London Calling (41 page)

They rapidly expanded their activities to include underage runaways, advice on abortion, homelessness and squatting, and other
types of legal aid, and Princedale Road quickly became a drop-in centre, always crowded with people waiting to see Caroline
or Rufus. Caroline described it as ‘the underground with office hours’ but in fact she probably devoted twice as much time
to the job as most office workers, spending all day on the phone to lawyers and court officials as well as trying to raise
money in the evenings. The cases were handled by six volunteer lawyers, paid by Legal Aid. UFO and Middle Earth gave part
of their profits to Release. Jeff Dexter, who ran Implosion, gave them sixpence on every ticket sold. There were benefit concerts
but large ones were difficult to organize because of establishment hatred of hippies. The Royal Albert Hall, for instance,
refused to let them hire the hall for a benefit as ‘not being an organization with which we wish to deal’. Fortunately some
of the wealthier members of the underground scene contributed: George Harrison gave £5,000 in 1969 after Release helped him
with his drug bust, enough for them to expand their offices.

The drug squad took to dropping into the office, unannounced, which meant that Release had to stick firmly to the office ‘no
drugs’ rule, which caused some more extreme members of the underground to criticize them. Rufus became very good at befriending
the police and rapidly steering them out of the office and into a nearby pub. It was in this way he received advance notice
of a planned late-night raid on Release, presumably intended to seize their paperwork. Rufus and a solicitor camped out in
the office overnight and when the police arrived he calmly announced ‘no need to break down the door, officers,’ and showed
them amiably around the office.

By 1969 Release was taking fifty to sixty cases to court each month and had processed 2,000 cases in the previous eighteen
months. In Britain, 17 per cent of first-time cannabis offenders were being sent to prison, but none of those assisted by
Release received jail terms. Of the other cases they represented, only 10 per cent received custodial sentences, compared
to a national average of 26 per cent. It paid to call Release.

Ufo was followed by Middle Earth, at 43 King Street, in Covent Garden market, a straight commercial operation but one where
the businessmen backers stayed very much in the background. Dave Howson, who had co-organized the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream
with Hoppy, was the front-man manager. They made a point of booking the right underground groups and contributing to Release
and other underground causes. It never had quite the full flavour of UFO, largely because it was never able to become the
social centre of the underground, but it was all there was. But then, on 3 March 1968, the drugs squad launched one of their
biggest raids ever against the underground. One hundred and fifty police swarmed into Middle Earth, at 2 a.m., just as Tom
Pickard’s group King Ida’s Watch Chain were playing. The music stopped, the lights went up, and the police took more than
five hours to search 750 or more people. The cost must have been enormous but they only made eleven arrests, seven for drugs
and three for ‘offensive weapons’. The Arts Lab organized emergency accommodation with Jack Moore’s 25-strong Human Family
theatre company acting as runners between Bow Street police station, Middle Earth, and the Arts Lab where over 200 people
finished up, some of them badly shaken by the experience.
IT
reported: ‘Whatever else, the Middle Earth raid provided an opportunity for the community to work together and come together
in the spirit of love.’
¹¹

The rise of the underground press had been a gift to the obscene-publications squad; it gave them a number of easy targets,
whereas previously they had to cover up their partnership with the Soho pornography dealers by staging a series of raids on
art exhibitions and bookshops which stocked literature with sexual content (Henry Miller, Burroughs, etc.). In retrospect,
the two most amusing raids were on the work of Aubrey Beardsley and Jim Dine.

In August 1966 a vanload of police crammed into a greetings card shop on Regent Street and seized all the Aubrey Beardsley
postcards they could find.
¹²
In vain the shop manager explained that the very same images were on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Either to
go along with the farce, or because he was genuinely astonished by the assertion, the Metropolitan
police commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson, marched into the V&A without giving advance notice to the directors, in order to
inspect the exhibition himself. It was this highly praised exhibition that had launched the sixties ‘Beardsley craze’ that
put his delicate black and white images on student walls across the country and profoundly influenced poster artists such
as Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. Naturally there was a public outcry at a police ‘raid’ on a national public institution
and the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, had to placate outraged MPs and the media, while the Director of Public Prosecutions
made the police return the seized postcards to the shop immediately.

But the police didn’t learn and on 20 September 1966 Inspector Bill Moody and his men raided the Robert Fraser Gallery on
Duke Street, Mayfair, and seized twenty-one drawings by Jim Dine which showed male and female genitals (in fact some were
abstract). Though they raided with an Obscene Publications Act warrant, Fraser was charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1838,
designed to prevent war veterans from displaying their wounds in public to collect money. This way the police were able to
avoid being embarrassed in court by expert witnesses attesting to their artistic value as none were permitted for this offence.
A policeman claimed that he had been offended because, on looking through the gallery window, he was able to see the word
‘cunt’ used in a collage. Robert, true to form, informed the magistrate that he ‘didn’t give a damn for the opinion of some
tuppenny-ha’penny policeman’, and on 28 November 1966 he was found guilty at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court of staging
an ‘indecent exhibition’ at his Duke Street art gallery and fined £20 and 50 guineas costs. The magistrate was particularly
concerned that some of the organs were somewhat larger than life-size. Robert scribbled a cheque and tossed it on the table.
The police carefully noted his details for later.

Once more MPs and the press were outraged; this time the artist’s work was hanging in the Tate, which officers had visited
after the raid. The Minister for the Arts, Jennie Lee, wrote to the Home Secretary expressing her dismay, asking: ‘Can I be
sure that no policeman, plain-clothes or uniformed, will again set up as an expert on works of art?’ Lord Goodman, chairman
of the Arts Council and Harold Wilson’s private lawyer, asked:

Can there be any argument at all for a police officer invading a national collection such as the Tate? Surely here simple
instructions could be given to the police that with accredited national collections – they could be given a list of them –
they simply do not visit them to inspect alleged pornographic portraits.

If the director of the gallery is exhibiting pornography and not art, his trustees can be expected to deal with him and not
the police.
¹³

Jenkins was embarrassed and said that he had already told them to ‘steer clear of borderline cases in the arts and instead
concern themselves wholly in enforcing the law on hard-core pornography’.

It was apparently the raid on
International Times
that finally set Roy Jenkins against Scotland Yard’s ‘dirty squad’. Jenkins had no firm opinion about
IT
itself, and didn’t seem to mind the crude police attempt to close the paper down. What concerned him was that they had also
simultaneously raided Indica Books and seized William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
, a book that the Attorney General had already cleared on ‘literary merit’ in a 1965 ruling that it was ‘reckoned to be obscene
but to have literary merit’ under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act; an act that Jenkins himself had spent considerable effort
to place on the statute book. The Labour MP Tom Driberg wrote to Jenkins in his usual laconic way to say:

I am a bit worried about the recent police raid on the offices of
International Times
. As is usual when the police of any country take any sort of action against works of art or literature, their selection of
books to remove seems to have been a fairly silly and random one. They took, for instance, a book called
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer
. I do not happen to know this book, but I am told it is not pornographic at all! They also took copies of
The Naked Lunch
. I hope this does not mean there is any question of action against this book or its publishers.
¹⁴

The dirty squad’s Detective Sergeant Terry Beale had reported: ‘All these books are, in my opinion, grossly obscene.’

A note exists in the Home Office files written by one of his aides:

It seems to him [the Home Secretary] a matter for deep concern that officers of the obscene publications office should think
fit to seize copies of
The Naked Lunch
without apparently being aware that this book is by a serious author; that it has been on sale in reputable bookshops in
this country for a number of years; and that it has been respectfully reviewed in serious journals and newspapers; and that
a decision was taken some time ago by the director [of public prosecutions] not to proceed against it.

This incident reinforces the home secretary’s view that the officers in the Metropolitan police, as unfortunately in some
other forces also, concerned with this sort of work are not sufficiently well chosen; and he is particularly
disturbed that this incident should have occurred after the assurances he was given following the Beardsley seizure.
¹⁵

There were heated exchanges between the Home Secretary and the commissioner of Scotland Yard over the competence of the dirty
books squad which resulted in the material seized from
IT
being returned with no charges brought against the paper. At lunchtime on Friday, 9 June 1967, a botched attempt was made
to deliver the material. Detective Beale objected to the presence of press photographers and eventually decided to drive off.
Jack Henry Moore,
IT
’s new editor, jumped in the back of the truck, protesting that this material was ours and had to be delivered. A struggle
ensured in which Jack was pushed out of the moving van. He called Scotland Yard to protest, but they, of course, knew nothing.
The files and back issues were eventually delivered on the 14th but with ill-concealed hostility on Beale’s part. But the
raid had alerted the squad to a whole new arena to use as a smokescreen, and from then on they became avid readers of both
IT
and
Oz
.

The dirty squad was then a unit within the CID’s central office, known as C1, and getting into it was essentially the gift
of the C1 commander or the superintendent leading the squad. According to Martin Short, membership of the Freemasons was a
prerequisite.
¹⁶
From 1964 until 1972 it was led by Detective Superintendent Bill Moody, who, in a move worthy of the East German Stasi, was
appointed to head the biggest ever investigation into police corruption while it was well known, on the street at least, that
he was collecting enormous bribes from the pornographic bookshops in Soho to allow them to stay in business. In 1977, at the
police corruption trials at the Old Bailey, he was convicted of conspiring to make money from pornographers over an eight-year
period. He was shown to have been collecting about £40,000 a year in bribes for a number of years. One sample charge involved
a one-off payment of £14,000. These were enormous sums at a time when the average wage was about £1,000 a year. He was jailed
for twelve years. Five other members of the dirty squad went down for between five and ten years. In 1972 the newly appointed
Sir Robert Mark set up an anti-corruption squad called A10 and over a five-year period forced the resignation or dismissal
of almost 500 officers, as well as bringing many of the most corrupt ringleaders to trial. The three Old Bailey trials of
1977 resulted in two commanders, one chief superintendent and five inspectors being sent to prison. One of the top bent cops
was Commander Wally Vigo, head of the serious crimes squad, who was jailed for twelve years for corruption
but not only managed to keep the proceeds but was freed not long after on a ‘technicality’.

These were the men who the underground had to deal with, and it was not pleasant. Detective Sergeant Peter Fisher, for instance,
who himself did time, apologetically told the staff of
IT
that ‘I’d rather be out catching the real villains’ as he raided
IT
’s offices in April 1969 and carried away all their gay small ads.
¹⁷
This piece of harassment resulted in a long stressful court case that led ultimately to the House of Lords. Though being
gay was now legal, Graham Keen, Peter Stansill and David Hall were charged with conspiring:

to induce readers… to meet those persons inserting such advertisements for the purpose of sexual practices taking place between
male persons and to encourage readers thereof to indulge in such practices, with intent thereby to debauch and corrupt the
morals as well of youth as of divers other liege subjects of Our Lady the Queen.
¹⁸

The police added a count of ‘conspiring to outrage public decency by inserting advertisements containing lewd, disgusting
and offensive matter’ in case they wanted to plead guilty to a lesser charge. Conspiracy carried a possible life sentence.
The straight press, as usual, distanced themselves from
IT
. It was to be expected; that was what being underground meant: not playing the establishment’s stupid games. The gay community,
however, rallied round. David Hockney told Peter Stansill to go to the Kasmin Gallery, where one of his paintings would be
waiting for him. He should then give it back to the gallery, who would pay him a large, already agreed sum as Hockney’s contribution
to the bust fund. No-one had realized that even though it was legal to be homosexual now, it was still regarded as ‘disgusting
and offensive’ in law, and therefore illegal to even run a small ad service to allow gays to contact each other.