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.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Errol Flynn and Beverly Aadland, 5th May 1959

Errol Flynn was purportedly to have once said: ‘I like my whisky old, and my women young’. The above photo, whilst not saying anything about his choice of whisky although there is an impressive array of glasses in front of him, certainly says something about his taste in women, or should I say girls.

The picture of Flynn, taken in May 1959, was taken a month or so before his fiftieth birthday. He’s accompanied in the photograph by his girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, who was a few months from her 17th birthday that September. According to Beverley’s mother, who wrote about Flynn and Aadland’s romance in a book called ‘The Big Love’, by the the time of this meal they had already been together for a year. They are at The Lido Club which was situated in Swallow Street - a little lane that runs between Piccadilly and Regent Street.

“For the last time, he’s not my father…”.

Flynn, who was born in Tasmania, went to school from the age of fourteen to fifteen in Barnes in South West London. It was a very minor public school, that has long since disappeared, called The South West London College. It was situated at numbers 99-101 Castelnau which is a road of regency villas that lead up to the Southern side of Hammersmith Bridge.

Errol Flynn at the South West London College circa 1923

99-101 Castelnau today

After a particularly unhappy time in London (imagine what it was like after living in Tasmania all his life) he left the school in 1925 and sailed back to Australia and a subsequent meteoric rise to fame and film stardom in the US. Incidentally Errol Flynn’s father, Theodore Flynn and noted zoologist, travelled the other way, from Tasmania to the UK, and became Professor of Marine Biology at Queen’s University in Belfast from 1930 until 1948.

I once read that Flynn wanted to call his autobiography ‘In Like Me’. Which would have been brilliant, unfortunately the publisher insisted on ‘My Wicked Wicked Ways’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyuk5eCuvH0

Errol Flynn is here on a Canadian programme called Front Page Challenge where the guests have to guess who he is. It was recorded in January 1959, a few months before his death. Incidentally one of the guests is the journalist Scott Young, Neil Young’s father.

I can’t find anything written about The Lido Club in Swallow Street. I wondered if anyone out there has heard of it, or has any information about the place?

Joe Turner – Sweet Sixteen

Marching to Trafalgar Square, 17th May 1972

On the 4th May 1972 about 200 boys aged between 11 and 16, put down their pencils and rulers at Quinton Kynaston School on the Finchley Road near St John’s Wood in north London. It was the start of a protest about unpleasant school dinners, caning, and the conformity of school uniforms. The boys swarmed over the school wall and not knowing really what to do next decided to all go home.

The headmaster, Mr Everest-Phillips protested to the press:

They have a choice of meals and incidents of caning have been negligible. I have only used it three times since last September. School uniform in summer consists of only a blazer.

Steve ‘Ginger’ Finch

A few days later 18 year old Steve ‘Ginger’ Finch a pupil from Rutherford School in Marylebone organised a small group of pupils from his school and nearby Sarah Siddons Girls’ School. The rally of about 60 school children met initially at Paddington Green but then started out on an eight mile march to enlist support from other schools.

A school girl from Paddington and Maida Vale High School joining the demo.

The pupil power demonstration was called by the rebel Schools’ Action Union, of which self-confessed Marxist Ginger Finch was a member, who were mainly against caning, detention, uniforms and ‘headmaster dictatorships’. Eventually 800 pupils had joined the demonstration and Finch was arrested, charged with using insulting behaviour and obstruction.

Prime Minister Edward Heath decided to take no risks, remember this was only four years after students in Paris had brought down the French Government, and ordered MI5 and Special Branch to monitor the schoolchildren revolutionaries. Mr Heath asked Margaret Thatcher, then the Education Secretary to compile a report which warned:

“Some boys and girls are already beginning to develop political attitudes in an immature way…”

A march of 10,000 pupils was organised by the Schools’ Action Union and the National Union of School Students for the 17th May. The Government wanted to take no chances but were struggling to find out the exact nature and route of the march. A Conservative MP called David Lane forwarded a report based on the accounts of a group of girl ‘spies’ who had infiltrated a meeting.

“The leaders spoke with Cockney accents and spoke illogically. It seemed there were a number of middle-class kids who were dressing badly to look working-class.”

The march on the 17th May became the high point of a few weeks of pupil radical power.

Boys having a crafty fag at Hyde Park, 17th May 1972

Girls having a crafty fag at Hyde Park

With the absence of Ginger Finch (after his arrest a few days previously) and no real leadership, the event started with confusion with half of the pupils marching to Hyde Park and half marching along the South Bank to County Hall chanting “attack the pigs,” and “we want a riot.”

Speakers’ corner, 17th May 1972

The final mini riot at Trafalgar Square

The protesters had planned to hand a letter of protest to County hall, home of the Inner London Education Authority commonly known as the ILEA, but after arriving at their destination they realised the letter had been lost. In fact no one really knew who had the letter in the first place. The protesters subsequently marched on to Trafalgar Square where the demonstration eventually fizzled out.

Sir Philip Allen, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office said that although the march turned out totally disorganised, it shouldn’t detract from its significance “as a symptom of subversive influence”. However, and rather disappointingly really, the era of pupil-power was over almost before it had begun. The looming oil crisis and proper grown-up militancy became more important than whether school dinners were edible and school uniforms caused everyone to look the same.

Of all the original aims of the militant school-children from 1972, only the banning of corporal punishment in British schools has universally been achieved. Not at home though of course.

School Girl from Holland Park, May 1972

Slade – Look Wot You Dun

Alice Cooper – School’s Out

The Faces – Stay With Me

Mott The Hoople – Original Mixed-Up Kid

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

The 2 i’s Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street

Other coffee bars soon sprung up around Soho, often providing live music, and these included the Top Ten in Berwick Street and the Heaven and Hell bar in Old Compton Street. The most famous of all, however, and next door to the Heaven and Hell, was the 2 i’s at number 59.

Almost over night young people, who now for the first time were starting to be known as ‘teen-agers’ had somewhere to go they could call their own. The coffee shops were unlicensed and there was nothing to stop teenagers coming to Soho to listen to music, live, or on the jukebox. If you were young, Soho was suddenly the place to be.

Gina Lollobrigida in 1953

The Moka coffee bar in 1953, seemingly offering a free electric shave

Skiffle band playing on an old bomb site in Soho 1956

‘teen-agers’ in Soho 1956

Soho Square 1956

Lonnie Donegan September 1956

The Two i’s was bought in 1955 by an Australia wrestler called Paul Lincoln (Dr Death when in the ring – and one of the sport’s first masked wrestlers,cleverly enabling him to fight twice on the same bill, and thus doubling his fee). The name of the bar came from the two brothers called Irani he had bought it from.

The 2 i’s wasn’t a particularly busy place initially and it was quickly losing money, but this all changed when Lincoln started to put on skiffle groups that were becoming popular with teenagers, especially after Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line had become a hit. Skiffle was suited totally to the new coffee shops due to the minimal, cheap and un-amplified instruments the bands used and thus able to fit into the tiniest, sweatiest cellar.

When a skiffle group called The Vipers came to play one night at the 2 i’s, a friend of theirs called Tommy Hicks helped them out with some vocals and so impressed a watching record producer from Decca that it was Hicks who was signed to his label. Hicks was quickly taken on and managed by a former shopkeeper called Larry Parnes, who persuaded him to change his name to Tommy Steele. The name stuck and a hit single called ‘Rock with the Caveman’ soon followed and literally within days Tommy Steele became Britain’s first genuine teenage pop idol.

Tommy Steele 25th February 1957

Tommy Steele at the Bread Basker 1957

Tommy Steele performing in Soho 1957. How young he was is written all over his face.

Steele’s overnight success made the basement of the 2 I’s coffee shop the most famous music venue in the country. It was only a small place though, and like the other Soho venues was usually very hot and sweaty, with a small 18 inch stage at one end, one microphone, and some speakers up on the wall.

Clutching their guitars, teenagers, from all over the country, started coming to the 2 I’s, or even Soho in general, to try and find fame and fortune. Cliff Richard and the Shadows (initially the Drifters) all met by being regulars at the cafe. Bruce Welch of the Shadows once said:

“The Two I’s was the place to be discovered. If it was good enough for Tommy Steele it was good enough for us.”

Larry Parnes, considering himself an ‘impresario’ and known to many as ‘Mr Parnes, Shillings and Pence’, started to manage other singers and after the success of Steele insisted on creating cartoonish pseudonyms, thus Reg Smith became Marty Wilde, Ronald Wycherley became Billy Fury and Clive Powell became Georgie Fame. Joe Brown, however rejected his Parnes’ name of Elmer Twitch (not surprisingly) and solely, it seems, had a music career with the name with which he was born.

Billy Fury and Larry Parnes

Joe Brown

Mr Parnes Shillings and Pence

Clive Powell aka Georgie Fame

Reg Smith aka Marty Wilde and a young Kim Wilde

Roy Taylor aka Vince Eager

Larry Parnes wasn’t known as the ‘beat svengali’ for nothing, and his relationship with his proteges was ‘fatherly’ at the very least. Vince Eager at one point was wondering why he hadn’t received any record royalties. “You’re not entitled to any,” Larry Parnes told him. “But it says in my contract that I am,” Eager protested. “It also says I have power of attorney over you, and I’ve decided you’re not getting any,” Parnes replied.

Parnes’ power in the music business swiftly declined with the rise of the Beatles (he rejected them as a backing group for Billy Fury at one point) and, always happier with family entertainment, he went on to produce theatre shows. However the mid to late fifties was an incredibly exciting and creative time for British music and the attraction of rock ‘n’ roll brought talented (and, to be fair, not so talented) teenagers from all over the country to try their hand at a new musical fashion.

It seemed, at last, that anyone from any backgrould could make it. Only Punk, perhaps, echoed the musical ‘can do’ atmosphere of this period, just two decades later.

Frith Street in 1956, known as Froth Street in the heyday of the coffee bars

Leon Bell and the Bell Cats and some hand-jiving kittens

Doing what teenagers do best, hanging around. In Soho

The skiffle group City Ramblers in 1955

Bill Kent entertaining the ladies at the 2 I’s coffee bar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nsRHHcq1P8

It’s now over fifty years since the heyday of the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street. A lot of the Soho cafes, like everywhere else, are either closing down or becoming part of the ubiquitous Starbucks chain. Starbucks, of course, branched out last year and started their own record label featuring cutting edge artists such as Carly Simon and James Taylor.

The ubiquitous coffee chain also signed Paul McCartney, who fifty years ago was inspired by the skiffle boom created by the Soho Coffee shops to join John Lennon’s skiffle band The Quarrymen. And we all know what happened to them.

The Quarrymen in 1958

A long way from the Moka coffee bar and Gina Lollobrigida

The 2i’s today, November ’09