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The unending cesspit of Jimmy Savile and the 1970s

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

I’d planned to write a blog about Max Clifford shooting himself in the foot over Jimmy Savile. I had the idea before I’d seen anyone else covering this but before I finished putting my piece together The Guardian run a story headlined: Jimmy Savile scandal: ‘celebrity hedonism no excuse for child abuse’ and straplined, ‘Child protection expert criticises Max Clifford for saying celebrities didn’t ask for birth certificates’. Paul Roffey may not say things the way I’d have formulated them but the points are basic and unfortunately still need laying out in this way because there are so many twerps around who can’t grasp the key issues.

There is obviously much greater awareness of paedophilia today but in the 1960s everyone knew about the age of consent and people were regularly tried for breaking the law over it. The fact that someone may have looked 16 or 21 if they were male may be mitigation but it is no defence. (Roffey tells The Guardian)

This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need stating. Nonetheless scumbags like Max Clifford make it necessary to do so since their arrant bullshit on the subject shouldn’t pass unchallenged. The rich and famous remain arrogant enough to think they can defend the indefensible – but we won’t let them get away with it!

Moving on, when I was sixteen in the late-seventies I had a female friend of the same age who a thirty-something photographer persuaded to pose naked. A twenty-something guy we both knew who worked in a punk record shop thought my friend was being exploited, so he told the photographer my friend was only 15. In a panic the thirty-something perv destroyed the prints and negatives he’d made of my friend (who’d actually turned sixteen a week so so before she posed nude for him). The photographer knew he’d get done if he was caught with indecent images of a 15 year-old and he’d asked my friend if she was sixteen, but our older acquaintance was more convincing when he falsely claimed she’d lied. The record shop assistant clearly had a better understanding of the nature of consent than the law – where there is a massive inequality in power relations there cannot be consent.

Around the same time various members of my male peer group (including me) were offered a hundred quid if we’d submit to being bum-fucked on camera. £100 was a lot of dosh to us back then and we were even told that our faces wouldn’t be on the films, only our backsides. We concluded that rather than being for our benefit this was to protect the pornographers making the movies – if we couldn’t be identified then no one would be able to prove that we were beneath the age of consent for gay sex in the UK at that time (as we were). In the late-seventies I found myself constantly proposition by older men as I wondered around London – and I was not only under the age of consent for gay sex, I also looked considerably younger than my actual age. The saddos hitting on me knew having sex with me wouldn’t be legal – but they didn’t care coz they thought they could get away with it. It was more usually men who I had to tell to fuck off as they harassed me, but I’d get just as pissed off with women who did it (and the oldest person to offer me money for sex as I came out of a punk concert was a female in her seventies – the men who did this were more usually in their thirties of forties).

The punk scene was full paedophiles and those attempting to exploit paedophilia for commercial gain. The Guardian may now be carrying on the whole relatively sensible articles about Jimmy Savile, but as recently as 10 April 2010 Alex Needham wrote in a laudatory blog about the punk poser Malcolm McLaren: “After managing the band Bow Wow Wow (and attempting to bring paedophilia into the mainstream via a magazine called Chicken), McLaren decided to make records himself. ” This is in an article with the strap-line: “The punk impressario’s stunts shook up pop music for ever. Here are some of the best.” Doh!

Not that The Guardian should be singled out for criticism on this score. The British tabloid press has way more to answer for since it played a role in turning Savile into an untouchable celebrity. Right-wing hack Garry Bushell has written for a range of the red tops, as well as involving himself with some of the more unsavory elements of the punk rock scene, and fronting his own really bad dumbcore band The Gonads. Bushell may or may not claim the following lyrics from his song I Lost My Love To A UK Sub are a joke, but nonetheless they ought to provide all the tabloids for whom he’s written with some food for thought:

My first love was a virgin only 13 years old/Till Charlie Harper grabbed on his pension day I’m told/He showered her with badges/He bought her lots of booze/And then showed her his warhead/Now don’t you think that’s crude?/He got her in a stranglehold/He got her in the club/Before I bleedin’ knew it I lost my love to a UK Sub…

Charlie Harper was the rather unlikely middle-aged front man to the punk band The UK Subs, and he had a reputation for bedding underage girls. Whether Harper’s unsavory reputation was deserved or not I’ve no idea, but when I hung around the punk scene in London in the late-1970s, Harper was widely perceived to be a dirty old man with a penchant for young girls. Bushell is playing off and celebrating Harper’s reputation for bedding jailbait, as is obvious from the large number of UK Subs song titles worked into his lyric. Towards the end of the song Bushell returns to the subject of grooming underage girls that is first addressed in the words quoted above (viz badges and booze): “Tank her up with vodka till the silly cow is sick/Take her in a stranglehold/Take her out the pub/Get back to your place and you’ll never lose your love to a UK Sub…” And for the benefit of those not familiar with all of the UK slang in the song ‘in the club’ (first verse) means pregnant, so this lyric is a very blatant paean to kiddie fiddling.

I’ll end by noting that while child abuse imagery could be found in various parts of the punk scene of the 1970s, it seemed to have the strongest appeal to those with far-Right leanings. Neo-Nazi punk moron Ian Stuart recorded a song on this subject called Jailbait with his band Skrewdriver in 1977:

Normal hair looks so good / Temptation think I should? / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / No one knows you’re sneaking out / Your old man would scream and shout / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / Just because you’re just fifteen / They can’t guess the things you’ve seen / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / They don’t want you getting pissed / Enjoying things that they have missed / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait.

Again note the alcohol reference (‘getting pissed’) and the role this plays in grooming underage girls (and also boys in the case of many of those in the Skrewdriver entourage – such as fascist bonehead Nicky Crane who also wrote bad lyrics and drew crap record covers for the group). On a live recording of Skrewdriver performing Jailbat at The Marquee in London on 4 June 1977, Ian Stuart introduces the song by saying” “Right we’re going to do one about little girls….” in a leering voice, just in case anyone misses the fact that he fancies himself as a perv.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in mass media, music, True crime | 37 Comments »

Murder In Notting Hill by Mark Olden (Zero Books)

Friday, September 30th, 2011

The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards. Olden’s text is in part a narrative of his attempts to identify the killer, and the naming of Digby represents its climax.

Murder In Notting Hill is much more than simply a true crime book, it is also a social history. There are uplifting paragraphs about the struggles of those who in the 1950s were newly arrived in London from the West Indies, and far less edifying passages about racist teenage gangs and organised fascist activists. Over the years it has been claimed by some commentators that either Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement or Colin Jordan’s White Defence League had a hand in Cochrane’s murder. Olden is dismissive of this idea and if his identification of Digby as the killer is correct, then he is almost certainly right on this score. The lives of all Notting Hill residents are portrayed as pretty grim in this paperback, so Olden hits on the fascist ideologues and a toff copper – Superintendent Ian Forbes-Leith (“The Governor in the Bowler”) – as figures from whom he can wring a little humour. Describing a fascist meeting in defence of a gang of teddy boys imprisoned for a series of extremely vicious racist attacks the year before Cochrane’s murder, Olden writes:

At a meeting at Oxford Gardens School, just off Ladbroke Grove, the campaign to free the nine young men was growing. A tall thin Welshman – rarely seen out of the same jacket and trousers – held aloft a newspaper with their grinning portraits. “Thugs. That’s what they were called,” he said. This was outrageous. “These,” he shouted, “are some of the finest faces you could wish to see in Britain.” He vowed they “must not be forgotten as they lie in prison during the best years of their lives.”… The speaker was Jeffrey Hamm. He was 43-years old, had lived in Notting Hill for the past six years and was Secretary of a far-right political party called the Union Movement.

There are laughs to be had from filthy fascists who always dress in the same clothes, and such amusements very effectively lighten the mood and prevent the reader getting bogged down in Olden’s serious and at times very depressing subject matter. Occasionally the jokes are recycled, such as the chapter heading “One Foot In The Grove”, which will be familiar to those who have read Tom Vague on Notting Hill (and I wouldn’t be surprised if Vague had filched this one-liner from an earlier source). For those that aren’t acquainted with west London and/or English idioms, The Grove refers to the area around Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill, and Olden’s chapter heading is a play on the hackneyed phrase ‘one foot in the grave’. That said, ultimately Murder In Notting Hill makes for compelling reading because Olden deftly and very confidently walks us through his own investigation into Cochrane’s murder – as well as the failed police enquiry. The book works on one level as a whodunit, although obviously there is far more to it than that.

Murder In Notting Hill explores the long lasting detrimental effects of Cochrane’s murder on both the victim’s family and the killer (assuming, of course, Digby was the thug responsible for this repugnant act). It is also a timely reminder that neither institutional racism, police corruption, nor the old bill being in the pockets of the media, are anything new in London. Like the majority of historical works I read, Murder In Notting Hill relies a little too heavily on an established history to provide a backdrop to the main story. Olden writes well about the working class (both black and white) of Notting Hill but omits to deal with the hipsters who by the late-fifties were also an established part of the area. For example, Terry Taylor and his circle go unmentioned, despite the fact that Taylor provided the inspiration for the first person narrator of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes.

Moving on, the dry as dust far-Right splinter groups Olden disinters are old news to anyone who is au fait with the history of post-war British fascism. Less well documented – and completely passed over by Olden – is the Spartacan movement, which was organised by a group of right-wingers associated with the angry young man literary scene; they lived together at 25 Chepstow Road in Notting Hill from the mid to the late-fifties. The Spartacans appear to have had close links to Oswald Mosley and his Union Movement. They are viciously satirised by Bernard Kops in his 1958 novel Awake For Mourning. Obviously only so much material can be included in any one book, but I was nonetheless disappointed that in sketching the backdrop to his story, Olden – like the overwhelming majority of writers working today – stuck to such a well-beaten historical track.

No author or book is perfect, and despite some slight and inevitable imperfections, Murder In Notting Hill is an impressive piece of historical detective work. That said, one of Olden’s footnotes really pissed me off:

Among the speakers at Kelso’s graveside was the Notting Hill hustler Michael de Freitas, who later re-styled himself into the revolutionary Michael X, aka Michael Abdul Malik, Britain’s supposed answer to Malcolm X. De Freitas finished up more like Charles Manson, his life spiralling into megalomania and murder in his native Trinidad, where he went to the gallows in 1975.

For all his faults – and clearly de Freitas had many – to compare him to Charles Manson is deeply obnoxious. De Freitas may have engaged in criminal behaviour but he was not a deranged maniac. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the de Freitas trial will see that it was a miscarriage of justice and he should not have been hanged on the basis of the ‘evidence’ presented in court. De Freitas may or may not have been guilty as charged, but he was not a complete nutjob like Manson.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, politics, True crime | 20 Comments »

69 years of press coverage for Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones…

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

Over the past year I’ve devoted a number of blogs to my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones. Having talked to various people about Ray and located assorted print references to him made after he’d retired from being the greatest cat burglar in the world, I thought it was time to dig back into the past. Old newspaper reports of Ray’s court appearances verify much of what he had to say about his life, clarify various matters, and show that more recent accounts of his famous jail break have been distorted by those retelling the tale. Doing a quick search through national newspapers, I found no reports of Ray’s boxing career, and the earliest press coverage I could locate was dated 8 March 1940. The Daily Mirror put things this way:

“Thief Celebrated With 21 Suits

“A man living on the proceeds of house breaking once had so much money that he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pockets. And for two years his fists kept him free.

“The police stated this at the Old Bailey yesterday when Raymond Jones, 23, described as a labourer of King Edward Walk, Lambeth, London, was sentenced to two years imprisonments for causing grievous bodily harm to a constable who tried to arrest him at the Marble Arch in December 1937, and for attempted theft from a car.

“He was arrested in Lambeth last month.

“A detective said Jones admitted assaulting numerous police officers to escape arrest in the last two years and he had been living on the proceeds of house breaking.”

There was an equally biased report in The Times also of 8 March 1940:

“Caught After Two Years. Labourer’s Savage Attack On Policeman.

“After being at liberty for over two years a man who twice escaped from police in 1937, on both occasions leaving a police officer unconscious on the ground and was not recaptured until early this year at Lambeth Walk, appeared in the dock at the Central Criminal Court yesterday.

“He is Raymond Jones, 23, a labourer of King Edward Walk, and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for causing grievous bodily harm to one of the two constables, and attempted theft from a motor-car.

“Detective Hope said the prisoner admitted assaulting several police officers in order to escape arrest in the past two years. He had been living on the proceeds of house-breaking. On one occasion he had so much money he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pocket.

“Judge Beazley, in sentencing Jones, said he had been guilty of a savage attack.”

On the basis of these reports, the press should be in the dock, charged with spreading unctuous bullshit. As I hope I’ve made clear in my earlier blogs, Ray was not guilty, he was fitted-up. The papers, taking their cue from the Old Bill and a slimeball judge report him as being guilty of numerous assaults on cops, but he was found guilty on just one count! And in this instance, he acted in self-defence after being violently assaulted by a bully dressed in blue.

Ray’s 1952 appearance at the Old Bailey was also widely covered by the press under headlines such as Alleged Complicity In Fur Coats Theft (Times April 25 1952), £4000 Fur’s Theft, Six And A Half Year Sentence (Times 24 June 1952), and Police Kept Watch From ‘Q Van’ He Says (Daily Mirror 21 June 1952). This need not detain us, although the swiping of guests’ coats during a swanky New Year party thrown by Colonel Martin Charteris for his upper-class chums is an amusing tale; and it is also worth noting that in his evidence Ray mentioned a feud between his family and notorious 1950s gangster Billy Hill and that to defend his brother who’d been stabbed, Ray punched out the Mister Big of the London crime world. But let’s move on to Ray’s famous jail break. The Times of 18 October 1958 described it thus:

“Two Escape At Pentonville. Others Fail In Attempt.

“Five men took part in an escape attempt from Pentonville Prison last light. Three were recaptured, but two others got away. They were the first men to break out of the prison since it was reopened in 1946. A full scale search of the area was carried out.

“The men who got out of the prison were Raymond Jones, aged 42, serving 8 years preventative detention, who Scotland Yard said might be violent, and John Rider, aged 28, serving 5 years imprisonment.

“The escape was made during the period given over to evening classes. Jones and Rider found ladders being used during the repair of the prison roof, and took them to scale the 20ft wall of the prison.

“Once on top of the wall, they jumped into an alley that skirts the side of the prison and one turned left, the other right… Tracker dogs, police cars, wardens, uniformed and plain clothes police with torches toured streets around Caledonian Road.”

The Daily Mirror (18 October 1958) used Gaol Break 2 Men Hunted as its headline, and this front page story contained the following information not provided by The Times: “Two of the other three men perched on the top of the wall then dropped back into the goal yard. The third fell and was injured.”  Rider enjoyed just 24 hours freedom, as The Times reported on 20 October 1958:

“John Rider aged 34, one of two men who escaped from Pentonville Prison, London, on Friday night, was recaptured on Saturday while he was asleep on a sofa in an unoccupied home at Antler Hill, Chingford, Essex.

“The search continues for the other prisoner Raymond Jones aged 42, who was serving a sentence of eight years preventative detention. Scotland Yard issued a warning he might be violent.”

The idea that Ray was potentially violent was just a cop smear designed to justify the filth’s 1940 fit-up; Ray never carried weapons, although he would defend himself with his fists if attacked. Ray also knew how to run and hide, having spent the whole of 1938 and 1939 on his toes… When he was finally recaptured The Daily Express (24 November 1960) put the story on the front page and reported it this way:

“Two-Year Escaper Caught

“Pentonville’s record escaper, Raymond Jones, was recaptured in Staines, Middlesex, last night.

He went ‘over the wall’ two years ago – the longest time a fugitive has been on the run from the jail.

“A tip-off at lunch-time sent the police to Staines. They waited six hours to seize him at a house.

“Jones, a 42 year old Welshman, was serving eight years preventative detention.”

So there you have it, plenty of contemporary documentation to confirm just why Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones is a legend! And this is also why as recently as November this year Wales On Sunday devoted yet another page to this famous criminal, the closest thing the 20th century ever produced to a new Robin Hood!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in True crime | 74 Comments »

Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, the Hackney connection… completely missed by Iain Sinclair!

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Way back in February I posted a couple of blogs about Iain Sinclair’s book Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. What I didn’t realise back then, or even earlier when I’d given Sinclair a few pointers as regards research on this book, was that Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones was a long time Hackney character who during the 1990s featured regularly in The Hackney Gazette. Since Ray doesn’t appear in Sinclair’s book, I guess this proves that neither of us read the Hackney press with any diligence….

Ray lived for many years at Flat 9, St Andrews House, Cranwich Road, Stamford Hill, London N16 5JB. His long term press spokesman Michael Morgan has also been based in Hackney for many years, and when I met up with the latter man last week he told me that towards the end of his life Ray had used an otherwise empty flat belonging to a mutual friend in Colvestone Crescent, Dalston. This is why press reports about Ray often said he lived in Dalston, although he also kept his council flat in Stamford Hill until his death in 2001.

Among the press clippings Morgan gave me when I met him was the following headlined “Burglar Ray’s dying wish is in the posters’ from The Hackney Gazette of 20 August 1998:

“A cat burglar who robbed the rich and famous for more than 40 years, has been caught putting up his own ‘Wanted’ posters.

“Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, who lives in Colvestone Crescent, Dalston, has started sticking up the posters in Hackney, with a photo of him behind bars and details of his life story.

“The 82 year-old who is suffering from lung cancer, says it is his last chance to tell his story. ” ‘For years high-ranking police officers have stopped publishers printing my story because it would expose past corruption and victimisation,’ says Ray.

” ‘They know I’m about to die and they hope the truth will go with me. Well damn them, this story is coming out,’ he adds defiantly.

“Although now a frail old man, the crafty crook stole an estimated career haul of £60 million of jewels and valuables – despite spending 33 years in jail.

” ‘Most of them were for crimes I didn’t do and honest policemen have admitted that,’ says Ray. ‘I’m not looking for forgiveness. I was a criminal. I just want the people around me know what happened.’ ”

Two years before this, in an edition of 25 April 1996, The Hackney Gazette had carried the headline ‘Cat’s Campaign for recognition’ and beneath it the following story:

“The once-athletic burglar Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones has staged a one-man protest claiming that the police have tried to cover up his involvement in a gems burglary from a movie star.

“Standing next to a huge placard cataloguing his alleged part in the theft of jewels from Sophia Loren, 80-year-old Ray distributed 500 leaflets at Ridley Road market, Dalston, last Friday to passers-by.

“Ray who lives in Stamford Hill claims that he and an accomplice paid for information from two senior police officers that helped them steal the Italian actress’s gems when she was staying in London in the 1960s.

” ‘They are afraid of being exposed,’ said Ray, who confessed to the crime four years ago, but has not been arrested for it. He claimed that all attempts to reveal his role in the heist have been suppressed, including deals to publish his life story.”

When I met Michael Morgan in his Hackney flat, he told me that he’d lost many of the papers and press clippings relating to Ray, but he gave me photocopies of everything he still had. Michael spoke passionately about Ray and his decade-long friendship with him. Ray had clearly been a charismatic figure who made a lasting impression on those he met.

After I visited him, Michael Morgan sent me the following statement about Ray Jones:

“For people who read news on Raymond Jones in the Hackney & national newspapers, Raymond for many years wanted his life story published, the news in 1992 about the burglary of Sophia Loren from May 1960, caused a great deal of public interest, of course those unique court trials were the real reason why Raymond’s life story was stopped by the powers that be. If the trials from the 1930s 40s & 50s had come into the public domain, people reading  about these trials would have been very shocked to think that things like this could happen in crown courts. In 1994 the Mail on Sunday newspaper promised Raymond if he was arrested for the burglary of Sophia Loren they would do a large news story on him a reporter & photographer came out to Borehamwood Police Station and spent six hours there before Raymond was arrested. The story was shelved, why? The Sun newspaper on another occasion spent a day and a half with Raymond in Wales. The story was shelved, why? How sad they could do this to a very ill man, as Raymond was. Two major book publishers promised to publish Raymond Jones’s life story but shelved the plans, why? One of the editors talked to Raymond one day and said, I am sorry, we can’t publish your story we have been stopped and I can’t say more than that.

“Is this democracy? God help us all.

“A very big thank you to Welsh newspapers, The Western Mail and sister paper Wales on Sunday and The Hackney Gazette in London, for their kindness over a very long time and the very many stories that was published in these papers to get Raymond Jones’s life story into the public domain.

“If Raymond’s life story had been published, I am sure the public would have taken Raymond to their heart and would have looked on Raymond, not as a jewel thief but a martyr.

“Raymond Jones passed away on 4th February 2001.”

Thus while I was able to help Iain Sinclair out with his Hackney research into the Mole Man and other matters, I clearly let the side down by not knowing enough about the colorful life of my distant relative Raymond Jones. When Sinclair was working on his Hackney book, I knew my mother‘s cousin was a jewel thief but I didn’t know he had personal connections to Hackney going back to the 1950s and possibly much earlier… So in as far as Iain Sinclair might be criticised for his lack of local knowledge on this score, I too should bear some of the blame…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, deep topology aka psychogeography, True crime | 25 Comments »

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