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!)

Teddy Boys admiring the view on Clapham Common in the early 1950s

On the balmy summer evening of Thursday, July 2nd, 1953 there were maybe around two hundred teenagers hanging around a bandstand and its accompanying cafe situated roughly in the middle of the two hundred acres that make up Clapham Common in South London.

The band was playing hits of that year such as Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’ and Dickie Valentine’s ‘Broken Wings’ and noticeably smartly-dressed young men were feigning disinterest in the girls who were dancing to the music. The self-conscious teenagers were at the common ‘to see and be seen’ and they wore expensive-looking long jackets, white shirts and ties with tapered trousers, and shoes with thick crepe soles known as ‘creepers’. They had longish, greased-back hair in oft-combed waves over the top and sideburns down the cheek – a hairstyle that was beginning to become popular to differentiate from the National Service short-back-and-sides all too prevalent at the time.

Spectators at the Clapham Common bandstand in the 1950s

This new south London working-class style had actually derived from an upper-class ‘Edwardian Dandy’ look that had started to be worn in gay-circles, and particularly young guardsmen, around Mayfair and St James in the late forties. Young dandies such as Bunny Roger (who also invented Capri pants whilst on holiday there in 1949, as you do) were seen around Piccadilly proudly showing off their svelte figures by wearing long and fitted jackets with generous shoulders and mean waists with half-collars and turned-back cuffs of velvet.

The neo-Edwardian look was completed with tighter tapered trousers and ornate embroidered waistcoats which echoed the Edwardian syle of fifty years previously. It was meant to be, and was, an antitheses of the commonplace, drab, shapeless and austere demob suit.

Neil Monroe "Bunny" Roger showing off his Edwardian look in 1954. For his life read this wonderful obituary.

We're jolly well not Teddy Boys

A New Edwardian guardsman. 1953

A man being fitted with a ubiquitous de-mob suit soon after the war.

It was said that a shop-lifting gang from Elephant and Castle called the Forty Thieves were on a recce in the West End and were impressed by the rather flashy and expensive-looking new Edwardian-style and quickly took it for their own.

Around 1950/51 some young men around Elephant and Castle and Lambeth having appropriated the uptown Edwardian clothes started to mix it up with the look of a World War Two spiv but also borrowing from the hairstyles and style influences of American Westerns (the Mississippi gambler bootlace tie for instance) that were hugely popular in the early fifties.

This potent fashion statement could very well have been the first time teenage boys developed their own style of clothing that differentiated from their fathers or elder brothers. It was a conscious and colourful attempt, just like the posh dandies in St James, to rebel against the grey post-war austerity that had enveloped the country after the war.

South London Teddy Boy, 1954

Teddy Boys in Notting Hill, 1954. Picture Post was still calling them 'Spivs'.

Teddy Boys in 1954

Teddy Boys in a Mecca Dancehall in Tottenham. By 1954 the Teddy Boy look had spread out through the rest of London and subsequently the rest of the country.

Two young men wearing "the style that is known as Edwardian"

Teddy Boys in 1954/55 from Elephant and Castle - probably where the Teddy Boy style began

These fashionable young men from South London would be today known as Teddy Boys but the term had not been invented and the boys were known as ‘Spivs’, ‘Cosh boys’ or ‘Creepers ‘. A lot of the young men on Clapham Common almost sixty years ago were part of a loose gang known as the ‘Plough Boys’ a name that came from the nearby ‘Plough Inn’ at 196 Clapham High Street (it’s still there but now unfortunately part of the ubiquitous O’Neill faux-Irish pub chain). However there were other gang members milling around the common such as the relatively local Latchmere Lot or the Brixton Boys and the Elephant Mob from a few miles away.

Clapham Common tube today, what was the Plough Inn (now O'Neil's and Starbucks today) is in the background.

Later in that July evening on the Common, and after the band had stopped playing, four young men, not from the locality and not dressed in the fashionable Edwardian style, were sitting on two park benches facing each other with their legs stretched out across to the opposite seats. One of the so-called Plough Boys, a tough fifteen year old young man called Ronald Coleman, tried to provocatively push through the young men’s legs.

Referring to Coleman’s clothing one of the men who had been spread out over the park benches softly said ‘walk round the other way you flash cunt’. Being on his own Coleman decided not to retaliate but went to find some of his fellow ‘Plough Boys’ standing on the other side of the bandstand. Watching this and sensing the start of some trouble, and not being local, the four men decided to quickly leave the common. They were caught up by a group of lads at the drinking fountain north of the bandstand where, egged on by some teenage girls, a fist-fight quickly ensued.

Bandstand at Clapham Common today

What's left of the drinking fountain today, and the path leading to Clapham Common North Side

The original drinking fountain on Clapham Common, what happened to it? As drinking fountains go it seems pretty impressive.

Putting up a good fight, although completely outnumbered, the four men managed to get away. Two of them ran towards Clapham Common North Side where they saw a 137 bus coming along the street. Jumping on the open platform they must have thought they had got away but unfortunately, as is often the case in London, the bus dawdled in traffic and then came to a halt for the request bus stop where eight or nine of their pursuers were waiting. They dragged both the lads off the bus and started to attack them.

One was lucky, and despite bleeding from stab wounds to the groin and stomach managed to scramble back on to the open platform of the Routemaster bus as it was pulling away. The other broke away and managed only to run about a hundred yards up the road towards Clapham Old Town. All of a sudden he stopped and leaned groggily against a wall outside a fashionable apartment block called Okeover Manor. He eventually sagged down the wall ending up slumped in a half-sitting position on the pavement.

Map of Clapham Common from 1961. The common and its surrounding area hasn't changed substantially for decades.

The 137 bus stop on Clapham Common North Side today. The view is towards Clapham Old Town and Okeover Manor on the left is a 100 yards or so away. The 137 bus is in the background roughly where it would have stopped after the fight.

Okeover Manor on Clapham Common North Side today

The situation had suddenly got serious and the remaining Plough Boys ran off. One of the bus passengers, for the bus had now stopped, made a call from the Okeover Manor and another passenger made a makeshift pillow for the victim with a folded coat. At 9.42pm a policeman arrived and just one hour later the young man, found to have six stab wounds about his body and one to his face, was pronounced dead. His name was John Ernest Beckley and he was aged just seventeen.

Five youths were initially charged by the police, with one more charged a few days later, and they were remanded to Bow Street. After a three-day hearing, the case was sent to the Old Bailey for trial. The charged were 15 year old shop assistant Ronald Coleman, Terence Power aged seventeen and unemployed, Allan Albert Lawson aged eighteen and a carpenter, a labourer Michael John Davies aged twenty, Terrence David Woodman, sixteen and a street-trader and John Frederick Allan, aged 21 also a labourer.

Picture of Michael John Davies from the Daily Mail August 1953. The cigarette must have been added by the paper for villainous effect. MJD was a non-smoker.

On Monday 14th September 1953, at the Old Bailey, Ronald Coleman and Michael John Davies pleaded not guilty to murdering John Beckley. The four others were formally found not guilty after Christmas Humphreys, the prosecutor for the Crown, said he was not satisfied there was any evidence against them on this indictment. However they were charged with common assault and kept in custody.

The clothes of the defendants had been of interest to the prosecution who wanted to know if the youths on the common wore “tight trousers and strange-looking coats with a slit down the back?” It was during the reporting of this trial when the press, for the first time, started to make a connection between the odd-looking clothes of the South Londoners and casual violence.

The Evening Standard called Ronald Coleman ‘the leader of the Edwardians… a teenage gang of hooligans’ who wore ‘eccentric suits’. In fact Coleman in his statement to the police proudly described how he was dressed on the night of the murder. Stating that he wore ‘a very dark grey suit, single breasted with three buttons…after the style of what is called Edwardian.’ A Daily Mirror headline during the trial simply said ‘Flick Knives, Dance Music and Edwardian Suits’. It was the Daily Express on September 23rd 1953 who took the word ‘Edwardian’ and shortened it to Teddy and so the Teddy Boy was born.

The trial of Coleman and Davies lasted until the following week when the jury, after considering for three hours forty minutes, said they were unable to agree a verdict.

Mr Humphreys, for the prosecution, said that they did not propose to put Coleman on trial again for murder and a new jury, on the direction of the judge, returned a formal verdict of not guilty. Coleman was charged with common assault along with the four others for which they all received six or nine months in jail. Even the 15 year old Ronald Coleman, whom it could be said had started the whole affair, was considered too dangerous for Borstal and was also imprisoned.

Six had now become just one, and Michael John Davies’ trial for murder took place a month later at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey on October 19th. There would be a new judge, Mr Justice Hilbery, and of course a new jury although the senior Prosecutor, as for the initial trial, was still Christmas Humphreys.

Christmas Humphreys

Humphreys wasn’t your usual common or garden barrister, he was also the author of many works on Mahayana Buddhism. In fact Penguin had published his book ‘Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide’ just two years previously in 1951 and has, somewhere in the world, remained in print ever since. Indeed Humphreys had founded the Buddhist Society in London in 1924 (it still exists and is now one of the oldest Buddhist organisations outside Asia) and was the most notable Buddhist in the country.

Britain's most eminent Buddhist Christmas Humphreys in Kyoto 1946.

By the time of the Michael John Davies trial in the autumn of 1953 Christmas Humphreys had already had an extraordinary year. If he had been the sort of person who worried about what people thought of him (and he almost certainly wasn’t) he would have wished the upcoming Clapham Common murder trial to be as uncontroversial as possible.

Three years previously Humphreys had been the prosecutor when Timothy Evans was convicted and subsequently hanged for the murder of his wife and child in North Kensington. It was seen at the time as a relatively open and shut case (Evans, albeit a rather simple man, had essentially confessed to the murders) and it would have seemed that Humphreys, in his first case as Senior Prosecuting Counsel, had done well securing Evans’s conviction in a trial that lasted only three days.

There was doubt enough, however, for there to be an appeal which was subsequently turned down by three judges one of whom, and which seems slightly unfair, was Christmas Humphrey’s father.

Timothy Evans

Three years later in 1953 a man called Reginald John Christie, who had lived in the same house as Evans, was found to have murdered several women. Subsequently hiding the bodies in the building. Not only that, he had used almost the same technique to murder victims that had killed Evans’ wife.

Less than two weeks after the Clapham Common murder of John Beckley Christie was tried and then hanged on 16th July 1953. The general public and press disquiet about the case was almost tangible and the Government commissioned a rushed report on the Christie/Evans murders by John Scott Henderson QC that was only published just two days before the hanging. Henderson’s conclusion stated that the case against Evans was ‘an overwhelming one’ and that ‘there was no ground for thinking that there may have been any miscarriage of justice in the conviction of Evans’.

Surely to most people it must have appeared as a mighty coincidence, even to the self-confident Mr Christmas Humphreys, that two separate murderers, both of whom used the same modus operandi, lived in the same house in Rillington Place in North Kensington at the very same time.

John Christie was the main witness at the Timothy Evans trial in 1950 where he was convicted and subsequently hanged

The Timothy Evans conviction was certainly not the only controversial case in which Christmas Humphreys was involved. He had also been the senior prosecutor in the equally infamous Derek Bentley trial in January 1953. Bentley, an illiterate nineteen year old man with an extremely low IQ, had been hanged for the murder of a policemen in January 1953.

The verdict was questionable because Bentley (pardoned in 1998) had been technically under arrest at the time of the killing and had not even fired the gun. He was hanged, essentially, for apparently shouting to his guilty accomplice Christopher Craig (who was too young at the time to be executed) ‘Let him have it’. In court, Christmas Humphreys argued successfully that the phrase was filmic gangster parlance to shoot somebody and not a suggestion by Evans to Craig to kindly pass the gun back to the policemen.

Derek Bentley with another villainous cigarette

Whether these, what are considered today, miscarriages of justice preyed on Christmas Humphreys’ mind we do not know. Although in his autobiography entitled ‘Both Sides of the Circle’ and published in 1978, he wrote “I personally never asked a jury to convict if on the evidence before me I did not believe that the accused was guilty of murder.” In case you’re feeling confused about Mr Humphreys’ prosecuting philosophy he also wrote that:

“If it was my karma to prosecute, it was the karma of the prisoner not only to be prosecuted by me but also to have committed that crime or at least to be on trial for it…and his death, if he were hanged, it would be the result of his causing, and might, as it were, wipe out the causing in the infinitely complex, infinitely subtle weaving of this cosmic web.”

Meanwhile, Michael John Davies’ trial for the murder of John Beckley took place for four days from the 19th October 1953. Counsel for both the defence, a Mr David Weitzman, QC who had been a Labour MP for Stoke Newington and Hackney since 1945 and Mr Christmas Humphreys for the prosecution were the same as for the former trial and the same witnesses appeared. The witnesses were cross-examined in exactly the same way now for maybe the third or fourth time notably a Miss Frayling who had purported to have seen the attack from the top deck of the 137 bus and also seen Davies putting away a knife in his breast pocket.

Brian Carter, one of the four boys who were beaten up at the drinking fountain by the 'Plough Boys'.

It was almost certain that she had exaggerated what she had seen – it was late in the evening and her view of the fight on the moving bus with its internal lights on must have been obscured by both the relatively small windows of the 1940s designed RT bus (the heavier precursor of the Routemaster) and the large trees along side the road. She had initially picked out Davies as the main perpetrator while he was standing in the dock of a local south London court and not in an organised identity parade. Miss Frayling may have been enjoying the limelight that the case gave her a little too much but she kept exactly to the same story for the four times she appeared as a witness. The police and the prosecution both commended her for this after the trial.

Although no murder weapon was ever found and no one had seen Michael John Davies use a knife on that night (including the three victims that had been with John Beckley) the jury took just two hours to return with a guilty verdict. Davies remembered:

It just didn’t register, it didn’t seem to mean anything…then somebody said, ‘have you anything to say why sentence of death shouldn’t pass on you?” and I said, “I’m not guilty of murder sir,” and they put the black square thing on the judge’s head and he said something about being taken to a place of execution and there to be hung until I was dead, and ending up with, “And may the Lord have mercy on your soul,” which I think was a bit hypocritical on his part, but still.

It would have been at that moment when Davies found out exactly where his place was in the infinitely complex and subtle weaving of the cosmic web and he almost certainly didn’t want to be there but maybe that’s Karma for you.

Davies had been the only one of the original suspects to initially admit to the police to have been on the common and to have been involved in the fights. His fellow suspects had wrongly suspected he had grassed on them (it was someone else) and they and their friends almost certainly colluded and subtly made statements that subtly suggested that Davies had had a knife that evening and the girlfriend of one of the suspects apparently heard Davies say there’s “no claret on it” referring to blood on a knife. All of which Davies strongly refuted. A few years later one of Davies’ original fellow suspects wrote of him:

He was not a fighter and I have never seen him with a knife. When we were charged we all realised he was enjoying the notoriety and we decided that if he wanted to take the blame he could. At the same time we all knew that he had not committed the murder.

Ronald Coleman's girlfriend Sylvia Chubb - she stated in court that 'Mickey' Davies threatened her if she told the truth.

Michael John Davies

Although the actual murder weapon was never found there was a knife that was almost treated as such by Christmas Humphreys and the prosecution during the trial. It was a knife bought by Detective Constable Kenneth Drury in a jewellers near the Plough Inn for three shillings ostensibly as an example of what could have been used by Davies.  Incidentally Drury, one of the investigating officers in the Beckley murder case, would later become Commander of the Flying Squad in the 1970s and in 1977 was convicted on five counts of corruption and jailed for eight years. But of course that’s another story.

It seems that the police and the prosecution had worked together to find someone guilty in this highly-publicised court case. More than anything else it would have been important for them to find someone (whether it was right gang-member or not) to pay for the terrible crime even if it meant with their life. It wasn’t the first time of course the police and the prosecution would act in this way and it won’t be the last but it’s worth noting, however, that Derek Bentley had hanged a few months earlier in another case that involved a minor who, however guilty, couldn’t be hanged.

The Clapham Observer Friday, July 10 1953

There had been banner headlines in the local and national press from the day after the actual murder. Initially they only reported the side of the case which had been heard in the lower courts – the prosecution’s. “It was Davies – I have no Doubt”; “Edwardian Suits, Dance Music – and a Dagger” were examples of the lurid press headlines leading up to Davies’ trial. The freshly coined ‘Teddy Boys’ and the Edwardian suits they wore were already to the newspapers and their reading public beginning to hold connotations of violent crime. The Daily Mirror wrote on the 23^rd October about Davies:

The Clapham Common thug…took great pains to look like a dandy. Like most of his companions, nearly all his money went on flashy clothes, and just before the murder, he borrowed twelve pounds from his uncle to buy a suit…This man was a born coward beneath his bravado and his ‘gay dog’ clothes.

Michael John Davies slept fifteen feet away from these gallows in the condemned cell at Wandsworth prison for an incredible 92 days. He spent Christmas and his 21st birthday here.

Almost immediately after the guilty verdict there were suspicions to many that there had been a gross miscarriage of justice. Michael John Davies’ case went to appeal and eventually to the House of Lords both to no avail. However after many petitions to the Home Secretary he granted a reprieve for Davies after 92 days in the Condemned Cell.

The first thing he said to his mother and sister, glad that he could look smart again, was: “Look, they’re letting me wear a collar and tie!” The reprieve may have been because the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe thought that the murder weapon was an ordinary pocket knife and not a weapon of pre-meditated murder or that he had cruelly spent too long waiting for his execution.

After much work gathering new evidence by Davies’s sister and with the help of Lord Longford the Home Secretary, now RAB Butler, decided that, subject to good behaviour, he could be released in two years time. By now there were statements from many of the original suspects stating that Davies was not the murderer and also written evidence that one of the original suspects had swapped a bloody suit with a friend pointing to him as the murderer.

In October 1960 Michael John Davies was released from Wandsworth Prison after seven years, although not officially pardoned, he was now a free man.

27 year old Michael John Davies was released in 1960.

After the Michael Davies trial Christmas Humphreys continued to write books on Buddhism and Zen. In his lifetime he published almost forty books including some on poetry. He wrote poems inspired by his Buddhist beliefs, one of which posed the question: When I die, who dies? Which was presumably exactly what Michael John Davies was thinking when he was in the condemned cell for ninety days back in 1953. Incidentally Van Morrison in his autobiographical song ‘Cleaning Windows’ mentions that after work he would go back home to read, along with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Christmas Humphreys’ book on Zen.

The controversial prosecutor became a judge in 1968, it is said that due to his Buddhist beliefs he would only become one after capital punishment had been abolished. Maybe this wasn’t as ironic as it initially appears considering his prosecuting history. It could be said that Christmas Humphreys majorly contributed, albeit indirectly, to the eventual abolition of the death penalty.

It seems Humphreys was almost involved in all the cases that are said to have turned political opinion (if not always the opinion of the public) that eventually led to the abolition of capital punishment in the UK in 1965. Not only was he involved in the miscarriages of justice that led to the hanging of the innocent Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley in the early fifties, Humphreys was also the senior prosecutor during the trial of Ruth Ellis – the last woman to be hanged in this country. He later said about Ellis:

“It [mercy] never came into my mind because, you must understand, how we play in parts as if on a stage. I have my part to play. Defending counsel has his. The judge has his. The jury have theirs… Mercy never came into it. It was never suggested. It was never part of it. There could be no mercy in what seemed to be cold-blooded murder.”

The controversial hanging of Ruth Ellis probably brought forward the end of the death penalty in the UK but perhaps also the introduction of 'diminished responsibility' in 1957 for cases of murder. Good old Christmas Humphreys.

However mercy did come into it when Humphreys became a member of the Judiciary because he quickly developed a reputation as a ‘gentle judge’ and believed that long sentences were normally counterproductive. He found sentencing an ordeal because it meant adding to the suffering of the criminal and their family.

An example of his lenient sentencing caused a particular public outcry in 1975 when he gave a man who had raped two women at knife point a suspended sentence. He was asked to resign the following year and spent the last few years of his life devoted to Buddhist activities and remained president of the Buddhist Society until his death in 1983. His former home in St John’s Wood is now a Buddhist temple.

Teddy Boy at the Mecca Dance Hall in Tottenham

Tony Parker's The Plough published in 1965Teddy Boys in London, 1955

A lot of the information for this post came from a book by Tony Parker called The Plough Boy, ostensibly the story of Michael John Davies arrest, trial and subsequent freedom. One of really interesting quotes from one of the original protagonists brought to trial (albeit un-named) was fascinating and really brings to life what living in 1953 as a teenager must have been like:

It seemed to be somehow the war was over and we’d missed out on it, and yet it was still going on, if you know what I mean. It was in the atmosphere all the time, there was a kind of perpetual carry-over from it. The best-selling books were war books and the most popular films at the cinemas were war films. People didn’t seem able to have enough of it, somehow they didn’t want to let it go. Perhaps because the war years had meant something to them, been full of excitement and comradeship and a bit of glory, and in the end it had all turned out all right and we’d won – so people were still looking back at it as a kind of game. That went on for quite a long time after the war, you know, the feeling was in the air you breathed, you could sense it all round you – older people looking back on it with excitement and pleasure, almost, as something to be enjoyed.

To this day the Teddy Boy look, to some people, still has connotations of criminality.

Ken Mackintosh – The Creep

Dickie Valentine and the Stargazers – Finger of Suspicion

Frankie Laine – I Believe

Mickey Deans, Judy Garland and Johnnie Ray at Chelsea Register Office, March 1969

On March 15th 1969 at Chelsea Register Office on the Kings Road, Judy Garland married a gay discotheque manager and part-time jazz pianist called Mickey Devinko better known as Mickey Deans. After the brief ceremony, which was actually her fifth, Garland said;

“This is it. For the first time in my life, I am really happy. Finally, I am loved.”

Not that loved, because despite the long celebrity guest-list, not one of Judy’s famous friends made it to the reception held at Quaglino’s the large and expensive restaurant situated in Bury Street just south of Piccadilly. Several hundred people were invited and only fifty made it to the function.

Mickey, Judy and Johnnie

The glasses of champagne remained largely undrunk and an ostentatious three-tiered cake remained mostly uneaten. “I can’t understand it,” Judy was reported to have said in next day’s Sunday Express, “they all said they’d come”. Even her daughter Liza Minnelli, who had turned 23 just three days before, had called her mother to say “I can’t make it, Mama, but I promise I’ll come to your next one.” Another journalist apparently wrote that the reception was “the saddest and most pathetic party I have ever attended”.

Judy and Mickey on the empty dancefloor at Quaglinos

Actually there was one celebrity guest at the wedding – Mickey Deans’ best man, Johnnie Ray. Ray had had hits in the fifties such as Cry and The Little White Cloud That Cried and was famous for the mootable ability to cry on stage earning him the moniker ‘the Nabob of Sob’ or occasionally the ‘Prince of Wails’. In reality, Ray was no close friend of Deans or Garland and the only reason that he was a guest at the wedding was that he was due to open for a brief Scandinavian tour Deans had organised for his new wife four days after the wedding.

Johnnie Ray at the reception

Judy told the Sunday Express:

“I don’t know if London still needs me, but I certainly need it! It’s good and kind to me. I feel at home here. The people understand me, and I’m not aware of the cruelty I’ve so often felt in the States. I’ve reached a point in my life where the most precious thing is compassion – and I get this here.”

Judy and Mickey

4 Cadogan Lane in Chelsea, November 2009

After the wedding Garland and Deans rented a small mews house in a Chelsea cul-de-sac called Cadogan Lane. On Saturday 22 June, just three months after their wedding, Judy and Mickey had been watching a BBC documentary on the Royal family but, not untypically, had started to furiously row. Garland ran into the street shouting and screaming (also not untypically) followed not long after by Deans who ran after her. He was unable to find his wife and returned to the house and soon after went to bed.

At around 10.40am the next morning the phone rang for Garland. Deans, initially unable to find her, found the bathroom door locked. He climbed out on to the roof and looking through the window saw Garland motionless on the toilet with her head slumped forward and her hands on her knees. Climbing into the bathroom he found her skin was discoloured and dried blood had dribbled from her mouth and nose. She had been dead for about eight hours.

The Chelsea Coroner, Gavin Thurston wrote “This is a clear picture of someone who had been habituated to barbiturates in the form of Seconal for a very long period of time, and who on the night of june 22nd/23rd perhaps in a state of confusion from a previous dose (although this is pure speculation) took more barbiturate than her body could tolerate.”

Garland had been taking drugs since she was in her early teens, initially to keep her weight down – Louis B Mayer the owner of MGM called her ‘that fat kid’ (not to mention ‘my little hunchback’ – you can understand why she had trouble with self-esteem all her life) and was constantly troubled by what he saw as her weight problem. Studio doctors prescribed the new wonder drug Benzedrine and subsequently the more sophisticated offshoots Dexedrine and Dexamyl. Drugs like these, at the time, seemed like miracles of science and were as common as aspirin.

Judy at sixteen

Louis B Mayer and his 'little hunchback'

Garland had been prescribed Seconal, the drug that killed her, off and on, since the fifties. It is a barbiturate derivative medicine that was becoming widely misused in the sixties. It had nicknames such as ‘reds’, ‘red-devils’ or seccies, but another nickname was ‘dolls’ and thus responsible for the punning title of Jacqueline Susann’s novel ‘Valley of the Dolls’.

Seconal

Jacqueline Susann and Judy Garland at a press conference for Valley of the Dolls in 1967

The character Neely O’Hara in the book, with her undoubted talent blunted by self-destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, was purportedly based on Garland. Judy was actually cast in the film, not as O’Hara but to play the character Helen Lawson but not long into the filming Garland missed several days of rehearsals and was fired in April 1967. She was replaced by Susan Heyward but not before Garland recorded the song ‘I’ll Plant My Own Tree’.

Judy Garland was just 47 years old and $4 million in debt when she died. She was buried in New York and, making an effort this time, guests included Lauren Bacall, James Mason, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner and latterly Frank Sinatra who paid all the funeral expenses and presciently said, “Judy will now have a mystic survival. She was the greatest.”

Judy Garland's body as it arrived back in the States

Ironically, considering the effort she put into keeping her weight down, Garland was probably less than 70 lbs when she died. She was so thin that it was said that to keep the waiting photographers non the wiser, when her body was removed from the Cadogan Lane mews house, covered in only a blanket, she was carried out draped over someone’s arm like a folded coat.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7ZkqQTopOg

Judy Garland applying makeup before her last ever concert in Denmark 1969

Judy Garland (with Mickey Deans) – When Sunny Gets Blue – recorded three days before she died. Mickey is heard on the piano prompting her

Judy Garland – Broadway Rhythm – by way of contrast this is Judy performing on MGM radio with Wallace Beery aged just 13 and just after she signed with MGM (she’s wrongly announced as 12)

Billie Carlton

A young pretty actress called Billie Carlton had a starring role on stage at the huge Victory Ball held at the Albert Hall on 28th November 1918. Tatler had a few months previously described one of her appearances on a London stage, saying that she had: ‘cleverness, temperament and charm. Not enough of the first, and perhaps too much of the latter.’

While one newspaper described her appearance at the ball:

It seemed that every man there wished to dance with her. Her costume was extraordinary and daring to the utmost, but so attractive and refined was her face that it never occurred to any one to be shocked. The costume consisted almost entirely of transparent black georgette.

Although she she was well on the way to becoming a star her career was being held back by, what was becoming a rather obvious and large drug habit, and unfortunately the girl with too much charm and the daring costume was found dead in her Savoy Hotel suite by her maid the morning after the Victory ball. She was just 22 years old.

A gold box containing cocaine was found at her bedside and at the inquest it was suggested that she had died of ‘cocaine poisoning’. Although it was more likely that a combination of cocaine and some kind of depressant helped end her short life.

Billie Carlton in 1916

The subsequent court case revealed a highly dubious way of life for a young woman of the time. Witnesses described her heavy cocaine and opium use and it became known that the London-born actress, who incidentally never knew her father, was involved with three ‘sugar daddies’. Two of these helped her financially – she had a very expensive life-style to maintain including a permanent suite at the Savoy Hotel – while the other, a married dress-designer called Reggie de Veulle, was more of a drug-taking partner.

The Daily Sketch front page January 24th 1919

It was de Veulle who had given Carleton the cocaine that apparently had killed her. He had bought the drug a few days previously from a Scottish woman called Ada and her Chinese husband Lau Ping You who both lived on the Limehouse Causeway. In court it came to light that de Veulle had been involved in a previous homosexual blackmail case and with a headline that read “An Opium Circle. Chinaman’s Wife Sent to Prison. High Priestess of Unholy Rites” the normally staid Times reported that both de Veulle and Carleton had been at an all-night ‘orgy’ in a Mayfair flat where the women wore flimsy nighties and the men silk pyjamas while smoking opium.

The press and the court, however, considered Billie Carleton a tragic innocent victim describing her as having:

“a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.”

Ada was sentenced to five months hard labour, her husband escaped with just a ten pound fine while, despite the judge’s direction, the jury acquitted Carleton’s friend Reggie de Veulle of her manslaughter. He admitted, however, to supplying Carleton cocaine and was imprisoned for eight months.

The death of beautiful girl from drugs combined with the involvement of a Chinese man created what was to become the first big drug scandal of the 20th century. The press, as they say, whipped themselves into a frenzy and the newspaper Pictorial News, for instance, ran a series of pieces about the East End of London and what they described as the encroaching ‘Yellow Peril’.

In the real world the so-called ‘yellow peril’ was actually a small, relatively law-abiding Chinese community which had been based around the Limehouse docks area from around the beginning of the 19th century. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were two separate communities in the area – the Chinese from Shanghai were based around Pennyfields and Ming Street (between the present Westferry and Poplar DLR stations) whereas the immigrants from Southern China and Canton lived around Gill Street and the Limehouse Causeway. By 1911 the whole area had started to be called Chinatown by the rest of London.

The East End Chinatown in 1911

Three seamen on the West India Dock Road

Bag and sack shop circa 1900

Considering that there were rarely more than a few hundred Chinese people living around Limehouse before and after the first world war (in fact Liverpool had a far larger Chinese population), the East End Chinatown had an extraordinarily bad reputation.

It wasn’t just the fault of a slavering press looking for scandal and writing lurid headlines about opium dens and the white-slave traders there were also numerous writers, novelists and even film-makers that were helping to greatly exaggerate the danger and immorality of the area. At times it seemed that Limehouse was almost singlehandedly responsible for corroding the moral backbone of the British middle-classes.

Limehouse in 1927

Shop in Pennyfields in 1924

Limehouse in 1910

HV Morton the famous travel essayist and journalist wrote about Limehouse in his book ‘The Nights of London’ in 1926:

The squalor of Limehouse is that strange squalor of the East which seems to conceal vicious splendour. There is an air of something unrevealed in those narrow streets of shuttered houses, each one of which appears to be hugging its own dreadful little secret… you might open a filthy door and find yourself in a palace sweet with joss-sticks, where queer things happen in a mist of smoke……The silence grips you, almost persuading you that behind it is something which you are always on the verge of discovering; some mystery of vice or of beauty, or of terror and cruelty.

The fact that the Chinese community liked to gamble and smoke opium was bad enough but it seemed to be the fear of sexual contact between the races (which the drug-taking of course only exacerbated) that frightened so many people; especially the newspaper editors of the time. ‘White Girls Hypnotised by Yellow Men’ shouted the Evening News, writing that it was the duty ‘of every Englishman and Englishwoman to know the truth about the degradation of young white girls’.

Limehouse Nights a collection of stories by Thomas Burke

Thomas Burke, writing for an apprehensive suburban readership that lapped up his writings, even in the US, wrote a number of ‘sordid and morbid’ short stories and newspaper articles about the Limehouse Chinatown. One of his stories, from a collection entitled Limehouse Nights, was called ‘The Chink and the Child’ and was actually made into a successful film called ‘Broken Blossoms by DW Griffiths starring Lilian Gish.

Broken Blossoms directed by DW Griffiths in 1919, its alternative title was The Yellow man and the Girl. Lillian Gish was 26 at the time.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjAryGCumQY

Another of the stories from Limehouse Nights was called Tai Fu and Pansy Greers and was about a young white woman who submitted her self to a ‘loathly, fat and old’ Chinese man:

He was a dreadful doper. He was a connoisseur, and used his selected yen-shi (opium) and yen-hok (a needle used to cook the opium pellet) as an Englishman uses a Cabanas…She went to him that night at his house in the Causeway. He opened the door himself, and flung a low-lidded, wine-whipped glance about her that seemed to undress her where she stood, noting her fault and charm as one notes an animal. He did not love her; there was no sentiment in this business. Brute cunning and greed were in his brow, and lust was in his lips… What he did to her in the blackness of that curtained room of his had best not be imagined. But she came away with bruised limbs and body, with torn hair, and a face paled to death.

Sax Rohmer was another former journalist that used his knowledge of Limehouse to write popular fiction, notably the incredibly successful Fu Manchu novels about a depraved Chinese man whose evil empire’s headquarters was based improbably in Limehouse:

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present…Imagine that awful being and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

Sax Rohmer

The Mask of Fu Manchu released in 1932

Myrna Loy in Mask of Fu Manchu

Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories went on to inspire over thirty films and television series throughout the following decades. However Rohmer also wrote a novel called Dope in which a character called Rita Dresden was unashamedly based on Billie Carleton. A silly socialite in the same novel called Mollie Gretna envies the Scottish wife of the Chinese drug dealer:

I have read that Chinamen tie their wives to beams in the roof and lash them with leather thongs. I could die for a man who lashed me with leather thongs. Englishmen are so ridiculously gentle to women!

Freda Kempton in 1922

Four years after the death of Billie Carleton, a girl of roughly the same age called Freda Kempton, was found dead after an overdose of cocaine. At the inquest of the young nightclub ‘dance instructress’ the press found out that on the night of her death she had been with a notorious drug dealer called, rather brilliantly, Billy ‘Brilliant’ Chang at his Regent Street restaurant. He told the Coroner at her inquest “Freda was a friend of mine but I know nothing about the cocaine. It is all a mystery to me”. Chang during the inquest was portrayed as a man with a magnetic attraction to white women and one newspaper wrote that after the verdict:

“Some of the girls rushed to Chang, patted his back, and one, more daring than the rest, fondled the Chinaman’s black, smooth hair and passed her fingers slowly through it.”

According to the coroner there was no proof that he was linked to the death but the police, and the press, were convinced that he was. By now Chang had sold his restaurant in Regent Street and opened the Palm Court Club in Gerrard Street. There’s a strong possibility that Chang was the first Chinese man to open a business in the street which was to become the centre of the new Chinatown in London forty or so years later.

Billy 'Brilliant' Chang during the inquest of Freda Kempton

Limehouse Causeway, the location of Brilliant Chang's flat in 1924

Due to continuous police raids Chang sold up again and moved to Limehouse where he opened the Shanghai Restaurant. His flat was at 13 Limehouse Causeway (coincidentally just four doors away from where Mr and Mrs Lau Ping You lived) below a top floor let to two Chinese sailors and it was here in 1924 when his luck finally ran out.

The police had already twice raided his Limehouse flat and although they found no drugs on one occasion they found two chorus girls in his bed. On the third attempt however, and armed with evidence from a drug addicted actress called Violet Payne, they found a wrap of cocaine behind a loose wooden board and they arrested the man who may have been controlling 40 per cent of the London cocaine trade.

During the trial, the press, again pruriently slavering, had a field day. The World Pictorial News wrote:

“Sometimes one girl alone went with Chang to learn the mysteries of that intoxicatingly beautiful den of iniquity above the restaurant. At other times half-a-dozen drug-frenzied women together joined him in wild orgies.”

As well as the cocaine the police found at Chang’s home a pile of identical handwritten letters:

Dear Unknown – Please do not regard this as a liberty that I write to you, as i am really unable to resist the temptation after having seen you so many times. I should extremely like to know you better, and should be glad if you would do me the honour of meeting me one evening where we could have a little dinner and a quiet chat together. I do hope you will consent to this, as it will give me great pleasure, and in any case do not be cross with me for having written to you.

Yours hopefully, Chang.

P.S. – If you reply, please address it to me at the Shanghai Restaurant, Limehouse-Causeway, E14.

Chang was sentenced to fourteen months in prison after which he was deported. His ship left from the Royal Albert Docks and it was reported that one girl shouted out as he was leaving ‘Come back soon, Chang!’.

The local council, maybe because of the’Yellow Peril’ nonsense exaggerated by the wild press reports, lurid novels and films, started to clear the slums in the Limehouse area. This started to break up the original London Chinatown and a few years later the Second World War practically finished the job as the area was razed to the ground by the wartime bombing.

The Chinatown we know today began not long after the war when a few restaurants opened in Lisle Street, the road that runs parallel to Gerrard Street where Brilliant Chang briefly ran his nightclub. The area was on the edge of Soho where foreign restaurants had long been the norm and the rents were cheap for a West End central location.

The funeral of Chong Mong Young in 1964

Macclesfield Street in 1972

The number of restaurants increased mainly because of returning servicemen who had discovered a taste for food from the far East. However, when in 1951 the UK government finally recognised Mao Zedong’s communist regime, the diplomats and staff of the now defunct Chinese Nationalist Embassy suddenly had to find new jobs. A lot of them, including the famous restauranteur and cookery writer Ken Lo choose to open Cantonese restaurants in the area we now know as Chinatown.

A lot of the information and inspiration for this post comes from the really excellent book Dope Girls by Marek Kohn.

George Formby – Chinese Laundry Blues

Django Reinhardt – Limehouse Blues

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

Emily Davison May 1913 - a month before she died

No one really knows whether the Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison deliberately killed herself underneath the galloping hooves of Anmer – the Kings horse – at the 1913 Derby. Some say it was just a brave protest that went tragically wrong, after all a return train ticket was found in her handbag, along with an invitation to a suffragette event that evening.

However, Davison always knew that it would be a grand, even an ultimate, gesture that would get The Cause properly noticed by the public. She would have undoubtedly been pleased that out of all the thousands of suffragette protests in the early part of the twentieth century, it is her tragic protest that is still remembered today.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH_r6-JpO9Q

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdz1ydrpfyI

The Epsom Derby has always been enjoyed as a day out by Londoners of all classes, but from when it was first run in 1780 it had traditionally been a royal event and indeed King George V and Queen Mary had both come to watch the race in 1913. The middle classes sat in the grandstands or even on top of omnibuses which made alternative makeshift stands in the middle part of the race-track. The centre of the track had always been a free part of the course to watch the Derby so it would have been here that the many working-class Londoners came to watch the race, smoking and drinking, and enjoying a rare day away from the grimy smoky city near by. Emily Davison would have walked through this crowd, when she made her way to the famous sharp bend in the course known as Tattenham Corner.

A Derby crowd in the 19th century

Davison waited for the race to start behind the barriers at the corner and when the first horses started to shoot by, she slipped under the rail. Clutching on to her furled Suffragette tricolour banner of purple, white and green she ran out on to the track and was said to have futilely tried to hold on to Anmer’s bridle. Screaming, the woman with the suffragette colours was smashed down by the horse and jockey wearing the King’s colours. The next day the Daily Mirror wrote:

The horse struck the woman with its chest, knocking her down among the flying hoofs . . . and she was desperately injured . . . Blood rushed from her mouth and nose. Anmer turned a complete somersault and fell upon his jockey, who was seriously injured.

Aboyeur, the eventual winner of the 1913 Derby

"Home James, and don't hold the horses" - King George V and a beggar at the Derby

Anmer at the stables

Four days after what the Daily Sketch described as; ‘History’s most wonderful Derby’, Emily Davison died of substantial internal injuries and a fractured skull. She never regained consciousness. By the side of the bed at Epsom Cottage Hospital was an unopened letter with ‘please give this to Emily’ written on the envelope. It was from her shocked and confused mother and Davison never read the words that said:

I cannot believe that you could have done such a dreadful act. Even for the Cause which I know you have given up your whole heart and soul to, and it has done so little in return for you. Now I can only hope and pray that God will mercifully restore you to life and health and that there may be a better and brighter future for you.

The jockey Herbert ‘Diamond’ Jones (so called because he had won the racing triple crown in 1900 when he rode the future King Edward VII’s ‘Diamond Jubilee’) was badly concussed and had his arm put in a sling. It was reported that he bravely shrugged off attempts to take him to the nearby hospital.

King George V wrote in his diary that “poor Herbert Jones and Anmer had been sent flying” on a “most disappointing day”. Queen Mary sent Jones a telegram wishing him well after his “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman”.

If Davison had survived the collision with the King’s horse, it would have probably meant another visit to Holloway Gaol – the infamous North London women’s prison. She had already been there, amongst other prisons, six or seven times in the previous four years. The director of Public Prosecutions, even while Emily Davison was unconscious in hospital, stated that “if Miss Davison recovers it will be possible to charge her with doing an act calculated to cause grievous bodily harm”. It’s important to note that attempting suicide was illegal at the time, as it would be until 1961.

Morning Post headline 5th June 1913

Herbert 'Diamond' Jones (right) - the King's jockey

Herbert Jones in 1910

Emily Davison was born in Blackheath in South East London in 1872. Successful at school she won a place at Holloway College to study literature although she had to leave when her widowed mother couldn’t afford the £20 term fees. After a stint of teaching she earned enough money to return to university education and eventually ‘graduated’ from St Hugh’s College Oxford, women only allowed honorary degrees at the time.

Davison joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906 – the organisation ran by Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters Christabel and Sylvia which had broken away from the older non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. That same year the journalist Charles E Hands writing in the Daily Mail patronisingly called the all-female members of the new WSPU – ‘Suffragettes’. However the newly coined word was reclaimed (much in the same way I suppose as derogatory words such as ‘queer’ or ‘nigger’ were reclaimed decades later) and taken up by the WSPU to separate themselves from the ‘more constitutional’ NUWSS who were still known as Suffragists.

Emily Wilding Davison was perhaps the most militant member of the militant WSPU and from when she joined until she died she was continually in and out of prison. She threw metal balls labelled ‘bomb’ through windows, set fire to post boxes, hid in Parliament three times (notably on Census night in 1911) and continually went on hunger strike. The suffragettes who ‘hunger struck’ were initially released early so as to avoid martyrdom but soon the authorities started force feeding to, in the end, disastrous publicity.

Suffragettes at Holloway prison

A suffragette at Holloway prison in 1913

In 1912, in protest to another bout of painful force-feeding, and which may be a clue to her actual plans on the fateful Derby day of 1913, she threw herself off a balcony at Holloway prison. She was saved from her suicide attempt by the netting three floors below. She later wrote;

“I did it deliberately, and with all my power, because I felt that by nothing but the sacrifice of human life would the nation be brought to realise the horrible torture our women face. If I had succeeded I am sure that forcible feeding could not in all conscience have been resorted to again”

It seems unlikely, therefore, that Davison only a year later was only attempting to get to the other side of the course when Anmer unavoidably thundered into her at the Epsom Derby.

The WSPU cleverly used Emily Wilding’s funeral as a spectacular publicity event knowing that it would be filmed by the relatively new, but extremely popular, news-reel cameras. On Saturday 14 June 1913, to the drumming of ten brass bands, 6,000 women marched through the streets of London with huge crowds watching from the sidelines, the younger suffragettes dressed in white while their elders dressed in a more traditional black. Bricks were reported to have been thrown at the coffin and the carriages behind the first of which contained Davison’s close family including her mother and Miss Morrison – ‘Miss Davison’s intimate companion’.

guarding Davison's coffin at Kings Cross station

funeral procession at Piccadilly Circus

Mrs Yates and Mary Lee guarding Emily Davison's coffin

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbjzs8v6qsg

Herbert Jones wearing the King's colours

‘Diamond’ Jones never properly recovered after he and his horse crashed into Davison during the 1913 Derby. He lost three of his brothers in the First World War and his career started to go downhill and he retired in 1923 after a pulmonary haemorrhage.

It’s not that well known that in 1928 when the former leader of the WSPU, and perhaps the most famous of all the suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst died, Herbert Jones travelled to London for the funeral. The wreath that he left said

To do honour to the memory of Mrs Pankhurst and Miss Emily Davison.

On 17 July 1951, Jones was found dead in a gas-filled kitchen by his 17 year old son. The coroner subsequently recorded a verdict of ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed’. The former jockey had once said that he was ‘haunted by that woman’s face’ all his life. It wasn’t just one suicide that was connected to the fateful collision at the Epsom Derby on that humid June day in 1913.

Less than a week before Emily Davison’s tragic death at the Derby, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The complex and modern music caused chaos in the audience which soon degenerated into a riot. At the interval the Parisian police had to intervene. It was the slight discordant notes behind the initial bassoon solo at the beginning of the piece that set off the violence.

Incidentally, due to more pressing matters such as musical notes being slightly out of tune, France didn’t get round to allowing women to vote until 1944. Rather late in the day you may think, but incredibly, women in Switzerland were only allowed to vote in 1971 and male voters had it all to themselves in Portugal until 1976 – although to be fair nobody, whatever their sex, had the easiest time voting in Portugal around that time.

Brilliant photoshop picture by monicenfungirl at flickr

Stravinsky – Rite of Spring

Donald Cammell’s film Performance, shot in the summer of 1968, was largely set in a large house in Notting Hill’s Powis Square. This was a part of Notting Hill, featuring large run-down peeling terraces and squares that, a decade earlier, Colin MacInnes in his London novel Absolute Beginners had called ‘Napoli’. It was also, at that time, that is the mid to late fifties, the main stomping ground of the notorious and disreputable landlord Peter Rachman.

The original white working class neighbourhood was having to uneasily mix with a burgeoning West Indian immigrant community which was increasing in size not least because Rachman was willing to house West Indians – albeit at his infamous price. Powis square was where Rachman bought his first major London property – a huge Victorian building – which he had subdivided to such a degree that approximately 1200 tenants eventually lived there.

81 Powis Square in 1968 (number 25 in the film)

The slightly more salubrious-looking property today

Notting Hill in the mid-fifties

By 1968 the down-at-heel ambience of the area had also attracted a further wave of inhabitants – hippies, who hung around the Portobello Road market and the nearby ‘head’ shops. In other words it was the perfect bohemian part of London in which Performance’s fictitious rock star Turner lived. Turner, of course, was played by Mick Jagger and the film, along with Nicholas Roeg, was directed by the rather dissolute and louche friend of the Rolling Stones Donald Cammell.

Jagger and Cammell 1968

Cammell was born on 17th January 1934 in the Outlook Tower by the side of Edinburgh Castle to rather bohemian parents – his father, after losing the family fortune in the thirties (his family was part of the Cammell-Laird shipbuilding firm), was an editor of Art magazines. They must have encouraged the artistic side of his nature because by the age of 8 he was exhibiting at the Royal Drawing Society and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy at the age of 16. Good looking, gifted and self-assured, Cammell became a sought after society portrait painter before he was 20. He owned a studio in Chelsea’s Flood Street and was already enjoying a hectic party-lifestyle which in effect continued for two or three more decades.

Cammell painting Bronwen Pugh in 1957

In 1954 he had married the Greek actress Maria Andipa and in 1959 they had a son Amadis. A few months previously he and Maria had moved from Chelsea to Hampstead, apparently to be close to the actress Jill Ireland who was living there at the time and with whom Cammell was having an affair. One day soon after the move Maria returned from the doctor with what she thought was happy news that she was having a baby. Cammell completely crushed Maria by saying “I love you, and want to share my life with you, but I don’t want to share it with a child.” True to his word he left almost immediately for New York and cruelly would only see his son twice during the rest of his life.

Cammell's first wife Maria Andipa and son Amadis

It was in New York where Cammell met and lived with the model Deborah Dixon – he was to be with her for ten years and their relationship finished just before the filming of Performance, although she was a costume designer on the film. He had by now rejected painting society portraits and was now concentrating on work that had a Balthusian lolita-inspired influence (ie lots of young naked girls). While this helped him sate his notable sexual appetite (for much of his life he was irresistible to a good deal of the female sex and Dixon was seemingly happy with this and often shared his conquests) his artistic desires, at least in the form of painting, were waning.

Donald Cammell and his beautiful wife - the model Deborah Dixon

Deborah Dixon 1964

Deborah Dixon 1962

He moved to Paris with Deborah where she continued to model and where he began to try his hand at writing screenplays. She was now a very successful international model and essentially Cammell lived off her money for some years. During this time he collaborated on a script which was eventually made into a bad thriller called The Touchables and subsequently another script which was turned into a very sixties caper movie in 1968 called Duffy (originally called Avec Avec) which starred Susannah York, James Fox and James Coburn. Although Duffy was a better film than The Touchables it was still very flawed and again unsuccessful at the box office and this encouraged Cammell to try and direct the next film himself.

Susannah York during the filming of Duffy

Monika Ringwald, Esther Anderson, Judy Huxtable and Kathy Simmonds - on the film poster it said 'they try anything'.

Fox and Cammell on set at Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge where the interiors of the film were shot.

Filming started on Performance in July 1968, a few weeks after the death of Cammell’s father, and the production was later called by Marianne Faithful a ‘psycho-sexual lab’ and ‘a seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, incestuous sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together into a bitch’s brew’.

The old Harrovian and ex-Coldstream Guard officer James Fox was chosen to play Chas – a professional criminal on the run from his gangland boss Harry Flowers. Fox had recently grown his hair and become a bit of a hippy and had also become a close friend of Mick Jagger’s (for a short while Fox, Jagger, Faithfull and Fox’s partner Andee Cohen were essentially living a menage a quatre and Cammell later even hinted that Fox and Jagger had been lovers). Looking for a hiding place Chas finds himself at the dilapidated Powis Square house of the fading rock star Turner (played by Jagger). Chas announces soon after his arrival – “What a freak show! Druggies, beatniks, free love… a right piss-hole.” Living in the house with Turner were his two girlfriends Pherber, played by Anita Pallenberg then Keith Richards’ girlfriend, and Lucy, played by the 16 year old French waif Michele Breton.

After some sexually-ambiguous explorations with Turner, Pherber and Lucy in addition to a particularly huge mushroom trip Fox/Chas starts to feel more comfortable with staying at the rambling Powis Square house eventually undergoing a personality change and a metamorphis into the Jagger/Turner character. At the beginning of the film Chas says ‘I know who I am!’ by the end of the movie it’s certain that he doesn’t.

Cammell managed within the film, and to the chagrin of Pallenberg who realised what he was doing, to recreate a menage a trois that had existed between himself, Deborah Dixon and Michele Breton the preceding year. The trio were often seen together in Paris in 1967 but Cammell and Dixon had initially met Breton on the beach in St Tropez in 1966 when she must have been 14 or just 15. Sandy Lieberson, the producer of Performance, described Breton as ‘someone who didn’t care who she slept with. A strange little creature, totally androgynous-looking – the way Donald liked them.’ ‘Everybody was sleeping with everybody’, Breton later remembered, ‘it was those times’.

Indeed the production became infamous for its sex on and off the camera – one person working on the production described it as ‘the most sexually charged film ever. Everyone was fucking everyone. And Donald was a class-A voyeur.’ To confuse everything Pallenberg had also been a former lover of Cammell’s and during the filming of Performance she admitted that she, Jagger and Breton had actually consummated the threesome sex scene in the film. The more graphic footage of which found its way to an erotic film festival in Amsterdam a few years later apparently winning a prize. Keith Richards who never appeared on set but through mutual acquaintances knew something was going on between his girlfriend and his best friend and was often seen during the production fuming in his Rolls-Royce outside or the in the pub down the road. Overlooking all this one imagines a joyous Donald Cammell rubbing his hands in glee.

Michele Breton and Mick Jagger

Pallenberg and Jagger

Jagger, Breton and Pallenberg

Frames from footage shot by Anita and which appeared in the magazine OZ

Cammell was not particularly partial to drugs, although he smoked hash occasionally and had tried the odd LSD trip, but perhaps Performance was the first film that portrayed drug-taking that was also made by people who took drugs as a normal lifestyle choice. The drug-taking that went on during the filming of Performance was legendary. The art director John Clark said ‘you took one breath and you were stoned’ and a crew member on the production said ‘you want to get a fucking joint, they’re coming out of your earholes. You want a cup of tea, you’ve got no fuckin’ chance!’

Cocaine, yet to be the rock star’s drug of choice, wasn’t mentioned within the film but the characters all smoked hashish, took mushrooms (when Chas first arrives at Powis Square there is a shot of the mushrooms growing in a tray by the front door along with a couple of mars bars wittily referring to the Redlands’ drug bust the year before) and we also see heroin being injected, as a ‘vitamin shot’, by Anita Pallenberg.

Anita and Mick on set

Turner tells Chas at one point in the film “The only performance that makes it… that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” And the drugs and the psychotic atmosphere on the set seemingly took its toll on the main performers. A year after the completion of filming James Fox, while performing in Doctor in the House in Blackpool was persuaded to join a religious movement called the Navigators and left acting for ten years to become a Christian evangelist.

Anita Pallenberg started taking heroin seriously during the filming and subsequently became heavily addicted to the drug. She said ‘I think Performance was the end of the beautiful sixties – love and all that. That film marked the end for me.’ She continued to be a heavy user of heroin for ten years and eventually split from Richards at the end of the seventies.

Not a lot was known about Michele Breton especially after the film had finished. Cammell later said that she had smoked too much hash and was frequently under the influence of psychedelics. Breton herself said in 1995 ‘I was taking everything that was going. I was in a very bad shape, all fucked up.’ Soon after the completion of the movie Cammell eventually drove her to Paris letting her stay at his flat for a couple of days he then told her that he didn’t want to see her again.

Mick Jagger, perhaps alone amongst the main protagonists, came out of the experience mentally intact. According to Marianne Faithful, who helped him gain enough courage to act in the film, ‘Mick came out of it splendidly…he didn’t have a drug problem and he didn’t have a nervous breakdown.’ It could be said that the Turner became the character that Jagger used to present himself to the world – androgynous, decadent and sinister.

Donald Cammell’s subsequent directing career after Performance never really took off. The major film studios avoided him from the first screening of the film which couldn’t have gone more badly. One Warner studio executive wife literally vomited on her husband’s shoes while another executive after watching the film said ‘Even the bathwater’s dirty.’ The film was only released, almost two years after its completion, in 1970.

Joan Chen and Anne Heche in Wild Side

Cammell completed just three films in the next 25 years, Demon Seed with Julie Christie in 1975, White of the Eye in 1987 and Wild Side in 1995. The studio behind his last film refused to release Cammell’s version and released an exploitative cut to Cable TV.

A year later Cammell, after a life time suffering from bouts of depression, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The myth is that Cammell aimed his bullet in such a way that he would be able to experience for several minutes what it was like to die. However according to the coroner he died pretty well instantly.

Keith Richards, who never forgave Cammell for letting Pallenberg and Jagger fuck on camera, once said of Performance ‘The best work Cammell ever did, except for shooting himself’.

Mick Jagger – Memo From Turner

DVD of Performance can be bought here and the soundtrack of the film from here.

“What have I done, my dear! What have I done!”

Marguerite Fahmy

The two court cases were over seventy years apart and the LA suburb of Brentwood is a long way from the relative sophistication of London’s Savoy Hotel in the 1920s but when OJ Simpson was infamously acquitted in 1995, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the shocked reaction around the world would not have been dissimilar to when Marguerite Fahmy was sensationally found ‘not guilty’ of the internationally reported murder of her Egyptian playboy husband at the hotel in 1923.

The Savoy Hotel in 1923

The Savoy Hotel had opened in 1889, and had been no stranger to scandal – it was at Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial where it came to light that he had entertained a succession of rent-boys at the hotel’s room 361. After Wilde had been arrested for gross indecency the presiding magistrate said “I know nothing about the Savoy, but I must say that in my view chicken and salad for two at sixteen shillings is very high. I am afraid I shall never supper there myself.”

However it was still the place to stay for celebrities and royalty visiting London. In 1923 the hotel was still seen as one of the finest in the world and in that year, amongst others, Walter Hagen, Fred and Adele Astaire and the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini (as in chicken) had all stayed there.

Walter Hagen on the roof of the Savoy

Fred and Adele Astaire

A typical dismal drizzly April in London that year had only been brightened by the wedding of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York, Prince Albert – known as ‘Bertie’ to his family and close friends. The house band at the Savoy Hotel – The Savoy Havana Band – made its debut on the BBC on 13th April 1923, not least because the BBC at the time was next door and shared its generator with the hotel.

A few weeks later on the morning of Sunday 1 July 1923 a limousine drove into Savoy Court and the Hotel doorman helped out a couple who were known to the hotel as the Prince and Princess Fahmy. They were accompanied by the Prince’s private secretary, Mr Said Enani. Accurately Prince Fahmy wasn’t really a prince but he did little to discourage the use of the title when away from Egypt.

Savoy Court – the only road in Britain where drivers are required to drive on the right.

The 22 year Egyptian had met his bride to be, a woman ten years his senior, in Paris the year before -incidentally the year that Egypt was granted independence, if not overall control, by the British Government. To many people Marguerite was seen, at best, as a flirtatious gold-digger and more in love with his not inconsiderable fortune than the man himself. They had married in Egypt, first by a civil ceremony on 26th December and then followed by a Muslim wedding in January 1923 where Madame Fahmy, modestly veiled, proclaimed in Arabic ‘There is one God and Mohammed is His Prophet’.

Mr and Mrs Fahmy in Egypt

After a few days in London, which was experiencing a heatwave, Marguerite Fahmy summoned the Savoy’s doctor – she was suffering badly from external haemorrhoids. She alleged to Dr Gordon, while he was treating her, that her husband had ‘torn her by unnatural intercourse’ and was ‘always pestering her’ for this kind of sex. Already thinking about possible future divorce proceedings she repeatedly asked the doctor for ‘a certificate as to her physical condition to negative the suggestion of her husband that she had made up a story’. The doctor, although respectful, ignored her request.

On the 9th July the couple went to Daly’s Theatre on Cranbourne Street off Leicester Square (where the Vue West End cinema now stands) to see, with hindsight the darkly ironic ‘The Merry Widow’. It had been an incredibly hot day and you can only imagine how uncomfortably warm the theatre must have been in those pre-air-conditioned days (although as far as a lot of the West End is concerned we’re still in those days). Not the ideal conditions for someone suffering from piles I would imagine. The main performers in Lehar’s popular operetta were the 22 year old Evelyn Laye and the Danish matinee idol Carl Brisson.

Carl Brisson

The beautiful Evelyn Laye

Daly's Theatre

The couple returned to the Savoy after the theatre for a late supper, however the meal was disrupted by a huge argument which had recently become almost a daily occurrence. Ali had even appeared in public with scratches on his face and Marguerite had been seen with dark bruises on her face ill-disguised with powder and makeup. The row this time degenerated to such an extent that Marguerite picked up a wine bottle and shouted in French ‘You shut up or I’ll smash this over your head.’ Ali replied ‘If you do, I’ll do the same to you.’ They eventually calmed down, not without the help of the head-waiter, and went to the ballroom to listen to the Savoy Havana Band. The house band no doubt would have been playing at one point Yes, We Have No Bananas or perhaps Ain’t We Got Fun both big hits that year. It wasn’t long before Marguerite, after refusing the offer of a dance with her husband, retired to her room.

Mr Said Enani, as a witness in court a few weeks later, said that Mr Fahmy, in full evening dress, had decided to take a cab in the direction of Piccadilly even though the hot balmy weather had now turned into one of the worse thunderstorms in living memory. When asked the reason why he went, he said he did not know. Although we can perhaps presume that Ali was either visiting an unlicensed nightclub or on the search for either a male or female prostitute both of which frequented the area in high numbers around that part of the West End.

At around 2.00am the hotel’s night porter passed the door to the Fahmy’s suite but heard a low whistle and looking back saw Ali Fahmy bending down apparently whistling for Marguerite’s little dog that had been following the night porter down the corridor. After continuing on his way for just three yards he suddenly heard three shots fired in quick succession.

He ran back and saw Marguerite throw down a black handgun and also saw Ali slumped against the wall bleeding profusely from a wound on his temple from which splinger of bone and brain tissue protruded. ‘Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, mon cher?’ (what have I done, my dear?’) Marguerite kept saying over and over again.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall - The Great Defender

Marshall Hall was almost 65 at the time of Marguerite’s trial and was a household name. He was six feet three, handsome for his age, and a commanding presence in the courtroom. He was commonly known, after being responsible for several famous acquittals, as ‘The Great Defender’. Marshall Hall’s final speech to the jury in defence of Marguerite, or Madame Fahmy as the press were now calling her, slowly became a character assassination of her dead husband. he portrayed him as a monster of Eastern amoral bisexual depravity. (Not too) subtly Hall accused both Prince Fahmy and his private secretary of being homosexuals.

Ali Fahmy

The public gallery consisted of many young women some of whom were noted to be barely eighteen. Marshall Hall looked up to the gallery saying ‘if women choose to come here to hear this case, they must take the consequences’. None of them left. Meanwhile he turned the attack on Ali to sodomy. Fahmy, said Hall, ‘developed abnormal tendencies and he never treated Madame normally’ Asking them to disregard the fact that the victim was younger than his wife. ‘Yes, he was only 23 years old,’ he told them. ‘But he was given to a life of debauchery and was obsessed with his sexual prowess.’ He went on to remind them that, as an Oriental man, his wife to him was no more than a belonging and that however much he may have acquired the outward signs of urbanity and sophistication, he was forever an Oriental under the skin.

When Marguerite took the stand, she was encouraged by the Great Defender to describe her life as a Muslim bride and to a lot of observers this was when the case turned her way. She testified at one point how she had been sitting ‘in a state of undress in which her modesty would have forbidden her facing even her maid’, she had noticed a strange noise and she pulled aside the hangings that screened an alcove and ‘saw crouching there, where he could see every move she made, one of her husband’s numerous ugly, black, half-civilized manservants, who obeyed like slaves his every word’. She screamed for help, but when her husband, appeared from an adjoining room he only, laughed, saying that “He is nobody. He does not count. But he has the right to come here or anywhere you may go and tell me what you are doing.”

It was like a scene from Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, the extraordinarily popular film released the year before, and the women in the gallery were treating it as such.

Before he summed up, the judge, referring to the public gallery said, ‘These things are horrible; they are disgusting. How anyone could listen to these things who is not bound to listen to them passes comprehension.’ However he had been swayed by Marshall Hall’s defence, that pandered to the prejudices of the tie, and during the summing up endorsed Marshall Hall by saying ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt they have not the same views…’

The jury, after less than an hour’s consideration, announced ‘not guilty’ to both the charges of murder and of manslaughter, and Madame Fahmy was discharged and was now a free woman.

The prosecution was refused by the judge, seemingly in awe as much as anyone else to the Great Defender, to cross-examine Marguerite ‘as to whether or not she had lived an immoral life’, to show that she was ‘a woman of the world, well able to look after herself’.

If she had been cross-examined properly the jury would have found out that not only had Marguerite been a teenage common prostitute in Bordeaux and in Paris and had an illegitimate daughter when she was just fifteen, but she had also become a trained high-class courtesan (it was said that she always spoke in a rather stilted French because of elocution lessons). Not only that but Marguerite’s husband was not alone in having inclinations towards the same sex: it was found out by a private detective hired by the prosecution that it was well known in Paris that Madame Fahmy “is addicted, or was addicted, to committing certain offences with other women and it would seem that there is nothing that goes on in such surroundings as she has been moving in Paris that she would not be quite well acquainted with…”

The world’s press reported the case with undisguised glee, mostly portraying Mardame Fahmy as less than innocent in more ways than one. The French newspapers concentrated on the fact that the jury considered the case as if a crime passionnel defence was allowed in English law.

Marguerite Fahmy after the trial

After the verdict Marguerite soon left for Paris where she found out that she had no claim to her late husband’s fortune as he had left no will. After a failed, and slightly ludicrous plot where she pretended that she had been pregnant and subsequently borne a son (who would have been entitled to his father’s fortune). She was now almost a laughing stock in Parisian society and became relatively a recluse. She died on 2 January 1971 in Paris. She never remarried.

A big debt to this post is Andrew Rose’s excellent book about the notorious murder entitled Scandal at the Savoy originally published in 1991. The author has copies still available and can be contacted at andrewroseauthor@googlemail.com.

Billy Jones – Yes, We Have No Bananas!

The Savoy Havana Band – I’m Gonna Bring My Girl a Watermelon Tonight

Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Bessie Smith – Sugarfoot Stomp (Dippermouth Blues)

Jeanette MacDonald – Merry Widow Waltz

Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra – Happy Feet

Erik Satie – Gnossiennes No. 1

Benson Orchestra of Chicago – Ain’t We Got Fun

Mama Cass Elliot famously died choking on a ham sandwich, everybody knows that. Except she didn’t. The myth started because the first doctor who examined her after her death, a Dr Anthony Greenburgh, told the press the next day:

“From what I saw when I got to the flat she appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do…she seemed to have choked on a ham sandwich”.

Dr Greenbugh overlooked the rather important fact that the sandwich was by the side of her bed and lay untouched but by then it was too late. The press reported his initial comments and the doctor unwittingly gave rise to the sandwich myth.

Elliot actually died from the far more prosaic “fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity” in other words natural causes due to being overweight – she was prone to going on crash diets which in the end fatally weakened her heart. The sandwich story was a famous case of when “the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

Mama Cass in Soho Square

Mama Cass at Crockford's Casino, round the corner from Nilsson's flat in Mayfair

On 29 July 1974 Cass Elliot had just finished two nights at the Palladium and was pleased with the several standing ovations she had received. Before she went to bed she called her former band member Michelle Phillips who later recounted:

“She had had a little champagne, and was crying. She felt she had finally made the transition from Mama Cass”.

Cass Elliot was just 33 when she died.

9 Curzon Place in Mayfair (now 1 Curzon Square)

The small one-bedroom Mayfair flat at 12 Curzon Place (now 1 Curzon Square after some rather revolting 1980s redevelopment in the area) in which Cass Elliot died belonged to her friend the singer Harry Nilsson. He had bought it impressed with the location, it was near Apple Records (he was a good friend of The Beatles) but more importantly near the Playboy Club and Tramps disco.

The top floor flat, behind the relatively nondescript exterior, had been designed by a trendy company called ROR which was run by Nilsson’s friend Ringo Starr and the designer Robin Cruikshank. Nilsson was away from London a lot and was very happy lending his place to his musician friends, of which he had many.

Robin Cruikshank interior

Playboy Club in London 1969

Hugh Hefner at London's Playboy Club in Park Lane

Keith Moon with Annette Walter Lax 1977

Keith and Annette the evening he died

Incredibly just four years after Cass Elliot died at Harry Nilsson’s flat, Keith Moon, after fitting in enough partying and convivial nights in his short life for about a hundred people, died of an overdose of Heminevrin tablets in the very same bed. On the day he died Moon had woken at 7.30am and he asked his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax to cook him a steak.

After she complained about cooking him another meal he said,

“If you don’t like it, you can fuck off”

Unfortunately for Keith these ended up being his last words. He ate the steak while he watched the film The Abominable Dr Phibes but he fell back to sleep after taking 32 Heminevrin tablets which were prescribed to help alcohol withdrawal. Unfortunately six are enough to be fatal and Moon never regained consciousness. He was found dead by his girlfriend Annette later that afternoon and he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium a week later.

Moon the Loon was only thirty two when he died, but dying young didn’t come to anyone’s great surprise – he was one of the greatest partiers ever. He once outlined his typical daily diet to a doctor:

“I always get up about six in the morning. I have my bangers and eggs. And I drink a bottle of Dom Perignon and half a bottle of brandy. Then I take a couple of downers. Then it’s about 10 and I’ll have a nice nap until five. I get up, have a couple of black beauties [also known as Black Birds or Black Bombers and are a combination of Amphetamine (Speed) and Dextroamphetamine], some brandy, a little champagne and go out on the town. Then we boogie. We’ll wrap it up about four”.

All in all not the usual recipe for a long and healthy life but he sure fitted in some fun while he was around.

Carousing

more carousing

Mama's Got A Squeeze box

Harry and Keith became friends in the first place because of their mutual love of the booze. They met on a set of a film produced by Ringo Starr called Son Of Dracula with a number of other musicians. Keith remembered:

“We were supposed to be on the set at six, but it was nine before everyone was there. Then somebody brought out a bottle of brandy. Me, I think. Ah-Ha-Ha-HAHAHA! And Peter Frampton said no, no, too early, and some of the others said no. But ‘Arry was standing there with an ‘alf-pint mug. I knew at that moment it was destiny put us together. Ahhhh-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

After the death of a second friend in his bed Nilsson quickly sold his flat to fellow Who member Pete Townsend and moved back to Los Angeles permanently. Of course like Cass, and especially Moon, Harry Nilsson liked having a good time and his consumption of drink and drugs were once described as Herculean, which is one way of describing pissing your talent away for over twenty years.

Marianne Faithfull once said about Harry

“we used to do drugs together. And when I say drugs, I don’t mean those airy-fairy drugs they do nowadays. I’m talking about narcotics.”

Elton John once described seeing Nilsson in a recording studio,

‘He opened his mouth to sing, and blood poured out, he had done so much coke that his throat just haemorrhaged. And do you know what? He didn’t even notice.’

Compared with his two friends however, he managed to live to a relatively grand old age of fifty two before his body gave up. After surviving one the previous year he died of a second heart attack in 1994. At his funeral it was said that aftershocks from the recent Northridge Earthquake rumbled in the background. A joke made the rounds during the funeral that the earthquake was the result of Harry getting to Heaven and discovering that there were no bars.

It’s perhaps interesting to note that Mama Cass, a person it would be fair to say liked a bit of food, died from trying not to eat with a heart fatally weakened by too many diets. Coincidentally Keith Moon, a man with a prodigious appetite for booze, died from an overdose of medicine prescribed in an attempt to stop him drinking.

I’m not sure if Nilsson died from anything that was the opposite of what he liked to do, but not long before his first heartattack he found out that his entire $5 million fortune had been embezzled leaving him and his family almost destitute.

It was said that he never really recovered from the shock. In 2001 the building at Curzon Place containing Harry Nilsson’s old flat was bought by a developer who completely changed the interior and the three flats on Harry’s floor were knocked into two luxury flats. In 2002 these were placed up for sale at one million pounds each.

Nilsson the year before he died

More information of the three deaths at www.findadeath.com

More information about Harry Nilsson at fortheloveofharry.blogspot.com

Harry Nilsson – Lazy Moon
Dr Hook – Mama’s Got A Squeezebox
The Mama and The Papas – 12.30 (Young Girls Are Coming To The Canyon)
Badfinger – Without You
Harry Nilsson – Wasting My Time
Ella and Louis – Dream A Little Dream About Me
Peter and the Test Tube Babies – Spirit Of Keith Moon
Mama Cass – Make Your Own Kind Of Music
Harry Nilsson – Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear
Harry Nilsson – Jumping Into The Fire