Posts Tagged ‘central London’
Friday, June 26th, 2009
I try to catch as many of the BFI’s Flipside nights as I can, since this monthly delve into the wilder side of British cinema should not be taken for granted. It is sobering to think that only a few years ago the BFI was an incredibly stuffy and conservative institution that haughtily ignored the film culture it now highlights in its Flipside programming. So big up to Vic Pratt, Will Fowler and the current BFI management for being forward thinking and in the groove! The days of tossers like Colin McCabe passing-off their tiresome taste in bourgeois snore fests as somehow representing everything that is ‘progressive’ in cinematic culture are thankfully over!
First up at Flipside last night was Towers Open Fire (1963, directed by Antony Balch). This was a clean 35mm print from the BFI archive, and you could actually see where Balch had deliberately degraded the film stock to create contrasts between different passages. Towers Open Fire was written by and stars beat novelist William Burroughs. It condenses his literary obsessions and cut-up techniques into a dozen minutes of screen time. The world disintegrates, the stock exchange crashes, and some strange things happen in the old BFI boardroom on Dean Street. Magic is performed over cans of film, the director lies on a bed and jerks off, there are shots of a Brion Gysin dream machine, cameos by BFI luminary Liam O’Leary and junkie novelist Alexander Trocchi, and things more or less end with Ian Sommerville doing a comic dance. I’ve seen this short many times, but never from such a good print.
Next up was the legendary Kronhausen’s Psychomontage No. 1 (1963, originated and executed by Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen), a short I’d never seen before. Antony Balch did some of the cinematography for this movie, the rest is by the Granada Zoological Unit and Harold Keene. The film cuts between shots of animal sexual activity and amorous human subjects. Towards the end, the Kronhausen’s up-the-ante with some almost explicit scenes of a woman getting fresh with a dog. This short is very hard to source and the BFI screened it from a video copy supplied by Mark Pilkington of Stranger Attractor. By chance, Mark had the seat next to me in BFI Screen 1. We said hello but the programme had just started when he came in, and he rushed off at the end of this Flipside session, so I didn’t get a chance to quiz him about the Kronhausen movie. I’m still trying to get my head around it, and would like to see it again.
The main feature was Horror Hospital (1973, directed by Antony Balch). This is essentially a parody of a Bela Lugosi-style b-movie. The plot revolves around a mad scientist called Dr Storm (Michael Gough), who is performing brain surgery on victims he lures to his Gothic mansion, turning them into mindless slaves (who he sexually abuses). Inevitably one of Dr Storm’s assistants is a dwarf (Skip Martin), and the flick also features iconic 1970s British sex-comedy star Robin Askwith. Balch plays with old dark house and horror tropes but keeps the campy parody reigned in just enough to maintain audience interest in the slight plot, which concludes with the mansion going up in flames. The overall vibe is similar to movies such as Thundercrack (1975, directed by Curt McDowell) and Flesh For Frankenstein (1973, directed by Paul Morrissey), but Balch gives the proceedings a uniquely English twist and does so with considerably more aplomb than the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, directed by Jim Sharman). The audience at the BFI was in stitches throughout Horror Hospital.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, Antony Balch, Bela Lugosi, BFI, Brion Gysin, British Film Institute, central London, Colin McCabe, Curt McDowell, Dean Street, Eberhard Kronhausen, Flesh For Frankenstein, Flipside, Granada Zoological Unit, Harold Keene, Horror Hospital, Ian Sommerville, Jim Sharman, Kronhausen's Psychomontage No. 1, Liam O'Leary, London, Mark Pilkington, Michael Gough, Paul Morrissey, Phyllis Kronhausen, Robin Askwith, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Skip Martin, South Bank, south London, Stranger Attractor, Thundercrack, Towers Open Fire, Vic Pratt, Will Fowler, William Burroughs
Posted in film | 17 Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
After clocking my earlier blogs about Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, a couple of readers kindly passed on further information about this legendary criminal. As a consequence, I can now bring you a written statement in which Ray The Cat explains that he embarked on his career as a master thief in order to get his revenge on bent cops; these crumbs wrecked Ray’s boxing career by fitting him up on trumped-up assault charges. The story is best told in his own words:
“I have never had much schooling but I have learned a great deal from life.
From the age of 12 my whole dream was to have become the middleweight boxing champion of the world. I honestly believe I would have got there but for the evil of the police and the dishonesty of some judges. Because of the wrongs done to me – first of which was that I served a Borstal sentence of 3 years and I also served a total of 6 years imprisonment. I was innocent of both counts.
The 6 years I served, it was for hitting a policeman – who happened to be the metropolitan police boxing champion – in self-defence. I started that six years in 1940 but the offence took place in 1937 when I was 21 years old. It did not happen but only a few weeks later I was due to box a leading middleweight contender and had I won I would have fought the British middleweight champion for the title with Mr. Jack Solomon, the boxing promoter, who believed I would have beaten the both of them and won the title.
At the time I got the 6 year sentence, when I was taken into custody, the police question you as if you are responsible for all kinds of assaults on the police and one evil policeman at Gerald Road Police Station did falsely charge me for hitting him as well as the police boxing champion, when he knew I had not done so. It was that officer that took charge of the two charges – the one with him and the other with the police heavyweight champion.
I got convicted on the charge for hitting the police champion and I got 6 years imprisonment. I did get acquitted on the evil officer’s charge but to do so I did have my younger brother David come up to London from Wales and give evidence on my behalf and prove that I was not in London at the time. My brother never did get back home to Wales in 1940 because he was killed with the first bombing of London in the war and went home in his coffin, and I went to prison for the 6 years and I was innocent.
That was in 1940. In 1982 I was charged on the evidence of a supergrass and I am pleased to say that the presenting barrister on behalf of the Regional Crime Squad police did inform the trial judge that I was innocent of the 6 years sentence I served in 1940. That barrister also cleared me of a sentence of 18 months I did wrongfully serve in 1944.
When my brother was killed and I got that 6 year sentence I swore and vowed to myself that I would hit back at the rogues that had wrongly condemned me, and that I would become the greatest cat burglar and jewel thief that ever was. I kept that vow and I never ever stole from anybody poor. I only robbed the elites and most wealthy such as lords, ladies, dukes, duchesses, multi-millionaire industrialists and three of the world’s richest film stars – Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Bette Davies. Also the best Home Secretary of all time R. A. Butler.”
So there you have it, an unequivocal statement of opposition to the cops who fitted Ray up and set him off on his life of crime. I assume the 18 month sentence in 1944 was for an alleged prison misdemeanor and led to Ray doing a continuous six-year stretch inside. Likewise, it would appear Ray’s boxing career ended in 1937 because he was forced on the run. If anyone is able to clarify these matters or add new information please do so in the comments below. Jones was very keen to have his story told right up to his death, so anyone who can contribute to his biography is assisting in the realisation of his dying wishes. There is a further story I can add here, emailed to me by another of my blog readers:
“Ray and my grandfather were brothers. My grandfather’s name was Ambrose Jones. I was told by my grandad that when Ray was on the run he dressed up as a woman so he could go to his mother’s funeral. The police were at the funeral but no-one recognised him for a while and when he was spotted he had to scale a fence so he could get away. My dad was at the funeral and he said there were loads of old time criminals there, he said it was great.”
If anyone has press cuttings or videos of Ray The Cat’s TV appearances, I’d love to see those too. Ray Jones is a legend and by getting as much of his life-story online as possible we’ll ensure that his memory lives on! And I’m also looking for information on some other relatives of mine and Ray’s who lived in the Victoria area of London in the 1950s and 1960s, the Callaghans. The head of the family was Dinny Callaghan and he’d lost an eye in a fight over who ran the protection at The Derby. His sons were involved in criminal exploits too. According to family legend, the south Wales filth took a dislike to Dinny when he was a young man, and after illegally conveying him to the border with England, they told him never to return to Wales. The west London underworld is not nearly as well documented as that in south and east London, and by getting some leads on the Callaghans we can hopefully start filling in some more ‘lost’ history. Again any information placed in the comments section below will be greatly appreciated. Just to clarify, Dinny Callaghan was Ray The Cat’s uncle.
Checking again I was able to find Will Cohu’s hatchet job on Ray The Cat from The Independent on that newspaper’s site, so you can see it there for free rather than having to use a pay-to-view web archive service. With the statement from Ray above, it becomes possible to see that Cohu didn’t fully grasp everything Jones told him.
I also recently came across a couple of sentences on Ray The Cat AKA Raymond The Climber in Villains’ Paradise: Britain’s Underworld from the Spivs to the Krays by Donald Thomas (John Murray, London 2005, page 365): “In June 1952, Raymond Jones, known as ‘Raymond The Climber’, was also sent to prison, in his case for six years, for robbing Colonel Charteris. He had fifteen criminal convictions going back to the age of twelve.” A footnote informs us that Ray The Cat was found guilty and sentenced at the Old Bailey on 23 June 1952. Citing Peter Scott’s unreliable autobiography as his source, Thomas goes on to credit Ray’s assistant with sole credit for carrying out the 1960 Sophie Loren Elstree jewel theft, a claim Ray consistently contested (see my earlier blog).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: bent cops, Bette Davies, boxing, cat burglary, central London, Colonel Charteris, Donald Thomas, Elizabeth Taylor, Gerald Road, Gerald Row Police Station, Jack Solomon, Old Bailey, Peter Scott, R A Butler, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, Sophia Loren, Victoria, Villains' Paradise: Britain's Underworld from the Spivs to the Krays
Posted in True crime | 17 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 31st, 2009
Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie (Feral House $24.99) provides a curious history of one of the minor cults that flourished on the fringes of the counterculture. That said, The Process has remained very visible to this day, thanks in part to claims it was the hidden ‘evil’ force behind both the Tate-LaBianca and the Son of Sam slayings. Wyllie insists that these claims, as well as salacious stories about Process founder Mary Ann MacLean having been married to American boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and playing a role in the Profumo Affair, are false. All the available evidence would suggest Wyllie is correct on these matters, and while this adds to the credibility of his tale, it will probably do little for the sales of his book.
The book is a personal account of Wyllie’s time with The Process and the story he tells is more convincing than the portraits of the group found in books such as The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and the first edition of The Family by Ed Saunders, but it is also far more banal. Therefore, if you want to read sensationalist and ultimately fictionalised accounts of Satanic killing sprees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. There is plenty of that online, and a web search will also locate many Process writings and graphics.
The history of The Process is essentially this: in 1963 two former Scientologists Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston established a therapy business in Wigmore Street, London. Mary Ann MacLean was a former prostitute who grew up in poverty in Glasgow, while Robert de Grimston was from an upper class family and had served as an officer in the British army before becoming an architecture student and then dropping out three years into these studies. Wyllie first met de Grimston in 1959 when they both enrolled on the architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic (renamed Polytechnic of Central London in 1970, with a further name change to University of Westminster in 1992). In 1963 McLean and de Grimston began using Wyllie as a guinea pig to test and develop techniques they’d learnt as Scientologists, adapting them to their own purposes.
Wyllie’s circle of student friends provided the initial recruits to what was then called Compulsions Analysis. In Wyllie’s account, those involved with MacLean and de Grimson recognised a sense of spirituality in their activities and the name of the group was therefore changed to The Process in 1965. My own impression is there was nothing spiritual about MacLean and essentially she conned the group into becoming her disciples and funding the luxury life-style she and de Grimston craved. Even from Wyllie’s rather misty-eyed account, it is apparent MacLean was a hard-bitten hustler who’d mastered the con game when she was working as a high class London hooker throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.
While Process acolytes panhandled for money and lived in abject poverty, the group rented properties it could barely afford in an attempt to trick the outside world into believing they possessed wealth and power. De Grimston and MacLean were the only Process members to live in style. While de Grimston provided the theology, MacLean was the real power running this cynical money-grabbing hierarchy. Over the years the group expanded and at various times had chapters in Rome, Paris, New Orleans, San Francisco, Munich, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Miami. Chapters were sometimes moved from one city to another, and the membership never seems to have stretched beyond the very low hundreds, although The Process claimed to have tens of thousands of members.
Process theology was based on the unification of opposites, and a reading of the Bible that took Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy enemy’ to mean love Satan. Much of this gnostic garbage was confected in group sessions and then written up by de Grimston, and even Wyllie admits it didn’t read well on the printed page. After an Idris Shah book fell on his head in a Notting Hill bookshop, Wyllie convinced himself that de Grimston and MacLean were disguised Sufi masters, and like other members of the cult was also prone to viewing the latter as a human incarnation of the Goddess! The original core of The Process consisted chiefly of over-privileged and privately educated brats, and it seems to me that much remains to be written about how an upper-class upbringing renders individuals peculiarly susceptible to the brainwashing techniques of religious cults.
The Process fell apart when de Grimston and MacLean ended their marital relationship in 1974. De Grimston attempted to revitalise The Process without success. MacLean led the disciples who stuck with her into The Foundation, which adopted increasingly conventional Christian doctrines before reinventing itself as a secular animal charity called Best Friends. MacLean died in 2005, de Grimston is still alive.
Wyllie’s account of his 15 years with The Process is supplemented by the stories of various other members. The most shocking thing to come out of this is the criminal neglect of children whose parents belonged to the cult. The overall impression I’m left with is that life in The Process was very dull, and you had to be deluded to join it in the first place. The Process memoirs gathered together here also show that those conned by guru-figures are very slow to give up their illusions, and will often attempt to off-set the fact they were ripped-off with the desultory claim they enjoyed some kind of spiritual adventure in ‘the process’.
In addition to these memoirs, this book also contains a selection of unimpressive texts by de Grimston, and a very silly essay by Genesis P. Orridge about how he modelled Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth on The Process. The image section in this tome is rather more interesting, since it illustrates the strong design sense and corporate-style marketing of The Process as a self-consciously totalitarian cult. From Wyllie’s account of the group it is clear why The Process chose to project itself as a totalitarian ‘elite’:
“Mary Ann (cult leader Mary Ann MacLean) never made any apologies, for instance, about having considerable sympathy and respect for the Nazi regime. Doubtless it suited her authoritarian personality. A story I have heard her relate more than once is of her as a small girl of nine or ten, who found herself leaving her physical body and being transported into Hitler’s bunker during World War II. There she would slip around the table in her astral form whispering into the generals’ ears. Whether she ever claimed to observe der Fuehrer’s legendary rages, I don’t recall, but if she had I can only imagine she would have egged him on in his carpet-biting frenzies.” (Page 56).
Elsewhere Wyllie recalls:
“Michael and I stopped in to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, the ‘American Nazi’, out of allegiance to Mary Ann’s interest in extreme ideologies…. Rockwell sat in the only armchair… He looked younger than I thought he was going to be, with a buzz-cut and a surprisingly open, pleasant, face, marred now by a fixed scowl that didn’t leave him while we were there… He had a military bearing but was clearly a frightened man… Later I found out that Lincoln Rockwell was killed in August of 1967 by a disgruntled ex-member of his party and only days after our visit. I should add that Michael is the scion of a wealthy Jewish family and I can only imagine that Mary Ann instructed him to visit Rockwell as a way of testing his mettle…” (Pages 80-81).
Elsewhere in his narrative Wyllie tells tales of counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Simon Vinkenoog, assisting The Process. He also writes about a few of the celebrities the group attempted to shake down for donations; they range from Miles Davis to Salvador Dali. Sadly, he has nothing to say about Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, who okayed the reproduction of Process material on the art work to a couple of his albums. Mostly this is a book about the internal dynamics of The Process and as such it makes for curious but nonetheless extremely depressing reading; it appears that most of the ‘former’ cult members contributing to it are still deluded about their experiences years after the group broke up.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s, Abbie Hoffman, Adolf Hitler, American Nazi Party, Amsterdam, Best Friends, Boston, central London, Charles Manson, Chicago, Christianity, Compulsions Analysis, Ed Saunders, Feral House, Funkadelic, Genesis P. Orridge, George Clinton, George Lincoln Rockwell, Glasgow, Gnosticism, Idris Shah, London, Los Angeles, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, Mary Ann MacLean, Maury Terry, Miami, Miles Davis, Munich, Nazism, New Orleans, New York, Notting Hill, Paris, Polytechnic of Central London, Profumo Affair, Regent Street Polytechnic, Robert de Grimston, Rome, Salvador Dali, San Francisco, Satanism, Scientology, Simon Vinkenoog, sixties, Son of Sam, Suagr Ray Robinson, Sufism, Tate-LaBianca murders, The Family, The Process, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, The Ultimate Evil, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, Timothy Leary, Timothy Wyllie, Toronto, University of Westminster, Wigmore Street
Posted in books, counterculture | 51 Comments »
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols.
I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig. Not much further away is the site of the old Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, the building that housed it is now demolished. The Sex Pistols played the Marquee but I managed to avoid them both there and at St Martin’s. That said, I did spend a lot of time at the Marquee in the late-seventies. Although the Marquee was originally located on Oxford Street and much latter moved to Charing Cross Road, the Wardour Street address is its core location and the club was run from there between 13 March 1964 until 18 July 1988.
When I went to the Marquee in the 1970s, Big John the bouncer would be standing at the entrance, I’d pay between 50p and a pound to see the band, and as I walked down the corridor to the first bar I’d hear Jerry Floyd or Ian Flemming spinning disks as a warm up. The place is etched in my memory, and so is how dirty Soho and the rest of London were at that time. When I walked into St Martin’s yesterday it reminded me of how great London used to be before it was cleaned up and gentrified. The Marquee in the late-seventies was peeling, and so was the rest of London. St. Martin’s is in ruins today and repairs are avoided because this institution was merged with The Central School of Art in 1989, Central St Martin’s is now a constituent college in The University of the Arts London, and is moving to a new purpose built campus in Kings Cross in 2011.
Wandering around St Martin’s yesterday I could feel Soho history wafting through the corridors, and some of it smelt rank. The building was built around 1938 and at the time would have been really grand. Now there are little locked rooms all over the place, and I wonder if when they’re finally opened there will be a yield of dead bodies. No one seems to know what is locked behind those doors. While plodding tourist ‘heritage’ items like the Sex Pistols now form the official history of St Martins, it has a much more interesting subterranean past. To give just one example, beat novelist Alexander Trocchi was employed by the sculpture department on a pretty much a full-time basis between October 1964 and March 1966. As far as I’m aware that episode is still fairly blank in terms of published biographical accounts of Trocchi’s life.
Moving on, I guess everyone imagines Soho was best in whatever state they first got to know it. My real love affair with the place was between 1974 and 1980, from the ages of 12 to 18. This was the era of the dirty bookshops and sex cinemas. The sleazy feel of the place at that time totally grooved me and I hated the way it was subsequently cleaned up. If you read the memoirs of fifties London gangsters then they tend to bemoan the arrival of the sex shops, which they say brought about the decline of the family businesses that gave the area its distinctive feel. What those who first discovered Soho in the nineties are nostalgic about I haven’t a clue… But luckily for me it looks like the credit crunch is taking what was once my favourite part of London back to the state I think it ought to be in; i.e. a dirty rotten mess. Who knows, I might even catch Sohoitis once again! Yes, going into St Martin’s yesterday gave me a real whiff of a London I know is no longer lost forever….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1970s, 70s, Alex Trocchi, Alexander Trocchi, central London, Central School of Art, Charing Cross Road, Denmark Street, Greek Street, Ian Flemming, Jerry Floyd, London, Marquee Club, Oxford Street, seventies, Sex Pistols, Soho, St. Martin's School of Art, University of the Arts London, Wardour Street
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography | 34 Comments »
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Is it possible to enjoy modern art with your clothes on? Not if you are Mavis Artlover of the Art Lovers Network. According to promotional material you can find online: “This group is for everyone who likes to romp around naked with works of art. Sex with art is even better than masturbation!”
Mavis Artlover is a 25 year-old hotel chambermaid who moved from Totnes in Devon to Dollis Hill in London five years ago. She told me that she discovered she was sexually excited by art as a teenager when she was visiting the Arnolfini in Bristol: “I was looking at this Anselm Kiefer work and I felt a wave of pleasure washing through me. I discovered later I’d just had my first orgasm. Since then I’ve always felt an overwhelming urge to strip-off when I’m looking at great works of art.”
Despite 47 arrests and 23 convictions for nude and disorderly conduct in art museums, Mavis has never looked back since the Kiefer knicker-wetting incident. “I’m sexually fulfilled,” she told me, “and although the price of that has been several months of jail, it was worth it. That said, I don’t want to do any more porridge, which is why I’m campaigning for all major world museums to introduce regular clothes-optional days.”
Mavis has even got together with several like-minded aesthetes who share her passion for viewing art in the buff, and they are demanding a weekly nudist night at Tate Modern. And I’m with Mavis on that, since I can’t see why those who are so inclined shouldn’t leave both their clothes and their inhibitions behind in the Tate cloakroom while they enjoy a finger or three of the old Bill Viola.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve made the beast with two backs in an art gallery that you and your humping partner are sharing with stone-to the-bone contemporary masterpiece such as Santa Claus with a Buttplug by Paul McCarthy or The Great White Way Goes Black by Katharina Sieverding!” Mavis told me.
I agreed when she told me this, but mainly because I wanted to get into her pants. Then I realised Mavis wasn’t wearing any knickers, she was as naked as the day she was born. I thought I was in luck, but Mavis made it clear there was no way she’d let me ram my French stick into her her fuzz-box until The Tate Modern agreed to a weekly nudist night
So there you have it, two really good reasons you should join the campaign to demand that Nick Serota introduces regular naked art appreciation sessions at Bankside: 1) You’ll never look at Mike Kelly’s work in the same way again after experiencing it buck naked; 2) Mavis isn’t going to let me shag her until Tate Modern give in to her demands!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anselm Kiefer, Arnolfini, Art Lovers Network, Bankside, Bill Viola, Bristol, central London, Devon, Dollis Hill, Katharina Sieverding, Mike Kelly, Nicholas Serota, Nick Serota, nudism, Paul McCarthy, Santa Claws With A Buttplug, south London, Stendhal Syndrome, Tate Modern, The Great White Way Goes Black, Totnes, west London
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitionism, humour | 23 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 »
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Last night I was down at the BFI on the South Bank (the nearest thing you’ll find to a real rock ‘n’ roll club in London these days) to catch the first screening in a series dedicated to notorious underground/art film-maker Stephen Dwoskin, a one time contemporary of Andy Warhol. The first night of this month long season was given over to 5 early underground shorts. After an introduction by William Fowler which laid out Dwoskin’s role as a pioneer in both the New York and London underground movie scenes, the films were screened in chronological order, so Asleep (1961) came first. This shows the movements of a woman’s feet as she sleeps, it appears to have been sped-up and supposedly a whole night’s worth of movement is shown. This is a slight work, with the blanket from which the feet poke proving almost as distracting as the silent movie comedy-style piano soundtrack by Ron Geesin that was added in the late sixties – after Dwoskin had moved from New York to London.
Asleep looks like it comes from a different era to the rest of Dwoskin’s work, it resembles an early Fluxus joke piece and brought to my mind the extensive use of feet and shoes in the collages of Ray Johnson. Nonetheless, the inclusion of Asleep in the programme was useful, since it served to remind viewers that all artists have to start somewhere, and good film-makers develop rather than making their best work first time out. Next up was Alone (1963), which shows a fully clothed girl – identified as Zelda – picking her nose, then smoking a cigarette and moving through various sexually alluring poses. This, like the first short, was a new print and the quality of the film was quite extraordinary (which was not the case with Asleep, due both to inferior lighting and the battering the source for the new print of the 1961 short had obviously suffered over the years). Once again there was a Ron Geesin soundtrack added in the late-sixties after Dwoskin had moved across the Atlantic, but this time it was pulsing industrial-style noise that worked wonderfully with the imagery it accompanied.
The third short Dirty (1965) was shot in London shortly after Dwoskin’s transatlantic relocation. Two nude girls identified as Barbara and Ann, drink booze from a bottle and then frolic on a bed. The camera freezes at key moments and this, alongside the dirty and damaged nature of the black and white print, gives the short a dream-like quality. Dirty almost functions as pornography, but its formalism and minimal soundtrack by Gavin Bryars – again added several years after the film was shot and first screened – will frustrate the expectations of any viewer hoping for a wank fest. I found this film a real groove sensation; but it also left me wondering whether the two women it featured were sex industry professionals, aspirant actresses, or simply acquaintances of the director having a bit of a laugh. The rhythm of Dwoskin’s films is much slower than that of commercial cinema, and after watching Alone and Dirty my head was in a different space and moving at a very different speed from when I’d arrived at the BFI’s Screen 2. Dwoskin can be very trippy, although the effect of his later films is sometimes more like the psychosis induced by too many downers.
The fourth film in the BFI’s shorts screening was Moment (1969). This is shot in colour and shows the face of a girl called Tina Fraser framed on a pillow. The dominant colour is red and this gives the film a warm feel as Tina smokes and either masturbates or simulates this act. We see her face as she works herself up to orgasm, then afterwards in complete relaxation. As a consequence this feels very much like a heterosexual version of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Perhaps Dwoskin felt his short Asleep had provided the template for Warhol’s Sleep (1963), and was calling in the debt. Moment was the most carefully composed of the Dwoskin shorts on show last night. That said, the top right side of the screen is a kind of dead space made up of nothing but reddish pillow, with Tina Fraser’s head on the left of the frame; presumably the shot was set up in this way, with a mild imperfection, to prevent viewers from responding to it simply on the level of visual aesthetics.
The 30 minute Trixi (1970), was the longest of the films screened last night. It shows Beatrice Cordua being assaulted by Dwoskin’s camera. At first she has her clothes on, then they have been removed. As Cordua writhes through various poses, it becomes evident that the camera is metaphorically raping her. At various points we see her face and various parts of her body in extreme close-up. Like other Dwoskin women, Cordua is not particularly photogenic: her heavy eye make up is ugly, her skin looks course and uneven, the hair on her head appears to be dirty, while her bushy pubes could do with a trim. Cordua is skinny and looks like she’s not enjoying the best of health. Perhaps Dwoskin’s subjects are typical of what ordinary – as opposed to photogenic – individuals look like on camera; we’re not used to seeing averagely attractive people on film because Hollywood and the entertainment industry are so fixated with beauty. But this isn’t the only reading that might be made of the state of the women in the Dwoskin’s films screened last night; there are parallels with the drug intake – and thus also the states of consciousness – one might associate with the London underground over the period covered in the last three films: a move from mid-sixties exuberance involving alcohol, speed and acid, to the sonambulism of heroin and ultimately burn out.
The soundtrack to Trixi is simply the endless repetition of this name, and that also reflects the psychobabble one might associate with the counterculture at the dawn of the seventies. The verbal repetition of this soundtrack may hark back to a similar effect on The Cut Ups (1966) directed by Anthony Balch, but the use of a single word rather than several repeated phrases ultimately creates a pulse that resembles a heartbeat. By the end, the viewer – like the counterculture – is strung out and beaten into submission. Trixi is an unpleasant and confrontational film precisely because the camera functions as rapist, but for me it does not fit the reductive notions of ‘male gaze’ championed by the likes of Laura Mulvey and dismissed by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. You’d have to be psychotic to identify with the camera in Trixi, and the film is a formalist exercise because of the sadistic way it forces viewers to acknowledge the difference and distance between themselves and this recording device.
After the screening, I made my way up to The Strand for a bindhi at the India Club Restaurant (2nd Floor, Strand Continental Hotel, 143 Strand, London, WC2R 1JA). This establishment is very broken down and looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the 1960s, I suspect it only survives because it is right next to the Indian High Commission, and probably attracts custom from there at lunch time. I’ve always liked the non-gastro and undecorated atmosphere at the India Club, although I’ve never thought the food was that great, and it has got worse since I last visited the place a couple of years ago. From The Strand, I moved on to The Foundry in Old Street, where I’d arranged to meet Nina Power and Laura Oldfield Ford. Yet again I only succeeded in exchanging a couple of sentences with Nina before Laura dragged her off to a rave in a squat on Kingsland High Street. I didn’t want to go clubbing and since I hadn’t clocked Foundry owner Tacey Moberly, with whom I might have exchanged a friendly greeting, I decided to check out some action online instead….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 60s sixties, Alone, Andy Warhol, Anthony Balch, Asleep, Beatrice Cordua, BFI, Blow Job, British Film Institute, Carol J. Clover, central London, Dirty, east London, Fluxus, Gavin Bryars, India Club Restaurant, Indian High Commission, Kingsland High Street, Laura Mulvey, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Moment, New York, Nina Power, Old Steet, Ray Johnson, Ron Geesin, Sleep, South Bank, south London, Stephen Dwoskin, Strand Continental Hotel, The Cut Ups, The Foundry, The Strand, Tina Fraser, Tracy Moberly, Trixi, William Fowler
Posted in film | 28 Comments »
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Zero Books launched last night at Daunt on Marylebone High Street in central London. Upon arrival I was greeted by Zero editor Tariq Goddard. I hadn’t realised he’d moved out of London, but then I hadn’t seen him around for a while, so I wasn’t too surprised when he told me he was living in the country. Shortly after arrival I found myself chatting to sci-fi novelist China Miéville who brought up the extremely ugly subject of David Tibet (real name David Bunting) of Current 93 and his utterly ridiculous sub-musical collaborations with hardcore fascists. Our anti-fascist exchange was interrupted when the evening’s formal speeches began. I didn’t catch the name of the first speaker who was passionate on the subject of how neo-liberalism had collapsed but we still needed to clear away the ruins.
Next up was journalist David Stubbs who gave a short talk based on his book Fear Of Music. The blurb for this runs as follows: “Modern art is a mass phenomenon… However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant-garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant-garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances… This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?”
My impression is the tabloid press devotes more space to deriding modern art than it does to attacking modern music. That said, the (post)-modern art the ‘red tops’ have derided in recent years is largely a waste of space anyway; i.e. the yBa bores who put the con back into neo-conceptual art by jettisoning any overt political content and instead concentrating on selling over-priced luxury items to the rich. As a consequence, it has been rather amusing to witness the response of complete bafflement to the Ray Johnson retrospective currently on at Raven Row; most of the London art world simply cannot grasp a visual practice that is so obviously hostile to the commodification of culture. As for Rothko and Stockhausen, for me there is nothing to choose between them, and the bourgeoisie can stick them both up its arse!
In his talk Stubbs appeared to be defending everything about Stockhausen, which I found more than a little odd. There have certainly been reactionary attacks on Stockhausen, but by focusing on these Stubbs seemed to be saying sock it to the critics to my right and ignore my own problematic positions. Personally I agree with the critique of Stockhausen made by Henry Flynt and Action Against Cultural Imperialism back in the 1960s; among other things they pointed out that Stockhausen’s criticisms of jazz were racist. I also find Flynt’s radical avant-garde hillbilly far more of a groove sensation than Stockhausen. And while I can dig much of what Cornelius Cardew did musically from the Scratch Orchestra through to his reworkings of folk melodies, his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism lacks the edge of Flynt’s critique of this bourgeois hack. I have no problem with listening to modern music, but everything from Luigi Nono to grime is just so much better than Stockhausen. The positions Stubbs defended in his talk were both simplistic and wrong-headed.
As a speaker, Owen Hatherley was a lot more impressive than Stubbs. His book Militant Modernism was billed as a defence of modernism against its defenders. Hatherley was arguing in favour of post-war modernism, not just its early twentieth-century manifestations, and for its entanglement with revolutionary politics. I was with him on that, although I suspect we may well have differences on specific figures such as Bertolt Brecht and what is revolutionary. For me, defending the gains of modernism also means going beyond it, and this necessitates abolishing the capitalist social relations modernism emerged from. Of course, I haven’t read Hatherley’s book yet, because as a proletarian post-modernist, I’m blogging the launch and not the texts. Moving on, after Hatherley there was a quick word from publisher John Hunt. I then spoke to Hales Gallery artists Laura Oldfield Ford and Richard Galpin about the antagonism towards criticism on the gallery circuit. In the spirit of immaterial friendship I got to say hi and little else to Nina Power… and a few others. Then the booze ran out so most people moved on to the pub….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Bertolt Brecht, central London, China Miéville, Cornelius Cardew, Current 93, David Bunting, David Stubbs, David Tibet, Fear Of Music, Henry Flynt, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Luigi Nono, Mark Rothko, Marylebone, Marylebone High Steet, Militant Modernism, modernism, Nina Power, Owen Hatherley, Raven Row, Ray Johnson, Richard Galpin, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Tariq Goddard, yBa, Zero Books
Posted in culture gossip & parties | 37 Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009
What a difference a blog makes! The flurry of excitement that kicked off after my January entry on Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones continues apace with the greatest cat burglar of all time being featured in yesterday’s Wales On Sunday. There are few new details in the piece by Nathan Bevan but there is a lovely photo of Ray The Cat as a part of the print version (not with the online variant, which you can find here). Of course, there has to be a news angle, and in this instance it is the fact that the account of Ray The Cat’s escape from Pentonville as quoted in my earlier blog features in Paul Buck’s recent book The E-list. Having done some further research, Wales On Sunday give a variant account which suggests Ray was one of two men to escape together. I suspect this version is more accurate than the solo escape tale Buck quotes from an old Frankie Fraser book. Bevan also says the infamous Sophia Loren jewel theft took place while Ray The Cat was still on the run after his 1958 Pentonville jail break. He also notes that in his younger days Ray was a boxer. I’d not mentioned this detail in my blogs but I had clocked it elsewhere.
Something else that has come up in relation to Ray The Cat is the ‘Princess Margaret story’. I’ve got no real leads on it, but someone I asked ‘guessed’ that Ray The Cat was the uncaught mastermind behind the 11 September 1971 safety deposit box robbery of the Lloyds Bank on the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street (central London). Supposedly a series of sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret were found by the robbers in one of the riffled safety deposit boxes. This particular heist had a very different modus operandi to Ray’s jewel and fur thefts, but I suppose anything is possible. However, I would stress that the person who suggested this to me was ‘guessing’, there is no evidence to back it up. I am, however, confident that there is a reader of this blog who could throw more light on the matter, should he care to do so. Moving on, in my last piece on Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones I mentioned news reports about him that had been posted on the web and subsequently come down. What follows is just one example of these lost posts retrieved from my archive:
Last Bid For Imprisonment
The man campaigning to be credited with the £185,000 burglary of Sophia Loren’s jewels from an Elstree hotel is fighting his last battle in his war against a “cover-up”.
Ray “the cat” Jones, who has an estimated career haul of £60 million, was never charged with the 1960 raid on the Norwegian Barn in the grounds of the Edgwarebury Hotel in Barnet Lane — but was incensed when his accomplice claimed sole credit for it in a 1994 book.
Together with his spokesman, Michael Morgan, Ray was back in the village recently, delivering hundreds of leaflets door-to-door, calling on the public to demand police arrest him for the crime.
“This is definitely our last protest,” said Mr Morgan, “we want to finally lay this to rest”.
Ray, now in his 80s, claims the police do not want to re-open the case because it would come to light that officers accepted £12,000 from him for information to help him carry out the raid.
Another claim is that a senior officer, “knowing” Ray had earlier been jailed for a burglary he did not commit, ordered colleagues to let him off for the Elstree job. Mr Morgan added: “I’m convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt there’s been a cover-up.” Police have denied the claims.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion. Saturday 20 February 1999. Borehamwood and Elstree Times.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Baker Street, Barnet Lane, Borehamwood, central London, Edgwarebury Hotel, Elstree, Frankie Fraser, Llodys Bank Safety Deposit Box robbery, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Marylebone Road, Michael Morgan, Nathan Bevan, Paul Buck, Pentonville Prison, Princess Margaret, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, Sophia Loren, south Wales, The E... List: Notorious Prison Escapes, Wales On Sunday
Posted in True crime | 19 Comments »