David Hemmings driving on the Stockwell Road in Blow-Up.

STOCKWELL ROAD isn’t the most exciting and handsome of roads. It may have been once, but the Luftwaffe and the subsequent, typical unimaginative post-war redevelopment put paid to that. It’s got a skateboard park, if that’s your thing, and David Bowie was born in a road just off it, but even he moved to Bromley when he was six. And that’s about it, to most people, even if they live there, it’s just a road that joins up Stockwell and Brixton.

If you walk towards the Brixton end, however, and you stop and look carefully at the end of a terrace, you can see a tiny bit of maroon-ish red paint showing through some peeling cream emulsion. It’s the remnants of a lot of red paint and a clue that in the winter of 1966 this road made a glamorous appearance, alongside David Hemmings, the model Veruschka, and Vanessa Redgrave, in THE swinging Sixties film – Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. It was the Italian director’s first film in English (he had just signed a lucrative deal to make three English-language pictures for Italian producer Carlo Ponti), and it was David Hemmings’ first major film role.

Blow-Up Lobby Card

On stage, however, Hemmings had already been a star, of sorts. In 1954, thirteen years before Blow-Up was released, a twelve-year-old Hemmings had appeared, as a boy soprano, in Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw. To prepare for the role of Miles, in the as yet uncompleted opera, Hemmings had left school and his home in Tolworth, a southwest suburb of London, and had gone to live with Benjamin Britten at Crag House in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. ‘It was one of the most wonderful times of my entire life’ Hemmings once remembered: ‘we all gathered round the piano – Peter Pears, Jennifer Vyvyan, Joan Cross, Arda Mandikian, Olive Dyer and me … He really constructed the opera round our voices.’ Hemmings throughout his life never wavered from saying that Britten’s conduct with him was beyond reproach, at all times. In John Bridcut’s Britten’s Children Hemmings says:

He was not only a father to me, but a friend – and you couldn’t have had a better father, or a better friend. He was generous and kind, and I was very lucky. I loved him dearly, I really did – I absolutely adored him. I didn’t fancy him, I did go to bed with him, but I didn’t go to bed with him in that way.

Tenor Peter Pearsas Quint and child soprano David Hemmings (1941 – 2003) as Miles in the English Opera Group’s production of Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Turn Of The Screw’, 13th October 1954. (Photo by Denis De Marney

David Hemmings, aged 12 enjoying Venice (drinking water from a fountain) between rehearsals of Benjamin Britten’s new opera ‘Turn of the Screw”.

Just five weeks after Britten had completed the opera the British premiere took place on 6 October 1954 with the Sadler’s Wells Opera. It took place against a backdrop of increasing police antipathy to homosexuality. A situation not helped by the fervently anti-homosexual and moralistic Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. Three years previously, in 1951, the defection to the Soviet Union of Guy Burgess, who was as close to openly gay as you could be in those days, and the (almost certainly) bisexual Donald Maclean had also stoked up public hostility.

Prosecutions for ‘gross indecency’ were increasing and there had been several highly publicised arrests, such as Lord Montagu and John Gielgud. Britten was also interviewed by police officers in 1953 – he had been at school with Maclean and one of Guy Burgess’s boyfriends had lived at Britten’s Hallam Street flat in the 1940s – but nothing came of it. At one point, however, Britten discussed the possibility that his partner Peter Pears might have to enter into a sham marriage.

The end of Hemmings’ opera career with Britten came to a particularly abrupt end. The English Opera Group had taken The Turn of the Screw to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. It was 1956 and Hemmings was now fifteen. In the middle of Miles’ main aria, ‘Malo’, Hemming’s voice suddenly broke. Britten was utterly horrified and stopped the orchestra immediately. He waved his baton in anger at the now ex-soprano, and the curtain slowly lowered. Britten did not speak to, or even acknowledge Hemmings ever again.

Benjamin Britten (right) with Peter Pears.

Ten years later Antonioni chose Hemmings for the role in Blow-Up because he wanted a fresh young actor who had no self-conscious acting style. The Italian director detested ‘Method’ acting, and in The Passenger, filmed in London in 1974 and the third of Ponti’s English language films, Antonioni kept on saying to Nicholson, ‘Jack, less twitching’. Antonioni once said: ‘Actors feel somewhat uncomfortable with me. They have the feeling that they’ve been excluded from my work. And, as a matter of fact, they have been.’ He first saw Hemmings act in an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade, at a small theatre in Hampstead. A few days later, at the first audition for Blow-Up held at the Savoy hotel, and before the young actor had said a word, Antonioni told Hemmings, ‘you look wrong. You’re too young.’ Hemmings replied ‘Oh no. I can look older. I’ve done it before. You can trust me on this. I am an actor.’

After one more audition, Antonioni did trust him, and Hemmings went on to play his most famous role – the ‘swinging’, hip fashion photographer, who discovers by accident that some photos he took seem to reveal a murder. The character was purposely based on David Bailey who in the mid-sixties was at the height of his fame. Even a scene where Hemmings buys a large old propellor in a junk shop was based on Bailey doing exactly that. At eight quid they even got the price right, much to Bailey’s shock when he was watching the film in New York with his new wife, Catherine Deneuve. Bailey was once asked whether his photo sessions ever got as sexy as the one between Hemmings and Veruschka. ‘When I was lucky,’ he replied.

A publicity still of Veruschka and Hemmings from Blow-Up.

Poster for Blow-Up, released in 1967.

The shoot for the film began in April 1966 and wherever the filmmakers went they left their mark on London. Antonioni thought the roads were a bit grey in Woolwich and had them painted black, and it was said that even pigeons were dyed so they were just the right sort of pigeons. The Rolls-Royce, once owned by Jimmy Savile, was originally white and the director had that re-sprayed to black. Antonioni once talked of his fastidious attention to detail: ‘When I was making Blow-Up there was a lot of discussion about the fact that I had a road and a building painted. Antonioni paints the grass, people said. To some degree, all directors paint and arrange or change things on a location, and it amused me that so much was made of it in my case.’

Most people thought that Antonioni was only up to his old particular ways when they watched Hemmings drive his Rolls Royce down a long terrace of Victorian and Edwardian buildings, all painted entirely red. The buildings, however, really were that colour and were made up of dozens of properties all owned by the motorcycle spares company, Pride and Clarke, and every one painted red.

The company was founded in 1920 by John Pride and Alfred Clarke and was based on the Stockwell Road for over sixty years. In its heyday the showrooms of ‘Snide and Shark’, as they were occasionally called, took up a huge stretch of the road and if the Guinness Book of records had ever been interested in motorbike spares’ counters, they would have featured Pride and Clarke’s because it was the longest in the world. With about 2000 new motorbikes on display plus a good selection of traded-in second hand machines in their showrooms, on a Saturday afternoon, around the time Blow-Up was being made, thousands of bikers from all over the country would congregate outside the bright-red Pride and Clarke shopfronts.

Inside the Pride and Clark shop on the Stockwell Road, c.1964.

The contemporary press releases for Blow-Up made sure that attention was made to ‘the swinging world of fashion, dolly girls, pop groups, beat clubs, models and parties’ and one of the best lines in the film is when David Hemmings says to Veruschka at a party: ‘I thought you were meant to be in Paris!’ to which she stonily replies, ‘I am in Paris.’ The 26-year-old Veruschka, or Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort, to give her full name, was an extremely tall German model, born just before the start of the war in East Pussia. Her father was said to have fainted when the extraordinarily long baby was born, but Veruschka hardly got to know him, as he was executed five years later for his part in the July Assassination Plot against Hitler in 1944. Around the time the film was released she told the press that she now wanted to be a proper actress: ‘I should like now to go into the movies,’ she said ‘but it is difficult – the men are so small.’ The experience of working with Hemmings must have scarred; he was eight or nine inches shorter than her six feet four.

The party scene was shot in a house next to the Thames on Cheyne Walk. Owned by the designer Christopher Gibbs, it was full of Moroccan cushions and medieval tapestries. Antonioni paid beautiful people to be extras at £30 each (easily over an average week’s wage in 1966), [6] essentially just to get trashed. Paul McCartney once said, ‘I remember the word around town was “There’s this guy who’s paying money for people to come and get stoned at some place in Chelsea. And of course in our crowd that spread like wildfire…Everyone was being paid, like blood donors, to smoke pot.”’

Kieran Fogarty, in Jonathan Green’s Days In The Life, remembered the filming of the party scene in Blow-Up: ‘I was flung into this bedroom in Cheyne walk…plonked on the front of this bed with about another nine people on it and Antonioni tossed a couple of kilo bags of grass on the bed and said, “Right, get on with it.” It took five days. It just went on and on…people would stumble out going “Yeeeaahhh” and go gibbering back. Most of swinging London was there, every deb that was halfway decent looking, and wild they were too. Outrageously dressed, superheavy make-up …’

1966: Two men enjoying a conversation with each other while attending a party at Chrisopher Gibbs’ place. Photo by Terrence Spencer

Frank Horvat 1965: Paris, photo test with Veruschka

One of the reasons the party scene took so long to film was that Veruschka, most of the time, really was in Paris. She would phone the house every few hours saying ‘Tell Michelangelo that my taxi crash …’. Whoever picked up the phone would wander around the house saying ‘It’s Veruschka! Her taxi’s crashed, she’ll be here in five or six hours’. Despite the camera running for almost a week, the scene at the party ended up just 30 seconds long.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who in 1960 won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with his film L’Avventura, wrote an article in that year’s December edition of Films and Filming entitled: Eroticism – The Disease of Our Age. He asked ‘Why are literature and the entertainment arts so thick with eroticism today? It is the more obvious symptom of an emotional sickness.’ Six years later, after deciding to take no notice of himself whatsoever, Blow-Up became known as the first British mainstream film to show pubic hair, not to mention naked teenage models (including the 19 year old wife of John Barry, Jane Birkin). Not that anyone noticed particularly, as all around the country the public were treated to a ‘censored’ version of the film, not because the British Board of Film Censors or the local authorities were trying to protect the public’s morals, but because the brief moments of nudity, in those more sheltered days, were being trimmed out by projectionists to add to their private collections.

David Hemmings in a scene from Blow-Up

The film was released in March 1967, just as most people, especially in the capital, were getting rather bored with the idea of ’swinging London’. The result of which was mostly bad reviews from the critics in Britain – Peter Evans in the Daily Express, after describing Hemmings, aptly, as ‘a depraved choirboy,’ wrote: ‘What many people believed was to be some kind of tribute to the vibrant pace-setters turns out to be no less than an epitaph.’ He finished by describing the film as: ‘an unpleasant orgy of self-glorification.’

In Europe and America it was often a different story. Richard Schickel in Life magazine wrote: ‘This movie seems to me one of the finest, most intelligent, least hysterical expositions of the modern existential agony we have yet had on film’. Most of the contemporary reviews talked about the nudity, but none about how Hemmings’ photographer treated the women he encountered. Much of it uncomfortable to watch these days. But it is an enjoyable museum piece that, at least, gives us a good glimpse of groovy sixties London from the eye of an outsider. Additionally, if you want to stop the film at the right moments, you can see, briefly, Michael Palin and a young Janet Street Porter dancing in stripy Carnaby Street trousers during the the Yardbirds nightclub scene.

Janet Street Porter as an extra in Blow-Up.

Four months after Blow-Up was premiered at the London Pavilion, The Sexual Offences Act was made law in July 1967. It decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21. Although the comments of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary at the time, captured the government’s attitude: ‘those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of shame all their lives.’ Lord Arran, one of the original proposers of the bill, tried to minimise criticisms by making the qualification to what he called an ‘historic’ milestone: ‘I ask those [homosexuals] to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity … any form of ostentatious behaviour now or in the future or any form of public flaunting would be utterly distasteful …’

A few years later the motorcycle business started to change and during the seventies Japanese motorcycle companies such as Suzuki, Honda and Kawasaki took over from the old British and European marques. Alfred Clarke was an astute businessman (the nickname ‘shark’ wasn’t gained for nothing) and the Pride and Clarke firm was sold to Inchcape for about £3 million pounds in 1979.

Then and Now: The Stockwell Road in 2015 and 1977 the year that Sammy Hagar’s ‘Red Album’ was released.

Before the company and the red paint were whitewashed from history, however, the striking red buildings of the Pride and Clarke showrooms had one more brush with fame. In 1977, the former Montrose vocalist Sammy Hagar was in London to record his second solo album at Abbey Road. Known to his fans, but to no one else, as the ‘Red Rocker’, someone at Capitol Records had the bright idea that the Pride and Clarke shops on the Stockwell Road were perfect for the cover of the so called Red Album. So as not to look too downmarket, he was told to stand next to an expensive American car, also coloured red. There is no record of what Sammy Hagar made of the Stockwell Road and there’s no record left of the ubiquitous Pride and Clarke shops. Unless you look very, very closely.

Charlie Chaplin at the Ritz with 50 children from Hoxton in 1921.

Charlie Chaplin was woken up on the morning 17 September 1921 while in his bed at the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. “Visitors from Hoxton” he was told, and from outside the window he could hear children singing a song over and over again:

When the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

His boots are cracking, for want of blacking

And his little baggy trousers need mending

Before we send him to the Dardanelles

The song had originally been written in protest about Chaplin not enlisting during WW1 (it was said that he had tried, but at 5 feet 4 inches tall and not much more than 126 pounds was told he was too small) but by 1921 the song had lost its original connotation or at least it had to the group of children from Hoxton School that had walked across London to see him.

Chaplin had arrived in England from America only a week earlier, disembarking at Southampton after a pleasant and sunny voyage. He had sailed across the Atlantic on the RMS Olympic, the elder sister ship of the Titanic but now, of course, complete with the requisite number of lifeboats and luxuriously re-fitted after life as a troopship during WW1. The comedian had come back to England mainly to promote his new and first full-length (six-reeler) film called ‘The Kid’. Already a huge success in America it eventually became the second highest grossing film of 1921.

The Manchester Guardian, in rather a gushing style – although not that dissimilar to most other newspapers describing the event – wrote of the first glimpse of the homecoming Hollywood star:

Mr Chaplin just bubbled over with good nature and good humour. He poured out smiles and laughter and merry jokes in bumper measure, and all with the utmost simplicity and perfect freedom from affectation.

The Mayor of Southampton greeted Chaplin and began speaking rather nervously, with an apology about the weather, “It does not always rain in England…” Chaplin quickly interrupted, “I am an Englishman, Mr Mayor,” he said, “and English weather, whatever it is, is good to see. It was raining, I remember, when I went away nine years ago.

Chaplin was now an incredibly rich man but his childhood in Walworth had been a desperately poor one. Both his parents, Charles and Hannah Chaplin, were music hall performers but of no great fame. When Charlie was just three, Charles Snr left the family home after his wife gave birth to a boy whose father was Leo Dryden – another music hall performer. Not long after the birth Dryden came and forcibly took his child, Charlie’s half-brother, away from Hannah.

Struggling financially, Hannah Chaplin had a breakdown in 1895 and the following year, along with Charlie and his brother Sydney, entered the Lambeth Workhouse. Although within a few weeks, however, the two boys were sent to Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children.

In 1903, after further breakdowns, Hannah was placed in the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum in Surrey. Chaplin later wrote about a visit to see her in 1912, just before he left to live in America:

It was a depressing day, for she was not well. She had just got over an obstreperous phase of singing hymns, and had been confined to a padded room. The nurse had warned us of this beforehand. Sydney saw her, but I had not the courage, so I waited. He came back upset, and said that she had been given shock treatment of icy cold showers and that her face was quite blue. That made us decide to put her into a private institution – we could afford it now.

The brothers took their mother from Cane Hill and placed her at Peckham House – a private asylum in south London that cost 30 shillings a week. Not an inconsiderable sum in 1912.

Chaplin had been performing to audiences from the age of five – it was said that he was literally pushed on to a stage when an audience started jeering after his mother when she suddenly lost her voice half way through a song. By the age of 19 he had become a member of Fred Karno’s prestigious music hall troupe, and it was with them that he first took him to America in 1910 (one of the other members of Karno’s company was Stanley Jefferson who would later become known as Stan Laurel). On a second visit in 1912 Chaplin caught the eye of Mack Sennett and he began to work in the still very young film business. Within a few years he had appeared in more than sixty films, most of which he had directed himself. By 1918 Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous men on the planet.

When Chaplin stepped off the train onto platform 14 at Waterloo Station, just a mile or so away from where he had grown up as a child, he was visibly shocked at the thousands and thousands of people waiting ready to greet him. “A fierce roar of the great crowd smote his ears,” wrote one newspaper, while the Times wrote, “At Waterloo the stage might have been set for the homecoming of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Lord Haig rolled into one.”

The police managed to get Chaplin into a waiting car which then drove down to the Ritz on Piccadilly. Another enormous crowd was waiting and ‘Everybody – including the police – went mad,’ reported the Manchester Guardian. Chaplin, his hair dishevelled, but bronzed by his voyage and dressed immaculately in a grey overcoat stood up in the car and shouted:

Thank you, very much, for this generous, kind and affectionate welcome. This is a great moment for me. I cannot say much. Words are absolutely inadequate.

The police were almost overpowered by the boisterous and excited crowd and there was a struggle on the steps of the hotel before they managed to get Chaplin inside. The crowd continued cheering until he appeared at a first-floor window where be broke up a huge bunch of carnations and threw them down to the crowd. A few days later he received a letter (one of thousands, many of them begging), “My boy,” it read, “tried to get one of your carnations and his hat was smashed. I enclose you a bill of 7s. 6d. for a new one.”

Chaplin outside the Ritz on Piccadilly.

Chaplin throwing carnations to the crowd from his balcony at the Ritz Hotel.

The south London Waterloo area c.1921

Waterloo Bridge in 1921.

Chaplin told the press that he was tired and needed to rest but actually soon slipped out of the Arlington entrance of he hotel and took a taxi to Waterloo Bridge and then, on his own, he walked to Lambeth Walk an old haunt of his childhood. A few days later, on another trip to south London, he visited 3 Pownall Terrace in Kennington (the street would be demolished in 1968) where he had lived in a little room at the top of the house.

It was now occupied by a Mrs Reynolds, ”many’s the time I’ve banged my head on that sloping ceiling,” he said to her after she had taken him to see his old room. Mr Charles Robinson, described as Chaplin’s manager by the Daily Mirror, told the newspaper in an interview in 1921, that the attic scenes in The Kid were based on a replica of that room in Charlie’s old ‘diggings’ in Kennington.

Le Petit Journal dated 25th September 1921. Chaplin is seen visiting the Lambeth room, where he once lived and which had inspired his film ‘The Kid’.

The house in Pownall Terrace in Lambeth, where Charlie Chaplin once lived. It was demolished in 1968.

Back at the Ritz, on the morning of the 17th of September, Chaplin got dressed and walked into the sitting room of his suite to meet the young visitors from Hoxton. He found fifty excited boys and girls from the Hoxton school. One boy, called Charles Loughton, stepped forward and handed him a box of cigars and a letter. It read:

You were one of us. You are now famous over the world. But we like to think you were once a poor boy in London as we are. You are now a gentleman, and all gentlemen smoke cigars. So we have chosen a box as a little gift to ‘Our Charlie.’

A young girl, Lettie Westbrook aged thirteen, gave Charlie a bouquet with a note saying, “with our thanks for all the fun you give to us.”

After Chaplin had given each child a package of “candy,” he impersonated an old man in a picture gallery. By a skilful use of his overcoat, hat, and stick, he appeared to grow gradually to a height of some nine feet in order to look at the highest pictures, and the children screamed with laughter.

Three weeks after Chaplin met the boys and girls from Hoxton School he left London, via Waterloo again, for New York, this time on the Cunard liner Berengaria. He had also decided, along with his brother Sydney, to bring his mother back with him to California. After a particularly harsh and tragic life much of which had been spent in workhouses and mental institutions Hannah Chaplin was being properly looked after in a home in Los Angeles.

“Six Reels of Joy” – The Kid released in 1921.

During the production of ‘The Kid’ Chaplin had met a 12 year old girl called Lita Grey who appeared as the flirtatious angel in the dream sequence at the end of the film. Three years later he cast her again, this time as the female lead, in ‘The Gold Rush’. During the early stages of the production the 35 year old Chaplin became ‘romantically’ involved despite Lita being only 15. It wasn’t long before Lita discovered she was pregnant and was quickly replaced in the film by another of Chaplin’s lovers Georgia Hale.

Lita Grey in ‘The Kid’ released in 1921.

Charlie Chaplin and Lita Grey not long after they were married in 1924.

Grey and Chaplin were wed on November 25th 1924 in Empalme, Mexico. The New York Times, reporting on the event, listed her age as 17. They had two children, Charles Jnr born in 1925 and Sydney born the following year. On August 27th they were divorced due to ‘extreme cruelty’. Chaplin was ordered to pay $600,000 and $100,000 in trust for each child – the world’s largest divorce settlement at the time.

Exactly a year after the divorce Chaplin’s mother, the woman whose life he had based so many of his female characters, and who had probably been suffering from the symptoms of Syphilis for over twenty years, died at the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Hospital in Glendale in August 1928.

Hannah Chaplin in Los Angeles, not long before she died.

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William Joyce

On the cold and damp morning of 3 January 1946 a large but orderly crowd had formed outside the grim Victorian prison in Wandsworth. The main gates of London’s largest gaol are situated not more than a few hundred feet from the far more salubrious surroundings of Wandsworth Common in South West London.

Some people had come to protest at what they considered an unjust conviction, while others, ghoulishly and morbidly, wanted to be as close as they could, to what would turn out to be, the execution of the last person to be convicted of treason in this country.

Wandsworth Prison

William Joyce had woken early that morning and although he ate no breakfast he drank a cup of tea. At one minute to nine, an hour later than initially planned, the Governor of Wandsworth Prison came to the condemned man’s cell to inform him that his time had come.

The walk to the adjacent execution chamber was but a few yards but there was just enough time for Joyce to look down at his badly trembling knees and smile. Albert Pierrepoint, the practiced and experienced hangman, said the last words that Joyce would ever hear: ‘I think we’d better have this on, you know’ and placed a hood over the condemned man’s head followed immediately by the noose of the hanging rope.

A few seconds later the executioner pulled a lever which automatically opened the trap door beneath Joyce’s feet. Almost instantaneously Joyce’s spinal cord was ripped apart between the second and third vertebrae and the man known throughout the country as Lord Haw-Haw, was dead.

The gates of HMP Wandsworth around the time of William Joyce's execution

At about the same time as the hangman pulled his deadly lever a group of smartly dressed men in winter coats stepped away from the main crowd outside the gates of the prison and behind some nearby bushes, almost surreptitiously, were seen to raise their right arms in the ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute.

At eight minutes past nine a prison officer came out and pinned an official announcement that the hanging of the traitor William Joyce had taken place. At 1pm the BBC Home Service reported the execution and read out the last, unrepentant pronouncement from the dead man;

In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the west may the Swastika be raised from the dust, crowned with the historic words ‘You have conquered nevertheless’. I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.

The official declaration of William Joyce's execution pinned on the gates of the prison

The official notice of execution being pinned on the gates of Wandsworth Prison

William Joyce had actually been born in Brooklyn, New York forty years previously to an English Protestant mother and an Irish Catholic father who had taken United States citizenship. A few years after the birth the family returned to Galway where William attended the Jesuit St Ignatius College from 1915 to 1921. William had always been precociously politically aware but both he and his father, rather unusually for Irish Catholics at the time, were both Unionists and openly supported British rule.

In fact Joyce later said that he had aided and ran with the infamous Black and Tans, the notoriously indisciplined and brutal British auxiliary force sent to Ireland after the First World War in an attempt to help put down Irish nationalism. Joyce actually became the target of an IRA assassination attempt in 1921 when he was just sixteen.

For his own safety William immediately left for England, and after a short stint in the British army (he was discharged when it was found he had lied about his age) he enrolled at Birkbeck College of the University of London where he gained a first but also developed an initial interest in Fascism.

In 1924, while stewarding a Conservative Party meeting at the Lambeth Baths in Battersea, a seventeen year old Joyce was attacked by an unprovoked gang in an adjacent alley-way and received a vicious and deep cut from a razor that sliced across his right cheek from behind the earlobe all the way to the corner of his mouth. After two weeks in hospital he was left with a terrible and disfiguring facial scar. Joyce was convinced that his attackers were ‘Jewish communists’ and the incident became a massive influence on the rest of his life.

The bandage was covering twenty six stiches, he remained in hospital for two weeks

In 1932 Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and within a couple of years he was promoted to the BUF’s director of propaganda and not long after appointed deputy leader. Joyce was a gifted speaker and for a while became the star of the British fascist movement. He was instrumental in moving the union towards overt anti-semitism – something of which Mosley had always been relatively uncomfortable.

Joyce’s career with the British Union of Fascists only lasted five years when, with membership plummeting, a devastated Joyce was sacked from his paid position in the party by Mosley in 1937.

William Joyce, on the far left, with Oswald Mosley in 1934

In late August 1939, shortly before war was declared and probably tipped off by a friend in MI5 that he was about to be arrested, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce struggled to find employment until he met fellow former-Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley who got him recruited immediately for radio announcements and script writing at German radio’s English service in Berlin.

Crucially this was at a time when his British passport was still valid (although born in New York and brought up in Ireland Joyce had lied about his nationality to obtain a British passport – complications and niceties such as proving one’s identity with a birth certificate weren’t needed at the time) ostensibly to accompany Mosley abroad in 1935.

Dorothy Eckersley

The infamous nickname of ‘Lord Haw Haw’, associated with William Joyce to this day, was coined by a Daily Express journalist called Jonah Barrington. It’s not widely known but the title was actually meant for someone else completely – almost certainly a man called Norman Baillie-Stewart who had been broadcasting in Germany from just before the war. The nickname referenced Baillie-Stewart’s exaggeratedly aristocratic way of speaking. Barrington had written:

A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen [the site in Germany of the English transmitter]. He speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.

Norman Baillie-Stewart - the real Lord Haw Haw

Listening to Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts (which famously always began with the words “Germany Calling, Germany Calling”) was officially discouraged, although incredibly about 60% of the population tuned in after the BBC news every night. The BBC’s output at the beginning of the war was said to have been exceedingly dreary (plus ca change) and the British public seemed to prefer being shocked rather than bored.

Lord Haw Haw’s over-the-top and sneering attacks on the British establishment were really enjoyed, but in an era of state censorship and restricted information, there was also a desire by listeners to hear what the other side was saying. At the start of the war, simply because there was more to brag about, the German news reports were considered, by some people, to contain slightly more truth than those of the BBC.

William and Margaret Joyce in Germany

As the tide turned in the latter stages of the war Joyce and his wife moved to Hamburg. On the 22nd April 1945 he wrote in his diary:

Has it all been worthwhile? I think not. National Socialism is a fine cause, but most of the Germans, not all, are bloody fools.

Eight days later, and on the very day that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their Berlin Bunker, Joyce made his last drunken broadcast – the remains of his Irish accent can be heard through his slurring voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_v8yKaHxpg

The actual microphone and a script used by Joyce for his German broadcasts

At the end of the war William and his wife Margaret fled to a town called Flensburg near the German/Denmark border and it was there, in a nearby wood, that Joyce was captured by two soldiers. They, like Joyce, were out looking for firewood. Joyce stopped to say hello and one of the soldiers asked “You wouldn’t by any chance be William Joyce, would you?”. To ‘prove’ otherwise, Joyce reached for his false passport and one of the soldiers, thinking he was reaching for a gun, shot him through the buttocks, leaving four wounds.

The arrest was utter poetic justice. The soldier who had shot the infamous broadcaster was called Geoffrey Perry, however, he had been born into a German jewish family as Hourst Pinschewer and had only arrived in England to escape from Hitler’s persecutions. So in the end a German Jew, who had become English had arrested an Irish/American who pretended to be English but had become German.

The Woods near the German/Denmark border where Joyce was shot and arrested

Margaret Joyce at her arrest in 1945

A well-guarded William Joyce after his arrest in Germany 1945

Back in London, he was charged at Bow Street Magistrates court and in the dock he quietly stated “I have heard the charge and take cognisance of it.” He was subsequently driven to Brixton Prison in a Black Maria and on arrival, he said “So this is Brixton.” “Yes,” retorted his guard, “not Belsen.”

The trial of William Joyce began on 17 september 1945 and for a short period of time, when his American nationality came to light, it seemed that he might be acquitted. “How could anyone be convicted of betraying a country that wasn’t his own?” It was argued. However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce’s possession of a British passport (even if he had misrepresented himself to get it) entitled him to diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he started working for the Germans.

It was on this contrived technicality that Joyce was convicted of treason on 19th September 1945. The penalty of which, of course, was death.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, he later said that the trial of William Joyce was not one of which he was especially proud

A sizeable minority of the population were uncomfortable with the verdict mainly because of the nationality issue but also because he was alway seen as a bit of a joke-figure rather than someone trying to bring the country down. On Christmas day 1945 an accountant named Edgar Bray wrote to the King:

I know nothing about Joyce, and nothing about his Politics. I don’t know much about Law either, but I do know enough to be firmly convinced that we are proposing to hang Joyce for the crime of pretending to be an Englishman which crime, so far as I am aware, in no possible case carries a Capital penalty. It happens to be just our bad luck, that Joyce actually WAS an American, (and now IS a German subject), but that is no reason to hang him, because we are annoyed at our bad luck.

The historian AJP Taylor made the point that Joyce was essentially hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a paltry fine of just two pounds.

Interior of Wandsworth Prison

A cell in Wandsworth Prison in the late 1940s

Albert Pierrepoint

Not long after Albert Pierrepoint’s expert execution and with the blood from Joyce’s scar, that had burst open during the hanging, still dripping onto a spreading red stain on the canvas floor, the body was taken to the prison mortuary. A coroner pronounced that the death was due to “injury to the brain and spinal cord, consequent upon judicial hanging”.

There were specific rules pertaining to the burial of executed prisoners at the time, and William Joyce’s body was treated as any other. True to the normal rules he was buried within the Wandsworth Prison walls, in an unmarked grave, and was allowed no mourners. The body was dumped in the middle of the night, literally unceremoniously, on top of the remains of another man, a murderer called Robert Blaine who had been hanged five days previously.

In total 135 people were hanged at Wandsworth Prison during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the final execution taking place when Henryk Niemasz was hanged on 8 September 1961 for murder of Mr and Mrs Buxton in Brixton.

Incidentally the gallows at Wandsworth were not dismantled until 1993, 29 years after the last execution in this country and 24 years after the death penalty was abolished for murder. Incidentally the death penalty still existed for treason until 1998.

The condemned cell is now used as a television room for prison officers.

Lord Haw Haw pontificating

The lop-sided Battersea 'A' Power Station 11th May 1934

It has occasionally been said that the rather sad and disgracefully neglected Battersea Power Station in South London looks a bit like a billiard table turned upside down. It’s not a particularly good discription – the proportions aren’t right at all. Although if it was a billiard table and the right way up and it was before 1953, it would have fallen over because it only had two legs.

Battersea Power Station as we know it today, with its familiar four chimney layout, was actually two individual power stations – Battersea ‘A’ and Battersea ‘B’ but constructed eventually in the form of a single building with the last of the iconic fluted concrete chimneys only being raised as late as 1955.

The cathedral of rubble on 9th July 1981

During the 1920s electricity was supplied to London by small companies that were often dedicated to single industries or groups of factories. Any excess power was then sold to the public. However due to differing standards of voltage and frequency that were being provided, parliament in 1925, decided that the power grid should be a single system.

Several private power companies pre-empted the feared nationalisation (which wasn’t to arrive until after the war in 1948 with the British Electricity Authority) by forming the London Power Company which planned several very large stations for London. The first of these they came up with was in the Battersea area between the Thames and the Nine Elms Lane.

In 1928, with the architect Theo J Halliday in charge, construction started on the power station despite furious opposition by public figures such as the Archbishop of Canterbury. To appease the public, who were worried about the general size of the building and the pollution it might cause, the London Power Company hired the famous architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of Liverpool Cathedral and the red telephone box fame. He was known to the press as ‘architect of the exterior’ and it was his idea to turn the previously planned square chimneys into the fluted classical columns we know today.

The initial construction of Battersea 'A'

photograph of Sir Giles Scott in 1934

Battersea Power Station's control room July 1933. The station would ultimately provide a fifth of all London's electricity.

Checking the Synchoscope. It looked great but often caused cricked necks.

Battersea Power Station at sunset circa 1938

Work started on Battersea ‘B’ Station soon after the war, still under the auspices of the London Power Company. However by the time it completed building opened the UK’s electric supply industry had been nationalised into the hands of initially the British Electricity Authority which subsequently became, in 1955, the Central Electricity Generating Board and then finally (I think) the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1957.

The building of Battersea 'B' in 1951. 'One day, we will all have to wear day-glo high-vis jackets and hard-hats even when we're walking on the ground'.

The view over to the bucolic and rural sounding Nine Elms Lane. 14th February 1951.

In 1964 Battersea Power Station had a bad fire that caused power failures throughout London. Unfortunately it was due to be the opening night of BBC2 which in the end had to be delayed until the following day at 11am.

Incidentally Battersea Power Station is often described as Europe’s largest brick building but a quick Google describes two other buildings also as’Europe’s largest brick building’ – namely The Britannia Grand Hotel in Scarborough and the Malbark Castle in Poland.

The aforementioned Church of Sainte-Cecile in Albi, however, is often described as the world’s largest brick building, and as France is in Europe, that’s the building I’m going for. Churches though, are meant to look great. Power Stations, whether they have two or four chimneys, generally, aren’t.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVXU7jvvEs

The Jam – News Of The World

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD3OhIYUjlA

Pink Floyd – video to Pigs On The Wing which include fantastic views of Battersea Power Station

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABsA8GJTSjo

Rowan Atkinson’s spoof of BBC2′s opening night

Julie Driscoll in 1968

Years ago my neighbour Fred once said to me ‘Julie Driscoll used to live just down the road you know’, his eyes sort of glazed over and he wistfully sighed ‘Ah, Jools…’. I’d heard of her but I wasn’t entirely sure where or why, but went and bought a couple of her CDs all the same. Fred had done me a favour because Julie Driscoll made some really good music – her most famous track being a cover of Bob Dylan’s Wheels On Fire when she was part of The Brian Augur Trinity which was subsequently used as the theme music for Absolutely Fabulous.

She was one of the faces of the sixties with short cropped hair, bewitching eyes and was described as ‘the coolest of the cool’ and ‘The Face’ by the contemporary music press.

In 1969 she recorded her first solo album called 1969 (it was actually released a couple of years later) and included on the collection was a weird, but in my opinion a rather fantastic track called Vauxhall to Lambeth Bridge – which would be a short walk of about half a mile between two adjacent bridges that span the river Thames.

It’s actually a journey, being rather local, that I’ve made in one form or other hundreds of times. The south bank of the Thames here is known as the Albert Embankment and was built on reclaimed land from the river by Joseph Bazalgette, the man famous in London for being responsible for building London’s sewer system in the mid-19th century, most of which still exists to the present day.

View from Vauxhall Bridge, 2008

If you can get past the bit in the song where Big Ben is winking and smiling at Julie (it was the sixties after all), the song is about an evening walk along the riverside where she meets a man looking into the dark and black water of the Thames searching for something in the impenetrable depths – presumably, I suppose, searching for the meaning of life and not his watch or whatever. I’m not sure if Jools ever wanders down the same bit of river these days, I hope so, because if she does she probably sees me doing the same thing from time to time.

Julie in Vogue with a couple of pet cats, 1968

Vogue 1969

Julie, in the early sixties was working with the Yardbirds fan club when she was encouraged by the band’s then manager, Georgio Gomelsky, to try singing as a career. In 1963 at the age of 16 she released her first single , ‘Take Me By The Hand’ and in two years she was singing with a rhythm and blues group called Steam Packet which included Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart and and Brian Augur – the band was a sort of precursor of the late sixties supergroups. Well, it would have been if all the members weren’t complete unknowns at the time.

Rod, Long John Baldry, Julie and Brian Auger

Steampacket

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crg6Ajtgl2I

Eventually, Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry went off to try and be famous, with various degrees of success, and Julie continued singing with organist Brian and his Brian Auger Trinity. In 1968 they had a top five hit with Bob Dylan’s ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’. It remained their and Julie’s biggest hit although they released several fantastic singles including Donovan’s Season Of The Witch.

Streetnoise, the album that features Vauxhall to Albert Bridge.

Julie, is still performing, singing slightly more avant-garde material these days, and is now known as Julie Tippetts married to the jazz musician Keith Tippet who played on Streetnoise – the 1969 album on which Vauxhall To Lambeth Bridge is featured.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpizS9h-1Xk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sQvBkcJdY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozjXTagz75Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT8tsDclHzU

This time not with Julie but too good not to put up here. This promo ‘video’ of the Brian Auger Trinity was ridiculously ahead of its time.

Buy Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity stuff here and here

The Angry Brigade

The Angry Brigade is the man or woman sitting next to you.
They have guns in their pockets and hatred in their minds.
We are getting closer…
Power to the People.

America had the Weather Men, Italy the Red Brigades, Japan the Red Army Fraction, Germany the Baader-Meinhof gang but here in the UK we had the Angry Brigade. Today though, Britain’s first urban guerilla group have almost been forgotten – even their name seems a sort of pythonesque joke. Yet this disparate group of anarchists managed over about three years to explode 25 bombs between 1968 and 22 May 1971. The targets included senior policemen and politicians, a Territorial Army drill hall but also the less obvious Biba – the fashionable swinging London boutique which the Angry Brigade, rather a head of time, saw as exploiting sweatshop labour.

The Angry Brigade, with better luck than judgement, caused no fatalities, although someone once got slightly hurt, and the damage they caused was pretty minimal. Nonetheless the establishment were panicked due to the lack of evidence they could find on the initially nameless terrorists. Evidence of a sort at last arrived after the first ‘communique’ was issued by the Angries. It followed a bomb at the police commissioner Sir John Waldron’s home in August 1970. It was signed Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

bomb at Gant's Hill

The aftermath of the bomb at the minister's house

The next communique stayed in the wild west and was signed ‘the Wild Bunch’. However on 12 January 1971, Robert Carr, the Tory secretary of state for employment and productivity, was the target and the subsequent communique’s signature was stamped with a children’s John Bull printing kit and read ‘The Angry Brigade’. It was a title grabbed gleefully by the popular press and it became the name the anarchic urban guerilla group were to be forever known.

Tintagel House on the Thames south bank

The bomb at Tintagel house (a Metropolitan Police office block), just down from Vauxhall Bridge and a couple of buildings away from where is now the rather over-the-top MI6 building (officially known just as 85 Vauxhall Cross), was aimed at the police computer – a ‘state of the art’ UK designed ICT 1301 mainframe. As usual the explosion caused minimal damage and even though the computer was size of a house it seemingly could do nothing but add two and two together anyway.

1301 mainframe Computer

The computer in question was completely British and was built jointly by GEC Telephones of Coventry and the British Tabulating Machine company who held all the rights to IBM technology throughout the British commonwealth. However, and with hindsight not exactly sensibly, they decided to give up these rights and build the 1301 in competition with IBM – then the Microsoft (sort of) of the day. The biggest selling point of the ICT 1301 was that it could add and subtract pounds shillings and pence, and to be able to multiply sterling amounts by decimal numbers.

The computer was about 20 ft wide and 22 ft long, weighed five tons, and had an internal memory of about 72 kilobytes (a Word document a few pages long). Each of the Ampex 1″ tape units in the background on the right could store about 9 megabytes of memory (about a couple of mp3s).

A few months after the Tintagel House bombing the police raided a house in Stoke Newington finding various explosives, ammunition and guns but most damning of all a John Bull printing kit. Gradually eight supposed members of The Angry Brigade were arrested, subsequently becoming known, rather imaginatively by the press, as the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’.

The Angry Brigade’s campaign came to a definite end after the longest criminal trial in English history (it lasted from May 30 to December 6 1972) was concluded with John Barker, Jim Greenfield, Hilary Creek and Anna Mendleson each receiving prison sentences of ten years. Other defendants, however, were found not guilty including Stuart Christie, who had formerly been imprisoned in Spain for carrying explosives with the intent to assassinate the dictator Franco, and Angela Mason, who went on to become the director of Stonewall and the Government’s Women and Equality Unit and who was awarded an OBE in 1999.

London' s finest at Tintagel House on the Albert Embankment in 1971

Cold, Unloving, Rubber-Insulated Sex

Jeffrey atop of his penthouse apartment on the Albert Embankment

Next door to Tintagel House is a rather nondescript sixties tower block called Peninsula Heights but formerly known as Alembic House. Jeffrey Archer owns the penthouse at the top of the building and it was here that he held his infamous shepherd’s pie and Krug parties. The apartment was formerly owned by Bernie Eccleston, the Formula One baron and before that John Barry the James Bond theme composer and a host of other fantastic pieces of music.

Apparently Peter Stringfellow has the flat downstairs. It was also the groovy sixties location when the plans were organised for the Italian Job and it also featured in Sweeney! – the feature film version of the famous television series.

Interior of Jeffrey's penthouse suite

The journalist Deborah Orr visited Archer’s apartment just before his trial in 2001 and described it as having “no bookshelves in the living room, as all the available wall space is given over to Lord Archer’s much written about collection of art. This was dismissed airily by one of his acquaintances as ‘All the right names, all the wrong pieces’…But there are bookshelves upstairs, which at a glimpse can be seen to hold books not spine out but front out. The books, from this limited perspective, all seem to be Jeffrey Archer hardbacks.

Most disconcerting… is the preponderance of heavy, gilded, Empire furniture around the place. The general effect is that Frasier has been forced to sub-let to a minor but wealthy admirer of the Third Reich.”

Monica Coghlan

Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance?

I had no difficulty seeing his face. I was lying on top of him the whole time. He commented on how lovely I was. He was quite surprised by my nipples. It was over very quickly – about 10 minutes, what with getting undressed and the actual sex. Because it was over so quickly, I suggested that he relax for a while and he could try again. I lit a cigarette and I laid down on the bed with him. I asked him what he did for a living. He said, ‘I sell cars,’ and he had no sooner said that than he jumped off the bed and said he should go and move his car.

Jeffrey and Mary outside court

‘The Elephant was not exactly a classy district.’

The Elephant was not exactly a classy district. The streets were as rough and dangerous as it was possible to get without anybody actually declaring war, and even the cinema was not without its perils. (Michael Caine)

The Trocadero Theatre at Elephant And Castle was built in 1930 and had 3400 seats but by the 1950s the theatre was renowned for its critical and violent local Teddy Boy audience who threw coins at Cliff Richard and jeered Bobby Darin but idolised Duane Eddy. When the film Rock Around The Clock played there, the Teds famously slashed the seats, rioted in the aisles and two policemen were seriously injured when the ‘juvenile deliquents’ let off steam after watching the film. The incidents made headline news. They also loved Buddy Holly who actually made his UK debut at the cinema and concert hall (strangely with Des O’Connor as the compere) in March 1958.

Elephant And Castle, like a lot of South London, had been heavily bombed in the Second World War (most of the damage occurring over just two nights in 1941) and for over a decade the streets, where once music halls, brothels, pubs and tightly-packed terraced houses had stood, now lay desolate and dilapidated. From this grim and desperate south London district a new phenomenon grew, The Teddy Boys – Britain’s first youth cult. Their style was derived from Savile Row tailors who had revived the Edwardian look after the war, ironically for upper-class ex-army officers wanting a dandyish look, however the fashion was quickly taken up by teenagers in and around Elephant And Castle in the early fifties and the name given to the followers of the fashion movement soon got corrupted to ‘Ted’ or ‘Teddy Boy’. They wore long drape jackets, usually with a velvet trim collar and pocket flaps, high-waisted drainpipe trousers, chunky brogues and later large crepe-soled shoes (known as brothel creepers), white shirts and narrow ‘Slim Jim’ ties. These clothes were mostly tailor-made at great expense and paid for through many weekly installments. The Teddy Girls meanwhile also wore drape jackets but with hobble skirts (these are narrow at the hem and thus ‘hobble’ the wearer) or toreador pants, cameo brooches, and espadrilles. It was possibly the first example of a sartorial protest against authority and post-war austerity and, realistically, the beginning of the British teenager.

PHOTOS REMOVED BY REQUEST FROM THE COPYRIGHT OWNER

small versions of the Ken Russell pictures here

Truly excellent photos of Teddy girls and boys from the mid-fifties by the director Ken Russell

The self-styled ‘King of the Teds’ in the late fifties was Eddie Richardson, brother of the future South London gang leader Charlie Richardson. The Richardsons were soon to become infamous for their rivalry with the East London Kray Twins but also for their sadistic methods of torture they dealt out to their enemies. These included being nailed to the floor, teeth being pulled out by pliers (the speciality of their fellow gang member ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser) and being electrocuted to unconsciousness. However the Richardsons were just part of the local tradition and there had been a history of violence in this part of South London for centuries – even the word ‘hooligan’ (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) comes from ‘a 19th century Irish family in south-east London conspicuous for its ruffianism’. The original Hooligan was apparently a Limerick-born Patrick Hooligan (originally Houlihan) and his family who specialised in street violence in the mid Victorian era. By the beginning of the 20th century Elephant And Castle and its surrounding area was perhaps the most lawless part of the capital. The main gang of criminals, led by Charles ‘Wag’ McDonald, were the so-called Elephant Boys. However while the men were heavily involved in protection rackets and organised violence, the local women were experts at shoplifting. A woman known as Aggy Hill, known as the ‘Queen of the Forty Elephants’, and her associates (presumably some of the Elephants, but did anyone call them that to their faces?) would descend on the West End in chauffeured-driven cars and fleece the shops while their cars waited outside. Of course there were no double yellow lines, officious traffic wardens and parking meters to disrupt the stealing.

The Teds pre-dated American rock and roll but they grew to love the rebellious aspect of this new musical fashion, and this part of South London in one way or another produced many of the British stars that were coming to prominence at the time, basically copying their US conterparts. Terry Dene was born above a sweet-shop in Lancaster Road (a street long since bulldozed and demolished) in Elephant And Castle in 1938. He started playing at the famous Two I’s coffee bar where the influential producer Jack Good spotted him and signed him for popular music television show Six Five Special. His first release was A White Sports Coat which was an instant hit but he found the looming stardom, which seemed to his for the taking, hard to cope with and he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and the popular press attacked him – the establishment at the time blamed ‘evil’ rock and roll music for seemingly all of society’s ills. It led to a nervous breakdown and his mental health only deteriorated when he started National Service and because of this he was soon discharged after only two months. This time the headlines were even worse as the press presumed he was just trying to avoid conscription. His career was now in ruins, and although he appeared in a film ‘The Golden Disc’ and joined the talent-spotter Larry Parnes’ stable of stars, he was unable to recapture the momentum and faded from the music scene. There were several unsuccessful comebacks and in 1974 he released a book and album entitled ‘I Thought Terry Dene Was Dead’, unfortunately it didn’t really make any difference and the majority of people presumably thought he still was.

Just ten minutes walk away from ‘The Elephant’ on the Waterloo Road was a cafe called The Cave (so-called because it was under some railway arches). Three young musicians played there in a skiffle group called The Cavemen and named after the cafe. They were Lionel Bart, local boy Tommy Hicks and Mike Pratt. They’d all met at a party at a sort of pre-hippie Beatnik commune called The Yellow Door next to The Cave and over six or seven months they played at coffee shops and cafes around town for up to ten shillings a night. They slowly started finding an audience especially at the Two I’s cafe in Soho where they was spotted by the impresario Larry Parnes who re-christened Hicks ‘Tommy Steele’. Decca Records signed Steele in 1956 and in October the trio recorded ‘Rock With The Caveman’ with the help of some British jazz notables including saxman Ronnie Scott. It became the now solo Steele’s first UK hit. A year later the song ‘Handful Of Songs’ which came from the film soundtrack of ‘The Tommy Steele Story’ (released in 1957 and incredibly made in three weeks) and written by Bart, Hicks and Pratt went on to win a Ivor Novello award for the best song.

Pictures from Picture Post in 1957 – he was still living at Frean Street in Bermondsey.

Tommy Steele soon became a huge success albeit more as an all round family entertainer than a rock and roll star. Lionel Bart went on to write Living Doll – the massive Cliff Richard hit and of course was the writer of the hugely successful musical Oliver! – incidentally Bart couldn’t read or write a note of music and he could barely plonk out a tune with one finger on a piano – so he wrote all his famous songs by humming his tunes into a tape recorder. Mike Pratt, before dying of lung cancer in 1976, eventually went on to strangle Roger Moore in The Saint, gave Patrick McGoohan a severe beating in Danger Man and was the villainous Simey in The Adventures of Black Beauty, but his famous role was when he played Jeff Randall in the fantastic sixties series Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased).

The Trocadero was demolished in 1963 as part of the huge sixties rebuilding of Elephant And Castle. During the previous decade there had been calls to regenerate the violent and filthy district, and in September 1959 ambitious plans to redevelop the area with a shopping centre and housing estates were released by Sir Isaac Hayward the leader of the London County Council. He said ‘With its famous name and history of traditions the new Elephant and Castle offers opportunities one would have to go a long way to better. Here’s a real chance for the South to ‘show them how’ on the north side of the Thames’.

Well the chance certainly wasn’t taken. The new dystopian Elephant And Castle made south London even more of a joke and a seeming irrelevance to north Londoners and the planners managed to finish off what the German bombs had started. They decided to make the Elephant into one enormous gyratory system surrounded by massive, brutal, featureless and ugly concrete estates where the car was king and pedestrians banished to dirty, leaky and poorly lit walkways that became just a labyrinth of fear and crime.

Part of the regeneration, however, included Erno Goldfinger’s Odeon which opened in December 1966 on the site of the old Trocadero. It featured a famous ‘floating screen’ which had no masking at the top and bottom and had two black panels which rotated around from the back of the screen if the aspect ratio needed changing. The Odeon, itself, was shockingly demolished in 1988 for nothing more than a car park.

Terry Dene – A White Sports Coat

Terry Dene – Lock And Chain

Tommy Steele – A Handful Of Songs

Tommy Steele – Rock With The Caveman

Buy Tommy Steele stuff here and Terry Dene stuff here