Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  Chris by my side, where he had been ever since Jenny sent him round to take care of me, repaying the favour I'd done for her one hundredfold. Both of us amazed at the way his gallery had come back to life. Back from the dead.

  And Jenny in my mind's eye, white and glowing, like an angel.

  This is how it all begins, and where it all ends.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without these books:

  Tanky Challenor SAS & The Met by Harold Challenor and Alfred Draper

  The Man Who Would be Bing by Ken Crossland

  King's Road by Max Décharné

  Straight From the Fridge, Dad by Max Décharné

  Give the Anarchist a Cigarette by Mick Farren

  London Blues by Anthony Frewin

  Trouble in West Two by Kevin Fitzgerald

  The Challenor Case by Mary Grigg

  Memoir of a Fascist Childhood by Trevor Grundy

  Tainted Love by Stewart Home

  Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes

  City of Spades by Colin McInnes

  Fighters by James Morton

  Gangland Soho by James Morton

  Stand on Me by Frank Norman

  Found Naked and Dead by Brian McConnell

  Journal by Kate Paul

  The Profession of Violence by John Pearson

  Underworld Nights by Charles Raven

  The Legendary Joe Meek by John Repsch

  Nick of Notting Hill by Anthony Richardson

  Jack of Jumps by David Seabrook

  Now You See Her: Pauline Boty First Lady of British Pop by Adam Smith

  Getting it Straight in Notting Hill Gate by Tom Vague

  Who Killed Freddie Mills? by Tony Van Den Bergh

  Groovy Bob by Harriet Vyner

  And these films:

  Beat Girl (dir: Edmond T Greville)

  The Boys (dir: Sidney J Furie)

  The Blue Lamp (dir: Basil Deardon)

  The Killing of Sister George (dir: Robert Aldrich)

  The L-Shaped Room (dir: Bryan Forbes)

  Pop Goes The Easel (dir: Ken Russell)

  Séance on a Wet Afternoon (dir: Bryan Forbes)

  And the music of Joe Meek and Roy Orbison.

  On the long, strange trip of writing, the following have been of invaluable assistance and inspiration, whether they know it or not: John Williams, Caroline Montgomery and Pete Ayrton for their faith; David Peace, David Knight & Ruth Bayer, David & Bianca Price, Roland Blaney, Paul Willetts, Pete Woodhead, Joe McNally, Max Décharné & Katja Klier, Ken & Rachel Hollings, Jay Clifton, Dr Theo Koulouris and the Tight Lip Group, Marc Glendening, David Fogarty and the Sohemian Society, Lydia Lunch, Terry Edwards, Gallon Drunk, Barry Adamson, Martyn Waites, Jake Arnott, Harriet Vyner, Michael Dillon, Stewart Home, Roger K Burton, Charlie Gillett and James Morton for their wisdom; Matthew, Yvette, Billy & Tommy Unsworth, Ann Scanlon, Richard Newson, Ben Newbery, Emma & Paul Murphy, Lynn Taylor, Cath Meekin, Danny Meekin, Frances Meekin, Eva Snee, Raphael Abraham, Damjana & Predrag Finci, James Hollands & Dr Paddy, Kerry Sutch, Tommy Udo, Damon Wise, Mari Mansfield and Billy Chainsaw for their love and friendship; Chris Simmons & Andrew Clarke, Ced Fabre, Estelle Chardac, Alan Kelly, Jane Bradley, Andrew Stevens and 3AM for their enthusiasm; Niamh Murray, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Rebecca Gray, Margaret Nicholls and Claudia Woodward for their understanding; Julian Ibbitson for my hair; and finally but most importantly, Michael Meekin for everything.

  Lyrics to ‘This is my Murder’ reporoduced by Kind Permission of Lydia Lunch. Lyrics to ‘Hate on Sight’ reproduced by Kind Permission of Karl Blake.

  AFTERWORD

  Cathi Unsworth, photographed by Julian Ibbitson.

  THE GHOSTS OF LADBROKE GROVE

  When I finally came to the end of writing Bad Penny Blues, on 5 February 2009, I was too spooked and exhausted by the process to list anything other than the books, films, music, relatives and friends who helped me navigate the long, strange trip of this cursed and complex story. It was just under two years since I had started reading David Seabrook's Jack of Jumps, a non-fiction account of the unsolved Jack the Stripper murders of 1959-65, based on Metropolitan Police files that were supposed to have been sealed and off-limits. Seabrook was familiar to me through his previous book, All The Devils Are Here, a psychogeographic essay on the sites and characters of the Kentish coast where he lived, which I reviewed for Bizarre magazine in 2002. An audacious writer, he was championed by many people whose work I admire: Iain Sinclair, Tony Frewin – whose London Blues (1997) had cast an earlier spell on me that is traceable in Bad Penny – and David Peace, on whose recommendation I picked up my copy and began my voyage back to 1959. Before this, I was only vaguely aware of the Hammersmith Nude Murders, as they were often referred to, from articles about notorious unsolved murders and another favourite author, Stewart Home. Stewart had been investigating the life of his birth mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, work that became his 2005 novel Tainted Love, and had given me a short story called Rigor Mortis based on this research for the London Noir compendium I edited in 2006. What both Seabrook and Home made me realise was that the centre of this story was not Hammersmith, nor the River Thames, in and along which seven of the eight victims had been found naked and dead – but Ladbroke Grove, the district of London where I have lived since 1987.

  The women who were the victims of this shape-shifting fiend lived and worked on streets I thought I knew so well, which back then formed the epicentre of London's red light district. The rage I felt for their lives – already nasty and brutish enough – cut short and buried under mounds of prurient dirt because of their occupation as sex workers compelled me to tell their stories. I had no delusions about solving the mystery and revealing the identity of the phantom killer – my overriding aim was to give them back the voices they had been denied and force my readers to think about what the life of a so-called Good Time Girl in post-war, pre-Swinging London was actually like. Perhaps, during the course of achieving this objective, I could postulate a theory about who had so comprehensively outwitted the Met in what was then the biggest case in the force's history that seemed more plausible than the conclusion Seabrook and other commentators on the case had previously come to. But the killer was not the most important person in this story for me. It was all about the victims.

  To try and find them, I started delving into my local history, with the help of Tom Vague's Pychogeographies of W11, purchased from Wong Singh Jones, a now defunct acid house headshop on the corner of Portobello and Lancaster Road – a thoroughfare on which both I, and Stripper victim Mary Fleming, had once lived. Tom's richly detailed work provided the connections that sparked the book to life, on the corner of Holland Park Avenue and Lansdowne Crescent, where the first of the dead girls, 21-year-old Elizabeth ‘Bobby’ Figg, disappeared into the night of 17 June 1959.

  Across the road from the late night coffee stand outside Holland Park tube, where Bobby's penultimate punter dropped her off, stands Lansdowne Studios. This towering architectural curiosity began life as the Victorian artists’ studios of Glyn Philpot, Vivian Forbes, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. By 1956 it had become a recording studio, built by the impresario Denis Preston, who rode the crest of the Trad Boom by producing Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Ken Coyler and Humphrey Lyttleton, creating the Landsdowne Jazz series for EMI's Columbia label and the Jazz Today imprint for Pye. Amongst the talented engineers on his roster was the young Joe Meek, who produced the single after which I named my book, Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues, at this address.

  Throughout 1959, Meek lived in a flat in Arundel Gardens, W11 – another road on which I have lived, eight doors down from him, between 1988-92. It was here, I discovered from John Repsch's exemplary The Legendary Joe Meek, that Joe conducted the séance that would haunt him for the rest of his days, predicting the death of his idol Buddy Holly on 3 February 1958. Holly was actually killed in a plane crash on 3 February 1959, and Meek would take his own l
ife, along with that of his landlady Violet Shenton, at his Holloway Road studios on 3 February 1967. There is a curious footnote to this I pieced together while working out a walk based on this novel for The London Adventure. In Joe's last years, when he was taking huge amounts of speed, he became convinced that his studios were being bugged and other producers stealing his ideas – first among them, Phil Spector. Spector, no stranger to weirdness and controversy himself, was convicted and sentenced to life for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, shot dead at his Los Angeles mansion on 3 February 2003.

  But at the time Bobby Figg was saying goodbye to Ernest Forrest, her final witness on this Earth at 1.10am, Meek was holed up at Lansdowne Studios with his box of recording curiosities, secretly working through the night on his space pop opus I Hear A New World.

  Forming a triangle with Bobby and Joe's locations was an address that was too irresistible for me to dismiss as coincidence: the headquarters of the Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association, an institution run solely on the funds of its founder, the trance medium Winifred Moyes. Daily Telegraph journalist-turned-psychic Miss Moyes was a medium for the spirit guide Zodiac as well as a philanthropist, who had founded Free Night Shelters For Homeless Woman in 1941, offering sanctuary and succour to those bombed out in the Blitz.

  All of which brought the first chapter of Bad Penny racing from my brain through my keyboard like a film spooling through my mind: of Joe Meek up in Lansdowne's high tower, fiddling around with his radios, opening up a channel through which the evil of Jack the Stripper came. His weird sonics sound-tracking Bobby's footsteps as she walks along the pavement towards her killer's car. Miss Moyes channelling the now terrified Bobby's last message to the closest person sensitive enough to pick it up – the girl who lives next door to Joe, art student Stella Reade, asleep and dreaming in Arundel Gardens. I turned Joe into the fictional James Myers – he never actually appears in the book but provides much of the musical score and plenty of offstage intrigue.

  I would never have put this all together without Vague's Getting It Straight in Notting Hill Gate, nor found my way to so many other pivotal sources. Thank you, Tom.

  Although Jack of Jumps had provided the impetus, I did not want to use it as my primary source to the Stripper case – I felt Seabrook had got lost in the labyrinth of material he had access to, the hundreds of blind alleys that zigzagged across the mountain of paperwork raised by the sheer manpower involved in the investigation, and lost sight of the man he was pursuing. Instead I turned to the first book written about the case by a crime journalist who knew the terrain and some of those involved. Brian McConnell's 1974 Found Naked and Dead is a slim tome – and all the better to see the actual story for it – written in the vernacular of the day, which makes time travel that little bit easier. But I needed something more, another musical connection to inspire me the way the Joe Meek revelation had. Using McConnell's text, I wrote down the dates that the victims had been discovered. Then I looked up what had been number one in the chart that corresponded. This is what came up:

  Elizabeth ‘Bobby’ Figg, 17 June 1959

  ‘Roulette’ Russ Conway

  Gwynneth Rees, 8 November 1963

  ‘You'll Never Walk Alone’ Gerry & The Pacemakers

  Hannah Tailford, 2 February 1964

  ‘Needles & Pins’ The Searchers

  Irene Lockwood, 8 April 1964

  ‘Can't Buy Me Love’ The Beatles

  Helene Barthelemy, 24 April 1964

  ‘A World Without Love’ Peter & Gordon

  Mary Fleming, 14 July 1964

  ‘House of the Rising Sun’ The Animals

  Frances Brown, 25 November 1964

  ‘Baby Love’ The Supremes

  Bridget O’Hara, 16 February 1965

  ‘You've Lost That Loving Feeling’ The Righteous Brothers

  An eerily suggestive selection of sounds that I began to hear, coming out of phonograms, jukeboxes, transistor radios, pubs, coffee houses and shop doorways in the London I had to rebuild, songs that brought with them a heady flavour of the era of the crimes, which began nine years before I was born. Show tunes and novelties rendered by a six-fingered pianist, the emerging sounds of Motown and Mersey, lyrics about the value of love and not walking alone that would never sound quite the same again. Starting with these, I named each chapter with a hit single from the era and never were there so many apposite titles – ‘The Night Has A Thousand Eyes’, ‘She's Not There’, ‘In Dreams’, ‘Learning The Game’…

  The character of Stella did not come entirely out of thin air – in the late 1950s my own mother had attempted to get into art college in London and had an interview at The Slade that my grandma stopped her from attending. I wondered what it would have been like for her if she had been able to follow this dream – and found quite a few answers to that in Kate Paul's Journal, which recounted her time at the RCA with fellow students including Derek Boshier. I started to sketch out some friends for Stella and found myself describing a blonde Bardot lookalike who cast a mesmerising spell over her fellow students. “You're talking about Pauline Boty,” my friend Dave Knight assured me. I had never heard of Pauline Boty. Yet the book that Dave downloaded for me – for want of a conventional publisher it had been posted online – Adam Smith's Now You See Her: Pauline Boty First Lady of British Pop did seem to indicate a very similar young woman to the Jenny Minton I thought I had invented. Ken Russell's 1962 Monitor film Pop Goes The Easel offered a further tantalising glimpse of Boty, Boshier and Peter Blake, following the pioneers of Pop Art through their bedsit studios to the basement jazz clubs of Ladbroke Grove, where Pauline jives beside David Hockney. Not only do I need to thank Dave for his brilliant insight here, but also, along with his musical partner Karl Blake, for the lyrics to ‘Hate on Sight’, the Shock Headed Peters song rendered with such world-weary veracity by Daneille Dax on the Fear Engine II LP, which they allowed me to use as one of the epigraphs. The other, the extract from ‘This Is My Murder’ comes from my constant source of inspiration, Lydia Lunch, who was a frequent houseguest and confidante while I was writing this novel.

  Jenny Minton's boyfriend and partner in art pranks, Dave Dilworth, is a proto-hippy agitator who was partially informed by former Ladbroke Grove resident Mick Farren, whose excellent memoir Give The Anarchist a Cigarette is such an evocative portrait of the place at the time; and partly Joe Meek protégé Screaming Lord Sutch. Sutch's mission to expose the hypocrisy inherent to politics in both his Teenage and subsequent Monster Raving Loony parties was matched in show-stopping originality by the rockin’ vaudeville of the records he made with Meek – including the classic ‘Jack The Ripper’, which the duo promoted by driving a hearse through Whitechapel.

  My Jenny also had roots in the character of Jenny Linden in Edmond T Gréville's 1959 juvenile delinquent movie Beat Girl. Although a light-hearted look at the beatnik milieu, the dichotomy of Jenny Linden and her architect father Paul, busy constructing a concrete city of the future while living in luxury in Kensington, provided inspiration for Jenny Minton's father Alex, who aims to remake Ladbroke Grove to his own Brutalist design. Pauline Boty had her own concerns about architecture and morality – the ‘Anti-Ugly’ demos staged by Jenny Minton in Bad Penny Blues mirror the real protests organised by Pauline and friends in 1958 against the construction of such concrete cathedrals as Kensington Town Hall – which eventually went up over the top of an underground civil defence bunker on Horton Street where, on 25 November 1964, the body of the penultimate Jack the Stripper victim, Frances Brown, would be dumped.

  One of the strangest interludes I had while writing was watching what looked like one of Pauline's demos being reconstructed on Westbourne Grove as I walked to the shops one afternoon. A line of people were weaving their way along the crowded pavement, holding up placards proclaiming NO MORE UGLY – the exact words Boty used. I could not believe my eyes and ran closer to see if I was witnessing an actual time slip – sadly not, it turned out to be a pro
motion for a new furniture shop. But it happened only a couple of roads distant from what would have been Pauline's address in 1959, a house on Sutherland Place that stands back-to-back with where I currently live and wrote this novel.

  By the time this happened, I was starting to properly visualise the parallel late Fifties/early Sixties world where these crimes had taken place. It was the same ‘little Napoli’ as Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1958) and as captured in celluloid by Basil Deardon's The Blue Lamp (1950) and Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room (1962). A shady, shifting world, humming with radical politics and an uneasy racial mix, where writers and artists could find cheap rents, upper class girls rubbed up against the rude boys, and gangsters and lords carved up the spoils. What divided working class girls like Stella, who came to London from the provinces to find excitement and liberation in the art college boom of the period, from the droves of those from similar backgrounds fleeing abusive, broken homes with nothing but dreams of making it as a model or film star was, to quote Helene Barthelemy's theme, ‘A World Without Love’. With no place to head for once they arrived in London, those kind of girls would routinely be met by predatory pimps as they got off their trains in King's Cross, Paddington or Euston. They'd be strung a line about all the potentials of modelling work and hostessing, buttered up a little with cheap clothes and perfume, given a room in a boarding house and then set to work – in a clip joint at first, then perhaps ‘modelling’ of a different type to what they had envisioned, and then, inevitably, on their backs. You can feel a real sense of it all in three mondo documentary films by Stanley Long and Arnold L Miller that were released by the BFI Flipside as I was writing in 2009, West End Jungle (1961), London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) – the latter of which features a luridly tabloidesque recreation of Jack the Ripper's crimes in service of the then-ongoing Stripper investigation.