Donald Duart Maclean and Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess

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

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

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

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

Clifford Chambers, 10 New Bond Street in Mayfair today.

Jack 'Jacky' Hewit

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

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

Burgess and Hewit's flat on New Bond Street.

Not the most salubrious flat in Mayfair.

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

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

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

Donald Maclean in 1935 aged 22

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall in the fifties

Dining room at the Royal Automobile Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Austin A70

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

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

Gieve's after the IRA bomb in 1974

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

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

Traveller's Club at 106 Pall Mall

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ship that Burgess and Maclean took to St Malo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ8BRj4YWLM

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

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

Savoy Turkish Bath in Duke of York Street, 1951 - "A vigorous lathering on a marble slab with a wooden pillow."

Late in 1951, on a cold foggy afternoon, the type that only London in those days could serve up, a young woman called Grace Robertson, one of the few female professional photographers of the time, spent a day amongst the regular clientele in the tarnished and faded elegance of the Savoy Turkish Baths in London’s St James.

Robertson photographed the customers as they went from one hot room to the next which was then followed by a cleansing pummel in the bath’s marble wash-house. Finally the women plunged into an ice-cold pool had a massage and then took a quick look at the weighing scales before stepping outside into the grey austerity of London in the early fifties.

The women-only Baths were situated at 12 Duke of York Street directly round the corner from the more infamous Savoy Turkish Baths at 92 Jermyn Street.

"Then you plunge into an icy pool...!"

However the Savoy baths weren’t the first Turkish baths to be built in Jermyn Street. In 1862 the London and Provincial Turkish Bath Co. Ltd. built what was said by some to be the finest in Europe at number 76. It was built under the superintendence of the diplomat and Hammam obsessive David Urquhart.

It was Urquhart that had been largely responsible for the the introduction of the Hammam to the UK in the mid-nineteenth century and it was him who actually coined the term ‘Turkish Bath’ that is still used in this country.

He had travelled around Turkey, Greece and Moorish Spain and had been greatly affected by the Hammam’s popularity in these countries and especially how relatively classless they were.

The incredible 'Turkish' Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street.

Urquart reckoned that if Turkish baths could become common-place in the dark and dirty towns and cities around Britain the grubby and filthy life of the workers could in some way be alleviated. He thought the bath houses he proposed to build around the country would contribute to a “war waged against drunkenness, immorality, and filth in every shape.” We won’t know for sure but David Urquhart probably wouldn’t have been entirely happy about some of the behaviour that went on in the Turkish baths in the following century.

By the time the Jermyn Street Hammam had been built there were about 30 Turkish baths in London. All due mainly to the efforts of David Urquhart. These Turkish Baths, as understood by the Victorians, were dry air saunas, different from the Russian steam baths or the Finnish saunas (which has water ladled onto the hot coals), and drier even than the present day Turkish baths or hammams.

76 Jermyn Street

plan of the Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street

Urquhart gave lectures and wrote pamphlets extolling the return of this ancient method of healthy bathing. Recommending it for people suffering from practically any illness the Victorians thought existed, but including constipation, bronchitis, asthma, fever, cholera, diabetes, syphilis, baldness, alcoholism and even baldness and dementia. Feminine hygiene ailments could also be cured Urquhart maintained, although whatever they were, they apparently weren’t decent enough to discuss in the public forum of a pamphlet.

Not that it particularly mattered as far as the Jermyn Street Hammam was concerned because, like most other Turkish Baths being built in London, when it opened it was men-only. A separate women’s bath, laid out in the original plans, was never built and even Urquhart’s ideal of different classes bathing together didn’t materialise either. No ordinary working man could have afforded 3/6d during the day and as much as 2/- in the evening.

The York House Hydro - opened in 1908 and became the women-only Bath house two years later.

Fifty years later, a less exclusive clientele were catered for in Jermyn Street when the York House Hydro was opened by Ernest Henry Adams in Duke of York Street in 1908. Two years later Adams opened some Turkish baths around the corner at 92 Jermyn Street. The two premises were joined at the back and the original baths in Duke of York Street turned into a Ladies’ Turkish Baths and it was here where Grace Robertson took her beautiful Picture Post photographs in 1951.

Photograph by Grace Robertson for Picture Post in 1951 - "A women's club with a towelling-only uniform."

The Savoy Baths, apparently the best in London.

Developments in domestic sanitation had changed the way a lot of people got clean and between the wars there was a huge reduction in the need for municipal bathing facilities and private steam baths in all but the poorer areas of London. The original Jermyn Street Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street although both grand and spectacular closed down at the beginning of the war due to lack of use.

It would never reopen mainly because a few months after the baths closed the site was completely destroyed when a Nazi parachute bomb exploded above Jermyn Street on 17th April 1941. It was the same bomb that ended the life of the popular singer Al Bowly who, when it exploded, was reading a cowboy book in bed in the adjacent Duke’s Court apartments.

The aftermath of a parachute bomb that exploded above Jermyn Street in April 1941.

Jermyn Street today, the Hammam at 76 would have been on the right on the corner of Bury Street.

Meanwhile the exclusively male Savoy Turkish Baths at 92 Jermyn Street remained open, indeed they remained open all night long and not surprisingly soon they became popular with gay men not least because of the ‘bachelor chambers connected to the bath’ that could be ‘let at moderate rentals’.

After the war, in an attempt to survive as ongoing concerns, the remaining Turkish baths in London, and especially the Savoy, started to subtly encourage their gay clientele while at the same time subduing their internal policing. Hunter Davies in the New London Spy wrote:

“Staff mostly turn a blind eye to much of the midnight prowling…if the activity is not too blatant.”

Photographs by Maurice Ambler in 1951, also for Picture Post

"The Turkish Bath embraces the classical and Oriental ideal. Even the Roman names are retained. The present-day bather strips off and rests in the Frigidarium, starts to sweat in the Tepidarium, and finishes in the Caldarium." - Picture Post 1951

However the baths had always had a bit of a gay reputation and it was to the Savoy Turkish baths that Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden took the 24 year old Benjamin Britten in 1937. This would have been around the time of their collaboration for the famous GPO film Night Mail which was produced by Basil Wright.

“Well,” Basil asked Isherwood afterwards, “have we convinced Ben he’s queer, or haven’t we?” Britten wrote in his diary of his experience at the baths: “Very pleasant sensation. Completely sensuous, but very healthy. It is extraordinary to find one’s resistance to anything gradually weakening.”

Benjamin Britten and WH Auden in the late thirties.

Derek Jarman once wrote of the infamous Savoy Baths in Jermyn Street:

“as a young MP, Harold Macmillan – who was expelled from Eton for an ‘indiscretion’ – used to spend nights at the Jermyn Street baths; anyone who went to them would have been propositioned during the course of an evening. I went there myself on two or three occasions. They were a well-known hangout: dormitory and steam rooms full of guardsmen cruising.”

One of the attractions of the Savoy baths were the amount of famous people to be seen there. The Turkish baths were was one of the few places a closeted gay actor, of which it would be fair to say there would have been quite a few, could feel reasonable safe from the police. Alec Guinness was a regular there, although he wrote in his diary, “it all revolted me”. Although it apparently so revolted him he kept on going back.

The closeted gay actor Rock Hudson would also often visit the Jermyn Street baths perhaps after trying the various after-shaves available in the Dunhill shop across the road (which is still there). However the cinema-going public in the UK remained blissfully unaware of the young actor’s nocturnal steamy proclivities and were fed plenty of publicity shots of Hudson with the latest pretty starlet.

Rock Hudson and Yvonne de Carlo in London, August 1952. They were publicising the film Scarlet Angel.

Hudson was lucky though, because in 1985 the Daily Mirror ran a story that the 27 year-old had actually been arrested and thrown out of the Savoy baths in 1952 for importuning. Presumably they had been sitting on the story for thirty-three years before daring to publish it.

Rock Hudson in 1952

The Savoy Turkish baths in Jermyn Street, 1955

“If you adopt the Boy Scouts’ motto Be Prepared you should be able to spend a night at the Turkish Baths…the steam has a peculiar effect on some chaps.” A later edition published in the seventies was already warning that “Sauna and Turkish baths are regularly raided and/or change management, check daily.”

Whether it was because the Savoy baths were unprepared for changing fashions or the police raids became too frequent, the inevitable happened and the last of the Jermyn Street baths closed down forever in 1975. The women’s baths in Duke of York Street, perhaps always a bit of a mismatch in the male preserve of Jermyn Street and its environs, had closed much earlier in 1958; just seven years after Grace Robertson took her photographs for the Picture Post.

92 Jermyn Street today

Duke of York Baths "Trepidation on the threshold of the first steam room."

"After all that, I haven't lost an ounce!"

Thank you to Malcolm Shifrin at www.victorianturkishbath.org

Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames at The Flamingo Club

It’s not widely known but Georgie Fame was slightly connected to the Profumo affair, the political scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo the Secretary of State for War in October 1963 and ultimately the fall of the Conservative government, a year later, in 1964.

In 1962 Georgie Fame had started a three year residency at The Flamingo Club – famous for its weekend all-nighters where it stayed open ’til six in the morning on Friday and Saturday nights. It was situated at 33 Wardour Street, a building which also housed the Wag Club during the eighties and nineties, and is now the Irish-theme pub O’Neills.

The police outside The Flamingo in Wardour Street

The Flamingo Club which originally specialised in modern jazz was opened by Rik and John Gunnell in 1959. The club quickly became popular with West Indians and also black American soldiers that were still stationed in quite large numbers just outside London and who had few other places to socialise. Georgie Fame once recalled:

“there were only a handful of hip young white people that used to go to The Flamingo. When I first went there as a punter I was scared. Once I started to play there, it was no problem.”

Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames

Fame, who was born Clive Powell but was instructed to change his name as part of Larry Parnes’ stable (he was originally Billy Fury’s pianist), often employed black musicians, one of which was the strikingly named ‘Psycho’ Gordon – a Jamaican who come to the UK in the late 1940s.

Psycho Gordon often brought to The Flamingo Club his brother ‘Lucky Gordon’ a part-time jazz singer and drug dealer. Lucky had also been a boyfriend of the infamous Christine Keeler and it was at one of the hot and sweaty ‘all-nighter’ Flamingo sessions in October 1962 when Gordon bumped into another of Keeler’s black lovers – Johnny Edgecombe.

Gordon and Edgecombe started arguing and it soon developed into a vicious knife fight. The fracas ended with Edgecombe badly slicing the face of, this time a rather unlucky, ‘Lucky’ Gordon. No one knew, least of all the two protagonists, but the fight started a slow-burning fuse that eventually caused the explosion that became the most infamous political scandal of the twentieth century.

Aloysius 'Lucky' Gordon the sometime lover of Christine Keeler

Gordon was treated for his wound at a local hospital but a few days later in a fit of jealousy, and rather unpleasantly, he posted the seventeen used stitches to Keeler and warned her that for each stitch he had sent she would also get two on her face in return.

Meanwhile a scared Edgecombe, along with Keeler, went into hiding from the police. Keeler even bought a Luger pistol in a bid to protect herself from the dangerous and still threatening Gordon.

On December 14th 1962 Keeler finished with Edgecombe, after finding him with another lover, saying that she would testify that it was he who had attacked Lucky Gordon at The Flamingo two months previously.

Keeler went to visit her friend Mandy Rice-Davies at Stephen Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews with Johnny Edgecombe following her there in a taxi. When Keeler refused to speak to him he angrily shot seven bullets at the door of the flat. Frightened, the girls called Ward at his surgery and he in turn called the police who soon came and arrested Edgecombe.

Lucky Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe

Before Edgecombe’s trial, Keeler was whisked off to Spain, one assumes because somebody, somewhere, thought various people would be badly compromised if she was allowed to talk in the witness box. Conspicuous by Keeler’s absence Edgecombe was found not guilty, both for assaulting Lucky Gordon and the attempted murder of Keeler. He was, however, found guilty of possession of an illegal firearm, for which he got seven years and served five.

Christine Keeler in Spain

On April 1st 1963 Christine was fined for her non-appearance at court and Lucky Gordon was bundled away by the Metropolitan police, shouting “I love that girl!” Not long after Keeler bumped into Gordon back at The Flamingo Club and again he had to be dragged away from her by other West Indian friends of hers.

The police struggling with Lucky Gordon 1st April 1963

In June 1963 Gordon was given a three year prison sentence for supposedly assaulting Keeler and in the same month Stephen Ward was arrested for living off Christine’s immoral earnings.

By now the whole story involving Profumo and the Russian attache/spy Ivananov was emerging, drip by drip. The chain of events that started with the fight of Keeler’s jealous ex-lovers at The Flamingo Club eventually caused the infamous resignation of the Secretary of State for War John Profumo, the suicide of high society’s favourite pimp, portrait painter and osteopath Stephen Ward, and ultimately, it could be said, the fall of the Conservative government.

Christine Keeler outside the Old Bailey 1st April 1963

Christine Keeler with friend 25th April 1963

Stephen Ward unconscious after his suicide attempt. He died a few days later.

In December 1963, after a drunken tape-recorded confession that she had lied about Gordon assaulting her, Keeler pleaded guilty of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice at Lucky Gordon’s trial. Her barrister had pleaded to the judge before sentencing:

“Ward is dead, Profumo is disgraced. And now I know your lordship will resist the temptation to take what I might call society’s pound of flesh.”

It was to no avail and Christine Keeler was sentenced to nine months in jail which ended what her barrister termed, a little prematurely:

“the last chapter in this long saga that has been called the Keeler affair.”

Lucky Gordon after his release from prison

Christine Keeler arriving at court, October 1963

29th October 1963

Just before Christine Keeler’s trial Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames recorded a live album entitled Rhythm and Blues at “The Flamingo” and it was released in early 1964. The following year Fame had a number one hit with his version of ‘Yeh Yeh’.

After the publicised trouble at The Flamingo, American service men were banned from visiting the club. However, drawn by the weekend all-nighters and the music policy of black American R ‘n’ B and jazz, The Flamingo Club was already becoming the favourite hang-out for London’s newest teenager cult, the Mods. But that’s a different story…

"What if I sit astride the chair? It might just work."

Skatalites – CHRISTINE KEELER

Georgie Fame – Night Train (recorded at The Flamingo)

Derrick Morgan – Fat Man

Derrick and Patsy – Hey Boy Hey Girl

Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland – Turn On Your Lovelight

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles – I Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying

Kim Weston – Looking For The Right Guy

John Lee Hooker – Tupelo

Brenda Holloway – I’ll Always Love You

Marvin Gaye – Pride and Joy

Buy some Georgie Fame stuff here

“The woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.” – Sir Maurice Hill

Jessie Matthews as a boy in 'First A Girl'.

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

She was born on March 11 in 1907, in a small, cramped and overcrowded flat above a Butcher’s shop in Soho’s Berwick Street. Matthews was the sixth of eleven children and her father was a costermonger in the market for which Berwick Street is still famous. Twenty years later, with elocution lessons having removed her natural cockney accent, the saucer-eyed actress took the West End by storm.

Early 20th century views of Berwick Street

Jessie aged 16 appearing in the Music Box revue

In 1927, already a star, Jessie Matthews was booked to perform in the 29 year old Noel Coward’s new revue This Year of Grace. Her co-star in the production was a bespectacled and short comic actor called Sonnie Hale who was married to the regally beautiful blonde actress called Evelyn Laye. Laye was seven years older than Matthews and was an extraordinarily popular West End singer and actress at the time.

Already a West End star, the 17 year old Evelyn Laye in 1917

Evelyn Laye

Evelyn Laye and Sonny Hale at their wedding in 1926

Evelyn Laye held a small supper party, at the end of 1927, for her close friends at Soho’s recently opened Gargoyle Club. The guests included the actress Ruby Miller and the young actor Frank Lawton. After one of the rehearsals for This Year of Grace her husband brought along his young, pretty and dangerously charming co-star (the Sunday Times’ theatre critic James Agate would later describe Matthews as ‘the rogue in porcelain’).

Matthews was already married at this time, unfortunately to a womanising debt-ridden actor called Henry Lytton Junior. She had married Lytton, who was from a famous theatrical family to seek stability in a life which must have seemed completely unreal to her at her young age. His family also offered social advantages to the young actress that her working-class upbringing would have lacked.

Their wedding occured only eighteen months after she had been initially courted and then raped at the age of sixteen by a louche, handsome Argentinean friend of the Prince of Wales called Jorge Ferrara. He must appeared utterly sophisticated and seemingly from another world when the extremely innocent Matthews met him on a ship to New York where she was to appear on Broadway as an understudy for Gertrude Lawrence.

When Jessie returned to London she had a secret and illegal abortion from which she never really recovered psychologically (and maybe physically as she suffered from miscarriages though out her life). She made fourteen films during the thirties and maybe had as many breakdowns. She later wrote in her autobiography; “All my life I have been frightened.”

Unfortunately the stability she sought in her marriage started to crumble after just eight months when Lytton, who had not only had been sleeping with chorus girls behind Matthews’ back (indeed he’d been having an affair with one girl in particular from the very week they had been married), had started to become increasingly envious of her growing success.

Jessie and Henry Lytton Jnr performing together in Charlot's Revue in 1925, two months before they married.

At the Gargoyle club, situated in Meard Street – a stone’s throw from Berwick Street – a friendly Laye (at least on the surface) genially greeted Matthews when she arrived with her husband. The two women would have previously met at theatrical parties but they didn’t know each other well and sitting at the table facing each other, observers of the two well-known actresses would have noted how they contrasted in looks and temperament.

The blue-eyed blonde Laye was tall, cool and sophisticated but maybe slightly aloof (Sonnie would later say that she was sexually frigid), although certainly not classically beautiful, Matthews’ brown pageboy fringe and huge sparkling eyes contributed to a sexual attractiveness and zest for life that most men found utterly irresistible.

They both had one thing in common, however, and that was their love for, it has to be said less than Greek, Sonnie Hale.

The 20 year old starlet Jessie Matthews in 1927

The 'less than Greek' Sonnie Hale in 1926, the year he married Evelyn Laye

Jessie in 1926

Early in the new year of 2008 Evelyn Laye had travelled up to Manchester where Coward’s This Year of Grace was previewing and on arriving she accidentally caught her husband and Jessie holding hands. The co-stars rather to0 quickly and expeditiously unclasped the hands on seeing her. Laye pretending to joke, asked whether they were in love with each other, to which they laughingly assured her that the idea was absurd and foolish. It was, as Sonnie pointed out, less than a month to their second anniversary.

Although genuinely upset and confused, Jessie and Sonnie were lying. They had been lovers for several weeks.

This Year of Grace opened to rave reviews both for Jessie and for the writer Noel Coward (it resurrected his career). The Sunday Express ironically ranked Jessie Matthews with Evelyn Laye as ‘the brightest female stars on our English light musical stage’. This would have really rankled Laye, who saw herself as London’s reigning stage beauty, and it only got worse when Room With A Veiw a song from This Year of Grace became a huge hit that summer and it would have been played on every radio show and in every night club.

A few weeks later Evelyn Laye found passionate and rather explicitly detailed love letters, albeit in an ill-educated childish scrawl, from Jessie to her husband. After confronting Hale with them, he admitted his love with Matthews, and it wasn’t long before Laye moved out of the Hale home in Linden Gardens and moved into a small flat in South Audley Street in Mayfair.

Evelyn appearing in Ziegfeld's production of Bitter Sweet in 1930

On the 2nd June 1930 the decree nisi granted, in absence to Jessie Matthews against Henry Lytton, was made absolute. Five weeks later in the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, Evelyn Laye’s divorce petition came before Sir Maurice Hill – a judge who was close to retirement but particularly averse, in almost a prehistoric fashion, to divorce.

Evelyn Laye wasn’t present as she was filming One Heavenly Night in Hollywood, however, and against all advice, Jessie Matthews decided to attend. She realised her mistake when her letters to Sonnie were read out in open court:

‘My Darling, I want you and need you badly, all of you, and for a very long time. I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs, which you love so much, are waiting for you also.’

At one point Jessie Matthews fainted during the reading of one letter and had to be helped outside but this didn’t help with the brutal severity of the judge’s final comments:

‘It is quite clear that the husband admits himself to be a cad, and nobody will quarrel with that, and the woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.’

Evelyn Laye in One Heavenly Night 1930

Evelyn Laye and John Boles in One Heavenly Night

Evelyn Laye in 1933

Jessie and Sonnie Hale on their wedding day.

Jessie Matthews and Evelyn Laye, not surprisingly, hardly spoke to each other again – quite difficult, one suspects, in the relatively small world in which they lived and worked. In January 1931 Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews married at Hampstead registry office.

After all the scandal that the relationship had caused it wasn’t a particularly long and happy marriage and Jessie had many affairs including Salvador Dali during a holiday in Barcelona, and the bisexual actors Tyrone Power and Danny Kaye.

It was while she was performing with Kaye in a disastrous Broadway musical that Matthews had the worst of her breakdowns and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and the hospital reported to Hale that she was ‘on the edge of madness’.

When Jessie returned to Britain she found out that Hale had fallen in love with the nanny who had been employed to look after their adoptive daughter and a year later they were divorced.

Jessie Matthews in a blonde wig appearing in Evergreen 1930

Jessie Matthews never retained the popularity of her pre-war years. Her style of dancing and singing appeared old fashioned not helped by the cut-glass accent caused from her elocution lessons from when she was a teenager.

By 1970, when she was awarded an OBE, she had become, if not fat, slightly more rotund and matronly than in her lithe graceful days as an actress and dancer during the twenties and thirties. Around this time Evelyn Laye, seeing her perform at an all-star charity gala, said waspishly:

‘Oh look, the dear little boobs have become apple dumplings.’

Evelyn Laye married again in 1936 to the handsome young actor Frank Lawton who ironically had been at the late supper at the Gargoyle club where Laye and Matthews had first formerly met. They were happily married until Lawton’s death in 1969 and Evelyn continued to work in the theatre until well into her nineties.

Evelyn Laye and her second husband Frank Lawton

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6NMrYrBNis

Evelyn Laye in One Heavenly Night

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjquAEjkrrs

Jessie Matthews in Evergreen

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1XkhEw0hQI

Jessie Matthews in First a Girl

A lot of the information for this post has come from the biography of Jessie Matthews by Michael Thornton which although out of print can be found here.

Two songs made famous by Jessie Matthews sang by two of her contemporaries:

Noel Coward – Room With A View

Al Bowlly – Over My Shoulder

Jessie Matthews DVDs and music can be bought here
Evelyn Laye music can be bought here, alas copies of her films seem to be short on the ground, although apparently her acting style, like Jessie’s singing, has dated somewhat. It’s safe to say that her extraordinary beauty certainly hasn’t.

He would, wouldn’t he?

For two years in the early sixties Mandy Rice-Davies, the girl with the bit-part in the profumo affair, lived at 1 Bryanston Mews West in Marylebone not far from the Edgware Road. It was owned by the infamous slum landlord Peter Rachman and featured a two-way mirror and a tape-recorder under the bed.

Rice-Davies initially came down to London from her family home in Sollihull in 1960. Although just sixteen she was Miss Austin for the launch of the new mini at the Earl’s Court Motor show. She was impressed with the glamourous receptions and parties that went with the week of modelling and soon decided to move to London permanently. She found herself a job as a showgirl at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho, an intimate club for 110 guests with deep-red carpets and gilt furniture. It was a place where topless showgirls mingled with gangsters, celebrities and royals – it was said that Princess Margaret was a member.

It was at Murray’s that that Mandy met Christine Keeler, one of the protagonists of the Profumo affair – ‘It was dislike at first sight,’ Rice-Davies recalled, and the feeling was mutual. However they both found themselves at the same parties and the two became close friends, working well together and seemingly complimenting each other – Rice-Davies was shrewd and had a head for money, Keeler did not and was generally disorganised. They also worked well in the bedroom, bringing them money for expensive clothes and lifestyles.

Stephen Ward 1963

It was Christine Keeler who introduced her to Stephen Ward, the well-connected osteopath and pimp and it was through him, and the orgiastic parties he organised, that she met many powerful politicians including Viscount Astor – a member of MacMillan’s Government in the early sixties. These characters became the major players in probably the greatest, well the most fun anyway, political scandal of the 20th century – the Profumo Affair.

John Profumo 1963

Rice-Davies, ironically, never actually met John Profumo although she will always be connected to the scandal because of her brilliant, withering and pithy riposte to the prosecution council – “He would, wouldn’t he?” when told at Stephen Ward’s court case that Viscount Astor denied ever having slept with her or even having ever met her. This brazen riposte perfectly summed up the public’s perception that the Establishment was riddled with hidden scandal and hypocrisy. At the end of the trial Stephen Ward couldn’t prove that Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler’s rent hadn’t come from the proceedings of prostitution and he was was convicted on two counts. On bail, Ward killed himself on the last day of the trial before hearing the inevitable verdict.

Mandy Rice-Davies had been the mistress of Peter Rachman a man now so infamous that his name is included in English dictionaries – ‘the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords.’ Mandy was introduced to Rachman by Stephen Ward (they had been partners in a failed topless coffeebar venture) soon after she had arrived in London, and although their affair began on a professional basis it apparently turned into a pretty genuine relationship. Christine Keeler described them as “well matched, they had a material happiness together.”

Unlike his other girls the 17 year old Mandy accompanied him on visits to the theatre, opera and even Wimbledon and also hostessing his gambling sessions attended by aristocrats and gangsters. Rachman, by all accounts, was a pretty unpleasant man and looked, not unlike, an Ian Fleming villain. He was short and fat, with very tiny hands and feet, no neck and a head that looked like a football. He also had a fetish about hygiene insisting that all his silverware be sterilised and untouched by human hands.

Rachman became ill towards the end of 1962 and on November 29 died at Edgware General Hospital with his wife Audrey at his bedside after a second heart attack. It was assumed by everyone who knew him that he would be very rich, but after the creditors had picked the bones of his estate it was valued at a mere £8000. His property empire was just an elaborate juggling act and with his death the balls all came tumbling down. Even his Rolls Royce was on HP with instalments overdue.

Mandy Rice-Davies had just returned from Paris and although she had recently finished her affair with Rachman, immediately fainted when told of his death by Stephen Ward. When she came round the first thing she said was “Did he leave a will?”

Rachman’s infamy, it could be said, came by chance when his name was connected to the the Profumo Affair. He was already dead from the heart attack when the scandal had reached its peak and by the time he died Rachman had practically extricated himself from his slum empire. Even the rent tribunals with their horrific evidence had remained unreported in the press.

If he had chosen any other girl than Mandy Rice Davies as a mistress, subsequently letting her live in his Marylebone mews flat from where she and Christine often operated, the chances are his name today, other than mentions in obscure housing-law, would be completely unknown.

Unlike Christine Keeler, who never really recovered from the notoriety the Profumo Scandal accorded her, Rice-Davies revelled in the publicity, eventually marrying an Israeli businessman, Rafi Shauli. She went on to open a string of successful nightclubs in Tel Aviv called Mandy’s, Mandy’s Candies and Mandy’s Singing Bamboo. Rice-Davies also sang on a few unsuccessful pop singles for the Ember label in the mid-’60s.

With an obvious way for words, she once commented “My life has been one long descent into respectability.”

The Apple Boutique at 94 Baker Street in Marylebone opened at 8.16pm, Monday 4 December 1967 (the exact time John Lennon, for some good reason or other, decided it should open). The Beatles had commissioned the Dutch design group The Fool to design the shop and one of the first things they did was to paint the outside of the building using a team of art students.

The Beatles asked a man called Alexis Mardis, known to their entourage as ‘Magic Alex’, to design the lighting for the shop, and one thing he promised was an artificial ‘sun’ using laser beams that would light up the sky during the boutique’s gala opening. Unfortunately, and to no surprise to a lot of people who weren’t taking the same amount of hallucinegic drugs the Beatles were, the artificial Sun did not materialise. It wasn’t, however, until about a year later that the Beatles realised that practically anything Magic Alex promised to invent or produce, failed to get passed the drawing board, or indeed even get on to a drawing board.

Throughout most of 1967 The Beatles as a group, and especially John, were heavily into psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD. In the early part of the year, John Lennon was at a party where he was given some LSD by Alexis Mardas. While Lennon was feeling the psychedelic effects, Alexis took the opportunity to describe to John his interest in electronics (in actuality his ‘expertise’ came only from being a former TV repairman), describing a variety of things such as car paint that would change colour at the flick of a switch, an invisible curtain of ultrasonic vibrations that would shield the Beatles from the screams of their fans and electronic wallpaper that would make any room into a huge loudspeaker.

Mardas was patently charismatic, and given the inventions he described and John’s mental state, Lennon decided that he liked Magic Alex and befriended him. He soon introduced him to the rest of the Beatles: “This is my new guru: Magic Alex” he said. McCartney was surprised at this but later wrote “Because John had introduced him as a guru, there was perhaps a little pressure on him to behave as a guru”. Alex soon became a major player in The Beatles ever-growing entourage and was actually the person who told Cynthia Lennon that John would be divorcing her while trying to seduce her at the same time. He ended up sharing a flat with Jenny Boyd, George Harrison’s sister in law and an employee at the Apple Boutique.

The Beatles created a division of Apple called ‘Apple Electronics’ especially for Magic Alex. Money was poured into the company but most people, especially George Martin, realised that he had just rudimentary electronic skills – the Beatles however trusted him. Mardas was given the job of designing the Beatles’ new recording studio in the basement of Apple Headquarters in Savile Row partly because he had told them he was able to produce the World’s first 72-track tape machine (remember an 8-track recorder in those days state of the art).

During the year Mardas gave regular reports on how he was doing (and apparently spending ten million pounds in the process) but when they required the new studio in January 1969 to record what was to become known as Let It Be, The Beatles found a set of cramped rooms with no talkback, no soundproofing, and no wiring between the studio and the control room. There was one crude mixing console that Mardas had built but that had to be thrown away after just one session. The group were livid and embarassed and Alex was largely dismissed from their circle, disappearing relatively quickly into obscurity.

John’s letter inviting Magic Alex for dinner probably to explain ‘what the hell is going on?’

When asked to explain his involvement with The Beatles, Magic Alex said “Man is just a small glass, very, very clear, with many faces, like a diamond. You just have to find the way, the small door to each face.” I suppose if you’ve taken a shed-load of LSD that makes total and utter sense.

Roll up! Roll up! Everything’s free, man.