Posts Tagged ‘Michael X’

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 »

Hadewijch, or Bruno Dumont at the London Film Festival

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Hadewijch is the latest film from Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy lecturer whose movies are often compared to the work of Robert Bresson. Dumont doesn’t so much take inspiration from Bresson, as allow the older man’s films to possess his own, so that he might correct their faults. If someone had told me before I went to see Hadewijch that it was ‘The Trial of Joan of Arc meets Mouchette in the age of post-modern simulation’, then I could have imagined the flick in its entirety before I viewed it. That said, the process of attending the screening was nonetheless worthwhile, albeit rather irritating.

It was difficult to get into the Vue in Leicester Square due to a simultaneous premier for a very boring British film set in Twickenham in the early sixties. The crowds and the cops were out in force, and I had to get past some ridiculously heavy security before being allowed anywhere near the multi-screen Vue. Thus after much hassle and finally seated, I realised I hadn’t seen a Dumont flick since his big screen debut, The Life Of Jesus, came out a decade or more before.

Hadewijch is inspired by the writings of a 13 century Flemish mystic of this name, a rich but nonetheless hip chick who liked to eroticise her relationship with ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ by foaming at the mouth until the resulting insanity poured forth from her pen. Hadewijch’s religious pornography took the forms of poetry, letters and written records of visions; and these mystical freak-outs might be likened to free spirit heresies. But while this provided Dumont with his initial inspiration, he sets his film in contemporary France.

The plot of Hadewijch isn’t of much consequence. Celine (Julie Sokolowski) is booted out of a nunnery for being too zealous. She returns to her parent’s opulent apartment. The 20 year-old Jesus freak then hangs out in and around her Parisian home; she meets Yassine (Yassine Salihine), an unemployed teenager from the suburbs who wants to get it one with her, but they never do anything more intimate than embrace. However, in Yassine’s brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) she recognises a kindred spirit, a fellow religious nut. Nassir tells Celine about Islam and then takes her to Lebanon; when they return to Paris they ‘matyr’ themselves by performing a two person suicide bombing on a metro train. If this were a realist film, then the explosion would be the end of the movie, but Dumont’s speciality is a Baudrillardian simulation of realism, and there is a lose thread to tie-up in the form of a character called David (David Dewaele).

At the beginning of the film, David is a prisoner doing restoration work on the nunnery from which Celine is expelled. He is also framed at various times to look rather like the image of Christ in various Dutch old masters. A succession of scenes indicate that he is a conflation of both Christ and the thieves on the crosses beside the Toad Of Nazareth at the time of ‘The Crucifiction’. I assume Dumont is inviting viewers to recall Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and even if he isn’t, this is what the depiction of David brought to my mind; in other words, religion is an alienated projection of human attributes into a bogus realm of ‘the sacred’.

After the explosion (i.e. after Celine and Nassir’s implied but not explicitly depicted deaths), Celine and David appear back at the nunnery, but rather than it being winter – as was the case when we first saw them there – it is now spring. Celine attempts to drown herself in a pond but is saved by David. The series of events that take place after the explosion clearly confused much of the audience and became a focus for questions to the director during his Q & A session. I wasn’t feeling engaged enough to point out that the failed drowning rather too self-consciously invokes the climax of Bresson’s Mouchette. My unwillingness to join the discussion stemmed in part from Dumont’s answers exuding the rotten-egg smell of what is sometimes labelled ‘the anxiety of influence’, and this made what he did say so boring that I left before he finished.

Nonetheless, a director like Dumont becomes significant when you see how many of the people attending his screenings don’t understand that film as a medium need not be restricted to utterly flat realist narratives; and is, in any case, better understood as ‘poetic’ images. Quite a few people walked out during the festival screening of Hadewijch I attended. I like the effect Dumont has on audiences considerably more than his movies – which are still too tastefully made to shake up the film world as much as I’d like.

After seeing Hadewijch, I found myself imagining an alternative version in which Celine was a white rasta rather than a catholic, who is loosely modelled on Gale Benson (the daughter of a British Tory politician murdered at Michael X’s black power commune in Trinidad); this would also allow for a heavy dub soundtrack rather than the shit classical music Dumont favoured. Such a venture is not something I can imagine Dumont carrying off successfully – and so, instead, I look forward to him making a Deulezian cross between my two favourite Bresson movies A Man Escaped and Pickpocket. Dumont remains the Jean-Philippe Toussaint of contemporary French language film. Good as far as he goes, but cinema will leave him behind when we force it to go much further….

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 film | 16 Comments »

Ladbroke Grove in the 1960s with the accent very much on 24 Bassett Road…

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!

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Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography, Julia Callan-Thompson | 33 Comments »

There is no beginning, there is no end, the counterculture goes on forever…

Monday, May 4th, 2009

The London Zine Symposium 2009 took place at The Rag Factory (16-18 Heneage Street, London  E1 5LJ)  yesterday, Sunday 3 May. As an event, it occupies the ground between Publish & Be Damned (with its self-published art focus) and the Anarchist Book Fair (for those committed to full-on and weekend variety anarchist life-styles). There were a lot of familiar faces on the stalls at the Zine Symposium ranging from Mark Pawson (who can also be seen at Publish & Be Damned) to Active Distribution (who favour the Anarchist Book Fair). I was at the top of Brick Lane at lunch time before making my way to the Zine Symposium, and the Whitechapel Anarchist Group (all two of them) were out in force selling their publication WAG in front of the Beigel Bake. Later they were manning a stall down the road at the Zine Symposium. The anarchists somehow managed to constitute themselves as a separate fraction within this event, although the art elements appeared to dominate in terms of the stalls, reflecting the fact that Published & Be Damned is currently the biggest annual bring-and-buy self-publishing event in London.

There were a bunch of readings, workshops and debates, but I only attended Alternative Visions: comics, zines and politics since the 1970s at 2.30pm. The event was dominated by Roger Sabin, a reader in popular culture at Central Saint Martins College of Art. He was assisted by Teal Triggs, Professor of Graphic Design at the London College of Communication. After their own presentations, Sabin and Triggs put a few questions to Isy from Morgenmuffel and Edd from Hey Monkey Riot/Last Hours zines. I had difficulties with the way Sabin treated the hippie and punk subcultures as ultimately distinct, since I feel they are more closely entwined than he assumed, and I also find he takes the rhetoric of those involved with such scenes rather too seriously. However, my main problem with Sabin’s presentation was that he didn’t really deal with the economic and technological factors that have driven change in zine and comic production over the past forty years. However, his ideological idealism didn’t really surprise me given that I’ve never found Sabin’s academic work on subculture very satisfactory, as my ten year old review of his book Punk Rock, So What? indicates (see text in right column of link for this).

As the afternoon wore on, more and more people I knew – starting with Malcolm Hopkins and concluding with Richard Essex – drifted off to The Pride Of Spitalfields. I looked into the pub, but then decided to try to catch the William Blanchard AKA Wildcat Will show Assemblage at the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery in Redchurch Street. That exhibition space turned out to be closed and locked up; but as I headed up to it, I did see Jimmy Cauty making his way towards his car, and Martin Sexton standing outside his Artwars Project Space on the other side of the street from the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery.

Martin told me Jimmy had just been in to see his joint show with Dominique Lacloche, Beneath The Pavement… The Beach, which was coming down that very night. This joint effort between Sexton and Paris based Lacloche is certainly one of the crazier art manifestations I’ve seen on Redchurch Street in recent years, featuring as it did giant leaves on which photographs have been developed, a levitation machine and a mask of Socrates made out of a 4.5 billion year old meteorite. It made sense to me that a former member of the KLF would have been visiting it. I haven’t seen Jimmy for a couple years, and the weekend just gone was an interesting one for passing people without speaking to them; this started late on Friday afternoon when I’d walked past Liam Gillick on the stairs at Book Works, as he’d been making his way up to the editorial floor of the building, and I’d been leaving. There were a few people I’d avoided speaking to at the Zine Symposium as well, but they shall remain nameless.

Martin Sexton talked me through a few of his innumerable upcoming plans. One that I suspect will remain unrealised is for a psychogeographers super-group featuring Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Tom Vague and me, to play a one off concert at his Artwars Project Space. The next show opening at Sexton’s space is Psycho Pomp, which runs from 8 to 31 May 2009. After leaving Sexton, my next move was a meet with Tom McCarthy, Eva Stenram and visiting US writer Jesse Ball; the conversation ping-ponged between Iceland, Finland and teaching creative writing. Later in the evening I opened an email from Richard Thomas apologising for the short notice but saying that the Gloria radio show I’d recorded for Resonance FM would be broadcast tonight (Monday 4 May) from 9.00 to 10.00pm, and repeated on Sunday 10 May, 7.30 to 8.30pm. Finally, I caught the likes of John Williams and Kodwo Eshun talking on Sukhdev Sandhu’s curious but ultimately unsatisfactory BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature The Life & Times of Michael X, before deciding that was enough counterculture for one day, and settling down with an old school kung fu movie.

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 counterculture | 37 Comments »

Grainger & Trina, 2 Ladbroke Grove hipsters of the 1960s…

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Two names that come up frequently when I’m looking at the real hip scene of the 1960s are Malcolm Drake AKA Grainger and Trina Simmonds. Their names even appear from time to time in print but to date the semi-official historians of the London counterculture have singularly failed to get to grips with what they and their scene were all about.

Alan Semple, who knew Trina Simmonds in the early sixties, told me that before she met Grainger she’d been partnered up with another London streetwalker called Kay, and that this pair were as likely to roll johns as do the business with them. Indeed, they’d steal anything of value punters were foolish enough to let them lay their hands on, and the items they filched ranged from money and cheque books to booze. Semple met Trina and Kay in 1961 when they stopped his car late at night on Kensington Church Street. They asked him if he had a bottle opener and when he replied he had one at home, the two flat-backers got into his motor so that he could drive them to his pad. Together they drank the wine Trina and Kay had swiped from a drunken john, swapped life-stories and became friends. Semple told David Seabrook the same story I got from him, and the recently deceased true crime journalist incorporated it as background material into his book Jack Of Jumps; but Seabrook didn’t supply Trina’s surname and apparently didn’t know it, and as a result he seems to have missed her walk on role in media coverage of the later Gail Benson murder too. As far as I can ascertain, Trina was born on 31 December 1941.

Other people, and in particular ex-junkies who’d rather not be identified, know considerably more about Grainger and Trina than Semple (who was only acquainted with Trina before she met Grainger). These sources say Grainger studied pharmacology at a northern university, but didn’t complete the course. After working on the dodgems in a seaside fun fair in the summer of 1961, he moved down to London from Bradford. Grainger discovered pot in London in the autumn of 1961. He smoked reefer and took amphetamines until mid-1962, when he graduated to junk. Grainger wrote a lot of poetry in the early sixties but didn’t succeed in getting anything published. He wanted to be a professional writer. He fathered a son in either very late 1961, or early 1962 (no later than the spring) but no one I’ve been able to dig up knows what happened to the child, or the mother’s name. It has been suggested that I may be Grainger’s boy; while this strikes me as possible, I view it as improbable. My mother’s on-off relationship with Grainger, who she was living with when she died in 1979, appears to date back to at least the mid-sixties; but I’ve never been able to ascertain whether it began as early as 1960 or 1961. By the time Grainger’s love child was born (as I’ve said, possibly me), he was dating Liz Cook – she was then a drama student and later became Brian Barritt’s lover.

According to my anonymous sources, Grainger and Trina met through the junk scene in 1963, at a chemist’s shop, or alternatively in a doctor’s waiting room. They were both registered users. Trina had a pad in Queensway when Grainger first knew her. Kay disappeared soon after Grainger and Trina became an item. Grainger dabbled with acid in the mid-sixties, and settled in the Grove at that time, but even in the nineteen-seventies he was still working with the insights and assumptions that came from the earlier beatnik scene. He was not a full on acid head or hippie, he was formed by the beat traditions of junk and bebop. He adapted to countercultural changes but in the hippie era was an elder. When he was first in London, Grainger talked up the work of writers like Trocchi and Burroughs but didn’t know them personally then. He got close to Trocch, and heavily involved in his drug dealing scene, after meeting Trina in 1963.

Some of this can be confirmed by chasing up drug stories carried by the British press in the early sixties. Grainger suffered what looks like his first bust in the spring of 1962 which led to the headline ’5 Idle Chelsea Men Had Hemp’ in The Times of 24 April that year. This story describes Grainger as 22 years-old and unemployed. Busted alongside him were his flat-mates Robert Osbourne Morgan, John Beaumont, Charles Terrence Westwood and Selwyn Paul Eva. After he was informed that Grainger aspired to being a poet, the magistrate announced: “That is a nice job for the evenings and getting up in the morning to see the sun rise.” The beak was not impressed with the defendants ‘long hair’ and seems to have viewed them all as worse than work-shy, ranting after reading a report on Beaumont: “…your philosophy is that work has to be avoided at all costs. You have almost a religious faith in being able to exist without earning any money…” The court case apparently caused a sensation at the time, with Grainger and his friends being dubbed ‘the kids who couldn’t give a damn’ by the tabloid press (which was, of course, only too happy to pay them for their story).

There are reports of a second bust in the summer, which graced The Times under the headlines ‘Premises Dens of Iniquity’ (6 August 1962), ‘Indian Hemp Youth Gets Six Months’ (11 August 1962) and ‘Probation for Girl In Drug Case’ (18 August 1962). Subheadings to these stories included: ’11 Men and a Woman on Drug Charge’, ‘Syringes Found’ and ‘For a Bit of a Kick’. Most of those busted lived at the time in bedsits in Regents Park Road, including Grainger and Robert Osbourne Morgan. Like Morgan, John Beaumont who earlier in the year had been busted with Grainger in Chelsea, was up before the beak on a repeat offence; this time he’s listed as being of no fixed address. Grainger was sentenced to three months in jail. After this he apparently felt little inclination to compose poetry, telling acquaintances that he lived poetically and therefore thought it best if lesser talents were left to write it.

Fast forwarding into the 1970s, Grainger and Trina arrived at Michael X’s Trinidadian commune in November 1971 and left roughly one week after the murder of Gale Benson who died on 2 January 1972. It isn’t entirely clear whether or not Grainger and Trina knew about this homicide prior to the discovery of Benson’s decomposed body; among other things, there is an ambiguous passage on pages 93 to 94 of Charlie and Mike Phillips’ literary and photographic memoir Notting Hill In The Sixties that might be taken as intimating they did. Benson was the privileged daughter of a former British Tory MP, she dug the black power message and somehow got herself killed. Her death generated headlines and among the more lurid of them was ‘Two Loves Of Black Power Girl’ which graced the front page of The Sunday People on 27 February 1972. This article claimed Benson had been a heroin addict and was in love with both Hakim Jamal and Michael X. Benson provided exactly the type of horror story reactionary journalists loved, since despite a privileged upbringing and society wedding, she’d wound up dead after immersing herself in the hippie and black power scenes.

Most commentators ignored the claim made in the Sunday People that Benson was a heroin addict, and instead their credulity was revealed when they portrayed Grainger and Trina as naive hippies, or even a writer and his girlfriend, rather than a pimp and prostitute who had a perhaps undeserved reputation as ruthless junkie survivors. Indeed, early press coverage of the murder, such as ‘Trinidad Death Victim May Have Been Buried Alive’ in The Times of 29 February 1972, report local police as being concerned to discover the whereabouts of Grainger and Trina who are described as a missing English man and woman. Grainger is (mis)identified as Mr Granger, while Trina appears under her married name of Mrs Pashley.

Trina is said to have been a frequent companion of the murdered woman, and the inference in early press reports (before she’d been located back in London) is that the authorities were worried about her and Grainger’s safety and well-being, since they too might have been killed. While Trina in particular was apparently deeply shocked, shaken and upset by Benson’s murder, she and Grainger concealed their feelings in court, where they claimed to have seen nothing untoward during their stay at the commune. Of course, court statements along these lines are exactly what one would expect from such junkie survivors regardless of what they actually did or did not see; the trial was widely reported in the British press and it was imperative that their peers did not perceive them to be grasses, since this would have made their lives difficult and Grainger’s activities as a drug dealer untenable, thereby cutting off a major source of their income. Grainger and Trina’s perception of the commune when they were resident there may have been exactly as reported in court; on the other hand, Trina’s apparently hysterical outbursts to acquaintances upon their return to London might be taken to indicate this was not the case.

Denis Browne who knew Grainger and Trina in the early 1980s told me in 2002:

“Grainger’s favourite saying: “I’m a healer not a dealer.” I scored off Grainger for years up until my last bust in 1984. I’ve had no contact with him since then. Grainger and Trina feature quite a bit in a late seventies biography of Michael X. The main “message from Alex” they took to Trinidad was an once of smack. For the commune hospital, of course. Even among serious junkies G and T were regarded as a pretty ruthless pair of survivors. Grainger could be a total bastard, especially when he took speed, but was generally okay with me – I had a bit of extra cred, having been introduced by Alex Trocchi and found Grainger great company on a good day – a sharp, no bullshit kinda guy. Rare among long-term junkies. Trina was just like Fay from Cain’s Book (Trocchi’s autobiographical novel) – a totally ruthless junkie who’d “suck the last fix out of your arm” – she generated an endless series of hustles, scams, rip-offs and marathon psychodramas round at their place – a poky thirties council flat in Elephant and Castle when I knew them – which tended to spoil things.

“I didn’t know Grainger in the days when he roamed the Grove in a hooded purple cape, but I do remember him talking to me about your mother. What I can recall is that he was incredibly cut up about her death and seemed to feel a lot of guilt and self hate about what had happened – this would have been about 81/82 – a few years after her death. Grainger was a fair bit older than most of us who’d hang out round their place. I reckon he’d be in his mid-sixties now.

“Grainger was from Leeds and definitely had the hard-bitten Yorkie vibe about him. Wiry/wired kind of guy, small beaky nose and hooded eyes gave tortoise-like impression. He’d often seem somnolent in group situations but his mind would be blazing all the time. When the speed/Trina paranoias weren’t in full effect and if you could get him on his own, he could be great company. Alex Trocchi wouldn’t hear a word against him.

“The time when he rapped about your mum came about because I got frozen in round at his flat one particularly cold Xmas (81?82?) for about three days. Trina had gone back to her folks in Gateshead after a real spectacular: suitcase over the balcony when Grainger found she’d nicked a load of his private stash of diamorphine amps.

“In one account of his early days he said he’d trained or qualified as a pharmacist before the sixties kicked in During another long session he told me how he’d been part of a wild traveller gang who travelled around the North, vaguely connected with putting on funfairs etc., “I lived like a fucking animal” he recalled with no pride. Then he’d discovered first acid and then smack – in the days when GPs were able to prescribe class A’s and things were a bit of a free-for-all. A golden age of junk – when I got into smack a few years later – when the regime had changed from heroin maintenance to methadone reduction – we felt really pissed off and cheated that we’d missed out on the ‘good times’, I’m sure most of the Trocchi stories in circulation come from this time. It might help explain the vibe around in your mother’s time when some fairly hardcore drug use really wasn’t considered that outré

“If I had to try to liken Grainger to someone you’re familiar with I’d tentatively suggest John Lennon. Similar mix of contradiction maybe. I was reading something last night about Lennon’s drunken arsehole in LA period in the mid-seventies – and how generally given he was to drunken destructiveness – compared to the received image of the guy. Grainger had the same kind of caustic vibe as Lennon. “I’m a healer not a dealer” could almost be a Lennon lyric. Another favourite Grainger saying: when declining to give someone gear on tick – as experienced by yours truly – “No-one wants to pay for drugs they’ve already taken.” Hard but one of the truest things I’ve ever heard…”

I’m told by those that knew Grainger in the sixties that the Michael X episode changed him dramatically and very much for the worse. Likewise, the same sources tell me Grainger and Trina were only very loosely together for much of the seventies, and lived in separate pads for extended periods. In the very early seventies there was a sex scene going on with Grainger, two girls, one dark, one blonde, and a black guy. The fair girl may have been my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. Grainger and Trina only got back together on a full time basis after my mother’s death.

There are a number of stories in circulation about my mother’s death, and these vary from the claim that she was murdered by an obsessed john to the less sensational suggestion that she died from an accidental heroin overdose. Only the latter rumour need concern us here, since Grainger features prominently in it. The story runs as follows.

In the late-seventies my mother was having a down period. However, at the very end of her life she got a job in a clip joint. The manager had employed her before but was wary of her smack habit, so she’d had to convince him she was clean in order to get the job. Since it isn’t easy to land a hostess job at the age of 35, my mother really felt she was on the up again. She had just done cold turkey in the US, but once she was back in the UK with Grainger, she wanted hits to help her relax after she finished work. Grainger made these up from his personal stash, and although Julie was living with him as his common-law wife, he charged her for the gear. He told friends he exaggerated the size of the hits he was giving my mother, because lying to her about this kept her straight enough to do her clip joint job (it also meant Grainger had both more money and more junk).

On the night my mother died, Grainger had sold a lot of gear and used all that was left over himself. Therefore there wasn’t a shot for my mother when she got in from work. Desperate for a fix, my mother went and scored street heroin from Brian Barritt. She bought the equivalent of what she thought she’d been getting from Grainger, not knowing he’d exaggerated the size of the hits he’d been giving her. She shot up before going to bed. My mother woke Grainger in the night to tell him she couldn’t breath and needed help. He told her to go back to sleep, which is what he did. When Grainger woke up in the morning my mother was dead in bed beside him because she’d overdosed. Grainger proceeded to clean up the flat, removing all needles and other signs of drug use. When he called on his near neighbour Brian Barritt, he was visibly upset and in a panic. Grainger had broken up with Trina to get back together with my mother, and since he loved her, he was completely cut up by her death – for which he felt he was in some ways responsible.

Without some form of corroboration, it is impossible to know whether or not there is any truth to the story I’ve just related. Regardless, since Grainger may be able to throw some light on my mother’s death, I am keen to collect further information about him; and if he is still alive to speak to him. I can’t find any west London hipsters who have seen Grainger since 1986; five years ago I called several times at a flat in south London where I believed Grainger was living, but the man resident in the property wouldn’t answer the door and it is now occupied by someone else. Although my mother had many lovers, ultimately only two were really significant to her, Grainger was one and Bruno de Galzain the other. And to wrap up, while Brian Barritt can be contacted easily enough, he has to date refused to speak to me about my mother and her death. If you have anecdotes about Grainger and Trina, you can – of course – add them to this by leaving a comment.

Addendum: On 22 February 2010 I received an email from someone Grainger and Trina befriended during the post-Ladbroke Grove phase of their lives. It included the following: “Grainger died in February 2000. He had contracted Hepatitis C many years previously no doubt as a result of very liberal heroin use in the 60′s and 70′s. I think he was unaware that he had it until early 1999 when he fell seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver. I went to his funeral in Elephant & Castle. Trina has moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and is living with her mother.”

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

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