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

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

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

Mr Britt was going to give us a Salome dance!

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

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

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

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

Police Sergeant Arthur Spencer wrote:

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

Police Constable Gavin contributed to the report:

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

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

Fitzroy Square in the 1920s

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

Fred and Adele Astaire in Lady Be Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred and Adele - vaudeville dancers in 1915

Fred and Adele

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

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

The future Lady Charles Cavendish

The Empire Theatre around the turn of the century

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

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

Jack. Oh no! I loathe listening.

Algernon. Well, let us go to the Club?

Jack. Oh, no! I hate talking

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

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

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

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

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

The Indomitable Mrs Ormiston Chant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Empire Theatre in 1896

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

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

Oscar Wilde in 1895

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

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

The last photograph of Oscar Wilde in 1900

Bobby Britt, 1927 naked above his loins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 Fitzroy Square today.

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

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

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

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

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48tmnqg5bc

Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth – Oh Lady Be Good!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmhnb34XAcc

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

Eric Morley, the creator of Miss World, noting down some important vital statistics.

There were two separate protests at the Royal Albert Hall on 20 November 1970. One of them, the iconic flour-bomb demonstration directed at the Miss World contest by a group of young feminists, has become part of popular social history. The second, a potentially more serious event (something similar would certainly be taken as such today), has almost been completely forgotten.

At around 2.30am, on the morning of the Miss World contest, a group of about four or five young people had gathered around one of the BBC’s outside broadcast lorries that had been parked at the side of the Royal Albert Hall. They slid a home-made bomb under one lorry and ran off quickly down Kensington Gore in the direction of Notting Hill. A small amount of TNT, wrapped in a copy of The Times, exploded a few minutes later waking up residents in a nearby block of flats, one of whom saw the youths running away.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zse1_l6SA8s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejV2BQpkd8g

The small explosion was mentioned in the press the following day but it didn’t compare to the huge publicity the women’s liberation demonstration garnered, not least because of the unbelievable popularity of Miss World at the time. The 1970 contest, in the UK alone, had almost 24 million viewers – the highest rated television programme that year.

It was in the middle of the contest when about fifty women and a few men started throwing flour bombs, stink bombs, ink bombs and leaflets at the stage wile yelling “we are liberationists!”, “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry” and “ban this disgraceful cattle market!”. The whole world took notice.

We're Angry, Very Angry

Protestors outside the Royal Albert Hall, 20th November 1970

The protest inside the Albert Hall

"Resignation is only abdication and flight, there is no other way out for women than to work for her liberation."

Bob Hope, who was to crown Miss World and was performing when the protest started, certainly noticed and he quickly tried to flee the stage as the missiles flew by. He was hampered by Julia Morley, the wife of the organiser Eric Morley, who grabbed hold of his ankle in a desperate attempt to stop him leaving. It only took a few minutes for the police to restore order but the women’s movement had in one fell swoop established itself as part of the seventies.

Meanwhile a clearly shocked Hope was persuaded by Morley to get back on stage where, for once, not reading from idiot boards, he said:

These things can’t go on much longer. They’re going to have to get paid off sooner or later. Someone upstairs will see to that. Anybody who wants to interrupt something as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope.

The Sun, which the day before had stated ‘we’re in for a long, hard winter’ because the ‘lovely Miss World girls have abandoned the mini-skirt for the midi’, rejected the ‘cattle market’ comparisons wittily declaring ‘If you can’t stand the cheesecake, stay out of the market.’ The Daily Mirror, not wishing to be accused of comparing women with cattle, wrote ‘you couldn’t ask for a field of shapelier fillies than those coming under starter’s orders tonight for the grand Miss World stakes.’ The Mail described the demonstrators as ‘Yelling Harpies’ and asked what was ‘degrading about celebrating the beauty of the human body?’

www.youtube.com/watch?v=reCX3_OAkv8

The world’s most famous beauty contest had started just twenty years previously in 1951 when an ex-squadron leader called Phipps was in charge of publicity for the upcoming Festival of Britain. He rang a former RAF friend, who was now running a catering and dancehall company called Mecca, asking for ways to add some “razzamatazz” to the rather sedate festival plans. He was quickly told “My man Morley will come up with something”.

A few days later, over lunch at the Savoy, Eric Morley, who was already responsible for coming up with ‘Come Dancing’ for the BBC in 1949 and went on to popularise Bingo, suggested a ‘Miss World Festival Bikini Girl contest’. It went ahead and become a huge hit – a Swedish woman called Kiki Hakansson won the first prize of £1000.

When Miss Universe was launched in America the following year Morley successfully persuaded Mecca to make Miss World an annual event. The only change being that bikinis were to be banned, a strange decision by Morley, as a year previously he had said “Even a girl with big hips can be made to look good in a bikini.” He was later to describe the kind of girls he was looking for:

Girls between 17 and 25, ideally five foot seven, eight or nine stone, waist 22-24″, hips 35-36″, no more no less, a lovely face, good teeth, plenty of hair, and perfectly shaped legs from front and back – carefully checked for such defects as slightly knocked knees.

The first Miss World at the Empire Rooms on Tottenham Court Road, 1951

Eric Morley helping with a jammed zipper in 1955

Eric Morley checking no contestants had big hips in 1955

Twenty years later in 1970 the Miss World bomb, as far as the perpetrators were concerned, had been a success although it was overshadowed by the feminist ‘cattle market’ protests. However it was just the latest incident in an anti-establishment bombing and shooting campaign in the UK by an as yet-un-named loose group of anarchists. They had been in existence, in one form or another, since 3 March 1968 when two bombs exploded at the Spanish Embassy in Belgrave Square and the American Officers Club in Lancaster Gate. However the bombing campaign reached another level when a bomb that was left outside the house of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron on 30 August 1970. He was sent a letter signed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

The letter sent to the Police Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron

Just ten days later another bomb exploded at the London home of the Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson in Chelsea. Another ‘communique’ was released obviously from the same source as the commissioner’s bomb but this time signed by The Wild Bunch. The young anarchists that were responsible for the bombings were utterly confused with the lack of publicity so far. They assumed, almost certainly correctly, that there was a conspiracy of silence on behalf of the establishment in case urban guerilla activity became fashionable.

On 4 December 1970, just two weeks after the Miss World bomb, a car drove around Belgrave Square and machine-gunned the Spanish Embassy. The young student militants again found there was nothing in the papers after the attack and still suspecting an establishment conspiracy they decided to issue more Communiques to the underground press and for the first time they were signed ‘The Angry Brigade’.

The International Times December 1970, does anyone know what the 'Dramatic Half-Face' graphic means?

The name was thought up after a drunken Christmas party and may have came from the ‘We Are Angry’ placards at the Miss World protest. Although Stuart Christie, an anarchist and connected with The Angry Brigade, later wrote that they had toyed with the name ‘The Red Rankers’ in deference to the speech defect of the former Home Secretary ‘Woy’ Jenkins.

Members of the Angry Brigade 1970

So far the relatively unreported bombing campaign had utterly mystified the police. They were completely confused as to who the perpetrators were but they successfully managed to keep the bombs and the shootings relatively under-reported (the Miss World bomb was an exception). The situation immediately changed when on January 12 1971 a bomb exploded at the home of the Right Honourable Robert Carr, Secretary of State for Employment (and chief advocate of the hated (by many) anti-union Industrial Relations Bill). The Angry Brigade released another of their communiques stamped with the distinctive children’s John Bull printing set, and, with this particular incident too serious to be brushed under the establishment’s carpet, the Angry Brigade suddenly found that they had reached the nation’s consciousness.

The aftermath of the Angry Brigade's bomb that exploded at the home of Employment Minister Robert Carr on 12th January 1971

The Python-esque name chosen by the disparate group of anarchists was grabbed gleefully by the popular press, America had the Weather Men, Italy the Red Brigades, Japan the Red Army Fraction, Germany the Baader-Meinhof gang but in the UK they had the Angry Brigade. The newly monikered urban terrorists managed six more bombs including an explosion on May 1 1971 inside the fashionable swinging London boutique Biba in Kensington Street which the ‘Angries’ saw as exploiting sweatshop labour. They quickly released Communique 8:

`If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying’.
All the sales girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up, representing the 1940′s. In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards — they’ve nowhere to go — they’re dead.
The future is ours.
Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt.
Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires?
Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN. The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses — called boutiques — IS WRECK THEM. You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.
Revolution.
Communique 8 The Angry Brigade

Miss Selfridge girls dressed and made up the same and no doubt contemplating that capitalism can only go backwards.

A few months after the Biba bombing the police raided a house at one end of Amhurst Road in Stoke Newington where they found various explosives, ammunition and guns but most damning of all a John Bull printing kit with the words ‘Angry Brigade’ , rather incriminatingly, still set out. The police soon arrested eight supposed members of the Brigade and they quickly became known, rather imaginatively by the press, as the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’.

The Bomb Squad, Commander Robert Huntley, Commander Ernest Bond, Detective Inspector George Mould and Detective Constable Ron Smith

The Angry Brigade’s campaign came to a definite end after the longest criminal trial in English history (it lasted from May 30 to December 6 1972) – they were accused of carrying out 25 attacks on government buildings, embassies, corporations and the homes of Ministers between 1967 and 1971. At the end of the trial a majority verdict of guilty for conspiracy ‘with persons unknown’ meant that four of the defendants, John Barker, Jim Greenfield, Hilary Creek and Anna Mendleson each received prison sentences of ten years despite the jury’s request for clemency. It was difficult for the jury to deliver anything but guilty verdicts after the judge Mr Justice James explained that active participation was irrelevant; mere knowledge, even “by a wink or a nod”, was sufficient proof of guilt. He went on to describe the Angry Brigade politics as ‘a warped understanding of sociology’.

Hilary Creek in 1971

Anna Mendolson

Other defendants, however, were found not guilty including Stuart Christie, who had formerly been imprisoned in Spain for carrying explosives with the intent to assassinate the dictator Franco, and Angela Mason, who went on to become the director of Stonewall and the Government’s Women and Equality Unit and who was awarded an OBE in 1999.

Time Out magazine in 1972. A lot of people were, well angry, after the guilty verdicts at the Angry Brigade trial

All the contestants of the 1970 Miss World pageant

Receiving a $1200 tiara and $6000 in cash for her troubles, it was the 22 year old Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hosten, who eventually became Miss World and the first black winner of the contest in 1970. In fact it another black contestant – Miss Africa South, a Pearl Gladys Jensen – came second.

Miss Africa South isn’t a typo by the way, that year Eric Morley, hoping to placate the growing disquiet about apartheid South Africa, decided he would admit to the contest a black and a white contestant from the country. Jillian Elizabeth Jessup, the white South African, and who was allowed the sash with the real name of her country, came fifth.

Miss Africa South and Miss South Africa 1970

Jennifer Hosten

I was wrong when I said there was two separate protests at the Royal Albert Hall forty years ago. There was also a third, but this time it wasn’t about the exploitation of women but a collective disapproval of the result. After the Miss World contest had come to an end many of the audience gathered outside the Royal Albert Hall to protest and started chanting ‘Swe-den, Swe-den’. The BBC also received numerous protests with accusations that the contest had been rigged.

Four of the judges, it later came to light, had given first place to the Swedish entrant, a twenty year old model called Maj Christel Johansson, although, rather oddly, she came only fourth overall. However Miss Grenada, the eventual victor, only got two first place votes from the judges. Was it more than a coincidence that one of the judges, a Sir Eric Gairy, was the premier of Grenada? Had he influenced the other judges who incidentally included Joan Collins and Glen Campbell?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhf5CQY87Js

The judges of Miss World 1970 including Sir Eric Gairy.

I wonder if Maj ever got to meet Agatha Christie? I suspect not.

Miss Sweden, who was the favourite to win before the contest, probably didn’t help her cause when two days earlier she had denounced the Miss World event saying that she would have walked out if she wasn’t under contract to the organisers:

I don’t even want to win. I was warned the contest was like a cattle market and I’m inclined to agree. I feel just like a puppet.

Jennifer Hosten was far better at toeing the Miss World party line:

I do not really know enough about what they were demonstrating against, all I know is that it has been a wonderful experience competing for the Miss World title.

Julia Morley in the early seventies

Four days after the contest, Julia Morley, although insisting that no vote-rigging had occurred, resigned from her post as organising director of Miss World after intense pressure from the British press. Luckily her husband ran the Miss World organisation and, after the fuss had died down, she was reinstated a few days later.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms_tg9CKsC0

If all this anarchist and feminist politics is a bit much. Here’s Lionel Blair and his dancers opening the Miss World show at the Royal Albert Hall 20th November 1970, without a protest in sight; although almost certainly there should have been.

Finally, in case you want to know, Jennifer Hosten’s vital statistics were 36-24-38, which meant that her hips were two inches larger than Eric Morley’s ideal Miss World shape. He probably wished she was wearing a bikini.

Because they have been largely forgotten this Angry Brigade chronology is absolutely extraordinary.

Marie Lloyd at home in 1921, a year before she died.

There is a strange, but rather brilliant documentary, directed in 1967 by Norman Cohen, called The London Nobody Knows, the beginning of which features a slightly incongruous James Mason, in very smart polished shoes, gingerly stepping over the literally putrefying remains of an old music hall theatre.

The building was the Bedford Music Hall on Camden High Street and it was said to be Marie Lloyd’s favourite place to perform. Unfortunately the theatre closed permanently in 1959 and the sad, rotting building was eventually demolished ten years later. Two years after nearly ruining James Mason’s brogues.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZVabi3FCj0

Excerpt from The London That Nobody Knows

At one point in the film James Mason mentions, with a wry smile on his face, that an early regular performer at the Music Hall may well have still been haunting the place – a local singer called Belle Elmore.

Elmore’s stage career was relatively unsuccessful and her name is unknown to most of us today, especially as a Music Hall artiste. However, after her death in 1910 she achieved notoriety throughout the land, not as a singer, but as the murdered wife of the infamous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.

The Bedford Theatre in 1949

Belle Elmore in 1900, ten years before she was murdered by her husband.

Dr Crippen

Before the infamous Doctor had murdered Elmore and subsequently burnt her bones in the oven, dissolved her internal organs in an acid bath, buried what was left of the torso under bricks in the basement and placed her decapitated head in a handbag which was subsequently thrown overboard on a day-trip to Dieppe, the married couple lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. It was quite a salubrious address about a mile from the Bedford Music Hall.

Hilldrop Crescent near Holloway in 1910

Dr Crippen is notorious, of course, for being the first murderer to be arrested with the use of telephony when, during an attempted escape to Canada on the SS Montrose with his young lover Ethel Le Neve, Captain Henry George Kendall sent a telegraph back to England saying:

Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.

Chief Inspector Dew, who had already once interviewed Crippen and initially decided that he was innocent, took the faster White Line steamer – the SS Laurentic – to Canada. On the 31 July 1910 the Inspector greeted the couple when they met him on the ship:

Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.

After a pause, Crippen replied,

Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Crippen then held out his arms for his handcuffs. Dew later recalled:

Old Crippen took it quite well. He always was a bit of a philosopher, though he could not have helped being astounded to see me on board the boat. He was quite a likeable chap in his way.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew

Dr Crippen being led off the SS Montrose, seemingly by one of the Thompson twins but more likely by Chief Inspector Dew

Ethel Le Neve circa 1910

The final resting place of a bit of Belle Elmore

The Hallway at 39 Hilldrop Crescent

Crippen and Ethel Le Neve were tried separately by the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey and Crippen, likeable philosopher or not, was found guilty after just 27 minutes by the jury and subsequently hanged at Pentonville prison in November 1910. Ethel Le Neve, however, was acquitted and only died in 1967 – not long after James Mason was filmed exploring what was left of the Bedford Music Hall.

The Old Bailey during the trial of Dr Crippen August 10th 1910

James Mason in his piece about the old theatre in Camden failed to relate that only nine years after Marie Lloyd’s fiftieth birthday celebrations (which were incidentally held at the Bedford), and seven years after her death in 1922, the comic-actor Peter Sellers actually lived at the Bedford with his mother and grandmother in a rented flat above the entrance in Camden High Street.

Sellers’ mother was performing at the Bedford in a production called ‘Ha!Ha!!Ha!!!’ along with his father. When the revue finished, Peter’s father Bill suddenly decided to leave home forever, leaving Peter, his mother, and grandmother to totally fend for themselves while still living upstairs at the theatre. Sellers may well have been still living in the flat above the Bedford when he performed, at the age of five, with his mother in a revue called Splash Me! at the Windmill theatre in Great Windmill Street.

The Bedford Theatre’s fortunes eventually declined and, like many other theatres and converted cinemas in London, it eventually capitulated to its unavoidable fate when it fell dark completely in 1959.

Bedford House on Camden High Street in 2007

Dr Crippen’s old address, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, was spared the indignity of being demolished at the whim of a sixties Camden council planning meeting, but only because it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. It was replaced, like so many other buildings, by a nondescript block of flats. Another nondescript block was built to replace the Bedford Theatre. It is still known as Bedford House though.

39 Hilldrop Crescent today

Marie Lloyd and Claire Loumaine 1913

If Heat magazine, or perhaps Perez Hilton, had existed before the First World War they would have surely printed the picture above which features a 43 year old Marie Lloyd embracing and kissing a woman called Claire Loumaine. The photograph was taken on 25th April at Paddington Station where the music hall star had gone to meet Loumaine on her return from Australia.

Does anyone know who Claire Loumaine is? I can’t find anything about her at all.

Nine years after Marie Lloyd greeted her close friend off the train at Paddington the music hall star collapsed on stage during a rendition of one of her most famous songs I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit. The crowd continued laughing thinking that the staggering around that preceded the fall was all part of her act. Lloyd was desperately ill however, and died soon after on 7th October 1922. One hundred thousand people were reported to have attended her funeral five days later in Hampstead.

A twenty year old Marie Lloyd in 1890

Marie Lloyd – A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good

Windmill Theatre, Tonight and Every Night 1952

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bag One exhibition programme cover

'Erotica 6 - Yoko in Bed' by John Lennon

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

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

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

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

The cover of the infamous schoolkids issue of Oz

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

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

Page 36 of the Schoolkids' issue of OZ magazine.

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

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

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

Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis

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

The extremely unintelligent future multi-millionaire publishing magnate Felix Dennis

The home secretary Reginald Maudling

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

Fenwick explained to Maudling;

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

Maudling was shocked with this explanation, or what was rather a lame excuse, and he quickly initiated a major corruption inquiry into the Metropolitan police. The Government and the judiciary, albeit too slowly, were coming to the conclusion that there was more than the odd bad apple in the Metropolitan police. It later came out that Fenwick had brought a pornographer to Holborn Police Station and select what confiscated pornographic material he wanted for redistribution in his sex-shops.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner in 1972

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

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

Soho in the early seventies

In the same year as Mark’s appointment various Sunday tabloids exposed a connection between James Humphreys (who openly ran two strip clubs and was one of the biggest operators of pornographic bookshops in Soho) and Commander Kenneth Drury. They had both enjoyed a luxurious two week holiday in Cyprus accompanied by their wives, all paid for, of course, by the Soho pornographer.

Drury was hopelessly compromised and concocted a story that he was in Cyprus looking for the train robber Ronnie Biggs and contradictorily paid for the trip himself. Nobody believed the story.

James Humphries in January 1974

James Humphries after his arrest, January 1974

Humphreys quickly realised the danger for him of appearing to his criminal associates as a police informant and announced that Drury had set up the whole thing. After a police raid at his house a diary of Humphrey’s was found in a wall-safe and open-mouthed the corruption investigators found that it unbelievably detailed payments to seventeen different policemen including Drury.

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

List of bribes taken by Drury and two of his colleagues

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

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

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

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

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

After the second trial Mars-Jones said it revealed:

“corruption on a scale which beggars description.”

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

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

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

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