Chapter 1 - Confessions of a teenage pornstar

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...” Henry V – William Shakespeare

Mandy Rice-Davies is dead. I just heard it on the news and now I stand here in total shock. That little bundle of bouncing, blonde bawdiness that taught me so much in my, ahem, formative years is gone. It is just me and Christine Keeler left now.

Instantaneously I am transported back over fifty years and 10,000 miles from the blinding glare of an Australian summer to my childhood years spent in a grey and damp old London Town. Back then I was at the heart of a scandal. Slap-bang in the middle of a sensation that would bring down a government, launch the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and propel the names of Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies and Stephen Ward into the stratosphere.

Mandy’s passing is the prompt I need to finally commit my memories to print before I too pop my clogs. Me? You won’t have heard of me, so, perhaps a little introduction is in order.

My name is not important but you can call me Sven. I was privileged to have grown up in Bromley in south London as a lad. Well, actually it was Widmore Green to be precise and, as this is the story of my life then I guess I should be.

My Dad was a Major in the elite Norwegian Royal Guards who had married a lovely Scottish lass during the war and at the end of hostilities they both returned to Oslo, where I was born. Dad was also a close friend of the then Crown Prince, but later King, Olav of Norway.

When we returned to England in ’51 I spoke no English and, whilst some of my friends might claim I still can’t, this situation was quickly resolved by my attendance at the Ol’ Tin Hut school in Nightingale Lane before I moved to another ex-military establishment in Bromley (I forget the road) and then the newly-built St. George’s Primary in Tylney Road before going on to Quernmore Secondary in London Lane. In 1963, just as the shit hit the fan, we emigrated again, this time to Australia, but it is my adventures in London that I wish to share with you all.

For anyone unfamiliar with the ‘official’ details of the, so-called, ‘Profumo affair’ I suggest you click the conveniently provided blue link.

Before we commence upon this glorious romp through the Establishment’s pseudo-history of the 1960s and I fill you in on the reality, I should perhaps warn you that the cast list is somewhat extensive and, therefore, potentially confusing.

I will, wherever possible, provide you with a photograph as an aide memoir, so, here’s one of me. If not I have endeavoured to provide as many external links or Wikipedia profiles of the individuals concerned as I can; likewise I have tried to provide links to my source material.

The author: back in the day, obviously!

I am also rather fond of the odd colloquialism, or two, and so I will also do my upmost to explain any curious turns of phrase, slang or any other euphemisms that I may employ.

Back in 1963 the staid and distinctly decrepit world of little old England erupted in shock and scandal when it emerged that the then Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had been caught with his pants down shagging someone who was, most definitely, not his wife. The Tory minister, who had been banging Christine Keeler for months, further compounded these sexual indiscretions by then lying to the House about the nature of his relationship with Chrissie as he sowed the seeds of his, and his Government’s, destruction along with his own wild oats.

Poor Chrissie, who’d had more pricks than a smack addicts veins, was about to become an inadvertent icon of the sixties; the Lewis Morley image of her sat naked, astride a chair, becoming perhaps the defining image of the decade.

Christine Keeler

Back in those far-flung days Chrissie had been a busy girl; as well as two black west London hustlers, and Profumo, she had also been simultaneously shagging a Russian naval attaché called Captain Yevgeny (Eugene) Ivanov. Perhaps not unsurprisingly given that this was the height of the Cold War, the world wanted to know what little pearls of national security the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, may have revealed to Chrissie when he lay back and smoked his post-coital ciggie. Loose hips sink ships and all that, don’t you know.

The story really went stratospheric though when the good denizens of Fleet Street claimed that Chrissie, and her pal Mandy Rice-Davies, were actually a pair of two-bob slappers being pimped by a society portrait artist and osteopath named Stephen Ward who was also a commie sympathiser hell bent on bringing down the British Establishment.

That, like so many things connected to the scandal, is total and utter bullshit.

The Profumo affair was the biggest cover-up in global history, and Stephen Ward became its global scapegoat. The ripples and fall-out from the scandal extended way beyond the narrow confines of 1960s London. Its true scope and enormity would shock even the most ardent conspiracy theorist: it encompasses not just Ward, but all his girls and how he controlled them; its connections with the JFK assassination; of how the hippie movement was created as an instrument of generational control; the invention of a non-existent serial killer; of phoney spies and royal conspiracies. All to protect a secret!

A secret I will reveal to you.

But all in good time; first, a little background detail is in order.

I knew Mandy Rice-Davies very well actually. I dated her in 1961 and ‘62, ‘borrowing’ her from Peter Rachman, the slum landlord, who I knew via Stephen Ward. Her name was actually Marilyn Davies-Rice but her stepfather preferred his name first. Once we found out what was wrong with her – she’d been abused all her life by the aforementioned paedophile stepfather - and initiated a cure, she calmed down into a lovely little lady that everyone liked and she finally convinced Rachman that she was the girl to spawn his kids. He then taught her Hebrew, business management and economics (helped by Rachman’s then wife, Audrey, who had several degrees. Theirs was a business marriage, she was gay).

Phoney Rachman

Rachman, like Profumo, is another whose name has entered the social lexicon; Rachmanism having become a euphemism for rogue landlords who let their tenants shoddy, undesirable and, in some cases, uninhabitable dwellings. In fact, Rachman’s tenants were not unhappy with their accommodation; Rachman being prepared to let his properties to anyone with a penny-piece in their pockets in an era otherwise dominated by the ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ agenda.

By the way, the little fat guy you think of as Peter Rachman was, in fact, his double; an ex-paratrooper living on borrowed time (wounded in the war) from the East End who had Polish neighbours as a boy and who spoke some Polish. The real Peter Rachman was in fact tall, dark, and very handsome, 6 feet 5 inches tall in his stockinged feet; he had to bow his head in our living-room to avoid hitting the ceiling! Mandy fell madly in love with him at first sight. She only came up to his navel, which led to many a ribald comment!!!

Phoney Rachman and Mandy: Many say this was his best side!

The real Peter Rachman, Ilan Ram’el, was a rich art-student from Lvov who was planning on buying a tile factory when the war started. Peter loved designing and making tiles. He served under Menachem Begin during the war as well as with Vladek Sheybal - the actor in From Russia with Love - and the three survived the massacre of the Polish Army at Katyn in 1943 as they were out slitting German throats and stealing their food supplies. 

Peter then decided Begin had to be gotten out of Europe and to Israel and so led them west to Britain, where he had family friends. But when they got ambushed on the way Peter offered himself up to allow Begin to escape, and thus spent nearly two years in a concentration camp, surviving only by “doing things that shamed me”. Unfortunately, for him, some of the inmates survived too and there was a death sentence placed on Peter’s head. He got to England before the Poles found him. “I saw the inmates were walking dead, they had given up. Well, I wasn’t going to do that. Somebody had to survive to tell of the atrocities that went on in Poland, and the camp. So…”

I expect you may be struggling to believe some of what I have just told you, well hold on to your hats folks, because you won’t believe a l lot of what I am about to reveal, but that’s history for you. What was it Napoleon once said: “History is a lie agreed upon”.

History is written by the powerful and they will only tell you what they think you should know. They will give you a load of old cobblers about it not being ‘in the interests of national security’ or some such old flannel, but these are events from over fifty years ago and the paperwork relating to the so called ‘Profumo affair’ is being kept under lock and key until 2046. Officially this is because it will then be over one hundred years since Mandy’s birth, but Mandy is now dead. So is Stephen Ward, so is John Profumo, so is Lord Astor, so just who are they protecting?

Hence this journal: There are only Chrissie and I left now and she won’t ever tell the whole story. She is too traumatised and besides, who would believe her? I doubt anybody is going to believe me either; hell this is the tallest of tall stories but I shall write this and leave it for posterity to judge.

I used to be Britain’s top teenage porno-star.

Yes, you did read that right. Nobody knows of me though, back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s porno was kept very much under the covers as only very rich people had film projectors anyway. Most of these films were made to order, for a very specific type of pervert, and not sold under the counter and wrapped in a brown paper-bag like the top-shelf mucky magazines of the time.

That said, I did do a few photo shoots as well, but even these were only available for wealthy customers; your average hairy-arsed worker was barely earning enough to eat at the time, let alone to indulge in some top quality wank material. So all my starring roles will be gathering dust up in grubby lofts in Belgravia now; that’s why I can’t find anything yet. Found a few old girlfriends though. There were so many girls you can but recall only a few. Luckily a lot of them were glam-models for George Harrison Marks so pretty faces all-round and with tits so big you could get lost for a week! Oh, happy days. Sometime, somewhere, some piccies or a film will turn up.

Lately I’ve been out surfing the net for these glamour girls and watching so much porn that my eyes are popping out. A man could go blind doing this!

My first impression was that most of the guys and gals involved were a bit screwy, nobody deliberately fucks for a living on camera if they’re halfway sane. Mind you, I worked in the London theatres, the Mermaid and the Garrick, for a couple of years, ‘60-‘62, and a lot of stage/film/TV stars are a bit screwy too!

I’m out researching my murky past now, hence the porno-surfing. I’ve been in touch with a few people in the biz, so to speak, enthusiasts, collectors etc. You’d be surprised what some people are into for a hobby!

Nowadays I’m just an old git living on fading memories and I never earned a penny out of it; lunch and a free fuck was my payment and, whilst I’m not complaining, I thought now was the time to write down my recollections before they’re gone forever.

You won’t believe my tale; it’s so fantastic I struggle to believe it myself sometimes, but I’m going to tell it anyway.

It actually all started when I began helping out Harley Street doctors to research sexual development and what sex was. Only now I understand it wasn’t about research at all, it was all about money and control!

This had never been done before, you see, sex was a taboo subject even in medicine. The pill was on the way and they knew there was likely to be trouble and they wanted to pre-empt any problems; psychological mainly. I wound up doing sex-shows, photographs and films for a while. I now understand it wasn’t all research, someone was making money out of this and that someone was George Harrison Marks, the so-called ‘glamour photographer’ and film-maker.

I worked with Doctor’s Emanuel Miller (Jonathan Miller’s Dad) and Richard Asher (Jane and Peter Asher’s Dad), and Sir Raphael Cilento (Diane Cilento’s Dad). I have often wondered if it was a coincidence that they should all have successful and famous offspring or if it was a payoff for their ‘assistance’? Archie McIndoe was a silent partner, he agreed with the principle but daren’t be associated as he could be struck-off; his burn-patients always came first.

I began with the doctors in 1958 and I was to thoroughly lose my innocence in an occult ritual in a mere two years. It was a very quick apprenticeship! It began because we had a new neighbour that was a top orthopaedic surgeon (I forget his name, we always called him ’Doc’, originality not being a prevalent feature round my way!). He had a Harley Street practice and, like the others, taught med-students in his spare time.

He suddenly needed a ‘model’ to use; the boy he had having moved, and my Mum said yes to him using me. When I was up at Harley Street we used to have elevenses with the other doctors and often went to lunch together. Thus I met Stephen Ward, who wasn’t actually a doctor, officially, at least (long story, but he was actually the finest doctor I ever met, a genius) he was an osteopath. Ward wasn’t actually involved in our work, though he sometimes looked-in as he was interested. It was merely over tea and a chance remark that led us to the subject of hypnotism and me being asked to be the guinea-pig.

Doctor’s Miller and Asher were the best guys in Britain and they couldn’t hypnotise me, so they were annoyed. Ward smiled at them and asked me if he could try. Voila, I was under his spell. Though they were very embarrassed the doctors were forced to ask Ward to do the experiment for them, and as it progressed over the months he became an integral part of the secret research we were slowly getting into. I didn’t really know Ward at this time; I only met him with the other doctors there. One day my doctor had a real patient come to him in dire trouble, and I was taken to Ward’s surgery for tea and a chat during her visit, Ward having no patients just then; he was rarely overworked, though it did happen. Ward was amusing company, we had lots to talk about, we liked each other, he having no family of his own and he obviously missed having somebody to care for, a son, and I became that substitute.

Dr Stephen Ward

Ward got on well with my Mum too; so much so that I used to wish that they would marry. Sadly though, my mother already was, to my Dad, who was working abroad by this time. I later discovered that Ward was probably impotent; so no good to my Mum but she loved his company anyway. He was a really nice man and she used to visit him up in London quite often.

My work in Harley Street was always during the week, though sometimes my Mum would let me spend the night at Ward’s providing she had his telephone number for emergencies. PAD 8625, I remember it even now.

He had once raced cars and he took me to Brands Hatch, the racing circuit, where I met all the racing-drivers of that time, and got to sit in a few cars, too. Ward had been a fine racer, Stirling Moss once told me he sighed with relief when Ward decided he had to quit and think of a career, not being wealthy enough and being a mite too old to go pro: “You would have never have heard of me, otherwise,” Stirling said. “Stephen Ward could have been a big star of the ‘50s if he was just five years younger or had some money behind him.”

At the time I became involved in this medical research at Harley Street I had no idea about its background or beginnings. I now know that it all started with the ‘shell-shock’ survivors of World War I who came home from the trenches in a dreadful state and for which the Tavistock Institute was initiated to help to find solutions. Even in my time we were still working with war veterans, though these were of the World War II vintage. I remember one time when we were shooting some porn photos that there was this guy. He was a war-hero, a captain on a warship that ran into a German cruiser in the North Atlantic one stormy day when neither ships radar were working due to the freezing conditions. Surprised, neither backed-off.

The German ship was either sunk or was severely damaged, enough for the Navy to run them down. The British ship, however, looked like a corkscrew; blown apart, burning, half of the crew dead.

Despite being raked by shrapnel all over his body, his cock and one testicle blown-off, barely alive, the Captain lay in agony on what was left of his bridge and directed his sailors as to how to sail a ship scarcely afloat back into port, not resting for a second the entire time. He got a medal for that. Then his wife left him; “half a man as he was”, and he only ever saw his daughter when she wanted money. By the time I met him he was a successful businessman who was busily working himself to death. He was also going crazy. He still had an enormous sex-drive, but no cock.

The top psychiatrists of the day, the aforementioned Doctor’s Emanuel Miller and Richard Asher, aided by Stephen Ward, used me to find out how to give this man the orgasm he needed to relax. It’s all in the mind, you see. Tests with Ward (into alternative medicine) showed you could create orgasms using acupuncture but this wasn’t good enough, the poor man had to be able to do it himself, in his head.  

To this day I don’t how, or if, my work helped this guy and the others in the same boat; but it sure helped me!

One of the experiments we did was in ‘The Tank’ at a military establishment. They used to train agents and divers in there. Or so they said. It was a huge, heated, soundproofed water tank. They would throw you in naked and slam the door and turn out the light! Sensory deprivation. There was an air-line from the roof and a mouthpiece to breathe with so you didn’t drown. Then they gave you a weighted belt so you sank under the surface, floating as though weightless in space.

I was told by the Navy divers that I had what it took to be one. They used to read to me sometimes, Shakespeare mainly, through a loudspeaker. I was taught both under hypnosis and not (to see the difference) all his works, and Welsh!

They told me that they were testing to see if it was a good way to learn scripts, you see. I recall it came out all mixed up, not in the right order. I could only do bits of it and I needed reminding a lot. Thus they knew that the brain stores things in different places. But not why, and how?

It was all very interesting work and I enjoyed it. Far better than wearing short trousers and playing conkers with the other brain-dead kids!

Stephen Ward was involved with the war wounded as well. The first time I ever met John Profumo was after a visit to the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead with Ward to see ‘his boys’, the burned Battle of Britain pilots he had worked with during the war. Ward never passed by without going in to say hello, though they never mentioned this in the media - and the other charity works he was involved with, Dr Barnardo’s, child abuse (with Valerie Hobson, Profumo’s wife, no less) Leonard Cheshire etc.

Though I now deeply suspect his motives, I didn’t then. We had stopped off at Cliveden House for a quick cuppa when Lord Astor came down to invite Ward to a dinner that evening. I couldn’t go as it was a black-tie affair and I was in jeans, but Ward was in a suit that would pass muster. So I had tea alone in Ward’s cottage listening to the radio. At nine I walked up to the house, the guests were just leaving at this time and I was to have coffee with the Astor’s. People were still getting their coats on, so I waited outside. Profumo was coming out for a quick smoke and a stroll. He just said: “Hello, nice to meet you at last” before strolling off around the house to the cars as he waited for the women to get sorted.

Astor, who was a former naval intelligence man, had met Stephen Ward in 1950 when he treated the Lord after he had fallen from a horse. By 1956, Astor, so enamoured with Ward’s restorative powers, had gifted him the use of a cottage on the Cliveden Estate, for which Ward paid a peppercorn rent.

There is a photo of Chrissie on the internet that always reminds me of the second time I met Profumo; she’s sitting in a chair, dressed in a blouse and skirt, looking fab (as usual, she was a really lovely girl, far better in reality than in a photo) a glass table on her left, Ward’s briefcase behind her on the right. If the photo was bigger you’d see my duffle-bag next to his briefcase!

I helped Ward set up this very quick shot, using only one light; she is looking up at me as he took it!

She had come out of her room ready for a date and Stephen was so taken with her beauty that he just had to take a picture. Then, as he was in the kitchen, taking out the now-finished roll of film, a horn hooted outside and she rushed back into her room to brush her hair again: “God, I look a mess!” A few seconds later John Profumo came up, agitated, “I’m double-parked! Where is she?” “Doing her hair...again”, I told him. He raised his eyes.

Then out she came with a warm smile and looking simply stunning. “Oh”, I quipped, “you CAN make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!” Profumo laughed. Chrissie pinched my nose and wrinkled hers at me. “You’d better go before Stephen comes back in, I’m not supposed to have seen him”, I said, nodding at Profumo, adding I’d been told not to look out of the window. “Have a nice time, you two”. I got smiled at and they left.

So as you can now see I was at the very centre of events during the biggest scandal of the twentieth century.

Hopefully you are now beginning to realise that there was a lot never mentioned during the scandalous Profumo Affair? Why aren’t you asking why the entire anti-Ward agenda is on the top secret list until 2046? If Ward was, in essence, a mere pimp, a dime-a-dozen sleazebag, then this would not be worthy of a mention on the back pages let alone the expense of a huge trial in Crown Court.

No, he was the sacrificial lamb executed to spare the embarrassment of the so-called elite, the Establishment.

These same ‘fine’ people that used to rule us with the sword, before they realised this was self-defeating as they needed slaves to do all the hard work for them and devised religion to control us. This eventually began to lose its effect so they came up with the ultimate solution; rule us via our wallets.

They created the Industrial Revolution to force us to manufacture the goods we were then forced to spend our wages on. They moaned at how much we were costing, but omitted to say that they immediately took the money back again – and with interest! And we are so stupid we lap it up, ‘We’ve never had it so good’ forgetting the fact that we have to come up with the repayments every month or wind up starving in the streets. All we’re doing is making a few select families, dynasties, Masonic ones, richer by the minute.

Of course, though, there is a lot more to it than just pure greed and Ward was far more than a mere puppet; puppet master more like. Indeed MI5 once described Ward as being ‘the provider of popsies for rich people’, and they should know. Ward supplied the young girls in the same way the spy Anthony Blunt, or the gangster Kray twins, procured the young boys; on behalf of MI5 and for the express purpose of obtaining materials for blackmail.


Chapter 2

Chapter 3 - Cheshire Cats

I suspect that all of this seems more than a tad unbelievable but, trust me when I tell you this, nothing is real. John Lennon was right when he wrote those lyrics for Strawberry Fields Forever; ‘Living is easy with eyes closed. 

Misunderstanding all you see’. Strawberry Field was a children’s care home as well, I wonder what Lennon knew?

Everything you have ever been taught about this world is bullshit, it is fiction. However, all I can do is connect the dots and let you form your own opinion. Circles within circles my friend, they’re all there.

I mentioned earlier seeing Ward at Leonard Cheshire’s place, well, let me tell you about Cheshire and his wife Sue Ryder. Cheshire was a war hero; a former air force pilot who won the Victoria Cross for his wartime exploits with the famous Dambusters and was someone of whom I was in absolute awe at the time.

After the war he opened a care home for the disabled. Incidentally, one of the founders was Lord Denning, the man who would write the cover-up report for the government after the Profumo scandal denying any security leaks and blaming everything on Stephen Ward. Needless to say that was a whitewash!

Sue Ryder was a member of Churchill’s wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) and may have been involved with operations to smuggle Nazis into Britain under the guise of them being refugees. The Ryder homes have also been rumoured to have employed illegal immigrants as nurses and of covering this up by using false identities.

From 1966 to 1969, commissioned by the then Ministry of Health, research was conducted by the Tavistock Institute at all the Leonard Cheshire Homes. Yes, the self-same Tavistock Institute that had initiated the Project Monarch brainwashing programme. Don’t believe me? Try Googling Leonard Cheshire and Tavistock Institute.

Incidentally, should you be so minded as to submit a Freedom of Information request to find out the official results of this research you will be informed that to reveal this information is not in the public interest. The purpose, however, of the Tavistock involvement was, purportedly, to provide the inmates with a voice. It is ironic in the extreme then, that this voice is deemed as not being worthy enough for the public to hear.

Freedom of Information request

Another function of the Tavistock Institute was to attend to the psychiatric well-being of one Rudolf Hess post his close-up encounter with a Scottish field in 1941. Many and varied were the rumoured purposes of the Deputy Fuhrer’s Caledonian sojourn, the most frequently recounted being that he was there to negotiate a peace settlement behind Churchill’s back (I know the real reason and we will get to that in due course).

In fact when Hess flew to Britain he immediately requested a meeting with the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton was a member of the Cliveden Set - named after Lord Astor’s Buckinghamshire pile where Christine Keeler was ‘accidentally’ seen by John Profumo swimming in the nude - which was formed by a group of toff’s that wished to negotiate a peace deal with Hitler’s Nazis. What prompted this proposal – besides a shared ideology with the Fuhrer – was the realisation that should the noise of Nazi Jackboots ever be heard marching on British pavements it would sound the death knell for their cosy inbred plutocracy. 

Another member of this, so-called, elite who desired the same outcome was the Duke of Bedford. Bedford was also known as the Marquess of Tavistock and the grateful Tavistock institute had adopted his name after he had kindly donated a building to them. An act he initiated for purely philanthropic purposes I am sure!

Given Leonard Cheshire’s wartime activities and Sue Ryder’s rumoured involvement with Nazi refugees, not to mention the fake identities of patients and the Tavistock involvement, could there have been a conspiracy to conceal a programme that experimented on the patients in these care homes for mind-control purposes? Furthermore, could they have needed these patients to supplement the shortage of subjects left by the gradual demise of the original ‘guinea-pigs’; the wounded soldiers, after the end of the war?

If you are having problems believing these allegations of mind-control then consider this nugget from the author Aldous Huxley:

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961.

What we have here is a systematic attempt by the authorities to experiment on its own citizens, war heroes a lot of them too, and to conceal these programmes behind seemingly legitimate organisations. What happened to vulnerable kids was even worse and it strengthens my suspicions that villains such as the Krays were obtaining kids from the care homes like Dr Barnardo’s and forcing them to take part in these vile orgies. It wasn’t just the care homes though from whence they came.

The Contemporary Youth Club in Walthamstow in east London was run by a woman called Rose Finesilver. Rose, like Peter Rachman, was a Jewish refugee from Poland and, it has been rumoured, was an early handler of the Kray twins. Whatever the truth of that the Contemporary provided the local youth of Walthamstow with an oasis of calm and a haven from the streets. At least, that was the external appearance.

 

Rose Finesilver

In reality Rose was keeping an eagle eye out for any vulnerable waifs and strays that may stumble upon her refuge. Rather than providing hospitality and nurture these poor unfortunates would land up in the dubious care of Ronnie and Reggie who would then pimp them out amongst their coterie of perverts and lowlifes.

About six miles west from Walthamstow is Muswell Hill where, in January 1967, 17 year old Bernard Oliver, a young, vulnerable man with learning difficulties disappeared. His dismembered body would later be discovered in sleepy, rural Suffolk, in a suitcase, in eight pieces.

The prime suspects for this brutal murder were two doctors who would soon after emigrate to Australia, with one later committing suicide, though no arrests were ever made. However, back in London and a couple miles south of Muswell Hill on the Holloway Road events would conspire sufficiently so that the gay record producer Joe Meek became convinced that he would soon be implicated in the Oliver murder investigation after the Metropolitan Police said they would be interviewing all known homosexual men in the city.

What sparked Meek’s fear is unclear but, following a conviction for ‘importuning for immoral purposes’ in a public toilet in 1963 and having been fined £15, he had become a frequent victim of blackmail attempts. Meek is also rumoured to have attended parties held at the DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s flat in the East End where amongst the entertainment supplied were young boys from the Kray’s care home syndicate. 

Despite clearly being innocent of any involvement in Oliver’s murder Meek blew his brains out with a shotgun, having just killed his landlady, less than a month after Oliver went missing.

The Krays and blackmail: frequent bedfellows.

Rose Finesilver also had a reputation for liking children and teenagers to be used as pawns to get politicians and other notables into positions from whence they could be blackmailed. So I have heard, the rotund, and now very dead, politician Cyril Smith went to visit Rose when he found himself at the centre of a blackmail plot concerning his penchant for buggering young boys. The story goes that Rose admired his honesty and his crocodile tears so much that she arranged for the Krays to ‘sort’ the situation. True or not, I do not know, but given what has subsequently come to light about Smith I would err very much on the side of true.

Either way, any and all information from Rose and her Contemporary contemporaries found its way back to Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

Whilst trawling the old www I stumbled upon a photograph of Ronnie Kray and Lord Boothby at some posh do; could that be Rose Finesilver perched at the end looking very pleased with herself?

Another regular at the Contemporary was a guy by the name of Buttons, real name Peter Welsh. Now Buttons, back in the sixties, was the leader of the local Rockers – I was always a Mod myself – who had found himself a lucrative side-line as a bodyguard for Peter Rachman; or rather Rachman’s dwarf double. Buttons would go on to gain the distinction of being given permission to form the first chapter of the British Hells Angels; though one wonders if that can actually be considered an achievement?

Rachman’s connections to the Krays were many and numerous; not least due to their acquisition of Esmeralda’s Barn; a club and gambling den in Knightsbridge that enabled the twins to spread out their operations beyond their traditional East End manor.

Esmeralda’s Barn

In fact Esmeralda’s had been opened originally by one Hod Dibben, and that opens up a whole new can of worms. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Another rumour attributed to old Rose Finesilver was that she had arranged for the shooting of the famous ex-boxer Freddie Mills over the non-payment of a debt. I don’t know if this is true or not, but Freddie, who was good friends with the Krays, did land up dead with a bullet lodged in his cranium.

This bullet wound though may well have been self-inflicted; one of the rumours that swirled around was that the police were closing in on Freddie as a suspect in the Jack the Stripper murders.

Remember the girl I told you about at the parties at Dolphin Square, Hannah Tailford? She was just one of a number of good-time-girls who landed up being strangled and dumped naked in various parts of west London. Now Freddie met his haymaker in July 1965 and as no more corpses washed up after that maybe the Old Bill’s* finest minds put two and two together and came up with five; who knows? However, if old Freddie did blow his own brains out himself then he at least had the good grace and manners to carefully place the rifle upright on the car floor and eject the spent cartridge after he had done so!

But Freddie was no murderer; how do I know? We will get to that but, suffice it to say, when it came to the time to read out Freddie’s will it turned out he was boracic lint**. Despite the nightclub, despite the TV appearances, despite the newspaper column and despite the many and numerous bouts, poor old Freddie didn’t have a pot to piss in. Just a mere £300 left. So where had it gone? Blackmail. Pure and simple.

*Old Bill: Slang expression for members of the police.

**Boracic lint: Cockney rhyming slang for skint, meaning to have no money.

The rumours had been doing the rounds for a while that Freddie had been having a gay affair with the singer Michael Holliday, who may well have been having a simultaneous gay affair with Ronnie Kray as well, and for sure Freddie and Michael were great mates. In 1963 Michael died of a drug overdose just hours after giving his last performance at Freddie’s nightclub and poor old Freddie was gutted. Whatever the truth about Freddie and Michael someone had something on Freddie and either he refused to pay up and paid the ultimate price or he took another way out.

Another link to both the Krays and to Jack the Stripper came in the form of one Cornelius Whitehead. Whitehead, who was jailed along with the Krays as an accessory to the murder of Jack ‘the hat’ McVitie in 1969, had been the pimp of a Welsh whore called Gwynneth Rees.

Gwynneth Rees

On 8 November 1963 Gwynneth was found dead near the River Thames. Once again, investigators felt Rees may have been a victim of Jack the Stripper due to her being found near the river, and because she had been strangled with a ligature and because several of her teeth were also missing.

You may be noticing a recurring death theme in these memoirs; funny that isn’t it? Prominent people + sex scandals + blackmail = death. Perhaps we should start at the beginning and work our way forward.

Chapter 4

Chapter 10 - Battered Strumpets

Hannah Tailford, who boasted of having attended a party in Eaton Square - where Lord Boothby lived - in which she was paid £25 to have sex with a man in a gorilla suit, was one who participated in this line of work before it got out of hand and she found herself cast as the star in her very own snuff-movie.

The author Brian McConnell in his expose of the Stripper murders Found Naked and Dead claims that police discovered that Hannah had access to a photographic studio and equipment; perfect for a would be blackmailer:

‘The blackmail theory was uppermost in the detective’s minds. For in their pursuit of her background they found an apartment she rented to entertain her clients. There were cameras, photographic lighting equipment, and an address book.’

Now I am no detective and I don’t want to blow my own strumpet but Hannah Tailford was a mere two-bob, street-walking harlot; there is no way she could have had either the means or the gumption to have set up a sophisticated extortion racket. Somebody was bankrolling this operation. Stephen Ward had the funds and Peter Rachman had the premises.

Likewise Margaret McGowan, aka Frances Brown; who, like the snapper Vasco Lazzolo, had given evidence in defence of Stephen Ward at his high profile trial in 1963, was another lady of the night who was quite happy to get the puppies out for a punter with a Box Brownie until she too fell victim to the Stripper Killer.

Indeed, young Margaret had once been pestered by the aforementioned Vasco Lazzolo, the society photographer and friend of Stephen Ward, to participate in a mucky picture shoot with another girl just weeks before her death.

Margaret McGowan

Irene Lockwood

Yet another mucky muse cursed to die at the hands of the Stripper Killer was Irene Lockwood; only Irene was one who should really have known better given that her best friend Vicki Pender had only recently fallen foul of a customer with a violent temper. Vicki had made the cardinal error of trying to blackmail the client direct and had landed up strangled for her troubles; yet another dead brass on the streets, only not this time due to killer or killers unknown.

Vicki didn’t know that you needed specialist skills to successfully extract the cash from a guilt-ridden and disease-laden punter. Vicki didn’t know that you should only blackmail people actually worth blackmailing. In fact, Vicki didn’t know very much at all until death’s stiff-fingered embrace put an end to her blissful ignorance. Irene Lockwood didn’t know either, but she knew what Vicki knew and that was enough to ensure that she must be silenced.

One thing both Vicki and Irene did know though was where to score those Purple Hearts. So did Hannah Tailford. They knew that the speed-freak trail led east to Brick Lane and to the lair of the twin faces of twentieth-century evil and to the self-same streets that had spawned the original ripper killer a century earlier.

So, Vicki, Irene and Hannah, the speed they peddled, the Kray twins and the spectre of the whore-hating serial-killer had all travelled the self-same, well-worn path from east to west London.

Vicki Pender; or Veronica Walsh as she had been christened by her ever-so proud parents, breathed her last gasp with the vice-like grip of an ex-paratrooper’s strong hands clamped around her throat.

Colin Welt Fisher was that former paratrooper, but was, by then a 33 year old civilian salesman/engineer/art-photographer. Colin had turned to Vicki for her own strong grip technique, though she had, in an amphetamine flash, found that the boot was on the other foot and that things were going spectacularly tits-up very rapidly.

After a 48-hour speed and hash fuelled bender the prosecution claimed Fisher, at a time unknown, had strangled the bejesus out of Vicki before running off to the Daily Mirror with a story to sell. The compassionate newspaper informed Colin that his tale was only of interest to its readership, and, therefore, lucrative for Colin, if he coughed for the murder charge. Clever Colin quickly worked out that dirty money was no good to a man dangling from the end a rope and so decided to keep schtum. A wise move given that the paper was feeding back everything Colin told them to the Old Bill. The Daily Mirror, despite assurances, never did reveal what Colin had told them, which given Colin’s defence had been memory loss, may, or may-not be revealing.

However, Colin was also using his photographic expertise to carve out a niche business in the under-the-counter group-sex photographs racket for which both Vicki and Irene were particularly game. After all, it is infinitely more rewarding to pose with your pal and a strap-on dildo in a nice warm, anonymous room than to lay with your knickers around your ankles in the back of an old Ford Zephyr whilst being impaled by a beer-breathed navvy!

Vicki’s pal, Irene Lockwood, had also developed a neat side-line which involved mugging punters by luring them to a flea-pit hotel room before doing the off with their rapidly dropped trousers and wallets, safe in the knowledge that they were highly unlikely to go running to the law.

That is, of course, before the Stripper Killer added Irene to his expanding roll-call of victims.

So by 1964, and with Peter Rachman, Stephen Ward and the street girls all silenced, Mary Ann de Grimston quickly spotted the gap in the market. Mary could bring with her an ever-growing list of willing devotees who, by dint of the Scientologist auditing process, will have provided a full and frank admission of any and all sexual peccadillos and perversions. Plus there was the additional benefit of being able to add a touch of class and breeding to the cinematic proceedings. Hookers are all well and good but, let’s be honest, you’re just not going to add that hint of English rose, a frisson of virtue or a soupçon of purity to your celluloid masterpiece by using a rough-as-arseholes tart with ‘Mum and Dad’ tattooed on her forearm. Casting is everything after all.

Also, with snuff-movies being what they are there is an ever changing cast-list and landing the coveted lead role is somewhat of a poisoned chalice. If you were selected for that plum position the only thing you could be certain of was that you would give the performance of your life.

You see these girls: the Hammersmith nudes, the Thames torsos, the prey of Jack the Stripper, they weren’t the poor victims of a punter with the pox; they were silenced because of what they knew and who they knew.

Rachman had seen the writing on the wall and had faked his death, but Stephen Ward made the fatal mistake of believing that his friends in high places would save him. Of course once he no longer had direct control over his portfolio of pornography then he was a dead man walking.

L. Ron Hubbard Jr. was wrong about having had Ward by the balls though. Hubbard and his Process allies knew only too well the power that incriminating materials can buy you, but they bought right into the Cold War bullshit and thought that they could play the Americans and the British off against the Russians. But it didn’t work like that, that’s not where the real power lay.

Chapter 11