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

James Earl Ray's passport photos 1968

At 11 o’clock in the morning on Saturday, June 8th 1968 an immigration officer at Heathrow Airport took a look at a passenger’s Canadian passport and said;

“Would you please step into our office for some routine questions, Mr Sneyd”.

The man he called Mr Sneyd entered the office but when he saw a policeman standing there, all he could say was “Oh God, I feel so trapped” and allowed himself to be arrested.

The bespectacled Mr Sneyd was found to have a .38 caliber revolver in his back pocket and he also, rather suspiciously, had another passport on him under another name.

Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, a man not particularly shy of publicity, soon arrived at Heathrow to make the arrest. Butler had become well known to the British public after the arrest of the Great Train Robbers four years earlier. The observant immigration official’s initial suspicions were confirmed by the senior policeman and fingerprints proved that Sneyd was, in reality, Illinois-born 40 year old James Earl Ray – the escaped convict accused of assassinating Martin Luther King on April 4 in Memphis Tennessee.

Martin Luther King with Lyndon Johnson in the background

Heathrow in 1968

Air Traffic Control at Heathrow in 1968

The bloody balcony in Memphis where Martin Luther King was assassinated

Four days after he had left his fingerprints on the Remington rifle that had killed Dr King, Ray drove across the Canadian border and rented a room in Toronto. It was well-known amongst American prisoners (Ray had been an habitual but unsuccessful criminal pretty well all his adult life), that it was ludicrously easy to get a Canadian passport.

Essentially all you really had to do was swear that you were Canadian and ask for one. Ray asked for a passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd – a Toronto policeman whose name was probably picked at random from a city directory. On May 6 he flew on a BOAC plane to London, and the next day he flew on to Portugal.

The fake passport used by James Earl Ray

Ray's flight details from Toronto to London

The FBI, meanwhile, launched their biggest manhunt in its history but there seemed to be almost no leads at all. However, on June 1, there came a big break. At the FBI’s request (they were also aware of Canada’s lax passport rules), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been checking hundreds of thousands of passport photos and eventually they came across a picture that closely resembled the escaped convict and the only real suspect for Martin Luther King’s murder – James Earl Ray

While all this was going on, Ray was in Lisbon working out his next move. He apparently attempted to change his fake passport, but only got as far as changing the ‘d’ in Sneyd to an ‘a’. He told the Canadian consul: “My name has been misspelled,” and he was issued with a new passport on May 16.

Earls Court in 1968. Photographer Bill Holmes

The next day Ray flew back to London and anonymously stayed in one of the hundreds of back-street seedy hostels around the Victoria, Pimilico and Earls Court areas of London. On May 28 he checked into the New Earl’s Court Hotel situated at 35-37 Penywern Road – a pretty seedy and run-down street in those days. Jane Nassau the receptionist at the hotel apparently helped Ray with the confusing 5p and 10p coins that had been introduced a month or so before. She later stated that: “I recognised his southern drawl and wondered why he had a Canadian passport.”

jane Nassau, the receptionist at the New Earls Court Hotel

Room 54 at the New Earls Court Hotel

The New Earls Court Hotel in 1968

The very door key for room fifty-four used by Ray at the New Earls Court Hotel

On June 5 Ray moved again, this time staying at the Pax Hotel at 126 Warwick Way (equally seedy in the late sixties) which was run by Swedish-born Mrs. Anna Thomas. She later stated that for the next three days, Ray never left his room for more than 20 minutes, even refusing to to emerge for four telephone calls, two of them from an airline. When she brought breakfast to Ray’s door:

“He was always fully dressed. I had the idea that he never got undressed for bed.”

Mrs Thomas, the proprietress of the Pax Hotel in Pimlico

Ray's room at the Pax Hotel

The Pax Hotel, 126 Warwick Way in 1968

Although it isn’t really known how he got the number, on June 6 Ray, while he was staying at the Pax Hotel, mysteriously telephoned Ian Colvin, a senior journalist at the Daily Telegraph and asked him for a contact who could help him to become a mercenary. Colvin offered an address in Brussels and it was to there Ray was heading when he was arrested at Heathrow two days later.

FBI Wanted Poster

The police van bringing James Earl Ray to court

There must have been a rugby scrum of reporters around these phone boxes outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, June 14 1968

He was initially charged at Cannon Row police station with possessing a forged passport and having a firearm without a certificate but on June 14th James Earl Ray entered the witness box at Bow Street Magistrates Court for his extradition hearing. He flatly denied that he had killed Martin Luther King. Roger Frisby, his British lawyer asked him these questions:

“Are you the man who was arrested at London Airport?

“Yes”

“Did you know Dr. Martin Luther King?

“No Sir”

“Had you ever met him personally in your life?”

“No Sir”

“Have you ever had any grudge of any kind against him?”

“No Sir”

“Did you kill Dr. Martin Luther King?”

“No, Sir”

However, Ray almost certainly did kill him and he was quickly extradited to the States and charged with King’s murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though three days later he wrote a letter to the court asking that his plea be set aside – the judge refused the request) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

James Earl Ray back in America

He died in 1998 at age 70 from complications related to kidney disease, caused by hepatitis C probably contracted as a result of a blood transfusion given after a stabbing while at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

35-37 Penywern Road today, the former site of the New Earls Court Hotel

Bakers Hotel (formerly the Pax Hotel) at 126 Warwick Way today

.

Dion and the Belmonts – Abraham, Martin and John

Elvira Barney arriving at her parents house at 6 Belgrave Square, 7th July 1932

Visiting England apparently on a whim and a year before she made her first film late in 1925, a seventeen year-old Louise Brooks became a dancer at the Cafe de Paris in Coventry Street. It was here that she reputedly became the first person to dance the Charleston in London. The Piccadilly nightclub had quickly become the place to be seen after it opened a year earlier in December 1924, not least because the Prince of Wales soon became a regular visitor.

Brooks later wrote about the so-called ‘Bright Young Things’ she had met during her time in London and waspishly described them as a dreadful, moribund lot. She added that when Evelyn Waugh wrote Vile Bodies about them, only a genius could have made a masterpiece out of such glum material.

The Cafe de Paris in 1932

Louise Brooks in 1924

Marion Harris in London in 1932

In May 1932, and eight years after Brooks danced in front of the rich and famous at the Cafe de Paris, the celebrated American singer Marion Harris was in the middle of one of her long engagements at the Cafe de Paris. Harris was known to audiences at the time as the first white woman to sing the blues and after moving to England at the beginning of the thirties was performing to great success in the capital city. The Prince of Wales was actually a big fan and often came to see her sing. One night after she had performed, the manager came into her dressing room excitedly announcing that the Prince of Wales had been so impressed that he would like her to have a drink at his table. Miss Harris coolly declined, telling him that “If your customers get to know you too well, they don’t come back and pay money to see you. The illusion is destroyed.”

She may have been on stage singing ‘the blues’ – the acts began their set at eleven – when just after midnight on 30th May 1932 an intoxicated couple (both of whom would have undoubtedly considered themself a Bright Young Thing, albeit slightly tarnished), entered the famous West End night for a rather late supper.

The couple were Elvira Barney and her louche bisexual lover Michael Stephen and they had travelled by cab to Coventry Street after holding one of their numerous parties at the home they shared in Williams Mews just off Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge. After they had finished their meal at the Cafe de Paris and had further drinks at The Blue Angel in Dean Street they returned back home in the early hours of that morning.

It wasn’t long before the neighbours, not for the first time, started to hear screaming and yelling from the first floor and Elvira was reported to have shouted:

“Get out, get out! I will shoot you! I will shoot you!’

Almost immediately the street heard the report of a pistol shot echoing into the night and almost immediately a neighbour heard Barney crying

“Chicken, chicken, come back to me. I will do anything you want me to.”

At about 4.50am, after a frantic call to his house just ten minutes earlier, Doctor Thomas Durrant arrived at 21 Williams Mews and came across Barney continually repeating:

“He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident. He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident.”

On the stairs, shot in the chest at close range, lay a distinctly moribund Michael Stephen.

‘There was a terrible barney at no. 21′, a neighbour later told the police, apparently unconscious of the pun.

Michael Stephen

21 William Mews and a dead Michael Stephen

21 William Mews today

Macdonald Hastings wrote about the fatal evening in his book The Other Mr Churchill, (this Mr Churchill was a forgotten about firearms expert and not the prestigious Prime Minister) and he described the police being incredibly shocked when they entered the mews house:

‘Over the cocktail bar in the corner of the sitting room there was a wall painting which would have been a sensation in a brothel in Pompeii. The library was furnished with publications which could never have passed through His Majesty’s Customs. The place was equipped with the implements of fetishism and perversion.’

Shocked or not, and despite Elvira at one point striking Inspector Campion in the face saying: “I will teach you to say you will put me in a cell, you vile swine,” after she had made her statement, the police, obviously knowing their place, simply allowed her to go back to her family home at nearby 6 Belgrave Square. She was accompanied by her parents, Sir John and Lady Mullens.

Four years previously, a twenty-three year old Elvira, despite her parents protestations, had married an American singer and entertainer called John Sterling Barney. When they met, at a society function held by Lady Mullens, he had been performing in a ‘top-hat, white-tie and tails’ trio called The Three New-Yorkers. They were relatively successful in the UK at the time and often played at the Cafe de Paris.

The Three New Yorkers at The Cafe de Paris - John Barney is on the left

The Three New Yorkers and a couple of Bell-boys

By many accounts the facile John Barney was a rather unpleasant man and a friend of Elvira’s once recalled:

“One day she held her arms in the air and the burns she displayed – there and elsewhere – were, she insisted, the work of her husband who had delighted in crushing his lighted cigarettes out from time to time on her bare skin.”

Violent rows started within weeks of the marriage and after a few months the American returned back to the United States never really to be heard of again. Elvira, according to her biographer Peter Cotes, went off the rails and ‘started sniffing the snow…and became the demanding but generous mistress of a number of disorientated and sexually odd lovers.’ Unfortunately he doesn’t really go into any more detail but the description goes someway to explain how, at the start of 1932, she ended up sharing her bed (and her bank account) with the drug-dealing ‘dress-designer’ Michael Scott Stephen.

Sir John Mullens, with his society connections managed to persuade the former Attorney-General Sir Patrick Hastings to defend his daughter. Hastings, in his early fifties, was at the height of his fame as a Kings Council and towards the end of the trial made a final address to the jury, that the judge – a Mr Justice Humphreys – later called the best he had ever heard.

The Honourable Mr Justice Humphreys picking up a London Metro on the way to court

Sir Patrick Hastings on the cover of Time in 1924

The jury must have also been impressed with Sir Patrick’s speech and after two hours returned a not guilty verdict. On his way out of the court Mr Justice Humpheys exclaimed:

‘Most extraordinary! Apparently we should have given her a pat on the back!’

The jury had acquitted her but Fleet Street weren’t going to let her off that easily and they gleefully reported that Elvira Mullens (the name she had reverted to) had shouted on the dance floor of the Cafe de Paris soon after the court case,

‘I am the one who shot her lover – so take a good look at me.’

Sir Patrick Hastings described Elvira during the trial as ‘a young woman with the rest of her life before her’. Unfortunately the rest of her life lasted a only four short years and she was found dead in a Parisian hotel room. After a typical long night of drinking and taking cocaine she had decided to return back to her room complaining that she felt cold and unwell. She was discovered later that night half on her bed, half off, with signs of haemorrhage around her mouth. The years of drinking and drug-taking had finally taken their toll.

The police holding back the crowd at the Old Bailey during the trial of Elvira Barney

Marion Harris in New York

Not long after Elvira Barney’s death in Paris, Marion Harris retired from showbusiness and married a successful English theatrical agent called Leonard Urry. In early 1944 their home in Rutland Street (just a few hundred yards west of Williams Mews) was razed to the ground by a V1 flying bomb.

Harris returned to America completely traumatised and never really recovered from seeing her home completely destroyed. On Sunday, April 23, 1944, alone in a New York hotel room she fell asleep while smoking a cigarette. It set the room alight and it was never disclosed whether she died of burns or suffocation from the smoke.

The Cafe de Paris, unlike the majority of theatres and nightclubs in the West End, remained open at the start of the second world war. This was probably because of the rich and famous patrons having a slight influence on the wartime licensing regulations, however it was said that the dance-floor was so far underground that it would be completely safe when the air-raid sirens sounded.

Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson

On Saturday 8th March 1941 Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and the West Indian Orchestra were playing at the Cafe de Paris as usual. While carefully not mentioning the actual club or the band leader (due to wartime censorship) Time magazine reported what happened subsequently:

The orchestra at London’s Cafe de Paris gaily played Oh, Johnny, Oh Johnny, How You Can Love! At the tables handsome flying Johnnies, naval Jacks in full dress, guardsmen, territorials, and just plain civics sat making conversational love. The service men were making the most of leave; the civilians were making the most of the lull in bombings of London.

Sirens had sounded. Most of London had descended into shelters, but to those in the cabaret, time seemed too dear to squander underground. Bombs began to fall near by: it was London’s worst night raid in weeks. The orchestra played Oh, Johnny a little louder.

Then the hit came. What had been a nightclub became a nightmare: heaps of wreckage crushing the heaps of dead and maimed, a shambles of silver slippers, broken magnums, torn sheet music, dented saxophones, smashed discs.

A special constable with the rather splendid name Ballard Berkeley was one of the first on the scene. He saw Snakehips Johnson decapitated and elegantly dressed people still sitting at tables seemingly almost in conversation, but stone dead. He was shocked to see looters, mingling with the firemen and the police, cutting the fingers from the dead to get at their expensive rings. Ballard Berkeley many years later became famous as the actor who played the major in Fawlty Towers.

Cafe de Paris, 9th March 1941

In 1929 British International Pictures released Piccadilly starring the beautiful Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong. The scene where Wong’s character Shosho performs her exotic dance in front of an adoring nightclub crowd was filmed in location at the Cafe de Paris. The film also includes a brief appearance from Charles Laughton playing a gluttonous diner – his first feature film performance.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQA2zemtLrE

In 1948, the Cafe de Paris was refurbished and seven years after the tragic death of Snakehips Johnson the doors reopened. Although it was again graced by royalty, notably Princess Margaret, the club never really regained its sophisticated aura it had before the war.

The only evening of note I can find was on 29th September 1965 when Lionel Blair introduced, to an extremely grateful public no doubt, his new dance called ‘The Kick’.I’m not sure but I don’t think it was a storming success.

Lionel Blair accompanied by Cilla Black, Joe Loss and Billy J Kramer dance 'The Kick' at the Cafe de Paris in 1965

Billie Holiday – These Foolish Things

Al Bowlly – Dinner For One Please, James

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

“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

The King of the Kings Road

In 1995 Ossie Clark, the iconic sixties and seventies fashion designer known for his flowing dresses and a rather excessive party lifestyle, invited the 27 year old Italian Diego Cogalato to move into his one-bedroomed Holland Park council flat in Penzance Street. Just eighteen months later, Cogalato called 999 and said to the operator ‘I think I’ve killed someone…’.

When the the police broke into the flat they found Ossie Clark on the floor with 37 stab wounds to his body and with his head completely stoved in, apparently by a large terracotta pot.

At the trial Coglato’s defence revealed that at the time of the murder he had been high on a mixture of Prozac and amphetamines – a combination of drugs that caused him to see himself as the New Messiah. Unfortunately they also caused Coglato to see Ossie Clark as a devil. A devil that needed to be extinguished. Coglato was convicted of murder but given just a six-year sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

By the time he died, Ossie Clark was an unkempt and sad figure often wandering around Holland Park near his flat. He had become a buddhist and apparently prayed everyday in front of a shrine made entirely of empty packets of Sobranie cigarettes. His carpet was just brown cutting paper and his goldfish were kept in vases. He was so poor that he was occasionally seen scouring the streets for dog-ends to smoke and even fished pennies out of the fountain in Holland Park.

Ossie and Peter Morgan at the Royal College of Art in 1965

Ossie at the Royal College of Art 18th June 1965

Just thirty years earlier, and ultimately to become one of Britain’s greatest fashion designers, Ossie Clark was at the beginning of his glittering career. In 1962 Ossie Clark moved to London to enrol at the Fashion Design School at The Royal College of Art. He graduated in June 1965, with a first class degree and a collection inspired by artist Bridget Riley.

Clark was an immediate success and he’d hardly graduated when Vogue magazine wrote about him as a major new talent and photographer David Bailey was hired to take his portrait.

Clark began to sell both his couture and ready-to-wear lines in the Chelsea boutique, Quorum with his friend and business partner Alice Pollock. Incidentally David Gilmore, later of Pink Floyd was a driver for Quorum for a while and later would provide a lot of music for Clark’s innovative fashion shows.

Ossie lighting Judy Guy Johnson's cigarette with Patti Boyd looking on.

Chrissie Shrimpton and Ossie 1965 by David Bailey

Linda Keith, Chrissie Shrimpton, Suki Poitier and Annie Sabroux displaying the Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock winter collection April 1967

Part of the success of Clark’s clothes at the time was due to the extraordinary collaboration with his wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell. Many of Clark’s more famous garments were designed around her fabrics.

Clark had met Birtwell while they were both students in Manchester and although he was sexually attracted to men they became lovers, marrying in 1969 when she was pregnant with their first child. David Hockney, friend of the couple and sometime lover of Ossie, was the best man.

The marriage only lasted a few years – towards the end of the marriage Birtwell could no longer put up with Clark’s wild-partying, drug-taking and his many affairs with both men and women. She eventually had had enough and started an affair with the artist Adrian George, leaving Ossie for good in 1974.

David Hockney’s famous painting ‘Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy’ was given to the couple as a wedding present. Ossie, later in his life and needing the money, sold it to the Tate Gallery for just seven thousand pounds. It is now one of (if not the) most famous British painting and worth millions. Clark was always, despite his success, a very bad businessman.

Mr and Mrs Clark

Ossie with his hi fi 1970

Ossie, Celia and Percy the cat

Triangle coffee tables, chocolate biscuits, Ossie Clark and his son

During the decade before the separation however, Ossie Clark was the star of British fashion – even describing himself as a “brilliant butterfly”. He was particularly famous for his bias cut dresses and brilliant tailoring.

He had an incredible eye for the female form and thus created incredibly flattering clothes – it was said that he could cut a dress to fit a woman perfectly just be running his hands over her body. Marianne Faithful described trying on one of his dresses for the first time when she was eighteen -

“Ossie wanted everything to be on bare skin, so he said ‘Take it all off’ – and I did – the display was heart-tugging.”

Ossie with Gala Mitchell his favourite model. 'It's all in my brain and fingers' he once said, 'I am a master cutter.'

ossie in 1969

Ossie in his workshop in 1969

By the early seventies Clark was at the height of his fame – his dresses were worn by the the most beautiful and famous women of the era – Patti Boyd, Ali MacGraw, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Elizabeth Tayor and Liza Minelli. He even designed some of Mick Jagger’s stage costumes including the famous white jumpsuit he wore on the 1973 Exile On Main Street tour. If he was visiting New York he would hang out with Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote. He probably thought that life couldn’t get much better.

Ossie, no stranger to a convivial night out, and friends

Ali MacGraw 1969

Ali MacGraw

After the separation with Celia, Clark never really recovered emotionally and professionally and although the first entry in his diary in 1974 read:

January 10. Moved into Powis Terrace. Dinner with Mick and Bianca. Took Mo to cheer him up. After, Paul Getty Jr with Nikki Weymouth, Chrissy, Robert Fraser.

When times got tough for Ossie, he found that the famous names, as famous names tend to do, soon disappeared and the diaries become sad and depressing reading. For years, although he had perhaps enjoyed a few too many convivial nights Celia had provided the stability he needed to cope.

In the mid-seventies his fortunes went into a downward spiral, never a good business man, Clark now found his clothes decidedly unfashionable. The Kings Road was now enthralled with the punk revolution and its accompanying home-made fashion.

By 1983 Clark was declared bankrupt after the Inland Revenue claimed 14 years of back tax. He lost his house and had to live with friends until, eventually, the DHSS re-housed him in the small council flat in Penzance Street – the council flat where he was ultimately murdered.

Except for bits and bobs he never really worked properly again.

Ossie at Claridges in1985

Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark with Percy

Nicky Samuel modelling Ossie Clark

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8HhncQH6bE

The Quorum fashion show in 1971 at the Royal Court Theatre

]]> http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2008/04/ossie-clark-the-king-of-the-kings-road-in-holland-park/feed/ 10 http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/11/denmark-street-the-rolling-stones-vince-taylor-and-denis-nilsen/ http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/11/denmark-street-the-rolling-stones-vince-taylor-and-denis-nilsen/#comments Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:45:00 +0000 admin http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/11/denmark-street-the-rolling-stones-vince-taylor-and-denis-nilsen.html
Denmark Street – The Kinks

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

Regent Sound Studios is a shop in Denmark Street just off the north end of Charing Cross Road and these days selling mostly Fender guitars but it has a lovely reconstructed sign above the window illustrating its former use as a tiny but famous recording studio. In November 1963 The Rolling Stones made some demo recordings there, mostly new songs they had recently been practising and playing during their nationwide tour. The band so loved the sound of the tiny, primitive and cramped studio, with actual egg-cartons as soundproofing and curtains on the wall to deaden the sound, that in a bid to get away from the major record company studios with their strait-laced tie-wearing producers, they became the first band to actually use the studio to record their actual master recordings. In January 1964 they started to record, on the two-track revox recorder, their first LP eventually to be called, simply, The Rolling Stones. The studio was so small that there was hardly any definition between the instruments and the band could hardly avoid putting down on tape an approximation of their live sound of the time.

Mick Jagger in the cramped recording studio December 1963

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

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

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

Andrew Loog Oldham in Denmark Street 1964

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

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

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

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

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

Vince Taylor And His Playboys – Brand New Cadillac

Elton John – Bitter Fingers

Rolling Stones – Little By Little

]]> http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/11/denmark-street-the-rolling-stones-vince-taylor-and-denis-nilsen/feed/ 10 http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/09/the-kray-twins-and-the-walker-brothers/ http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/09/the-kray-twins-and-the-walker-brothers/#comments Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:22:00 +0000 admin http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2007/09/the-kray-twins-and-the-walker-brothers.html A couple of months ago I visited The Blind Beggar pub with my friend Nick. The pub of course is notorious, certainly not because of its beer, decor or food these days but because it’s where Ronnie Kray shot fellow villain George Cornell right between the eyes with a 9mm Mauser in 1966. It is said, and I do hope it’s true, that one of Kray’s bullets richocheted and hit the juke box, which was playing the number one record at the time by The Walker Brothers and the record started jumping on the line The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More..Any More..Any More..Any More… It was said that George, big and brave admittedly, was not the most intelligent of men, and had called Ronnie ‘a big fat poof’. Ronnie obviously took exception to this, though not for being called a ‘poof’ apparently, but because he was ‘big and fat’ – quite 21st Century of Ronnie really.On the other side of the Whitechapel Road from the Blind Beggar is the horribly named LHT Urban bar which used to be called The London Hospital Tavern (named because it’s next to the London Hospital which incidentally was where the Elephant Man lived for a short while and if you ask nicely you can see a plaster cast of his body). It was here in the early 60s that the biggest gang fight for decades occurred, featuring the Kray Twins and their “Firm” and the fantastically named “Watney Streeters”. The Kray’s Firm easily won and their reign of the East End of London began.
I’m not sure, but I suspect, that the Krays might have felt slightly uncomfortable with the current imaginative exterior decor and they may have taken their fight elsewhere. Don’t you need planning permission to paint the outside of your pub like this? If so, shouldn’t the planning officers be shot? Perhaps between the eyes.

Here are a few versions of the song including the original sung by Frankie Valli

The Walker Brothers – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore

Neil Diamond – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore

Frankie Valli – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore

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