by Paul Howard
Contributing to the general mood of greyness, a thick fog – the infamous ‘pea soup’ – regularly enveloped the city, even bringing the traffic to a standstill. ‘I remember buses being abandoned on Oxford Street because the driver couldn’t see the road six feet in front of him,’ recalled Michael Rainey, a fashion designer who would help define the Sixties look. ‘You’d have to get off and somehow feel your way home.’
In a philosophical sense, the people of the city were similarly uncertain of their bearings. In the days when Britain’s empire had covered one quarter of the planet, London could lay claim to being the capital of the world. In the wake of the Second World War, the country was broke; worse, it had lost its relevance in the wider world. Eclipsed by the United States in respect of its global influence, economically frozen out of the Europe it helped to liberate, and with its colonies falling away one by one, Britannia – and its bomb-scarred capital – was coming to terms with the sad reality that it no longer ruled the waves. ‘It was the whole end of empire thing,’ said David Mlinaric. ‘India went and that was the big one. And then after Suez, you knew that the entire political landscape had changed. I think people’s confidence was pretty bashed up.’
But that was about to be swept away by the coming youth quake. By the time Tara came to live with Dom and Sally, the city was on the cusp of a cultural and social renaissance that would make it once again the focus of the world.
The economic roots of Swinging London were in the late-1950s financial boom that moved Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to inform the people of Britain that they’d never had it so good. From the debris of the past, a new London began to emerge that was different to the one that Time magazine once described as a ‘horizontal city with a skyline dominated by Mary Poppins chimney pots’. Shining steel and glass structures ascended from amongst the charred remnants of Britain’s war with Germany as retail and services began to supersede manufacturing as the main source of employment in the city. And as the topography of the city changed, so too did the lifestyles of its citizenry. The office replaced the factory as the main place of work for a new and aspirant middle class who had money in their pockets and no war to fight.
As Britain dared to dream of a happier and more prosperous future, there was suddenly a new focus on youth. The babies of the Blitz era had become teenagers: a phrase not even recognized a generation earlier, when adolescence was a sort of social purgatory to be endured between childhood and adulthood. Now, they were the architects of the country’s future. Compulsory military service was abolished at the end of 1960, an enormously significant moment in the making of the Sixties. For young men of Tara’s age, it was as if some hideous grey rock face had fallen away, offering them a clearer sight of their life ahead. They no longer had to follow in the footsteps of their fathers; they had the chance to define themselves on their own terms. The young ones – as Cliff Richard sang in his January 1962 paean to youth – didn’t need to be afraid. Unlike their parents, they could afford to have educational and career aspirations – and they had money.
‘At the start of the Sixties, London had this cloak of dullness about it,’ recalled Michael Rainey, one of London’s most famous young groovers, who would go on to dress The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. ‘If you were rich, you went to the 400 Club or you had dinner at the Dorchester. But there wasn’t a whole lot going on for anyone else, especially if you were young. Then the Sixties came along. There were suddenly a lot more young people and they were employed. They could buy records. They could buy clothes. Young people started to think and act independently. There was a huge energy released.’
In the mid to late 1950s, young London trendies with money in their pockets had gravitated towards Soho, to the Italian-style coffee bars that were suddenly springing up like mushrooms overnight. There, teenagers, who were still too young for the pub, could drink tarmacadam-thick espressos, listen to live jazz and show off their new clothes with the studied coolness of Fellini characters. The new vogue for coffee bars and the la dolce vita trend for kicking back and watching the world go by was an important trigger for the lifestyle changes that were coming in the 1960s. And, like so many of the elements that made London suddenly interesting again, its roots were in immigration.
After the war, the Italian government allowed young men to defer their military service until the age of thirty-six, on condition that they could find work abroad. The United States had imposed restrictions on immigration, so London became the destination for a generation of young Italians who didn’t want to put on a uniform and play at being soldiers. They brought with them many of the tastes that became staples of life for London’s youth – pasta, an interest in men’s fashion, and those dainty little cups of steamed coffee that seemed to be so conducive to sitting around and shooting the breeze. In 1953, the first Gaggia espresso machine was imported into London. By the early 1960s, coffee bars were huge business – and even the landed gentry were trying to grab a piece of the action. With money from the Guinness family trust, two of Tara’s half-brothers, Gay and Dominick, opened one in Paddington called the Two Bare Feet. The name came from a line in ‘Star of the County Down’, an Irish ballad that Gay loved. ‘We hired a pastry chef,’ remembered Dominick, ‘and a black singer named Mundo. It was fine until Lucian Freud started to turn up with all of his criminal friends at eleven o’clock at night. They used to start terrible fights. In the end, we had to close it down.’
•
After arriving in London, Tara quickly picked up his friendship with Glen Kidston and joined the scene around Soho, which had become a hub for young, fashion-conscious mods.
The imperative for them was looking sharp – working hard all week to buy nice threads, then spending Saturday afternoon posing in the window of the latest, coolest coffee shop. Glen and his crowd weren’t much into alcohol. They despised the drinkers, Mark Palmer remembered, considering them old hat.
As far as their personal tastes went, they enjoyed rhythm and blues as well as modern jazz, they buzzed around on scooters and they bought their garb from John Stephen on Carnaby Street, once a little-known throughway, which had become a cultish place to shop among the new breed of straight young men who cared about how they looked.
Carnaby Street was an unlikely birthplace for the look that defined the Swinging London man about town. Before the 1960s, the street was a forgettable succession of trade premises, workrooms, a tobacconist and a pub called the Shakespeare. It was situated within easy walking distance of Mayfair, Piccadilly and Soho, close to the London Palladium and the shops of Regent Street and Oxford Street, yet the vast majority of Londoners couldn’t have picked it off a map.
That it became the epicentre of an explosion in men’s fashion that reverberated around the world was down to one man: John Stephen, a gay, former welder’s apprentice from Glasgow, who had arrived in London in 1952 with a James Dean quiff, £13, and a head full of ideas for revolutionizing the way men dressed. He worked in various clothes shops around Soho that specialized in the Continental – meaning Italian – look, and catered to a largely ‘theatrical’, or gay, clientele. With his partner, Bill Franks, he saved up enough money to open his own workshop at 19 Beak Street, at the southern end of Carnaby Street, recognizing the commercial potential in straight, young mods who wanted to wear the kind of clobber their fathers wouldn’t have been seen dead in.
His plan was to become a supplier to several of the shops where he’d worked, but one day in 1957, while he was out at lunch, an electric heater set fire to some curtains and his workroom was destroyed. The landlord offered him alternative premises at number 5 Carnaby Street, a ground-floor unit with the advantage of having a giant window in which to display his wares and the opportunity to retail them himself. The only drawback was that few people ever walked past. That didn’t remain a problem for long. Very quickly, all of London’s young Vespa-riding dudes were seeking out his shop, His Clothes.
Stephen’s outré fashion sense and his impeccable eye
for cut and detail made his jackets, shirts and trousers must-have items among the wannabe ‘faces’ of late 1950s and early 1960s London. He and Franks used the money they made to lease even more unit space on the street, using the windows to showcase the new styles they turned out on a weekly, even daily, basis. Shirts in pink and lilac. Moccasin shoes. Brightly coloured denim hipsters. Reefer jackets. Yachting caps. Towelling shirts. Roll-neck sweaters. Sky-blue Italian jeans. Horizontally striped matelot T-shirts. Elephant-cord trousers. Mohair sweaters, fashioned from a rug – when they sold one to Cliff Richard, they couldn’t deal with the sudden demand.
Meanwhile, further west in what was once regarded as the sleepy, riverside village of Chelsea, something very similar was happening in women’s fashion. The bellwether for this revolution was John Stephen’s friend Mary Quant, the daughter of two schoolteachers, who invented a way of dressing that defined what it was to be a cool and carefree young woman at the dawn of the beat boom.
Quant was married to Alexander Plunkett-Greene, a blue-blooded, pyjamas-in-public-wearing eccentric, whom she met while they were studying at Goldsmith’s College of Art in southeast London. The couple became part of a circle of rich and restless creative types living out an extended art school adolescence in and around the King’s Road. The so-called Chelsea Set was a down-the-generations echo of the Bright Young People: artistic, bohemian rich kids who were just as determinedly silly as their forebears and similarly inclined towards outrageous, headline-grabbing stunts.
The window of Bazaar, Quant’s Chelsea boutique, became a sort of exhibition space for her latest twist on fashion, with rubberneckers gathering three deep on the pavement outside for the opportunity to be shocked. She did things that were truly subversive, refashioning children’s clothes, even men’s underwear, into clothes for women that were interesting to look at and easy to wear.
Before long, she was flogging her designs as quickly as she could run them up. In early 1962 she received her first order from J. C. Penney, the US retail behemoth. At twenty-eight, the career and reputation of the woman who would go on to create the most iconic fashion symbol of the decade – the miniskirt – was about to go global.
London hadn’t yet started to swing, but a revolution in taste and style was being cooked up in quiet corners of the city in those early months of 1962. Musically, Londoners were still moving to an American beat. The British pop charts were still dominated by acts like Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka and Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, or English knock-offs, like Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and Adam Faith. Musically, it still felt like the 1950s. But that was about to change. While Quant and Stephen were busy setting what would become the aesthetic template for the Sixties, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor, three members of a teenage garage band that played American rhythm and blues covers, crossed the city from Dartford to take in a gig at the Ealing Jazz Club. While they were there, they watched a young man from Cheltenham who called himself Elmo Lewis play slide guitar. Blown away by his version of Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’, they stuck around afterwards to say hello. Elmo’s real name, it turned out, was Brian Jones and he had plans to form his own band. He said he would consider letting them join.
Around the same time, two hundred miles up the M6, the four members of the rock and roll and skiffle band formerly known as The Quarrymen were about to receive some bad news. Following an audition in West Hampstead on New Year’s Day, Decca Records had decided to pass on The Beatles. ‘Guitar groups are on the way out,’ Dick Rowe, the head of A&R at the label, reportedly told Brian Epstein, the twenty-seven-year-old record-shop manager who was stewarding their career. Shattered, Epstein left Rowe’s office in London for the return train to Lime Street station, to consider his next move for John, Paul, George and the soon-to-depart Pete.
Meanwhile, James Bond, a fictional secret-service agent created by Ian Fleming, the foreign editor of the Sunday Times, was about to enjoy his big-screen debut in Dr No, the first of a series of movies that would establish a new ideal of heroism for Britons still coming to terms with their place on the margins of the new geopolitical order.
It wouldn’t have been evident, even to the most intuitive social observer, but all of the elements of Swinging London were about to come together, with music, fashion and 007 – no scruff himself – setting the new cultural agenda.
•
While young mods weren’t big drinkers, their poison, other than espresso, was speed, usually in the form of Purple Hearts or Black Bombers, which were not only legal but unavoidable once you graduated from the coffee shops to the nightclub scene on Wardour Street. Soho’s clubs, which had once hosted live jazz acts and even swing bands, were suddenly vibrating to the new American R&B sound that allowed smartly dressed young dudes like Tara to get their groove on without the hindrance of a dance partner.
Wardour Street had the Flamingo and La Discotheque. In Ham Yard, there was Scene, which was run by Ronan O’Rahilly, the young Irish music entrepreneur, who was in the process of setting up the offshore pirate station Radio Caroline. But most famous of all was the Marquee, a giant, cavernous space below a cinema on Oxford Street, which would help make the careers of some of the best-known bands of the era.
Dance floors began to feature mirrored glass, so that all the wired-up, smartly dressed peacocks could check themselves out while they performed the Shake, the Block and the Mashed Potato, not to mention the dance that was sending Britain’s vicars into a tizzy in the spring of 1962. They called it the Twist.
The music newspaper Melody Maker had carried a feature about the new American dance at the end of 1961, describing, in dry language, its sexually suggestive component parts of rotating hips and pelvic thrusts. The article was headlined ‘The Most Vulgar Dance Invented’, and it wasn’t long before it was being denounced from church pulpits as an affront to common decency, a righteousness that seems almost comical now in view of what the rest of the decade had in store.
As with most things that were new and carried a whiff of danger, Tara got there way ahead of the crowd. He’d discovered Chubby Checker in Paris almost two years earlier, when ‘The Twist’ was among a box of new releases he’d ordered from America. Now, as the nightclub scene took off, there were umpteen songs inspired by the new dance craze. Sam Cooke was twisting the night away, The Isley Brothers were twisting and shouting and Chubby Checker was twisting again like he did last summer.
When he returned to Ireland for Easter week in 1962, Tara’s mother had a surprise for him. ‘She flew this chap over from New York,’ remembered Nicholas Gormanston, who had joined Tara’s Soho circle. ‘He may have been involved with Chubby Checker’s band, actually. There was certainly some connection between them. And he was hired to teach Tara the Twist.’
The instructor outstayed his welcome at Luggala, however, breaking the house rule that guests must never be boring. ‘He was a frightful man,’ Nicholas recalled. ‘A bunch of us went for a climb to the top of the Fancy, which is the steep mountain that overlooks the lake at Luggala. He tagged along with us. We were coming down the rocky way and the chap said, “I can’t go down that way. If I broke my ankle, I’d be out of business.” In other words, no more twisting. Tara, who’d probably learned everything he needed from him at that stage, said, “Sorry, old chap,” and he left him there! He had a wicked sense of humour, like his mother. The poor man’s probably still up there to this day!’
Miguel was about to present his second Maison Ferreras collection to a largely uninterested fashion world. The business was losing money at a rapid rate and his marriage to Oonagh was becoming even more tempestuous. Oonagh wanted Tara to come back to Paris with them, but he was happy living with his father – for all he and Dom saw of each other.
Tara, still only sixteen, had thrown himself into London life like a sailor on furlough. The city suddenly seemed more vibrant and ‘happening’ than existentialist Paris.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, London had seen a mass wave o
f immigration from the English-speaking Caribbean, especially Jamaica, as the country struggled with a labour shortage in its effort to rebuild its bomb-damaged cities. These new immigrants drove buses. They helped build the new lines on the London Underground. And they brought their music with them.
‘There was a club called the Roaring Twenties,’ Nicholas remembered, ‘where Tara and I heard Jamaican music for the first time – not Reggae, which hadn’t even been invented yet. This was Ska. It was in a huge basement in Carnaby Street. The DJ was called Count Suckle, a great big black guy.’
This wasn’t the London that Tara discovered in the company of his mother: shopping in Harrods of Knightsbridge, watching the coronation of a young queen from the window of Selfridges, or taking tea at Claridge’s with one of Oonagh’s titled friends and perhaps a debutante daughter or two. He was now at the centre of a new and exciting adult world.
It was Glen who introduced him to Michael Beeby, a popular ‘face’ around both Chelsea and Soho, known for his sense of style, wideboy charm and Sam Weller repartee. Enlivening and entertaining company, Michael was also impossibly cool, impeccably dressed and was driving around London in a red Mini long before it became part of the popular iconography of the times. ‘He was a mix of French and American cool in the way he dressed and presented himself,’ remembered Nicholas Gormanston. ‘There were a lot of people like him around at that time: they took most of their imagery from films.’
Michael became Tara’s newest best friend.
•
Like many teenagers in Britain, Tara was enjoying every minute of his new-found independence. And he was navigating his way around London in his very first motor car. On 4 March 1962, the day he turned seventeen, he had his own set of wheels: a red, two-door Alfa Romeo Giuletta Sprint, a birthday present from his mother. He collected it from a garage near the Cumberland Hotel. Oonagh, who was in London for a week, took a photograph of him sitting proudly on the bonnet, in a grey duffle coat, smoking a cigarette, in the bitter cold of the garage courtyard. Glen, who was with them when they picked it up, said Oonagh had no idea of the power of the car she’d placed in the hands of her teenage son.
