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 Time_s 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!
Comments
Comment by Shirley Pearce on 2009-03-18 12:47:19 +0000
Love is a sad song….
Comment by Scotch Alex on 2009-03-18 13:17:01 +0000
Grainger was super-hip as well as reliable, knew how to keep a secret and dug true poetry!
Comment by International Times on 2009-03-18 13:37:26 +0000
Transtemporal psychogeography is a groove sensation but it’s time to loosen up, freak out and rap….
Comment by Tony Temple on 2009-03-18 14:49:57 +0000
If only my memory wasn’t shot to pieces I could probably tell you a thing or two!
Comment by Georgina Shaw on 2009-03-18 15:03:16 +0000
Don’t think I ever met Grainger, but I heard about him!
Comment by Bennie Gray on 2009-03-18 22:44:31 +0000
Grainger wasted his talents as a hustler, if he’d stayed away from the drugs he could have been a millionaire.
Comment by Baz Jennings on 2009-03-18 23:39:38 +0000
I haven’t seen Grainger since 1986 either.
Comment by Bunty Duhresson on 2009-03-19 00:46:59 +0000
Danger Grainger, you better get with the Footsbarn Theatre and paint your face.
Comment by John Grevelle on 2009-03-19 02:06:00 +0000
Now we come to the pay off? Or we should but it doesn’t look like there is enough smack in the house to keep a man straight, let alone get him high!
Comment by Marianne Fiathfull on 2009-03-19 07:41:36 +0000
Grainger rocked!
Comment by Creative Commons on 2009-03-19 10:22:42 +0000
Hey that quote ‘Nobody wants to pay for (junk) they’ve already taken’ is not only a paraphrased advertising maxim but has popped up from somebody else in the last ten to fourteen days.
Comment by Will Self on 2009-03-19 14:46:27 +0000
Just dropping by !
Comment by Peter Ackroyd on 2009-03-19 14:47:26 +0000
Me too ! I dig your work.
Comment by howling wizard, shrieking toad. on 2009-03-19 14:49:36 +0000
Oi, Self! Call yourself a psychogeographer?
Hiker more like!
Drop by my cave for a pipe or two one day.
Comment by arthur cravan on 2009-03-19 14:53:02 +0000
Wizard, I will drop by with Jacques Vache and Hugo Ball if you like. We make good conversation.
Comment by John Grevelle on 2009-03-19 20:20:25 +0000
You should invite Ron Hunt along while you’re at it.
Comment by Peter Ackroyd on 2009-03-20 07:59:11 +0000
I enjoy hiking , errr…..psychogeography to you that is. I created my “House of Dr Dee” after such a hike…..err,psychogeo wotsit ramble around Archway and Holloway Rd and Dalston.
I like Stewart Home’s books a lot.
Sod off Howling Wizard , and your toad can get lost aswell– you are no competition for John Dee — and your Wardour St English is rubbish too. I am much better at it dear sir.
Will, I will see you for dinner at 6.00.
Comment by Peter Ackroyd on 2009-03-20 09:20:14 +0000
It has often struck me, for example, how for centuries there has been one sure distinction within London culture. There has always been a journalistic and intellectual establishment which likes to think of itself as being fashionable or even enlightened. It forms an informal circle of what might be called bien pensants, or, in the cliche of our day, the politically correct. These are the people who parrot whatever the conventional wisdom might be, and support the shallow-minded artists who reflect it in their work. But in London there has always been a stronger and more significant tradition – it is that of the energetic, individualistic and unfashionable artists who, more often than not, turn out to be native Londoners. They may be right-wing reactionaries or apolitical anarchists, but they so unceremoniously reject the values of the standard intellectual culture that they are discounted, attacked, or marginalised. It happened to Blake, it happened to Turner, it happened to Dickens in the last half of his literary career. The newspaper critics disliked precisely those qualities of the Cockney visionaries which were essential to their vision of the city. They disliked their energetic display. They disliked the variety they provided. They deplored Turner’s ‘visionary absurdities’ and ‘crude theatrical blotches’, just as they condemned Dickens’s theatrical caricatures. They also condemned Dickens for mixing the tragic with the comic, just as they despised Blake for mixing the spiritual with the material. They detested what is an essentially Cockney vision. Dickens called it the ‘streaky bacon’ effect, and revelled in it.
I believe I am describing London in almost a religious sense, although I cannot be sure what particular religion it is. Someone once said that cities are always pagan places, and there is a great truth in that.
And there is another point here, too. The London visionaries I have been discussing are not necessarily ethical or moral artists. They are not necessarily concerned with the minutiae of the human psyche, or with debates about values and beliefs. They tend to favour spectacle and melodrama and the energetic exploitation of whatever medium they are employing. As city writers and artists, they are more concerned with the external life, with the movement of crowds, with the great general drama of the human spirit. They have a sense of energy and splendour, of ritual and display, which may have little to do with ethical judgement or the exercise of moral consciousness. That is why the more intellectual critics, for example, hated Dickens so much. These Cockney visionaries have a powerful sense of the sacred, but in the darkness in Dickens’s novels or in the light of Turner’s paintings there may be something as pagan as Mother Goose. You remember that when Turner died, in Chelsea, his last words are supposed to have been ‘The sun is God’.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-03-20 12:37:42 +0000
London is a groove sensation!
Comment by Arthur Cravan on 2009-03-20 13:38:15 +0000
a powerful sense of the sacred
Comment by Arthur Cravan on 2009-03-20 13:54:30 +0000
Do you now understand,’ continued the old man, ‘that Lailie is you, and the warriors you put to death were you also? And not the warriors only, but the animals which you slew when hunting and ate at your feasts were also you. You thought life dwelt in you alone but I have drawn aside the veil of delusion, and have let you see that by doing evil to others you have done it to yourself also. Life is one in them all, and yours is but a portion of this same common life. And only in that one part of life that is yours, can you make life better or worse — increasing or decreasing it. You can only improve life in yourself by destroying the barriers that divide your life from that of others, and by considering others as yourself, and loving them. By so doing you increase your share of life. You injure your life when you think of it as the only life, and try to add to its welfare at the expense of other lives. By so doing you only lessen it. To destroy the life that dwells in others is beyond your power. The life of those you have slain has vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. You thought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs, but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time nor space. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousand years: your life and the life of all the visible and invisible beings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alter it, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. All else, but seems to us to be.”
Comment by Vance Packard on 2009-03-20 14:48:52 +0000
Michael K’s famous union-jack-in-the-colours-of-the-irish-tricolor poster campaign in Belfast in 1991 predates Mark Wallinger’s less famous Brixton version but is preceded by Kenny Murphy-Roud’s even less famous version in 1980’s Glasgow. Michael K fled Belfast shortly afterwards and released the actual record, ‘Lead Drilled (Sitting Ducks)’, a psychotic purge of the stress of growing up in Murder City, from the safety of Dundee while eating chili fries, while Mark Wallinger could eat chilli fries at leisure in Brixton. Nothing is known of whether Kenny Murphy-Roud ate or could eat chili fries but at this stage there was already the possibility of a deep-fried Mars Bar at selected ‘greasy spoons’ in Glasgow
Comment by Malcolm Drake on 2009-03-20 15:01:43 +0000
Julia Callan-Thompson may have died in the back basement flat at 104 Cambridge Gardens on 2 December 1979 but suggestions that the person on the front of Stewart Home’s ‘Tainted Love’ is either his mother or Julia Callan Thompson have to mitzigaynored by the rumours that the pics of Julia are in fact pictures of Home’s sister and that the whole campaign by Home to infiltrate the sixties scene from a transtemporal psychogeographical standpoint are the result of him running out of juice with the punk attitude of ‘those who take drugs past the age of twenty just haven’t grown up’.
Of course, Home has yet to reply to the assertiong made about his twisted psychology of advertising leanings (cf. History begins where Life Ends and Manufacturing Dissent) but viewed from an angle of 45 degrees at 3.30am, his portrait in the Victoria and Albert Museum starts to look a bit like….hmmm….I’ll finish this spontaneous polemic later.
And I’m not your fucking dad!
Comment by Christopher Nosnibor on 2009-03-21 21:03:50 +0000
Those are pretty grave assertiong, it has to be said….
Comment by Dick on 2009-03-22 15:23:04 +0000
Very grave indeed. There, I said it…
Comment by Bitter Balls is Back!! on 2009-03-23 18:01:35 +0000
Internet Explorer has just warned me that I need to press any key to continue but I’m alread typing so I’ll just say I just popped in to just say that I just read the just allegations above and I just think it’s so JUST WILLIAM
Comment by Nicole Black on 2009-04-04 00:49:52 +0000
I’m just not sure if someone would come back to the same home every night and get their drugs from the same person. And that they’d not see them mixing them which would make it pretty obvious how much they were getting; plus the colour, smell and consistency of the shot. And you’d have to be off a fair while to have lost your tolerance. Having said that, 51 people died in Sydney one weekend because a some gear didn’t get cut somewhere in the supply chain. Have you met one arm Micky in your investigations?
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-04-04 08:55:48 +0000
One Armed Micky sounds familiar as a name but not much more…. I’ve also come across names like Blind George (he’s dead now and I know a bit more about him than Micky)….. it was a tight scene….