by Will Birch
Ian’s letter continued with reference to ‘Janet Fagg’, whom he had ‘loved and lost’, despite taking her to ‘the wrestlies’ [wrestling] at the Albert Hall. Ian closed his letter with: ‘what is all this bloody Lennon Language? (It’s really foul Will Burroughs influence). Mind it.’
Ian was feeling a little bit sorry for himself and expressed his money worries:
I wrote a sad letter the last week, but I didn’t post it as certain situations changed, then changed again. I’m up to the neck, or was until yesterday in terrible shits and monetary owings and dolly hang-ups . . . I got a council cheque yesterday at long last, which will see me through for a spell. Living out of other people’s pockets always shits me up something terrible and until this loot arrived I was £30 in schnook. I have assets of around £50 to still arrive for an illustration I did and for major tasky holiday work.
In the autumn of 1965, Ian was pulled out of despondency when he met his future musical collaborator, Russell Hardy. Some years earlier, Russell had worked as a laboratory technician at South East Essex Technical College, where he had befriended Terry Day. The painfully shy Russell, who used to spend his meal breaks putting the college’s Bechstein piano through its paces, went one night to see Ginger Baker play the Candlelight Club at the Plough public house. He struck up a conversation with Terry Day and before long they had formed a jazz trio with double-bassist Terry Holman, another ‘mad’ laboratory technician. Terry Day dragged Russell along to Elgin Avenue, where Ian was busy working on an illustration for London Life magazine, a commission that had been passed to him by Peter Blake. ‘He was making a collage with drawings of famous musicians,’ remembers Russell. ‘It was meticulously set out. I talked to him and, Ian being Ian, I didn’t have to say much. I felt at ease with him.’
Russell Hardy, then twenty-four and prematurely balding, worked in the East India Docks as a tally clerk and was ‘often in a disgustingly pissed state’, specially if there was an export shipment of Scotch Whisky going out. Every other Friday, Russell would visit Ian at Elgin Avenue. Eventually, Ian asked Russell, ‘Can you give us a lift up the college?’ It was the start of Russell’s long career as Ian’s unofficial chauffeur. If Russell wasn’t around, Ian’s preferred mode of transport was a taxi to Kensington, funded by his freelance drawing work. To avoid attention on arriving at the Royal College, Ian would have his cab stop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, so he could sneak into the adjoining Royal College painting school through a staff entrance. Occasionally, he would visit the V&A canteen, where a dinner lady by the name of Geraldine would supply free food and make a fuss of him.
Whenever Russell gave him a ride to college, Ian would drum on the dashboard and sing Tutti Frutti’. Russell had taken no previous interest in rock ’n’ roll but quickly became familiar with the songs of Little Richard and Eddie Cochran. In return, Russell would enthral Ian with tales from the docks. ‘My grandfather also worked there and he told me all the wrinkles,’ says Russell. ‘Ian was fascinated by the criminal fraternity, a bit like a schoolboy, so I told him stories about the bonded warehouses; how the dock workers would cleverly stack the lorries to conceal shortages; how the Customs officers would all be playing cards and say to me, “Come in, Mr Clerk, and have a waxer!” It was a huge tumbler of Scotch at nine o’clock in the morning, on the dockside. By lunchtime I was paralytic.’
Ian and Russell complemented each other perfectly and became almost mutually dependent. Ian was the front man, whose boisterous exterior opened doors at social gatherings, thus helping to draw Russell out of his shell. Russell, car at the ready, was Ian’s mobility. ‘Russell’s motor was a terribly useful thing,’ says Geoff Rigden, ‘because Ian always wanted to go somewhere. We once went to the British Grand Prix at Goodwood. On the way back, Ian said, “Let’s go to a party, it’s in Romford!”’ On many occasions, Russell was also Ian’s legs, carrying him on his back up flights of stairs at parties that the gang gate-crashed. ‘Ian grew up with a bunch of hooligans,’ says Terry Day. ‘We were all in our twenties, drinking and having a good time, but Ian’s disability was no problem. We were coming home in the snow one night and he fell over, so I put him on my back and carried him home. He hated snow, but we would always help him if he slipped, though sometimes we would wind him up. “Stay down there you bastard!”’
The conversation frequently turned to music, and Ian would fantasize about making it big, promising Russell that he would be able to play his grand piano all day long on a big yacht when they become millionaires. ‘That was our dream,’ says Russell. ‘Ian really liked the idea of becoming financially successful.’ Ian was still dreaming of stardom when he had his first brush with a real rock star. Terry Day was again the catalyst. Terry had first met Charlie Watts in 1963, when he and Derrick Woodham bumped into the Rolling Stone coming out of a cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue. Watts was dating his future wife Shirley Shepherd, who had been at Hornsey College of Art with Woodham. Terry persuaded Charlie to come along to the Royal College to hear the Hardy-Holman-Day jazz trio. When Ian was introduced to Watts, he quizzed him mercilessly about his experiences with the Stones, then second only to the Beatles in the music popularity polls. Later on, when Watts bequeathed a Gretsch drum kit to Terry, Ian saw this tenuous connection with the Rolling Stones as a possible future benefit. But, for now, he was preoccupied with getting his diploma.
Students at the Royal College were assessed on a combination of practical and written work. Ian’s life-size drawing of Gene Vincent, which consumed over two dozen 6B pencils, was an impressive effort. For his written work, he prepared a thesis on one of his favourite topics. Entitled ‘Chicago Hoodlums’, it profiled Al Capone and the gangsters of the prohibition era, much of it lifted from The Lawless Decade, a treasured tome by legendary New York journalist Paul Sann. ‘Ian’s thesis was brilliant,’ says Bill Ellis, a student contemporary. ‘Ian knew all about the gangsters.’
‘I was right into gangsters,’ Ian would tell journalist Steven Fuller some years later, revealing his major literary and cinematic influences. ‘I was drawin’ them and readin’ about them . . . Ed McBain’s and Ross MacDonald’s. I don’t like crap writers like Agatha Christie and Margerie Allingham. I like crime documentaries about America. I like James Cagney films when he’s not going completely crackers. Kiss of Death with Richard Widmark and Victor Mature . . . Key Largo is an incredible film . . . The Wild One just took my head apart . . . Somebody Up There Likes Me is great, there’s a knife fight on the roof with Steve McQueen . . . Tony Curtis I really dig. The Vikings, fuckin’ ’ell!’
Peter Blake continued to pass magazine commissions to Ian including illustrations for London Life, depicting the stars of the 1965 Royal Variety Show. For this, Ian collaborated with Alison Armstrong and Stanford Steele, who drew the costumes and background respectively. Ian’s contribution was a series of distinctive caricatures of the stars, including Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, Shirley Bassey, Jack Benny, Peter, Paul and Mary, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Dusty Springfield, and Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan. His portrait of Tony Bennett adorned the front cover. Although Ian welcomed the work, getting paid was another matter, as he complained in a letter to Gordon Law:
I have been eating drinking and sleeping lately. I have done this and that but it’s never enough. People owe me money for a drawing and some grant for holiday work is due. I am writing on lined paper because I’m tired and it’s 2.30 morningwise. I’ve been asleep already out of lackaday. Derrick’s Lithuanian lady has just made me a big meal. I have not used African tobacco for some time now, but the booze is eating into my overdraft.
As well as encouraging his students to paint what they liked, Peter Blake helped to broaden their social horizons by inviting them to exhibition openings on the London art circuit. At the hottest galleries, there was always the prospect of bumping into a Beatle or a Stone and quaffing copious quantities of champagne. Geoff Rigden recalls, ‘Peter used to casually say, “I’m going to a private view tomorro
w evening, would you boys like to come along?” We’d turn up, very gauche, and stand there with our mouths open. Ian and Terry were very close and equal in their ability to chat up girls. Terry was impish, whilst Ian wasn’t so mobile, but they were a double act; they both had that brightness.’
At a showing of Blake’s work at the Robert Fraser Gallery on 20 October 1965, Ian looked dapper in ‘a navy blue suit with white chalk stripe, a shirt with a pin through the collar and natty tie’. Terry Day’s legendary chat-up technique was put to the test, as he was goaded by Ian. ‘Oi, Tel, see that bird over there . . .’ Terry looked round to see a stunning oriental girl and quickly started a conversation, while Ian and Geoff looked on, marvelling at the Dagenham Casanova, working his magic. As Terry was about to slip the girl his telephone number, she added, ‘You’re very kind, but I’m here with my friend,’ and gestured towards a blue-suited gentleman in the corner. ‘We looked round and it was Marlon Brando!’ says Rigden. ‘Terry went, “Streuth!” He definitely had panache with the girls. Ian loved it.’ Terry remains modest about his pulling powers, crediting Ian and Geoff with much of the action. ‘Tony Curtis was also there that night,’ he recalls, ‘with the actress Kristine Kauffman, so we all started chatting her up and slobbering over her, getting drunk on red wine. Brando leaned over and said, “You seem to be getting on all right there boys.”’
Ian’s fleeting glimpse of Marlon Brando was yet another notch on his social CV, but despite the presence of ‘the beautiful people’ on the London art circuit, the Royal College itself was rather less fertile for joint predators Day and Dury. In their male-dominated year group, girls were outnumbered five to one, and in the close confines of the college former Walthamstow students such as Valerie Wiffen and Alison Armstrong continued to receive the boys’ attentions. But it was twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Rathmell, known to friends as Betty, who turned the heads of Ian and Terry. Born on 12 August 1942 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Betty was the attractive third daughter of Thomas and Lilian Rathmell. Thomas Rathmell was a noted figurative painter who had moved from Cheshire to Wales after the war to teach at Newport College of Art. Betty studied at Newport, as did her boyfriend Dave Parfitt, before they both came to London in 1963, having won places at the Royal College of Art.
Ian and Terry were intrigued by Betty’s gentle personality, sense of fun and the trace of a Liverpudlian accent in her soft voice, not to mention what some considered her slightly old-fashioned portraiture taken from photographs and drawn in coloured pencils with muted grey tones. The style would regain favour a few years later with the advent of ‘photo-realism’. In her early days in the capital, Betty stayed in a students’ hostel opposite the Natural History Museum but now lived in a studio flat above a shop at 103b Westbourne Grove. Betty’s head had been turned by London life and she outgrew her relationship with Dave Parfitt. ‘She was surrounded by lots of amoral, liberal hooligans,’ says Terry Day, who won her affections in 1966. However, their romance was not to last and when it ended, Ian was ready to pounce.
The mid-1960s witnessed the gradual liberalization of British society. Ian and his friends were pleased to see many of the old taboos being quashed and progressive new legislation introduced. Although thousands campaigned in vain for the legalization of cannabis, 1965 had seen the abolition of the death penalty, and within two years abortion would be legalized and homosexuality decriminalized. The summer of 1966 – memorable for England’s football victory in the World Cup and the release of the Beatles’ Revolver LP – also saw some significant changes in Ian’s life. The flat in Elgin Avenue was vacated, and the art school gang dispersed. Peggy and Aunt Elisabeth, both now retired, left Upminster for Barnstaple in Devon and settled at Higher Brockham, a National Trust cottage in East Down, where their pet tortoises, Homer and Chloe, could roam free. Although Ian would make many trips to East Down, his mum was no longer ‘just around the corner’.
Ian was now courting Betty and missed her terribly when she went on holiday to Spain with Alison Armstrong that summer. Betty and Alison returned via Paris, where they found Ian waiting. ‘This was really the first I knew of their romance,’ says Alison. ‘They kept it a bit quiet as they thought I’d be upset.’ By October, Ian had moved into Betty’s Westbourne Grove bedsit. Although it was not unusual for young couples to ‘shack up’ in the newly permissive society, this was Ian’s first experience of cohabiting with a girlfriend.
Betty continued to paint but was uncomfortable with the schmoozing and marketing aspect of being an artist and sold few of her works. Ian was slightly more commercial in outlook and received illustration commissions from The Sunday Times Magazine. He also landed a part-time teaching assignment at Barnfield College, Luton. Although he had graduated on 8 July with a second-class honours diploma as an Associate of the Royal College of Art, Ian had to accept that, whatever his talent, he was unlikely to earn a living from painting. Perhaps encouraged by Peter Blake, he decided that teaching art would be an acceptable compromise.
‘I wanted to teach,’ Ian told me. ‘There are only ten painters in this country who make money. As a fine art lecturer the bread was good, £20 a day, a shit load of money if you’re doing two days a week. That was enough to live on, plus it involved me in running it on with the younger ones. If you’re a full-time teacher you end up sharpening pencils and doing the register, but part-time teachers are expected to be working painters. That’s what they wanted. It was a lovely life, but it was hard in the holidays. I had to sign on. I don’t always know if sacrifice is a good thing. Peter Blake once said to me that a lot of his life he sacrificed other things for his art, which ultimately hadn’t made him happy. He then developed the belief that happiness was an important element in art. It’s not necessary to be in a garret with rats gnawing at your heels.’
Ian and Betty were in love and less than twelve months into their relationship they married. The ceremony took place on 3 June 1967 at Barnstaple Register Office. Signing the register, Ian gave his profession as ‘painter and freelance illustrator’, while Betty described herself as an artist. Later that year, Betty’s parents gave the couple a belated wedding present in the form of the first year’s rent – a generous £500 – on a home in Bedford Park, Chiswick. This architecturally notable area was home to an established artists’ community, an enclave where young painters might meet and develop their artistic skills.
Kara Lodge, at 14 Newton Grove, London W4 was designed and built in 1880 by Maurice B. Adams, for the artist J. C. Dollman. Since Dollman’s death, the building had been divided into flats, but retained many of its original Arts and Crafts features. Number 2, on the ground floor, contained Dollman’s purpose-built studio with its high ceiling, a large window and a minstrel’s gallery overlooking the central area, with bathroom and kitchen off to one side. This was now Ian’s home. He had a telephone installed, which was handy for keeping in contact with the Sunday Times, for whom he continued to freelance. He also found time to befriend some of his neighbours, including Tom Affleck Greeves, a former architect and Slade-trained artist who had formed the Bedford Park Society in 1963, and one Geoffrey Stutfield, ‘a distressed gentleman in reduced circumstances’.
Bill Dury had for some years been a chauffeur for the Western European Union (the defence organization), driving diplomats and politicians to and from London Airport in his Mercedes limousine, but on 25 February 1968 he died from acute bronchitis and emphysema in his small flat in Victoria. He was sixty-two years old. He had spent the previous Christmas staying with his sister Florence in Southborough, where he had complained of severe chest pains, and, although word had reached Ian that his father was not in the best of health, they had seen nothing of each other in recent years. Ian agreed to identify Bill’s body and register his death at Caxton Hall, thus protecting Peggy from the grim task. ‘Ian phoned me when his dad was dying,’ remembers Barry Anderson. ‘He said, “I’m out of my head over this. I’ve been a proper bastard.” He felt guilty, but he was very proud of hi
s dad. I remember Bill as a wonderful, funny guy who used to buy us copies of Esquire, in between giving us rides in the Rolls-Royce.’
Bill bequeathed Ian and Betty a modest amount of money, providing the couple with the financial security they felt they needed to start a family. Their first child, Jemima, was born on 4 January 1969 at Chiswick Maternity Hospital. Bringing Jemima back to Kara Lodge, they placed her cot behind one of the dividing screens that Ian had erected to separate sleeping and living areas. Their cosy domesticity, however, was often disrupted by Ian’s social agenda. Russell Hardy recalls, ‘Ian and I went out in the car, to pubs or parties, but I used to feel a bit sorry for Betty, stuck indoors with Jemima, whilst we were out getting pissed.’ Geoff Rigden, who lived in nearby West Kensington, was also a regular visitor. ‘We had days to fill in,’ says Rigden. ‘Ian acquired a small billiards table, and we spent hours playing on it and listening to recordings of Woody Allen. Ian kept on painting, and we did some teaching. That was the system.’
Some years earlier, Rigden had introduced Ian to his West Country pal Clive Davies, a writer and journalist who became an occasional member of the gang. Davies and his wife Jennifer lived in a Victorian mansion block near the Oval cricket ground but were keen to leave London. By the middle of 1969, when lack of funds was threatening to force Ian and Betty out of their distinctive Chiswick home, they joined forces with the Davies family and viewed inexpensive rental properties in rural locations as far apart as Wiltshire and North Essex, but none were suitable.
‘I was signing on in Acton,’ recalled Ian. ‘They were giving me the fucking run-around. They sent me to a chap – I looked at the sign on his door – “Disabled Resettlement Officer” – I said, “I’m outta here.”’ Now broke and unable to pay the rent at Kara Lodge, Ian avoided Mrs Garmston, the old landlady who kept a room in the building. Before long, local estate agents Whitman Porter began marketing the unique property, and a string of prospective tenants arrived to inspect it. These included the artist John Plumb, who had first learnt about the Durys’ imminent eviction from Andrew Clarke, a pupil of Ian’s at Barnfield College. Plumb, who had just returned from teaching in the USA, remembers: ‘When I first visited Kara Lodge, Ian was working on a portrait of Marilyn Monroe and listening to an LP by the American comedian Murray Roman. I’ve been indebted to Ian ever since for introducing me to that style of comedy.’ Plumb arranged to take over the flat, and Ian and Betty were faced with homelessness, but were heartened by news from Aunt Molly, who was about to come to the rescue once again.