Posts Tagged ‘Notting Hill’

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 »

From Soho clubs to Bloomsbury – ‘glamour’ in early-sixties London

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!

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Posted in Julia Callan-Thompson, occulture | 41 Comments »

Another take on The Process Church of the Final Judgment

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!

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Posted in books, counterculture | 51 Comments »

King Mob’s Chris Gray RIP

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I just got an email from Charlie Radcliffe telling me that Chris Gray died last Thursday morning (14 May 2009). Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact.

I got to know Chris around 2002 when I was researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson. At that time Chris had been ill with hepatitis c for some years, but it didn’t stop him from getting out on the streets to join anti-war and other demonstrations. He was extremely upbeat about the ongoing possibilities for the revolutionary transformation of society, and never complained about his illness. Chris told me several times he felt really sorry for those who got hep c from blood transfusions etc.; his attitude was that despite becoming ill from needle sharing, at least he’d had and enjoyed the smack that went with it.

When I saw Chris it was usually at his spartan flat in New Court, Hampstead. For health reasons, he was dividing his time between London and Cornwall. Despite the minimal decor in his London pad, Chris was really hospitable and always cooked for visitors. He viewed both me and his own daughter Mob as numbering among what he humorously referred to as ‘the lost children of Ladbroke Grove’. The first time I visited Chris, he told me he’d been aware of what I’d been doing for a long time, and said it was a shame we hadn’t met before because we had so much in common; viz, shared political and cultural interests alongside his acquaintance with my mother. Nonetheless, Chris hadn’t known my mother nearly as well as two of his former partners did in the late-sixties and early-seventies; both Brenda Grevelle and Hazel Gray saw her more much more regularly than he did back then.

During the years I knew Chris he was working on a book about LSD, and he seemed particularly curious about his own mother’s medical treatment with this drug in the 1950s. There is no need to repeat here the many anecdotes about Chris that have led some to view him as legendary, you can find them elsewhere but obviously not everything that has been written about him can be described as strictly factually accurate. Suffice to say I found Chris great company and appreciated him for his sharp mind. Rapping with him really brought home for me the fact that his translations of Situationist texts were intended to have an effect on the political climate of Britain and America; he was not aiming for the dry pseudo-objectivity of an academic.

Some of the lines that most impressed me when I first read the translations Chris made from French were his interpolations; added because he wanted to ensure these incendiary Situationist tracts worked for an Anglo-American audience. My absolute favourite among them is in his translation of On The Poverty Of Student Life. Here he threw in something along the lines of: “If the anarchists will tolerate each other they will tolerate anyone…” Chris assured me this addition was based on a throwaway line of conversation the pamphlet’s author Mustapha Khayati had tossed at him, he’d merely substituted ‘anarchists’ for ‘English’.

To the best of my knowledge, Hazel Gray died many many years ago. But Chris was still in close contact with Brenda Grevelle when I knew him. So my thoughts are with her and their daughter Mob.

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, obituary, politics | 40 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 »

Gustav Regler, The Owl of Minerva, Ruth Forster & Julia Callan-Thompson

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

In late 1961 my mother – Julia Callan-Thompson – moved across London from a one room bedist at 101 Barnsbury Street N1 (Islington) to a two room pad on the top floor at 24 Bassett Road W10 (off Ladbroke Grove).  Both the basement flats beneath her at 24 Bassett Road had interesting occupants. In one was the Trinidadian drummer Russ Henderson who led the first steel band to play on the streets of London, and later had a hand in setting up what became known as the Notting Hill Carnival. In the other was a refugee from Nazism called Ruth Forster, who I’ve been told was a Jewish bookseller and a member (or a former member) of the Communist Party. Forster apparently threw extraordinary parties and among the many amazing people my mother allegedly met in her basement flat over the coming months and years, another former Communist Party member called Gustav Regler made perhaps the greatest impression. If my mother did indeed meet Regler, then this must have been in either late 1961 or sometime in 1962, since he died in New Delhi in January 1963.

Regler was a confused man from a German Catholic background. He was born in 1898 and wrote many books, the overwhelming majority of which have never been translated into English. A World War I hero of sorts, he travelled to Berlin in 1919 to join the right-wing militias. After serving the cause of reaction in the German capitol, Regler moved on to Munich where he abortively involved himself in defending the Bavarian Soviets, but the revolution was viciously snuffed out. Next a good marriage resulted in Regler becoming a wealthy businessman. However, feeling oppressed, he abandoned his wife and young son to become an impoverished writer. A committed Stalinist by the time the Nazis ascended to power, Regler became a German exile in Paris from where he very actively participated in the anti-fascist struggle. Regler later claimed that visits to Moscow led to his disenchantment with Bolshevism in the mid-thirties, although this didn’t prevent him from assuming a position of authority within the Stalinist controlled International Brigade in Spain.

During the Spanish civil war Regler befriended the American novelist Ernest Hemmingway and appears to have held himself aloof from the acts of sabotage carried out against the Republican cause by some of his Bolshevik comrades. Regler didn’t actually break with Stalinism until after Franco’s fascist triumph in Spain and the forging of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Following internment in a French concentration camp and then a period of exile in Mexico, he returned to Europe in 1957. All of this is recorded in his autobiography The Owl of Minerva. Ruth Forster is mentioned in passing towards the end of this book as the girlfriend of Walter, a former German artillery officer with progressive political views, who was imprisoned in France with Regler. Part of a letter Forster sent to Walter is reproduced in The Owl of Minerva and Regler makes it clear that she’d taken part in the underground resistance to Nazism in Germany and had been imprisoned for these activities in 1937. How she got away from Germany isn’t recorded. The text of her letter does, however, reveal that she was greatly enamoured by the poetry of Rilke.

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, Julia Callan-Thompson | 21 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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Posted in counterculture, Julia Callan-Thompson, True crime | 30 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 »

The 1960s nude murders & the 17th century Whitefriars punks who liked to give head…

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Having spent some time looking at my mother’s life and in particular her time from 1961 onwards in Notting Hill, I have inevitably had cause to ponder Jack The Stripper and the nude murders. At least six west London prostitutes died in a bizarre series of mid-sixties sex slayings but the killer was never caught. I have always been more interested in the victims than their murderer(s), but I felt it worth commenting on a recent book that claimed to identify the killer. My focus in this review was on the author of this travesty, since he made a number of outrageous claims without any proof to back them up. You can read my review here. Despite this, via the mail form on my website, I get a fair number of messages about Jack The Stripper. Indeed, I got one yesterday that read:

“Nude Murders. Dear Stewart, would you be interested in discussing this subject with me. I believe that 2 people were responsible for these murders. The first is Mungo Ireland, the second Harold Jones, a near neighbour of Ireland. Google Neil Milkins for more info on Jones. Neil Milkins.”

Mungo Ireland is one of the usual suspects put in the frame for the Jack The Stripper murders, alongside the likes of boxing champion Freddie Mills. I hadn’t heard of Harold Jones before. After doing a web search I discovered Jones had been convicted of killing two children in 1921 when he was himself only 15 years-old. Milkins has produced a book about the case entitled Every Mother’s Nightmare: Abertillery in Mourning (Old Bakehouse Publications 2008) and as The South Wales News of 8 November 2007 explained: “After many years of researching the subject, Mr Milkins threw himself whole-heartedly into the project after leaving his job as a tree-feller due to an injury.” When I checked yesterday, the book only had one Amazon review, but it was enthusiastic and gave a 5 star rating:

“Kevin Milkins (Wick/Scotland). I have just finished reading my brother’s first book and found it a great and informative read. Well done Neil for turning an interesting factual story into print for all of us to share. Can hardly wait for your next book.”

My web searches also revealed that Neil Milkins had drummed up some local newspaper coverage for his Jack The Stripper theories. For example, the Hounslow Chronicle ran the following under the headline “Author uncovers new suspect in sixties murder mystery” on 26 August 2008:

“While the hedonists of the King’s Road were preoccupied with the swinging sixties, a grim orgy of killing was taking place just a few kilometres to the west.

“A serial killer obsessed with prostitutes murdered six, possibly eight, young women between 1964 and 1965, dumping their naked and mutilated bodies on the banks of the River Thames. His heinous acts earned him the moniker Jack the Stripper – but he was never caught.

“Now the dormant investigation has been given a boost after the name of a notorious Welsh double-child murderer was put in the frame for the killings.

“Harold Jones was aged 15 when he was convicted of killing two girls, aged eight and 11, in Abertillery, Wales. He served 20 years for his crime and was released in 1941 and moved to Fulham.

“We know he was living in Hestercombe Avenue, Fulham, as Harry Stevens until 1962, said author Neil Milkins, who conducted research into Jones’ movements for his book Every Mother’s Nightmare.

“The next record is from 1965 when he is living in Aldensley Road, Hammersmith, as Harry Jones. But his whereabouts during the years of the killings is unknown. I don’t know that he was involved in the murders, but it is certain a psychopath with the capability of committing callous crimes and covering them up was around the area.

“Mr Milkins examined Jones’ psychologist and prison reports at the National Archives Centre, in Kew, before handing his suspicions over to Scotland Yards murder review team.

“But Neil insists: The coincidence of Harold Jones being there just jumped out at me and I’m hoping people come forward with more information on him where he worked, who he associated with and the kind of person he was. I want to find out where he was between 1962-65, the answer to that may answer a whole lot of other questions.

“Harold Jones died in Hammersmith in 1971, his death certificate names him as Harold Jones, otherwise Harry Stevens.”

Moving on from this newspaper report, I happen to know that Milkins is an Irish name, whereas Malkin is an English name, and these two surnames have quite distinct origins. Nonetheless, some people might be struck by the similarity between Neil Milkins’ surname and the name Malkin, and then read something into the fact that malkin was a slang term for a lewd woman in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. For an example of the word malkin being used in this fashion we might turn to Father Hubburd’s Tales by Thomas Middleton: “and none can justly except me but some riotous vomiting Kit or some gentleman-swallowing Malkin.” (Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, page 166; the tale we’re dealing with was first published in 1604). A kit is, of course, a loose woman… but the phrase ‘some gentleman-swallowing Malkin’ is the one that really gets me going, since it might be taken to mean a prostitute doing ‘French’ (i.e. performing oral sex, giving head, providing a blow job etc.). It is thought Jack The Stripper killed his victims by suffocating them with his manhood as they gave him oral sex…

A lot can be (mis)read into the fact that Neil Milkins’ Irish surname sounds similar to the unrelated English name Malkin. Likewise it may appear curious that a Welsh double-murderer seems to have been living in west London when the Jack The Stripper murders took place, but given the size of the population in the area at the time it is unlikely he is the only psychopath who might be put in the frame for the killings on the basis of past record. I haven’t seen anything that convincingly links Harold Jones to these unsolved crimes. And for me the victims are still of greater interest than the killer… To finish, f you want an example of a contemporary Malkin whose reputation is considerably lower than that of a Whitefriars punk, then right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin fits the bill….

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

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Posted in True crime | 32 Comments »