Albion Dreaming (16 page)

Far from 1950s Britain being a psychedelic wasteland, a variety of mind-expanding drugs was available if you knew the right people.

Cunliffe had been aware of LSD use in London for some years but was under the impression that the drug was fake or exceptionally weak. Rather than LSD, mescaline with its longer pedigree and body of literature was the holy grail of mind-expanding drugs at the time. Nevertheless, LSD was accessible, science fantasy author Michael Moorcock recalling that it was available as early as 1956, with a doctor’s script, from London pharmacists John Bell & Croyden. Liberty cap mushroom,
Psilocybe semilanceata
, was also widely used, ingested as a tea or in the form of a chewy sweet. Unlike LSD and mescaline, psilocybin was freely available in the countryside during early autumn. Cunliffe writes, “After a time, those in the know went on weekend nature walks and parts of idyllic pastoral Fifties Britain often resembled Seventies hippie festival sites.” This, anecdotally at least, locates the genesis of recreational use of LSD and other psychedelics in Britain in the period 1956–59.
³

There was little media or public sensationalism surrounding illegal drug use in this era. What interest there was from the fourth estate revolved around the barely concealed racist notion that West Indians and other non-whites were corrupting Britain’s youth with cannabis or heroin. The possibility that young
white people were, of their own volition, seeking the intense, psychedelic, experience offered by mushrooms, mescaline or LSD had not yet been dreamed of in Fleet Street’s tobacco and alcohol suffused editorial meetings.

On a winter’s day in late 1959, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Cunliffe made a delivery to Samuel Thomas, a jazz trumpeter living in London’s Notting Hill district. Thomas opened the package in front of Cunliffe, revealing small squares of blotting paper. “Grade A acid,” he purred, suggesting Cunliffe try one. Wary at first and mindful of Thomas’ reputation as a notorious conman Cunliffe hesitated briefly but, ‘... the mind manifesting lure was too great, and I greedily swallowed the diminutive blotter. It was truly a cosmic eruption ... This was the real thing. Conversion and evangelism would soon follow.”
⁴

Although Cunliffe and others had limited access to LSD at this point in the late 1950s, the drug was of variable quality and its usage was largely confined to the jazz and beatnik scenes. A distinct LSD subculture was yet to form and for this to take shape a central figure was necessary. This catalyst appeared in the form of a drug user who, perversely, preferred the dreamy certainties of opiate-based drugs to the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelics.

Several people have described Alex Trocchi as a monster. Indeed, Andrew Murray Scot’s biography of Trocchi is subtitled
The Making of the Monster
, and few have anything good to say about him. One memory of Trocchi from the 1950s paints him as being, “... extraordinarily magnetic, some would say manipulative – able to get what he wanted out of people. He was very charming, but with a hint of danger.”
⁵
Trocchi’s early promise as a poet had ebbed in the wake of a failed relationship and the end of the 1950s saw him addicted to heroin, often injecting in public, eventually fleeing America as a wanted man for supplying the drug to a minor. In 1959, during his American sojourn, Trocchi encountered LSD in Los Angeles, where he took it under the guidance of Dr. Oscar Janiger, one of the early American psychedelic pioneers.

In 1962, after several years in Paris, America and Scotland, Trocchi settled in London’s Notting Hill Gate. There he held court to a shifting population of counter culture heroes such as William
Burroughs and many of those who would become influential in the British hippie underground. One such visitor to Trocchi’s flat was Brian Barritt, a young artist and heroin user. Barritt was no stranger to opiates, amphetamines and cannabis and equally experienced with the effects of the psychedelic compounds present in Mexican cacti and morning glory seeds. He was keen to try any drug he believed would expand his mind. But for all his experience, Barritt admits he had “no precedent for acid”. His opportunity to try the drug came when Trocchi gave him twelve 250 μg doses of LSD in exchange for some ink drawings. The LSD had been sent by Michael Hollingshead from the USA and was in liquid form. Just one 250 μg dose would have provided a mind shattering psychedelic experience but Barritt decided to split the entire twelve doses between him and his girlfriend Paula; 1500 μg each. Rather than take the drug orally Barritt opted to inject the LSD.

The effect was instantaneous. “We leaned back, pressed the plungers and were out of our heads, out of north London, out of the known universe, almost before the needles were out of our arms.”
⁶

It’s impossible to adequately describe the effects of such a powerful dose of LSD and Barritt’s eloquent account in his aptly named autobiography
The Road of Excess
, only hints at what went through his mind for the next twelve hours: “... the Devil (Pan) is projected onto the bedroom wall. A huge, hair covered man-face with the corners of its mouth turned up in a lecherous satyr smile. On each side of his head, where his horns should have been, are his hind legs, all glossy with fur, as his hooves kick they draw up the corners of his mouth with each shudder so that the whole face spasms in continuous orgasm. His eyes are glowing and terrible with wisdom, but what sends my spirit soaring is not only his tremendous lust and vitality, but the gigantic humour that seethes about him. The universe was literally shaking with mirth, the earth was part of a vast Cosmic Joke – and all I had to do was to see the funny side of it! The terror of the vision suddenly shooting out at me as I opened the bedroom door had startled me nearly into panic but now I could see that it was just the joy of existence to which he was dancing, his fear inspiring mien was just the knowledge
and acceptance of the mixture of awfulness and wonder that is the human condition.”
⁷

Fortunately Barritt’s mind set was untainted by later media propaganda about the possible dangers of LSD and he clung to the belief that whatever was happening he had taken a drug the effects of which would eventually wear off. But LSD was radically different to the other drugs Barritt was acquainted with. LSD could effect permanent change in the personalities of those who took it and as he began to descend down from the peak of the experience he realised: “This LSD was serious stuff, it could change the world, and it was the key to the inner self.”

If his words sound like those of a religious convert that is the closest analogy to the experience he had undergone. Barritt amplified the numinousity of his experience when he wrote, “The Psychedelic Goddess had chosen to manifest Her divine presence on this planet and I was one of the channels She had chosen.”

Like Cunliffe, Barritt became an evangelist for LSD and set about spreading the word, seeing “... acid trickling through the veins of all London, changing those who wanted change ...” He distributed hundreds of doses and his customers came back for more, amazed at LSD’s effects and the experiences and insights it gave them. Barritt had become an LSD dealer and was buying large quantities of liquid LSD from Trocchi, who was obtaining his supplies by post from Michael Hollingshead. The LSD had to be broken down into manageable doses and Barritt found the easiest method of preparing it for distribution was to drop it onto sugar cubes. He soon discovered that LSD could be absorbed through the skin when the Tate & Lyle logo, a figure with a sugar cube for its body, leapt out at him from the box and started to dance! As with so many others who took strong doses of LSD, Barritt found that the drug raised questions about the nature of personal identity and consensus reality. This interest led him to explore other techniques of consciousness expansion, such as yoga, and he also immersed himself in magic and mysticism focusing on the works of English magician Aleister Crowley, a keen user of mescaline in the 1920s.

Barritt believes that Trocchi was crucial to the early LSD subculture in Britain. Although not a frequent user of the drug,
Trocchi was one of the first major importers and his flat became a focus for those wanting to buy, use or discuss the amazing new substance. Through this psychedelic salon Trocchi provided a fertile breeding ground for LSD users and the genesis of a London LSD scene.

While the beatniks and embryonic hippies were revelling in the wonders of the universe viewed through a psychedelic lens, others were also coming into contact with the drug, albeit sometimes unintentionally. A 1962 dinner party attended by Conservative peer Lady Lane-Fox turned out to be an unusual experience when she unwittingly ate food that had been spiked with LSD. Twenty-one years later, in 1983, she called on the Government during parliamentary Question Time to warn the public of the dangers of the drug. Yet the account she gave of her LSD experience wasn’t entirely negative: “The trip I went on was quite amazing, an incredible sensation. I felt I could do anything in the world and of course that is the danger because you want to repeat the experience ... I had been invited to dinner but unbeknown to me the drugs had been put in mandarin oranges. I ate them and immediately felt a million dollars.”
⁸

Because LSD was still legal, the medical profession could obtain it without question. This ease of access led to an interesting statement at an inquest in February 1963 during which the Coroner revealed that Willesden’s Medical Officer for Health, Dr. Samuel Leff listed “... swimming and intermittently to take LSD” as being among his hobbies. Leff’s friend, Dr. Leonard Henry, told the inquest, “Three years ago he asked me to supervise him having LSD, and hypnotise him so that we could study the effects, which I did.” Leff had drowned and the Coroner strongly suspected this was because he was under the influence of LSD at the time, having also mistakenly injected himself with his wife’s insulin. The Coroner returned an open verdict. Clearly the LSD cat was well and truly out of the bag and the substance was spreading slowly through London, permeating society at all levels.
⁹

Trocchi’s influence in kick-starting the British LSD subculture of the 1960s was immense. But the influential driving force behind him, and the link to the evolved psychedelic philosophies of
Leary, Metzner and Alpert was Michael Hollingshead, still with Leary in the USA. Hollingshead’s relationship with Timothy Leary had soured over a variety of issues; Hollingshead’s propensity for control and allegations that he had tried to blackmail Richard Alpert were among them. Leary and a hard core of psychedelic idealists had flown to Mexico to start a utopian community based on the model outlined in Aldous Huxley’s novel
Island
. Hollingshead and his girlfriend Karen decanted to Jamaica where they spent several months living another kind of island life in a beach house in the grounds of Kingston’s Copacabana Club. There they swam, walked and communed with nature. But true to his nature, Hollingshead wasn’t satisfied and was soon yearning for London again. Tapping into his list of wealthy contacts he wrote to the world famous psychic Eileen Garret who immediately sent him a first class plane ticket to France where he spent several days as her guest. Hollingshead must have impressed the psychic because she then gave him a cheque for $3000, a considerable sum in 1962, on the proviso he wrote her a report on the Harvard-Concord prison project.

By early November 1962 Hollingshead, once again in possession of funds, was back in London, staying briefly at a flat in Brompton Square. Towards the end of November he moved to Pinefield near Battle in Sussex where he rented an old, rambling house. His description of his new home to Leary could have come straight from the pages of a H.E. Bates novel: “My dear Timothy, there is a village in South England remote from civilisation; an unvisited oasis, a symbol of what some say is reserved for the soul – a group of elms, a little turn of the parson’s wall, a small paddock beyond the graveyard close, tended by one man, with a low wall of very old stone guarding it all round, a pub, a cricket green where the scent of grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to this unvisited land.”

Perhaps Hollingshead was hoping this sentimental amplification of the English archetype which he had already foisted on Leary’s circle would soften their feelings towards him. From his rural idyll Hollingshead wrote Leary a series of letters in which he essentially tried to lull him into taking him back into his confidence. Of their
breakdown in communication and trust Hollingshead wrote, with typical spin: “May we not now look upon all of this as a spiritual exercise – I know that I would personally prefer to forget all about it and return to the friendlier, more colourful and positive status anti-quo.”
¹⁰

The purpose of Hollingshead’s return to England remains unclear. But he did everything for a reason and one odd incident which took place in 1963 has his fingerprints on it.

Maverick psychoanalyst Ronnie Laing first took LSD in 1960 becoming, by 1967, a key figure in Britain’s LSD subculture. In the spring of 1963 however both he and his interest in psychedelic drugs were barely known. Laing had visited America in 1962, but had not yet encountered Timothy Leary or his circle of psychedelic initiates. His stance on LSD was diametrically opposed to Leary’s, and unlike the former Harvard professor Laing did not believe LSD should be available for everyone. Yet someone desperately wanted to link Laing and Leary, as this extract from Laing’s unpublished autobiography indicates. Referring to the aftermath of his trip to America Laing writes of a mysterious visitor to his Granville Road flat: “A few months later one of the self-appointed generalissimo-guru-high-priests of the acid revolution came over to see me. They were thinking of doing a similar experiment in London, but since this was my territory, if I said ‘No’, that would be the end of it no argument without question and if I said yes then it would be on. What would be on was this. A number of people had arranged to distribute 300,000 × 304 μg units of acid (one serious trip) in the form of pills to the 17–20 year olds especially in chosen sections of the Berkley-Bay area. Could such a collective clarification of consciousness all at once all in the same territory possibly be a spark which might spread like wildfire once lit? ... it was really changing America – how about it here? I said ‘No’ and that was the end of it.”
¹¹