Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond

By Paul Willetts

For almost forty years, Paul Raymond was one Britain's most scandalous celebrities. Best known as the owner of the world famous Raymond Revuebar, he was a successful theatre impresario, property magnate and porn baron.

With his pencil moustache, gold jewellery and taste for showgirls, Raymond was both the brash personification of nouveau riche vulgarity and exemplar of the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled a poor boy from Liverpool to become Britain's richest man.

'Like 24 Hour Party People, we want to capture the life of an extraordinary man living in extraordinary times' Steve Coogan

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Sep 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781847653024

Paul Willetts

Paul Willetts is the author of four acclaimed works of non-fiction, the latest of these being Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms. Since making his literary debut with a biography of the Soho writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross, he also edited four much-praised collections of Maclaren-Ross's writing. In parallel with these projects, he compiled and worked as co-photographer on Teenage Flicks, a jokey celebration of Subbuteo, featuring contributions by Will Self, Graham Taylor, David Baddiel and others. His journalism has appeared in the Independent, The Times, TLS, Spectator, Independent on Sunday and other publications.

Book preview

Paul Willetts is the author of two previous works of non-fiction, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and North Soho 999. Alongside these, he has edited four much-praised collections of writing by the bohemian dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross. He also devised and worked as co-photographer on Teenage Flicks, a jokey celebration of Subbuteo, featuring contributions by Will Self, David Baddiel and others. His journalism has appeared in the Independent, Guardian, The Times, Spectator and elsewhere.

Praise for Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia:

‘Very striking, very strange and altogether fascinating’ Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder

‘[It] breaks new ground and revives a remarkable writer in the context of his times…’ Philip French, Observer, ‘Books of the Year, 2003’

‘[An] entertaining chronicle of the ’40s literary legend J. Maclaren-Ross’ D. J. Taylor, Spectator, ‘Books of the Year, 2003’

‘His book evokes not just the seedy flamboyance of a man who slept in Turkish baths… but also a long-vanished bohemian world’ Michael Arditti, The Times, ‘Books of the Year, 2003’

‘An inspiring read’ John King, New Statesman, ‘Books of the Year, 2003’

‘…an inventory of flits from boarding houses, unpaid bills, drinking clubs, unfulfilled hopes. It should deter anyone who reads it from becoming a writer’ Jonathan Meades, Evening Standard, ‘Books of the Year, 2003’

‘Willetts’s gloriously readable biography paints a picture of a life which, for all its disappointments, was richly lived’ Mail on Sunday

‘[This] wonderful book is so informative and so psychologically perceptive…’ Francis King, Spectator

‘Diligent, painstaking and bleakly hilarious’ Guardian, ‘Book of the Week’

‘Amusing and ultimately tragic…’ Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph, ‘Summer Books Recommendations, 2003’

‘A cracking portrait of London bohemia’ Independent

Praise for North Soho 999

‘This book is like one of the best black and white films… Unputdownable’ Independent, ‘Books of the Year, 2007’

‘[An] immensely well-researched evocation of late ’40s London gangland…’ D. J. Taylor, Spectator, ‘Books of the Year, 2007’

‘I urge you to read North Soho 999… It’s the absolutely gripping true story of an armed raid on a Fitzrovia jewellers/pawnbrokers that escalated into a huge manhunt’ Mark Gatiss, Independent on Sunday

‘Fitzrovia is the setting of Paul Willetts’s tour-de-force North Soho 999… a fascinating account of a vanished Britain’ Philip French, Times Literary Supplement

Members Only

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF

PAUL RAYMOND

Soho’s billionaire king of burlesque

Paul Willetts

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Serpent’s Tail,

an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London EC1R oJH

www.serpentstail.com

This eBook edition published in 2010

Copyright © Paul Willetts 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 302 4

For V.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

1     An Audience with the King

2     Educating Geoffrey

3     Phwoar and Peace

4     Fiddler on the Hoof

5     Privates on Parade

6     Nude Awakening

7     Mammary Man

8     Strip! Strip! Hooray!

9     Stripteasey-weasy Raymond

10   Breast of British

11   Crumpet Voluntary

12   Gentlemen Prefer Nudes

13   A Room with a Revue

14   G-Sting

15   Treasure Chests

16   The Wages of Skin

17   The Men Who Would Be King of Clubland

18   Storm in a D Cup

19   Ding-Dong

20   Impresario Lothario

21   The Bottom Line

22   Misleading Ladies

23   Tanky Panky

24   Undressed to Thrill

25   The Sin Crowd

26   Strip Special

27   Yes, We Have No Pyjamas

28   The Naked and the Bed

29   Porn Again

30   Mr Striptease v. Lord Porn

31   Filthy Lucre

32   Tonight’s the Night

33   This Is Your Executioner Speaking

34   Greetings From Pornland

35   Money with Menaces

36   Room at the Top Shelf

37   Something Blue

38   The Raymond Follies

39   Let’s Get Laid

40   A Captain of Skindustry

41   Playboy of the West End World

42   When the King of Porn Met the Queen of Clean

43   Paul Raymond Killed My Mother

44   Non-stop Erotic Cabaret

45   Sugar and Spice and All Things Vice

46   Monte Carlo and Bust

47   Find the Lady

48   Hard Cash

49   Material Girl

50   Death Duties

51   Vital Statistics

52   The Way of All Flesh

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography

Filmography

Source Notes

Picture credits

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

p. vi–vii Paul Raymond backstage at the Raymond Revuebar

p. 15     School photo, featuring Paul Raymond

p. 28     Wartime show at the Windmill Theatre

p. 29     Cover of 1943 Revudeville souvenir programme

p. 47     Chrystabel Leighton-Porter, a.k.a. ‘Jane’

p. 49     Publicity photo of Phyllis Dixey

p. 53     Poster for Folies Parisienne

p. 60     Poster for The Jane Show

p. 69     Programme listings for Burlesque

p. 71     Poster for Nite Life USA

p. 74     Poster for Le Cirque Nu de Paris

p. 92     Soho cartoon

p. 102   Front of house photo of Lorraine Burnett

p. 115   Cover of programme from the Raymond Revuebar, 1958

p. 127   Paul Raymond posing with a Revuebar performer

p. 135   Advert for the Celebrité restaurant

p. 141   Both sides of a Raymond Revuebar cigarette card

p. 147   Paul and Jean Raymond posing outside court

p. 152   The Fabulous Raymond Girls dance troupe

p. 156   Advert for the Bal Tabarin nightspot

p. 163   A member of the Fabulous Raymond Girls at her dressing-table

p. 165   Ingrid Anthofer and the chorus-line at the Raymond Revuebar

p. 173   The Fabulous Raymond Girls perform a dance sequence

p. 181   Advert for the Raymond Revuebar

p. 193   Rubin ‘The Hurricane’ Carter pretends to spar with a bunny girl

p. 202   Adele Warren and her equine co-star

p. 209   Wild West-themed dance sequence at the Raymond Revuebar

p. 214   The Beatles watch an undress rehearsal at the Raymond Revuebar

p. 219   Cover of Raymond Revuebar programme, 1967

p. 220   Cover of Pyjama Tops programme

p. 228   Cover of Birds of a Feather programme

p. 303   Cover of programme for The Royalty Folies

p. 321   Fiona Richmond and Robin Askwith in Let’s Get Laid

p. 332   Debbie Raymond and Jonathan Hodge

p. 333   Photos of wedding reception for Debbie Raymond and Jonathan Hodge

p. 334   The Reverend Edwyn Young

p. 344   Paul Raymond and companions

p. 368   Carl Snitcher

p. 410   Paul Raymond at his daughter’s funeral

Author’s Note

You need only flick through Members Only to realise that it features more speech than some novels. This isn’t because I’ve resorted to the type of fraudulent ‘imaginative reconstructions’ favoured by a disconcerting number of contemporary writers of what masquerades as non-fiction. The speech is, instead, drawn from a range of historical sources, all identified in the notes at the back of this book. My sources include newspaper reports, recordings, memoirs, interviews, witness statements, police transcripts and hitherto secret phone taps, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Overleaf: Paul Raymond, backstage at the Raymond Revuebar, 1 January 1960

AS I WALKED through the night I got to thinking about what I had seen… I got to thinking why things happen in London at night. For twenty-five years I had seen these topsy-turvy people come into clubs at the hour when respectable people are going to bed. For twenty-five years I had seen men and women do crazy and unlawful things in the hours between midnight and four or five o’clock in the morning… I thought, too, that maybe these queer and sometimes frightening hours were the cause of all the crazy things I had seen. Perhaps when midnight passes and you’re sitting in a club listening to the music, drinking too much, and watching sexy floor-shows while some painted harlot with her eye on your pocket-book is pressing her thighs against yours; perhaps at these times there’s a madness steals over you, a derangement of the brain that vanishes with the dawn.

Jack Glicco, Madness after Midnight

1 AN AUDIENCE WITH THE KING

FOR MOST MEN it was the raw material of pulse-quickening fantasy. But these auditions had, by the closing months of 1960, become little more than a tiresome ritual for the man sitting near the stage that morning at the Raymond Revuebar, the upmarket strip-club he’d opened just over two years earlier. Destined to establish himself as one of the world’s wealthiest people, his face familiar to British newspaper readers, the man in question was a thirty-five-year-old Northerner who had changed his name to Paul Raymond, a durable memento of his own abortive stage career. His sharp suit, cut in the continental style worn by Marcello Mastroianni in the previous year’s hit movie La Dolce Vita, contributed to an impression of well-groomed prosperity and suave self-assurance. Such was his fastidious poise, you could almost have been persuaded that he also shared the Italian actor’s dark good looks. Instead, he possessed the long, clean-shaven, pallid features of a medieval effigy. Any fleeting associations with the frigid hush of some bucolic parish church were, however, dispelled by the cigarette between his lips and the sight of his receding, wavy brown hair which he oiled into a crisply parted quiff, resembling the spirals of whipped cream piped on to the desserts served in the fashionable restaurant downstairs. Recurrent doses of cod liver oil and malt extract had failed to vanquish his unhealthy facial puffiness.

Smoke rings unspooled above Raymond as his doleful, dog-at-the-dinner-table eyes scrutinised the hesitant young girl who had ventured onto the otherwise empty stage. It extended fifteen feet into the terraced auditorium, around which tables and chairs had been arranged. Those seats would soon be filled by the usual attentive, smartly dressed crowd: film producers, businessmen, aristocrats, politicians, singers, gangsters, barristers, movie stars, quaffing overpriced drinks while they watched the show. At present the audience was sparse, just the inevitable technicians, plus Raymond and the journalist who had come to interview him about his controversial club.

Raymond had grown accustomed to encounters with the press. His latest interviewer was Ernest Dudley, courteous, fruity voiced and almost two decades his senior, though the age gap seemed greater because Raymond shaved off a few years whenever journalists asked how old he was. Until recently, Dudley had enjoyed nationwide fame as a BBC radio presenter. Nowadays he concentrated on working as a novelist and screenwriter. In between, he’d picked up a commission from Today – a popular weekly news magazine – to write a three-part feature about Raymond.

Had Dudley requested a press clippings file on his interviewee, he’d have been presented with a sheaf of yellowed articles from national newspapers. These bestowed on Raymond a range of flippant titles, including ‘Mr Striptease’ and ‘the King of the Keyhole Shows’, the latter rendered doubly pertinent because Raymond claimed to have obtained his first sight of naked female flesh by peering through a keyhole. The object of King Paul’s bug-eyed scrutiny was one of his unsuspecting aunts, gingerly lowering herself into her bath.

Flavoured with disdain, the newspaper cuttings portrayed Raymond as a stereotypical wide-boy. But Dudley’s interviewee bore no resemblance to the brash and sleazy profiteer who emerged from so many of these. Contrary to the stereotype, Raymond had manners as immaculate and formal as his custom-made suits. He had a gruff, carefully modulated voice with a slight stammer that hinted at vulnerability, only a trace of what could have been mistaken for a Manchester accent discernible in his nasal, constricted delivery. He had a temperament that was phlegmatic, guarded, watchful, initially even a little shy and abrupt with strangers, his old-fashioned decorum prone to be misinterpreted as coldness. And he had practised charm with which he kept journalists at a distance while purveying an illusion of intimacy, of privileged access. He’d woo them with his self-deprecation, his bracing, ostensibly guileless candour, his ample stock of dryly humorous stories about his rackety past, stories garnished by a catchy laugh redolent of a misfiring lawnmower. Mouth realigning itself into a contagious half-smile, cigarette waved with a theatrical flourish, he’d say, ‘I’ve never had a good write-up and I don’t expect yours to be the first.’

It was part of a repertoire of lines Raymond trotted out during interviews, his delivery displaying all the brisk confidence of a former top-of-the-bill performer in provincial variety shows.

‘I have read parts of a book, but never an entire book,’ he delighted in telling reporters. ‘Maybe I attempted to read the wrong sort of book.’ Sometimes he’d justify this tone of gleefully mischievous philistinism by adding, ‘Reading could destroy my instinct for what’s popular. The average man doesn’t read books. And I understand the mass trade. I believe I have the touch that the ordinary man in the street wants.’

On other occasions he’d strike a rare note of self-congratulation by gesturing to his luxurious surroundings and saying, ‘Not bad for a lad who arrived from Liverpool with five bob in his pocket…’

Questions about the future of his lucrative, red-plush-adorned realm elicited the pronouncement, ‘There’ll always be sex – always, always, always.’

Forced to defend the nature of his business, he’d dispense another of his old favourites: ‘It’s simply that a normal, healthy chap likes to see a pretty girl without any clothes on.’

Raymond’s routine captivated his current interviewer, who was fascinated by the contradictions of his personality, by what Dudley later described as ‘his breathless audacity’. The first instalment of the eventual feature series would pose the question ‘Is his sort of entertainment harmless or a moral menace?’ To counter the predictable accusations of immorality, Raymond – or maybe his publicist – fed Dudley a line about him being a devout Roman Catholic, spiritually at ease despite the apparent incompatibility between his religious faith and his chosen career.

Quizzed about the titillating contents of his newest show, which featured a naked woman dancing with a boa constrictor, Raymond shrugged his well-padded shoulders and said, ‘But what harm can there be in showing beautiful girls in interesting acts? Everything is clean, wholesome and above board.’

Right then, Dudley was studying Raymond as intently as Raymond was studying the girl he was about to audition. Regular letters from girls like her arrived at the Revuebar: girls who fancied reinventing themselves as gypsy seductresses, Nordic goddesses or South American sexpots, girls from any social class, their letters enclosing a snapshot more often than not taken by an obliging boyfriend or brother on some windswept British beach. Frequently, Raymond’s wife Jean – responsible for choreographing and producing the shows as well as designing the costumes – would attend the subsequent auditions and rehearsals with their four-year-old daughter Debbie, who’d throw tantrums unless Jean brought her along.

Since his wife wasn’t there to help him reach a verdict on the current would-be recruit, Raymond had to rely on his own judgement. Not that he lacked belief in his ability to select the appropriate candidates. He told people that he always looked at a stripper’s face first because that’s ‘what makes everything come alive on a girl’s body’. The attributes of a perfect stripper had, he believed, the immutable authority of Old Testament scripture. Call them the Four Commandments. Thou shalt be between eighteen and thirty years old. Thou shalt be five feet eight inches tall. Thou shalt weigh nine stone. And thou shalt not have excessively large breasts, the preferred dimensions being between thirty-six and thirty-eight inches. If they were bigger than that, he reasoned they’d be too floppy. Perhaps as a legacy of his strict upbringing, Catholic dogma mingling with middle-class squeamishness, Raymond was in those days reluctant to refer to them as ‘breasts’, let alone ‘tits’, ‘bazookas’ or any such lustful epithets. Betraying a streak of prudishness that Dudley found anomalous in a strip-club owner, Raymond insisted on calling them ‘busts’ or ‘bosoms’.

His regal position within the club gave him the mandate for expressing absurd generalisations about the girls he auditioned. ‘Very pretty girls’, he was fond of declaring, ‘often have bad figures, but girls with attractive figures invariably have pretty faces.’

In a reflection of changing fashion and his own changing tastes, what he defined as a pretty face and an attractive figure were remote from their equivalents thirty years later. Back in 1960, these paradigms of feminine allure could have subtly rounded stomachs, broad hips, pasty complexions, asymmetrical breasts and arms that didn’t appear as if they were equipped to bench-press 100 lb. weights

Whenever Raymond scheduled auditions, he liked to claim that he wasn’t just looking for the obvious attributes. No, he was looking for girls who were unselfconscious and capable of walking gracefully. As a rule, performers with at least a smidgen of showbusiness experience were favoured because he thought they lacked any offputting coyness. He said he was keen to recruit girls from what he termed ‘good homes’, girls from the quieter suburbs who, he felt, made the best strippers. He also said he wasn’t, unlike some of his European colleagues, trying to find girls who derived a sexual thrill from what they did. His shows, he insisted, had nothing to do with sex. They were just ‘two hours of refined, family-style entertainment’.

Eager to impress her potential employer, the girl currently onstage was wearing an unseasonal summer dress and a bit too much makeup, designed to give her the appearance of someone older, more sophisticated. Far from achieving the desired effect, the make-up emphasised her callowness. You could tell she’d never been auditioned before. Nor had she, in all likelihood, previously set foot inside the Revuebar or any other strip-club.

She flashed a nervous, ingratiating smile at Raymond. He responded with a slight nod.

The girl glanced into the wings, as if seeking further instructions. Then she peeled off her dress. Now wearing nothing but her bra, panties and slip-on shoes, she stood awkwardly beneath a proscenium arch embellished by Raymond’s gilded, cursive monogram.

Another uncomfortable pause ensued before she swivelled round and paraded in front of both Raymond and his interviewer. She could have done with some music to lend her movements rhythm. Ordinarily, a three-piece band accompanied the performers. In the band’s absence, noises from the surrounding central London streets tended to leak into the theatre: shouts, wolf-whistles, the hum of cars and lorries, the angry insectoid buzz of scooters.

Under Raymond’s direction, the girl was soon mincing round the stage and striking the requisite poses, shedding her initial reticence more slowly than her dress. Next time she met his genial, non-committal gaze, her expression had acquired a new-found coquettishness.

Speaking softly, he asked her to take off her remaining clothes. As she followed his instructions, he watched with the detachment of an antique dealer appraising a piece of china. Almost a decade in the skindustry had left Raymond blasé about female nudity. For him, this wasn’t about ogling pretty young girls. It was about his abiding obsession – not sex, but money. It was about business, about profit and loss, about contributing to the cost of his next Bentley, his Savile Row suits, his daughter’s school fees, his wife’s haute couture outfits.

‘Believe me, I get no special kick out of the job I do,’ he assured Dudley. ‘To the girls, I am no more than a doctor examining his patients.’

2 EDUCATING GEOFFREY

RAYMOND OFTEN DESCRIBED himself as a self-made man. Infused with an undercurrent of immodesty, it led many people who met him during the 1960s to assume he was part of the influx of predominantly northern working-class talent energising the London art and show business scene and pushing at the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable. His well-advertised past as an itinerant market stallholder and variety artiste, together with the vestiges of a North Country accent, conspired to reinforce that misapprehension. Here was someone whose name appeared to belong in a roll-call spanning actors, writers, fashion designers, photographers, musicians and painters, among them Michael Caine, David Hockney, Ossie Clarke, Joe Orton and John Lennon. If pressed on the subject, however, Raymond would admit to being middle class, yet that label conceals as much as it reveals.

He was the second child of socially and temperamentally mismatched parents. His gregarious, roistering father Francis – known as Frank – Joseph had grown up in godless poverty amid the slums of the West Derby area of Liverpool. Raymond’s paternal grandfather had worked on the city’s docks during the nineteenth century, where he installed rigging on sailing ships. Defying the handicaps of this impecunious background, the future strip-club maestro’s father had ended up running his own Liverpool-based ‘forwarding agency’ – what would now be called a haulage company. In 1921, aged twenty-six, Frank Joseph married a middle-class girl named Maud McKeown. Prior to their marriage, she’d been living with her Irish-born parents and her nine well-educated siblings, two of whom were schoolteachers. Maud had grown up in a spacious house in nearby Toxteth, a district far removed from its 1980s incarnation as a symbol of urban decay. The rigidly stratified class system of the period meant that her elderly father, who had, by his retirement, achieved the exalted rank of superintendent in the Liverpool Constabulary, was unlikely to have welcomed her choice of husband. There was also the contentious matter of religion, the McKeowns being such staunch Roman Catholics that Maud’s brother, Charles, had become a Jesuit priest.

Probably as a way of appeasing his in-laws, Frank Joseph agreed to let his children be brought up as Catholics and to change his palpably Jewish surname. Duplicating the middle name of another of Maud’s brothers, Felix Quinn McKeown, he became Frank Quinn, ersatz Gentile. He and Maud liked his new name enough to bestow it on the son she bore him during the winter of 1923.

In view of Maud’s unstinting religiosity, which surely extended to a horror of contraception, her relationship with her husband can’t have been a great sexual success, otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a gap between the birth of Frank Quinn, Jr and her next pregnancy. On Sunday, 15 November 1925 their second child was, along with a high proportion of children at that time, born at home. Maud’s labour must have been accompanied by the echoey noise of tannoy announcements from the railway station not far beyond the end of their small back garden. The scene of his birth was ‘Brentwood’, a large semi-detached house at 20 Rathmore Avenue. His family’s home formed part of a new development, set in the grassy, tree-dotted south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill, byword for prim respectability.

Like his father, whose reputation as a boozy womaniser he’d inherit, Raymond didn’t begin life with the name by which he came to be known. He was, instead, baptised Geoffrey Anthony Quinn – a name better suited to a Whitehall mandarin than a nightclub owner.

P

His mother was a reproachful woman of puritanical thrift and severity, reflected in one of her favourite maxims – ‘Much wants more…’ This frugality encompassed both the material and emotional worlds. Perpetuating the aloof style of parenting favoured by so many middle-class parents during the nineteenth century, the era of her birth, she avoided physical contact with her children. Public displays of affection were, in any event, something she regarded as ‘common’. She was, according to her second child, ‘a terrible snob’. Lest it reflect badly on her, she wouldn’t even permit her husband to bring copies of the downmarket News of the World home from work.

Statues of the Virgin Mary were distributed round their house, presenting an inescapable reminder of her oppressive piety. She’s likely to have been behind the decision to send Geoffrey – and presumably his elder brother Frank as well – to a local fee-paying infant school, run by the Notre Dame order of nuns. Geoffrey would remember the experience with great fondness. He said they taught him to be ‘polite and forgiving’. While he seldom forgot their lessons in politeness, he had trouble with the concept of forgiveness, his natural inclinations being closer to the vengeful eye-for-an-eye creed of the Old Testament.

Two years before completing his primary schooling, he acquired a younger brother named Philip, the arrival of whom in 1931 appears to have accelerated the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. His father moved out of the house on Rathmore Avenue soon afterwards, leaving his mother in what was, during the early 1930s, the rare and socially awkward position of being a single parent. Nonetheless she refused to divorce her husband because that contravened the teachings of Catholicism.

Geoffrey’s aunts on his mother’s side of the family – Sarah, Winifrid, Josephine, Mary and Catherina – did their best to make up for the absence of his father, their ubiquity teaching him to feel comfortable around women. The support from the McKeown family may also have been financial.

He and his elder brother were told to respond to enquiries about their dad’s whereabouts by saying that he was working abroad. In reality their errant father was living with a girlfriend in a house on the waterfront at New Brighton, just across the river from Liverpool docks. Decades from then, Geoffrey would reminisce about a melancholy occasion when his embittered mother had taken him there and pointed out the house’s lighted windows.

His father’s departure and the subsequent dissembling must have provided a hurtful introduction to the world of adult duplicity. Tears were an obvious release for the pain endured by Geoffrey. But he had, under the influence of his emotionally straitened mother, been brought up to believe men shouldn’t cry. As an adult, he declared, ‘I think it’s absolutely appalling to see a man cry. That’s the most terrible, terrible thing of all time.’

After primary school Geoffrey moved on to St Francis Xavier’s College, the Catholic boys’ private school where his brother Frank was already in the third year. Referred to by pupils and staff alike as ‘SFX’, it was a Jesuit-run institution, located on the fringe of the city centre. It had a reputation for offering its 600 pupils a route into the prestigious civil service or even to university, higher education at that stage being a privilege available to a tiny percentage of the population.

Maybe as a consequence of some childhood illness, Geoffrey – generally addressed as ‘Geoff’ – missed the start of the academic year, only attending his first lessons on Thursday, 9 November 1933. Arriving there would have been an intimidating experience for him – fear of the unknown, of mingling with older boys, of coping with its harsh discipline compounded by its dismal architecture. The arched entrance to the school pierced the flank of a huge red-brick French Gothic-style building, the monumental buttresses of which resembled the ribs of a dinosaur. Not exactly guaranteed to soothe any ripples of anxiety endured by the seven-year-old Geoff, attired in his unfamiliar new school uniform – cap, tie, grey blazer, knee-length shorts and long socks.

With no defined catchment area, SFX drew boys from as far away as south Manchester. Geoff joined a mixture of other fee-paying pupils and a smattering of poor boys who had won scholarships, shared religion tending to smooth out the social differences that caused friction at other schools. In imitation of the public school system, he and his fellow new boys were assigned to one of four houses – Briant, Campion, Ogilvie or Southwell. Captained by urbane, Brylcreemed senior pupils who wore double-breasted suits and brogues that made them appear older than they were, each of these houses competed against the others for an array of sporting trophies.

Under the dog-collared headmastership of Father Woodlock, athletic excellence was prized almost as much as scholastic achievement. An ageing but vivacious former army chaplain who had served in the trenches during the First World War, Woodlock combined his administrative duties with teaching Latin and running the school boxing club, not to mention coaching football and cricket. He was a lanky man with a scrape-over hairdo, round wire-rimmed glasses and an unassuming manner that belied his double first from Oxford University. By the standards of the period he was kindly and humane, making a point of learning the names of all the boys. Corporal punishment was nevertheless administered with brutal frequency.

Sitting at their desks in Victorian classrooms which were seen as antiquated and inadequate, Geoff and the other boys could be disciplined for not paying attention, talking during a lesson, or failing to answer a question correctly. As if the looming possibility of punishment didn’t already exert enough pressure on Geoff each time a teacher pointed at him and asked a question, he also had to contend with a stammer sufficient to make teachers impatient and induce derisive laughter from classmates.

Punishment must have been a regular occurrence for Geoff who, as an adult, confessed to having struggled with schoolwork, invariably finishing bottom of his class’s league table of scholastic attainment. Quite a contrast to his more academically inclined brothers, the younger of whom would follow their Uncle Felix into a career as a GP. Coloured though Geoff’s confession may have been by rebellious, anti-intellectual bravado, it was lent credence by his presence in the lower of the school’s two academic streams.

Whenever Geoff or his schoolmates committed some misdemeanour, their teacher wrote out what was known as ‘a bill’. These small invoices stated the offence that had been committed, the offender’s name, the date and the requisite number of blows, usually in multiples of three, extending up to twenty-four. The offender then took his bill to be countersigned either by one of the senior teachers or a sleekly besuited prefect. After that, the bill-holder trudged up to the first-floor storeroom which doubled as the place of execution. Holding out both hands, the victim received the specified number of blows on each palm. This stinging punishment was administered with a ferula – a pliable, foot-long bat, made from a wooden composite material.

Geoff’s long-fingered, boney hands would, courtesy of his lack of distinction in the classroom, have been a ferula magnet. Some of his similarly unacademic contemporaries redeemed themselves through sporting excellence, but the school playing-fields merely offered Geoff another arena for mediocrity, if not outright failure.

Sport and scholarship weren’t the only components of the timetable at SFX. Besides being taught the catechism by rote, he attended mass once a week and received religious education lessons. Every fortnight he also had to go to confession in the local parish church. Juxtaposed with this diet of religion were elocution lessons, the ability ‘to speak properly’, to mimic what was sometimes caricatured as the ‘lah-di-da’ pronunciation of BBC presenters, being considered a prerequisite for social and professional advancement. His elocution teacher was the wonderfully named Miss St George-Yorke, the name itself akin to some lip-flexing exercise in pronunciation. She must have contributed to the adult Geoff’s precise, rather clipped – yet still perceptibly Northern – diction, its precision indicative of someone for whom every syllable was an obstacle that had to be scaled with care.

Extending the impressive breadth of education on offer were all sorts of extracurricular activities. There was a swimming club, a photography club, a debating society and a literary society, though the resolutely unbookish Geoff wasn’t likely to have relished the opportunity to discuss the novels of P. G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh. As well as the clubs and societies hosted by the school, there were theatrical productions and annual trips – camping expeditions to North Wales and holidays in France where the boys had the chance to go round the cultural landmarks. If Geoff ever visited Paris on one of these trips, his Jesuit guide failed to instil in him so much as a flicker of interest in art and architecture. His adult self came to equate Paris not with the Louvre or Notre Dame Cathedral but with the Crazy Horse Saloon and other temples of French striptease.

Since his separation from his wife, Frank Quinn had played little if any role in the lives of his three sons. By 1936, his business had buckled under the weight of the Depression. Now he was living in a rough part of Liverpool and working as a lorry driver. Most evenings, his son Geoff recalled, he could be found chatting up women in the Bear’s Paw pub in Kensington, a district to the east of the city centre.

The latest intake of pupils at SFX that year included a Scottish boy six years older than Geoff. His name was John Gregson and, like Geoff, he’d go into show business – not as an impresario, but as the amiable star of Genevieve and other popular British movies. While he and Geoff and their fellow pupils were reacquainting themselves with the insular rhythms of school life, the worrying political situation in Europe further deteriorated. This violent polarisation between right and left even extended into the corridors of SFX. Instinctively tribal and quarrelsome, many of the boys sided with either pro or anti-fascist cliques, disputes between the two factions resulting in widespread lateness for lessons. The conflict found more cerebral expression within the Debating Society, where a mock Parliament was created.

Pupils were encouraged to treat school drama productions with comparable seriousness. What might have appeared an inconsequential exercise in self-indulgence was viewed by the Jesuits as a valuable facet of education which honed their pupils’ public speaking skills. Few of the boys at Geoff’s school were, however, prepared to relinquish their free time in order to take part in rehearsals.

Affording a sneak preview of his theatrical leanings, Geoff enlisted in the school’s Glee Club, which staged an annual Shrovetide production. Not many weeks into the autumn term of 1938, by which time he was a comparatively tall, style-conscious thirteen-year-old with a dark, greasy quiff and a cheeky demeanour, he volunteered for the cast of Columbus in a Merry Key, an operetta about Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Geoff failed to land a leading role, instead finding himself part of the sailors’ chorus, his stammer apparently disappearing whenever he was required to perform. Together with a small orchestra, he and the other cast members attended after-school rehearsals in the Music Room, from where a contemporary of theirs reported hearing a cacophony that didn’t bode well for the scheduled public performance.

But the production ran into far greater problems just before Christmas when two of its stars pulled out. The possibility of cancelling the show was discussed. Eventually the producers decided to go ahead, prompting them to audition replacement singers. Once the vacant roles had been filled, rehearsals began again, though there were complaints from boys working backstage about the limited preparation time.

Costumes and a large painted backdrop depicting the deck of a Spanish galleon were nevertheless ready for the show’s solitary performance on Tuesday, 7 February 1939. Geoff and the rest of the sailors’ chorus donned matching jackets, white shirts, dark shorts and white bandanas. Three of their schoolmates, meanwhile, had to appear in drag and eleven others – cast as ‘savages’ – blacked-up, the uneven makeup lending them the grubby-faced look of miners at the end of a shift.

On the night of the show, parents and relatives were well represented in the audience that awaited Geoff and the rest of the cast. ‘The principals were excellent,’ reported the school magazine. ‘Columbus, though stiff in movement, sang in a clear and sweet voice.’ The magazine’s anonymous correspondent reserved his scorn for the three choruses – the sailors, savants and savages. ‘When a complicated movement was in progress, there was always a savant endeavouring to find his relations in the audience. A desire among some to be prominent in the front row robbed some of the groupings of their full effect.’

Geoff Quinn (inset close-up) pictured with the rest of the cast of Columbus in a Merry Key. He is fourth from the right on the third row from the back

It wasn’t the most auspicious of preambles to Geoff’s career in show business. At that age, however, he doesn’t seem to have had any intimation of the path his life would take. He later claimed that, as a thirteen-year-old, he’d wanted to become a priest and that he and his elder brother – probably encouraged by their mother – would play what they called ‘altars’, dressing up and pretending to conduct mass.

3 PHWOAR AND PEACE

ALL BUT THE MOST NAIVE optimists were aware of the imminent military conflict in Europe. The devastation already wreaked by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War had alerted the British populace to the destructive potential of aerial bombardment. With its teeming docks, Liverpool was a certain target for similar raids. By that summer Maud had arranged for herself, her sons, one of her sisters and her recently widowed octogenarian mother, Hannah, to move out of the city.

In mid-July 1939, when the school year ended, Geoff left SFX. So did his sixteen-year-old brother Frank, who had just passed half a dozen School Certificate exams – the equivalent of GCSEs. Along with seven-year-old Philip and the rest of their immediate family, they’d been invited to live with their mother’s unmarried brother, Felix, described by Geoff as ‘a marvellous, kind uncle’.

His Uncle Felix was a First World War veteran who had won the Military Cross before going on to run his own medical practice. The setting for this was the small industrial town of Glossop, a freckle on the buxom contours of the High Peak District, thirteen miles to the south-east of Manchester.

Like the majority of his colleagues in the pre-National Health Service era, Felix McKeown charged for his services. They were lucrative enough to provide him with a home of sufficient size to accommodate not only a surgery but also the six evacuees. Geoff’s new home was Moorbank House, a three-storey stone building with high-ceilinged rooms, plaster cornices and elaborate ceiling roses. Situated near the foot of Victoria Street, which sloped past the town hall and into the high street, it shared the soot-blackened appearance of Glossop’s other predominantly stone buildings. The soot had been disgorged by numerous mill chimneys that spiked the town’s skyline. These included a paper mill and a chemical works, both of which sent peculiar smells wafting through the streets.

Instead of trying to smooth the transition between Liverpool and Glossop by befriending the locals, Geoff’s mother and his aunts coalesced into a self-sufficient group, mistrustful of the motives of other women, that suspicion perhaps deriving from his father’s extramarital dalliances. Nurture bolstering nature, the boy who’d become Mr Striptease must have acquired some of his habitual wariness from his mother and aunts. Even with his friends, he was reluctant to disclose much about himself or betray any sign of weakness. As several of them have testified, he always gave the impression that he was withholding things, that they knew only what he wanted them to know.

For Geoff and his displaced family, religion offered a potentially comforting sense of continuity. Free to choose between three Catholic churches, his mother – true to form – opted for the grandest of them: Sumner Memorial Church, usually known as St Mary’s. It possessed the added cachet of a senior priest, the Very Reverend Canon W. R. Winder, officiating at mass.

Maud must have been annoyed that the town had no Catholic school comparable to SFX. Ready for the new academic year, her sons were enrolled at the best available alternative: Glossop Grammar School, known throughout the area as ‘GGS’. In common with SFX, it was a fee-paying establishment that admitted a limited proportion of scholarship boys and had a reputation for steering its pupils into the professions and, in a few cases, university.

During the summer of 1939, Geoff and his brothers were kitted out in the GGS uniform. This featured a snazzy blazer and tie, which incorporated blue, red, green and black stripes, trimmed with gold thread. Sewn to the breast pocket of the blazer was the town crest, paired with the motto ‘Virtus, Veritas, Libertas’ – ‘Virtue, Truth, Liberty’. Geoff would, in subsequent years, take only the latter to heart.

Germany’s invasion of Poland that September triggered the outbreak of what would escalate into the Second World War. Those opening weeks of the conflict overlapped with the beginning of the autumn term at Geoff’s new school.

Built in 1910 at the junction between Talbot and Fitzalan Streets, GGS was within easy walking distance of Moorbank House. To Geoff, accustomed to a school with twice as many pupils, GGS must have felt small and, possibly, less daunting in consequence. Its shabby classrooms, condemned by the Ministry of Education as ‘utterly unsatisfactory’, were crammed into two floors and a basement. Further teaching space was provided by five dilapidated and even shabbier wooden huts. Owing to the lack of a suitable room, morning assembly had to be held in the entrance hall.

On the Quinn brothers’ first day at GGS, their fellow pupils would have been packed into the lobby. Being in such close proximity to the girls who made up half the school’s intake would have been a novel experience for Geoff and his brothers. Assemblies were usually presided over by the middle-aged headmaster, Cecil Lord, nicknamed ‘Joe’, a benign soubriquet that obscured sadism sufficient to make even the Jesuits flinch. He’d recently inaugurated an annual cross-country race, would-be entrants to which had to prove their athleticism by dangling for two minutes from an improvised trapeze, suspended from the ceiling of the woodwork room. His malevolent streak also manifested itself through his habit of making disparaging remarks about the boys from poorer families. It was a habit that fostered what one pupil called a ‘them and us’ atmosphere, dividing the scholarship pupils from the rest of the school whose families paid fees of £10 10s a year.

Geoff and his brothers weren’t the only evacuees to enrol that term. They were joined by children from Manchester, Bolton and Surrey. The war soon made itself felt within GGS in other ways, too. All sports fixtures against schools outside Glossop were cancelled. In the spirit of the famous ‘Dig For Victory’ propaganda campaign, an allotment was created at one end of the playing fields, situated well away from GGS’s main buildings. Trenches were dug elsewhere around the edges of the sports pitches, offering pupils shelter from bomb blasts. Gas masks were issued to everyone. These hung from row upon row of pegs in the basement, which had been turned into an air-raid shelter. And the Stationery Room was transformed into the First-Aid Room, equipped with basic medical supplies. To provide some security from explosions for the building’s occupants, brick walls were constructed in front of the ground-floor windows. As a safeguard against flying glass, heavy felt curtains, which could be quickly unfurled, were hung on the other side. For additional protection, brown paper was glued to the glass, necessitating electric lighting even on the brightest of days.

In the early months of the war, air-raid drills and first-aid lessons became an intermittent feature of Geoff’s schooling. When a drill was announced, the caretaker rushed round the classrooms lowering the safety curtains while the pupils hurried down to the basement, where they had to sit beneath their pegs, attention diverted by prefects under instructions to organise word games. The pupils and staff remained in the basement for an hour at most, their improvised shelter rendered uncomfortable by lack of ventilation.

At assembly, the occasion as yet free from sobering references to former pupils who’d been killed fighting for king and country, there began to be recurrent allusions to ways in which GGS could contribute to the war effort. Campaigns