What the REAL Swinging Sixties were like – gangsters and police corruption

Faces of the 1960s. (From left) Teddy Smith, Micky Fawcett, Johnny Davis, Reggie Kray, Freddie Mills, Ronnie Kray, Dicky Morgan and Sammy Lederman at Freddie Mills’ Nite Spot. (Photograph from Micky Fawcett’s book Krayzy Days)

According to the Daily Telegraph in 2001, Mad Teddy Smith was:

“a psychopathic homosexual rumoured to have had affairs with Ronnie Kray and Tom Driberg, the former Labour MP. He disappeared the day after an argument with the Krays in 1967.”

The Kray Twins – gangsters Ronnie and Reggie – are iconic figures of the 1960s.

They were arrested in 1968, the year after ‘the summer of love’. Their associates included Micky Fawcett and ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith.

When I chatted to Micky Fawcett in June 2013, I mentioned it had been widely reported over the last 40 years that Teddy Smith was killed by the Krays. A very good article in the Daily Mail in August 2010 headlined SEX, LIES, DOWNING STREET AND THE COVER-UP THAT LEFT THE KRAYS FREE TO KILL repeated the story that the Kray Twins had killed him.

“No,” Micky told me in 2013, “I would think he’s in Australia or somewhere like that.”

Micky Fawcett (left) with son Michael Fawcett at The Ritz

I had another chat with Micky Fawcett and his son Michael Fawcett this week.

“When Reggie Kray was on his deathbed,” Micky told me, “he was asked if he had been involved in any unknown-of killings and he couldn’t miss the chance, knowing it was the end, of saying: Well, there was one other… and that was all he said.

“Then Nipper Read (the Scotland Yard detective who arrested The Krays) told the Daily Telegraph: Yes, we know all about it – It was Teddy Smith they killed and they buried him down at Steeple Bay (in Essex).

“But,” Micky told me this week, “there is this bloke who’s very interested in Teddy Smith – he’s got a sort of bee in his bonnet about him – and he had a chat with us and he finished up going to Australia and found Teddy Smith had died from natural causes in 2006.”

“How did he track him down?” I asked.

“We had pictures,” said Micky, “and he went out to Australia. Teddy Smith was quite a character. He used to walk around and he had a little tiny dog and a long cigarette holder.”

Teddy Smith in the 1960s, shortly before he did not die

“Was he gay?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” said Micky. “He considered himself to be a playwright and he did write a play once for the BBC.”

“It was,” said Michael Fawcett, “the first TV play to be broadcast in colour on the BBC. It was called The Top Bunk. Something to do with prisons.”

The Top Bunk was transmitted by BBC TV on 30th October 1967 in their Thirty Minute Theatre series. Teddy was credited as Ted Smith and, according to the BBC synopsis:

“Two old lags who share the same cell have got prison life down to a fine art. They are upset when an outsider, a public school type and a first timer, is made to live with them and bowled over when he reveals a sinister side to his nature, which makes him their natural leader, entitled to the position of prestige – the top bunk.”

“He was put in Broadmoor,” said Micky. “Mad Teddy Smith was. He was certified insane. He used to be very confident.

Micky Fawcett’s book: the title says it all

“I was talking to him one day in the house in Vallance Road (where The Krays lived with their mum) and, as we walked out, he said: Oh, they get on my nerves. They drive me mad – talking about violence all the time. If only people knew what I did to get myself certified and into Broadmoor…”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“I never found out,” sad Micky. “He was an interesting character, though. This gay bloke with this dog and this cigarette holder.

“On another occasion, Ronnie said: Do us a favour, Mick, there’s a fellah called Cholmondley – he was one of Ronnie’s young ‘friends’ – I’m sending Teddy Smith to get hold of him for me. Can you go with Teddy and keep an eye on Teddy for me? So I went with Teddy Smith to Soho. I thought I knew Soho, but Teddy took me to two or three different unlicensed bars above clip joints and whatever.

Francis Bacon, acquaintance of Mad Teddy Smith (Photograph by Jane Bown)

“We went in one and there were all these men in hacking jackets like you’d expect to find at a golf club or somewhere like that. They were obviously all gay and one of them was the painter Francis Bacon, who knew Teddy because that was his sort of style.

“We couldn’t find Cholmondley there, so then we went to The Establishment Club, which was a theatre.”

“Peter Cook’s satire club?” I asked.

“Yeah. Lenny Bruce had been in there. There was a box office with a little grille. Teddy Smith said I just want to go in and have a look for a friend and the fellah said You can’t come in without a ticket.

“So Teddy Smith was getting a bit annoyed and said Could you come round here? I want to have a word with you and I thought Awww… Fuck off, I’m going to get involved in a murder here or something. But a fellah came from behind in a brown smock and with a bit of a black eye and he said: I’m Detective Sergeant Challenor. Can I help you?”

“Woo-hoo!” I said.

“You know about Challenor?” Micky asked me.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Was it Challenor?”

“Yes,” said Micky. “So I was out the door with Teddy Smith as quick as I could. At the time, I was living in fear of Challenor. I didn’t want to cross his path. He would have set me up and I’ve been set up a few times by the Old Bill.”

Richard Attenborough (moustache) was Truscott in Loot film

“Truscott of The Yard,” said Michael Fawcett. “Truscott in Joe Orton’s play Loot was modelled on Challenor.”

“They put him in a mental home,” Micky said to me. “Challenor. You know – Bongo Bongo? He had a war against crime in Soho, going round punching people.”

Challenor was posted to the notoriously corrupt West End Central Police Station in 1962. It policed the Soho area. At one point, Challenor had a record of over 100 arrests in seven months. He eventually totalled 600 arrests and received 18 commendations. He achieved this by using what were, at that time, by no means unusual techniques.

On one occasion, he punched a suspect from Barbados while he (Challenor) sang Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo.

Various people claimed to have been beaten up or to have had evidence planted on them by Challenor, but they were still convicted.

On 11 July 1963, though, he arrested Donald Rooum, a cartoonist for Peace News, who was demonstrating outside Claridge’s Hotel against Queen Frederica of Greece.

Challenor reportedly told Rooum: You’re fucking nicked, my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you? and hit him on the head. Going through Rooum’s possessions, Challenor added a half-brick, saying: There you are, me old darling. Carrying an offensive weapon. You can get two years for that. 

‘Mad’ Harold Challenor – upholder of the law in 1960s Soho

Rooum, a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, handed his clothes to his solicitor for testing. No brick dust or appropriate wear-and-tear were found and Rooum was acquitted, although other people Challenor arrested at the demonstration were still convicted on his evidence.

By the time Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead

“They chucked him out of the police,” said Micky, “and said he’d had a mental breakdown.”

He was sent to Netherne mental hospital in Surrey and was said to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

A total of 26 innocent men were charged during Challenor’s activities. Of these, 13 were imprisoned. On his release from hospital, Challoner worked for the firm of solicitors which had defended him during his trial.

Since then, “doing a Challenor” has become police slang for avoiding punishment and prosecution by retiring sick.

Welcome to the wonderful world of British policing.

… CONTINUED HERE …

The transvestite corrupt police officer + a comic cycling to the Edinburgh Fringe

Martin Soan naked, before his bicycle accident

A couple of days ago, a car knocked comedian Martin Soan off his bicycle in a road just south of Tower Bridge in London. The car did not stop.

I saw Martin last night. He said he was “OK apart from a sore bum. But the bike’s a write-off. Absolute nightmare. Smashed.”

We were at last night’s Sohemian Society meeting.

As soon as Martin walked into the room above the Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, he recognised it as an early alternative comedy venue decades ago: the Guilty Pea.

“The only comedy clubs around then,” Martin told me, “were the Guilty Pea, the Sombrero – which was more of a variety-type place – the Comedy Store, the Earth Exchange and Malcolm Hardee’s Tunnel club. I think the Sombrero opened up before the Comedy Store.”

Last night’s Sohemian Society talk was by Professor Judith Walkowitz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who has written a book about London’s Soho in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s: Nights Out Life in Cosmopolitan London.

She was surprised, perhaps because she is an American, to find out that the Metropolitan Police’s extensive and now well-publicised corruption in the 1950s and 1960s stretched back well before then.

After her talk, conversation turned to an era after the period covered in her book when Sohemian Society organiser Marc brought up the subject of Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor, a former World War II SAS man who became a corrupt transvestite CID officer at the legendarily corrupt West End Central police station in London – the station which covered Soho.

Challenor was the model for Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s play Loot and apparently used to pretend he had to work undercover as an excuse to dress up as a woman when, in fact, everyone knew he was a transvestite and, when he walked into a Soho pub or club in his female ‘disguise’ , everyone immediately recognised him.

This talk of policemen dressing up led Martin Soan to tell me about a police drugs raid on a pub in Portobello Road around 40 years ago, when Martin was an 18-year old plying his then-trade of Punch & Judy man.

“It must have been in the early 1970s,” he said. “I used to go to the pub to build up my courage to do the Punch & Judy show. I was in there at lunchtime, the sun was out and a twelve-man police team came in, supposedly in disguise.

“They were pretending to be painters and decorators, but they were wearing these perfectly-laundered overalls. They looked like they had come straight out of the packet and still had creases where they had been folded. There was no dirt on them – nothing – but they had obviously stood the policemen in a line and got some paint and flicked it onto the overalls.

“They walked into the pub and everyone just said: Uho… It’s the police! and most people who were carrying drugs just walked out of the pub. I think they managed to arrest some poor old bloke who didn’t know what day of the week it was.”

Martin also told me he is thinking of reviving his Greatest Show on Legs act (not the Punch & Judy act but the one involving the infamous naked balloon dance) with Steve Bowditch and Martin Clarke at the Edinburgh Fringe this year – but he has not yet decided.

“It’s the cost,” said Martin. “Going to the Fringe costs a fortune – even the free shows – because you have to pay for accommodation and transport up there. I am thinking of cycling up.”

“Cycling up to Edinburgh from London?” I asked. “That’s 400 miles each way.”

“I have a trailer to pull behind my bike now,” said Martin. “As you know, I have a few props. I’ve got a…”

“Hold on,” I said, “Hasn’t your bike been destroyed?”

“Well yes,” said Martin, “obviously there are a few issues surrounding my biking capacity at the moment, but I have a trailer for it now and I can fit the miniature Irish dancers and the whole show into it, though I couldn’t take my hydraulic lifting chair. So I am thinking of cycling up. I can make it to Norwich.”

“Norwich?” I interrupted. “That’s not on the way to Edinburgh.”

“Well,” Martin explained patiently, “you’re going by car. I’m going by bike, man. I would start off about two weeks before… Make it to Norwich, where I know some people, stay the night… Lincolnshire’s after that and I know someone I can stay with in Lincolnshire… And then I know someone in Hartlepool where I can stay… The major thing is, obviously, on a bike, I can’t do the motorways… And even the country lanes are dangerous on a bike, especially with a trailer behind it…

“But it’s really cool… I would have a lovely, lovely time… Loads of caffs and cake shops and cycling through villages… Not that I’m fond of cakes myself, but I do like a cake shop… I like the tea and they often do a sandwich supplement to their cakes…”

“Oh, that’d be fine, then,” I agreed.