roomed flat in Mayfair situated at Clifford Chambers, 10 New Bond Street and opposite Asprey the famous jewellers. It was (and is of course) a salubrious part of London, if not the salubrious part of London.

In 1951, if for some reason you had been looking for an area in the world that was visually and politically diametrically opposed to anywhere in the Soviet Union, Bond Street would have been pretty high up on your list. Burgess, the infamous Eton and Cambridge-educated Soviet spy, coped with the irony surprisingly easily until this Friday morning in May when his world suddenly turned upside down.

Clifford Chambers, 10 New Bond Street in Mayfair today.

Jack 'Jacky' Hewit

Burgess had been brought a cup of tea that morning by his flatmate, and erstwhile lover, Jack Hewit known to his friends as ‘Jacky’. He had once been a ballet and chorus dancer but now was a slightly over-weight office clerk but Hewit was a close and faithful friend to Burgess and they had been sharing various flats in and around Mayfair for fourteen years. Hewit later wrote of that morning:

“Guy lay back, reading a book and smoking, and he seemed normal and unworried. When I left the flat to go to my office, Guy said ‘See you later, Mop’ – that was his pet name for me. We intended to have a drink together that evening.”

Burgess and Hewit's flat on New Bond Street.

Not the most salubrious flat in Mayfair.

Burgess's books he eventually left behind he took with him a volume of Jane Austen's collected novels.

At 9.30 on that same morning Donald Duart Maclean would have already caught his usual train from Sevenoaks some two hours previously and would have been sitting at his desk in Whitehall. He was head of the American department at the Foreign Office in King Charles Street.

The job sounds important but care was already being made that it was of no operational importance as, for some time, Maclean had been under suspicion, along with four others, for leaking atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. In the last few days, however, the four suspects had now become just one.

Donald Maclean in 1935 aged 22

Two years younger than Burgess, Maclean was exactly 38 years old for it was his birthday and he had asked if he could take the next morning as leave (Saturday mornings were still worked by many civil-servants after the war) so he could celebrate with family friends at home in Surrey.

Maclean was the son of one of the most illustrious Liberal families in the country. His father, Sir Donald Maclean, had first entered Parliament as the Liberal member for Bath in 1906 and was President of the Board of Education in the cabinet when he died in 1932.

At around 10-10.30 am a senior MI5 officer and the head of Foreign Office security were received by Mr Herbert Morrison, who had recently become Foreign Secretary, in his large office in Whitehall. After reading a few papers Morrison signed one of them and this gave MI5 permission to bring Donald Maclean in for questioning.

Herbert Morrison in 1951, his daughter gave birth to Peter Mandelson two years later

A few days previously Maclean and Burgess had met for lunch, ostensibly about a memorandum that Burgess had prepared while in America about American policy in the Far East and the threat of McCarthyism. They met at the Reform club but according to Burgess the dining room was full and they walked to the Royal Automobile Club along Pall Mall. On the way Maclean said: “I’m in frightful trouble. I’m being followed by the dicks.”

He pointed to two men by the corner of the Carlton Club and said, “Those are the people who are following me.” Burgess described the two men “there they were, jingling their coins in a policeman-like manner and looking embarrassed at having to follow a member of the upper classes.”

London Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall in the fifties

Dining room at the Royal Automobile Club

At around the same time as the Herbert Morrison meeting in Whitehall, Burgess urgently left his flat in New Bond Street. He had just received a telephone call from Western Union relaying a telegraph from Kim Philby in Washington, seemingly about a car he had left in Washington, but in reality a coded message that Maclean would be interrogated after the weekend.

Burgess first went to the Green Park Hotel on Half Moon Street (a former town house in a terrace built in 1730 – the hotel is still there and now known as the Hilton Green Park Hotel) just off Piccadilly and about ten minutes walk away. Here he met a young American student called Bernard Miller whom he had befriended on his journey back from the US on the Queen Mary. Burgess later described as  – “an intelligent progressive sort of chap” .

They had a coffee in the hotel’s comfortably luxurious lounge before going for a walk in nearby Green Park. They had planned a few days away in France and Burgess had already booked two tickets for a boat that sailed at midnight to France later that night. After a few minutes Burgess stopped and said to his surprised American friend who had been animatedly chatting away about their trip:

“Sorry Bernard,” he said, “I haven’t been listening, really. You see, a young friend at the Foreign Office is in serious trouble, and I have to help him out of it, somehow.”

Burgess assured the shocked Miller that he would do everything he could so that they could make their midnight crossing but he would not be able to say anything definite until later on in the day.

By now it was just before midday and the American went back to his hotel and Burgess went to the Reform Club for a large whisky and a think about what was lying a head. After half an hour he asked the Porter to call Welbeck 3991 and he spoke to Welbeck Motors and hired a car for ten days.

While Burgess was slumped in a large corner armchair at his club Maclean left his office and walked up Whitehall and across Trafalgar Square to meet a couple of friends, a married couple, for lunch in Old Compton Street. They walked through a door which was part of a green facade with the heading ‘Oysters/WHEELER’s & Co./Merchants’ written along the top.

Cyril Connolly and Caroline Blackwood (soon to become Mrs Lucian Freud) outside Wheelers in 1951. Connolly, the writer and critic, was a friend of Burgess. Two days after Burgess returned to London he described Washington to Connolly: "Absolutely frightful because of Senator McCarthy. Terrible atmosphere. All these purges."

In the early fifties Wheeler’s restaurant was a Soho institution. The owner was Bernard Walsh who started Wheeler’s in Soho in 1929 as a small retail oyster shop. After seeing how popular his oysters were in London’s top restaurants he bought a few tables and chairs and started serving them himself. By 1951, when Maclean and his friends visited for lunch, the restaurant featured a long counter on the left-hand side, where a waiter or Walsh himself opened oysters at frightening speed.

There was a large menu which had thirty-two ways of serving sole and lobster but no vegetables save a few boiled potatoes. During post-war austerity when English food was at its dreariest and some of it still rationed, Wheeler’s seemed a luxury.

Francis Bacon with friends, including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach at Wheeler's in 1951/2

When Donald Maclean came out of Wheeler's and turned left this would have been his view in 1951

The restaurant was very crowded on that Friday lunchtime and after sharing a dozen oysters and some chablis Maclean and his friends decided to eat the rest of their lunch elsewhere. Maclean seemed unconcerned and almost nonchalant as he and his friends walked up Greek Street and through Soho Square to Charlotte Street where they had two further courses at a German restaurant called Schmidt’s situated at numbers 35-37.

This area of London was still known to most people at the time as North Soho. The name Fitzrovia was coined relatively recently and named after the Fitzroy Tavern. Coincidentally ‘Fitzrovia’ was recorded in print for the first time by Tom Driberg, the independent and later Labour MP – a close friend of Guy Burgess.

Most of the staff at Schmidt’s had been interned during the second world war which maybe explained why the waiters were infamously known as the rudest in the world. The restaurant still served food using an old European restaurant custom where the waiters brought meals from the kitchen and only then sold them to the customers.

After his relatively long lunch Maclean said goodbye to his friends and gratefully accepted an offer that he could stay with them while his wife was having her baby – she was only two weeks from having their third child. He said he’d call them in the following week to arrange the details.

The Welbeck Motors car hire form. Burgess writes his address as 'Reform Club'.

While Maclean was having lunch Burgess called on Welbeck Motors at 7-9 Crawford Street half a mile or so north of Marble Arch to pick up his hire-car – an Austin A70 that was due to be returned on June 4^th, ten days later. For this he paid £25 cash in advance – £15 for the hire of the car and £10 deposit.

Welbeck Motors became famous throughout the country ten years later when they created the first major fleet of mini-cabs. The fleet cost £560,000 and consisted of 800 Renault Dauphine cars that were being built in Acton at the time. Michael Gotla, the man behind the skillful publicity of Welbeck Motors, argued that the 1869 Carriage Act only applied to cabs that “plied for hire” on the street and that their mini-cabs only responded to calls phoned to the main office the number of which was WELBECK 0561.

The fares were only one shilling per mile – a lot cheaper than the traditional Austin black cabs and much to the chagrin of the traditional cabbies. The fleet of Renault Dauphines, the first to feature third-party advertisements on their bodywork, were a huge success, particularly to people who lived outside central London. Although passengers were advised not to concentrate too much on the Spanish “widow-maker” nick-name for the Renaults so named due to their very unsafe cornering.

A Corgi model of a Welbeck Motors' 'widow-maker' Renault complete with advertising

The Austin A70

Burgess drove the Austin down to Mayfair again where he dropped into Gieve’s the tailors at number 27 Old Bond Street at around 3 pm. The two hundred year old company had only been at the premises for about ten years because the original flagship store a few doors down at number 21 had been destroyed by a German bomb in 1940.

Incidentally, Gieves and Hawkes, now maybe the most famous bespoke tailoring name in the world, only merged in 1974 when Gieve’s Ltd bought out Hawkes enabling it to also acquire the valuable freehold of No. 1 Savile Row. The acquisition was good timing because Gieve’s flagship store in Old Bond Street was again destroyed by high-explosive not long after the merger, this time courtesy of the IRA. From then on, number 1 Savile Row became Gieve’s and Hawkes as it is today.

Gieve's after the IRA bomb in 1974

At Gieve’s Burgess bought a ‘fibre’ suitcase and a white mackintosh and then went to meet Miller again. After a couple of drinks he dropped the young American back at his hotel telling him: “I’ll call for you at half-past seven.” Burgess didn’t, and Miller never saw him again.

After his relatively long lunch Maclean took a taxi down to the Traveller’s Club – the West End club that had long been associated with the Foreign Office. He had two drinks at the bar and cashed a cheque for five pounds which he did most weekends so it wouldn’t have seemed unusual. There wasn’t anyone at the club he knew and he returned to his office just after three.

Traveller's Club at 106 Pall Mall

Burgess drove back to the flat where he met Hewit who had returned from his office. According to Hewit the phone rang and Burgess answered soon making it clear to his flatmate that he was talking to Maclean. Burgess was visibly upset and left the flat almost immediately. He was never to see Hewit again. Before he left he grabbed £300 in cash some saving certificates and quickly thew some clothes and his treasured copy of Jane Austen’s collected novels. He also asked to borrow Hewit’s overcoat.

He was next seen at the Reform Club in Pall Mall where he asked for a road map of the North of England presumably to lay a false trail and from the club he drove to Maclean’s home at Tatsfield in Surrey.

Maclean left the Foreign Office at exactly 4.45 and walked up Whitehall to Charing Cross Station joining the hurrying commuter crowd. He was followed as usual by the two Mi5 ‘dicks’ and they carefully made sure he entered the station and went through the barrier to catch his usual 5.19 train to Sevenoaks.

Burgess and Maclean arrived within half an hour of each other at the Maclean’s house. According to Maclean’s wife Melinda, Burgess was introduced to her as Mr Roger Stiles, in a business colleague. They all sat down for a birthday dinner at seven for which Melinda had cooked a special ham for the occasion. Eventually Maclean put a few things into a briefcase including a silk dressing gown and casually told his wife that he and ‘Stiles’ would have to go out on business but would not be away for more than a day.

Melinda Maclean leaving hospital in June after the birth of her baby. She once wrote to her sister saying: "Donald is still pretty confused and vague about himself, and his desires, but I think when he gets settled he will find a new security and peace. I hope so...He is still going to R. (the psychiatrist), however, and is definitely better. She is still baffled about the homosexual side which comes out when he's drunk, and I think slight hostility in general, to women."

With Burgess at the wheel of the hired cream-coloured Austin A70 they set off for Southampton at around 9 pm. Their destination was Southampton docks 100 miles away to catch the cross-channel ferry Falaise which was due to leave for St Malo at midnight. They made it with just minutes to spare and abandoning the Austin on the quayside they ran up the gangway almost as it was being raised. A dock worker called at them: “What about your car?” Burgess shouted: “Back on Monday.”

The ship that Burgess and Maclean took to St Malo

He wasn’t of course and Burgess and Maclean never set foot in Britain again. It wasn’t until five years later that the Krushchev admitted that the two traitors were now living in the Soviet Union. Burgess, who rather unsurprisingly didn’t really enjoy the Soviet lifestyle and still preferred to order his suits from Savile Row. He died of chronic liver failure due to alcoholism in 1963.

Maclean found it far easier than his  spying partner to assimilate into the Soviet system and became a respected citizen. He died of a heart attack in 1983.

Burgess sunbathing in Russia and making the best of a place he hated.

Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel was written in 1952, the year after Burgess and Maclean’s defection. In it, James Bond has a crisis of confidence perhaps for the first and last time:

This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date,” he says, “Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2A2g-qRIaU

The ‘Third Man’ Kim Philby at a press conference in 1955 after he had been accused of being an associate of Burgess and Maclean in parliament. He shows the confidence and extraordinary charm that enabled to keep undercover for so long. He defected to Russia from Beirut in 1963 and died in 1988 of heart failure. While in the Soviet Union he had an affair with Melinda Maclean.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ8BRj4YWLM

The ‘Fourth Man’ Anthony Blunt being interviewed by Richard Dimbleby as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Blunt was one of the first people to search Burgess’s flat after he had absconded enabling him to remove any incriminatory material.

Obviously not documents considered 'incriminatory' by Anthony Blunt but these drawings of Lenin and Stalin by Burgess were left behind in the flat at New Bond Street after he had fled to Russia

The Rector of Stiffkey, Harold Davidson with Estelle Douglas 1932

‘It is very hard to be good, once you have been bad.’ - Barbara Harris

The Reverend Harold Francis Davidson, the Rector of the small Norfolk parish of Stiffkey for twenty-five years, was utterly besotted and bewitched by pretty young girls – of that there was no doubt. Exactly how he behaved in the company of said pretty young girls was more up for debate. And in 1932 practically the whole country, including the highest echelons of the Church of England, were debating exactly that.

The Rector preaching at Stiffkey

Every Sunday, from 1906 to 1932, with a break for the First World War when he joined the Royal Navy, the Reverend Davidson was always at his pulpit at the Stiffkey church. Although, it has to be said, he pretty well spent the rest of the week in Soho in London. He’d catch the first train every Monday morning and the last one back to Norfolk on Saturday night.

The Stiffkey locals joked that in the summer it was probably for the best not to die on a Monday morning as the body would be rather malodorous by the time Davidson made it back for the funeral. He was well-liked all the same by most of his local parish.

Davidson would walk around the streets of the West End all week essentially stalking and pursuing girls wherever he went (occasionally without the dog-collar). Whether it was attactive young actresses, shop girls or waitresses none of them were particularly safe from the the glint in the Reverend’s eye.

Until the day he died the Rector always argued that he was doing nothing else but God’s work as he wondered around Soho. His aim in life, he claimed, was helping young women, particularly shop-assistants and waitresses, many of whom had left home for the first time and were on very low wages, from falling into a life of prostitution. He once said:

“I cannot help feeling, that is, say, half the London clergy would, individually, spend a quarter of the time I spent looking after country girls stranded in London…instead of wasting their time…at gossiping Mothers’ Meeting, Parish Tea fights, and Society functions, there might not be so many thousands of the poor, misguided girls openly, shamelessly plying their terrible trade.”

At his own estimate Davidson had made the acquaintance of, in one way or another, two to three thousand girls between 1919 (when he returned home from the First World War to an adulterous and pregnant wife) and 1932:

“I was picking up in this way roughly, as my diaries show, an average of about 150 to 200 girls a year, and taking them to restaurants for a meal and a talk, of these I was able definitely to help into good jobs of work a very large number.”

When Davidson talked about ‘restaurants’ he almost certainly would have been talking about relatively cheap cafes such as the J. Lyon’s Tea Shops of which there were many around London in the twenties and thirties and indeed throughout the country. The first of the Lyons teashops opened at 213 Piccadilly in 1894 (it’s still a cafe, now called Ponti’s and you can still see the original stucco ceiling of the original teashop).

Soon there were  more than 250 white and gold fronted teashops which occupied prominent positions in many of London’s high streets. Food and drink prices were the same in each teashop irrespective of locality. The tea was the best available and the blend was never sold or made available to the public.

The J. Lyons flagships shops were the Corner Houses situated on or near the corners of Coventry Street, the Strand and Tottenham Court Road. They were started in 1909 and remained until 1977. They were gigantic places with food being served on four or five floors. In its heyday the Coventry Street Corner House served about 5000 covers and employed about 400 staff. There were hairdressing salons, telephone booths and even at one point a food delivery service. For a time the Coventry Street Corner House were open 24 hours a day.

Lyons Corner House, Coventry Street.

The hot food counter in Lyon's Corner House restaurant in Coventry Street. The bar is made of functional steel, with built-in hot water jets and a row of tea urns, which is in marked contrast to the classical styling of the rest of the restaurant.

Davidson at a Foyles Literary Luncheon at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London. "I could get you in films, you know".

An associate of Davidson called J. Rowland Sales once referred to an incident that occurred in the large Coventry Street Corner House. Davidson was visibly upset while recounting a very sad story about a homeless couple he had recently found sleeping under a hedge. All of a sudden his demeanour instantly changed. It was almost like he was a completely different person recounted Sales, and all because “a young ‘nippy’ waitress had walked by. Davidson called out ‘Excuse me, Miss. You must be the sister of Jessie Matthews‘, before leaping up and rushing out of the teashop promising the startled waitress that he would get her a part in a new play that was opening in London.”

Lyons' Nippy waitresses

In 1926 there was a staff competition to name to choose a nickname for the Lyon’s teashops’ waitresses – the former name of ‘Gladys’ was now seen as old fashioned. The waitresses wore starched caps with a big, red ‘L’ embroidered in the centre, a black Alpaca dress with a double row of pearl buttons sewn with red cotton and white detachable cuffs and collar, a white square apron worn at dropped-waist level. The name ‘Nippy’ was eventually chosen, presumably because the waitresses nipped speedily around – often trying to avoid the advances of middle-aged men like Harold Davidson no doubt.

The Perfect Nippy

Although it was reported by Picture Post that 800-900 Nippies got married to customers ‘met on duty’ every year and they wrote that ‘being a Nippy is good  training for a housewife’. If ‘Nippy’ sounds a trifle strange as a name for a waitress, its worth noting that other rejected suggestions included ‘Sybil-at-your-service’, ‘Miss Nimble’, Miss Natty’, ‘Busy Betty’ and even ‘Dextrous Doris’.

The strange and rather bizarre stories of Reverend Davidson came to be noticed by the higher echelons of the Church of England, notably the Bishop of Norfolk. In 1931 the Bishop decided to investigate Davidson, and soon the self-styled Prostitutes’ Padre was charged with offences against public morality under the 1892 Clergy Discipline Act.

A consistory court, which is a type of ecclesiastical court used by the Church of England to this day for the trial of clergy (below the rank of bishop) accused of immoral acts, opened at Church House in Westminster, on 29 March 1932. A Consistory court has no jury and is presided over, in place of a judge, by what is called a Chancellor of the Diocese.

The original Church House was founded in 1887 and built to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. It was knocked down and replaced in 1937 the year of Davidson's death.

Inside Church House

The court case was a sensation and front page news. Davidson wasn’t slow in courting the press and on the first day of the trial arrived in flamboyant style while smoking a characteristic large cigar. He even signed autographs.

Harold and his cigar

Davidson's Family outside Church House in Westminster

Amongst, what seemed like hundreds of Nippies and domestic servants brought up to give evidence, the prosecution’s star witness was a young woman called Barbara Harris whom Davidson had met in 1930. He had first seen her at Marble Arch – a popular haunt of prostitutes at the time – and he used his old tried and tested trick of comparing Barbara to a famous actress, this time Greta Garbo.

Barbara was just sixteen and already a prostitute suffering from gonorrhea. She had never known her father and been abandoned by her mother who suffered from mental illness. She welcomed the kind gentleman’s offer of help and was soon pouring out her life-story to Davidson, no doubt in a Lyons cafe in the near vicinity. Davidson helped her find lodgings and they became close over the next 18 months.

Rosie Ellis, one of the main witnesses at Davidson's trial.

Star proscecution witness Barbara Harris arriving at the church court. 1932

The Worshipful F. Keppel North, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Norwich ie the Judge.

The rector gave Barbara money and even found her a job in domestic service at Villiers Street in Charing Cross but she quickly tired of both the job and the reverend’s repeated attentions. At one point she gave him a black-eye and threw coins at him but he continually came back for more.

One morning at 9 am Davidson had appeared at the room where she was sleeping. During the court case the prosecution asked Barbara about this:

Prosecution: What did he do?

Barbara: He tried to have intercourse with me.

Prosecution: Did you let him?

Barbara: No

Prosecution: When you refused, did he say anything?

Barbara: He said he was sorry afterwards.

Chancellor: When he tried to have intercourse with you, did he do anything to his clothes?

Barbara: Yes, he said he got them into a mess.

Chancellor: Did he undo his clothes?

Prosecution: Did he do anything? You said something about his clothes being in a mess?

Barbara: He relieved himself.

Prosecution: Did that happen more than once?

Barbara: More than once. It happened two or three times.

Prosecution: You say you kissed him?

Barbara: Yes.

Prosecution: How often was he kissing you?

Barbara: He was always kissing me.

Prosecution: Did he ever ask you to do things?

Barbara: Yes, he once asked me to give myself to him body and soul…

"I know he has the keys of a lot of girls flats, and front doors" - a letter from Barbara Harris to the Bishop of Norwich.

If this wasn’t enough, near the end of the trial additional evidence was suddenly produced which ultimately finished Davidson’s clerical career.

To Davidson’s utter shock and horrified disbelief, the prosecution produced a photograph of the reverend standing next to a naked 15 year old actress. The girl was called Estelle Douglas and was the daughter of a friend of his – an actress he had helped to get on stage some twenty years before. In turn she had asked Davidson to try and get her daughter into films.

The rectory rather naively holding a pyjama party with young actresses to be, including Estelle Douglas, 1932.

A photoshoot had been organised at the Stiffkey rectory with the idea of taking publicity shots of Estelle in her bathing suit. At one point the photographer told Estelle that the strap of the bathing suit and her chemise were both showing and, apparently out of earshot of the Reverend, asked her to remove them, leaving her with a black tasselled shawl to protect her modesty. A series of photographs were then taken.

Harold Davidson rushing to protect the young actress's modesty. 1932

According to Davidson the photographer offered fifty pounds to take a photograph of him and Estelle with the intention of selling it to the newspapers. Davidson was broke and needed the money and rather stupidly agreed to the request. Whether the photograph was set-up or not (there is evidence to suggest that it was) it was now all over for the ‘Prostitute’s Padre’ and the court found him guilty of five counts of immoral conduct. He was charged £8,205 costs and his career in the Church was finished.

Mr and Mrs Gladstone. Their marriage was happier than it looked. Despite the prostitutes.

Of course the Reverend Davidson wasn’t the first member of the establishment who seemingly spent most of his spare time giving a helping hand up to fallen women in central London. Extraordinarily finding time while being Prime Minister four times, the Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, passing the third Reform Act and trying to establish home-rule in Ireland, William Ewart Gladstone was notorious for wandering around the darker environs of the West End.

With almost reckless abandon he searched for young women to ‘rescue’ often asking them back to his house. A shocked Private Secretary once asked him ‘What would your wife say?’. ‘Why’ Gladstone answered, ‘it is to my wife that I’m bringing her’. His wife Catherine would indeed feed the women and give them a place to sleep before finding, not always particularly gratefully, a temporary shelter to stay. Catherine Gladstone once astutely wrote that it was ‘a common thing for [servants] to be engaged without wages or clothes and only for ‘food every other day’. Who can wonder at girls so situated yielding to temptation and sin?’

Although Gladstone was completely open about his ‘rescuing’ of the young street women, even he wrote in his diary that he had occasionally committed ‘adultery of the heart’ and ‘delectation morosa’ meaning ‘enjoying thinking of evil without the intention of action’. Indeed a fellow parliamentarian called Henry Labouchere, MP for Northampton, wryly noted that:

‘Gladstone manages to combine his missionary meddling with a keen appreciation of a pretty face. He has never been known to rescue any of our East End whores, nor for that matter it is easy to contemplate his rescuing any ugly woman and I am quite sure his convention of the Magdalen is of incomparable example of pulchritude with a a superb figure and carriage.’

Gladstone spent a minimum of £2000 a year helping prostitutes and providing shelters. He lived until the ripe old age of eighty-nine with an extraordinarily full political life. Less than forty years later, at the age of just fifty-seven the former Rector of Stiffkey and the self-styled ‘prostitutes’ padre’ found himself on the scrap-heap. He picked himself up and, using his experience on the stage as a young man, he turned himself into a showman in order to attract as much publicity and money as possible. He wanted to appeal his court case and believed he should have been tried by a jury.

His most imfamous stunt involved him fasting inside a barrel at Blackpool. The container was fitted with an electric light and a small chimney from which his cigar smoke could escape. Through a grille he’d protest his innocence to anyone who would listen and even invited Ghandi to meet him there for tea. To no avail I might add.

The Rector with his barrel.

Davidson in Blackpool in 1933 outside the barrels.

Despite his stunts becoming more and more outrageous, for instance at one point he was being roasted in an oven while being prodded in the buttocks with a pitchfork by a mechanical devil, the erstwhile clergyman’s fame was beginning to wane. In the summer of 1937 Davidson tried one more stunt and at Thompson’s Amusement Park in Skegness he was billed as ‘A modern Daniel in a lion’s den.” Davidson stood in a cage with a lion called Freddie and a lioness called Toto. Again he spoke about the injustice he had been dealt merged with a torrent of abuse against his former church leaders.

Rector with Freddie the Lion in 1937, Skegness.

Unfortunately on the 28th July Davidson accidentally stood on Toto’s tail. Presumably because of the lioness’s sudden movement Freddie attacked the former rector. The lion mauled him around the neck and shook him around like a rag-doll.

Despite the bravery of a 16 year old lion tamer called Renee Somer who fought the lion back using a whip and an iron bar, Davidson was admitted to Skegness Cottage Hospital. It is said that the publicity-hungry Davidson, with blood pouring from his neck, still had the presence of mind to say:

“Telephone the London newspapers – we still have time to make the first editions!”

The badly injured Davidson died in hospital two days later and a verdict of misadventure was returned at the inquest. He was buried in Stiffkey churchyard and with the help of the police to control the crowds, over two thousand mourners attended the funeral.

Looking back eighty years ago, Harold Davidson was almost certainly badly treated by his bishop and the Church of England. He could always be accused of extreme naivety and extraordinary eccentricity but was probably only guilty of an avuncular caress or two (alright lots of avuncular caresses!). However evidence of true immorality was almost non-existent and almost certainly he helped hundreds of young women away  from a life of prostitution.

Harold Davidson's grave at Stiffkey in 2010.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQen-JvafQ

Binnie Hale talks about her role in ‘Nippy’ the 1930 musical

Police photograph of Bobby Britt and his party guests at his flat at 25 Fitzroy Square, January 1927

At one in the morning on 16th January 1927 Superintendent George Collins of the Metropolitan police knocked on the door of the basement flat at 25 Fitzroy Square. A woman called Constance Carre eventually answered and Collins told her that he had a warrant to arrest the occupants. Carre responded:

Mr Britt was going to give us a Salome dance!

Ignoring her the Superintendent and his fellow officers quickly entered the flat where they immediately came across a man who was wearing, as the later police report described, ‘a thin black transparent skirt, with gilt trimming round the edge and a red sash… tied round his loins.’ The report added ‘he wore ladys (sic) shoes and was naked from the loins upwards.’ The 26 year old man gave his name as Robert Britt and said:

I am employed in the chorus of ‘Lady Be Good’. These are a few friends of mine. I was going to give an exhibition dance when you came in.

I have been here for about eight months and pay two pounds five shillings weekly for the flat. Carre is my housekeeper. I was a Valet to a gentleman for about nine years who died last November. I did not like that sort of life, so as I’m considered good at fancy dancing I decided to go on stage… Some of the men I have known for a long time and they bring along any of their friends if they care to do so.

Fair enough you might have thought, it wasn’t a bad story, but unfortunately the police thought otherwise and it eventually came to light that they had been staking out the property for a month or so. Sergeant Spencer and Police Constable Gavin of “D” division had spent 16th, 17th December 1926 and 1st and 2nd of January 1927 essentially peering into the flat from the front and rear of the property. They noted the activities during various parties Robert Britt held at his flat.

Police Sergeant Arthur Spencer wrote:

At 11.45pm I saw two men, who I saw enter at 11.30pm leave, they were undoubtedly men of the “Nancy type”. They walked cuddling one another to Tottenham Court Road, where they stood waiting for a bus. I stood close to them and saw their faces were powdered and painted and their appearance and manner strongly suggested them to be importuners of men.

Police Constable Gavin contributed to the report:

I saw from the a roof into a bedroom in the basement, where two men enter the bedroom, they both undressed and got into bed and the light was put out. I heard them laugh and scream in very effeminate voices.

The bedroom in Bobby Britt's Flat as photographed by the police at the raid.

Fitzroy Square in the 1920s

Bobby Britt, as he mentioned to the police, was at the time performing at the Empire Theatre in the dancing chorus of Lady Be Good! It was the first Broadway musical by the Gershwin brothers starring the brother and sister team of Fred and Adele Astaire. It had been a huge success in New York and had now transferred to the famous theatre in Leicester Square to equal or even greater acclaim. Bobby Britt was dancing in easily the hottest show in town.

Fred and Adele Astaire in Lady Be Good

Leicester Square "is one of the gayest quarters of London". Almost certainly the word 'gay' would have already been in use by a few people to mean homosexual around this time. Albeit probably not by postcard writers.

George Gershwin attended the opening night in London which brought huge crowds to the theatre. Later with the Astaires he partied at the fashionable Embassy Club, where apparently he stayed until eight in the morning.

The fashionable Embassy Club, the location for the first night party of Lady Be Good!

Lady Be Good established the Astaires as international celebrities and the Times enthusiastically wrote:

Columbus may have danced with joy at discovering America, but how he would have cavorted had he also discovered Fred and Adele Astaire!

Adele and her younger brother Fred had been a successful vaudeville act since 1905 and in 1926 Adele was actually the bigger star of the two. Fred at this stage of his career played almost a supporting role. Professionally the siblings were completely different. Fred, a constant worrier, was never happy with his or his sister’s performance and usually arrived at the theatre two hours early to limber up. Adele, a much more relaxed individual, would generally turn up a few minutes before her first entrance.

Fred and Adele - vaudeville dancers in 1915

Fred and Adele

Adele enjoyed her new found celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic and appreciated the attention she had started to get from rich tycoons’ sons and wealthy young aristocrats. In 1932 she retired from the stage and her professional relationship with her brother when she married Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish and moved to Ireland, where they lived at Lismore Castle.

Although she had been dancing most of her life, Adele made no attempt to hide the fact that the theatrical life wasn’t really for her – “It was an acquired taste,” she said, “like olives.”

The future Lady Charles Cavendish

The Empire Theatre around the turn of the century

Thirty years before Fred and Adele danced on the stage of the Empire to such acclaim, Oscar Wilde had his character Algernon Moncrieff mention the theatre in the first act of The importance of Being Ernest’.

Algernon. What shall we do after dinner? Go to a theatre?

Jack. Oh no! I loathe listening.

Algernon. Well, let us go to the Club?

Jack. Oh, no! I hate talking

Algernon. Well, we might trot round to the Empire at ten?

Jack. Oh, no! I can’t bear looking at things. It is so silly.

The original production of Oscar Wilde’s play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ showing Irene Vanbrugh as Gwendolen Fairfax and and George Alexander as John Worthing. 1895.

Oscar Wilde, who wrote his last and ultimately most successful play during August 1896, would have known exactly what connotations the audience would glean from ‘the Empire’ reference.

While Wilde had been writing the play the Empire had been in the news for months, mostly because of the ‘purity campaign’ by the indomitable campaigner against vice – Mrs Ormiston Chant. The Daily Telegraph gave it huge coverage worried about ‘the prudes on the prowl’.

The Indomitable Mrs Ormiston Chant

Prostitution and the theatre, of course, had always been pretty close bedfellows, so to speak. At Wilton’s music hall, for instance, it was flagrant, the gallery could only be entered through the brothel inside which the hall had been built.

In the 1890s the Empire in Leicester Square was justly famous as a Variety and Musical Hall theatre especially for its spectacular ballet productions and its ‘Living Pictures’ – frozen-moment representations of well-known paintings or other familiar scenes where seemingly half-naked young men and women stood very very still.

In reality, the dominant attraction, and to what Wilde was probably referring, was the Empire’s second-tier promenade. This was an area behind the dress circle, where you could still see the stage if you wanted to, but was essentially a pick up joint for high class prostitutes. The theatre charged half a crown (12 1/2p) for a rover ticket that gave you licence to enjoy the promenade. There was room to wander around but there were also comfortable seats and what was called an ‘American Bar’ serving one shilling cocktails such as the ‘Bosom Caresser’ and the ‘Corpse Reviver’.

The luxurious and opulent interior of the Empire Theatre. The tier two promenade is on the bottom right.

The promenade was known as ‘The Cosmopolitan Club of the World’ and the essayist and caricaturist Max Beerhohm described it as “the reputed hub of all the wild gaiety in London – that Nirvana where gilded youth and painter beauty meet…in a glare of electric light.”

Enchanted Mrs Chant was not, and she was of the opinion that it was the risque ‘abbreviated costumes’ on stage that contributed to, and encouraged the indecent and indecorous air of the Promenade. She told the London County Council responsible for the licensing of the Empire:

“We have no right to sanction on the stage that which if it were done in the street would compel a policeman to lock the offender up…The whole question would be solved if men, and not women, were at stake. Men would refuse to exhibit their bodies nightly in this way.”

Her efforts were not in vain and she managed to persuade the council in October 1894 to instruct the Empire to build a barrier between the theatre itself and the infamous ‘haunt of vice’ promenade.

When the Empire Theatre management put up canvas screens to hide the auditorium from the Promenade they were quickly torn down by a rioting audience. They were egged on by the young Sandhurst cadet Winston Churchill who wrote to his brother:

“Did you see the papers about the riot at the Empire last Saturday? It was I who led the rioters – and made a speech to the crowd – “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!”.

The Empire Theatre in 1896

Mrs Ormiston Chant would have been even more shocked and horrified if she had known what was going on within the less prestigious and cheaper first tier promenade. Oscar Wilde, however, almost certainly did, and his ‘Empire’ reference may well have had other connotation altogether to a more select part of his play’s audience.

At a cheaper price of only one shilling the Empire Theatre’s first tier promenade was THE gay pick-up location in the whole of London. A letter to the council dated 15 October 1894, just six weeks after Mrs Chant’s visit to the theatre, described the rough ejection of a man from the shilling promenade by Robert Ahern, the front of house manager. The letter writer described the man who was thrown out “as a ‘sodomite’ as were perhaps half the occupants of that promenade, that it was the only venue for people of this kind, and that he ‘could lay his hands on 200 sods every night in the week if he liked.”

Oscar Wilde in 1895

It’s not known whether Oscar Wilde ever went to ‘look at things’ in the first tier promenade at the Empire Theatre but it does sound like the place he would have frequented around that time. However just a few months after Mrs Ormiston Chant’s intervention at the Empire, and only two months after The Importance of Being Ernest premiered at the St James Theatre in February 1895, Wilde was charged with gross indecency after a failed libel case with the belligerent little Marquess of Queensbury. Wilde was convicted under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.

The judge, Mr Justice Wills described the sentence, the maximum allowed at the time, as “totally inadequate for a case such as this,”. Wilde’s response was “And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?” but it was drowned out in cries of “Shame in the courtroom. Five years later he was dead. A broken man.

The last photograph of Oscar Wilde in 1900

Bobby Britt, 1927 naked above his loins.

Thirty years later Lady Be Good! finished its run at the Empire on 22nd January 1927 presumably without Bobby Britt in the chorus because exactly two weeks previously he had been formally charged with keeping a disorderly house. Or to put it in slightly more detail he was charged with permitting:

…divers immoral lewd, and evil disposed persons, tippling whoring, using obscene language, indecently exposing their private naked parts, and behaving in a lewd, obscene and disorderly and riotous manner to the manifest corruption of the morals of His Majesty’s Liege Subjects, the evil example of others in the like case, offending and against the Peace of Our Lord the King, his Crown and Dignity.

After some legal arguing about what a disorderly house actually meant, poor Bobby Britt was sentenced to 15 months hard labour for essentially being a ‘nancy boy’ and enjoying the occasional party. Four of his friends were sentenced to six months without hard labour.

Lets hope when Bobby was eventually released (there seems to be no information about what happened to him) that he was able to go and enjoy Oscar Wilde’s Salome, perhaps to compare dances. The play, forty years after it was written (it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on the basis that it was illegal to depict Biblical characters on stage), had its first public performance at the Savoy theatre in 1931.

An influence for Mr Britt? Maude Allan as Salome and the head of John the Baptist in 1906.

Maud Allan became known as the 'Salome Dancer'. Interesting character - her brother was hanged for murder of two women, she published an illustrated sex manual for women in 1900 and in 1918 it was implied by the British MP Noel Pemberton Billing in his article 'The Cult of the Clitoris', that she was a lesbian associate of German wartime conspirators. She sewed her own costumes though.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=44OmwMoGWfs

The silent film star and dancer Alla Nazimova stars as Salome in 1923.

After Lady Be Good’s run had come to an end. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures who had bought the Empire promptly demolished the famous old theatre and built a large cinema in its place. The Empire Theatre cinema, in one form or another, still exists to this day.

The Empire Theatre just after the war, it was showing the film Bad Bascomb with Wallace Beery and Margaret O'Brien.

The Empire Cinema today. It seems a long long way from Fred and Adele Astaire. More respect for the original building please.

25 Fitzroy Square today.

To try and recreate the ‘Naughty Nineties’ atmosphere at the Empire Theatre you may want to try the cocktails Bosom Caresser and Corpse Reviver.

Bosom Caresser
1 tea-spoon raspberry syrup
1 egg
1 jigger brandy
milk

Fill a mixing-glass one-third full of fine ice; add a teaspoonful raspberry syrup, one fresh egg, one jigger brandy; fill with milk, shake well, and strain.

Stir well with ice and strain in to a cocktail glass.

By the way Harry Craddock, who wrote a famous cocktail book in 1930 and worked at the Savoy Hotel wrote that the Corpse Reviver No. 1 should be drunk “before 11am, or whenever steam and energy are needed.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48tmnqg5bc

Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth – Oh Lady Be Good!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmhnb34XAcc

The Berry Brothers and Eleanor Powell perform Fascinatin’ Rhythm from Lady Be Good 1946

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'.

Once upon a time it was fair to say that Jessie Matthews was one of the most famous women in the country. Before the Second World War she was easily Britain’s biggest film star by far. Today, except for the eldest amongst us and a blue plaque on the wall of the Blue Post pub on the corner of Berwick Street, she is now almost completely forgotten.

She was born on March 11 in 1907, in a small, cramped and overcrowded flat above a Butcher’s shop in Soho’s Berwick Street. Matthews 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 having removed her natural cockney accent, the saucer-eyed actress took the West End by storm.

Early 20th century views of Berwick Street

Jessie aged 16 appearing in the Music Box revue

In 1927, already a star, Jessie Matthews was booked to perform in the 29 year old Noel Coward’s new revue This Year of Grace. 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

Evelyn Laye held a small supper party, at the end of 1927, for her close friends at Soho’s recently opened Gargoyle Club. The guests included the actress Ruby Miller and the young actor Frank Lawton. 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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6NMrYrBNis

Evelyn Laye in One Heavenly Night

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjquAEjkrrs

Jessie Matthews in Evergreen

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1XkhEw0hQI

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

Windmill Theatre, Tonight and Every Night 1952

For over 200 years Soho has always had a somewhat racy reputation. Prostitution had always been relatively open in the area at least until the Street Offences Act of 1959.  However the number of sex-shops had always been relatively few but rose from just a handful in the early sixties to almost sixty by the early seventies.

It seemed at one stage that they were almost taking over the area. That there was corruption in Soho – essentially collusion between the ‘pornographers’ and the police in the late sixties and early seventies was an open secret amongst journalists, lawyers and the police themselves; although not many vaguely knew the extent of it.

At the front the typical Soho bookshop looked relatively benign. Behind a discreet curtain there would be far harder pornography for sale.

While the Soho porn industry was steadily proliferating, seemingly untouched, there was an almost ferocious police assault against, what the police thought as, politically subversive ‘obscenity’ and apologists for the ‘alternative society’.

In 1970 Eugene Schuster’s London Arts Gallery was raided by the police. The gallery was closed down and Schuster was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. This was a situation not particularly abnormal for the time but this particular closure garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity.

It had only been open for two days but the gallery had been showing The Bag One exhibition – 14 ‘intimate and erotic’ lithographs by John Lennon that depicted himself and his wife, Yoko Ono, in various sexual poses. Each lithograph was for sale for £40 each or £550 for the set which included a leather hold-all to keep them in.

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

A policeman hard at work on duty outside Lennon's Bag One exhibition at London Arts gallery 1970

Soon after the closure the Director of Public Prosecutions received a letter from a member of the public, a Mr P.F.C. Fuller. The letter warned that if the court case went ahead art collections throughout the country could potentially be in trouble, including, he suggested even the Queen’s. In his letter Fuller wrote;

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

Only 300 of these bags were made. The John Lennon lithographs were placed inside.

The Bag One exhibition programme cover

'Erotica 6 - Yoko in Bed' by John Lennon

John once said "If art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life, and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness."

The summons alleged that the gallery had “exhibited to public view eight indecent prints to the annoyance of passengers, contrary to Section 54(12) of the Metropolitan Police Act, 1839, and the third schedule of the Criminal Justice Act 1967.”

When the case came to court several months later, a Picasso lithograph and a catalog of Picasso drawings were produced at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court for comparison with John’s prints. Detective-Inspector Patrick Luff, of the Central Office, New Scotland Yard, said that when he went to the gallery on January 15 about forty people were viewing the prints. “I saw no display of annoyance from the younger age group, but one gentleman was clearly annoyed,” he said.

Mr. St. John Harmsworth, the magistrate, asked: “Did he stamp his foot?” “Anger was registered on his face,” Inspector Luff replied. The case was dismissed when the magistrate decided that John’s prints were “unlikely to deprave or corrupt.”

The cover of the infamous schoolkids issue of Oz

In the same year as the gallery closure and after it was accused of losing touch with their younger readers, the satirical magazine Oz reacted by inviting actual schoolchildren to edit a forthcoming May 1970 issue. It quickly became known as the Schoolkids’ Oz.

The magazine’s offices had already been raided several times by the The Obscene Publications Squad (known colloquially at the time as The Dirty Squad) but the bringing together of schoolchildren and, what some considered obscene material, soon led to arrests of Oz’s actual editors.

Page 36 of the Schoolkids' issue of OZ magazine.

The infamous Oz obscenity trial took place in 1971 with the defendants charged with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’. The magazine’s defence lawyer, the late John Mortimer QC announced at the opening of the trial

[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. November 1971

The extremely unintelligent future multi-millionaire publishing magnate Felix Dennis

The home secretary Reginald Maudling

The Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, hauled in Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, at the time in charge of the Obscene Publications Squad, asking 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 into the Metropolitan police. The Government and the judiciary, albeit too slowly, were coming to the conclusion that there was more than the odd bad apple in the Metropolitan police. It later came out that Fenwick had brought a pornographer to Holborn Police Station and select what confiscated pornographic material he wanted for redistribution in his sex-shops.

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 in the Met he was a provincial outsider. Mark had q reputation as ‘Mr Clean’ and the Met had nicknames for him such as the particularly witty ‘The Manchester Martinet’ and the hilarious ‘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 shops in Britain in the mid-seventies they were open seven days a week. The windows were filled with garish displays of soft-core magazines and books but with notices implying, usually 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 various Sunday tabloids 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 concocted a story that he was in Cyprus looking for the train robber Ronnie Biggs and contradictorily paid for the trip himself. Nobody believed the story.

James Humphries in January 1974

James Humphries after his arrest, January 1974

Humphreys quickly realised the danger for him of appearing to his criminal associates 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 open-mouthed the corruption investigators found that it unbelievably detailed payments to seventeen different policemen including Drury.

Even senior policemen such as Bill Moody – Head of the Obscene Publications Squad and, incredibly, his superior Commander ‘Wally’ Virgo – a man who had overall control of nine squads including the Flying, Drugs and the Porn Squad were being paid off.

List of bribes taken by Drury and two of his colleagues

It was estimated that James Humphreys and his fellow porn barons were paying an extraordinary £100,000 a year to corrupt policemen enabling 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.

It was important for the Metropolitan police to raid exhibitions such as John Lennon’s Bag One and bust ‘alternative’ magazines such as Oz to at least look like they were doing something.

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

The corrupt policeman had built a delicately balanced house of cards that 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.”

In response to the obvious corruption that was happening the Home Office, in conjunction with the Met Police Commissioner Sir Robert Mark, appointed the Assistant Chief Constable of Dorset Constabulary, Leonard Burt to investigate all the allegations.

In August 1978 a team of two hundred officers began investigating the Metropolitan police from top to bottom. Referring to Burt it had the nickname Operation Countryman. At first the team were housed at Camberwell Police Station but following clumsy attempts to interfere with their documents, records and evidence they moved to Godalming Police Station in Surrey.

After six years, Operation Countryman presented its findings to the Home Office and the Commissioner. It eventually came to light that over 400 police officers lost their jobs during or after the Countryman investigation. Despite  the Countryman Operation’s report that recommended that 300 officers should face criminal charges, not one officer was ever charged with a criminal offence as a result of the investigation. Plus ça change.

'See any porn constable?'...'Nope, not a dirty book to be seen'.