Archive for the ‘Julia Callan-Thompson’ Category
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Searching for someone called Francois Raymond on the outskirts of Paris is probably a little like looking for a specific John Smith in London. Who is Francois Raymond? The one I’m looking for exhibited a series of six photographs of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson as part of an exhibition entitled Exposition Tamrauc at the Maison de Jeunes et de la Culture (Paris) in October 1967. I have two prints of just one of these photographs, and rubber stamped on the back of one of them is an address: Francois Raymond, 37 Rue Gambetta, Puteaux (Seine). I’d like to acquire copies of all the photographs Raymond took of my mother, which is why I’ve been attempting to track him down…
Virtually every town in France seems to have a street named after the nineteenth-century French politician Leon Gambetta – so the fact that someone with a name as common as Raymond’s should have an address on one such street seemed psychogeographically apt to me. There is another Rue Gambetta in the neighbouring commune of Suresnes, which is a ten minute walk from the street of that name in Puteaux.
On my first visit to Puteaux I approached Run Gambetta via La Defense, the Paris business district. Two thirds of this high-rise office development is situated within the Putueax municipality, although parts also encroach upon Nanterre and Courbevoie. As a consequence, Puteaux is one of the richest municipalities not just in France, but the whole of Europe. Initially I was a little confused by the lay-out of La Defense but I managed to walk out of it and along to Rue Gambetta without wasting too much time. Raymond’s street was a mix of old and new dwellings, with a monstrous vista of La Defense. The view towards Paris must have been very different in 1967 when Raymond took the pictures he exhibited of my mother.
37 Rue Gambetta turned out to be an apartment block. The outside had been refaced and the balconies replaced relatively recently, but close examination of the structure, the garages behind it, and in particular the doors, led me to the conclusion it had probably been built in the 1950s. It seems safe to conclude that Raymond had lived and/or worked in this building around 40 years before my visit to it. I examined the buzzers to the flats but none of these were labeled with the name Raymond. Next I tried stopping people on the street outside the building but no one knew of a Francois Raymond who had lived there.
I went back to Puteax a couple of days later, approaching it on foot via the bridge over the Seine. This time I went first via Boulevard Richard Wallace (presumably the street is named after the illegitimate son of the Marquess of Hertford, a 19th century ‘philantropist’ and art collector), to Rue Gambetta in Suresnes, since I wished to compare it with the Puteaux street of that name. This second Rue Gambetta looked a little less well-heeled than the one in Puteaux, and was considerably less ambient. Both lie in municipalities that are densely populated by European standards. This second trip to Puteaux seemed to take me no further in my quest for Francois Raymond and his lost pictures of my mother than my previous one. However, rather than walking back to La Defense, I decided to take the suburban train there from Puteaux.
Approaching the train station I clocked a couple of pissheads who were weaving so erratically on the pavement that I decided to let them get a little ahead of me as we all approached the escalators up to the platform. The drunks looked like a working class couple in their late-sixties, and they were pretty hefty too. As they reached the escalator, the woman – who’d gone ahead – placed a foot not on the first or second steps which were closest to her and still flat, but the third step that was rising; having done this, she quickly brought her other foot up onto the escalator and placed it beside the right one. The man attempted to do the same thing and lost his balance, grabbing hold of the woman as he did so.
I run forward and caught both the man and the woman. If I hadn’t the man would have certainly bashed his head on the metal stairs and this might have resulted in a nasty injury or even worse. The pair of them were heavy and behaved like a dead weight. I thought the woman would pull herself upright, and then that the man would do the same. When this didn’t happen, another passerby took the woman’s hand to help her, but it seemed she was too drunk to stand up. I held this fat and heavy couple up until we reached the top of the escalator, where the woman rolled awkwardly off the stairs and the man managed to get himself upright.
The first thing the man did was check that none of the multiple bottles of wine in the plastic bag he’d been carrying had been smashed, and amazingly they were all in one piece. I rescued one of the woman’s shoes which had come off, another passerby returned the other. I hoped that once the woman had her shoes on she would get up, but she was too dazed. By this time a small crowd were trying to help the couple, particularly the woman. Since neither of them were able to understand my English and odd words of French, I decided to leave them in the hands of the native speakers who’d come to their assistance after me.
As I made my way towards a train, the man shouted ‘merci’ at me. My impression was that neither he nor the woman were fully aware of what had happened, but he at least knew I’d caught them both as they were falling. Once I was on the train and speeding toward the centre of Paris, I realised I should have asked the man if he was or knew Francois Raymond. Obviously it is unlikely he was Raymond, although I guess he was about the same age as the man I was looking for, and if he’d lived in Puteaux most of his life he may have known him… This chance encounter on an escalator seems as close as I’m going to get to the elusive Monsieur Raymond for the time being. That said, he can’t be any more elusive than my mother, who changed her name by deed poll in the early sixties and then rarely used her full legal name; more than one person has told me they’ve never heard of Julia Callan-Thompson, but upon being told other names she went by and given contextual information to place her, they realise she was indeed somebody they knew way back when!
BTW: several sequences in my short In The Street Today were shot in Puteaux; towards the end of it the actual escalators on which I prevented the drunks from falling are featured, and the decorative night lights earlier in the video are situated right beside them. The soundtrack to the film is a looped recording I made of this particular set of Puteaux escalators (there is another set of identical escalators, not featured in my film, a little nearer Rue Gambetta).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 37 Rue Gambetta, Boulevard Richard Wallace, Courbevoie, Exposition Tamrauc, France, Francois Raymond, John Smith, Julia Callan-Thompson, La Defense, Leon Gambetta, Maison de Jeunes et de la Culture, Marquess of Hertford, Nanterre, Paris, Puteaux, Richard Wallace, Rue Gambetta, Seine, Sir Richard Wallace, Suresnes
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 16 Comments »
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
My mother Julia Callan-Thompson didn’t publish very much during her lifetime, but anyone who has read her diary and letters will know she was a natural when it came to putting pen to paper. What follow are a couple of pieces by my mother that appeared in issue one of an underground publication called Shoestring put together by Sonya Perry in Harlech, north Wales, crica 1974. Cutting to the quick, here’s my mother’s humorous essay from that Roneoed journal:
STILL IN THE SAME KICK
Hippies usually come from families which suffer from ‘status mal-integration’ – inter-ethnic or mobile families, or families whose economic and cultural status are not on a par. In such families, the children have difficulty in knowing what is to be their social role, and often have difficulty in adapting ‘normal’ sexual roles. Jewish people, girls for example, have an upbringing which prepares them for a world no longer in existence.
Hippie Society is attractive to such young people because:
1. It emphasises tolerance and practices ‘mutual appreciation’ (!)
2. Boys can enjoy quasi-homosexual relationships with impunity, e.g., ‘potheads’ – or affect an exaggerated ‘virility’.
3. Boys are not required to seduce. They can treat a girl as a mother, while she can treat them as a child. Often the girls support the boys, while the boys cultivate the ‘feminine’ attributes of affectivity, self-expression, proneness to moods and… being ‘beautiful’.
4. Mentally ‘abnormal’ phenomena are tolerated and even constitute a status symbol. Secondary anxiety is avoided, because these experiences can always be attributed to the drugs.
One should not dismiss immediately this subculture, as Hippie Society can serve as a kind of civil hospital, and may save disturbed people from psychosis and homosexuality.
I really like point 4, but I’m not sure about all the others… especially as point 2 and the final statement render the entire piece extremely ambiguous. My own position is, of course, that homosexuality and all other forms of consensual sexual expression are a groove sensation!
Moving on, the poem my mother contributes to Shoestring 1 mirrors my own fascination with silence and the aporetic – and prefigures my recent blog strike by about 35 years!
THE WORDLESS
I shall proclaim
a Wordless Day,
Placing a
loaf on my lips.
There will be
a festival of the wordless -
songs without words will be sung,
plays without words will be performed.
Some new clouds will be proposed,
filling up the skyline,
Critics will be sworn to silence.
All day we shall go
In and out through each other’s eyes,
In and out, in and out.
Towards evening will come
an easing of the mind.
The singing of the mad
will fall to a whisper.
One wordless day a week -
that should do it.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Posted in counterculture, humour, Julia Callan-Thompson | 17 Comments »
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
Yesterday I posted an essay on the main part of this website entitled The Real Dharma Bums: on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain. The text documents one of my mother’s relationships and the endless scamming that accompanied the hardcore drug use that was a part and parcel of said romance. Running to 10,000 words, this piece was too long to use as a blog. I prefer to place shorter and more fragmentary materials here. But as a supplement to that and other writings about my mother, I’m running below a couple of letters she wrote to my grandmother Elsie in the early 1960s.
The first letter was written from 101 Barnsbury Street, London N1. It is undated but would have been composed in either August or September 1961; most likely mid-to-late August. My Uncle Terry had recently been caught in possession of stolen goods and was banged up, while my Uncle Johnny was on the run from the army and the cops. Shortly before this, my grandfather Dai was one of several Newport dockers to lose his job after he was discovered incapacitated at work as a result of liberating and downing a large amount of booze that he’d been handling. The early 1960s were tough times for my family and my mother resolved to hide from them fact that she was pregnant (they would, of course, have been very happy to hear this had she been married). My mother was always a little cagey in her letters home, and I’ve heard enough stories about her teenage years to know that while she was only 17 years-old when she penned the first missive I reproduce here, she was already extremely streetwise and adept at pulling scams and cons.
I don’t really know what to make of the employment my mother refers to below, she was a nightclub hostess at the time she wrote the letter. Likewise, the story about going to Germany appears to be no more than a way of covering her tracks: she did not want to see family members when she was heavily pregnant with me. My view is my mother had no intention of leaving London – where I was born just before Easter 1962. That said, while disentangling truth from falsehood may be difficult here, the expressions of love towards my grandmother and our wider family are nonetheless one hundred percent genuine. So here’s the first letter:
“I’m writing because I’m wondering why you haven’t written. I sent you a card and a small something on your birthday which included my present address. Have you received this? If it has been mislaid in the post tell me in your next letter and I’ll get in touch with the post office as I’ve a receipt.
“How are things at home, did Terry get off lightly and have they caught up with Johnny yet? Hell! Here I am writing you what is supposed to be a cheerful letter and I haven’t said one cheerful thing yet.
“I’m living near to the hospital where I used to work. Its quite a nice area except when the Cypriots that live next door start arguing. Honestly I’d thought our family could argue but you should see this lot once they start going. Bank Holiday they started at about 11 am and no word of a lie mum they were still at it when I came home about midnight. The trouble is they start off with two people arguing and then their family join in then all the people that occupy the flats where they live join in, then the bloke who owns the cafe down the road joins in until you’ve got every Cypriot that lives within the radius of 4 miles joining in . It wouldn’t be so bad if you knew what they were arguing about but the trouble is that you don’t because they’re either babbling in Greek or Turkish and it does make old nosey want to know what’s going on.
“I must tell you mum I’ve actually acquired a sewing machine, a typewriter and a camera all within the last week. No I haven’t won the pools!!! The typewriter I had given me. You see mum up until this week I was working for a solicitor in Baker Street and the girl who I was supposed to be successor to was leaving to go to South Africa with her husband so naturally she wanted to get rid of all the things that she couldn’t take with her. The only problem was that I had to carry it all the way from East London. God I nearly killed myself doing it. It’s not a nice modern portable, but one of those big black heavy pre-war things and so you can imagine what a job it was lugging it all the way to the underground. When I got there the tube was full so I had to carry it. Then off the underground to get the bus then I had to walk about 200 yards from the bus stop to the house. Honestly mum I’m sure that if anything I lost about 2 stone that night and put muscles that were never there in my arms. Still I mustn’t grumble must I. At least I’ve got a typewriter for nothing. Also I bought the camera off her for only £1. Is a simply super one too.
“Now for the sewing machine. Last Sunday I was in the market. I don’t know if you know mum but the markets in London are all in the streets not closed in like the ones at home. You know you can bid a price down and I got the machine that was advertised for £6.10 for £3.10. I was so pleased with myself for getting it at £3 less that I just had to buy it.
“I’ve also paid my overdraft at the bank and got my tape machine out of the pawn shop. Honestly mum with all these things I’m beginning to feel that I ought to open up a shop.
“By the way is the radio working? I’m enclosing a spare valve because one of them is practically burnt out and it would cost you about fifteen bob to replace so as I’ve one here which I can’t use for anything else you might as well have it.
“Also mum when I collected my cases at Paddington there were only two. Did you send the other one or not? In case you haven’t I’m enclosing ten shillings which I hope will pay it, if not I’ll send on the difference You might as well have it sent straight to the house mum.
“I don’t think I’ll be home before next Easter at the earliest mum, as a German girlfriend who I have known since I’ve been in London stayed with me last week as she was going back to Cologne this week and she invited me to stay with her family for Christmas. If the finances will enable me I intend staying until almost up to Easter in which case I’ll come home straight from Germany and stay for a few weeks before I move on to somewhere else but after next Easter I don’t somehow think I’ll come back to London. I’m thinking of going to Leeds or Manchester or some other city as I’m becoming a bit fed up with London. Or maybe I’ll do a season job in Germany or someplace. I just can’t get over how much I’ve written, honestly mum, I’m bound to have paralysed my hand or something.
“I hope that you had some days out mum. I really do wish that I could share my luck with all the family. I had a really wonderful holiday in the Isle of Wight. I visited Ventnor and tried to see if I could find the hotel Johnny stayed at, but I’d forgotten the name. I hope you all received my cards and that Pat and Gerald received their rock all in one piece. Also when I was down there after about two weeks I went on to Lee-On-Solent which is just a small seaside place – but I was able to go to Southampton – which wasn’t very thrilling as I’d been there too many times before, and also you only had to take the ferry over the water and you came to Portsmouth where I’d never been before. Also, Margaret will probably know its only a 5d bus fare from Portsmouth to Southsea which is a lovely place, really mum you ought to spend a holiday there. The beaches are just as nice if not better than Brighton and the lights in the nights are really and truly beautiful from the water.
“I really must close now mum although I do miss you all. I must say thank you mum for giving me such a nice welcome at home and look forward to my next visit whenever that is. My regards and best wishes to the family. All my fondest love, Julia.”
Here’s the second letter, written by my mother on 2 March 1963 from 24 Bassett Road, London W10:
“Dear Mum
“I’m glad to hear that you’re up and about again, I was quite worried but it was good to know that the family hadn’t neglected you.
“In your letter, as in nearly all the letters you’ve written me, you have once more asked me to come back home. Well mum although I haven’t been very much use to you as a daughter, I would be of even less use to you in Newport. At least in London I’m being of some use to myself and I hope my friends.
“I was very young when I left home and most probably it caused you considerable worry, but myself I have never regretted the decision. This is no reflection on you but rather on other circumstances.
“You always seem to think that I’m unhappy. I sincerely want to stress the point mum that I am far happier here than I would be down there, it isn’t because of the higher wages that I stay here, although obviously it is much more pleasant not to have to worry about every penny. I had a very different life than I would have had had I stayed at home, and have therefore become a different type of person. I just wouldn’t fit into a Newportonian way of life any more, so please don’t fret about it.
“It’s very sweet of you to save up for my 21st. I’m not being ungrateful, but I’d much rather you had a holiday or some extra luxury with the money.
“Fondest love to dad, also my love to the rest of the family. Bye for now. Affectionately, Julia.
“PS. Look after your legs and don’t over use them, you won’t be supplied with a new pair if those should wear out.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Barnsbury Street, Bassett Road, Bruno de Galzain, central London, Cologne, David Callaghan, Elsie Callaghan, Germany, Isle of Wight, Islington, Johnny Callan, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ladbroke Grove, Lee-On-Solent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newport, Paddington, Portsmouth, sixties, Southampton, Southsea, Stewart Home, Terry Callan, Ventnor, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson | 17 Comments »
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
Back in the late 1960s my mother Julia Callan-Thompson was in the countercultural jargon of the time an ‘India freak’; a drop-out obsessed with the ‘mystic east’. Among my mother’s extant papers are a number of letters she sent while out on the hippie trail, and one she received from a woman called Georgian Shaw as she was making her way back to Europe. My favourite among the various surviving missives my mother sent my grandparents over the years is the following, mailed from Kathmandu on 13 June 1969:
“Everest although cold was the most beautiful sight you could see. Yes! we’re the luckiest people alive!!! Just returning from the mountains. Kathmandu seems such a big city now, although in comparison to London it’s just a village. Bruno has fractured his spine, nothing too serious, just that he must not carry anything or exert himself much for six months. We both would like to have a European summer, here the rainy season has started, rains at least 4-5 hours a day and July and August nearly all the day, enough of hot tropical weather. In India 150 degrees Fahrenheit, so we start back to drizzle and lukewarm weather, how we long for those cool English evenings. A friend is driving in about a week to Kabul in Afghanistan, that’s 3,000 miles of the 12,000 miles over to Europe, we should arrive in Kabul about the beginning of July or at the earliest last week in June. Its strange before I used to think that Wales was such a long way from London, now that 150 miles seems like a before breakfast walk.
“We hope to find a place to settle for a while, maybe, God willing, start a family, and live a normal family life. Travelling is one of the most stimulating things I know, but it’s a full time occupation, leaving no time for anything else. Bruno is dreaming of a big studio somewhere (maybe, South of France), where he can paint in peace and not have to leave things behind all the time because there’s too much to carry. It’s also time for us to become responsible citizens not wandering bums. Should see you sometime in August. Bruno wants so much to meet you all and me so proud of being a real countess although most of the time we don’t have two half pennies to rub together. Yes I’m married to the best man in the world. Love compensates for everything. We love you and will see you all soon…”
I guess that by 1969 my grandparents were used to receiving messages like this. It would have been quite something for a docker’s daughter like my mother to have become a countess; but she hadn’t actually married her boyfriend Bruno de Galzain, and he wasn’t a really count (although he delighted in telling people that he was).
As my mother returned west, she stopped off at the British Embassy in Kabul to pick up mail. When she went there she was handed the following missive from Georgina Shaw (which while addressed to her, seems to have been written more with Bruno in mind):
“Rishikesh 6th July 1969. Darlings God bless. Kabul Summer 1969, so glad we are together. I returned to Rishikesh full of thoughts of you which will continue to speed us all on our way and bring more meetings, more love. I wrote Layfayette that everything is fine. It is…
“Rarely can a trip to Delhi have been so miraculously rewarding.
“The spiritual circus continues to amuse in Rishikesh and the Ganges keeps us cool; perhaps we shall meet in a country garden in England.
“Stay wonderful.
“I shall not forget how beautiful Julie looked in the Nepalese gown – playing the one-stringed instrument. Happy days anyway you look at it. I love you. Delhi was peaceful compared with this seething metropolis where there is never a moments peace; Happy days.
“Pray that you are passing lightly through the trip and all is as it should be; as it must be.
“It is a great happiness to have seen you before you left, let me have news soon; I should love to know how Europe seems to be. We can at least be certain that Lucky will remain for a while yet.
“I AM AS HOLY AS POSSIBLE HERE.
“Swimming a good deal.
“How everybody scatters and regroups intricate karmas. Tokyo for Cherry Blossom twice – this year next year sometime…
“Your gift widened horizons in the foothills; I do not completely believe that the encounter between us actually took place, but exhibit A is pretty convincing.
“I think of you as though you were already in England; please write me news as soon as you can.
“Meanwhile Om Shanti. Peace and love and even flowers and incense. Hari Om and mostly Love, Georgina.”
After returning to London, Shaw would share a flat in Islington’s Thornhill Square with Carnaby Street fashion phenomenon Michael Fish, where she’d entertain figures both comic and influential, including seventies pot broker Howard Marks.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1969, Afghanistan, Bruno de Galzain, Carnaby Street, Delhi, England, Ganges, Georgina Shaw, Howard Marks, India, India feak, Islington, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kabul, Kathmandu, London, Michael Fish, Mount Everest, Nepal, Rishikesh, South of France, Thornhill Square, Tokyo, Wales
Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson, psychedelia | 16 Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
I imagine there must be many autobiographical accounts of working as a film extra in London in the sixties, although I can’t recall reading any. Looking at the film industry from the bottom up strikes me as considerably more interesting than the recent obsession with celebrity focused accounts of the movie world. My mother, Julia Callan -Thompson, briefly took up extra chores in the mid-sixties and she ran them in tandem with attempts to establish a modelling career. She found her way onto the fringes of the London film world through a friend called Annette Monaghan. Annette had grown up two streets away from my mother in Newport and relocated from south Wales to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In London, Monaghan adopted the stage name Annette Foley. My mother had arrived in London in 1960 to pursue a beatnik lifestyle and accompanied Annette to a film audition circa 1964 just to keep her company. The producer auditioning Annette said he’d employ my mother too if she got an Equity card, which she did.
One of my mother’s first film jobs was working as an extra on the historical movie Becket. It starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. The film was adapted by Edward Anhalt from a Jean Anouilh play and directed by Peter Glenville. Despite being nominated for a bunch of film awards, the movie is actually a camp romp in which sado-masochism and homo-eroticism are delightfully evoked through lush visuals and barbed dialogue. In the film, Thomas a Becket comes across as a Saxon version of St Sebastian, and the blatantly sexualised whipping of Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral is used as a framing device for the entire story. The first shot of Henry shows him arriving at Canterbury with a tolling bell swinging in the frame. After detailing his friendship and estrangement from Thomas in a series of flashbacks that last for over two hours, Henry is finally shown taking pleasure in his punishment and afterwards he gaily thanks the church officials who’ve lashed him. Archbishop Becket’s murder is just as stylised and heavily eroticised. The dialogue in Becket mixes Machiavelli and Clausewitz with high camp. For example, Becket telling Henry II that he should have no illusions about his popularity because the crowd cheering him have been paid to do so.
My mother, who mainly worked as a Soho nightclub showgirl and hostess, was used to staying up until the small hours and sleeping late. Film work, even when she was only employed as an extra, required her to get up at the crack of dawn. While my mother had long harboured a taste for amphetamines, the car already loaded with extras that would arrive at 6.AM to take her from Ladbroke Grove to Elstree increased their immediate usefulness. In an undated note she told our family back in Wales: “Apologies for the long silence – but I’ve been working every day – yesterday was my first day off working on the film Casino Royale, a send up James Bond – lots of people working on it. Peter Sellers, David Niven, Ursula Andress, George Raft etc. – not grumbling because the money is so good but will be glad when it’s finished so I can have a rest.”
The original Casino Royale was so star filled that my mother doesn’t bother to list all the celebrities appearing in the movie. Among those omitted from her roll call are Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Daliah Lavi, Joanna Pettet, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer and one of the most famous faces of French cinema at that time, Jean Paul Belmondo. The film had five credited directors: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish and Joe McGrath. It was very loosely based on the James Bond book Casino Royale, with comic innuendo largely replacing novelist Ian Fleming’s extreme sado-masochistic fixations. While elements of the trouser dropping humour on display are patently English, overall the film has a pan-European feel with the sparse plotting and international cast bringing to mind Roger Vadim’s similarly camp late-sixties confection Barbarella. In both films scantily clad female ‘eye candy’ (hence the hiring of my mother as an extra) brighten up a series of exotic and often high tech locations. Casino Royale’s arch-villain Woody Allen is creating doubles of world leaders and various spies in an attempt to take over the planet. The soundtrack is by Burt Bacharach. There are many bedroom and bathroom sequences, including slinky shots of Ursula Andress exotically costumed and filmed through a fish tank. Casino Royale is a thoroughly enjoyable period piece, replete with speculation about bad guy Woody Allen being a junkie and various other heavily sign-posted drug references.
In another undated note my mother wrote to our family: “…have finished working on Casino Royale, did three days this week on a Dirk Bogarde film called Accident and will be working on a Laurence Harvey film Spy With A Cold Nose tomorrow, so I’ve been pretty lucky with work this summer – unless something really great happens I’m planning to winter in Paris – anyway if I do decide not to stay in London – will come and see you all before leaving…”
In Joseph Losey’s Accident, love triangles among the Oxford University set provide a vehicle for a lingering exploration of guilt, repression, thwarted desire and emotionally restrained but nevertheless excessive drinking. In striking contrast, Spy With A Cold Nose was a spoof espionage movie about a dog that had been bugged and presented as a gift to the head of the Soviet state. Directed by Daniel Petrie, the film starred Laurence Harvey, Daliah Lavi and Lionel Jeffries. Harvey plays a sex obsessed society vet blackmailed by the security services into assisting them; his character appears to be modelled on Profumo Scandal fall guy Stephen Ward who was a sex obsessed society osteopath. To underline the Profumo Scandal parallels, one scene in Spy With A Cold Nose is set in a hostess club.
To the best of my knowledge, after 1966 my mother stopped working as an extra on London film productions, although she does turn up on documentary footage of countercultural events including The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream and Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt. I know she worked as an extra on some Bollywood movies in 1968, but to date I’ve not managed to unearth the titles of these epics.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Accident, Alex Trocchi's State of Revolt, Annette Foley, Annette Monaghan, Barbarella, Becket, Bollywood, Burt Bacharach, Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral, Carl von Clausewitz, Casion Royale, Charles Boyer, Daliah Lavi, Daniel Petrie, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Dirk Bogarde, Edward Anhalt, Elstree, George Raft, Henry II, Ian Fleming, India, James Bond, Jean Anouilh, Jean Paul Belmondo, Joanna Pettet, Joe McGrath, John Gielgud, John Huston, Joseph Losey, Julia Callan-Thompson, Ken Hughes, Ladbrook Grove, Laurence Harvey, Lionel Jeffries, London, Newport, Niccolo Machiavelli, Orson Welles, Peter Glenville, Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers, Profumo Scandal, Richard Burton, Robert Parrish, Roger Vadim, south Wales, Stephen Ward, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, The Spy With A Cold Nose, Thomas Becket, Ursula Andress, Val Guest, west London, William Holden, Woody Allen
Posted in film, Julia Callan-Thompson | 14 Comments »
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Although a number of famous American beatnik writers made Buddhism the focus of their spiritual quests, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac being the most notable among them, this certainly wasn’t the only avenue of religious pursuit to be explored by the European-wing of post-war drop-out youth. A good number of European beatniks wanted to come into knowledge of God. As a consequence one of the things that came up in conversation as they sat around getting stoned was Subud, a syncretistic movement that can be traced back to the mystical ecstasies a Javanese man called Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo experienced in 1925. After taking on an institutionalised form and acquiring the name Subud around 1947, the movement was brought to Europe in the 1950s. Thus by the 1960s some beatniks – including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson – had involved themselves with Subud.
Regardless of whether or not the word Subud was chosen for its similarity to founder Pak Subuh’s name, it is usually explained by initiates as being derived from the abbreviation of three Sanskrit words: Susila, Budhi, and Dharma. Susila requires that followers lead a life in accord with the Will of God. Budhi represents the inner force to be found within all men and women. Dharma indicates submission and surrender to God. Subud attracted my mother and 1965 marks the onset of her seven year flirtation with the movement. Subud’s proponents claimed it wasn’t a religion but to non-initiates like me it appears to most closely approximate a cross between Islam in its heretical Sufi form and Buddhism in its Zen manifestations. Thus the term Subud is perhaps most easily explained as a contraction of Sufism and Buddhism, even if this definition will be found wanting by converts.
In Subud the specific spiritual practice of its initiates was called the latihan, which entailed spontaneously achieved contact with God. Initially someone who has already established contact with God’s power transmits this experience across to the new human receiver. Experienced devotees are able to do latihan alone, although the number of sessions per week is stringently restricted. Perhaps unconsciously revealing the Islamic roots of Subud, contact with God through latihan is described as an act of submission, which can be halted by human acts of will and volition – but never initiated by such means.
That said, my mother’s circle believed that drugs were of huge assistance in achieving these higher states of consciousness. One of the things my mother liked about Subud was the value it placed on the teachings of all the great world religions. In this Subud, like political doctrines such as Bolshevism, was entrist; but for my mother the opportunism that I might read into a stance of tactical pantheism was of absolutely no significance, since it was a theological position that opened up the beginnings of a rapprochement with a Catholic upbringing from which she felt estranged.
I’m not particularly sympathetic to the ‘new’ religious movements with which my mother involved herself; Subud, followed by seven years of deep immersion in Divine Light Mission activities. However, in a comment appended to an earlier blog on this site, I invoked the famous quote from Marx about religion: “‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.” Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
I went on to say: “Marx is clearly talking about organised religion not other states of consciousness, and mysticism can be about either one of these, or both! But when mystical experiences are enjoyed away from organised religion, they enable us to experience at a higher level the states of consciousness enjoyed by man in primitive communist societies. The idea that mature communism is only going to replicate at a higher level the modes of social organisation found in primitive communism is clearly ludicrous, it must also be about regaining lost states of consciousness. Anything less would be a failure to break with bourgeois modes of thought and shallow rationalism.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Bolshevism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Christianity, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Islam, Jack Kerouac, Julia Callan-Thompson, Karl Marx, Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, Subud, Sufism, Zen
Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson, occulture, psychedelia | 25 Comments »
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
James Daly is one of the many curious underworld figures who knew my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. It seems my mother first came across Daly when they were both scoring smack at 75a Cambridge Gardens in the early 1970s. The gear sold at this address was supplied by a former jockey of Australian extraction called Larry Benns. He’s been described to me as a hot tempered man suffering from low self-esteem who excelled at pissing off his girlfriends. The scene at 75a was intense, a number of addicts seem to have overdosed there including, it is said, one of Brenda Grevelle’s boyfriends. Benns apparently went on the run while on bail facing drug charges; he is rumoured to have returned to Australia where he died.
Turning our attention to Jim Daly, he was a blonde-haired small-time thief from an Irish family who’d take stolen goods to 75a Cambridge Gardens and exchange them for drugs. The absurd nature of Daly’s criminal life is evident from an escapade in which he played a peripheral role that garnered coverage in The Times under headings such as ‘Man On Firearm Charge’ (5 February 1973), ‘Escape Plot Alleged’ (6 February 1973), ‘Shotgun Court Breaks Up In Disorder’ (6 April 1973) and ‘Escape Bid Was Based On Black Power Type Plot’ (12 June 1973). The gist of the story is that while on remand in Brixton Prison, Daly then aged 24 met a 38 year-old American consultant engineer called Nathan Greenberg who was facing a fire-arms charge and wanted to make an escape bid. With others they cooked up a plan inspired by the antics of the Black Panthers in California, whereby Greenberg’s 19 year-old German girlfriend Erika Pijanka would smuggle guns into the West London Magistrates’ Court during his next hearing and use them to free him.
Thus on 1 February 1973 Pijanka entered the public gallery of the court, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at the magistrate and screamed: “All right, stay where you are!” As a cop wrestled Pijanka to the ground, a single shot went off. The escape bid was foiled without loss of life or serious injury. Greenberg eventually got a seven year sentence for his fire arms offences, and nine months to run concurrently for contempt of court. William White, the man who Daly had allegedly placed Greenberg and Pijanka in touch with to supply the guns for the escape bid, was found not guilty of furnishing the weapons. Daly got an eighteen month suspended sentence for his role in the plot.
Daly evidently spent a lot of time in jail in the 1970s and my mother visited him at least once while he was banged up. Among her extant papers is a letter dated 23 October 1975 on Blenheim Project headed paper and addressed to the “The Officer on the Gate, H. M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, W6”:
Re: James Daly.
Miss Julia Callan-Thompson is a bona fide Social Worker at the above named Blenheim Project and is the bearer of this letter.
A visit had been arranged for Miss Druecilla Verney, also of the Blenheim Project, to visit the above named at 4.00 this 23rd day of October, and we hope that it will be possible for Miss Callan-Thompson to accompany Miss Verney on this visit. Miss Callan-Thompson is also a member of the S.C.O.D.A. working team.
Yours faithfully,
Kathrine Parker,
Social Worker
The Blenheim Project.
If my mother was ‘a bona fide Social Worker” at the Blenheim Project, this was due to a touch of fraud on her part. I have a copy of a job application she made to the Blehheim Project in the summer of 1975 on which she falsely claimed she attended University College London and gained an upper 2nd philosophy B.A. Hons. in 1963 and an MPhil 1966. In fact, my mother left school at the age of 16 in 1960, and during the period she told the Blenheim Project she’d studied at UCL, she’d been far more gainfully employed as a showgirl and hostess at Murray’s Cabaret Club and Churchill’s in the west end of London. Despite her job as ‘a bona fide Social Worker’ providing my mother with an excellent front when visiting jailed friends, she didn’t like the nine-to-five regime that went with it and soon jacked it in.
As for Jim Daly, I’ve no idea what happened to him. Blog comments from anyone with information about him would be appreciated. I don’t know whether or not William White was a part of the well-known London crime family of that name, it seems possible but is certainly not proven right now; one of Alf White’s sons, known to friends and family as Billy, went by this name.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alf White, Australia, Billy White, Black Panthers, black power, Blenheim Project, Brenda Grevelle, California, Cambridge Gardens, Churchill's, Druecilla Verney, Du Cane Road, Erika Pijanka, James Daly, Jim Daly, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kathrine Parker, Larry Benns, London, Murray's Cabaret Club, Nathan Greenberg, seventies, The Times, UCL, University College London, west end, west London, West London Magistrates’ Court, William White, Wormwood Scrubs
Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 33 Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
In her book Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, Muriel Jakubait claims that her club hostess sibling (who was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain) was set up by the security services after she’d performed various minor tasks for them, and learnt too much about things they didn’t want the general public to know. Drawing a broader picture, other commentators also make it appear that in the middle of the twentieth-century British intelligence was very interested in hostesses like Christine Keeler and Mariella Novotny. According to some observers, Keeler’s club crowd was manipulated for geo-political gain by the British and other security services; books such as Honeytrap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, or An Affair of State by Caroline Kennedy and Philip Knightley, cover this in some depth. While allegations of this type are often notoriously difficult to substantiate or disprove, it is nonetheless worth noting that alongside the Soho club world, the Notting Hill drug scene in which Keeler and other women from these hostessing circles were simultaneously immersed was also subject to undue influence by representatives of the British state, albeit it in the form of ‘bent coppers’ (see, for example, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short).
My ongoing interest in Keeler and company is due in part to the fact that my own mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was a part of their set in the early 1960s. She both worked at Murray’s and lived in Notting Hill, and was completely immersed in the drug subculture there. My mother’s problems with bent west London coppers didn’t really kick in until the mid-sixties, by which time she was working at Churchill’s Club, but while at Murray’s she did mingle in other spook connected circles; for example, the social scene centred on the University College London (UCL) philosophy department in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The dominant UCL philosophy figures of that time were A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, both had worked in military intelligence during the war. They’d previously been part of the same social set as British Soviet spies Burgess, Philby, Blunt and MacLean; and of those more ambivalent and ambiguous Bolshevik sympathisers of the thirties typified by Coronwy Rees.
Roger Taylor, author of the late-seventies cult work of Marxist aesthetics Art, An Enemy of the People, met my mother through her UCL connections in September 1962, the day he enrolled for a philosophy PhD. I should explain here that after my mother settled in London at the age of 16 in 1960, she often socialised with art students from The Slade and through them developed friendships within the UCL philosophy department. Taylor emailed me the following recollections of UCL and my mother Julie on Thursday, May 22, 2003:
“In the early sixties UCL philosophy could be very seductive. Gordon Square was Bloomsbury, it had the “radical” traditions of Mill and Bentham, its philosophers generally were on the Left, many of them had a sort of celebrity status (Ayer on the Brains Trust, Hampshire writing in Encounter), they were manifestly clever (Bernard Williams had the reputation of being the cleverest man in England!). They were engaged with everything “advanced” in culture, they had all the “taste” and “discernment” of the haute bourgeoisie, they were public school and Oxford and the Foreign Office, their morality unconventional with a frisson of scandal. It was the world of Burgess and Blunt but in place of subterfuge they offered furious and ingenious debate about counterfactuals and the like. Entering Gordon Square was to have a feeling of having attained access to somewhere very elevated. Some of this would have been sensed by Julie. She was at home in Gordon Square. When I arrived from the North, very aggressive and very unsure, she was already there and well in. The students knew her, she was very familiar with the secretary and… socialised with faculty.”
While Taylor sees beyond the fake glamour of Gordon Square in the early sixties, his account of the atmosphere to be found there remains very much in accord with those of other observers who still view the place through the ideological blinkers of bourgeois idealism. For example, Alan Ryan in his Independent (17 June 2004) obituary of Stuart Hampshire, writes: “…in 1960… Ayer moved to Oxford, and Hampshire replaced him as Grote Professor at University College, London. There he presided over weekly seminars that offered glimpses of an intellectual heaven where the depth of the issues discussed was matched only by the elegance of the arguments with which they were addressed.” My mother was a clever and feisty working-class teenager from south Wales, and so she would have been more than able to hold her own against upper-class academics who were a lot older than she was at the time.
Likewise, in my mother’s relationships with these philosophers the element of seduction would have run two ways, since the logical positivists from Gordon Square were attracted to the bohemian Soho club world of which she was already a fixture. A. J. “Freddie” Ayer would get drunk and dance in the Gargoyle Club where his fellow drinkers included the painters Francis Bacon and Johnny Minton, publisher David Archer, writer Graham Greene and before they were exposed as Soviet moles, the double agents Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. So if Julie was drawn to the fake glamour of Gordon Square, there were also those in the UCL philosophy department who felt a strong pull towards the world she worked in.
And as for the spookery, I should emphasis that I don’t think Ayer and Hampshire were still on the payroll of British intelligence while directing philosophical activities at UCL. But casual social ties would have been maintained, and while these were no doubt useful to the spooks, I don’t imagine they had any impact on my mother’s life. By way of contrast, the nefarious activities of bent west London coppers clearly did have an effect on my mother but that’s another story; and as for the shenanigans around the likes of Keeler and Novotny, as far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on that one!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, A. J. Ayer, Alan Ryan, An Affair of State, Anthony Blunt, Anthony Summers, Art An Enemy of the People, Barry Cox, Bernard Williams, Bloomsbury, Caroline Kennedy, central London, Christine Keeler, Coronwy Rees, David Archer, Donald MacLean, Francis Bacon, Gargoyle Club, Gordon Square, Graham Greene, Grote Professor, Guy Burgess, Honeytrap, Independent, Jeremy Bentham, John Shirley, John Stuart Mill, Johnny Minton, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kim Philby, Mariella Novotny, Martin Short, Muriel Jakubait, Notting Hill, Philip Knightley, Roger Taylor, Ruth Ellis, Ruth Ellis: My Sister's Secret Life, sixties, Slade School of Fine Art, Stephen Dorril, Stuart Hampshire, The Fall of Scotland Yard: A Penguin Special, UCL, University College London, west London
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, occulture | 41 Comments »
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
As noted in an earlier post on this blog, at the end of 1961 my mother Julia Callan-Thompson moved to a two room top floor flat at 24 Bassett Road, London W10. The area around Bassett Road had been developed as a series of housing estates in the 1860s in conjunction with the extension of the Metropolitan train line on a viaduct constructed over the Portobello stream and marshes to Ladbroke Grove. The station at this latter location was originally called Notting Hill, which is why an area that might more properly be designated Notting Dale is better known by the former designation. The development of the area was followed by an economic depression, which led the likes of nineteenth-century busy-body Florence Gladstone to complain: “Whole streets were not inhabited by the class of people for whom they were designed.”
In the late-nineteenth century rather than housing city clerks, many of the buildings in the Ladbroke Grove area were under multiple occupancy by members of the working class, and in particular Irish labourers who’d been forced by famine to migrate and were engaged in the construction of new railways in the area. Multiple working class occupancy of these building was something that would continue for more than a hundred years. By the beginning of the sixties the rail network was still providing work for many of the recent immigrants who were enlivening this drab part of west London; although now rather than constructing railways, a substantial proportion of those who’d been enticed to the metropolis from the West Indies with promises of remunerative employment were involved in the smooth running and maintenance of public transport.
24 Bassett Road is a large house with some neo-classical features such as the pillars that hold up the porch to the main door. By the early sixties the building’s generous rooms had been carved up into smaller units. I’ve been told the property was owned by a Trinidadian called Sandy Dalton-Brown who liked bohemians. My mother made friends with her landlord and would visit him at his home near Hyde Park. At one point he offered to sell her both the flat she rented and that of another tenant, so that the rent from the second flat would pay off the one hundred percent mortgage which he offered to arrange for the two dwellings. Before the introduction of stricter controls on British building societies at the start of the sixties, it was common for property speculators to off-load properties to both tenants and other parties with one hundred percent mortgages which the seller had pre-arranged. Indeed, constant resale was one of the best ways of inflating the value of slum dwellings. Despite the prices paid under such arrangements generally being above market value, ownership still proved cheaper than renting.
Apparently my mother didn’t like the idea of being a landlady, so she opted to remain a tenant. Dalton-Brown seems to have been known by this double-barrelled moniker in bohemian circles, which is how he is listed in my mother’s address book, without a forename or even a prefix such as Mister. It may be that Dalton-Brown was fronting as landlord for the real owner of the property, since the use of nominee landlords was common in Notting Hill at the time. If Dalton-Brown ever actually owned either parts or all of 24 Bassett Road in the early sixties, he’d at least partially sold up before my mother moved out since the Kensington General Rate book for the year to 31 March 1966 contains the following listings: Basement Flat – Dalstead Property Co. Ltd; Ground Floor Rooms – Miss Mary Murphy crossed out and entered by hand G. J. Warden; First Floor Rooms – The Occupier; Second Floor (on which my mother lived) – Miss Whitehurst. Dalton-Brown is said to have been involved in many different business ventures, and also seems to have owned a race horse which was kept at a stable in the north of England.
In one of the two basement flats was a Trinidadian musician called Russell Henderson who’d come to London in 1951 as a mature student and never left. Henderson was a first cousin to Sandy Dalton-Brown – who at one time owned or managed at least part of the property – and some of those in Henderson’s circles referred to his and my mother’s landlord as Uncle Sandy. In 1952, Russ Henderson linked up with Sterling Betancourt. Together they made some recordings of Henderson’s piano music which were released as singles by Melodisc. With the addition of Mervyn Constantine they switched to playing pan drums and became The Russ Henderson Steel Band. When Constantine left the band, it was augmented by Ralph Cherrie and his brother Max Cherrie. As well as performing regular gigs, they also appeared on the radio and in both TV shows and feature films; including Danger Man, The Saint and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (Amicus, 1965, in a segment also featuring Roy Castle and the Tuby Hayes Quartet!). By the mid-sixties, with a minor shift in the line-up, Henderson was running his ensemble as both a steel band and a jazz quartet. For the latter, he’d sit at the piano, Sterling Betancourt played drums, Max Cherrie was on double bass and Gigi Walker blew the trumpet. The group had house spots as both a jazz ensemble and a steel band at different London venues, and also played further afield. Henderson continued to make records in the sixties but all are now deleted and they have become collector’s items; however, one of his best tracks, West Indian Drums, appeared a few years ago on the CD compilation London Is The Place For Me Volume 2.
In the second basement flat at 24 Bassett Road was a Jewish refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster (covered in an earlier blog). Both Forster and Henderson lived at 24 Bassett Road from the nineteen-fifties right through to the mid-eighties. Forster appears to have died in the mid-eighties, while Henderson moved on to other parts of west London, where he still lives, now aged 85. Another very interesting occupant of a conversion at this address in the earlier part of the sixties was Peter Hammerton, who’d set up an Interplanetary Society in the late-fifties and was a fixture of early science-fiction conventions. Hammerton was a friend of the writer Michael Moorcock who also lived in the area. During the half-decade my mother rented her two room flat at 24 Bassett Road, she would take long trips to Europe but nonetheless liked having somewhere secure to come back to, despite being away for periods of up to six months. Eventually in the summer of 1966 she moved on to a pad at 55 Elgin Crescent W11; this street is only a short walk from Bassett Road, but the flat my mother lived in there was located to the east of Ladbroke Grove, rather than to its west like her old gaff.
At the time it was first developed in the 1860s, the area around Elgin Crescent was known as The Stumps. A hundred years before my mother moved there it was described in Building News as ‘a graveyard of buried hopes’ with ‘naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls and slimy cement work’. The terraced houses in Elgin Crescent were of a similar pseudo-classical design to the detached building my mother had just left in Bassett Road albeit with fuller whitewashing. When Julie moved in, the property at 55 Elgin Crescent had just been divided into flats by a development company, so she signed a three year lease which she was able to sell on at a small profit when she left for Paris less than six months later.
In the mid-sixties, Michael X’s mother Iona Brown lived in Elgin Crescent, and she made money practising Obeah and dispensing spiritual advice from her flat. However, Iona Brown died in May 1966, shortly before my mother moved to the street. Someone my mother had befriended and who lived in Elgin Crescent at the same time as her was Terry Taylor. He had a place right by Finches pub, possibly at number 16. At the end of 1966, my mother left London to live in Paris and after a year there travelled on to India. When my mother took up living in London full-time once again in the summer of 1969, it was initially in a flat she shared with Terry Taylor and other friends at 58 Bassett Road. But that’s another story….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check - www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Bassett Road, Building News, central London, Dalstead Property Co. Ltd, Danger Man, Doctor Terror's House of Horrors, Elgin Crescent, Finches, Florence Gladstone, G. J. Warden, Gigi Walker, Hyde Park, India, Interplanetary Society, Iona Brown, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kensington, Ladbroke Grove, London, London Is The Place For Me, Mary Murphy, Max Cherrie, Mervyn Constantine, Michael Moorcock, Michael X, Miss Whitehurst, North Kensington, Notting Dale, Notting Hill, Paris, Peter Hammerton, Portobello, Ralph Cherrie, Roy Castle, Russ Henderson, Russell Henderson, Ruth Forster, Sandy Dalton-Brown, sixties, Sterling Betancourt, Terry Taylor, The Russ Henderson Steel Band, The Saint, The Stumps, Tuby Hayes Quartet, West Indian Drums, West Indies, west London
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 33 Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Because actress Lana Clarkson and her sadistic killer Phil Spector met in an LA hostess club, the producer’s conviction for murder earlier this week turned my attention once more to 1960s London variants on the ‘lonely men pay pretty girls for conversation’ clip joint racket. Murray’s Cabaret Club where Profumo Affair sex scandal girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked is the most famous London hostess joint. Being glitzy, Murray’s presented itself as a cabaret but the real draw was the more fatal combination of drink and hostesses. But Murray’s wasn’t the only such club in London in the sixties, other examples include Churchill’s and Winston’s. The staff often circulated between these places; for example, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson worked at Murray’s in the early sixties and then moved on to Churchill’s for a few years.
Gangsters like Frankie Fraser and the Kray Twins were inevitably familiar with many London clubs and their owners, and among those mentioned in Fraser’s various books are Billy Hill’s former wife Aggie Hill who ran The Modernaires in Old Compton Street and The Cabinet Club in Gerrard Street, Tommy McCarthy’s Log Cabin in Wardour Street, Al Burnett’s Stork Club and The Astor; Bertie Green acquired the latter establishment after Burnett let it go. The clubs operated by Aggie Hill were aimed at the criminal fraternity, whereas others were successful precisely because of the frisson created when high society mixed with the more successful members of the so called ‘dangerous classes’.
Those hostess and related clubs that weren’t fronts for organized crime generally paid protection money to gangsters. Frankie Fraser writes about Billy Howard receiving a ‘pension’ from Bruce Brace for ‘protecting’ Winston’s. Howard’s son Michael Connor in his book The Soho Don suggests his father and Brace were actually partners in the club. Connor says criminal convictions prevented Howard from openly owning premises licensed to serve liquor, and therefore his name didn’t appear on legal papers. Howard’s interest in Winston’s is affirmed by Jimmy Evans in his autobiography. In the late-sixties Joseph Wilkins took over the establishment with help from Evans. Brace insisted later he was terrorised into giving the club away; a claim that might be substantiated from the fact that no money changed hands during the course of this transaction. According to Evans, Howard would have come out on top in a fair fight, but he put the frighteners on the old-timer by threatening him with a gun. Howard’s son Connor tells a more complex story about his father’s pragmatic decision to walk away from Winston’s, but the end results still chime with what Evans has to say. With Howard neutralized, Brace had no choice but to sign the club over to Wilkins.
After he took over Winston’s, Wilkins was also running various escort agencies in partnership with Wally Birch. These included La Femme, Glamour International, Playboy Escort and Eve International. Regular catalogues of girls available for hire were produced and rather unsurprisingly in 1976 Wilkins was jailed for living off the immoral earnings of the prostitutes he controlled. Prior to this Wilkins had been jailed for the way he obtained club licenses, and later on in the eighties he did time for drug smuggling. Writing well after the event in 1992, James Morton was able to give Joe Wilkins and Wally Birch’s misdemeanors detailed coverage in his book Gangland: London’s Underworld.
Club links to organized crime meant that the hostesses who made their living from these joints didn’t always have the most pleasant of working conditions. To give an example, a minder called Big Alf Melvin who worked at The Bus Stop was treated very badly by his boss Tony Mella. One night Mella pushed this minion too far and was shot by him. Mella managed to stagger into the street where he died with his head in the lap of one of his hostesses. Meanwhile, Melvin turned the gun on himself and blew his own brains out. Melvin and Mella are covered by Morton in Gangland.
Club hostess Lisa Prescott had a very bad time in December 1966 after being picked up by gangsters at either Churchill’s or Winston’s – depending on who’s account you believe. One commentator, John Pearson, even has it both ways, saying Winston’s in his book The Profession of Violence and correcting it to Churchill’s in the follow-up The Cult of Violence. Regardless, Prescott was taken to a flat in Barking where Frank Mitchell was hiding out after being sprung from Dartmoor by associates of the Kray twins. Mitchell and Prescott engaged in a series of sexual acts over a number of days. Then on Christmas Eve, Mitchell was taken to a van outside the flat and shot because the Krays found him hard to control and figured that the easiest way to save face was to kill him. Prescott who’d been paid about £100 to have sex with Mitchell was taken to a party and told to forget she’d ever met him. A terrified Prescott saw in the New Year working as a hostess; she also found herself having occasional unpaid sex with Albert Donoghue, who she believed had murdered Mitchell and suspected was planning to kill her. Many commentators view Donoghue as a red-herring, and believe the murder was actually committed by Freddie Foreman.
The confusion of Winston’s and Churchill’s probably becomes more understandable if you know that Churchill’s was originally set up by Bruce Brace and Harry Meadows, with the active involvement of Billy Howard. Meadows eventually gained sole control of the venture, with Brace and Howard setting up across the street as Winston’s. They’d lost a lot of money when Meadows eased them out of the first club, so they gave their next venture a similar name to wind him up.
Moving on, like Lana Clarkson, many women who worked in London hostess clubs in the sixties swung between showbiz proper and hostessing. Again, my mother Julia Callan-Thompson is a good example. She did a bit of modelling and film-extra work alongside hostessing at Murray’s and Churchill’s. She wasn’t as successful as Clarkson in films, but that was partly because her main interest was inner exploration. At the end of the day, beatnik concerns were closer to my mother’s heart than showbiz. Obviously, unless they are looking for a rich husband, the women who work as hostesses aren’t really interested in the men who pay them for conversation. In the case of my own mother, she much preferred the real hip scene to the sham of bourgeois marriage.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Aggie Hill, Al Burnett, Albert Donoghue, Alf Melvin, Barking, Bertie Green, Big Alf Melvin, Billy Hill, Billy Howard, Bruce Brace, Christine Keeler, Churchill's, Dartmoor, east London, Eve International, Frank Mitchell, Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, Gangland, Gangland: London's Underworld, Gerrard Street, Glamour International, Harry Meadows, James Morton, Jimmy Evans, John Pearson, Joseph Wilkins, Julia Callan-Thompson, Kray Twins, La Femme, Lana Clarkson, Lisa Prescott, Log Cabin, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mandy Rice Davies, Michael Connor, Murray's Cabaret Club, Old Compton Street, Phil Spector, Playboy Escort, Profumo Affair, sixties, Soho, Stork Club, The Astor, The Bus Stop, The Cabinet Club, The Cult of Violence, The Modernaires, The Profession of Violence, The Soho Don, Tommy McCarthy, Tony Mella, Wally Birch, Wardour Street, west end, Winston's
Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 19 Comments »