To some Paul Raymond was at the vanguard of the newly liberated post-war Britain but to others he was just a man who became filthy rich peddling filth. He was eventually known as ‘The King Of Soho’ and it was exactly fifty years ago when Raymond’s Revuebar opened on April 14 1958 in the former Doric Ballroom in Soho’s Walker’s Court. It was London’s first legal nude show with dancers who could actually dance. Before this date, especially at the notorious Windmill Theatre down the road no exposed flesh was allowed to jiggle, wiggle or shudder but Paul Raymond had the simple idea of making his Revuebar a member’s only club and charged a mere guinea for life membership. It became the first location in Britain with a sign legally offering STRIPTEASE, thus it became an infamous Soho landmark.
Cha Landers performing at the Revuebar in 1960
Within two years The Revuebar, according to The Spectator, included amongst his members “ten M.P.s, eight millionaires, more than 60 knights, 35 peers, and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill.”
However in 1961 a judge labelled it “filthy, disgusting and beastly” and fined Raymond £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house. Apparently the judge was particularly shocked that the members of the audience were actually allowed to ring Bonnie Bell the Ding Dong Girl’s bells (her costume consisted of nothing but three bells) and that Julia Mendez the Snake Girl was wont to swallow her snake in public.
The Beatles at the Revuebar in 1967
Paul Raymond was actually born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925, and was brought up in a strict Irish Roman Catholic family in Liverpool. Academic studies were not exactly his forté and he preferred studying at the university of life. During the war, he was sent down the mines as one of the ‘Bevan Boys’ – teenage National Service conscripts ordered to work as miners. This had been completely against his will and before his medical he consumed vast quantities of saccharin in sliced bread in a vain attempt to feign a heart murmur. Quinn only lasted two weeks and subsequently enlisted in the Royal Air Force, where for two years he was a drummer boy with a military band.
After the war he bought a mind-reading act from a clown called Ravel and teamed up with a girl called Noreen O’Hagan. By the time she discovered she was pregnant, Raymond had already moved to London to make his fortune, arriving, apparently, with just 1s 6d (7.5p) in his pocket. He quickly shed his Geoffrey Quinn persona and changed his name to Paul Raymond and in 1952 he married a young choreographer of showgirls called Jean. They went into business together with a touring variety show that featured naked girls all of whom, of course, had to stand absolutely still (I’m not sure where Jean’s choreography was useful here?). It was rumoured that Raymond would surreptitiously supply pea-shooters to some of his customers so that a well-aimed missile might produce some exciting jiggles for the rest.
Paul Raymond with his family in 1960
Not long after opening the Revuebar in Soho, it was profitable enough to provide the money to start producing sex magazines and he eventually published Men Only, Escort, Club International and Razzle. By 1970 Raymond completely dominated the market, saying “There will always be sex – always, always, always.” There was always property as well, and because at the time Soho was run down and seedy, the land was relatively cheap, and Raymond was astute enough to start buying up freeholds in the area. By the time he finished he was said to own an estimated 100 acres of prime real estate in central London with an estimated value of between £600 million to £2 billion. He is said to be the only person to have built a significant private London estate in the 20th century.
As Paul Raymond’s porn, and subsequently his property, empires helped the money pour in, Raymond grew his hair, sported heavy gold jewellery and wore a fur coat, seemingly whatever the weather. His affairs became more public especially his relationship with the former swimmer and soft-porn actress Fiona Richmond. Fed up with the public aspect of the affair, Jean, after an acrimonious and bitterly-fought case, divorced him in 1973. Richmond at the time was appearing in Raymond’s magazines and films such as Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid but also starring at the Whitehall Theatre (which Raymond now owned) in farces such as Yes, We Have No Pyjamas.
Fiona Richmond
Paul Raymond in 1981, on what must have been a very hot day
Paul Raymond and his daughter Debbie 1988
In 1992 Raymond’s daughter Debbie, a tough-talking, chain-smoking and hard-drinking woman, was being groomed to take over Raymond’s entire company and was already editor-in-chief of his magazine division when she tragically died of a heroin overdose at the age of just 36. Debbie had been the only thing that mattered in his life other than his wealth and the distraught Raymond became a complete recluse hardly ever leaving his apartment which overlooked Green Park behind the Ritz. He eventually died in March 2008.
Still the Revuebar but no longer Raymond’s in 2008
I’ve got an old and trusty blackened wok at home bought over 20 years ago for £4.50 in a Chinese Supermarket called Loon Fung situated at 44 Gerrard Street – the main thoroughfare of Europe’s biggest Chinatown in London’s West End. I, and I’m sure most of the, it has to be said, slightly grumpy staff certainly didn’t know the extraordinary musical history the building had. Incidentally the original Chinatown in London was actually at Limehouse in the East End but for various reasons the Chinese community slowly de-camped to the West End centring around a few streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue. After the war it was a particularly seedy area at the edge of Soho but the rents were practically at peppercorn rates which suited the new Chinese restaurants that sprang up around the area.
Gerrard Street in the late sixties
In 1967, after being a bit of a dingy old strip joint, 44 Gerrard Street became known as Happening 44 – a trendy psychedelic club run by Jack Braceland, one of the earliest light show artists in the UK who’d worked on some of the early shows of Pink Floyd amongst others.
His light shows featured hand-assembled wet slides and Aldis projectors. His company called Five Acre Lights was actually named after a psychedelic nudist colony he ran with his wife at Five Acre Woods near Watford – which in reality, was a number of caravans in a sea of mud and a club house that featured a ‘trip machine’ and where Pink Floyd once played a gig on Guy Fawkes night in 1966. Braceland was a middle-aged, slightly weird beatnik character but for the relatively short while Happening 44 existed, it featured such bands as the Social Deviants and Soft Machine.
Soft Machine in 1967
Happening 44 also put on some of the earliest gigs of Fairport Convention – the folk-rock band that would soon become one of the most influential bands in the country. The band had recently placed adverts in the Melody Maker, presumably read by Jack Braceland, which read:
‘Friday; Fairport Convention stays home tonight. Saturday; Fairport stays home again, patiently waiting for bookings’.
Alas Happening 44 closed down within a few months of opening and Jack Braceland went back to his Watford nudist colony, and presumably his ‘trip machine’, and was never really heard of again.
Soft Machine 1967
Fairport Convention in 1967/68
King Of The Ravers and B-Bombs
Mick Mulligan and George Melly – Photograph by Terry Cryer
In the early fifties and fifteen years before Happening 44, 44 Gerrard Street housed The West End Jazz Club run by George Melly and the trumpeter Mick Mulligan, and it was here that the first ‘all night raves’ were held and, improbably, also where the term ‘all night rave’ was coined.
The word ‘rave’ (as in to ‘live it up’) was invented by Mulligan and took several forms: other than the verb ‘to rave’, there was the noun meaning a party where you raved, and finally a ‘raver’ – someone who raved as much as possible. A newspaper at one point called Mick Mulligan the ‘King of The Ravers’. George Melly wrote once that the original all night raves that had attracted beatniks, Soho layabouts and art school students, were an enormous social success but a financial loss.
In his autobiography Owning Up Melly described the end of a typical rave: “At seven a.m. the band played its final number and we’d all crawl up out of the sweat-scented cellar into the empty streets of a Sunday morning in the West End. Hysterical with lack of sleep, accompanied by a plump art student, her pale cheeks smeared with the night’s mascara, I’d catch the Chelsea bus and try to read the Observer through prickling red eyeballs as we swayed along Piccadilly, down Sloane Street, and into the King’s Road. Then a bath, one of those delirious fucks that only happen on the edge of complete fatigue, and a long sleep until it was time to get up and face the journey to Cook’s Ferry or whatever jazz club we were playing that evening.”
All all-night ravers, from whatever era, need a drug that keeps them awake. The drug of choice that allowed George and his fellow ravers to last the course was Benzedrine taken from broken up inhalers.
The Benzedrine inhaler was intended as a decongestant, but you could break it open, remove the paper strip inside and soak the strip in a cup of coffee or tea. This was called a ‘B-Bomb’ and the preparation got so popular the manufacturers had to withdraw the inhaler from over the counter use in the early fifties.
By the mid-fifties 44 Gerrard Street had become a folk club originally called The Good Earth but after the success of Lonnie Donnegan’s Rock Island Line it became the 44 Skiffle Club run by John Hasted – one of the earliest champions of skiffle which he saw as a form of teenage urban folk music. The house band was known as John Hasted’s Skiffle and Folksong Group and featured the young folk singer Shirley Collins. It’s easy today to be bemused about these clubs based around, as in George Melly’s case trad jazz and with Hasted skiffle and folk music, but these were the first youth movements based around music in this country. It wasn’t rock and roll that was the soundtrack for the first teenagers. Not in London anyway. Nor were they the first drug-takers in the capital.
The 43 Club – Useful For Early Breakfasts
At number 43 Gerrard Street in the 1920s there was situated an infamous nightclub run by an Irish woman called Kate Meyrick. She was famous back in Ireland for being the first woman to ride a bicycle, but in London she was well-known for running a string of nightclubs and evading the strict licensing laws whilst doing so. The most famous of which was the ’43 Club’ in Gerrard Street. It attracted bohemians like the artists Augustus John and Jacob Epstein and writers such as JB Priestley and Joseph Conrad as well as a good sprinkling of gangsters and aristocrats.
Tallulah Bankhead who often performed in London during the 1920s described the club as “useful for early breakfasts” and when asked “what time breakfast would be then?” she replied “about 10pm”. Tallulah Bankhead often admitted to her liking of cocaine and the ’43 Club’ was said to be the centre of drug dealing in the West End of London – the advantage for dealers, during the many police raids on the club, of a hidden escape route to Newport Place was obvious.
Corrupting The Womanhood of this Country
The most notorious cocaine dealer in London during the 1920s was a man known as ‘Brilliant Chang’ – his name is still used as slang for cocaine to this day.
In 1918 a popular young actress called Billie Carleton was found dead in her bed by her maid after attending the Victory ball at the Albert Hall. At her bedside was a gold box containing cocaine given to her by her boyfriend , the costume designer Reggie de Veuille. He had bought the drug from a Scottish woman called Ada and her Chinese husband Lau Ping You. Ada and de Veuille (the prosecution attempted to paint the worst possible picture and described him as ‘somewhat in foreign appearance and accent with an effeminate face and mincing little smile…’) were sentenced to five and eight months hard labour respectively but Lau Ping You escaped with just a £10 fine. The involvement of a Chinese man, however, whipped the press into a frenzy and the newspaper Pictorial News ran a series of pieces on the East End’s ‘Yellow Peril’. Very soon another Chinese man called ‘Brilliant’ Chang was brought to the forefront. Chang was a former Limehouse marine contractor but now ran a restaurant called ‘Shanghai’ in the same part of the East End. Limehouse was London’s original Chinatown but although the population reached its peak just after the First World War the population was probably only around 300 people.
The original Chinatown in Limehouse during the 1920s
The Pictorial News said that Chang ‘dispensed Chinese delicacies and the drugs and vices of the Orient.’ The paper continued that Chang ‘demanded payment for his drugs in kind’ and further enlightened its readers advising that women ‘who retained sufficent decency and pride of race’ turn down ‘this fellow with lips thin and cruel tightly drawn across even yellow teeth’. This description of Chang seems to have come directly from a Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu novel – literature that didn’t exactly help the Chinese immigrant community’s cause and stoked Londoners fears of drugs, foriegners and crime – “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”
In 1922, Freda Kempton, a young nightclub dancer was found dead after an overdose of cocaine and the press soon found out that Chang had been with her the night before. He told the Coroner at her inquest ‘she was a friend of mine but I know nothing about the cocaine. It is all a mystery to me.’
According to the coroner there was no proof that he was linked to the death , but the police were convinced that he was. They raided his restaurant in 1924 and found a large quantity of the drug. He was jailed for 18 months and subsequently deported. The judge told him ‘It is you and men like you who are corrupting the womanhood of this country.’ While The Empire News wrote ‘Mothers would be well advised to keep their daughters as far away as they can from Chinese laundries and other places where the yellow men congregate.’
The Daily Telegraph reported a few years later that Chang had gone ‘blind and ended his days, not in luxury and rich silks, but as a sightless worker in a little kitchen garden.’
The womaniser and drug dealer ‘Brilliant’ Chang
In the thirties, probably encouraged by the atmosphere of ‘yellow peril’ hysteria whipped up by the popular press, the local council decided to clear the ‘slum area’ around Limehouse and many of the Chinese shops, restaurants and gambling dens were swept away. This, and the extensive bombing of the area during the Second World War encouraged the gradual migration of Chinatown from the East End to the West End.
Kate Meyrick, meanwhile, after several spells in Holloway prison due to repeated licensing laws offences and the bribing of policemen, died in 1933 – dance bands in the West End, apparently, fell silent for two minutes in tribute.
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