Mary Quant, 1963

These days the King’s Road looks not unlike many other high-streets across the country, albeit a bit posher. If you stroll down the road you’ll see, just like anywhere else, Boots, McDonald’s and the ubiquitous coffee-shop chains.  In fact, always a trend-setter, the King’s Road was where Starbucks chose to open its first ever UK coffee-shop in 1998.

The Kings Road has earned its notoriety for setting rather more exciting trends than over-priced milky coffee of course and it was here that perhaps the most celebrated fashion-statement of the last century really took off – the mini-skirt.

Everybody knows that Mary Quant invented the mini-skirt. Except she didn’t. In reality nobody really knows for sure who produced the diminutive garment first. Some say it was John Bates, famous for dressing Diana Rigg in The Avengers so memorably. Others say it was the French designer Andre Courreges, although Quant would later write: “Maybe Courreges did do mini-skirts first, but if he did, no one wore them.”

There is no doubt that skirts were getting shorter each year in the early to mid-sixties but this was almost certainly to do with technological advances that enabled tights to be produced relatively cheaply than anything else.

It is, however, almost universally accepted that Quant invented the word ‘mini-skirt’ after naming her version of the short skirt she was designing after her favourite car – the Mini. Even this isn’t exactly true as the Daily Express and other papers used the term in the 1920s to describe the relatively short skirts of the era. It is interesting to note that in Quant’s first autobiography ‘Quant by Quant’, published in 1966, the word ‘mini-skirt’ isn’t even mentioned.

Although it was the first British Starbucks that opened at 128 King’s Road in 1998 it wasn’t the first coffee shop that opened on the premises. This was the Fantasie coffee bar which opened at the beginning of 1955, admittedly a year or so after Gina Lollobigida opened the Moka espresso cafe at 29 Frith Street, but still one of the first coffee bars in London and certainly outside Soho.

Fantasie coffee bar in 1955. A screen grab from the film Food for a Blush – released in 1959 but filmed in 1955/6

Starbucks on the King’s Road today

It was owned by an ex-solicitor called Archie McNair who lived above the cafe. He also had a photographic studio in the premises used by a young team of photographers one of whom included the young Anthony Armstrong-Jones later, of course, to become Lord Snowdon the husband of Princess Margaret.

It was at the Fantasie that McNair and his friends Mary Quant and her boyfriend Alexander Plunket Greene worked on a plan to open a boutique on the Kings Road. “It was to be a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories…sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery and peculiar odds and ends,” wrote Quant years later.

McNair initially had asked Quant and Plunket Greene to help him with starting up Fantasie but they declined both thinking that coffee bars were to be a flash in the pan. A decision they’d regret as it became crowded every night with a large group of young people who would become known as the Chelsea Set. In the evening vodka was occasionally and illegally added to the drinks and a local Chelsea-based band called the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group regularly played there. Both of which contributed to the big success of the cafe.

Chas McDevitt

Quant romantically wrote about the ‘Chelsea Set’ of the time describing a bohemian world of ‘painters, photographers, architects, writers, socialites, actors, con-men, and superior tarts’ although the author Len Deighton described the same people as ‘a nasty and roaring offshoot of the deb world’ (it seems they have never left). Deighton was upset how the new crowd ending up replacing ‘an amiable mixture of arty rich and bohemian poor’ who, rather horrifically, all had to move out of the best parts of Chelsea beyond World’s End and even to ‘cisalpine Fulham’.

In 1955 McNair and Plunket Greene managed to buy the basement and groundfloor of Markham House on the corner of Markham Square and next door to a grotty pub called the Markham Arms (now a Santander bank). They paid just £8000 for the freehold.

Bazaar

Bazaar in 1955

Bazaar and the Markham Arms (now a Santander bank) today

The King’s Road in 1958. The Bluebird Garage can be seen down the road at numbers 330-350. The garage was opened in 1923 and was the largest in Europe with room for 300 cars in the main garage.

The King’s Road today-ish. The garage is now a restaurant of course.

The shop, which they called Bazaar, opened in November 1955 and was an almost immediate success with the stock flying out of the door. Although initially this was partly to do with naively selling their clothes and accessories too cheaply thus not only losing money on everything they sold but also upsetting the local shops and their wholesalers by undercutting the fixed retail prices.

It wasn’t long, however, that the trio of entrepreneurs realised that by luck they were on to a huge thing:

We were in at the beginning of a tremendous renaissance in fashion. It was not happening because of us. It was simply that, as things turned out, we were a part of it.

Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Green

Mary Quant and APG worked incredibly hard. They had also opened a restaurant in the basement of Markham House which soon became the place to come to in Chelsea. But if they worked hard they also played hard – incredibly they were still both only twentyone.

According to Quant the couple always found time to visit the music hall shows at the Chelsea Palace theatre down the road from Bazaar. At the time the shows were often slightly risqué in nature.  “We went once a week” said Mary. “the Chelsea Palace chorus girls wore very naughty fur bikini knickers.”

It must have been a very funny show…

Paul Raymond’s ‘Burlesque’ was performed at the Chelsea Palace in 1955

Burlesque by Paul Raymond – how kind of Jeye’s Fluid to sponsor the show (see the bottom of the bill)

Chelsea Palace of Varieties

The Chelsea Palace of Varieties had opened for business in 1903 at 232-42 King’s Road on the corner of Sydney Street opposite the Town Hall. It seated 2524 people. Marie Lloyd appeared there in 1909 and performed an act so vulgar that a complaint was made to the London County Council.

By 1923 it started to be used as a cinema as well as showing straight plays and ballets. In 1925 it was taken over by Variety Theatres Consolidated and from then until its closure in March 1957 it presented live theatre, often of a risque nature. One of the shows put on in 1955 called ‘Burlesque’ was produced by Paul Raymond at the beginning of his  career.

During the latter part of 1956 the Chelsea Palace ran a Radio Luxembourg talent competition  and it was won for four weeks in a row by the Fantasie coffee shop regulars – the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group. McDevitt described his flat in Chelsea at the time:

The flat I the King’s Road was an ideal pad in an ideal position. It provided a haven for many an itinerant jazzer, visiting American folkies and unsuspecting embryo groupies.

During the Chelsea Palace talent contests McDevitt met a twenty year old Glaswegian singer called Anne Wilson whose stage name was Nancy Whiskey.

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

Within six months Nancy Whiskey and McDevitt’s skiffle group had recorded a single called Freight Train. Amazingly, to most people concerned, it actually ended up in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. They even appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in the US along side the Everly Brothers six years before the Beatles’ famous appearance.

The particularly British institution of skiffle only lasted two or three years perhaps but its influence was long-lasting. It was a do-it-yourself reaction to the bland mediocrity that many young people felt about the popular music of the time. This was echoed twenty years later in the mid-seventies with punk which had a lot of similarities with skiffle. The Kings Road played its part in that too.

With his new success Chas McDevitt opened his own coffee bar in Berwick Street in Soho which he called, of course, the Freight Train coffee bar.

The swinging sixties were a bit of a myth this is what the King’s Road really looked like.

The King’s Road: Sundays weren’t for shopping in the Sixties

In 1957 the Chelsea Palace was renamed the Chelsea Granada and was to become a cinema. Although almost immediately the building was leased to Granada Television, within the same company, and the stalls in the theatre were replaced by a studio floor and it became Granada Studio 10 for the next eight years to augment the specially built studio complex in Manchester.

Sidney Bernstein, who with his brother Cecil owned Granada and which had recently won the franchise license to broadcast commercial television in the north west of England, numbered their studios by just using even numbers. This was simply so as to appear they owned more studios than they did.

It was actually the last of the London theatre to TV studio conversions. The Shepherd’s Bush Empire was now a BBC studio and Associated Television had already converted the Hackney Empire and the Wood Green Empire.

Incidentally it was at the Wood Green theatre in 1918 that the American magician known as Chung Ling Soo, (or William Robinson as he was really called) was tragically shot and fatally injured while performing his infamous act which involved catching (or not) a bullet between his teeth.

His last words were “Oh my God. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain.” It shocked everyone. Not so much that he had been shot but that he wasn’t Chinese and spoke perfect English.

William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, told almost no one that he wasn’t Chinese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-yeL-68E58

Boris Karloff wonders ‘Who Killed Chung Ling Soo’.

Studio 10 was used for the long running and extremely popular comedy series – the Army Game which ran for five years from 1957. An incredible 154 episodes were broadcast and the cast included many that would become household names for decades to come – Alfie Bass, Geoffrey Palmer, Bill Fraser, Dick Emery and Bernard Bresslaw and the writers included a young John Junkin, Marty Feldman and Barry Took.

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

The Army Game

Another very popular show that came from Granada’s King’s Road studio was the variety show called Chelsea at Nine. It ran for three series and purposely took advantage of the studio’s location in the capital to feature artists that were appearing in town. This meant that sometimes you would get one of the finest jazz musicians on earth playing after a comedian that would struggle to get on the end of a bill in Skegness.

Ella Fitzgerald once had to introduce an act who was appearing after her on the show as ‘the world’s greatest song and dance spoons man’. She laughed and laughed and simply couldn’t do it.

On the 23^rd of February 1959 a very gaunt and very unsteady Billie Holiday was helped up on stage and performed three songs. Strange Fruit, Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone and I Loves You Porgy. Luckily for us the shows were by then being recorded but they proved to be the last she ever made and she died just five months later of cirrhosis of the liver in a New York hospital on 17^th July. Only Strange Fruit and I Loves You Porgy still survive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbcZstt8ACY

Billie Holiday – I Loves You Porgy

The Chelsea Palace was shamefully demolished by developers in 1966 after Granada vacated the premises. If one day you’re buying a sofa in Heals which is situated on the corner of the King’s Road and Sydney Street where the Chelsea Palace once stood, you might take a few moments to note that one of the world’s greatest ever singers sang a few songs maybe just where you’re standing.

Heals today and not the Chelsea Palace

King’s Road in 1967

By the time the Chelsea Palace was demolished the miniskirt was ubiquitous on the King’s Road and pretty well everywhere else. In the ten years since she and APK had opened Bazaar she had become an international success. Quant and her clothes were an integral part of the so-called Swinging London. At the age of 32, dressed of course in a miniskirt, she received an OBE from the Queen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB5eIfHXkWQ

Brilliant Pathé footage of Mary Quant in 1967

Loudon Wainwright who wrote a column for Life magazine and was based in London

In 1967 Loudon Wainwright, father of Loudon Wainwright III and grandfather to Rufus and Martha was working in London for Life magazine. In his column called ‘The View From Here’ he wrote:

Until very recently one of my least crucial handicaps has been a sort of built-in propriety which, for example has forced me to avert my eyes whenever I say that a lady was going to have difficulty with her skirt. By difficulty I mean that the skirt was threatening to go up too high – in a chair, in the wind, as its owner disembarked from a taxi.

Loudon continues…

I’m not sure how this propriety has survived the miniskirt fashions…but a few days of lovely spring weather in London have abolished it forever. The balmy sunshine there brought out the miniskirts in mind-reeling profusion. The town was positively atwinkle with thighs…the training of years misspent in the useless protection of female modesty betrayed me, and I had to learn how to stare. Yet soon the delightful truth that I was supposed to notice -  burst upon me..

A few months later Mary Quant was interviewed in the Guardian

That’s the thing about today’s fashions – they’re sexy to look at but really more puritan than they’ve ever been. In European countries where they ban mini-skirts in the streets and say they’re an invitation to rape, they don’t understand about stocking tights underneath.

Miniskirts and men outside Bazaar in 1966/7

Mary Quant and APG in 1964

I recommend Max Décharné’s utterly fascinating book The King’s Road – The Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World It’s packed with so much extraordinary information about this fascinating street in Chelsea and inspired this piece.

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 peered at a passenger’s Canadian passport, looked up and said casually;

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

The man he called Mr Sneyd offered no protest and followed him into the office. His demeanour changed as soon as he saw a policeman in the room and he blurted out, “Oh God, I feel so trapped”. The bespectacled Mr Sneyd was found to not only have another passport on his person but also a .38 caliber revolver stuffed in his back pocket.

An hour later Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, a man who had become well known to the British public after the arrest of the Great Train Robbers four years previously and not particularly prone to shyness when it came to publicity, arrived at Heathrow to make the arrest. 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 fired the Remington rifle that had killed Dr King, Ray had driven across the Canadian border and rented a room in Toronto. It was well-known amongst American prisoners, and Ray had been an habitual but unsuccessful criminal pretty well all his adult life, that it was ludicrously easy to get a Canadian passport. All you really had to do, essentially, was swear that you were Canadian and ask for one. Ray requested 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 on the following 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, had launched their biggest manhunt in their history but there seemed to be almost no leads at all. On June 1, however, 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 this was all going on, Ray was in Lisbon working out his next move. He attempted to change his fake passport but only got as far as changing the ‘d’ in Sneyd to an ‘a’ – telling the Canadian consul: “My name has been misspelled,” and with no questions asked he was issued with a new passport on May 16.

Earls Court in 1968. Photographer Bill Holmes

The following 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 seedy and run-down street in those days. Jane Nassau the receptionist at the hotel 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 told reporters that for the next three days Ray never left his room for more than 20 minutes. He even refused 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

It was never revealed how he got the number, but on June 6 while staying at the Pax Hotel, Ray 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

Ray was charged at Cannon Row police station with possessing a forged passport and having a firearm without a certificate but on June 14th when he 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”

Ray almost certainly did kill Martin Luther King and he was quickly extradited to the States and charged with his murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (although 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

On June 11, 1977, Ray and six others escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee but recaptured three days later. A year was added to Ray’s previous sentence, to total 100 years.

James Earl Ray died in 1998 at the age of 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.

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

The author Adam Diment in 1967 with two lovely ladies. In the distance, at 120 King’s Road is the Thomas Crapper shop. It had just closed down.

The October 1967 edition of Michael Heseltine’s Town magazine featured an interview with the fashionable twenty-three year old author Adam Diment. The introduction said that he was:

“Hoping to move from his Fulham Road flat to trendy King’s Road, where his tight pink trousers and matching floral shirt will be more appreciated.”

In the late sixties moving a few hundred yards from one area of west London to another was like travelling to a different country. Diment knew he could afford the expensive move because after the publication of his first novel The Dolly, Dolly Spy, Diment suddenly became the most talked-about author in town. That year Publishers’ Weekly wrote about the novel:

A kinky, cool mod flare that is outrageously entertaining….If you appreciate clever plotting, plenty of excitement, sex at its most uninhibited, a dollop or two of explicit sadism, Adam Diment is a name to remember.

Except he wasn’t, and Diment is almost totally forgotten about these days. He wrote three more books – The Spying Game and The Dolly, Dolly Birds which were both published in 1968 and a fourth novel Think Inc that was published in 1971. After which, suddenly, he completely disappeared from public view.

His four novels, although entertaining romps through the swinging sixties, are hugely dated these days and are peppered with the era’s casual sexism and racism that make the James Bond novels appear as if they were written by Andrea Dworkin.

“Despite her lovely body it was her face which had me hooked. I do not belong to that philistine philosophy which propounds the ‘put a sack over their heads and they’re all the same’ nonsense. I like to watch something pretty and interesting when collecting my oats, and her face is certainly that. At present she was doing a languorous chameleon change from perplexed to pout.” - The Bang Bang Birds

“She was wearing her latest acquisition, bought in a boutique in King’s Road which is a cross between an Eastern bazaar and a rugger scrum. It was very short and covered with overlapping blue and yellow flowers. Over her heart, which was almost visible because it was as low at the breast as it was short at the thighs, was a bright pink heart…as she was so brown, she had given up wearing stockings. Veronica was about as naked as you can get these days without being nicked for indecency.” - The Dolly, Dolly Spy

The Bang Bang Birds published in 1968

The Dolly, Dolly Spy published in 1967

The books were all thrillers featuring a reluctant spy called Philip McAlpine. The sex-hungry hero was suspiciously similar in appearance to the writer and Diment, it seems, was very happy for this blurred confusion to continue. Especially, the marijuana smoking and the preponderance of girls. Fleet Street seemed genuinely intrigued with the similarity between hero and author and Atticus in the Sunday Times wrote:

Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls and pot.

While the Daily Mirror wrote:

McAlpine is the most modern hero in years. He’s hip, he’s hard, he likes birds and, sometimes, marijuana.

Adam Diment smoking a ‘hashish cigarette’.

More hashish with companion Suzie Mandrake in 1967

Adam with the artist Tim Whidborne, Anne McAuley and Victoria Brooke. 1967

Adam “I’ve got my eyes closed I promise” Diment with Tim Whidbourne presumably pretending to paint Suzie Mandrake.

On the inside cover of the 1969 edition of The Bang Bang Birds it says that “At present THE DOLLY DOLLY SPY is being filmed with David Hemmings as Philip McAlpine. A Stanley Canter/Desmond Elliott production for release by United Artists”. It’s worth noting that David Hemmings was at the height of his career at this stage – the premier of Blow Up was in October 1967 and both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Barberella were released in 1968.

The film came to nothing and whether filming ever took place or was halted half way through nobody seems to remember. Although there are pictures of Adam seen with David Hemmings and one of the producers Desmond Elliott.

Adam with David Hemmings in 1967.

Adam with Desmond Elliott and Suzie Mandrake.

Adam Diment published his final novel Think Inc in 1971 and then completely disappeared without trace. Except for one thing. Last year a few documents relating to Adam Diment (F.A. Diment) were released by the National Archives and amongst them were two anonymous letters written in March 1969 to the department of Exchange Control of the Bank of England.

Both the letters seemed to accuse Adam Diment of some kind of currency swindle involving the export of 2400 dollars which had been paid by the film producer Stanley Canter and one letter even mentions that there were suspicions that it may have been some kind of drug-deal.

Whether the currency swindle was anything to do with the non-completion of the film of The Dolly Dolly Spy or was the cause of Diment’s disappearance, there seems to be no clue. One of the letters, however, imparts the important piece of information that Adam Diment, despite telling Town magazine otherwise, never seemed to have made the move to The King’s Road as he was still living in the tight-pink-trousers-fearing Fulham at 28 Tregunter Road.

Adam with Victoria Brooke and a Tiger Moth

Ray Charles – Let’s Go Get Stoned

Muddy Waters – Champagne and Reefer

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

Eel Pie Island, 31st August 1960

I found these rather fantastic photographs from Google’s Life magazine collection. They feature some teenagers at a ‘rave’ on Eel Pie Island at Twickenham on a Wednesday night August 31 1960. There is practically no other information other than the photographs were taken by a Peter Hall (I’m presuming not the theatre impresario who became Sir Peter Hall).

Does anyone know anything about the parties held on the island at the time and what kind of music would they have been listening to? Was it some kind of jazz? There seems to be a sort of young scruffy beatnik sort of style going on.

Two girls called Marian Dawson and Kathleen Mayo, the original caption made sure we knew that Kathleen is holding her boyfriend's drink while drinking apple juice.

Dirty feet on Eel Pie Island

The wall decoration is described as 'beatnik graffiti'.

The two girls would be in their late sixties now.

Charles Mingus – Boogie Stop Shuffle
Charles Mingus – Better Git It In Your Soul

Buy Charles Mingus’s Ah Um here

Peter Hall’s Eel Pie Island photos are here

Drug taking, couples making love while others look on, a heavy mob armed with iron bars, filth and stench, foul language, that is the scene inside the hippies’ fortress in London’s Piccadilly. The People

Three rather wimpy 'Hells Angels' guarding 144 Piccadilly September 1969

At around 11.30am on Sunday 21st September 1969, a slightly-built Chief Inspector convinced the hippies inside the squat at 144 Piccadilly to lower an improvised wooden drawbridge so the police could help a seriously ill person inside.

The drawbridge came down and Chief Inspector Michael Rowling flung himself bravely across the barricaded opening to establish a bridgehead. It was an old trick, no doubt played out a thousand times back in the (medieval) day, and sure enough a police-whistle shrilled and seemingly from everywhere a hundred policemen charged over the drawbridge, drawing their truncheons as they got in through the door. Unfortunately they trampled all over the Chief Inspector in the process.

The raiding policemen had to brave slates, water filled bowls, bricks and one petrol bomb raining down upon them but it was only four minutes after the police charged in, a policeman was seen at the top of the mansion raising his truncheon in triumph. Not long after and to cheers for the thousands of onlookers on the street below, the Hells Angel’s flag was lowered from the flagpole.

As he was being led outside by the police, Dr John, the ‘so called’ leader of the squatters, screamed at the press and the crowds in the street;

“They conned us! They tricked us!”

The nice round number of exactly one hundred people were taken to custody with twenty-seven adults and three juveniles arrested for offences ranging from assault to drug possession. There were no bad casualties although many of the occupants complained of being beaten by the Police (no video phones or palm-corders in those days). The occupation of Hippydilly was over, just three weeks after it had begun.

"We don't want to split the scene, man."

The party at Hippydilly.

This is far out, man. Do you think I can fly dude.

September 1969 was the height of the anti-hippy scare-mongering from the British press and they fell upon the siege at 144 Piccadilly with glee. The Daily Telegraph noted that on the eviction of the squat a hospital governor had vomited, a police-woman became ill, and a policeman refused to allow his dog into the squat, all ‘because of the filth’. Most of the tabloids had sent in undercover reporters into number 144 and the News of the World described the squat as:

‘Lit only by the dim light of their drugged cigarettes’.

While the People had declared under the headline – HIPPIES – DRUGS – THE SORDID TRUTH!

Drug taking, couples making love while others look on, a heavy mob armed with iron bars, filth and stench, foul language, that is the scene inside the hippies’ fortress in London’s Piccadilly. These are not rumours but facts, sordid facts which will shock ordinary decent living people. Drug taking and squalor, sex – and they’ll get no state aid…

The squatters at 144 were originally organised by a group of young people who called themselves The London Street Commune and led by the almost mythical Dr John (he may have been Phil Cohen who was part of the anarchist group King Mob). The organisation had been created to help find somewhere for hundreds of hippies that were sleeping rough in London’s parks to stay overnight.

144 Piccadilly, an empty five-storey disused mansion at Hyde Park corner seemed an ideal place to set up a communal squat.

A bored hippy bemoaning the lack of facilities and furniture: "I think I'll crash on the floor, man."

"I think I'm gonna blow this place, man. I've lost my shoes."

At one point during the siege some media-incited skinheads (then as now the tabloids were skilful at contriving stories) turned up in the night to shoot air-guns at the squatters. They must have been so shocked and surprised when suddenly hundreds of incongruous water-filled carpet boules, thousands of which had been stored in the empty building prior to the take-over, started raining down upon their shaven heads.

Skinheads had started to become more and more popular as a sort of tough working class alternative to to the ‘love and peace, man’ image of the middle-class hippies. The heavy carpet boules thrown by the hippies from several storeys high (while underneath a graffitied sign saying ‘We Love Peace’) easily defeated the skinheads and their air-guns. The skinheads attempt to invade the squat was quickly over.

We Love Peace, man, unless skinheads are involved.

Skinheads off to get their airguns for some hippy hunting

Water-filled carpet boules. Deadly weapons.

On the 20th September (the day before the police raid on the squad) there was a free festival at Hyde Park. It was the third of free festivals in the park that summer and admittedly the one that has been forgotten (the first featured the super group Blind Faith and the second was the famous Stones performance after the death of Brian Jones). The third festival featured Soft Machine, the Deviants, Quintessence, Al Stewart and the Edgar Broughton Band who as usual finished with their fans favourite ‘Out Demons Out’.

Many of the visitors to the Hyde Park concert would have come from out of town and many of them went to visit 144 Piccadilly which had been extensively in the news by that time. Many of them must have tried to stay the night there, not having anywhere else to stay, and must have unfortunately been caught up in the raid the next day.

Hyde Park audience 20th September 1969

Hyde Park, man.

When the police raided the squat, after a high court order to leave had been ignored, most of the onlookers, many of whom had been there overnight, cheered. The developer Ronnie Lyons (infamous for inventing the industrial estate) was seen going into West End Central Police Station and donating £1000 to police charities in appreciation of a good job done in getting rid of the hippies from 144 Piccadilly.

144 Piccadilly stayed empty for three more years until it was knocked down, despite being listed, in favour of a huge modern luxury hotel called Hotel Intercontinental Park Lane which still, unfortunately, stands on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly today. If you feel like staying there it did have a 63 million pound refit only three years ago. I’m sure its very good value at £329 for their cheapest room.

A hippy being escorted from the premises.

We are the writing on your wall

Edgar Broughton Band – Out Demons Out

Fairport Convention – Genesis Hall

In a basement flat on the corner of Liverpool Road and Furlong Road in Islington, the freshly monikered Elton John (to his friends and even himself it was still Reg) lived with his writing partner Bernie Taupin and his fiancé Linda Woodrow. On the 7th June 1968 Elton had written to an old school friend writing “Just a few lines to let you know I am getting married on 22nd June at Uxbridge Registary (sic) offices … Well if you think it’s a bit sudden you’re right. Seeing as we were living together we thought as well get married. Nothing much happening record-wise because I’ve got problems with my record company at the moment. Reg.”.

Only a week or so before Elton wrote the invite, Bernie and Linda were both having a an afternoon nap in their Furlong Road flat. Linda recalled ‘I came out of my room and Bernie came out of his, both thinking we’d heard a noise. We went into the kitchen, and there was Elton lying with his head in the the gas oven.’

Bernie quickly pulled Elton away from the oven fearing the worst but soon noticed that the gas was only turned to ‘low’ and the kitchen window was wide open. Elton had even thoughtfully placed a cushion in the oven to make his suicide attempt slightly more comfortable and in the end Linda merely remarked that it was just a waste of good gas.

Although the suicide attempt hardly seemed wholehearted it was nevertheless a cry of help from a man who was getting more and more confused and upset about his life. He was actually in a deep depression about his career, the failure of his first single and the continued false dawns and disappointments trying to sell his and Bernie’s songs. He was also coming to terms about his sexuality although up to then it didn’t really occur to anyone not least himself that he was anything but heterosexual. The lack of interest in women was just seen as a symptom of his shyness.

Towards the end of 1967 Dwight announced to the surprised members of Bluesology, a band led by the tall 6ft 7 inch singer Long John Baldry and for which he played keyboards, that he had ‘pulled a bird’. Bluesology had played at a nightclub called Fiesta in Sheffield and watching the band was a very short man who called himself The Mighty Atom, a DJ at the local Locarno ballroom, accompanied by a skinny blonde girl called Linda. The Mighty Atom apparently drove around town in a white E-Type Jaguar with wooden risers on the pedals and they must have made an odd couple as Linda was just shy of six feet.

Linda and Reg quickly found a lot in common and she travelled around with him for the last few dates of the Bluesology tour. At the end of the tour, just before Christmas 1967, Reg announced that he was leaving the band. Although Elton had been getting more and more frustrated about not being able to sing, it hadn’t helped that Baldry had just got to number one with the syrupy ballad ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ – when he sang the hit a backing track was used and the rest of the band had to stand around doing nothing but looking suitably morose. Before Reg parted company he asked politely if he could borrow parts of Elton Dean, the saxophonist, and Long John Baldry’s names to re-name himself Elton John.

Linda and Elton found a basement flat in Furlong Road and Bernie Taupin soon moved in with them in the spare room. Linda was heiress to the Epicure Pickle company could live off a comfortable trust fund. Philip Norman, Elton’s biographer wrote that Elton had begun his affair with Linda “in the spirit of a non-swimmer, plunging headlong with eyes shut and fingers pinching nose, hoping that, if he went straight in at the deep end, everything would somehow sort itself out”.

Elton's first photo-shoot in 1968

It of course didn’t and in June 1968, three weeks before the proposed wedding, Elton was having a drink with Long John (who was to be Best Man) and Bernie at the Bag O’ Nails club in Kingsly Street where they both tried to dissuade him from the marrying Linda. Bernie remembered that Baldry, by then an unrepentant’out’ gay man, went on at Elton all evening – ‘It’s absurd, you don’t love really love her, you’re just being a damned fool…’. Almost certainly Baldry pointed out a few things about Elton’s sexuality that he might not been entirely aware of. Although Elton has since written “I cannot believe I never realised that he was gay. I mean, I didn’t realise I was gay at that time, but looking back on it now, John couldn’t have been any more gay if he tried”.

Long John Baldry on Top Of The Pops 1968

Long John Baldry, although to his many fans after the success of ‘Heartaches’ wouldn’t have had a clue, was as flamboyantly ‘out’ to his friends as it was possible to be in 1968. Which possibly shows Elton’s innocence at the time but it has to be noted that homosexuality had only been legal in the UK for less than a year. Baldry had become rich (for a short time) from the number one hit and was leading a very hedonistic life in 1968, often attending the non-stop party at the home of Oliver composer Lionel Bart, who shared his interest in young men – the age of consent for gay men at the time was, of course, twenty-one.

Baldry’s sister Margaret does not go into detail, but does reveal that “some of them were very young. John was blackmailed on a couple of occasions. I used to meet a lot of these young guys who were way beyond their years, and they were clearly out to get his money.”

Baldry at the hairdresser John Stephen in Carnaby Street 1968

By the time the Bag O’ Nails closed Baldry, Elton and Bernie were joined by PJ Proby and also Cindy Birdsong from The Supremes, all acting as celebrity agony aunts and telling him that it was wrong to marry Linda.

PJ Proby

At four in the morning, and drunk, Bernie and Elton trudged back to Furlong Road. Elton was determined to finish the relationship and that night he did just that. ‘All hell broke loose’ according to Bernie with Linda pretending that she was pregnant and that she would commit suicide in the hope that Elton would change his mind. All to no avail.

In the morning Elton called his mother and in a few hours a van drew up outside the Furlong Road flat driven by his stepfather Derf Farebrother. In less than an hour Elton, Bernie and their respective record collections made the journey back to Elton’s family home at 30a Frome Court, Northwood Hills. Bernie and Elton were still sharing bunk beds at his old family home eighteen months later. Elton by then a huge star.

Long John Baldry, immortalised as Sugar Bear in Elton’s song ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ never repeated the success of ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’. However he will always be remembered as instrumental in the birth of British blues and a link between black American blues and British rock. Other than Elton John he played with Mick Jagger before the Rolling Stones existed, went to school with Charlie Watts where they started a Jazz and Blues appreciation society and he famously found an 18 year old Rod Stewart singing a version of John Lee Hooker’s Dimples on the platform at Twickenham station.

After recording a relatively successful album in 1971 called ‘Take It Easy’, a side each produced by the now very famous Elton and Rod Stewart, Baldry moved to Canada in 1978 where he recorded sporadically including a record called ‘Out’ which could either have been about his sexuality or that he had recently been released after being institutionalised due to mental health problems. He died of a severe chest infection in 2005. It was always difficult for Baldry to accept that he was more well-known for who he knew and who had played in his bands than for his music.

Linda Woodrow (now Hannon) lives in America and seemingly still bitter about Elton John and the, it has to be said, slightly misogynistic and one-sided ‘Someone Saved My Life’. Making up for not marrying Elton in 1968 she has since married four times.

The Mighty Atom has now sensibly reverted back to his real name Chris Crossley and is now an artist in Brincliffe, Sheffield.

The Mighty Atom today

Reg's erstwhile fiance Linda Woodrow in 2007

Linda Woodrow and The Mighty Atom today

“Will you marry me? It’s risky, but you’ll get fucked regularly”.

The angry young playwright in Chelsea 1958

“I think the writer is trying to say: ‘Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I am, Ma!”.

Terence Rattigan in 1955

In actuality, after the first night the Guardian wrote: “The author and actors do not persuade us that they ‘speak for’ a new generation.” The London Evening Standard called the play “a self-pitying snivel”.

The next day the director of the play Tony Richardson and Osborne sat in the little coffee shop next to the Royal Court theatre utterly depressed. Richardson broke the silence, and said:

“But what on earth did you expect? You didn’t expect them to like it, did you?”

Although the play was generally initially dismissed by most of the critics, a prescient 39 year old Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer -

“All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage … I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”

Kenneth Tynan with Claire Bloom

Kenneth Haigh and Osborne 1956

Kings Road in 1958

Kenneth Haigh and Mary Ure in the last scene of Look Back In Anger

Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave

‘Anger’, as luvvies are apt to call the play, initially took very little money and the production was seen pretty much as a miserable failure. However, a few weeks into the run, the BBC decided to broadcast a short excerpt of the play one evening. The listeners liked what they heard, decided to go and see the play for themselves and takings immediately doubled at the box office. The effect snowballed and the play eventually transferred to the West End, subsequently to Broadway and was made into a film in 1958 starring Richard Burton. It certainly wasn’t overnight but Osborne had now become a very famous angry young man indeed.

Richard Burton and Claire Bloom during the making of the film

Richard Burton at the opening night of the film 1958

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKk5gzEhphY

Osborne in 1971

Osborne went on to write successful plays such as The Entertainer (starring Sir Laurence Olivier), Luther and A Patriot For Me. He also won an oscar for his adaptation of Tom Jones in 1963. He occasionally continued acting and his acting role in the 1971 film Get Carter was highly regarded and indeed was a brilliant menacing performance.

By the early seventies, however, depression and alcoholism set in. Bad reviews of his latest unfashionable plays didn’t help and were woundingly taken to heart. For instance the Financial Times’ BA Young’s review of his play Sense of Attachment which was put on in 1972 – “This must surely be an end to his career in the theatre”.

Writers, and artists in general, are often excused character defects and bad behaviour, for the sake of their art, but the treatment Osborne dealt out to most of the women in his life (and surprisingly, considering his behaviour, there were a lot of them with five wives and numerous affairs) was often extremely vile and misogynistic.

He left his first wife shortly before the opening of Look Back In Anger, and subsequently married Mary Ure the leading actress in the play and the film. They lived in a house in Woodfall Street just off the Kings Road a few hundred yards from The Royal Court Theatre. It was a marriage that would only last five years and his love life was, by the early sixties, extremely complicated. He was on holiday in the South of France with his mistress the beautiful flame-haired dress designer Jocelyn Rickard in 1961, while at home Mary Ure was giving birth to a son (to be fair it probably wasn’t Osborne’s). At the same time, in Italy, the journalist Penelope Gilliatt, and future mother of his daughter, received a charming marriage proposal by letter;

“will you marry me? It’s risky, but you’ll get fucked regularly”.

Osborne and his bride and leading lady Mary Ure, August 1957

Osborne, Mary Ure, Vivien Leigh and Olivier

Osborne, the moustache and Jill Bennett at their wedding in 1968

John Osborne and Jill Bennett in 1969

The letter worked (one day I will understand women) and a year later he married Gilliatt with whom he had a daughter. As usual the marriage was a relatively short-lived affair, and he married the actress Jill Bennett in 1968. Again the marriage soon became unhappy and the couple, both drinking extremely heavily, ended up viciously trying to put each other down. At a party she once shouted;

“Look at him, the poofter can’t even get it up.”

Jill Bennett committed suicide in 1990, two years after their divorce. Osborne decided to add a spiteful extra chapter to his memoirs – expressing pity that he hadn’t been able to look into her open coffin and “drop a good, large mess in her eye”. Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’ was played at her funeral.

When Gilliatt also fell in to irreversible alcoholism, their daughter Nolan, who had been brought up in New York with her mother, came to live with Osborne and his fifth wife Helen, then both living in Kent. It was a chance for him to make amends for his own unhappy childhood (his father died of TB when Osborne was 10, for which, some reason, he always blamed his mother) but after just three years Osborne threw Nolan out of his house, removing her from school for good measure. She was just seventeen. Her only crime seems to have been typical teenage sullen behaviour and a lack of interest in her father’s hard-drinking thespian friends. He once shouted at her;

“There is not one of them who is not worth a dozen low lifes like you.”

She went to stay with the family of a schoolfriend and Osborne never saw her again. “Nolan’s birthday,” he wrote in his diary when she turned 22, “God rot her.”

Likewise when his mother died in 1993, he wrote an article for the Sunday Times which included a first line, ‘A year in which my mother died can’t be all bad.’

Osborne, who by this time had long left Chelsea’s Kings Road and started to act the country gent in Shropshire with his fifth wife Helen, died on Christmas Eve in 1994, 12 days after his 65th birthday. For once their marriage was a relatively devoted and private relationship. The last words that he wrote, found by his wife scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his deathbed in the hospital, were, “Sorry, I have sinned.”

Osborne more sleepy than angry towards the end of his life

Peggy Lee – Is That All There Is?

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8HhncQH6bE

The Quorum fashion show in 1971 at the Royal Court Theatre

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