Posts Tagged ‘James Morton’

Blog closed until further notice…

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.

Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!

A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.

I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.

My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying  – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.

Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.

Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me -  to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!

In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing  one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!

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 Web 2.0 | 30 Comments »

London hostess clubs of the 1960s

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!

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Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 19 Comments »

Ray “The Cat” Jones again…

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

My post of 24 January 2009 about career criminal Ray “The Cat” Jones caused a flurry of interest. I got a couple of messages saying Ray was dead, and further confirmation of this in a comment added to that blog yesterday:  “Ray died in 2001, just so you know.” Likewise, Neil Milkins told me: “I have made some enquiries with a nephew of Ray, Michael O’Dowd of Nantyglo. (Ray was his mother’s brother.) He said Ray died of cancer in London about 7 years ago.” To clarify my own distant relative status with the greatest cat burglar of all time, Ray’s mother was an older sister of my maternal grandfather David Callaghan (AKA Dai Callan), and my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – was named after this particular aunt.

Moving on, Ray “The Cat” Jones appears as ‘Taffy Raymond’ in the autobiography of the old school heavy Eric Mason. After flashing up the name of Peter Scott, Mason gives an account of Jones loosing heavily in a Notting Hill spieler and then slipping out with his criminal accomplice George “Tatters” Catham to do a quick robbery. Upon their return Jones and Catham negotiated the price of a jewel with the governor of the spieler before resuming their places at the gaming table. South London gangster Mad Frankie Fraser tells a similar tale about Billy Benstead, and as a lead in to this story mentions that Tatters Chatham and Ray Jones numbered among the other leading cat-burglars who were also degenerate gamblers. As noted in my previous Jones blog, Fraser also cites the unaided escape Ray made from Pentonville as one of the greatest prison breakouts of all time;  Mad Frankie says Jones broke both legs going over the wall and still managed to get away. Elsewhere, Fraser makes a passing reference  to cat-burglar Raymond Jones having a brother known within the London underworld as Taffy Jones. But since Ray was lumbered with this appellation by Cockney villains, it may be that Mad Frankie is getting confused. In my experience Fraser and his ghost writer are not 100 percent reliable as sources.

Towards the end of his life,  Ray garnered a certain amount of newspaper attention as a kind of aftermath to  Peter “The Human Fly” Scott publishing his autobiography Gentleman Thief:  Recollections of a Cat Burglar (1995). Scott had been a small time tea leaf until Ray introduced him to major league larceny and the support network that is essential to the headline grabbing criminal. Scott incensed Jones by using his book to claim sole credit for stealing movie star Sophia Loren’s jewels when she was filming at Elstree in 1960.

In the late nineteen-nineties and using a spokesman called Michael Morgan, Jones ran a campaign to get the public to demand that the police arrest him for this 1960 burglary. Jones asserted there had been a cover-up and that the authorities wouldn’t charge him with stealing Loren’s jewels because he’d paid corrupt police officers twelve thousand pounds for information that enabled him to secure the haul. It has even been claimed that because the police knew Jones had been wrongly jailed for another burglary, they decided not arrest him for this particular theft.

Ray claimed to have nicked sixty million pounds worth of goods during his life-of-crime. Like many other underworld figures, Jones and Scott seem to have constantly bigged up their own importance. That said, Jones was an ‘honest’ working-class criminal, not a middle-class slimeball like Scott, so while Ray may have on occasion bent the truth, what he had to say is considerably more reliable than the rot on offer in Gentleman Thief.

According to gangster Albert Donoghue, Loren’s valuable gems were fenced by George Mizel whose Hatton Garden jewellery repair business was a front for this type of activity; however, many London villains active back then believe that upon examination the Loren ‘treasures’ turned out to be paste copies, and not the valuable originals. The same sources add that fortunately Jones and Scott had also lifted this Italian sex siren’s smalls and they did terrific business flogging off her underwear. Peter Scott certainly enjoyed targeting female film stars and he readily admits he got a sexual thrill from riffling through their possessions and stealing their knickers; so this tale about Loren’s paste jewels and stolen underwear is credible albeit unproven. Regardless of its truth or falsity, it certainly makes a good story.

Bruce Reynolds in his Autobiography Of A Thief also applies the name Taffy Raymond to Ray The Cat and says: “Michael Black’s real name was Michael Hackett, a former Leicester boy who had originally been taken under the wing of Taffy Raymond in the early 1950s. Taffy was one of the older climbers who was good at finding up-and-comers, normally at the Billiard Hall in Windmill Street or somewhere like that, and he would ‘educate’ them and set them to work..” (Page 266)

Sources:  Eric Mason – The Brutal Truth: The Inside Story Of A Gangland Legend (Mainstream, Edinburgh 2000).  Bruce Reynolds – Autobiography Of A Thief (Virgin Books, London 2005). Albert Donoghue and Martin Short – The Enforcer: Secrets of my life with the Krays (John Blake Publishing, London 2001). Peter Scott  – Gentleman Thief: Recollections of a Cat Burglar (Harper Collins, London 1995). Frankie Fraser with James Morton – Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime (Warner Books, London 1995); Mad Frank And Friends (Warner Books, London 1999); Mad Frank’s Diary (Virgin Books, London 2001); Mad Frank’s London (Virgin Books, London 2002). Seven or so years ago when I last checked Ray out online there was some local south Wales newspaper coverage of him freely available on the web, and although that has subsequently disappeared, I made notes from it at the time. That said, you can still check “Who Done It?” Independent, November 8, 1998, via HighBeam Research or a copyright deposit library -  this carries the strap-line: “Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, who has spent more than 30 years in prison, now wants recognition for the Sixties theft of Sophia Loren’s jewels. Will Cohu hears his story”. Also available via the same sources is “Ray The Cat Book Bid,” Wales On Sunday, March 3, 2002.  For this blog entry I also made use of notes from conversations I had with Mad Frankie Fraser and various other ‘old hands’ circa 2002.

Further details of Ray’s life and crimes – including exact dates for his birth and death – would, of course, be greatly appreciated in the comments.

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 Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 23 Comments »