My post ‘I Spit On Your Grave’ mentioned Penelope Gilliatt, the film critic for ‘the Observer’ who married the neurologist Roger Gilliatt in 1954. Roger Gilliatt was a close friend of Lord Snowdon, Ma’am Darling’s husband and Gilliatt was best man at their wedding. Snowdon lived in Belgravia but his grandfather Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones was a Top Doc from Gwynedd who kept a country house near Caerrnarfon, where Snowdon – and while they were together Ma’am Darling – used to stay. See previous posts. Snowdon’s requirements for class A drugs and sex workers were met in London and, when he was in north Wales, by Dafydd and Gwynne’s gang. Gwynne was always on hand to lobotomise anyone who complained too loudly about Snowdon and the other celeb clients of the gang, including Bertrand Russell.
Gwynne and Dafydd were rendered particularly bombproof as a result of Roger’s dad being Sir William Gilliatt, the Royal Top Doc who delivered Carlo and Princess Anne. Sir William worked at the Middlesex Hospital while Gwynne the lobotomist was a medical student there. Roger Gilliatt trained at the Middlesex, but was a bit younger than Gwynn; he added to the protection afforded to Gwynne and Dafydd by the Middlesex network. Roger Gilliatt became a very well-known and influential neurologist – from what I can work out as a result of his social position rather than ability – and was in an excellent position to protect Gwynne the lobotomist. See previous posts eg. ‘Error of Judgement?’ for info on the Drs Gilliatt.
Penelope Gilliatt (born Penelope Ann Douglass Conner; 25 March 1932-9 May 1993) was one of the main film critics for ‘The New Yorker’ in the late 1960s and 1970s and spent many of those years living in the US. Gilliatt began her work as a film and theatre critic with ‘The Observer’ for which she wrote numerous reviews between 1961 and 1967; Penelope and Roger were divorced in 1961.
It was in 1967 that Gilliatt began a column in ‘The New Yorker’ in which she alternated for six month intervals with Pauline Kael as that publication’s chief film critic. Penelope Gilliatt prided herself on knowing actors and directors personally. Gilliatt wrote profiles on many directors; her favourite directors included Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel, Jeanne Moreau and Woody Allen.
Gilliatt’s career as a film critic for The New Yorker ended in 1979, after it was determined that a profile that she had written of Graham Greene contained unattributed passages. The fact-checker had warned Editor William Shawn – a close friend of Gilliatt’s – of the plagiarism, but Shawn published the article anyway. Greene stated that Gilliatt’s ‘profile’ of him was “inaccurate” and the product of a “rather wild imagination.” Gilliatt continued to publish fiction in ‘The New Yorker’ although she no longer wrote film criticism for the publication.
Gilliatt wrote short stories, novels, non-fiction books and screenplays as well as film criticism. Most notably, she wrote the screenplay for ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (1971), ‘an accepting treatment of homosexuality’, while her ex-husband protected Gwynne and Dafydd, who were running a trafficking gang specialising in supplying boys for adult male paedophiles and at the same time subjecting adult consenting gay men to ‘aversion therapy’ as well as destroying people’s lives in a number of other ways.
Penelope Gilliatt won several Best Screenplay awards for ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Writers Guild of America and Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA.
Penelope wrote an introduction to the 1971 US publication of the script of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ which contained a few gems of interest. She explained that in the late 1960s she was asked to write a script for the film director John Schlesinger and the man who produced Schlesinger’s films, Joe Janni. Penelope stated that ‘the offer came through my indispensable young English agent, Clive Goodwin, when I was film critic of ‘The Observer’. Penelope and Clive – who was Penelope’s friend as well as her agent – subsequently drove down to Dorset to stay with Schlesinger, where he was shooting ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’.
John Schlesinger is discussed in my post ‘Oliver’s Army’. He was the son of Top Doc Bernard Schlesinger, who was one of the Top Docs practising in London when a whole group of Top Docs, particularly psychiatrists, paediatricians and obstetricians, were facilitating the abuse of children and young people. Not only that, but some of them were treating their junior colleagues appallingly as well. They abused their positions in every way. Bernard Schlesinger knew what they were doing, he knew how serious it was, he knew that they were expanding their activities into an international trafficking ring and he was happy to not only keep quiet about it but to write tributes and flattering obituaries about these giants of medicine. See ‘Oliver’s Army’. Bernard’s son John was one of the generation of celebs who were supplied with sex workers who had been trafficked by Dafydd’s gang.
Joseph Janni (21 May 1916-29 May 1994) was a film producer best known for his work with John Schlesinger. Janni was born into a Jewish family in Milan and became interested in film making while at university. He emigrated to England in 1939 and once Italy declared war against England was briefly interned on the Isle of Man. Janni soon became involved in the British film industry and worked his way up to producer. He produced the first films of Schlesinger and Ken Loach, including ‘A Kind Of Loving’ (1962), ‘Billy Liar’ (1963), ‘Poor Cow’ (1967) and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (1971).
Penelope’s agent Clive Goodwin came to an unfortunate end soon after Clive bagged her the offer from Schlesinger to write a script, as Penelope herself explained; Clive died after lunching with a producer at a Beverley Hills hotel; Clive was sick ‘on the red carpet’ and was ‘carted off in a squad car’ because the desk clerk thought that he was drunk. Clive wasn’t drunk, he had a brain tumour and died in a ‘night cell’. Penelope was acutely aware of the hypocrisy and brutality of her circle: ‘Terrible things are engendered by the panicky amorality of Hollywood’ which has ‘deaths such as Clive’s on its hushed-up conscience’. Penelope wrote that in 1971, it was published and read widely. It will not have gone unnoticed and Penelope’s own sad death years later could probably have been avoided if only someone had lifted a finger to help.
Other friends of Penelope’s who were mentioned in that introduction to the script of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ were Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, Murray Head and Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
Penelope Gilliatt wrote several novels and her short stories were collected in Splendid Lives, Nobody’s Business (1972) and Come Back If It Doesn’t Get Better. Gilliatt also published two non-fiction books on film directors Jean Renoir (1975) and Jacques Tati (1976).
Gilliatt’s novel Mortal Matters (1983) is largely set in Northumberland and Newcastle. There are several pages devoted to Hexham and numerous mentions of Newcastle locations; the novel celebrates the achievements of the North East of England.
Dafydd’s partner gang ran the trafficking ring in the North East and received both staff and children from the gang in the North East. See eg. ‘The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Connection’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’. In 1983 Dafydd and co were in a panic because Mary Wynch had begun litigation against them and was on her way to the Master of the Rolls. Something happened at the Student Health Centre at UCNW with Gwynne the lobotomist as well, I am sure that it involved a death, but I haven’t been able to find out what it was exactly. In 1983 a frantic exercise was taking place in north Wales in order to reassure everyone that It Could Never Happen Again and that things had changed. Dafydd’s mate Professor Robert Bluglass rewrote the Mental Health Act, Dafydd’s other mate Willing Bingley wrote the Code of Practice to accompany it and Tony and Sadie Francis and a few other Nice Young Doctors eg. Lyndon Miles arrived in north Wales to show that there was Fresh Blood.
There would indeed be Fresh Blood, the new arrivals were fully on board with the gang and when Dafydd Did it All Again and illegally imprisoned me in 1986/87, just as he had Mary Wynch a few years earlier, Robert Bluglass and William Bingley were among those who helped Dafydd stay out of trouble.
At a Parliamentary level, George Thomas was given a Viscountcy by his mate Thatch in 1983 so someone was worried. The gang also had me in their sights in that year, but I didn’t know it and I hadn’t yet raised concerns about them, although Brown and me were already under surveillance by the security services; D.G.E. Wood had Brown down as an Armed Revolutionary because Brown didn’t leave his brains at the door when he went to see Wood and he was also carrying out academic work on media bias.
Miranda was elected as the MP for Sedgefield in Durham on 9 June 1983. Miranda had previously worked as a pupil barrister for George Carman QC, one of the lawyers who did most to conceal Dafydd, Gwynne et al and he had also lived in Wandsworth, where the Borough Council, in collaboration with St George’s Hospital Medical School and Springfield Hospital, facilitated the branch of the Westminster Paedophile Ring across south London, in partnership with Dafydd’s gang. See eg. ‘Lord Snooty The Third’.
Although Penelope Gilliatt was born in London, she had an excellent knowledge of the North East and would have had a vested interest in helping Dafydd’s partners in crime up there, because her family were Of Them. Penelope’s Gilliatt’s dad was a barrister, Cyril Conner and both he and her mum came from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Penelope’s parents divorced not long after she was born; she had an upper-middle class upbringing in Northumberland, where her father, having left his legal practice by then, was Director of the BBC in the North East, 1938-41.
Lord Reith stepped down as DG of the BBC in 1938 and in 1940 joined Neville Chamberlain’s Gov’t and took a commission in the RNVR, thus joining the many with the dirt on Lord Mountbatten, the Gay Spies in the Admiralty etc. See post ‘The Defence Of The Realm’. In 1943, Reith was appointed Director of the Combined Operations Material Department at the Admiralty, a post that he held until early 1945, so he really was in the thick of whatever it was that so many people later used to protect jobs and pensions and indeed political office.
Reith was succeeded as DG of the BBC by Sir Frederick Wolff Ogilvie (7 February 1893- 10 June 1949), who served as DG, July 1938-January 1942. Ogilvie was VC of Queen’s University, Belfast, 1925-38. He was knighted by King George VI on 10 June 1942. In 1945 Ogilvie was appointed Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. Jesus College has strong Welsh connections of scores of paedophiles’ friends holding the more influential positions protected Dafydd and Gwynne. The corrupt judge Huw Daniel went to Jesus College, as did his father Professor J.E. Daniel, one of the founders of Plaid. See post ‘Tan yn Llyn’. Gwilym Williams the Bishop of Bangor and Archbishop of Wales and member of the gang was an alumnus of Jesus College. The network had a hotline straight to the top of Gov’t for years as a result of Harold Wilson being a graduate of Jesus College. See previous posts.
In 1953, Lady Ogilvie became Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Lady Ogilvie lasted until 1990; many of Penelope Gilliatt’s dad’s influential friends were around to make a nuisance of themselves for a long time.
As in north Wales, the organised abuse and criminality on the part of corrupt professional people in the North East festered away for years before it erupted in the activities of T. Dan Smith, Andy Cunningham et al and the Top Doctors in the 1960s, who by then were running a criminal empire that stretched across the whole of the UK and involved corrupt Civil Service mandarins and Westminster politicians, who in turn had links to the Royal Family. See previous posts.
The ultimate Westminster Swinger, Richard Crossman, recorded in his ‘Diaries’ that on 23 July 1969 Crossman, in his capacity as Secretary of State for the DHSS, had a meeting with T. Dan Smith, ‘the big boss of the North East, whom I put on the Maud Commission and who, I gather, has done a good job of work there. He had come to see me about the news that I was going ahead with the Regional Hospital Board’s plan for building a new hospital in Geoffrey Rhodes’s constituency at Newcastle… Dan was…full of his concept that the hospital must help in the export trade and must provide a base for Newcastle’s industry…’
The development of this flagship hospital in Newcastle was yet another dodgy deal cooked up between Harold Wilson’s Gov’t, T. Dan Smith and his crooked friends and Dafydd’s mates who were running the huge trafficking ring in the North East. Dafydd and Gwynne’s mate and umbrella, Lord John Walton, the Bastard of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and his mates did really well out of it, although there was a great deal of scrapping between all factions, so much so that Crossman had to intervene as the Top Docs went at each other hammer and tongs. I will be discussing this in more detail in a future post.
Geoffrey Rhodes was the Labour MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne East, 1964-74 and also a journalist, broadcaster and lecturer. Rhodes was Crossman’s PPS and will have known that Crossman was swinging with the best of them, facilitating the Westminster Paedophile Ring and concealing the criminality of Dafydd and Gwynne. Rhodes died on 22 June 1974, at the age of only 45. I haven’t had time to research the circumstances of his death yet. His pal and boss Crossman had died from liver cancer on 5 April 1974 at 67 years old.
Crossman’s own Top Doc was Dr John Long of Oxford; I have not been able to find out anything about Long, but Crossman’s state of health was rather flaky for a man of his age when he was at the DHSS. Crossman was in pain, had difficulty walking and consulted Long about ulcers on his legs. Crossman was issued with surgical stockings and told by Long to go on a diet; Crossman’s idea was to ‘ruthlessly diet’ when he was out having dinner at the Ritz and the Athenaeum and he also discovered by accident that he had not been given the best advice re the type of surgical stockings…
Geoffrey Rhodes’s Parliamentary seat was succeeded by Mike Thomas, who served as Fattersley’s PPS, 1974-76, when Fattersley was Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Previous blog posts have taken the piss out of Fattersley because I knew that he did know about Dafydd and Gwynne and concealed it; Brown used to live near Fattersley’s constituency of Sparkbrook (1964-97) in Birmingham and Fattersley’s constituents were having a hard time and the most extraordinary experiences at the hands of the welfare state. Fattersley didn’t give a stuff, he was far too busy writing those foodie columns. I have just found out that when he was Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Fattersley served with Dafydd’s mate David Ennals who facilitated organised abuse wherever he went. Ennals was one of Crossman’s right hand men re the Westminster Paedophile Ring. See previous posts.
Remember the Dream Ticket which came into being on 2 Oct 1983, the year in which Penelope Gilliatt published her PR piece for the North East?
When that Dream Ticket was formulated, Brown and I were under attack from the gang and under surveillance by the security services; a member of the security services had even moved into our shared house on Anglesey in the guise of Trishes aka Patricia Margaret Edwards, a rather batty teenager working as a trainee technician on a Manpower Services Commission scheme at UCNW, who cost us much energy and expense. See previous posts eg. ‘He Got On His Bike and Looked For Work’.
In 1981 Mike Thomas parted company with the Labour Party and joined Dr Death and the Gang of Four. Thomas ended up falling out with Shirl in public at the SDP conference in 1987 when the SDP conducted a civil war over whether they should continue alone with Dr Death leading them into the future or join the Liberal Party at the hip. Mike soldiered on with Dr Death in the Continuing SDP. See previous posts.
One of Mike Thomas’s rivals for the Labour Party candidature in 1974 was Jeremy Beecham, a Labour Party activist and Newcastle Councillor. Beecham has starred on this blog before, but it is worth reminding readers of his highlights.
Jeremy Hugh Beecham was the elected Chairman of the Labour Party’s NEC, October 2005 – September 2006. He is Jewish and a Board member of the New Israel Fund in the UK. Beecham was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and University College, Oxford, 1962–65. He became a solicitor. Beecham joined the Labour Party in 1959 and was elected a councillor for Benwell, Newcastle in 1967. Beecham Chaired the Social Services Committee on the Council, 1973-77 and was Leader of Newcastle City Council, 1977-94, Chairing the Finance Committee, 1979-84. While all those kids in care in the North East were sent to children’s homes in north Wales.
In 1991, Beecham became Chairman of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA). When the AMA merged with the Association of District Councils and the Association of County Councils on 1 April 1997 to form the Local Government Association, Beecham became the first Chairman of the LGA. He was, as of 2006, the LGA Vice-Chairman and continued to Chair the LGA Labour Group. Beecham was the President of the British Urban Regeneration Association (now folded). He belongs to the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group.
Beecham has been a member of many boards and committees in Newcastle and North East England and advising Government. He has been a member of the Labour Party NEC since 1998. Beecham was made a Freeman of the City of Newcastle in 1995. He is/has been Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Tyne and Wear and continues to sit on the City Council. Beecham has been a Council member of Common Purpose since 1989.
In the 1994 Birthday Honours, Jeremy was knighted. 1994: the year that Peter Howarth was jailed for 10 years for abusing kids in care in north Wales, just weeks after his friend and boss Matt Arnold, the Head of Bryn Estyn, died from an ‘unidentified blood disease’. Until they relocated to Bryn Estyn in 1973, Arnold and Howarth worked at Axwell Park Approved School in Gateshead. In 1994, the Jillings Investigation was underway. Dafydd had also planted that brick and told the police that I’d thrown in through his glass front door, shortly after Patient F and I met with the Mental Health Act Commissioners and told them that Dafydd was sexually exploiting patients and that serious complaints against him were not being investigated… The Chief Exec of the MHAC was William Bingley. William and his mum Lady Juliet knew David Ennals – as well as Dafydd – very well, because they’d spent years working with Ennals at MIND in Ennals capacity as a campaign organiser, then Chairman and then President.
Lady Juliet was mates with the one-time PM of Malta, Dom Mintoff, who was a member of the Maltese Mafia. Mintoff was also friends with Richard Crossman and Jack Jones the General Secretary of the TGWU. Lady Juliet was the daughter of Reginald Vick, a surgeon at Bart’s Hospital and married Sir Admiral Alec Bingley, who had been Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet and NATO Commander Allied Forces Mediterranean in 1959 and then Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth and Allied Commander-in-Chief, Channel in 1961. Sir Alec was a colleague of Lord Mountbatten’s. See previous posts eg. ‘The Defence of the Realm’.
Beecham’s K was conferred by Lilibet on 22 Nov 1994. On 4 Nov 1994 Dafydd obtained an injunction against me from Liverpool High Court on the grounds that I was a danger to him without presenting any evidence at all of any wrongdoing on my part, except a statement that I had thrown that brick. Dafydd had known for weeks by then – as had the police – that I could not have thrown the brick, I was known to have been miles away at the time that the brick was planted.
The Chair of the South Tyneside Local Safeguarding Children Board, Gateshead LSCB and Sunderland LSCB and the Chair of the Safeguarding Adult Boards of Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland is Sir Paul Ennals, David Ennals’ son. Sir Paul also Chairs Haringey LSCB.
Here’s Paul, doing a bit of Safeguarding:
Here’s his dad, Dafydd and Gwynne’s mate:
In 2006 after a few too many scandals, the Welsh Gov’t commissioned Jeremy Beecham to set up a Review to advise the Welsh Assembly Gov’t on the reform of public services in Wales. The serious organised crime in the public services in Wales continued apace but that was inevitable when one considers that it was Jeremy who set up the Review and the identity of the people whom Jeremy appointed to do the Reviewing. See eg. ‘A Major Coup – Or A Complete Disaster?’
My lawyers had finally obtained my medical records in 2005 after Keith Thomson, the CEO of the NW Wales NHS Trust, was threatened with imprisonment by the High Court in Cardiff after unlawfully withholding them. There were thousands and thousands of documents detailing serious organised crime over decades in every agency with which I had ever had contact. Thomson resigned hours later and appeared in the local paper announcing his retirement. He didn’t retire; Dr Brian Gibbons, the then Welsh Gov’t Health Minister, appointed Thomson as the CEO of the NHS Trust in Pembrokeshire/West Wales but the appointment wasn’t announced. Mark Drakeford was Rhodri’s SPAD at the time and, I am told, advised on how to rig everything from then on. Mark’s reward was to be Rhodri’s safe seat when Rhodri retired and then eventually a job as FM! Mark’s son was jailed for rape not so long ago, days before the Big Prize, but that didn’t hold Mark back.
Mark Drakeford had previously been a social worker in West Wales where a sex abuse ring had operated with direct links to Dafydd’s gang in north Wales. Before Keith Thomson was CEO of the NW Wales NHS Trust, he had been a middle manager in Gwynedd Health Authority, in 1994 when F and I complained to the Mental Health Act Commission about Dafydd…
During 2005/06, John McTernan’s brother-in-law stole my computer. At some point after that, Nerys, the wife of Merfyn Jones the VC of Bangor University, developed a brain tumour and Dafydd’s colleagues at the Walton Centre found that there was just nothing that they could do. Nerys died in 2008. It wasn’t widely known that Nerys was ill, Merfyn had been protecting her privacy. So Betty Williams, the then Labour MP for Conwy and long-standing member of the gang, announced it at a public lecture given by Charlie Falconer at Bangor University not long before Nerys died. See previous posts. The Walton Centre neurologists were networked into their colleagues elsewhere, including Lord John Walton’s crew at Newcastle and some of them will have known Roger Gilliatt. See eg. ‘Murder In Samarkand’.
On 20 July 2010, Jeremy Beecham became Lord Beecham; he sits on the Labour benches.
In 1983, when Penelope Gilliatt published her novel which waxed lyrical about the joys of the North East, she had good reason to collude with and conceal the criminality with which so many of her friends and relations were involved. From the 1970s onwards, one of the essential techniques used by the gang – in addition to good old fashioned police and legal corruption – was PR in terms of romantic portrayals of their turf. It’s why everyone heard so much about Kate Roberts and Welsh cultural traditions whenever there was an investigation or Inquiry into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. See eg. ‘Feet In Chains’.
I noticed that ‘Viz’ magazine – founded and based in Newcastle – acquired mass appeal during the late 1980s and 90s, whereas it had previously been a small circulation highly cult publication enjoyed by students and alternative people in the North East and I have had a think about that. The writers of ‘Viz’ are of the same vintage as me which is why so much of it satirises the 1970s popular media; I was told years ago by an Insider that there were people at ‘Viz’ who had an excellent knowledge of those we know and love. Roger Mellie is, I was reassured, based on a Real Person at the BBC and I noticed a great many other observations in ‘Viz’ years before matters such as the Westminster Paedophile Ring, the Queen Mum’s Loyal Retainer Backstairs Billy etc became widely discussed. Brown’s brother was at Newcastle University before ‘Viz’ became mainstream, he used to get it for me before it became available everywhere.
Dafydd and the gang traced Brown’s brother to Newcastle, he was getting hassled by the gang up there and some of his lecturers were Of The Gang, particularly a nasty old bugger in the Dept of Physics who had been allotted as his tutor. Furthermore the nasty old bugger had been the PhD supervisor of Dr Lyn Branson, a truly obnoxious teacher at Bridgwater College who had taught us all and who was networked into the people who were concealing the ring in Bridgwater which was linked to Dafydd et al (see previous posts eg. ‘A Trail Of Blood’ and ‘I Spit On Your Grave’); Lyn Branson disliked most of her students but she hated Brown’s brother.
Brown’s brother is younger than me and he only began his degree at Newcastle after I had complained about Gwynne to the GMC in 1984. Dafydd and Gwynne’s mate and big umbrella the neurologist Lord John Walton, the Bastard of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was President of the GMC at the time and refused to investigate my complaint when I wrote to the GMC. Walton pretty much ran Newcastle University as well as the city and I am in no doubt that they were ready for Brown’s brother as soon as he arrived, which was why he and so many of his friends at Newcastle had such bad experiences there.
It is entirely possible that the gang assisted with the marketing of ‘Viz’ a la Kate Roberts’s work, to bring fame and cult status to Newcastle but it backfired on them. Not only were Sid the Sexist, the Fat Slags and Eight Ace not the best advert for Newcastle life, but ‘Viz’ contained plenty of observations that were going over the heads of anyone who tried to use it to assist the gang with PR. When ‘Viz’ really hit the big time – it was when I was working at St George’s, the students loved it, in one SU election every candidate ran a ‘Viz’-themed campaign – I think that the original founders sold it, but somewhere along the way someone was keen to undermine attempts by the gang to hijack ‘Viz’ as a vehicle.
Penelope Gilliatt however was not involved with ‘Viz’ and her PR was uncomplicated.
Gilliatt attended Queen’s College in London before studying at Bennington College in Vermont.
After Penelope Gilliatt divorced neurologist Roger, Lord Snowdon and Gwynne’s mate, she carried on using Gilliatt’s name; there will have been a reason for that, it is an unusual name and it probably opened doors as it were. Roger Gilliatt married Mary Green in 1963 and Penelope Gilliatt married playwright and Angry Young Man John Osborne in the same year; they divorced in 1968. If Penelope’s circle of Influential People was impressive before she married Osborne, afterwards it was unbelievable but also very complicated as a consequence of the swinging in all directions on the part of so many. No wonder the gang went into overdrive re a group of young academics and media professionals in the late 1980s who refused to shut up. There were just so many jobs, pensions and reputations at stake. Including that of Lord Snowdon’s mate Professor Roger Gilliatt, who by that time had transformed the Institute of Neurology at Queen’s Square, London, from an embarrassment into a global leader. Or so we are told. See previous posts.
John Osborne was a grade A scumbag with many wives and bedfellows, nearly all of whom he treated appallingly and two of them committed suicide, or that was the official line at least. Penelope Gilliatt was Osborne’s third wife. I’ll provide an overview of John Osborne’s complicated domestic arrangements shortly.
Gilliatt and Osborne had one child together, their daughter Nolan, whom Osborne later disowned at the age of 17 after giving her a terrible time throughout her childhood. Nolan is now known as Nolan Parker and in an interview published by ‘The Sunday Times’ in March 2006 – the first time that Nolan had ever spoken publicly about Osborne – she showed a remarkable degree of sanity, observing that he was pretty crap, pretty selfish, didn’t have the capacity to be a good dad, that she bumped into him when he was coming out of the Garrick once and didn’t have anything to say to him. The interview mentioned that Nolan was married to a financial consultant, has children and lives in East Sussex.
Ronnie Waterhouse was a central figure in the Garrick, a club with members who are drawn from the legal profession or the theatre in particular. Ronnie’s mate Robin Day was a member, as was Ronnie’s other mate Sir William Mars-Jones. William Mars-Jones was a farmer’s son from Denbighshire who made it very big as a lawyer and practised in London as well as on the Chester and Wales Circuit. Mars-Jones was President of UCNW, 1982-95; I complained about Gwynne to the authorities at UCNW in 1984. Mars-Jones’s family still lived in north east Wales, where his brother David ran the family business and was a leading light in the Freemasons. David’s wife Dilys was CC’d into correspondence about me after I complained about Dafydd and the gang (see previous posts). That might have been because Dilys was a member of Clwyd Health Authority, I can imagine that she may have held such a role; however even if she was a member, the correspondence should not have been CC’d to her…
Dilys died a few years ago and the local papers waxed lyrical about her many community activities; the chapel, the community council and her position as a Councillor for Conwy County Council. See previous posts. Dilys’s husband David was also a Councillor and served as the Mayor of Colwyn. David and Dilys have children and grandchildren who still live in north Wales.
Nolan’s habitat of East Sussex had for years hosted yet another one of Dafydd’s partner gangs. Sussex was the location of the country houses of many of the Bloomsbury Group, who were related to and/or friends with Sir Clough and Lady Amabel Williams-Ellis at Cwm Croesor and many of them rented second homes in the area and hung out with Bertrand Russell et al, forming the Welsh Bloomsbury Group. They knew about Dafydd and Gwynne’s services and some of them utilised those services. See eg. ‘The Village’, ‘The Vermin Club’ and ‘Captain Swing And His Crew’.
John Allen owned brothels in Brighton and London to which the kids from children’s homes in north Wales were trafficked, so there was a considerable contingent in Brighton who were propping up Dafydd and Gwynne as well, one of those being Harold Wilson’s friend Lord Asa Briggs, the former VC of Sussex University.
Nolan didn’t give the sort of Tell All interview that so many would have given; whether that was because she just really didn’t want to go there or whether she was aware of how many of those closely associated with her father and mother had been found dead in unfortunate circumstances I don’t know.
Nolan’s 2006 interview was given at about the time that John McTernan’s brother-in-law stole my computer and when I had begun receiving e mails from journos and others claiming to be interested in exposing the criminality in north Wales, but which I have recently been told were nearly all from people who passed on the info that I had to politicians, News International etc in order to ensure that it never became public. A lot of people knew just how seriously patients were being abused, including Nick Davies, Johann Hari, the Daily Mail, the BBC; they all knew…
Didn’t matter, just vulnerable people being sexually abused, violently assaulted and framed – leading to suicides – by the health and welfare services. After all, the journos have another article about the NHS Cuts to write and how they are Harming Vulnerable Women! Or how Women are Dying Of Shame by not going for Screening!
Anyone for Bravely Campaigning Against Period Poverty and FGM? In Uganda perhaps? How about a screening of the Vagina Monologues with the profits going to Wimmin’s charidees?
Following her divorce from John Osborne, Penelope Gilliatt was romantically involved with Mike Nichols and Edmund Wilson. ‘The New Yorker’ film critic Vincent Canby was her companion for many years. Gilliatt died on 9 May 1993.
Gilliatt had been an alcoholic for many years and was known to have been in a bad way. As so often happened to people who were of the gang, even their partners or former partners, Gilliatt just didn’t seem to receive the help that she needed for her alcoholism and depression. Gilliatt’s piece that she wrote in 1971 as an introduction to the publication of the script of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ demonstrated that she knew how bloody callous her industry was, even to the biggest names, when the chips were down. Of course everybody Just Loved Penelope and was so sad when she died, but there wasn’t much support forthcoming even when they saw her struggling, which she had been for years.
Bought to the world by Joe Janni and Ken Loach:
Penelope might as well have been a Hergest Unit patient with Angels screaming at her to go on and kill herself then, it was her choice and refusing her Services for her drink problem because she er had a drink problem. They really did do this, at Hergest and elsewhere; as the Angels and Top Docs lost all sense of humanity, gobsmacked onlookers would watch such scenes only to become even more gobsmacked when they later heard that the Empowered Service User had been found dead and the Top Docs and Angels didn’t even wonder whether they should have perhaps responded differently to their pleas for help. There were no regrets at all, the Top Docs and Angels would smugly observe that they had predicted such an outcome all along. NEXT please, we have our comfortable lives to think of, it is the only reason why we continue to do turn up to work in the mornings; we hate each other, we hate our jobs and we hate the patients but no, we will not be resigning.
Many of those who died were, like Penelope, witnesses to, or had information about, serious crime, but the Excellence killed so many in the end that a few others as well as witnesses were caught in the net of the Expertise as well.
Penelope died on 9 May 1993. Lord Lloyd Kenyon, one of the most powerful umbrellas of the gang in north Wales (see previous posts), died on 19 May 1993. Lord Kenyon’s son Thomas Tyrell-Kenyon had died just weeks previously of AIDS. Thomas was known to have been sexually abusing at least one boy in the care of Social Services in the late 1970s; it was even noted on the boy’s social work records. Thomas also took indecent photos of the boy which were helpfully destroyed by the police. Lord Kenyon was a member of the North Wales Police Authority, a JP, the most senior Freemason in north Wales, President of UCNW from the mid-1950s until 1982, the Chairman of Clwyd Health Authority… Thomas was never charged, although he was much older than the boy; after Thomas made a complaint of theft against the boy, the boy was sent to a detention centre. See previous posts.
Just a few weeks before Lord Kenyon died, Jackie Brandt – a Gwynedd social worker and member of the gang who in 1986 unlawfully detained me at Ysbyty Gwynedd, refused to respond to any of my complaints about the matter, as did Jackie’s boss Lucille Hughes (Dafydd’s mistress and Director of Gwynedd Social Services) and then in 1990 repeatedly perjured herself in the High Court in an attempt to have me imprisoned (see eg. ‘The Bitterest Pill’) – made a statement to the police that she had seen me in Safeways in Bangor with Patient F and I had screamed and sworn at her, such that she thought that I was going to launch an imminent attack on her. It was some two weeks or so before anyone told us that Brandt had made the statement; I was charged with ‘harassing’ Brandt in the weeks leading up to Lord Kenyon’s death but, I’m fairly sure, after Thomas Tyrell-Kenyon had died. At the trial in July 1993, Brandt began crying in the witness box under cross-examination and admitted that I had not said anything to her in Safeways at all. Nonetheless I was found guilty by Bangor Magistrates’ Court because I had ‘stared at her’ and I had to part with £60.
Brandt had not had any previous dealings with F at all, although her statement suggested that she had considerable knowledge of him. She would have: the rest of the gang hated F; many years ago he had found out about the mistreatment of boys in the Ty Newydd children’s home in Bangor and had challenged social workers about it and raised concerns with other people. After this, F received a visit from the drug squad who planted class A drugs on him and his then wife. He was punched in the face by a senior officer in the police station and fitted up for arson. F spent three weeks in Risley Remand Centre where he witnessed what was probably a murder of an inmate by a screw. He was then unlawfully held at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh for a year by Dafydd. In early 1993 F was denied all access to his baby son as a result of fallacious allegations made about him by the gang and a conspiracy between Gwynedd Health Authority, Gwynedd Social Services, the Arfon Community Mental Health Team (of which Brandt was a member), Dafydd Orwig (a Gwynedd County Councillor), the North Wales Housing Association, WPC Jo Bott the child protection officer, the Hergest Unit and the Bethesda GPs. F’s son was placed in a family with two members who were known to have abused kids in the past. Bott admitted to F in front of me that this was true – as did the Bethesda GPs and staff at the Hergest Unit – yet F was told that no-one had any concerns about his son’s welfare with this family. See previous posts.
Elwyn Jones, a solicitor in Bangor, was party to the conspiracy and at the time, David Jones, now the Tory MP for Clwyd West and David Cameron’s former Secretary of State for Wales, worked in the same practice as Elwyn Jones. David Jones had previously shared a practice at Ruthin, a town not far from Denbigh, with Ieuan Wyn Jones, who’s father and wife knew Dafydd and Gwynne, as did Ieuan himself (see previous posts). See post ‘The Right Honourable David Jones MP’.
F never saw his son again and in the run up to the Waterhouse Inquiry or just after it opened, a young man, Martin, who had lodged with the family with whom F’s baby was placed – and who had witnessed the conspiracy – was found dead in the road near Bethesda. When Martin was found dead, there was yet another prosecution of F and me underway on the part of the gang; we were acquitted after it became clear that perjury had taken place on the part of Jackie Brandt’s college, a CPN called Bridget Lloyd. There were no questions asked. See previous posts.
As well as Lord Kenyon’s other interests, he held positions in the world of arts/culture; he served as the President of the National Museum of Wales and as a Trustee and Chairman of the National Portrait Gallery. Other members of Lord Kenyon’s extended family held senior positions in arts/culture/academia, including the archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon who, as well as many other things, was Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 1962-73. Kathleen’s father Sir Frederic Kenyon had been Director of the British Museum. See previous posts for details of Dame Kathleen and Sir Frederic’s networks in academia/cultural life.
Lord Kenyon’s family seat was in Shropshire. John Allen had a children’s home in Shropshire and there was a pre-existing organised abuse ring in the county which had long had links to the gang in north Wales; the two rings exchanged staff. Lord Harlech’s family, the Ormsby-Gores, lived at their Shropshire residence for many years – they had estates in Gwynedd as well. My post ’95 Glorious Years’ discusses how many of the Ormsby-Gores met untimely or suspicious deaths after Lord Harlech – David Ormsby-Gore – served as the US Ambassador. Lord Harlech’s term as Ambassador covered the assassination of JFK. Lord Harlech became close to Jackie Kennedy after JFK’s death and got as far as proposing to her. Lord Harlech was seriously injured in a car crash near Shrewsbury on 25 January 1985 and died at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital the following morning, aged 66. Senator Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis and other Kennedy family members attended his funeral in Llanfihangel-y-traethau. Lord Harlech was succeeded in the barony by his second and only surviving son, Francis. Francis Ormsby-Gore was found dead a few years ago in his farmhouse near Harlech. Francis had a very bad time for many years and there are clues that he was targeted by those we know and love; he also had the experience of many members of his family dying before him, of gunshot wounds, drug overdoses etc. See ’95 Glorious Years!’.
Like Richard Crossman, Lord David Harlech studied at New College, Oxford, a recruiting ground for the British security services. Lord Harlech was some 11 years younger than Crossman, but Crossman remained at New College for some years after his time as a student, working as a don, in which capacity Crossman recruited for the security services.
Lord Harlech’s 1969 wedding was attended by, among others, Ma’am Darling, J.J. Astor and Michael Astor.
Lord Harlech was the Tory MP for Oswestry, 1950-61. He was succeeded by John Biffen, who went to school with my father and grew up on a farm two-three miles away from the house where I spent my teenage years. Biffen was a member of Thatcher’s Cabinet – although he eventually fell out with her – at the same time as Tom King, the MP for Bridgwater. For info on Biffen see eg. ‘A Local Boy Made Good’. King knew that there was an abuse ring operating in Bridgwater with links to Dafydd’s gang in north Wales and I have received info that King – and no doubt Biffen as well – made maximum capital out of what was happening to my friends and I at the hands of the gang. See previous posts.
John James Osborne (12 December 1929-24 December 1994) was best known for his 1956 play ‘Look Back In Anger’ and is considered to have been at his peak between 1956 and 1966. Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in Fulham, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh extraction and Nellie Beatrice, a Cockney barmaid. In 1935 the family moved to the north Surrey suburb of Stoneleigh, near Ewell. Osborne adored his father and hated his mother.
Osborne’s father died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Devon. Osborne entered the school in 1943, but was expelled in the summer term of 1945 after hitting the Headmaster, who had hit Osborne first, for listening to a forbidden broadcast by Frank Sinatra.
After school, Osborne went home to his mother in London and briefly tried trade journalism. A job tutoring a touring company of junior actors introduced him to the theatre and he teamed up with Anthony Creighton. Creighton and Osborne became good friends as well as colleagues and when Osborne wrote ‘Look Back In Anger’ in 1954 they were living on a houseboat on the Thames together .
Anthony Creighton (1922 -22 March 2005) served in the RAF during the war as a navigator on bomber aircraft. During the war he met Terence Rattigan who was then a wireless operator and air gunner. They appeared together in entertainment for fellow servicemen at RAF ground stations. After the war Creighton completed a course at RADA and subsequently joined a company at Barnstaple in Devon. Shortly afterwards Creighton formed his own travelling company, the Sage Repertory Group and was joined by three other actors from Barnstaple. An advertisement in ‘The Stage’ in 1949 was answered by Osborne, who joined the company in Ilfracombe. The company took their plays from village to village but enjoyed little success; they presented a summer residency at the Victoria Theatre on Hayling Island (near Portsmouth).
Jeremy Thrope – who was a friend of Ma’am Darling, Lord Snowdon and Roger Gilliatt and boasted of having slept with both ma’am Darling and Lord Snowdon – was the Liberal MP for north Devon, 1959-79. Mr Thrope had many close links with Dafydd and Gwynne’s gang, particularly through the Lloyd George family, with whom Mr Thrope had been friendly with since he was a boy. See previous posts eg. ’95 Glorious Years’. The presence of Mr Thrope in Devon certainly livened things up, but there were a few interesting happenings and people in Devon before Mr Thrope arrived there, in particular with regard to Michael Foot’s family, who pretty much ran Plymouth. Foot himself was involved with the Westminster Paedophile Ring; Dingle Foot was in a position to conceal it before Michael Foot got going and the extended Foot family colluded as well, over several generations. See post ‘The Bay Of Pigs Invasion’.
Nancy Astor was the Tory MP for Plymouth Sutton, 1919-45. Among Nancy’s children were J.J. (John Jacob) and Michael – who attended Lord Harlech’s wedding – and David Astor, who was Editor of ‘The Observer’, 1948-75 – the Astors owned ‘The Observer’ – when Penelope Gilliatt and her mates were employed by that publication. Nancy had a son by her first marriage, Robert ‘Bobby’ Gould Shaw III. Bobby was born in the US but moved to England the year after his mother did.
After moving to England, Bobby went to Shrewsbury School. He developed alcohol problems, was often suicidal and had quite a troubled life. In 1931, when he was in his early 30s, Bobby was imprisoned for six months for homosexual offences. Bobby was alleged to have become even more distraught after Nancy’s death in 1964 and on 10 July 1970, Bobby committed suicide – or so it has always been maintained – aged 71. Bobby’s partner was Alfred Edward Goodey an art collector from a Derby family. There was a long-standing ring in Derbyshire with links to the gang in north Wales by the early 1970s; there was an exchange of staff between north Wales and Derbyshire.
Nancy Astor’s Parliamentary Secretary was Ray Strachey, born Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe. Ray’s younger sister was Karin Stephen née Costelloe, who married Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s younger brother, in 1914. Ray married the civil servant Oliver Strachey, with whom she had two children, Barbara (born 1912, later a writer) and Christopher (born 1916, later a pioneering computer scientist). Oliver Strachey was the elder brother of the Lytton Strachey; other siblings in the Strachey family included psychoanalyst James Strachey – who, along with his wife analyst Alix Strachey was directly linked to Gwynne the lobotomist – novelist Dorothy Bussy, educationist Pernel Strachey, who was a Head of Newnham College, Cambridge. Ray’s mother-in-law was Jane Maria Strachey, a well-known author and supporter of women’s suffrage who co-led the suffragist Mud March of 1907 in London.
The above Stracheys were all relatives of Amabel’s Williams-Ellis of the Welsh Bloomsbury Set. Amabel’s father was John St Loe Strachey aka John Strachey, Editor of ‘The Spectator; her brother, Evelyn John St Loe Strachey also aka John Strachey, was a Labour MP who was a good friend of the bisexual swinging Tory Lord Bob Boothby. See previous posts for details of the John Stracheys and indeed Bob Boothby, one time sexual partner of Ronnie Kray as well as of Dorothy Macmillan, Harold’s wife.
Ray Strachey’s name and picture (and those of 58 other women’s suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Milicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in April 2018, after a campaign led by Caroline Criado Perez. Caroline was vexed that there were many more statues of men than wimmin. So Caroline’s campaign resulted in the name of at least one woman – Ray Strachey (and I bet that there’s more as well) – who was a close friend and a relative of a whole circle of very privileged people, men and women, who facilitated and even partook of the organised abuse of children and young people of both genders and the illegal imprisonment, lobotomising and even the occasional murders of witnesses and complainants. All we need now is for Sister Hutt to erect one of her Purple Plaques to celebrate the roles of Jackie Brandt and Lucille Hughes – they can share a Purple Plaque – as Unsung Feminist Heroes of Gwynedd.
For most of her life, Ray Strachey worked for women’s suffrage organisations. Papers of Rachel Pearsall Conn Strachey (also known as Ray Strachey, née Costelloe) (1887–1940) are held at the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University. Ray worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, sharing her Liberal feminist values and opposing any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement with the Labour Party. In 1915, Ray became Parliamentary Secretary of the NUWSS, serving in this role until 1920. Ray rejected the attempt by Eleanor Rathbone to establish a broad-based feminist programme in the 1920s. Eleanor Rathbone’s descendant Jenny currently sits in the Senedd as the Labour AM for a Cardiff constituency. Jenny served as a Councillor for Islington, 1998-2002, until she realised that the Welsh Assembly was in need of her talents. The trafficking ring which operated in the children’s homes in Islington and was ignored by Islington Councillors had links to the ring in north Wales.
The charidee set up by the Rathbone family years ago provided assistance to some of those involved with the abuse of kids in north Wales. See previous posts.
It was in 1931 that Ray Strachey became Parliamentary Secretary to Britain’s first woman MP to take her seat, Nancy Astor. Nancy was of course well-known for hating Jewish people and ‘The Observer’ refused to employ Jewish people even as recently as the 1960s. In 1935 Ray Stratchey became the head of the Women’s Employment Federation.
- I came across a reference to one of Ray Strachey’s books recently, ‘Our Freedom And It’s Results’ (1936). It was referenced in a chapter written by Jane Lewis, ‘Women Between The Wars’, in a 1980 volume entitled ‘Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s’, edited by Frank Gloversmith. Gloversmith was at the time that he edited that book working in the School of English and American Studies at Sussex University. The book has a foreword written by dear old Asa Briggs, Harold Wilson’s mate who worked in the intelligence services at Bletchley Park during WW II, was close mates with Howard Smith who became DG of MI5 in 1979. Asa the VC of Sussex University, 1967-76 and who concealed the activities of Dafydd’s partners in crime in the Brighton area. Because he was able to abuse his links with the security services, Asa caused a great many problems for people elsewhere as well, including in north Wales. Asa never forgave Merfyn Jones and his mates for throwing red paint over a visiting US official in 1967 when Merfyn et al were students at Sussex as an anti-Vietnam protest. See post ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’. Asa was still wreaking revenge on Merfyn in 2005 when Merfyn was VC of Bangor University and a BBC Governor. That was before the Top Docs ensured that Merfyn’s wife didn’t survive. Asa himself lived in comfort until he died at a very old age in 2016.
Sussex University housed the Mass Observation Archive, which was a result of the efforts of Asa and Tom Harrison. One person who contributed to the Mass Observation project was a woman who worked with kids in care in inner London in the 1970s/80s. She knew that they were being trafficked for sex and that the Boroughs of Haringey and Lambeth were colluding with it. She wrote all about it in her diaries for the Mass Observation Archive and was told to remove all references to the matter. She had never been asked to delete any entries before; the kids themselves were not identifiable from her entries. Previous posts of mine discuss how Top Docs and others being commissioned by Gov’t to carry out research on British citizens, including children, shared the confidential data with Docs and others facilitating abuse and used it to target victims.
Asa had access to the whole Mass Observation Archive. Asa was a member of the intelligence services and was assisting in facilitating an international trafficking ring the members of whom were murdering witnesses. Think about the implications of Asa’s database. No wonder I am receiving all sorts of info about relating to my friends and I at school in Bridgwater in the 1970s that I was unaware had ever been collected, yet alone passed on to anyone. Huge amounts of data were unlawfully collected on children and were handed straight over to academics and professional people involved with abuse and serious organised crime…
- Another one of Ray Strachey’s books was entitled ‘Careers and Openings for Women’. Not for women like Nerys or me who’ve challenged a gang of old paedophiles obviously, we don’t find many openings, we find ourselves unlawfully dismissed and discriminated against.
Jane Lewis, who referenced Ray Strachey’s work in the book for which Asa provided a foreword, is a social scientist specialising in gender and welfare. Lewis was Professor of Social Policy at Oxford University, 2000-04 and Professor of Social Policy at the LSE, 2004-16.
From 1968 to 1971, Lewis studied history at Reading University. She moved to Canada and completed her PhD at the University of Western Ontario. Lewis’s doctoral theses was entitled “The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939”.
In 1979, Lewis returned to England and joined the Department of Social Policy and Administration at the LSE, which was where she was based when she wrote the chapter for the book edited by Asa Briggs’s mate which had a foreword written by Asa. Lewis was appointed Professor of Social Policy at the LSE in 1991, the year in which the careers of a few witnesses to the ring run by Asa’s mates were destroyed. In 1996, the year in which William Hague announced the Waterhouse Inquiry, Jane Lewis joined Oxford University as Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. Previous posts eg. ‘The Science Of Animal Behaviour’ and ‘International Women’s Day! Let Us Celebrate With Jane…’ have discussed how Dafydd’s associates were given funding – often by the Wellcome – which they used to rewrite the history of the mental health/welfare services, carefully sanitising it all. Gwynne and his lobotomising don’t appear anywhere in the accounts of the recent history of psychiatry in north Wales, but Gwynne was very much there until the 1980s.
Jane Lewis was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She was made a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College in 1998: a Quondam Fellow is a former fellow and not part of the College’s governing body.
Between 1998 and 2000, Jane Lewis was Professor of Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. My post ‘Vested Interests Or Common Pool?’ discussed the many senior social scientists at Nottingham University who had concealed or facilitated abuse. One such person was Ann Craft, who had previously worked with Dafydd’s gang in north Wales, ‘supporting’ learning disabled people in Bryn-y-Neuadd Hospital in their sexual relationships. There was abuse of patients at Bryn-y-Neuadd. Ann’s husband Dr Michael Craft carried out ‘research unto incest’ with Dafydd. See post ‘The Old Devils’.
In 2000, Jane Lewis returned to the University of Oxford having been appointed Professor of Social Policy there and was elected a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. She returned to the LSE as Professor of Social Policy in 2004 and remained there until her retirement in 2016. Jane was then appointed Emeritus Professor by the LSE.
In 1995, Jane Lewis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2004, Lewis was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
All Souls, of which Jane Lewis, specialist in gender and welfare, is a Quondam Fellow:
Some of the institutions in which those who benefited from Jane’s expertise in gender and welfare were to be found:
Who is benefiting most from Jane’s specialism in gender and welfare? We need to ask Jane when she last incurred a broken arm and a ruptured anus at All Souls. If Jane did sustain a broken arm and a ruptured anus at High Table, I imagine that Jane would not be refused NHS treatment.
With regard to Anthony Creighton et al performing in Portsmouth with their theatre company, Portsmouth was of course the location of the big naval base and Sir Alec Bingley and Jim Callaghan were fixtures there for quite some time. The wider area of Hampshire housed Sarah Ferguson’s dad Major Ron and Lord Denning, as well as his brother Vice-Admiral Sir Norman Denning, who served as Director of Naval Intelligence, 1960-64 and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff for Intelligence, 1964-65. See previous posts.
After touring in Devon and Portsmouth, Anthony Creighton collaborated on two plays with John Osborne, ‘Personal Enemy’ and ‘An Epitaph for George Dillon’. The friendship between Osborne and Creighton faded over time. In 1960 Creighton co-wrote another play with the American writer-director Bernard Miller, Tomorrow with Pictures which was produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1961. Subsequently Creighton taught drama at various London education establishments.
Creighton met Osborne on one last occasion in 1994, at Osborne’s country home in Shropshire – more of which later on in this post – to discuss George Dillon royalty payments. Osborne died shortly after the meeting. Creighton said of the melancholy visit that he would prefer to remember the impecuniously happier times of the 1950s, “I look back on Osborne with love”.
After Osborne’s death, Creighton claimed in an interview with the critic Nicholas de Jongh that he and Osborne had lived together as lovers. Osborne’s surviving family were quick to refute any suggestion of homosexuality on Osborne’s part.
Creighton finally admitted in an interview with Osborne’s biographer, John Heilpern, that he had lied to de Jongh and no homosexual relationship had ever existed.
However, the Torygraph’s obituary for Anthony Creighton, published on 28 May 2005, supplied further information with regard to the matter:
had conducted a long love affair. Creighton’s revelations were greeted with surprise by those familiar with the playwright’s opinions on such matters.
“Whatever else,” Osborne wrote in 1964, “I have been blessed with God’s two greatest gifts: to be born English and heterosexual.”
But Creighton’s claims seemed to be backed up by a series of letters from Osborne, sent to him in the 1950s when both men were jobbing actors sharing a houseboat in Chiswick, west London. Whenever he went off to work in repertory, Osborne would write regularly, and extracts from the letters seemed to indicate that Osborne and Creighton, whom he affectionately called “Mouse”, had a tender and loving relationship. “My love for you,” Osborne wrote in 1954, “is deeper than I could bear to tell you to your face. It is so strong and indestructible. Never be in doubt about either this or my loyalty.”
And bunnies will go to France, as Mr Thrope wrote in that letter to Norman Scott, although of course there was not a word of truth in Norman’s allegations…
According to Creighton, the two men were involved in an on-off affair throughout the 1950s, during two of Osborne’s five marriages. “It was a love affair,” Creighton said in 1995, “a good, happy, mutually supportive and enduring relationship.”
These claims were utterly refuted by Osborne’s widow, Helen,
I’ll be providing details re Helen later in this post
who said that the friendship had been purely platonic.
John Osborne had been married to Penelope Gilliatt by then, who in turn had been married to Roger, Lord Snowdon’s mate, OF COURSE OSBORNE WAS NOT GAY. Particularly as in 1995, when Creighton made those rash claims, the Jillings Investigation into the abuse of children in the care of Clwyd County Council since 1973/74 was underway; Nicola Davies QC – later Dame Nicola – was reviewing the paperwork of the North Wales Police re child abuse to see in a Public Inquiry was in the public interest (the entire paperwork from 1989 was missing); in Dec 1995 Nicola stated that a Public Inquiry would not be in the public interest, although Ronnie Waterhouse had already known for a few months that he would be Chairing it.
For the first few years of Clwyd County Council’s existence, business had really got going for the trafficking ring; in the mid-late 1970s, Lord Snowdon was still quite young and Gwynne had not yet retired from the NHS…
On 17 June 1995 David Ennals died fairly suddenly, from pancreatic cancer. On 2 July 1995 Geraint Morgan QC, the Tory MP for Denbigh, 1959-83, died. On 9 July 1995, the corrupt Home Office Drugs Branch mandarin Bing Spear, who was of such help for so many years to Dafydd as well as to Dr Ann Dally – Ma’am Darling’s and Lord Snowdon’s dealer in Harley Street – died. On 13 July 1995 Sir Peter Morrison was found dead at his home in Belgravia. Brown was forced out of his job at Aston University in July 1995.
Dafydd gained his injunction from Liverpool High Court against me on the basis of no evidence at all of any wrongdoing on my part in Nov 1994, the month before John Osborne died, Osborne having gone downhill with er very heavy drinking and diabetes.
The conspiracy on the part of Dafydd, Tony Francis and the gang to have me banged up in a secure unit continued throughout 1995.
The actress Pamela Lane, who remained friends with Osborne after their brief marriage in the 1950s, also denied much of Creighton’s story. “In all those years,” she protested, “I think he would have told me.”
But in 2001 the University of Texas, which had bought Creighton’s 122 letters from Osborne, made them available to the public. Not only did they reveal much of the emotional fury behind Osborne’s “angry young man” stance, but they also showed the playwright’s unusual tenderness for Creighton. “Don’t let this horrify you,” Osborne wrote in 1951 of his marriage to Miss Lane, “I know that the word marriage probably seems like the end of everything to a very lonely Mouse. Your place in my heart has never seemed so real, secure or assured. Nothing can knock down this unique relationship, we have created something very fine and splendid.”
Mr Thrope’s wives – Caroline Allpass and then Marion Stern (who had previously been married to Lilibet’s cousin the Earl of Harewood) – didn’t know about those bunnies going to France either. It didn’t mean that the bunnies weren’t in existence.
…Osborne’s great affection, even if platonic,
Which of course it was
for a homosexual man, casts much of his work in a new light, particularly A Patriot for Me, his dramatisation of the life of a blackmailed homosexual in the Austro-Hungarian army in the 1900s. “I think people should be able to appreciate,” said Creighton in 1995, “that Patriot for Me, which stigmatises homosexuality, is a projection of his own self-hatred.”
It is also a good example of the fuckwittery to which so many people signed up. Including Gwynne and his Royal umbrellas.
Anthony Creighton was born at Swanage in the spring of 1922. His parents separated while he was still young and he was brought up by his mother, Elsie. They moved about for some time before finally settling at a village near Saffron Walden, in Essex, from where his mother made a living buying antiques and selling them on to metropolitan dealers…
Rab Butler was the Tory MP for Saffren Walden, 1929-65. Butler was around in the Tory Party in senior roles for so long that he was party to nearly all the political collusion with wrongdoing during those years; he served as Master of Trinity College, 1965-77 and was Carlo’s mentor and special counsellor when Carlo was at Trinity College, 1968-71. See previous posts. Trumpers, who was friends with Jimmy Savile and concealed the VIP sex abuse ring in Cambridgeshire, was also friends with Butler. See post ’95 Glorious Years’.
Butler was called upon the play a role in many sensitive matters that touched on the Westminster Paedophile Ring. One such matter was Butler’s Chairing of the high-profile Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders, widely referred to as the Butler Committee, 1972-75 – the Committee was established with Butler as Chairman when Ted Heath was PM – which proposed major reforms to the law and psychiatric services, most of which were never implemented. No-one could afford to do so, because the psychiatric system was being used to silence witnesses to the Westminster Paedophile Ring as well as to force vulnerable adults into sex work.
Details of [Creighton’s] early life are vague, but it seems that, as a young man, he lived for a time in Canada and studied at McGill University, in Montreal. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and the RAF… He found an outlet for his theatrical ambitions by performing in entertainments for fellow servicemen at RAF ground stations; during this time he met Terence Rattigan, then a wireless operator and air gunner, and they appeared together in at least one concert, which featured a chorus line of RAF personnel in drag.
After the war, Creighton trained at RADA and subsequently joined the John Gay Players at Barnstaple, Devon.
…he formed his own travelling company, the Saga Repertory Group. This toured Devon in a decommissioned ambulance putting on plays such as Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall in village halls. During the winter they moved indoors, first to a theatre in Ilfracombe and then to the Gaiety at Sidmouth, which was where John Osborne joined them. He stayed with the company until the following summer, when he and Creighton took up a Saga summer residency at the Victoria Theatre, Hayling Island; the two men now began sharing a houseboat moored at Chiswick. The friendship petered out after Osborne became involved with Penelope Gilliatt.
It was at that point that John Osborne and everyone else realised that Osborne had never been gay or even remotely gay.
Creighton wrote another play, Tomorrow with Pictures, with Bernard Miller, which played at Hammersmith in 1961. But his theatrical career did not endure. After abandoning the theatre he worked as a drama teacher at schools and adult education institutes in inner London. For a long time he drank heavily, but he gave up drinking altogether in the mid-1990s.
So Creighton managed to kick his heavy drinking and lived to tell the tale, unlike so many other witnesses to Dafydd and Gwynne et al, including Penelope.
In 2002, after Channel 4 broadcast a documentary claiming that Osborne was a homosexual, Creighton seemed to backtrack on his earlier claims: “Yes, he was the most important person in my life,” he explained. “But… we never had a sexual relationship.”
Creighton backtracked two years after the publication of the Waterhouse Report. In 2002 the gang perjured themselves yet again and I was charged with ‘threatening to kill’ Alun Davies…Charges were subsequently withdrawn on the first day of the trial.
From the beginning of the Waterhouse Inquiry, throughout the Inquiry and for a number of years afterwards, there was a frantic rearranging of furniture on the part of numerous people. Lord Snowdon reconstructed himself as a disability rights campaigner of all things – Snowdon’s disability campaigning came hot on the heels of the discovery of the dead body of Ann Hills, his mistress of 20 years, on the roof of her London penthouse, Ann’s father Dr Elliott Philipp being a facilitator of organised abuse himself (see post ‘Error of Judgement?’) – and Snowdon ‘campaigned’ on matters disability alongside his other mistress Marjorie Wallace, an old mate of Dafydd and the gang. Marjorie was married to Andrew Skarbek, a Top Doc who was facilitating organised abuse and Marjorie came to the Top Docs’ aid in 1986 when things were erupting in Wales and there was huge pressure to finally close places like the North Wales Hospital once and for all. Marjorie’s response was to set up her charidee SANE which literally campaigned to keep nutters locked up. Marjorie knew about Jimmy Savile and the abuse of patients at Broadmoor but remained schtum until after Savile’s death, when Marjorie joined in the en masse Me Tooing of Broadmoor staff re We Knew That He Was Mad And Dangerous. See post ‘One Dangerous Fucker’ for further details re Marjorie.
Savile was appointed to the management task force at Broadmoor in 1987 by Trumpers, when Trumpers was a junior Health Minister. See eg. ‘Socio-Political Context of the North Wales Mental Health Services In The 1980s’ and ‘A Pretty Class Piece Of Operation’. Savile knew Dafydd and the gang and visited Bryn Estyn; one boy claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a group of men while Savile watched. In 1987, Dafydd and the gang undertook a lengthy conspiracy with which the Home Office and the Mental Health act Commission were also fully involved, with the aim of framing and detaining me in Risley Remand Centre very shortly after the June 1987 General Election. See previous posts eg. ‘Security, Security’ and ‘Hey, Hey DAJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?’ The ultimate aim of the gang was to have me transferred to Broadmoor…
The Cunning Plan began weeks before the General Election and Tony Francis played a key role in it. The Windbag deluded himself that he was going to win that General Election: the Windbag had known Tony Francis when Francis was a student in Cardiff and the Windbag’s in-laws from Holyhead and their friends eg. Lord Cledwyn had colluded with the gang for decades, back as far as Gwynne’s heyday.
As the extent of the criminality of Dafydd and the gang and the efforts made the Thatcher Gov’ts to conceal it becomes ever more evident to me, I can only marvel at how bloody irresponsible the Windbag and the Labour Party were to refuse to go public on what was happening and instead shamelessly bang the NHS and ‘Nurses, Nurses’ drum. It is well-known that Thatch was a personal friend of the molester George Thomas, although he was Labour; Thatch’s excuse was that their shared Methodism breached the political divide. What is less well-known is that Thatch was also a personal friend of Eric Heffer and that he used to pop in for a late night tipple with her; Heffer and his wife Doris played a key role in concealing Dafydd and the gang’s stitching up of witnesses who then ended up in HMP Walton, in Heffer’s constituency. See previous posts.
Imagine my surprise when I came across an entry in Richard Crossman’s ‘Diaries’ for 26 Oct 1969, re Thatch: ‘She is rather a pal of mine, I got on very well with her when she was at Pensions [Thatch was Joint Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, Oct 1961-64] and she is one of the few Tories I greet in the lobby. She is tough, able and competent…’
Again and again, Thatch is revealed as having been friendly with people actively involved with the abuse of children and sexual exploitation of vulnerable people. Thatch was bluntly told what Peter Morrison and Savile were doing and she did not care: after she was told directly about Morrison by Barry Strevens her bodyguard, Thatch appointed Morrison as her PPS and she continued to lobby for Savile to be given a K although she was told of the ‘rumours’…
I don’t quite know where Thatcher’s brain was, but it wasn’t where it should have been.
In 1987 I wrote to Marjorie Wallace about Dafydd and the gang, having no idea that she personally knew them… I imagine that Marjorie was on the blower to a few people immediately after she read my letter.
[Creighton] displayed little bitterness towards Osborne, despite the fact that the playwright described him in his autobiography as “a cadging homosexual drunk”.
John Osborne really was a waste of space.
The pair met for the last time, to discuss royalties, several months before Osborne’s death in 1994, but they had little to say to one another, as Osborne, who was a heavy drinker and had severe diabetes, was almost incoherent.
So Penelope had drunk herself to death and Osborne died in a similarly sorry state on 24 Dec 1994 himself.
1994: On 12 Jan 1994 Clwyd County Council set up the Jillings Investigation. John Smith died on 12 May 1994; Matt Arnold, the former Head of Bryn Estyn, died on 9 June 1994; on 8 July 1994 Arnold’s long-term friend and colleague Peter Howarth was jailed for 10 years at Chester Crown Court for sexually assaulting boys in care; on 21 July 1994, Miranda became Leader of the Labour Party. F and I raised our concerns re Dafydd sexually exploiting patients with the Mental Health Act Commission in the spring of 1994. See previous posts.
Down at Westminster Paedophile Ring HQ, St George’s Hospital Medical School, Prof Geoffrey Chamberlain and Malcolm Pearce, for whom I had previously worked, were caught in a research fraud scandal. Malcolm was struck off in June 1995; Chamberlain was never investigated by the GMC although his name was on the journal article documenting the fraud and he was the Editor of the journal; Chamberlain gave evidence against Malcolm at the GMC hearing. See eg. ‘Now Then…’
Up in north Wales, in July 1995, Dafydd the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Expert, ‘retired’ as part of an agreement that none of the serious complaints against him would be followed up and ‘left work’ clutching the contract to provide ‘substance abuse services’ for the NHS for north Wales. See post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’ On 17 June 1995 David Ennals died. In July 1995, Geraint Morgan QC (former Tory MP for Denbigh), Bing Spear and Peter Morrison all died. The world was told that the North Wales Hospital shut down in the summer of 1995. It didn’t, patients remained there but the NHS has never come clean about which patients and how long they were there for.
As a bonus, on 25 May 1995, Ronald Matthews died. Ronald Matthew was the Dept of Health mandarin who had served as the Private Secretary to Dafydd’s mate Sir Kenneth Robinson and then as Private Secretary to Dick Crossman. Ronald had been at the coalface with regard to ensuring that Dafydd and Gwynne were untouchable.
To summarise Ronald Sydney Matthews’ Civil Service career: born Kingsbury 26 July 1922; Clerical Officer, Ministry of Health 1939-59 (RAF 1940-46), Principal 1959-67, Assistant Secretary 1968-73; Private Secretary to the Minister of Health 1966-68; Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Social Services 1968-69; Under-Secretary, Department of Health and Social Security 1973-76, Deputy Secretary 1976-81; CB 1978; married 1945 Bronwen (Bunny) Shaw (died 1989; one son, one daughter); died Wimborne, Dorset 25 May 1995.
Ronald was at the top of the DHSS throughout it all until he retired after Mary Wynch had made her way to her lawyers after finally getting out of Denbigh. Ronald’s wife being called Bronwen suggests that she was Welsh, or that her parents were.
Virginia Bottomley was Minister of State for Health, Oct 1989-9 April 1992 and Secretary of State for Health, 9 April 1992-5 July 1995; Stephen Dorrell succeeded her.
Ginny was Health Secretary when Ollie Brooke began publishing journal articles with Chamberlain and others at St George’s, giving St George’s as his address AFTER he had been convicted and jailed for child porn offences. See post ‘Too Many Pills’. Ginny was in post during all the times that the gang took me to the High Court on the basis of their perjury in an attempt to have me imprisoned. See eg. ;The Bitterest Pill’. Ginny was in post throughout the fabrication of documentation, the planting of evidence etc…
Ginny was a graduate of the LSE when Crossman’s mates ran that institution and she trained as a psychiatric social worker… For more info on Ginny, her husband Peter and the many other relatives of hers who were complicit, see previous posts…
John Redwood was Secretary of State for Wales, 27 May 1993-26 June 1995; David Hunt succeeded him, 26 June-5 July; William Hague succeeded Hunt. Hunt had previously served as Welsh Secretary, 4 May 1990-27 May 1993. They are all culpable. See previous posts.
Then there were the deaths of all those witnesses during those years…
“I prefer to remember the good times,” Creighton declared in 1995. “I look back on Osborne with love.”
Not that any of them were ever gay.
Anthony Creighton died on March 22 2005. He was unmarried.
How Anthony Creighton managed to reach old age without dying from drink as well I have no idea.
The Indie obituary for Anthony Creighton was published on
Next month, Epitaph for George Dillon by Anthony Creighton and John Osborne – written before but produced after Osborne’s leap to celebrity with Look Back in Anger in 1956 – is to be given a West End revival, at the Comedy Theatre. Peter Gill directs and Joseph Fiennes will be in the title role.
In 2005 the Gang was in need of PR again; I finished my PhD in the summer of 2005 and Brown and me had started publishing about the mental health services. The gang had declared war on Merfyn and Brown’s mum was found suddenly and unexpectedly dead.
Joseph Fiennes grew up in Wiltshire, where his father farmed. Peter Morrison’s family farmed in Wiltshire. Joseph is a relative of the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, who’s brother was a surgeon at St George’s when I worked there, 1989-91. See previous posts for details of Ranulph and his brother, who specialises in bariatric surgery.
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Joseph Fiennes is known for his portrayals of William Shakespeare in ‘Shakespeare In Love’ (1998), for which he was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Male Actor in a Leading Role; Sir Robert Dudley in ‘Elizabeth’ (1998), Commisar Danilov in ‘Enemy at the Gates’ (2001) and Monsignor Timothy Howard in the TV series ‘American Horror Story’ (2012–2013). Fiennes’ role in the 2017 TV drama series ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.
Anthony Creighton has been reduced to mere footnote status in the history of post-war British theatre, but more light will be shed on his shadowy figure when, next year, John Heilpern’s authorised biography of John Osborne – with whose life and career Creighton in the 1950s was inextricably linked – is finally published. With access to Osborne’s papers and the letters he wrote to Creighton, Heilpern will, perhaps, resolve the truth of their relationship.
Only in 1995 – coinciding with a posthumous revival of A Patriot for Me, Osborne’s epic, once-banned play of the Franz Joseph empire era centred round the closeted gay (and duplicitous) Colonel Redl – did he state in an engrossing interview with the critic Nicholas de Jongh that his involvement with Osborne had been “a love affair – a good, mutually supportive and enduring relationship”, although later, in a 2002 television documentary, he puzzlingly seemed to contradict his previous remarks.
Puzzlingly?? It was highly likely to have been the result of a Royal Command.
Osborne’s fifth wife and fiercely protective widow, the former Observer journalist Helen Dawson, vigorously rebutted Creighton’s claim (“utter tosh”).
His first wife, the actress Pamela Lane – who for a time in the 1950s shared a flat with both men – felt that Osborne surely would have told her (although some argue that, given the degree of self-loathing and the violent repudiation of gay sensibilities often revealed in his work, suggestive of at least some denial, that is perhaps not so certain).
It was a case of advanced fuckwittery and hidden bunnies.
The extracts revealed to date from Osborne’s letters to Creighton, frequently written when both men were acting separately in the often unlovely circumstances of provincial repertory in a bleak age of austerity – with Osborne sometimes sending remittances when he was employed and Creighton was not – are full of concern and an unexpectedly open, palpable tenderness (he often calls Creighton his “Mouse”: shades of Jimmy Porter’s “squirrels and bears” in Look Back in Anger). His fellow dramatist Richard Harris, living for a time on a houseboat on the Thames at Chiswick adjacent to The Egret shared by Creighton and Osborne – Creighton, on occasion unaccountably wearing a kilt, would visit Harris’s boat for company after Osborne’s solo success with Look Back – and forced to overhear some explosive rows, formed the impression that they were, indeed, a “couple”.
‘Private Eye’ would have no doubt have observed in this spirit that Osborne was a ‘rough, tough, puff poof’…
Little can be established with any certainty of Creighton’s very early life… he was raised by his always-loving mother, Elsie… Elsie inadvertently provided her 12-year-old son with a neo-Damascene experience when she took him to see the legendary 1934 Hamlet at the New Theatre with John Gielgud… Hooked on theatre and set on an actor’s career, Creighton lived for a period in adolescence in Canada, studying at Merrill University in Montreal before wartime service….
Their first collaboration was on Personal Enemy (unpublished), a fiercely felt piece set in McCarthyite America, produced in 1955 at Harrogate Opera House. When the team submitted Epitaph for George Dillon (written in 1955) to the same theatre it was rejected, largely because of its awkwardly confusing flashback structure which was subsequently totally revised. The play was finally produced at Look Back in Anger’s home, the Royal Court, in 1958, directed by William Gaskill, with Robert Stephens – who rejected suggestions of Osborne’s bisexuality, claiming with some understandable admiration that during his second marriage to Mary Ure, Osborne had a mistress ensconced round the corner “and a courtesan at the Savoy Hotel” – giving an unforgettably charismatic performance as the eponymous flawed charmer.
The play did strong Royal Court business but ran for only six weeks on transfer (entitled simply George Dillon) to the Comedy Theatre. It had ill luck in New York (John Golden Theatre, 1958)… Produced by the monstre sacré David Merrick, it undoubtedly suffered from an Osborne surfeit on Broadway (both Look Back and The Entertainer had been recently seen) and the New York Times review was cool. Merrick wanted to close at once but Marlene Dietrich, who had seen it with Noël Coward… and had been much taken by Stephens, warned Merrick, then pursuing her to repeat her Frenchy in a planned Broadway musical of her film Destry Rides Again, that she could not work for “a man who closes George Dillon”. Merrick kept it open (Dietrich still never signed for the show)…
As Osborne’s marriage to Mary Ure collapsed, he began his affair with Penelope Gilliatt..
I’ll be providing further information about Mary Ure shortly. Osborne began an affair with Penelope when she was still married to Lord Snowdon’s and Gwynne’s mate Roger.
One of the junior Top Docs at St George’s facilitating the general insanity when I worked there, 1989-91, was Sarah Creighton. I have no idea if Sarah was anything to do with Anthony Creighton; he was a Bachelor so she won’t have been his daughter, but a lot of people at St George’s were related to high profile people, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Sarah Creighton was a member of Anthony Creighton’s wider family.
Osborne’s first play The Devil Inside Him was co-written with his mentor Stella Linden, who then directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950. Stella Linden (born Stella M Marsden, 5 June 1919) was an actress and writer and the wife of actor Terrence Edward Duff, better known by his stage name Patrick Desmond. Stella’s mother shared ownership of the Wimbush chain of confectionery shops in Birmingham with other members of the family. In 1923, Stella’s mother re-married to Benjamin L Ingham and shortly after, gave birth to a boy, Ambrose.
Sometime prior to the summer of 1945, Stella married and became Stella Coulthard. In 1945, with the war over, Stella (no longer married) joined Anthony Creighton’s Sage Repertory Group and took the stage name Stella Linden. Stella met Patrick Desmond in the troupe and they married in July 1948. Stella’s mother, who by then used the name Ruby Ingham and Stella’s half-brother Ambrose Ingham, were the only witnesses to the marriage.
When John Osborne told Patrick Desmond he was trying to write his first play, Desmond referred Osborne to Stella, unaware that Osborne and Stella were lovers at the time. In 1950, Stella left Desmond and sought fame in Hollywood. Unable to get a role, she went to Mexico where she got divorced from Desmond, notifying him in a letter. From 1951, Stella did a bit of acting and subsequently gained steady jobs as a gameshow hostess and as a model.
In 1967, Stella wrote an episode of ‘The Monkees’ and a book, ‘Two a Penny’. Two a Penny was adapted to film that same year; Linden co-wrote the screenplay for Two a Penny with David Winters, who went uncredited. Winters, an actor, dancer, choreographer, film producer and director, was born in London but relocated to the US and took American citizenship. Winters has been involved with hundreds of films, productions, TV programmes etc. In 1989 Stella wrote a novel, Shameless. Stella Linden died in Jan 2005, two months before Anthony Creighton.
John Osborne married Pamela Lane in 1951. ‘Look Back In Anger’ was directed by Tony Richardson and starred Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure and Alan Bates.
Tony Richardson was born in Shipley, West Riding of Yorkshire. Asa Briggs came from nearby Keighley and was just seven years older than Richardson; Denis Healey also grew up in Keighley and represented a constituency in Jimmy Savile Central of Leeds, 1952-92 and was four years older than Asa. Tony Richardson went to Ashville College, Harrogate and then Wadham College, Oxford. His Oxford contemporaries included the Dirty Digger, Thatch, Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson. Richardson was President of both the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club (the ETC), in addition to being the theatre critic for the university magazine ‘Isis’. Those Richardson cast in his student productions included John Schlesinger and Shirl.
Tony Richardson was married to Vanessa Redgrave, 1962-67. Vanessa was involved with the Bertrand Russell initiative the Committee of 100 and knew Pat Pottle and Michael Randall, Russell’s Secretaries, who lived in the Cwm Croesor area and sprung the spy George Blake from prison. Vanessa was accused of funding the springing of George Blake; she denied it but Tony Richardson’s wiki entry states that he funded the escape. See post ‘A Message Of Peace At Christmas’.
Tony and Vanessa had two daughters, Natasha and Joely, both actresses. Natasha married film-maker Robert Fox and then actor Liam Neeson. On 16 March 2009, Natasha sustained a head injury when she fell while taking a beginner skiing lesson about 80 miles from Montreal, Quebec. At first Natasha did not seek medical help but complained about a severe headache two hours later. She was flown to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, where she died two days later from an epidural haematoma.
Natasha died a few months after Merfyn’s wife Nerys. Merfyn grew up in Cwm Croesor and as a teenager was a member of the Committee of 100.
Tony Richardson left Vanessa Redgrave for actress Jeanne Moreau, although the marriage he had anticipated never materialised. In 1972 Richardson also had a relationship with Grizelda Grimond, daughter of British politician Jo Grimond. Grizelda gave birth to his daughter, Katharine Grimond, on 8 January 1973.
Jo Grimond was Leader of the Liberal Party, 1956-67, before Mr Thrope became Leader and stood in as acting Leader in 1976 after Mr Thrope stood down in the wake of the unfortunate business of him being charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder. Jo’s wife married Laura Bonham Carter, a member of the famous Liberal Party dynasty, many of whom were involved with and/or colluded with the Westminster Paedophile Ring. Laura was a big fan of Mr Thrope and campaigned for him. See post ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ for details of the extended Bonham Carter clan.
Tony Richardson was bisexual, but never acknowledged it publicly until after he contracted HIV. He died of complications from AIDS on 14 Nov 1991. The year of so many deaths and wrecked careers of witnesses to the criminality of Dafydd et al, the knighthood for Peter Morrison and the launch of the North Wales Police investigation into a possible VIP paedophile ring in north Wales/Cheshire.
Milton Shulman in the ‘Evening Standard’ called ‘Look Back In Anger’ “a failure” and “a self-pitying snivel”. But the following Sunday, Kenneth Tynan, the most influential critic of the day – who knew Ronnie Waterhouse – of ‘The Observer’, praised the play to the skies. Harold Hobson of ‘The Sunday Times’ called Osborne “a writer of outstanding promise”.
‘The Observer’ and its journos are a running theme throughout this sewer. Although David Astor, the Editor of ‘The Observer’, 1948-75, had a reputation as being a liberal fair minded man, he worked very hard to ensure that the damage sustained by his family during the Profumo Affair, to which his brother Lord Bill Astor was central, was minimised. See eg. ‘In Memoriam – Bronwen, Lady Astor’. The Astors were not the only people who did their best to maintain that they weren’t really that much to do with matters Cliveden; members of the Royal Family were regulars there as well and they barely received a mention throughout the scandal…
David Cameron’s wife Samantha’s mother Annabel married William Waldorf Astor III – the son of the Lord Bill Astor who starred in the Profumo Affair – after she and Samantha’s father divorced. William Waldorf Astor III was the nephew of Annabel’s own stepfather, Michael Astor.
David Cameron’s father Ian was Chairman of White’s, when Sir Peter Morrison was a member of that club. Call Me Dave was a member of White’s himself but resigned over White’s refusal to accept ladies as members. Call Me Dave might be fascinated to know that many of us ladies wouldn’t be that interested in joining a club with a paedophile who was a mate of Dafydd’s as a member, although perhaps the ladies in Call Me Dave’s life would be OK with that.
Sam: an Executive Businesswoman who designs expensive notepaper and I think handbags as well:
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Sir Peter Morrison and Thatch:
Call Me Dave was seen as the heir to Thatch, although he tried to dress it up a bit with hugging huskies and suchlike.
Theresa May was Call Me Dave’s Home Secretary when she organised the cover-up of the Waterhouse Inquiry that was the Macur Review. Theresa was elected a Councillor for Merton Borough Council in 1986, the year that Ollie Brooke was jailed. St George’s ‘catchment’ area covered Merton. Theresa was a Merton Councillor until 1994; she served as Chairman of Education (1988–90) and Deputy Group Leader and Housing Spokesman (1992–94). Merton was a neighbouring Borough of Wandsworth; the Director of Education for Wandsworth, Donald Naismith, was known to be abusing kids in care. See previous posts.
Theresa was born in 1956 in Eastbourne. Her father the Rev Hubert Brasier was a C of E clergyman (and an Anglo-Catholic), who was chaplain of an Eastbourne hospital. The Rev Brasier later became vicar of St Mary’s at Wheatley to the east of Oxford; Theresa married in that church. Theresa’s mother was a supporter of the Conservative Party. Theresa went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford and graduated in 1977.
Olivia’s father Paul Channon was one of Thatcher’s Cabinet Ministers at the time; Paul Channon was a member of the Guinness family. Olivia’s friend Rosie Barnes was the scapegoat for the whole business; Rosie went to prison whereas some equally culpable – probably more culpable – people from rather more influential families than Rosie’s were let off very lightly indeed by the Oxford magistrates, including Count Gottfried von Bismark, in whose rooms Olivia died after everyone else scarpered from the scene of the crime.
In August 2006, Anthony Casey fell 60ft from von Bismarck’s Chelsea flat and died. Bismarck was not arrested and the police said that there were no drugs found in his flat. Media articles claimed that the incident occurred during a cocaine-fuelled orgy. The coroner’s report stated that there was a significant amount of cocaine in Casey’s body. A great deal of ‘sexual paraphernalia’ was discovered in the flat and ‘in common parlance, in the early hours of the morning, there was a gay orgy going on’, the Westminster coroner Dr. Paul Knapman told the ‘The Guardian’; ‘Nevertheless, this was conducted by consenting males in private’. It may well have been, but Paul Knapman, a St George’s graduate, had a long and glorious history of failing to miss obvious signs of possible foul play in many of the deaths of the high profile people over whose inquests he presided. Such as that of Lord Snowdon’s mistress Ann Hills. When I worked in London I was told by someone on the London medical scene that Knapman was ‘corrupt’. See previous posts for more info on Knapman…
On 2 July 2007, von Bismarck was found dead in his almost empty £5 million flat, which was in the process of being sold. He was 44 years old. An inquest into the circumstances was opened on 6 July 2007. Sebastien Lucas, the pathologist who carried out the postmortem, said that Bismarck had been injecting cocaine on an hourly basis on the day before his death and that Bismarck’s body contained the highest level of cocaine that he had ever seen, as well as morphine; Bismarck also had liver damage, Hep B, Hep C and HIV.
After Olivia Channon’s death, von Bismarck was fined £80 by Oxford magistrates.
See post ‘Is The Party Over Yet?’ for details of Olivia’s death and everyone involved.
Call Me Dave graduated from Oxford two years after Olivia died. Call Me Dave was a mate of Michael Heseltine’s daughter, Annabel, who was a student at Durham, but nonetheless managed to be photographed at celebrity parties with her twattish mates from Oxford and elsewhere. Heseltine was in the Cabinet with Olivia’s father and knows all about Dafydd and the gang. As with his colleagues, Heseltine constantly tried to use his knowledge of the criminality to further himself; it underpinned his various attempts at becoming PM. See previous posts eg. ‘A Legend Lives’.
Norah Beloff worked as a journo for ‘The Observer’ for years when David Astor was Editor; Norah also worked for Reuters. Norah was the sister of Lord Max Beloff, a friend of Ioan Bowen Rees, the Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council when the Council’s children’s homes hosted the paedophile gang. See post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’. Ioan’s dad was a teacher at Dolgellau Grammar School; Lady Bronwen Astor was the daughter of Sir Alun Pugh, a judge who grew up in Carmarthenshire. Bronwen went to boarding school in Dolgellau; there was only one years difference in age between Bronwen and Ioan. There was long-standing organised abuse in Carmarthenshire/West Wales which by the 1970s was directly linked to Dafydd’s gang. Before Ioan was Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council, he was County Secretary of Dyfed County Council, which covered the area formerly known as Carmarthenshire. See post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’
Lord Max was one of the movers and shakers behind the private University of Buckingham, of which Thatch became Chancellor and a number of Lord Max’s relatives secured academic posts at the University. See eg. post ‘The International Language of Screaming’. Norah fell out with David Astor’s successor as Editor, Donald Trelford, but by then was married to another journo who worked for ‘The Observer’.
Lord Max’s son and Cherie and Miranda’s friend Michael Beloff QC – Norah’s nephew – was the legal adviser who ensured that the 1996 Jillings Report into the abuse of children in the care of Clwyd County Council was made available only to lawyers and insurers and was subsequently pulped. See post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake…’
See my post ‘Britain In Agony’ for the mangling that Michael Meacher received in the Courts in 1988 when he sued ‘The Observer’ for libel over an article that they had published about him in October 1983. Meacher was someone else who tried to use his knowledge of Dafydd, Tony Francis et al for personal gain – spurred on by the Windbag of course. Meacher’s first wife Molly did even better out of it than Meacher did; she became Baroness Molly. But then Molly was a social worker with an interest in Mental Health and Drug Addiction, during the years when Mary Wynch, Alison Taylor and I were raising concerns about Dafydd and the gang. See eg. post ‘A Vintage Crop’. Molly is now married to Lord Richard Layard, the LSE Happiness Guru, who recipe for tackling mental distress is is farcical as that of his fellow traveller, Prof Mark Williams, formerly a colleague of Dafydd’s. See previous posts.
‘The Sunday Times’ provided much help to the gang as well. Lord Snowdon’s bit on the side Marjorie Wallace worked as a journo for ‘The Sunday Times’ as did her bit on the side from an earlier time, Tom Margerison. Margerison worked for the security services, published ‘New Scientist’ and founded LWT into the bargain. Richard Crossman’s ‘Diaries’ mention that on Jan 27 1970, he had lunch with Muriel Bowen, the Local Gov’t correspondent of ‘ The Sunday Times’. Crossman knew Harold Evans, the Editor (see previous posts) and commented of Muriel: ‘There we were all at the Dorchester and I’ve almost decided to give the Sunday Times the scoop next Sunday of what is likely to be in the Green Paper on the Health Service. Miss Bowen is a funny screwed-up woman who eats a lot, drinks nothing, looks after me and somehow gets on with me…’ Crossman mentioned that Harold Evans ‘thinks of her as a woman of privilege’.
Muriel Bowen (16 January 1926-23 August 2000) was Irish and born at Clonea Castle in Dungarvon, County Waterford. She was educated at Mount Anville Secondary School and Trinity College, Dublin. On leaving school, Bowen found work as a journalist with the ‘Irish Independent’, writing about horses and contributing to the society and music columns in the ‘Irish Tatler’. Bowen was also a member of Fine Gael and in 1947 she was appointed to its finance and general purposes committee.
In 1952, Bowen moved to London to work for ‘The Daily Express’ and then in 1955 she began working for ‘The Evening Standard’. Muriel Bowen became active in the Tory Party and at the 1955 General Election stood unsuccessfully in West Ham North. She then moved to the United States to work for ‘The Washington Post’.
Lord Elwyn-Jones was the Labour MP for West Ham South, 1950-74 and then for Newham South for one month in 1974. Elwyn Jones was a lawyer who grew up in Carmarthenshire, studied at Aberystwyth University and was an essential part of the trafficking gang, providing a link between Dafydd’s partner gangs in London and Wales. Elwyn Jones served as the Attorney General, 1964-70, under Harold Wilson and was then Lord High Chancellor, 1974-79, under Wilson and Callaghan. The party was well and truly underway. Elwyn Jones had held positions of responsibility as Ollie Brooke et al built up and expanded that trafficking ring.
Lord Elwyn-Jones was married to Pearl aka Polly Binder, an Artist with a Passion for the East End, while her husband oiled the wheels of the business which trafficked the kids of that area. Their son Dan was a social worker who then became an Artist. Dan Jones has been based in the East End for decades. See previous posts for details of Elwyn Jones and his family and friends.
Peter Shore was a fellow Labour MP in the East End who was a Cabinet Minister in Gov’t along with Crossman; Shore was also facilitating Dafydd’s gang and the Westminster Paedophile Ring. Shore’s wife Elizabeth was Dr Liz Shore, a Nice Lady Doctor, who by the time that Richard Crossman was Secretary of State at the DHSS, was Deputy Chief Medical Officer to Sir George Godber, the CMO. Godber was fully on board with Dafydd and Gwynne and protected Dafydd et al until the end of Godber’s very long life, in Feb 2009. Lest readers think that an old boy of 100 yrs old couldn’t do much to prop up Dafydd, he could and he did, because he was a leading light in the MDU in his later years and being someone who Helped Nye Create The NHS, the old bastard was untouchable. See previous posts for info on Godber and the Baron and Baroness Shore.
Muriel Bowen may have been a Tory, but her political opponents really were not socialist revolutionaries and everybody’s interests in troughing was prioritised over anything else. Muriel knew them and will have troughed along with the rest.
Returning to London after her stint in the US, Muriel Bowen was elected in the London County Council election of 1961 for Battersea South, serving until the Council’s abolition three years later. In the meantime, Bowen was elected to Westminster City Council, one of the 32 new boroughs which came into being as the LCC ceased to exist. Bowen served as a Councillor for Baker Street, 1964-68.
Westminster City Council facilitated the Westminster Paedophile Ring and was in a particularly good position to do this, because until 1980 when St George’s Hospital relocated to Tooting, St George’s was at Hyde Park Corner and on the patch of Westminster City Council. A number of Top Docs at St George’s were Westminster City Councillors. Sir Brian Warren served on Westminster City Council; Warren was Ted Heath’s friend and personal Top Doc. Warren and his wife, Dame Josephine Barnes, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, both facilitated the Westminster Paedophile Ring. See post ‘Uncle Harry’s Friends…’
Everyone involved came to the assistance of Dafydd and Gwynne when needed. Westminster City Council later achieved notoriety under the Leader Dame Shirley Porter for rampant corruption. Still no-one mentioned the organised abuse and criminality being facilitated by the Top Doctors, not even the Labour members of Westminster City Council such as Diane Abbott. See previous posts…
Muriel Bowen began working for ‘The Tatler’ and remained active in the Conservatives. In 1967 she began writing for ‘The Sunday Times’ and in 1968 she wrote “The Fullest Rights”, a pamphlet about the history of women in the Tory Party. In her spare time Bowen was a leading carriage driver. She also showed horses and was a member of several hunts. She won eight all-England titles in the 1980s and was champion at the Royal Show in 1979 and 1980. Bowen never married and died in Dorking, Surrey from a blood disorder, aged 74.
There are a number of books written by a Muriel Bowen. One is ‘Irish Hunting’ (1954); a Muriel Bowen published ‘The Carmarthenshire Antiquary; The Transactions of the Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society’ in 1992, 1993 and 1994 and there were two Welsh language titles published by University of Wales Press in 1972 and 1978 published by a Muriel Bowen Evans. I have no idea what the fuckwittery was all about, I suspect the involvement of the security services. Who had they not been so busy pissing around with over-privileged idiots like Muriel, might have managed to stop an international trafficking gang who were murdering witnesses.
During the production of ‘Look Back In Anger’, John Osborne, still married to Pamela Lane, began a relationship with Mary Ure. Osborne subsequently divorced Pamela to marry Mary Ure in 1957. A film version of ‘Look Back In Anger’ was released in May 1959 with Richard Burton and Mary Ure in the leading roles. I have briefly discussed Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in previous posts and comments. Burton famously grew up in south Wales and retained close links there, even after he became Rich n Famous. Burton drank like a fish and as with so many other celebs who had knowledge of the crimes committed by those we know and love and who could afford the Finest Top Docs, somehow they were ineffective with regard to Burton and his boozing.
By the age of 41, Burton had declined so far in health that by his own admission his arms were thin and weak. He suffered from bursitis, ‘possibly aggravated by faulty treatment’, arthritis, dermatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and kidney disease; by his mid-40s, Burton had developed a pronounced limp. According to Melvyn Bragg’s 1988 biography of Burton, how much of this was due to his intake of alcohol is impossible to ascertain, ‘because of Burton’s reluctance to be treated for alcoholism’. In 1974 Burton spent six weeks in a clinic to recuperate from a period during which he had drunk three bottles of vodka per day. Burton was also a chain smoker, with an intake of between three and five packets a day for most of his adult life. Health issues continued to plague him until his death at the age of 58 from a brain haemorrhage on 5 August 1984 at his home in Geneva, Switzerland.
Although Burton’s death was sudden, his health had been declining for several years and he suffered from constant and severe neck pain. As early as March 1970, he had been warned that his liver was enlarged and he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and kidney disease in April 1981.
In Aug 1984 Mary Wynch was knocking on the door of the Master of the Rolls. I was writing to the UCNW authorities and the GMC about Gwynne and threats were raining down on the heads of Brown and me from Top Docs. George Thomas, at some point in 1984, contracted an STI, was hospitalised and was so concerned at the prospect of the media finding out that his mate Leo Abse – another mate of Dafydd’s and a Westminster Swinger who’s Top Doc brothers Dannie and Wilfred were also mates of Gwynne and Dafydd’s and Westminster Swingers as well (see post ‘O Jones, O Jones’) – that Leo told a pack of lies to the media re Thomas’s illness and the Top Docs backed it up. See post ‘It Wasn’t On Our Radar’.
Shortly before I sat my finals in May 1984, Dr D.G.E. Wood’s friend Stuart Ferraris, a dentist in Beaumaris, was nearly killed in an explosion at Dickie’s boatyard at Bangor. Stuart’s life was saved by a Top Doc, a gynaecologist, who was working on his own boat nearby. All the gynaecologists in north Wales were assisting in facilitating the trafficking ring; it is highly unlikely that Stuart Ferraris didn’t know what was going on. See previous posts for the full details on how Ferraris nearly died.
Lord Maelor spontaneously combusted on 18 Nov 1984. Lord Maelor aka Thomas Jones, had served as the Labour MP for the constituency that included Cwm Croesor, 1951-66. Lord M had begun life as a schoolteacher who trained at the Normal College in Bangor, an institution historically dominated by members of the gang (see eg. Thought For The Day’) and when off-duty, liked to relax by wearing ladies clothes. Lord M’s brother James Jones was the Labour MP for Wrexham, 1955-70. See post ‘Slaves, Perfect Slaves’ for details of Thomas and James Maelor.
1984 had started in an exciting way in Gwynedd as well; the offices of the local paper in Caernarfon were burnt to a cinder, just like Lord Maelor was at the end of the year.
After Richard Burton died, as well as maxing out on the fact that she’d been married to him a few times, although they kept getting divorced as well, Elizabeth Taylor spent a great deal of her time campaigning on behalf of folk who had developed AIDS and Fighting The Stigma, as so many of her mates were clobbered with HIV. See previous posts. The UK Gov’t Campaigned at about the same time; Thatch had been very hostile to the idea of a public health campaign re AIDS until Dafydd’s mate Sir Donald Acheson, the then Chief Medical Officer, explained to Thatch in words of one syllable that this was a killer, there was no known effective treatment and that her mates who enjoyed gay sex with kids in care and rent boys were going to die themselves if they weren’t very careful, particularly as the rent boys with whom they were having sex were usually infected. See previous posts.
I was entertained to read that Thatch was particularly traumatised over the possible use of the phrase ‘back passage’ in the public health campaign. Surely ‘back passage’ is the biggest euphemism on earth, it is a phrase only usually used by the over 80s. Even Dafydd managed to utter the word ‘anus’ in the High Court in Liverpool in 1994 when he told a pack of lies in order to obtain an injunction against me. Why Dafydd discussed his anus in the affidavit none of us ever worked out, but as ever no-one asked any questions.
Previous posts have explained how Helping AIDS Victims became a growth industry for so many of those who facilitated the gang. Gwynne and Roger Gilliatt’s alma mater the Middlesex Hospital opened the first AIDS ward and Diana, then still married to Lord Snowdon’s former brother-in-law, went along and Shook The Hand of an dying AIDS patient, to Fight the Stigma. Peter Shore extracted dosh out of Ken Clarke at the Dept of Health to convert the old Mildmay Mission Hospital in the East End into an AIDS hospice (see post ‘Apocalypse Now’) and Sir Robin Wales et al in the Borough of Newham really pushed the boat out and ended up with Canary Wharf (see post ‘The Bodies Buried Beneath Canary Wharf’). Then there were the numerous counsellors, helplines, charidees etc eg. London Lighthouse. See previous posts.
Everyone involved had known all about the abuse of those kids in care and they knew that the former kids in care were now dying and could name names if distressed. So the dying rent boys were given Beds In Hospices and Counselling In Complete Confidence Because Of The Stigma. Those dying young men probably did tell those Looking After Them exactly who had done what to them when they were kids in care in north Wales and elsewhere. It was helpfully explained to the world that the dying AIDS patients didn’t have families because they had been rejected for Being Gay. No, they had been forcibly taken away from their families when they were kids and given to John Allen and Dafydd. Of the ones who did later make contact with their families, the problem wasn’t that they were gay; they were hopelessly addicted to drugs, as mad as a box of frogs after years of beatings, gang rapes and Help and they were sex workers. That was what caused the rifts.
The biggest vampire of the lot was Baroness Margaret Jay, who took a Special Interest in HIV/AIDS and later married Michael Adler, a Top Doc who is an HIV specialist. Miranda made the Baroness Margaret a Health Minister in 1997. Margaret was the daughter of Jim and Audrey Callaghan, who facilitated abuse and concealed the crimes of Dafydd and the gang for years (see eg. post ‘Cry, The Beloved Country’) and her first husband was Peter Jay, son of Lord Douglas and Peggy Jay, who were both friends of Richard Crossman and the Westminster Swingers. Lord Doug was a Labour Cabinet Minister who famously declared that the man in the street didn’t know what was what where Health was concerned and Whitehall knew better and should take the decisions. So we got this:
Peggy Jay was a Labour Councillor and a friend of Herbert Morrison – Mandy’s granddad – and Peggy virtually ran Hampstead and Camden, including keeping the lid on the sex workers down the road at St Pancras. Many of Peggy’s friends and neighbours in Hampstead were professionals facilitating and concealing abuse, including those members of the Bloomsbury Group who spent time in Cwm Croesor or who were mates with those who did. Peggy’s son Peter Jay was a good mate of Dr Death; Dr Death was a personal friend of some of the Top Docs running the trafficking ring, including some of those in north Wales. See eg. ‘Dr Death’ and ‘We’ve Been Expecting You…’ Dr Death dispensed advice to Richard Crossman at the DHSS, who was mightily impressed with Dr Death. Peggy was Virginia Bottomley’s aunt. See eg. ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ for info on Peggy and her mates.
What a con it all was.
As for Thatch, after the ‘Don’t Die Of Ignorance’ AIDS education campaign conducted while Norman Fowler the Health Secretary colluded with the serious crime in north Wales, in 1989 the nation was entertained when Thatch declared herself to be infused with the reincarnated spirit of Churchill. It was brilliant, people were rolling around laughing saying ‘well she’s finally gone completely bonkers’. Now I was told by more sober people that there was genuine concern at the time over what was very likely to have been the symptoms of an amphetamine-induced psychosis. It was common knowledge that Thatch was boosting herself up with class A drugs from Harley Street but it was Never Mentioned outside of Top Docs’ circles. People in north Wales refused to believe me when I told them that Thatch was on class As; I don’t think that Hergest patients understood that Dafydd et al have the Respectable as their clients as well as street addicts in Wrexham and Holyhead. However a few years later, F and I were watching TV when a few old clips of Thatcher as Churchill were screened and F yelled ‘Look at that!! Speed freak, she’s a speed freak’. Yes, she was. I don’t know who exactly in Harley Street was flogging Thatcher her goodies, but various Top Docs in London knew. I think that Uncle Harry’s friend Wendy Savage knew who it was; Savage got pissed at a party one day and I understand let a few things slip… Savage was facilitating the business of Dafydd’s partner gang in Tower Hamlets and was mates with Geoffrey Chamberlain – who was mates with Cilla, a robust supporter of Thatch – so she’d have been in a position to know. See previous posts eg. ‘Uncle Harry’s Friends…’,’The Logic Of Medicine’ and ‘A Charming, Uplifting Sound…’
‘Look Back In Anger’ made Osborne wealthy; it won him the ‘Evening Standard’ Drama Award as the most promising playwright of 1956. When Laurence Olivier first saw Look Back in Anger, he was dismissive, viewing the play as unpatriotic and bad theatre. At the time, Olivier was making a film of Rattigan’s co-starring Marilyn Monroe and she was accompanied to London by her then-husband Arthur Miller. Olivier asked Miller what plays he might want to see in London. Miller suggested ‘Look Back In Anger’; the two of them saw it together. They went backstage to meet Osborne. Olivier was so wowed by Miller’s reaction that Olivier asked Osborne for a part in his next play. George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court, sent Olivier the incomplete script of The Entertainer; Olivier took the central role, playing to great acclaim both at the Royal Court and then in the West End.
Osborne achieved great success over the following years; his play ‘Luther’ transferred to Broadway and won Osborne a Tony Award and Osborne won an Oscar for his 1963 screenplay adaptation of ‘Tom Jones’. A Patriot For Me and The Hotel in Amsterdam won the ‘Evening Standard’ Best Play of the Year awards. Osborne’s plays in the 1970s included West of Suez which starred Ralph Richardson and Watch It Come Down, first produced at the National Theatre, starring Frank Finlay.
In this period, Osborne made his acting appearance as gangster Cyril Kinnear in ‘Get Carter’ (1971). Osborne appeared in ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’ (1978) and ‘Flash Gordon’ (1980).
Throughout the 1980s, Osborne lived in Shropshire, near Church Stretton, while he was married to Helen. He opened his garden to raise money for the church roof, having returned to the Church of England in about 1974. Osborne lived in Shropshire when John Allen ran a children’s home there, when the sex abuse ring operating in Shropshire exchanged staff with Dafydd’s gang in north Wales, when Lord Kenyon lived – and died – in the family seat in that county, when Lord Harlech died in Shrewsbury hospital after the car crash and when John Biffen was the Tory MP for Oswestry. In the early 1990s, there was a police investigation into the abuse of kids in care and Ralph Morris was jailed for abusing boys in his care while he worked as a teacher, including a Headteacher. Ralph Morris was a well-known figure in Shropshire, particularly the Ludlow area and held public positions. The abuse of boys at Castle Hill School was part of the police investigation. See eg. post ‘The Mentor’.
In Sept 1989, Alison Taylor was filmed extensively by Yorkshire TV for a planned documentary on the abuse of kids in care in north Wales. In Feb 1990, Yorkshire TV abandoned their documentary about north Wales and made one about Castle Hill School instead which was subsequently screened. There was no expose of matters in north Wales. A lot of people worked very hard to ensure that there wasn’t.
John Osborne also wrote a diary for ‘The Spectator’. In the early 1990s, there was a bit of media interest in Mary Wynch, after Mary continued to battle with the Courts AFTER she won her case against Dafydd et al; the gang simply refused to pay Mary the damages that had been agreed, Mary was still in hiding and more problems followed. A piece about about Mary appeared in ‘The Spectator’, commenting on the extraordinary injustices that she had endured and the failure of anyone to sort it out. Jeremy Paxman’s then partner, Elizabeth Clough made a documentary, for the BBC series ‘Taking Liberties’ called ‘Who Will Listen To Mary Winch?’ (both spellings of Mary’s name are used in Court documents, so when I began this blog I was unsure of which was the correct spelling), which was screened on 5 March 1991. Peter Morrison had been knighted the month previously and my career had ended, as had the careers of other witnesses, all at the beginning of 1991.
After the BBC programme, there was much media comment along the lines of ‘How has this ever all happened?’. In April 1991, the Drs Francis took me to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand in an attempt to have me imprisoned on the basis of their perjury. St Helena Kennedy was starring in a test case in a neighbouring Court and as I left the Royal Courts, still a free woman, the wimmin demonstrating on behalf of St Helena’s client asked me for my support. St Helena is friendly with and has worked extensively with Prof Nigel Eastman, a forensic psych at St George’s/Springfield. See previous posts. In Feb 1991 Eastman had told me to leave London and go back to north Wales because Dafydd was my doctor and ‘they know you there’. Eastman had been sent a letter by his colleague Dr Robin Jacobson, another Springfield psych, telling him that Dafydd was sexually abusing patients and that Jacobson thought that Tony Francis was as well and that I was suicidal because of the constant arrests and grief from Dafydd et al. Dafydd had told Jacobson over the phone that I was ‘attractive and seductive’ and Jacobson had mentioned this in the letter to Eastman. There was only one remedy: I could go back into the arms of Dafydd, obviously… See previous posts.
In 1991, shortly after my appearance at the Royal Courts of Justice in The Stand, Pat Pottle and Michael Randall appeared at the Old Bailey charged with offences relating to them having sprung the spy George Blake from prison in 1966. Pottle and Randall were cleared on 26 June 1991. There was plenty of media comment questioning why they had been put on trial after all that time, but no-one mentioned that this was the second ridiculous case involving matters Gwynedd at the Royal Courts of Justice during a matter of weeks. See post ‘A Message Of Peace At Christmas’.
On 19 March 1991 an Early Day Motion was tabled, sponsored by David Bellotti, the Lib Dem MP for Eastbourne: ‘This House urges an immediate review by the Home Secretary of the gross injustices suffered by Miss Mary Winch, now resident in Eastbourne, and recorded in the BBC Two programme ‘Taking Liberties’ on Tuesday 5 March’. Six MPs signed this Motion: Alan Beith (Liberal Democrat, Berwick-upon-Tweed), Malcolm Bruce (Liberal Democrat, Gordon), Ronnie Fearn (Liberal Democrat, Southport), Geraint Howells (Liberal Democrat, Ceredigion and Pembroke North), Matthew Taylor (Liberal Democrat, Truro and St Austell) and Dafydd Wigley (Plaid Cymru, Caernarfon).
On 31 March 1993, Alex Carlile asked the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor’s Dept, to order a full investigation into Mary’s case and asked when there was going to be a reply to letters concerning Mary’s case dated June 1991, August 1991, September 1991, October 1991 and May 1992. John M. Taylor replied that Mary had taken legal action against the Public Trustee which had not yet concluded and he wouldn’t comment because proceedings were before the Courts. Hansard records that on 27 April 1995 Alex Carlile asked the Parliamentary Secretary Lord Chancellor’s Department if he would make a statement on the actions of the Public Trustee in relation to legal proceedings brought by Miss Phoebe Winch (once more Mary Agnes Wynch’s name was misrecorded). On 25 April 1995 Julia Lomas had written to Alex Carlile stating that Mary’s case was lengthy, complicated etc and in 1994 a payment of £15k had been made to Mary to settle the matter, with no liability admitted on the part of the Public Trustee (the Public Trustee had also been named in Mary’s action) and now Mary could sod off.
That was the end of the matter; a respectable innocent woman had been ruined, swindled out of her inheritance by a bunch of small town crooked solicitors, illegally imprisoned in Risley Remand Centre and then banged up, again illegally, in a notoriously grim, lawless mental hospital for a year. The people occupying the highest offices of the British state colluded with all of it for years and Michael Howard at the Home Office had put the final killer nail in Mary’s coffin in 1994.
See post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’ for further info.
No-one ever mentioned Mary’s case again, not even Alex Carlile. Readers might note that every MP who signed the EDM in support of Mary in 1991 except for David Bellotti who tabled the EDM, remained silent for ever after and ended up in the Lords. Carlile is the Gov’t’s Expert On Terrorism and this morning a news bulletin stated that on the basis of Carlile’s advice, more anti-terrorist legislation has been passed and it is now an imprisonable offence to display flags of ‘proscribed terrorist organisations’. I am tempted to display a few on this blog, in honour of Alex Carlile, a Welsh barrister who spent years working with those we know and love, served as the MP for Montgomery and knew about Dafydd and the gang but decided to ignore what they were doing. See previous posts.
David Bellotti lost his Commons seat at the 1992 General Election. John Major won that General Election and David’s seat was won by Nigel Waterson, the Tory candidate. Days after that General Election, a firebomb was thrown into a building in Brighton where a party was being held; five witnesses to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal were killed. A surviving witness died in suspicious circumstances at a later date. See post ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs’.
David Bellotti remained in local politics, in Sussex and subsequently in Bath and North East Somerset. He died in June 2015, mid-way through the Macur Review.
In his latter years, John Osborne published two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991). ‘A Better Class of Person’ (1985) was filmed by Thames TV featuring Eileen Atkins and Alan Howard and Gary Capelin and Neil McPherson . At Osborne’s memorial service in 1995 playwright David Hare spoke.
Osborne was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain.
There are so many luvvies linked with Osborne and his friends that I really do not have the capacity to do them all justice here. I can only stress the following running theme: Dafydd and his services to celebs, the Garrick, Ronnie Waterhouse, Robin Day and William Mars-Jones…
John Osborne joined CND in 1959, which at that time was dominated by Bertrand Russell and his friends, many of whom were based, or spending a great deal of time in, the Cwm Croesor area and were utilising the services provided by Gwynne and Dafydd. See eg. ‘Captain Swing And His Crew’ and ‘The Vermin Club’. Later Osborne drifted to the libertarian right; Dafydd and Gwynne had umbrellas among that contingent as well.
Osborne’s wives and lovers were not always kept apart. In his 2006 biography, John Heilpern describes at length a holiday in France in 1961, that Osborne shared with Tony Richardson, a distraught George Devine and others. Heilpern writes:
Let’s see: Osborne is on a besieged holiday with his aggrieved mistress while having a passionate affair with his future third wife as the founding artistic director of the Royal Court has a nervous breakdown and his current wife gives birth to a son that isn’t his.
In A Better Class of Person, Osborne describes feeling an immediate and intense attraction towards his first wife Pamela Lane. At the time, the pair were both members of an acting troupe in Bridgwater. I knew nothing about this bit of Bridgwater’s history, but I’m sure that Dafydd and the gang’s antennae were twitching. Osborne loathed Lane’s parents – but then he didn’t like many people – who at one point hired a private detective to follow Osborne when he was based in Bridgwater after a fellow actor was seen ‘fumbling’ with his knee in a tea shop. Osborne admitted that this did happen and that the actor in question had a homosexual crush on him. Lane and Osborne married in secret in nearby Wells and then left Bridgwater the following Sunday amidst an uneasy truce with Lane’s parents (Osborne’s hated mother was not aware that he and Lane had got married until the couple were divorcing) and spent their first night as a married couple together in London.
Osborne and Lane lived an itinerant and reasonably happy married existence at first, living in digs around London and finding work in London at first, then touring and in Osborne’s case, staying in Kidderminster. While Lane’s acting career flourished in Derby, Osborne’s floundered and Lane began an affair with a rich dentist. This was in the summer of 1955 and Osborne spent much of the next two years before their divorce hoping they would reconcile.
Derbyshire was the location of a hub of organised abuse which by the 1970s had direct links to Dafydd’s gang and was exchanging staff. John Jillings, who Chaired the Jillings Investigation, was the retired Director of Derbyshire Social Services; Jillings has always refused to speculate upon whether a paedophile ring with links to other parts of the UK was in operation in north Wales.
The father of Kevin Lloyd, the actor who played ‘Tosh’ in ‘The Bill’ was a policeman who grew up in Gwynedd and later transferred from the police in north Wales to Derbyshire. He was killed while answering a false alarm when Kevin Lloyd was a boy.
Kevin Lloyd himself died on on 2 May 1998, in very worrying circumstances in an alcohol detox clinic on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border. Kevin’s family were of the view that he had received appallingly negligent ‘care’ from the clinic and they tried very hard to have the clinic held to account without success. They also challenged the portrayal of Kevin as violent. Kevin’s brother Terry was a journo who was shot dead by the US military on 22 March 2003 while covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq for ITN. An inquest jury in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing on 13 October 2006. The NUJ said that Terry Lloyd’s killing was a war crime. On 19 March 2007, the BBC reported that ITN had released the names of the 16 US Marines in the unit involved in Lloyd’s death. Despite the verdict at the inquest, the CPS decided in July 2008 that there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute Lloyd’s killers.
See post ‘That’s Entertainment’ for the full stories of Kevin and Terry’s deaths.
Previous posts have discussed Derbyshire MPs Who Knew About The Trafficking Ring, including Spencer le Marchant, Margaret Beckett, Edwina Currie, Dennis Skinner, Matthew Parris and Tony Benn.
One Derbyshire MP who has not yet received a mention on this blog is Peter Jackson, the Labour MP for High Peak, 1966-70, who lost his seat to the Tory Spencer le Marchant. Jackson receives a mention in Crossman’s ‘Diaries’, on 12 Nov 1969. Crossman described Jackson as ‘the bearded socialistic vaguely revolutionary Peter Jackson. He is a very sweet man, anti-foxhunting, pro-abortion, all the good causes and he’s utterly disillusioned with life and the Labour Party. I lunched with him one day this week, only because there was no other table with anybody sitting on it, but by the time the room had filled up they were all eyeing him and wondering what we were doing together. We were discussing his attitude to the Abortion Act and gerrymandering and here he was today making a great speech, saying his conscience would be besmirched being dragged down to this level. [Crossman had been pressurising Labour MPs into voting against implementing a recent Report by the Boundary Commission; it was indeed all about gerrymandering. Jackson announced that he would abstain.] I tried to explain the history of this to him and the arguments for deferring the Boundary Commissions recommendations until we had the Maud Report. [Crossman had rigged the Maud Commission with his own men, including the crook T. Dan Smith who was running the empire which partnered Dafydd’s up in the North East.] Today, owing to the extremely efficient work of Callaghan [then Home Secretary and concealing the crime in north Wales], the vote was carried decisively by big majorities and we shall be fighting the [forthcoming] election on the old boundaries’.
Peter Michael Jackson was born in Sheffield on 14 October 1928 and was educated at a Sheffield Grammar School, Durham University and University College, Leicester. Jackson passed through the essential hubs of organised abuse feeding into the Westminster Paedophile Ring then. He married Christine Thomas in 1961 (marriage dissolved 1979).
Before joining the Labour Party, Jackson was a member of the Commonwealth Party. After Parliament, Jackson pursued an academic career. He was a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the University of Hull, Fellow at University of Hull and Tutor at the Open University (1972-74) before becoming Senior Planning Officer in South Yorks (1974-77). I’ll simply mention the name Jimmy Savile…
Peter Jackson was one of the former MPs who was interviewed for an oral history project on Parliament. Here are extracts from his interview:
“My mind on the abortion issue was very much concentrated by – I could strangle the man – a judge who gave a woman a long jail sentence, like … Mrs [Vera Drake]. I sounded off in Parliament, I don’t know what I did but I made the lead story in the Sheffield newspapers, which surprised me, in criticism of this particular judge. As a result of this, I was put in touch with a working class man who was the husband of the lady who’d been sent to prison for I think it was four years, and I went to see him and he had three kids and he wasn’t skilled in child rearing and he was devastated by this. I felt very sorry for him. I can still see it now. That concentrated my mind, like nothing, to see a family’s life destroyed… if you ask me what was my most important contribution it would be my role in bringing about rights for women which they never had before, and hopefully not sending women to prison… The police browbeat a woman who had given her a fiver, and she said didn’t want to accept it, but the point is she was forced to accept it.”
Summary of interview:
Description of early life as an only child and father’s job as a valuation officer for Sheffield Council. Mentions his grandparent’s business and his parent’s aspirational character. Describes moving to Derbyshire in 1935 and his mother’s desire for him to be an accountant…Discussion of attending a grammar school in Sheffield. Describes working at age of 17 for firm of accountants. Mentions mother’s dominant personality. Mentions conscription. Description of being influenced by two masters at school. Tells story of the right wing texts on Chartists studied in history lessons… Description of a meeting in 1945 general election and asking a question. Puts his interest in politics down to his English and History masters. Discussion of importance of educational influence over family in shaping political interest. Discussion of parent’s voting Conservative. Mentions the lack of political discussion at home. Mentions reading the Guardian and subscribing to left wing journals. Discusses PJ’s political consciousness and awareness of Britain’s role at a young age. Mentions opposition to conscription. Tells story of telling father of plans to volunteer for the Bevin Boys and his father’s threatening to kick him out if he did. Description of father’s ambition for PJ. Discussion of opposition to being conscripted into the RAF because of Britain’s role and hostility to Soviet Union. Tells story of mother crying at Chamberlain’s declaration of war speech. Description of war as high point in PJ father’s life. Description of PJ’s father volunteering but was not being called up creating hostility from PJ. Discussion of the minimal role of PJ’s father in his life. Tells story of not getting credit in maths and his father blaming PJ’s canvasing for the commonwealth candidate in his lunch breaks. Description of joining Commonwealth party rather than Labour Party. Description of wartime practice of party nominated replacements in the event of an MPs death rather than elections. Description of Commonwealth party’s opposition to this practice…Description of taking an economics course at National Labour Colleges. Discussion of passion for books as a result of father’s action. Further discussion of father’s dissuading of PJ becoming a Bevin Boy and PJ’s father’s hopes of PJ becoming an officer. Description of working for accountants…Mentions being made an aircraft hand general duty. Description of getting easy jobs due to being literate. Description of being taught how to type. Description of being posted in Norfolk and going to adult classes in current affairs. Mentions being told he should go to university and not having ever thought about going to university. Description of government scheme to get ex-servicemen to go to university. Description of decision to become a social worker and seeing it as a positive left-wing role. Description of going to Durham and later making friends with left-wing students. Description of being introduced to classical music. Mentions meeting friends Jack Williams and Harold Evans at Durham. Description of deciding to go into teaching and taking a teaching diploma. Mentions Joe Banks. Description of project on the history of the productive side of the cooperative movement. Description of registering for a PhD on John Stuart Mill in Liverpool. Description of losing grant due to cuts but being able to register as a mature student at Hull. Description of becoming a full lecturer at Hull.
Description of relationship with John Reece [JR] who was active in Labour party. Tells of becoming a Labour party activist under JR’s encouragement. Discussion of going to a selection conference for the High Peak and being selected. Mentions interest in the countryside. Discussion of the Conservative past of the High Peak constituency. Discussion of Irish presence in the constituency. Description of activeness of party in the area. Discussion of PJ’s wife [Christine Thomas] and her parent’s communist connections. Description of encouraging wife to go to university. Description of PJ’s feminist beliefs. Description of open relationship with his wife. Mentions Eric Frome and ‘The Art of Loving.’ Description of divorce 18 years later in 1979 and his wife’s relationship with Eric Robinson. Discussion of love for trees and forestry. Description of choosing to study at Durham for politics over Bangor for forestry. Discussion of election campaign. Mentions Harold Wilson’s criticisms of PJ. Description of being an active humanist. Tells of declining Buxton church’s invite to attend a service for all candidates. Description of active role in abortion campaign in 1970 and having two votes of no confidence against PJ at local party level. Description of party’s fear that he was throwing away the catholic constituency. Mentions Douglas Howe and the David Steel cause. Mentions Stella Brown and his attempts to get a blue plaque for her. Description of votes of no confidence to pressure him not to provoke opposition amongst Roman Catholics. Mentions Guardian piece on PJ having lowest swing against any labour member defeated in the North West. Description of trying to get Ken Coates nominated to be his replacement. Description of first impressions after being elected to parliament in 1966. Tells story of John Parker writing all letters shorthand in the parliament library. Description of poor funding and impact on making MPs less effective. Description of day to day life in Parliament. Mentions South Africa and his membership of the Merseyside Boycott committee. Description of campaigning for people to boycott South African goods. Tells story of handing out leaflets outside John Lewis and being arrested and hit whilst in police custody. Tells of a charge being brought against the police but the police lying in court. Mentions importance of colonial issues to PJ. Tells of the Peter Hain arrest and a threat to storm the pitch. Discussion of maiden speech and need for a scraping tax. Discussion of time on agricultural committee. Mentions Walter Harrison. Discussion of pressure from the National Farmers Union. Mentions John Winifred [JW] and the National Trust. Description of JW persuading PJ to become a member of the executive council for the National Trust in 1988. Mentions a division over the issue of hunting. Discussion of anti-Vietnam views and attending. Tells of having car searched on way to protests. Tells of giving blood for the Vietnam victims. Mentions Wilson and Johnson. Discussion of voting against parliament on more occasions than any other MP. Mentions opposition to Tony Benn over Concord. Discusses relationship with the Labour party whips.
Mentions friendship with Sir John Smith. Description of restoring an old cotton mill and lack of support. Description of Landmark Trust taking on the project. Description of sponsoring a cross party political grouping that came to nothing. Discussion of role in the abortion bill. Mentions interviewing MPs he thought would be sympathetic. Mentions Sir George Godbar. Talks of hearing the opposition arguments on abortion in the committee stages. Discussion of unofficial role as a whip. Expresses opposition to Wilson’s lack of concern for women. Discussion of knowledge of back street abortion. Tells of criticising judge who gave women long sentence for having an abortion. Description of writing letters for people who wanted grants from the Historic Building Society. Mentions John Parker and setting up a forestry group. Tells of Ford Family giving PJ grant in 1968 to go to America. Discussion of American approach to national parks. Mentions Sierra Club. Discussion of leaving the Labour party and joining the Green Party in Australia and then in the UK. Discussion on the outcome of the abortion bill. Discussion of Northern Ireland in the abortion issue. Discussion of use of Private Members Bills. Discussion of Leo Abse. Discussion of election address. Discussion of election campaign. Tells of opposition to PJ’s speeches on Dahl in Buxton. Mentions persuading Kenneth Robinson to stop smoking in public. Discussion of response to loosing seat in 1970 election. Discussion of turning down offer to contest seat in Bury. Discussion of being chosen as a county councillor in 1972. Discussion of time as Chairman of Planning Committees and Peter Regan. Discussion of local politics as opposed to national politics. Speaks of frustration at councillors. Description of County Council trying to dismiss PJ and later expulsion from Labour group. Discussion of party enquiry to expulsion, which found in his favour. Description of working for the Open University in 1972. Discussion of giving up parliamentary constituency in order to work full time as a social planner. Description of having been left money by a relative and doing a masters at Oxford in forestry and land planning. Description of being chosen as Labour candidate for MEP of North Derby in 1979 but loosing the seat. Description of motor accident in 1978 and spending a year recovering. Discussion of low turnout at 1979 election. Mentions anti-Europe views. Discussion of disappointment at loosing election.
Mentions Terry Rachet. Description of moving to Lesotho and funding for university. Mentions fathers death and mother moving to live with PJ. Discussion of relationship after his first wife. Mentions being banned from South Africa and having luggage inspected for banned books. Speaks of being arrested for entering South Africa without having passport checked but found not guilty. Discussion of returning to England after four years. Mentions involvement in National Trust. Discussion of PJ’s partner’s son Paul who was a teacher. Mentions visiting Paul in Papua New Guinea. Discussion of inheriting a property and money after PJ’s mother died. Description of buying a property in Australia.
Description of caring for elderly mothers. Description of meeting Eric Lovett and EL’s role in electoral reform society. Description of joining the electoral reform society. Description of PJ monitoring the 1994 South African election as well as elections in Bosnia Herzegovina and Hungary. Expression of opposition to the Alternative Vote [AV]. Tells of wife voting for AV so PJ voting to cancel out her vote. Discussion of time in Australia and time campaigning on abortion. Discussion of Police and Crime Commissioner elections. Description of PJ’s opposition to the police. Description of high points of time in office. Mentions Jeremy Hunt. Description of writing to Frank Field. Tells of Tom McMillan throwing away letters from constituencies. Description of membership of Euthanasia society. Mentions interest in Kenya and abuse by British troops. Discussion of changes to MPs replying to letters.
Among all this radical activism and fighting for Wimmin’s Rights, Comrade Jackson managed not to mention the international trafficking gang or the Top Doctors of north Wales conspiring to ensure that no woman in the region could access an NHS abortion until the late 1980s/early 90s, thus forcing them into the clutches of the ‘private abortionist’ in Chester – referrals were made on demand if the woman had the fee – or er Dafydd and the North Wales Hospital for an ‘assessment’ with a view to an NHS abortion which was always refused anyway. Where all the babies born to the Denbigh patients went after they were unlawfully abducted I have yet to find out… See previous posts eg. ‘It’s Bachman Turner Overdrive – Not Arf’.
In 1956, Osborne met Pamela Lane at the railway station in York; during the meeting Pamela told Osborne of her recent abortion and enquired after his relationship with Mary Ure, of which Pamela knew. In April 1957, Osborne was granted a divorce from Pamela, on the grounds of his adultery. It later emerged that in the 1980s, Pamela and Osborne corresponded frequently and met in secret before Osborne became angered by her request for a loan.
Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure shortly after meeting her when she was cast in ‘Look Back In Anger’. The affair swiftly progressed and the two moved in together in Chelsea. There was infidelity on both sides; and, after an affair with Robert Webber, Mary Ure eventually left Osborne for Robert Shaw.
Osborne described visiting Mary after she had left him and having sex with her while she was pregnant with the first of her four children with Robert Shaw. Mary committed suicide in 1975.
It was in Oct 1975 that Norman Scott’s dog was shot dead by Andrew Newton, who then tried to shoot Norman and after the event maintained that he’d been paid to murder Norman. The trail led back to Lord Snowdon’s and Roger Gilliatt’s friend Mr Thrope and by 1976 it was clear that sooner or later Mr Thrope was probably going to be charged with a serious offence. Harold Wilson resigned as PM in a hurry on 5 April 1976 and no-one had any idea why… Harold didn’t go far, only to the Lords. Asa Briggs was given his peerage in 1976. George Thomas was appointed Speaker of the House and Carlo became Chancellor of the University of Wales in 1976. The House of Cards was ready for any charges that might be laid against Mr Thrope.
Ronnie Waterhouse’s closest mate, fellow member of Middle Temple and active Liberal Robin Day picked up his K in the 1981 New Years Honours, after a decent length of time had elapsed since Mr Thrope’s acquittal at the Old Bailey and after Mary Wynch began legal action but before everyone was in a complete blind panic. People were rather more anxious in the months following the publication of the Waterhouse Report in Feb 2000. On 6 Aug 2000, Robin Day died from heart complications at the Wellington Hospital in London.
Eileen Mary Ure (born 18 February 1933) was the second Scottish-born actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, for her role in the 1960 film ‘Sons and Lovers’. Born in Glasgow, Mary Ure was the daughter of civil engineer Colin McGregor Ure and his wife Edith. Ure went to Mount School in York and trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where her classmates included the actress Wendy Craig.
Sir John Mortimer, the barrister and writer who created Rumpole of the Bailey, explored Uganda extensively himself and had numerous links with Dafydd’s associates, had an affair and fathered a child with the actress Wendy Craig. Mortimer was married to his first wife Penelope Fletcher later known as Mortimer at the time; Mortimer’s second wife was called Penelope as well. Penelope Fletcher was born and spent her young years in Rhyl in north Wales, where her father was a clergyman, from a big north Wales family. Penelope maintained that the Rev Fletcher he molested her. Penelope Mortimer was Penelope Gilliatt’s replacement as the film/theatre critic on ‘The Observer’. Penelope Mortimer died from cancer in Oct 1999, four months before the Waterhouse Report was published. Ioan Bowen Rees had waved everyone a fond farewell on 4 May 1999. See post ‘I Spit On Your Grave’ for details of Mortimer, his crooked circle of associates and his two wives called Penelope.
Mary Ure and John Osborne married in 1957. Mary had her son Colin in 1961 and she and Osborne divorced in 1963. Osborne had continued having affairs during the marriage and Ure started an affair with her co-star Robert Shaw in 1959. It is believed that Shaw was Colin’s natural father. Ure and Shaw married in 1963, with Shaw immediately adopting Colin. Ure and Shaw had three more children together, Elizabeth, actor Ian Shaw and Hannah. Mary Ure and Robert Shaw were still married at the time of her death.
Mary Ure’s alcoholism was coupled with a continued deterioration of her mental health through the early 1970s. On 2 April 1975 she appeared on the London stage with Honor Blackman and Brian Blessed in an adaptation of the ‘The Exorcism’ and after a disastrous opening night was found dead aged 42, from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Mary’s body was discovered by Robert Shaw in their London home.
I do not know if Mary Ure was any relation of Midge Ure, the rock singer from the Glasgow area who evolved into a Seriously Cool Musician after his early beginnings in a teeny band, Slik. Slik’s songs were written by the people who wrote for the Bay City Rollers, the Scottish group who’s manager was the notorious gangster Tam Paton, who was at the centre of allegations of the sexual assault of teenaged boys and big time drug dealing. Very many more allegations were made about Tam Paton that were ever investigated by the police, including by a former Roller. It was also alleged that members of High Society were using young people procured by Paton. Derek Longmuir, the drummer from the Rollers, later trained as an Angel in Edinburgh and was subsequently convicted of child porn offences. He was allowed to continue working as an Angel. A witness to Paton’s activities died in a house fire not long ago. See post ‘Remember Girls – Never Get Into A Car With A Stranger!’
My post ‘A Charming, Uplifting Sound…’ discussed the ‘founder of child psychiatry in the UK’, Top Doc Sula Wolff and her Top Doc psych husband Professor Henry Walton, who were networked with Dafydd’s wider circle of Top Docs and part of the Edinburgh elite. Sula and Henry were dealers of fine art – indeed the finest, Ming china, Rembrandts, only the best. When Henry died he left over £5 million pounds worth of art treasures to the National Museum of Scotland. Henry and Sula were NHS Top Docs who did not inherit money.
Robert Archibald Shaw (9 August 1927-28 August 1978) was an actor, novelist and playwright. Shaw was born in Westhoughton, Lancashire, the son of former nurse Doreen and Thomas Archibald Shaw, a Top Doc of Scottish descent. When Shaw was seven years old, the family moved to Stromness, Orkney. When Shaw was 12, his alcoholic father killed himself. The family then moved to Cornwall, where Shaw attended the independent Truro School. The Liberal MP for Truro, 1974-86, David Penhaligon, attended Truro School, along with Roger Taylor from ‘Queen’. David’s cousin was the actress Susan Penhaligon. So a great many tentacles of Dafydd and the gang extended in David’s direction. David Penhaligon was killed in a road accident at 6-45am on 22 Dec 1986. Days after Ollie Brooke had been jailed and about a week after Dafydd illegally imprisoned me in Denbigh. See post ‘Hey, Hey, DAJ, How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?’
David Penhaligon’s research assistant Matthew Taylor, who had only been appointed in July 1986, succeeded his Penhaligon’s Truro seat. Matthew is now Lord Matthew, although no-one’s heard of him and he hasn’t done very much of note. Except for to be on the scene of a great deal of crime in 1986.
Roger Taylor’s friend and colleague Freddie Mercury died from AIDS on Nov 24 1991:
For a brief period, Robert Shaw was a teacher at Glenhow Preparatory School in Saltburn-by-the Sea in the North Riding of Yorkshire, before attending RADA. Shaw also served in the RAF.
Shaw was married three times and had 10 children, two of whom were adopted. His first wife was Jennifer Bourke, 1952-63, with whom he had four daughters. Mary Ure was his second wife, 1963-75, with whom he had four children, including daughters Elizabeth (born 1963) and Hannah (born 1966). He adopted son Colin (born 1961) from Mary’s previous marriage to John Osborne; according to an interview with Colin, he was Shaw’s son born during an affair while Mary was still married to Osborne. The marriage ended with Mary’s death. Shaw’s third and final wife was Virginia Jansen from 1976 until his death in 1978, with whom he had one son, Thomas and adopted her son, Charles, from a previous relationship. Shaw’s grandson (via his daughter Deborah and film producer Evzen Kolar) is American musician and composer Rob Kolar.
For the last seven years of his life, Shaw lived at Drimbawn House in County Mayo, Ireland. Shaw was an alcoholic for most of his life. He died in Ireland at the age of 51 from a heart attack on 28 August 1978, while driving home in County Mayo. Shaw suddenly became ill, stopped the car, stepped out and then collapsed and died on the roadside. He was rushed to Castlebar General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Shaw’s body was cremated and its ashes scattered near his home in Tourmakeady. Mr Thrope had been charged with conspiracy to murder on 4 Aug 1978.
Ian, Mary’s son with Robert Shaw (b. 1969), bagged his first role in 1993 in an episode of Casualty. After that, Ian appeared in the films Century (1993), Moondance (1995), The Boys From County Clare (2003), The Contract(2006), and Johnny English Reborn (2011). He was also the narrator of House of Usher (2008). He has also appeared in many TV series including EastEnders, Soldier, Soldier, The Bill, The Queen, Sharpe, Ultimate Force, Ghosts, Silent Witness and Medics.
Ian got his first break in 1993…
Penelope Gilliatt died on 9 May 1993. John Osborne met Penelope Gilliatt, Osborne’s third wife, while Gilliatt was still married to Roger. They met initially through social connections and then Penelope interviewed Osborne. Although Gilliatt was still married and Osborne knew Roger, Penelope set out to seduce Osborne and succeeded in doing so. “Penelope’s behaviour and my own during the weeks that followed were probably grotesquely indefensible”, he wrote. Osborne details some of the brazen subterfuges he created in order to commit adultery with Gilliatt before they were married, which included inventing a film festival in Folkestone so that they could go away together.
As it was Penelope who went in pursuit of Osborne, I’m wondering whether Penelope was subject to a Roger Gilliatt-inspired revenge attack later in life which is why no-one seemed that concerned about her poor state of health when she was older; her ex-Roger predeceased Penelope on 19 Sept 1991. There are no reasons provided in Penelope’s obituaries for her leaving Roger.
Osborne and Gilliatt were married for five years, 1963-68, (although together for seven). Osborne and Gilliatt’s marriage suffered through what Osborne perceived to be an unnecessary obsession on her part with her work at the time, writing film reviews for ‘The Observer’. Osborne also observed in Penelope a ‘growing pretentiousness’, Penelope taking to calling herself ‘Professor Gilliatt’. As everyone in the equation seemed to have been completely mad, deeply unpleasant and Penelope’s ex-husband part of a constellation of Top Docs who were facilitating the Westminster Paedophile Ring and protecting a lobotomist who was destroying the victims of Royal and celebrity sex offenders, calling oneself ‘Professor’ when one was not would seem to be only a minor transgression. The real Professor Gilliatt – Roger – was lethal.
Strains in the marriage between Osborne and Professor Penelope were ‘exacerbated’ by Penelope’s ‘alcoholism and what Osborne felt was malignant behaviour’. Poor old Osborne certainly had his cross to bear with these dreadful women surrounding him, committing suicide, taking to drink, calling themselves Professor while busying themselves writing for ‘The Observer’ etc. There was only one thing to be done with Professor Gilliatt carrying on in this manner: Osborne had an affair with the actress Jill Bennett and then married her.
Jill Bennett was as bad as Professor Gilliatt. Osborne had a ‘turbulent’ nine year marriage to Jill, ‘whom he came to loathe’. Their marriage ‘degenerated into mutual abuse and insult with Bennett goading Osborne, calling him “impotent” and “homosexual” in public as early as 1971’. ‘This was cruelty which Osborne reciprocated, turning his feelings of bitterness and resentment about his waning career onto his wife.’
It should be borne in mind that Osborne (and his mates) may well have had the last word re Jill’s alleged crimes, because Jill died before Osborne. Jill killed herself on 4 Oct 1990, more than two and a half years before that other harridan who caused Osborne such hassle died, Professor Penelope Gilliatt.
My post ‘The Bitterest Pill’ discusses the sequence of High Court cases that the gang brought against me during 1990, all of them based on the perjury of the gang, some of whom had never met me and some of whom had not seen the affidavits which they had ‘sworn and signed’ before they turned up in the witness box.
After a High Court case in Leeds, one in Chester and one in Cardiff, throughout which nothing was said about the industrial scale perjury or the mountains of evidence demonstrating that the law had been broken for years in north Wales and that patients were being seriously abused, Thatch appointed Peter Morrison as her PPS on 23 July 1990. On 10 July 1990, Gwynedd Social Services had attempted to have me imprisoned. The case collapsed because of the evident perjury. On 24 July 1990 – the day after Morrison was appointed Thatch’s PPS – administrators at Clwyd Health Authority contacted the bent Welsh Office lawyer Andrew Park claiming that I had rung a Kay Hemsley at the North Wales Hospital and threatened an Angel. No-one could produce evidence that I had done this or that if such a call had been received it was me who had made it, so Park wrote to Clwyd Health Authority requesting that next time could Hemsley remember to explain how she knew that it was me calling. Kay followed orders, within a short while she had given a written account of another call supposedly from me and explained that she knew that it was me because she had spoken to me before and recognised my voice. Park had been busy anyway, informing Gwynedd and Clwyd Health Authorities that he wanted as much information as possible, to build up a complete ‘dossier’ against me. The perjury and forging of documents continued apace. See ‘Some Big Legal Names Enter The Arena’.
At no point was anything said by anyone in the face of such extensive wrongdoing. After the extent of the perjury became obvious in Chester Court on 10 July 1990, Justice John Roch – later Lord Justice Roch – asked the perjurers of Gwynedd Social Services and Gwynedd Health Authority if they would like more time to rewrite their affidavits. The signed ones which they had never seen before they arrived at Court…
On 1 Nov 1990 Geoffrey Howe resigned as Deputy PM; Howe and his wife Elspeth had been good friends with Ronnie Waterhouse and his wife for years, they even holidayed together. Howe and his wife had concealed the crimes of the gang for decades. On 14 Nov 1990 Heseltine challenged Thatch for the Leadership of the Tory Party; Heseltine, like Howe, had grown up in south Wales and he too had concealed the gang for years. On 28 Nov 1990 Thatch resigned as PM.
By the time that Thatch had resigned, I and three of my friends who knew about Dafydd and the gang were all well on the way to being forced out of our jobs. We were ringing each other up every few days to exchange dreadful work-place experiences, although we had no idea why we were all being targeted. We just assumed that we had all had the misfortune to have ended up with awful senior colleagues, although we were aware that our work-place crimes were farcical eg. me failing to go to the St George’s wine club and my mate wearing ‘thick black tights and Dr Martens’ which caused the Royal Television Society no end of trauma. More trauma than the conviction of one of their managers for the sexual assault of a 10 year old boy.
During December 1990, the Drs Francis committed perjury yet again and I was arrested…
Jill Bennett’s suicide on 4 Oct 1990 ‘is generally believed to have been a result of Osborne’s rejection of her’. Osborne said of Bennett, “She was the most evil woman I have come across”, killing herself like that… Osborne penned a few words after Jill died:
Adolf [Osborne’s nickname for her] has left half a million to Battersea Dogs’ Home. She never bought a bar of soap in all the time she lived with me. Always, she cried poverty… It is the most perfect act of misanthropy, judged with the tawdry, kindless theatricality she strove to achieve in life. She had no love in her heart for people and only a little more for dogs. Her brand of malignity, unlike Penelope’s went beyond even the banality of ambition…. Her frigidity was almost total. She loathed men and pretended to love women, whom she hated even more. She was at ease only in the company of homosexuals, who she also despised but whose narcissism matched her own. I never heard her say an admiring thing of anyone… Everything about her life had been a pernicious confection, a sham.
Osborne concluded by stating that his only regret was that he chose not to spit in Jill’s open coffin. Roger Gilliatt had a lovely friend in Osborne and it was obviously well worth the Royals who moved in Roger’s circle battling to maintain Osborne’s reputation. A complete bastard, but ooh no he wasn’t gay.
Nora Noel Jill Bennett (born 24 December 1931) 4 October 1990) was born in Malaya to British parents, educated at Prior’s Field School in Godalming and trained at RADA. She made her film début in 1951 with Rex Harrison. Jill Bennett made many appearances in British films including ‘Lust for Life’ (1956), ‘The Criminal’ (1960), ‘Inadmissable Evidence’ (1968), ‘I Want What I Want’ (1972) and ‘Britannia Hospital’ (1982). She also appeared in the Bond film ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (1981).
Jill made forays into TV, such as roles in ‘Play for Today’ with Wendy Hiller and in John Mortimer’s s adaptation of his own novel, ‘Paradise Postponed’ (1985). She co-starred with Rachel Roberts in the Alan Bennett TV play The Old Crowd (1979), directed by Lindsay Anderson.
Jill was the live-in companion of actor Godfrey Tearle in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was married to screenwriter Willis Hall before John Osborne. Jill and Osborne divorced acrimoniously in 1978. Jill had no children.
Jill died by suicide in October 1990, aged 58, having long suffered from depression. She killed herself by taking an overdose of Quinalbarbitone. John Osborne, who was subject during Jill’s life to a restraining order regarding written comments about her, immediately wrote a vituperative and opprobrious chapter about her to be added to the second volume of his autobiography, in which he rejoiced at her death.
In 1992, Jill’s ashes, along with those of her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts (who also committed suicide, in 1980), were scattered by their friend Lindsay Anderson on the Thames. Anderson, with several of the two actresses’ professional colleagues and friends, took a boat trip down the Thames and the ashes were scattered while musician Alan Price sang the song “Is There All there Is?” The event was included in Anderson’s autobiographical BBC documentary Is That All There Is? (1992).
Alan Price used to perform with Georgie Fame. In Aug 1993, Georgie Fame’s wife Nicolette died after she jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Nicolette had been in the care of expensive Top Docs and had asked for help while she was on the bridge. Presumably it didn’t come. Some truly bizarre reasons were given for Nicolette’s suicide that were so lame one wondered how anyone would have swallowed them; the menopause, her children leaving home… Previous posts discuss the idiocy in detail. Nicolette had previously been married to the 9th Marquess of Londonderry. At the time of her death, there were police investigations happening into organised abuse across the UK: north Wales, south Wales, the North West of England, the North East of England, Leicester, Lambeth, Islington, Shropshire…
There seems to have been quite a spate of unfortunate deaths among the network of people discussed in this post during the early 1990s, when I was being repeatedly taken to Court in ludicrous circumstances and the North Wales Police launched their investigation into a possible VIP paedophile ring in north Wales/Cheshire. During the course of the investigation there were over 100 complaints about the abuse of children in care in north Wales; a file was sent to the CPS. The DPP at the time, Dame Barbara Mills, did not mount one prosecution. Mrs Mills was a relative, friend and neighbour of so many of the Hampstead/Camden crowd who had been concealing organised abuse on the part of people with links to north Wales since the middle years of the 20th century. See previous posts…
Jill’s husband before she married John Osborne Willis Edward Hall (6 April 1929-7 March 2005) was a playwright and radio and TV writer who drew on his working class roots in Leeds for much of his writing. His best-known work was a stage adaptation of the 1959 novel Billy Liar (1960), co-written with the book’s author and Hall’s lifelong friend and collaborator Keith Waterhouse.
Born in Hunslet, Leeds, Hall attended local council schools as well as Cockburn High School. After school, Hall worked in a variety of jobs, including factory worker, trawler hand, and amusement park attendant. Upon reaching the age of eligibility for National Service, Hall volunteered for the regular Army, where he served in Malaya. During idle hours there, he wrote plays for Chinese children that were later broadcast on Radio Malaya and designed sets for Singapore Little Theatre.
Hall’s military experiences later inspired his first play; after gaining interest from Lindsay Anderson, the play was renamed ‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’ and premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1959. That year it won the Evening Standard’s Play of the Year Award, and was later turned into a film version directed by Leslie Norman in 1961 and a BBC TV series in 1979.
After his success with Anderson at the Royal Court, Hall contacted his boyhood friend, Keith Waterhouse, about adapting his successful novel Billy Liar (1959). Their 1960 play of the same name starred Albert Finney when it premiered and played for 582 performances before being taken out on a series of national tours. After this success, in 1963 Hall’s and Waterhouse’s self-styled company, “Waterhall Productions”, adapted the story for the big screen, where in 1963 it was filmed by John Schlesinger – it’s him again, son of Prof Bernard, member of Ollie Brooke’s circle – with Tom Courtenay in the lead role.
Thomas Daniel Courtenay (born 25 February 1937) came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ (1962), ‘Billy Liar’ (1963) and ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1965). Courtenay was born in Hull, Yorkshire, attended Kingston High School and studied at RADA. Courtenay made his stage debut in 1960 with the Old Vic theatre company at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, before taking over from Albert Finny in the title role of ‘Billy Liar’ at the Cambridge Theatre in 1961.
Courtenay was married to actress Cheryl Kennedy 1973-82. In 1988, Tom married Isabel Crossley, a stage manager at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. They have homes in Manchester and Putney, London. Courtenay is the President of Hull City AFC’s Official Supporters’ Club. In 1999, Courtenay was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hull University. Courtenay was given a knighthood in Feb 2001. On 19 January 2018 Sir Tom was bestowed the Honorary Freedom of the City of Hull.
Under Waterhall’s coaxing, ‘Billy Liar’ also became the long-running Drury Lane musical, Billy (1974), starring Michael Crawford, and a TV sitcom both in Britain, 1973–4 and in the United States, 1979.
Willis Hall continued his successful partnership with Keith Waterhouse and, over the next 30 years, they produced more than 250 scripts for theatre, film and TV. Hall also wrote more than a dozen children’s books; his membership of the Magic Circle was a source of inspiration for these books. Greville Janner was famously a member of the Magic Circle.
Willis Hall also wrote 40 radio and TV plays. He wrote a musical about the scarecrow Worzel Gummidge and others based on the books ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘The Wind In The Willows’.
Ratty and Mole are getting the hell out of there:
Willis Hall also wrote the script for the successful project, ‘Peter Pan: A Musical Adventure’ (1996).
Willis Hall was married four times. His first three marriages to Kathleen May Cortens (m. 1954), Jill Bennett (m. 1962) and Dorothy Kingsmill-Lunn (m. 1966), all ended in divorce. On 2 November 1973, Hall married the 28-year-old dancer and actress Valerie Shute, who survived him, along with his four sons. Following a long fight with oesophageal cancer, Hall died at his home in Ilkley in West Yorkshire on 7 March 2005. Willis Hall lasted rather longer than many other witnesses to the complexities involving so many hidden bunnies.
Willis’s stomping ground of Leeds and his years of work in celebsville and the BBC will have made it difficult for him to have not tripped over Jimmy Savile and the extensive police corruption which accompanied Savile’s activities in that part of the UK.
Jill Bennett’s friend Rachel Roberts (born 20 September 1927) is best remembered for her performances in 1960s classics Karel Reisz’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Lindsay Anderson’s ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963). For both films, Rachel won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress. Rachel Roberts was born in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, on the territory of the organised abuse which became part of the UK-wide network in the 1970s, assisted by Lord Elwyn-Jones etc. Michael Howard, who in the 1990s finished Mary Wynch off, was yet another barrister who came from that part of Wales and went into politics. Howard married Sandra Paul, who in the 1960s was always described as a ‘model’. Sandra’s first husband was jazz pianist Robin Douglas-Home, the nephew of Sir Alec, the former PM.
Robin was a jazz pianist and a leading society figure during the 1950s and 60s. In the 1950s, he had a relationship with Princess Margaretha of Sweden but, according to the press, they were refused permission to marry by her mother, Princess Sibylla, notwithstanding a subsequent statement from King Gustaf VI Adolf saying, “The King has not imposed any ban on the marriage in question”. Princess Margaretha’s nanny and confidante Ingrid Björnberg states categorically in her memoirs that the breakup of the couple was not due to Princess Sibylla refusing to permit them to marry, but because Princess Margaretha did not wish to marry him.
Robin Douglas-Home married Sandra Paul in 1959 and they had a son in 1962, Sholto. The couple were divorced in 1965 coinciding with Robin’s romance with Lord Snowdon’s then wife, Ma’am Darling. Robin’s divorce was the subject of a BBC TV documentary by Alan Whicker.
Robin Douglas-Home was author of a 1962 authorised biography of Frank Sinatra, the crooner famous for his Mafia connections. Douglas-Home killed himself in 1968, aged 36, having suffered for some years from clinical depression. Yet another witness to matters linked with Ma’am Darling and Lord Snowdon who didn’t benefit from the expertise of the Top Docs.
See previous posts for further info on Michael Howard and Sandra Paul and for the brief revival of Sandra’s modelling career in the 1990s when Dafydd and co needed the PR – Sandra modelled for M&S who have long-standing links with the gang, having been kind enough to bank-roll that grandiose HQ in Belgravia for the Royal College of Psychiatrists back in the 1970s at the request of Sir Martin Roth. See post ‘The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Connection’. Sandra also received a lot of publicity after Operation Pallial reopened the investigation into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal; Sandra was being interviewed everywhere about her crazy time in the 1960s, although she stressed that her own role in it all wasn’t too outrageous but ooh she wouldn’t be telling tales about anyone else. None of the toadying interviewers had the sense to ask Sandra why her husband had ruined someone who had stood up to a gang of bent Top Docs and lawyers who had run an international trafficking ring and killed witnesses.
Sandra’s first husband’s younger brother Charles Douglas-Home was Editor of ‘The Times’, 1982-85, succeeding Harold Evans in that role. Born in London, Charles was educated at Eton and then went into the British Army in 1956 in the Royal Scots Greys. Charles subsequently served as aide-de-camp to Sir Evelyn Baring who was Governor of Kenya at the height of the Mau Mau insurgency, 1958-59).
When Charles returned to the UK he worked on the ‘Scottish Daily Express’. The paper’s proprietor, Beaverbrook Newspapers, promoted Charles to be the deputy to Chapman Pincher, the defence correspondent of the ‘Daily Express’ in London. Through his family connections, Douglas-Home built a network of contacts through Parliament and Whitehall. After 18 months, Douglas-Home became the principal political and diplomatic correspondent of the Express. However he disagreed with the paper’s opposition to British entry to the EEC and with relief in 1965 was appointed to succeed the aptly named Alun Gwynne-Jones as ‘The Times’ defence correspondent. From 1970 Charles Douglas-Home was features editor and in 1973 he became home editor.
Mystic Mogg was impressed with Douglas-Home’s approach and made him foreign editor in 1978. When the Digger took over ‘The Times’ in 1981, Harold Evans was appointed Editor with Douglas-Home as his Deputy. A year later the Digger and Evans had a spectacular falling-out over ‘editorial independence’ and Douglas-Home succeeded the latter as Editor in 1982, as the scaffolding was assembled to protect the gang from the fall-out from Mary Wynch, who had begun litigation.
Douglas-Home ‘stabilised the paper’, which he had inherited ‘in a parlous state in the wake of its year long closure as well as the shock of the Harold Evans dismissal’ and then ‘began a steady process of improvement’, although that is not what I remember. Under Charles’s leadership The Times doubled its circulation to 500,000. According to Charles Douglas Home’s wiki entry, ‘Although firmly conservative in the editorial line of the paper’s leaders, Douglas-Home was at the same time committed to the tradition of impartial news reporting.’
So that is how this happened:
After the Digger purchased ‘The Times’, ‘The Times’ memorably introduced Times Bingo, only they called it Portfolio. On one occasion, ‘The Times’ had a discreet little report headed ‘Portfolio Draws £100,000’ in the same week that ‘The Sun’ ran a headline screaming ‘I’ve Won £100,000 Sun Bingo’ and ‘Private Eye’ asked whether the proprietors could possibly be related.
I took the piss out of Tony Francis for reading ‘The Times’ instead of ‘The Grauniad’ back in the days when he pretended to be on good terms with me. He probably stole those documents from my house that I’m told ended up in the possession of ‘News International’ himself.
I can only assume that Charles Douglas-Home thought that ‘The Times’ was a real newspaper after all those years on ‘The Daily Express’.
Charles Douglas-Home died of cancer at age 48 in Oct 1985, three months after Mary Wynch won her appeal to the Master of the Rolls and a few weeks after I contacted Keith Best, the then MP for Ynys Mon, about my difficulties with the mental health services in north Wales. See previous posts. Charles left a widow, Jessica Gwynne and two sons Tara (born 1969) and Luke (born 1971).
Jill Bennett’s friend Rachel Roberts had a Baptist upbringing (against which Rachel rebelled) in Llanelli and then studied at the University of Wales – but I don’t know which college – and then RADA, Roberts began working with a repertory company in Swansea in 1950. In theatre, Roberts performed at the Royal Court. She starred in Lindsay Anderson’s film ‘O Lucky Man!’ (1973) and the Australian-made ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (1975), directed by Peter Weir.
After relocating to LA in the early 1970s, Rachel appeared in supporting roles in several American films. Her final British film was ‘Yanks’ (1979), directed by John Schlesinger, for which she received a Supporting Actress BAFTA. It’s Bernard’s son John again… In 1979, Rachel Roberts also co-starred with Jill Bennett in the LWT production of Alan Bennett’s The Old Crowd, directed by Lindsay Anderson and Stephen Frears.
Rachel was married twice and had no children. She first married actor Alan Dobie in 1955. They divorced in 1960. The following year, Rachel married actor Rex Harrison. The marriage was tumultuous; Rachel and Harrison both drank excessively and engaged in public fights. Harrison later left Roberts and they divorced in 1971. Later that year, Harrison married ‘Welsh socialite’ Elizabeth Rees-Williams, Rachel Roberts’s former best friend.
Joan Elizabeth Rees-Williams is now married to former Tory MP Jonathan Aitken – who went to prison for perjury – and is known as the Hon Mrs Aitken (born 1 May 1936). She was born in Cardiff, the daughter of Alice Alexandra Constance (née Wills) and the politician David Rees-Williams, 1st Baron Ogmore. Lord Ogmore was the Labour MP for Croydon South, 1945-50 and was then raised to the peerage. He served as Minister of Civil Aviation in 1951 and was made a Privy Councillor in the same year. Lord Ogmore was President of the London Welsh Trust, which ran the London Welsh Centre, Gray’s Inn Road, 1955-59. The London Welsh Trust is packed to the rafters with influential Welsh people who live in London and colluded with Dafydd and the gang. See previous posts…
Lord Ogmore joined the Liberal Party in 1959, the year that Mr Thrope was elected as the MP for North Devon and served as Liberal Party President, 1963–64.
The Hon Mrs Aitken has three children from her first marriage and gained at least eight stepchildren from her later marriages. She has been married four times.
Mrs Aitken married Richard Harris in 1957, with whom she had three sons (Damian Harris, Jared Harris, and Jamie Harris). They divorced in 1969. Sir Rex Harrison was her second husband, 1971 -75. He had two sons (Noel Harrison and Carey Harrison) from a previous relationship. Mrs Aitken wed Peter Michael Aitken in 1980 and divorced in 1985. Peter Aitken has two sons from a prior relationship, (James and Jason Aitken), and is the cousin of Mrs Aitken’s current husband, Jonathan Aitken. Jonathan already had three daughters and one son, (Alexandra Aitken, Victoria Aitken, Petrina Khashoggi, and William Aitken). Petrina is Jonathan’s daughter as a result of his affair with Soraya Kashoggi, wife of billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Previous posts discuss Jonathan’s eventful life, including his stint as a Tory MP, his relationship with Carol Thatcher, his dodgy business interests, lies, involvement in a mad think tank with unsavoury connections, his role in TV-AM etc. After being jailed and then released, Jonathan didn’t just leave it at becoming a Christian, he was also ordained as a vicar.
Lord Ogmore’s daughter married Jonathan in June 2003, when the gang were working very hard to have me imprisoned for a long stretch for ‘threats to kill’ on the basis of the perjury of some eight NHS workers and a police officer, just after I’d begun my PhD. Jonathan will know something about it because so many of his friends work for the security services, although they directed their efforts at helping the gang rather than the gang’s targets.
Rachel Roberts was known in the entertainment industry as an alcoholic, ‘with a history of eccentric behaviour’. She ‘had a habit of imitating a Welsh Corgi when intoxicated and once, at a party thrown by Richard Harris, attacked actor Robert Mitchum on all fours, chewing his trousers and champing on his bare skin, while he patted her on the head, saying “there, there”.’ This could have been everyone simply having a laugh rather than evidence of Rachel being an insane alkie; she died in unfortunate circumstances, none of these selfish gits ever showed any concern for anyone else, even for people to whom they had once been married, who could tell what the truth behind this scenario was?
Devastated by her divorce from Rex Harrison, Roberts’ alcoholism and depression worsened. She moved to Hollywood in 1975 and tried to forget the relationship. In 1980, Rachel attempted to win Harrison back. The attempt proved futile as Harrison was then married to his sixth and final wife, Mercia Tinker.
On 26 November 1980, Rachel Roberts died at her home in LA at the age of 53. Her cause of death was initially attributed to a heart attack. Rachel’s gardener found her body on her kitchen floor, lying amidst shards of glass; she had fallen through a decorative glass divide between two rooms. An autopsy later determined that her death was a result of swallowing lye, alkali, or another unidentified caustic substance, as well as barbiturates and alcohol, ‘as detailed in her posthumously published journals’. The corrosive effect of the poisonous agent was an immediate cause of death. The coroner documented the cause of death as “swallowing a caustic substance” and, later, “acute barbiturate intoxication.” Rachel’s death was ruled a suicide. She was cremated at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.
Rachel could easily have died from a barbiturate overdose, but drinking alkali would have left her in screaming agony with nasty injuries. It wouldn’t have been mistaken for a heart-attack. Rachel died shortly after Mr Thrope was acquitted.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, many deaths of high profile people eg. Brian Epstein (see previous posts), were the result of barbiturate poisoning. Barbiturates kill you quite easily and you don’t have to take too many for this to happen. Not many lay people know that and Top Doctors have a habit of not bothering to warn patients whom they do not like of matters such as the toxicity of barbiturates and it has led to a lot of deaths. After Keith Moon died from an overdose, his friends observed that surely Moon’s Top Doc would not have prescribed him what he did if he had known how excessive Keith Moon was with drugs. Yes he would, Top Docs are like that. Furthermore, the circumstances of Moon’s death suggest that a lot of people were giving him enough rope as it were… Moon was very unpopular, he had pissed a lot of people off and the business of TVs through the hotel windows and the Rolls Royce in the swimming pool would have left no-one in any doubt as to Moon’s excesses. Moon was a wally but he was friends with some rather better connected people who knew Dafydd’s gang as well as rather grander people than Moon himself, including Graham Chapman, who had qualified as a Top Doc at Bart’s and sexually abused underaged boys for years. Chapman was close friends with Keith Moon and conducted himself in a fairly similar way, but having Bart’s as an umbrella meant that Chapman was seen as a zany Python rather than a pain in the bum who should have been prosecuted. See previous posts for info on Keith Moon and Chapman…
Rachel Roberts’s first husband Alan Russell Dobie (born 2 June 1932) was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to George and Sarah Dobie. His father was a mining engineer and his mother’s family were farmers. After attending Wath Grammar School, Dobie trained at the London Old Vic Theatre School and has performed in more than 117 productions during his 50+ year acting career. Dobie has played on Broadway in London’s West End in numerous productions. Dobie has an extensive list of TV roles to his credit. He was married to Rachel, 1955-61, then married Maureen Scott in 1963. Dobie appeared with his daughter Natasha, in the TR Times Star Challenge show, made by ITV Central in 1984.
Sir Reginald Carey Harrison (5 March 1908-2 June 1990), known as Rex Harrison, starred as Professor Henry Higgins in the 1964 film version ‘My Fair Lady’ which earned him both a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actor. In addition to his stage career, Harrison also appeared in Doctor Dolittle (1967).
Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire. Huyton was Harold Wilson’s constituency and throughout the Labour Gov’ts of the 1960s and 70s, Lancashire was massively influenced by Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, Babs’s constituency being Blackburn. Richard Crossman remarked in his ‘Diaries’ that Wilson and Castle’s main interest in Lancashire was to protect the textile trade. They both concealed serious crime and abuse in the NHS and Social Services, including in Lancashire.
Rex Harrison was educated at Liverpool College, which was where Dafydd’s umbrella David Hunt went to school. Rex first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison’s acting career was interrupted during WW II, while he served in the RAF. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play ‘French Without Tears’. He alternated appearances in London and New York and achieved superstardom for his portrayal of Henry Higgins in the musical ‘My Fair Lady’ where he appeared opposite Julie Andrews.
Harrison was married six times. In 1942, he divorced his first wife, Colette Thomas and married actress Lilli Palmer the next year. Lilli Palmer (born Lilli Marie Peiser; 24 May 1914-27 January 1986) was the daughter of a German Jewish surgeon. After beginning her career in British films in the 1930s, Lilli would later transition to major Hollywood productions. In 1947, while married to Lilli, Rex the Rotter began an affair with actress Carole Landis.
Carole Landis (born Frances Lillian Mary Ridste (January 1, 1919-July 5, 1948) worked as a contract-player for twentieth century fox in the 1940s. Her breakthrough role was as the female lead in the 1940 film ‘One Million B.C.’ with United Artists. Landis was known as “The Ping Girl” and “The Chest” because of her curvy figure. Landis was born on January 1, 1919, in Wisconsin, the youngest of five children. Her father was a ‘drifting railroad mechanic’ who abandoned the family after Carole’s birth. According to Landis’ biographer, circumstantial evidence supports the idea that Landis was likely the biological child of her mother’s second husband, who left Landis’ mother in April 1921 and remarried a few months later.
In 1923, Carole’s family moved to California. Carole’s mother worked in menial jobs to support the family. At the age of 15, Carole dropped out of San Bernardino High School and set forth on a career path to showbiz. Carole started out as a hula dancer in a San Francisco nightclub, where she was described by her boss as a “nervous $35-a-week blonde doing a pathetic hula at her opening night…that’ll never get anyplace in show business” and apparently who employed her only because he felt sorry for her; she later sang with a dance band. Carole bleached her hair blonde and changed her name to “Carole Landis”. After saving $100, she moved to Hollywood.
Carole made her film debut as an extra in the 1937 film a star in born. The movie that turned her into a star was the 1940 film ‘One Million B.C.’ Landis landed a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and began a sexual relationship with Darryl F. Zanuck. She had roles playing opposite fellow pin-up Betty Grable in 1941. When Landis ended her relationship with Zanuck, her career suffered and she was assigned roles in B-movies. Her final two films ‘Noose’ and ‘The Brass Monkey’ were both made in Britain.
Landis was married four times and had no children; she was unable to conceive due to endometriosis. In January 1934, 15 year old Landis married her first husband, 19 year old Irving Wheeler. Her mother had the marriage annulled in February 1934. Landis convinced her father – who had left the family shortly after Landis was born and who, by coincidence, lived near the family in San Bernardino) – to allow her to remarry Wheeler. the two were remarried on August 25, 1934. After three weeks of marriage, Landis and Wheeler got into an argument and Landis walked out. Neither filed for divorce and Landis began pursuing an acting career. In 1938, Wheeler reappeared and filed a $250,000 alienation of affections lawsuit against director and choreographer Busby Berkeley. Even though Landis and Wheeler were estranged, he claimed that Berkeley had enticed and otherwise persuaded Landis to transfer her affections. Landis maintained that she had not seen Wheeler in years and heard from him only the previous year when he claimed to want a divorce. Wheeler’s lawsuit was later dismissed, and Landis and Wheeler were divorced in 1939. In June 1939, Berkeley proposed to Landis, but later broke it off. On July 4, 1940, Carole married yacht broker Willis Hunt, Jr. in Las Vegas. Landis left Hunt after two months of marriage and they were divorced in November 1940.
While touring Army camps in London in 1942, Carole met US Army Air Forces Captain Thomas Wallace. They were married in January 1943, separated in May 1945 and divorced in July 1945. On December 8, 1945, Landis married Broadway producer W. Horace Schmidlapp. They separated in 1947 and Landis filed for divorce in May 1948 charging Schmidlapp with “extreme mental cruelty”.
During her separation from Schmidlapp, Landis entered into a romance with Rex the Rotter. The affair became an open secret in Hollywood. Landis was reportedly crushed when the Rotter refused to divorce his wife for her; unable to cope any longer, Carole committed suicide in her Pacific Palisades home by taking an overdose of Seconal. She was 29. The Rotter was the last person to see Carole alive, having had dinner with her the night before she committed suicide. The next afternoon, the Rotter and Carole’s maid discovered her on the bathroom floor. The Rotter waited several hours before he called a doctor and the police. According to some sources, Carole left two suicide notes, one for her mother and the second for the Rotter, who instructed his lawyers to destroy it.
During a coroner’s inquest, the Rotter denied knowing any motive for Carole’s suicide and told the coroner he did not know of the existence of a second suicide note. Carole’s official web site, which is owned by her family, has questioned the circumstances of her death and the coroner’s ruling of suicide.
The Rotter attended Carole’s funeral with Lilli. After Carole’s death, the Rotter downplayed their relationship and publicly claimed that she was merely a close friend of his and Lilli’s.
Rhett’s involvement in the scandal by waiting several hours before calling a doctor and police briefly damaged his career and Rhett’s contract with Twentieth Century Fox was ended by mutual consent.
Here’s Lilli having a fag in 1950 while Rhett looks over her shoulder:
Kay Kendall (21 May 1927-6 September 1959) was an actress and comedienne. Most prolific in British films, Kendall also achieved some popularity with American audiences and won a Golden Globe Award for her role in the film ‘Les Girls’ (1957).
Kay began a romantic relationship with Rhett Harrison after they appeared together in ‘The Constant Husband’ (1955) and they were married in 1957. Rhett learned from Kendall’s Top Doc that she had been diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia, a fact that was kept from Kendall, who believed she was suffering from an iron deficiency. Wiki tells us that Rhett ‘cared for Kendall until her death at the age of 32′. I expect that he gave her the iron tablets for that mineral deficiency of hers. On Top Doctors’ orders.
- Kay Kendall was born Justine Kay Kendall McCarthy in Withernsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Kendall’s father was “Terry” McCarthy (aka Terry Kendall), a vaudevillian performer. She had two elder siblings, “Terry” Kendall McCarthy (born 1923) and “Pat” Kendall McCarthy (aka Kim Kendall, born 1925). By her father’s second marriage to his professional dancing partner, Dora Spencer, she had a younger half-brother, Cavan Spencer Kendall McCarthy (aka Cavan Kendall) (1942-1999). Justine/Kay attended various schools, including St Leonard’s (Brighton), St Margaret’s (near Oban, Scotland), and the Lydia Kyasht Dancing Academy (London).Kay Kendall co-starred with Petula Clark more than once and achieved fame in one of those films, ‘Genevieve’ (1953). She followed this up with the comedy ‘Doctor in the House’ (1954) with her friend Dirk Bogarde. Kay was under contract to the Rank Organisation but unhappy with the parts offered. She appeared in the drama ‘Simon and Laura’ (1955) with Peter Finch; the comedy ‘Abdulla the Great’ (1955) with Sydney Chaplin and Gregory Ratoff; and the ‘The Adventures of Quentin Durward’ (1955), with Robert Taylor and Robert Morley. In October and November 1957, Kay appeared in two episodes of the short-lived American TV series the Polly Bergen Show and also starred as herself in an episode of the Phil Silvers Show on 17 January 1958. In 1958 Kendall won her Golden Globe Award for her performance in Les Girls. Kendall died in 1959, aged 32, soon after completing her last film, ‘Once More, With Feeling!’ (1960), starring opposite Yul Brynner.“As they say about crime victims, Kay Kendall was in the wrong place at the wrong time”, wrote Rhoda Koenig, a critic, in the Indie in 2006. Indeed, married to Rex Harrison. Early in her career, Kendall had a lengthy romance with actor Sydney Chaplin, the son of actor Charlie Chaplin by his second wife, actress Lita Grey. Kay also had affairs with a Swedish prince and grocery heir James Sainsbury – see previous posts for details of how James’s descendent David Sainsbury ended up with a peerage, a Ministerial job and wielded great influence over Gov’t mental health policy after parting with millions in the direction of New Labour and Cambridge University – and reportedly had a romance with Phil the Greek before he married Lilibet.
- In 1955 Kay starred opposite Rhett Harrison in The Constant Husband and an affair soon followed. Rhett was married to Lilli at the time. However, when Rhett learned from Kendall’s doctor that she had been diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia, he and Lilli agreed to divorce so that he could marry Kendall ‘and provide for her care’. Kendall always believed that she merely had an iron deficiency.As for the divorce, Lilli said she was not upset because she had a lover too. Lilli and Rhett planned to remarry after Kendall’s death, but Lilli ended up falling in love with her companion, Carlos Thompson and married him instead.
- Did Rhett inherit all Kay’s worldly goods? I think we should be told.Kendall’s gravesite is in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead Church, Hampstead. Part of the inscription on her gravestone reads “KATE / Deeply loved wife of / REX”. DEAD FROM AN IRON DEFICIENCY.
- In September 2013 Kay’s final resting place was restored by the Music Hall Guild of Britain and America. While Cameron and Theresa were organising the Macur Review, in order to cover up the cover up which was the Waterhouse Inquiry.
Kendall’s life is recounted in the 2002 biography The Brief, Madcap Life Of Kay Kendall by Eve Golden and Kim Elizabeth Kendall. Not so much madcap, but seriously unhappy as a result of dreadful behaviour on the part of other people.
Situated a stone’s throw from where Kendall once lived, the late 19th century lighthouse in Withernsea now houses a museum that contains exhibits dedicated to local history, including a memorial to Kendall and displays of many artifacts and photographs associated with her life and times. My post ‘A Trail Of Blood’ discussed the General Secretaries of the NHS union COHSE, which had many members working in psych hospitals where patients were being trafficked and abused. David Williams, a former Denbigh Angel before becoming a full-time COHSE rep for Jimmy Savile Central in Yorkshire, served as General Secretary of COHSE and found himself a very powerful man after Mary Wynch sued Dafydd et al. It was however COHSE General Secretary Hector MacKenzie who benefited most from the criminality; Hector made it into the Lords. In Nov 2018, Lord Hector, intriguingly, was invited to became Patron of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers.
- The Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund supports scientific research into leukaemia. I don’t know where this Fund’s source of dosh is coming from, but I’ve always been impressed with the ability of the Top Docs to milk the deaths of people who have died as a result of the Top Docs’ failures, Jade Goody being the best example in recent years. Jade died after a particularly aggressive tumour on her cervix rapidly spread to her major organs. That huge tumour had been busily growing away on Jade’s cervix as she religiously Got Screened and it was missed, although Jade was raising concerns about her symptoms. The lesson from Jade’s death was that Women Must Get Screened!! Er, it didn’t do Jade much good did it? If they miss something the size of a tomato on a part of the body that they can actually feel and if necessary view, WTF use are they?
- On 6 September 2014, a blue plaque commemorating Kay Kendall was erected by the Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America – they were certainly committed to resurrecting Kay at the Music Hall Guild – and unveiled at her former home in Withernsea to mark the 55th anniversary of her death, just as the Macur Review was underway.
- Terence Rattigan’s 1973 play ‘In Praise of Love’ was written about the end of Kay’s marriage to Rhett; Rhett appeared in the New York production playing himself.
After Kay’s sad death from an iron deficiency, throughout which Rhett looked after her so selflessly while planning to remarry his previous wife, Rhett was married to the unfortunate Jill Bennett’s unfortunate friend Rachel Roberts, 1962-71, which resulted in yet more grief for Rhett. In 1980, despite Rhett having married twice since their divorce, Rachel made a final attempt to win Rhett back, which proved to be futile. She bombed out on the barbiturates and alkali and went crashing through the glass in the same year and the poor bloody gardener had to clean up the mess. I expect that Rhett commiserated with him.
I’m wondering if Rex Harrison was registered with the GMC and insured by the MDU, he seems to have been at the scene of many suspicious deaths yet was never arrested. He was kicked out of Twentieth Century-Fox after that messy business of having dinner with Carole Landis and her turning up dead so soon afterwards, Rex finding the body but not calling the police or a Top Doctor, but Rex just went off and starred in films for another company, in the way that after Dafydd was kicked out of the Grosvenor Nuffield in Chester, he went elsewhere to hold his Private Clinics.
After divorcing Rachel Roberts, Rhett then married Lord Ogmore’s daughter Elizabeth Rees-Williams, divorcing her in 1975. In 1978, Rhett married Mercia Tinker, his sixth and final wife.
Rhett had numerous children and stepchildren, some of whom became well-known themselves.
Rhett’s eldest son Noel Harrison – by Rhett’s first wife Colette Thomas – was a member of the British Olympic skiing team in the 1950s, singer of the 1968 favourite ‘Windmills Of Your MIND’ and occasional actor. Noel John Christopher Harrison (29 January 1934-19 October 2013) was born in Kensington in 1934. Noel lived with his mother’s parents in Bude, Cornwall, during WW II. At the age of 15, his mother took him out of school at Radley to live in the Swiss Alps. Noel never returned to school and began ski-racing. He joined the Ipswich repertory theatre group and taught himself guitar, but his main interest and most of his spare time was spent skiing. Noel represented Great Britain at the 1952 and 1956 Winter Olympics.
After National Service, Noel toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist but instead concentrated on his guitar. Here he is with his kerchief, all casual:
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This is Noel in crooning mode:
Noel’s early break came when he took a regular part in the BBC TV programme ‘Tonight’ as part of a team who sang the day’s news in a calypso style. When Noel was 20, he started playing professionally, ‘around the tables in a Greek restaurant in London’. Anybody else doing that would be told to get a proper job. Noel also made a living ‘playing in bars and nightclubs all over Europe’.
After appearing in small roles in British films such as ‘Where the Spies Are’ (1965), Noel left for the US, ‘working as a nightclub entertainer at such venues as the Hungry I in San Francisco and at the Persian Room in New York City. Thanks to Noel’s managers Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, who went on to produce the ‘Rocky’ films, he had a record reach the charts, “A Young Girl”, written by Charles Aznavour. The King of the Crooners.
“A Young Girl” was included as one of the tracks on Harrison’s debut album in 1966. Two years later, Noel recorded “The Windmills of Your MIND’, the theme tune from the film ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’, which won the Oscar for the Best Original Song in 1968; it was also a Top Ten hit in the UK Singles Chart, which no doubt left Fluff Freeman and the Stars of Radio 1 in a state of uncontrollable excitement. Despite the song winning the Oscar, Noel did not sing it at the ceremony; his place was taken by Joe Feliciano. The change was made because Noel was working on the film ‘Take a Girl Like You’ in England, with Ollie Reed – who, like John Osborne was Definitely Not Gay but enjoyed passing the time of day wrestling nude in mud with other men and having his penis tattooed a la Friend of Dafydd’s Gang Dr Tony Jones and those buttocks of his (see previous posts) – and Hayley Mills.
Coincidentally, Noel’s dad had sung the Oscar-winning song “Talk To The Animals” only the previous year (1967). It’s Genetic, like schizophrenia!
Noel bagged a recording contract with Reprise and one of Noel’s albums reached #135 in the US Billboard 200 chart; Paul Gambaccini will know all about that, he’s probably repeated that particular Interesting Fact hundreds of times, while he raised one eye-brow and had that look on his face which suggested that it might actually matter. Noel toured with the Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher and appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ featured on a music program, Hullabaloo and appeared on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson’.
Cher’s former husband Sonny Bono died on January 5, 1998 when he hit a tree while skiing in California. After Bono’s death, Sonny’s wife Mary Bono said that Sonny had been addicted to prescription drugs (mainly Vicodin and Valium) and that she believed her husband’s drug use caused the accident. However no drugs or alcohol were found in Sonny’s body on autopsy. It has also been claimed that Sonny was murdered on orders of drug and weapons dealers who feared he was going to expose them.
After Sonny’s career in pop, he entered politics and was Mayor of Palm Springs, California, 1988-92 and the Republican congressman for California’s 44th district from 1995 until his death in 1998, as Ronnie was writing the Waterhouse Report. Sonny Bono may have made many enemies as a politician, but a brief reading of the details of his career in music and showbiz leaves one in no doubt that he could have exposed many people before he became a politician.
In 1968, Noel Harrison played the male lead in ‘The Fantasticks’, in touring theatres in the round, including The Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis, Massachusetts. In 1972, Harrison left the United States for Nova Scotia. He bought a farmhouse with 320 acres of farmland and hosted ‘Take Time’ for CBC Television. In winter 1974, the wood stove caught fire and Noel’s house burned down, inspiring him to write the humorous song, “The Middleton Fire Brigade”, which appeared on his 1979 album Mount Hanley Song. He subsequently built a new house from scratch with no electricity, inspired by the fashionable pioneers Helen and Scott Nearing and their self-help bible, Living The Good Life.
During the 1970s, Noel toured the United States in productions of ‘Camelot’ and ‘The Sound of Music’. Noel also played Henry Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, the part first performed by his father. That was Genetic as well. Other roles included one in ‘No Sex Please, We’re British’.
An admirer of Jacques Brel, Noel later created a one-man musical, Adieu, Jacques and in 2002 released an album of songs from the show. It was the aftermath of the Waterhouse Report and people were still loudly declaring it to have been a cover-up. In north Wales, the gang were busy with their attempts to stitch me up for ‘threats to kill’… In 2004, Noel returned to England, relocating his home to Devon. He had also begun acting again, appearing in cinema films and continued to sing, appearing in occasional concerts to finance the recording and release of his self-produced albums. A compilation album of his work was released by the ‘Reprise’ record label in 2003, and his debut album was re-released in 2008. In 2010, Noel recorded a new album, From the Sublime to the Ridiculous!. The record was made as part of the Internet event, The RPM Challenge, which challenged musicians to record a new album from scratch during the month of February.
In June 2011, Harrison played Glastonbury Festival’s “Spirit of ’71” stage, marking 40 years since his appearance at the second staging of the festival. The performance was televised by the BBC including a backstage acoustic version of the song The Windmills of Your Mind. Operation Pallial was launched in 2011. Rolf Harris of course had used Glastonbury to resurrect his career with his version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, back in the early 1990s, when the gang were under police investigation. See previous posts.
Noel Harrison was married three times. In 1959, Noel married Sara Lee Eberts Tufnell, with whom he had three children: Cathryn, Simon and Harriet, who are all luvvies themselves. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969. Noel’s second marriage was in 1972 to Margaret Benson. They had two children, Chloe and Will and divorced in 1989. Noel’s final marriage was in 1991 to Lori Chapman, to whom he remained married until his death in 2013. Noel died in hospital after suffering a heart attack at his Devon home, several hours after performing a concert locally on the evening of 19 October 2013, while Cameron, Theresa May etc were in the process of planning the rigged Macur Review, to reassure the world that Waterhouse Was Not A Cover-Up.
Rhett’s younger son Carey Harrison – his mum was Lilli Palmer- is a playwright and social activist. Carey (born 19 February 1944) was raised in Los Angeles and New York, where he attended the Lycee Francais. Subsequently, in Britain, Carey attended Sunningdale School, Harrow School and Jesus College, Cambridge. Carey Harrison is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Here’s a few famous old pupils of Sunningdale; can readers see any paedophiles’ friends hidden in the picture? Or indeed bunnies and mice?
- Henry Blofeld, BBC cricket commentator
- Michael Bowes-Lyon, 18th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne
- Sir Henry Cecil, horse racing trainer
- Guy Clark, Lord Lieutenant of Renfrewshire
- John Crichton, Viscount Crichton, property consultant
- Henry Field, US anthropologist who documented Iraq’s Marsh Arabs
- Francis Fulford, TV personality, reality star of The F***ing Fulfords
- Bamber Gascoigne, British television presenter and author
- Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster,
- Frederick Hervey, 8th Marquess of Bristol
- Bernard Heywood, Church of England bishop
- Nick Hurd, Government Minister
- Prince Michael of Kent, cousin of the Queen and member of the Royal Family
- Lord Frederick Windsor, British Royal and financial analyst
- Humphrey Lyttelton, jazz musician and BBC radio presenter
- Ferdinand Mount, writer and novelist
- Ian Ogilvy, actor
- Stephen Powys, 6th Baron Lilford
- Hugh van Cutsem, landowner, banker, businessman, and horse-breeder
You can tell that Carey is the intellectual of Rhett’s family, he has a beard and specs on top of his bald head:
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Carey Harrison
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Brown puts his specs on top of his head and he’s bald these days as well; he did observe the other day that he now leads the life of an elderly professor.
Carey’s first play was staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester in 1966. Subsequent plays were premiered in Edinburgh and the Stables Theatre Club in Manchester, where Harrison was Resident Playwright, 1969-70. His drama output for radio and TV includes numerous award-winning plays, among them Hitler in Therapy.
A more recent play of Carey’s, A Cook’s Tour of Communism, was broadcast by the BBC World Service in 2008. His most recent radio drama, Breakfast With Stalin,
was premiered in 2010 by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koeln in Germany, where 16 of Harrison’s plays have been broadcast in translation.
In 2009, a new stage play, Scenes From a Misunderstanding, a comedy about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was premiered at the Jewish Theatre Festival in Manhattan, and subsequently re-mounted at the Byrdcliffe Theatre in Woodstock, New York, along with Bad Boy. Subsequent plays were staged by The Woodstock Players in June 2010, June 2011, June 2012 and were premiered in repertoire in June and July 2013.
Carey is the author of 40 stage plays and 16 novels, most notably Richard’s Feet, published by Holt in the US and by Heinemann in Britain, winner of the Encore Award from the UK Society of Authors.
Carey Harrison has received numerous grants from the UK Arts Council and his prizes include Sony Radio Academy Awards, the Giles Cooper Award, the Prix Marulic, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, the Prix Italia Silver Award and the Best Play award from the Berlin Akademie der Kuenste as well as two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.
From 2005-11 Carey contributed a monthly essay on linguistic trends in ‘The Vocabula Review’ and from November 2011, a column on fiction-writing in ‘Roll Magazine Online’. His essays have appeared in magazines including ‘New Politics’, a journal of socialist thought and ‘Chronicles’, a paleoconservative magazine of American culture. Carey has reviewed books for numerous newspapers and journals including the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’, the ‘Chicago Tribune’ and the ‘London Review of Books’.
Carey Harrison was one of the London Recruits, a group of young people recruited by the ANC in the 1960s and 1970s to smuggle ANC and South African Communist Party literature into South Africa after the ANC had been decimated by the Rivonia Trials of 1963/4. Carey’s first wife was Mary Chamberlain, who was also one of the London Recruits. Previous posts have discussed the links between many anti-apartheid activists, members of the ANC and even people who knew Nelson Mandela personally – eg. the Labour politician from Glasgow Janey Buchan – and Dafydd’s network. This seems to have been a result of people on the left having long-standing links with Dafydd and Gwynne via people like Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot and Mervyn Susser, who were at the centre of much activism.
Mary Chamberlain (born 3 September 1947 in south London) is Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. Her book Fenwomen was the first book published by Virago Press in 1975 and pioneered the use of oral history in the study of women’s history. It was also the inspiration for the Joint Stock production of Caryl Churchill’s award-winning play Fen (1983). Fenwomen was followed by two further books on women’s history: Old Wives’ Tales: Their History, Remedies and Spells and Growing Up In Lambeth.
From 1987 to 1991, Mary Chamberlain lived in Barbados and began working in Caribbean history.
Mary Chamberlain is widely considered one of the founders of oral history,was the reviews editor of the Oral History Journal, 1977-87 and co-founder of the London History Workshop Centre. She is the author of many articles on women’s history, oral history and Caribbean history, has edited a number of books, and was a founding Editor of the series ‘Memory and Narrative’. Chamberlain has served on editorial, advisory and government committees and held visiting Chairs at the University of the West Indies (1995, 2004), and New York University (2004). She has been the recipient of a number of research awards and is an adviser to the National Life Story Collection at the British Library and the Raphael Samuel History Centre. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview with Mary Chamberlain in 2012 for its Oral History of Oral History collection held by the British Library.
That’s the wonderful thing about the Oral History crowd who descended from Raphael Samuel (see previous posts) and the Radical Thinkers, they are keen to ensure that Forgotten Voices are heard. Such as those of people who were once married to Rex Harrison’s son. When Brown and I began publishing re the Forgotten Voices in north Wales, those with Radical Consciences became very angry and did much to obstruct our efforts.
Mary Chamberlain’s most recent novel ‘The Hidden’ was published in 2019. She is also author of The Mighty Jester and one of the Editors of Memories of Mass Repression.
Mary Chamberlain is now married to the Stein Ringen (born July 5, 1945), Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Dept of Social Policy and Intervention, Oxford University and a Fellow Green Templeton College, formerly Green College, Oxford. Gwynne and Dafydd’s big mate Lord John Walton, the Bastard of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was Warden of Green College, Oxford, 1983-89.
Ringen holds degrees from the University of Oslo. He has been a Visiting Professor at Universite de Paris I – Pantheon Sorbonne (1995, 1996), Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (1996-1997), Masaryk University (2003), Charles University (2003), University of the West Indies (2004, 2006) and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung (2006).
Stein’s books include: The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century; Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience; The Economic Consequences of Mr Brown; and What Democracy Is For.
Mary Chamberlain’s ex-husband Carey Harrison now lives in New York with his current wife, the artist Claire Lambe; he has four children, Rosie (Laurence), Chiara, Faith and Sam and one stepdaughter, Zoe Lambe.
Rhett Harrison’s sister Sylvia Sackville, Countess De La Warr (born 16 July 1903) was Vice-Chairman of the Tory Party, 1951–54. She died in Hampshire in June 1992, not far from where I had lived in 1988, when I was under attack from Tony Francis’s mates in the BMA, Ken Clarke and the wider network, a number of whom lived in Sylvia’s part of the world. As did Lord Denning and his brother Sir Norman, Major Ron Ferguson etc.
Sylvia died during the North Wales Police investigation into possibility of a VIP paedophile ring in north Wales/Cheshire, which concluded not long after Sylvia’s death on the grounds that there was no evidence for such a thing. Up in north Wales, the gang which was running the paedophile ring which didn’t exist were trying to set fire to my house, telling other people that I was a danger to their kids and refusing Brown pain relief when he was clobbered with a kidney stone when visiting me.
Sylvia’s first husband was David Maxwell Fyfe aka Dai Bananas, a lawyer, Tory politician and judge, who was, among other things: the lead British prosecutor at Nuremberg; Solicitor General, 1942-45, Attorney General, May-July 1945; Home Secretary and Cabinet Minister for Welsh Affairs, 1951-54 and Lord Chancellor, 1954-62. Dai Bananas frequently travelled to south Wales, was Mr Big Of The Legal World when Ronnie Waterhouse was a young barrister; Ronnie toadied accordingly. Dai Bananas was Mr Big of the British legal establishment some years before Lord Elwyn-Jones took up that role.
Born in Edinburgh the only son of William Thomson Fyfe, Headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School, Dai Bananas was educated at George Watson’s College and Balliol, Oxford – Ted Heath, Denis Healey and Woy Jenkins were all at Balliol at the same time in the latter half of the 1930s, some years after Dai Bananas, but you know what alumni networks are like – where, ‘perhaps owing to his self-confessed interest in politics’, rather than to Fyfe being a hopeless student, he achieved a Third. Fyfe was a member of Gray’s Inn, along with Dafydd’s mate Sir William Mars-Jones. Dai Bananas became a pupil of George Lynskey in Liverpool and then joined his Chambers to practise, thus gaining a foothold among the corrupt professional circles in Liverpool, which provided armour plating for Dafydd and Gwynne for such a long time. Dai Bananas served as the Tory MP for Liverpool West Derby from 1935 until the mid-1950s. Bent lawyer, MP, Cabinet Minister, Lord Chancellor and eventually Viscount, no wonder Dafydd and Gwynne had no fear as they abused, lobotomised, broke the law, lied in Court, forged documentation and in Dafydd’s case cohabited with more than one female patient at once, while a few others kipped over at his house on a regular basis.
Dai Bananas’ dual role as Home Secretary and Cabinet Minister for Welsh Affairs, 1951-54, seems to have been a curious and novel position. Dafydd hadn’t yet got going when Dai Bananas was in that role, although the export of young Welsh people to England for, effectively, sex work, was happening and it was upon this base that Dafydd et al later built their empire. See eg. ‘Only One Died’ and ‘On The Occasion Of The 70th Birthday Of HRH Carlo’. Sir Clough and the Welsh Bloomsbury Set were enjoying themselves at Cwm Croesor by the early 1950s, but things really took off after 1955, when Bertrand Russell purchased a house near Cwm Croesor. Lord Snowdon’s Top Doc grandfather had his country residence near Caernarfon and Snowdon knew the place well, having stayed there as a boy and a teenager. Snowdon and Ma’am Darling were married in 1960.
In 1953 Lilibet had been crowned and Dafydd and Gwynne’s mate Sir Charles Evans, who served as the Principal of UCNW, 1958-84, while the trafficking gang used it as their vehicle, had reached the top of Everest – Evans was Deputy Leader of the team – and become a national hero.
The Leader of the 1953 Everest team was Lord John Hunt. I have discussed John Hunt, a British Army officer who was a member of the security services in previous posts, but it has only just sunk in that after his years of peak fame, he held two positions in which he could provide yet more assistance to Dafydd and the gang: Hunt was appointed as President of the National Association of Probation Officers in 1974 and he served as the first Chairman of the Parole Board, 1967-74. The Probation Service in north Wales was 100% on board with the gang; a look at the parts of the Waterhouse Report in which Ronnie provides the biographies of people who staffed or managed the children’s homes in north Wales reveals that again and again they had either worked as probation officers or went on to work for the probation service after working as social workers with responsibilities for the children’s homes.
Neither was the problem confined to north Wales; my post ‘Only One Died’ discussed the collusion and law breaking of the Probation Service in London with Dafydd’s partners in crime down there. Probation service staff who trained in the 1960s are very confusing for someone like me because back then their training seemed to give them a very solid grounding in social sciences and many of them sound eminently reasonable, even impressive, when in conversation; yet I know that they undoubtedly colluded with the most serious crime that they could never have justified.
Some years ago the former Head of the North Wales Probation Service was writing a lot of letters to the press critiquing Home Office penal policy. I agreed with virtually everything that he said in those letters, but I know what he presided over while he was running the probation service in north Wales and it was not a pretty sight. The corruption was so entrenched and so serious that he could not possibly have not noticed it. I realised that he had taken to writing to the same newspapers in which Brown and I had appeared discussing the mental health services… Then a retired probation officer got in touch with Brown and said that he’d like to work with us and he seemed a really nice bloke. Until I did a bit of digging as to his career history and it was a case of ‘Have you seen what he was involved with Brown??’. He’d retired to Chester as well so I presumed that he was yet another Gift From Dafydd. Then one much younger academic who was going to be working on the same project with us died in a freak road accident.
Previous posts have discussed the Parole Board; every Top Doc who played a key role in concealing the wrongdoing of Dafydd and the gang was subsequently appointed to the Parole Board.
The Parole Board was the centre of much bad publicity recently after a series of bombs went off and the Chair of the Parole Board for England and Wales, Nick Hardwick – a man who’s whole career has been spent in the bosom of Dafydd’s network – departed. In Sept 2018 the Secretary of State for Justice announced that the Chair of the Parole Board who would succeed Nick Hardwick would be Caroline Corby. There was much talk of Caroline’s previous career in private equity in the City and her sideline in writing children’s books. Caroline is not only a Woman who went to a Comprehensive School because her wealthy parents wanted her to experience Less Fortunate People, but she came with relevant expertise. Caroline became involved with the parole service in 2007 and joined the Parole Board’s management committee in 2015. Caroline also works for the Criminal Cases Review Commission and has been a magistrate.
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Caroline Corby
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Caroline’s wealthy father is John Mills, a major donor to the Labour Party, who played a leading role in Camden Borough Council for many years. John’s brother is David Mills, who accepted a bribe on behalf of Silvio Berlusconi and would have gone to prison if he had not utilised a loophole in the Italian legal system. David Mills was married to Tessa Jowell, who worked as a children’s social worker for Lambeth when the paedophile ring linked to the gang in north Wales was at work in Lambeth; Tessa also worked as a psychiatric social worker at the Maudsley, when it was full of Dafydd’s mates colluding with him and propping up Dafydd and the rest of the gang. Tessa was Deputy Director of MIND when Dafydd and his mates ran that organisation. See previous posts.
Caroline Corby’s mum is now deceased; she was Dame Barbara Mills, the former DPP. See eg. ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party’ and ‘The Mrs Mills Experience’. More than 100 complaints about the abuse of children in north Wales children’s homes yet Dame Babs didn’t mount one prosecution. Dame Babs was however OK with prosecuting me for staring at a social worker in Safeways…
Welcome to the Parole Board Mrs Mills’s daughter!
Here’s the man who appointed Caroline to get the party started:
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David Gauke
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As for Lord John Hunt, the man who did so much for the cause of accessories holding senior roles in the criminal justice system, John Hunt received his peerage in the 1966 Lilibet’s Birthday Honours for his ‘work with young people’.
Dafydd joined the party and embarked on his career as a Nice Young Doctor when Dai Bananas was Lord Chancellor.
In May 1941 Dai Bananas became Deputy to Rab Butler’s Chairmanship of a Conservative Party committee to analyse forthcoming post-war problems, taking over the Chairmanship from Butler in July 1943.
In 1952, the DG of MI5 was made directly answerable to the Home Secretary rather than the PM, although I don’t know why. Given this novel responsibility, Dai Bananas issued the Maxwell Fyfe Directive, which became the de facto constitution of the Security Service until the Security Service Act 1989 set it on a statutory basis. Sir Percy Sillitoe was DG of MI5, 1946-53. Sillitoe had served as Chief Constable of several police forces. His reputation was damaged by the 1951 defection to the Soviet Union Burgess and Maclean and by the investigation afterwards, which showed that MI5 had been unaware and slow to act and he resigned as DG in 1953. Well the DG was a Plod and the security services were full of gay swinging Communist intellectuals, no wonder it was a case of Richard Crossman the King of the Swingers doing whatever he wanted while he was at the top of the security services. Sillitoe died in April 1962, so he was still alive when Dafydd was taking his baby steps as Gwynne’s accomplice.
Dai Bananas delegated the shortlisting of Sillitoe’s successor to a committee of civil servants Chaired by Sir Edward Bridges. Bridges was the son of Robert Bridges, later Poet Laureate and Mary Monica Waterhouse, daughter of the architect Alfred Waterhouse. They could well have been Relations, the Waterhouses were a big family. In 1938, Edward Bridges was appointed Cabinet Secretary, succeeding Sir Maurice Hankey. Maurice – later Lord – Hankey was the first person to occupy the position of Cabinet Secretary. Hankey was the right hand man to David Lloyd George which was why Lloyd George invented the role of Cabinet Secretary, which then ensured Maurice Hankey’s key role in Gov’t for many years. Hankey was Cabinet Secretary, 1916-38. Hankey was Cabinet Secretary to Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain.
Edward Bridges remained Cabinet Secretary until 1946, when he was made Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service, a position he held until 1956. After his retirement Lord Bridges served as Chancellor of the University of Reading.
Lord Bridges’ Committee put forward Dick White and Sir Kenneth Strong as candidates for DG of MI5. Dai Bananas endorsed the Committee’s preference for White, observing to the then PM Churchill that an internal appointment would be good for the morale of the service.
Sir Dick Goldsmith White, was DG of MI5, 1953-56 and Head of MI6, 1956-68. Or at least he thought that he was or everybody else was told that he was. Dick Crossman and the Westminster Swingers and the bunnies of Oxbridge will have had other ideas. White was born in Tonbridge, Kent and went to school at Bishop’s Stortford College. Not being as brilliant as Dai Bananas, Dick White bagged a First rather than a Third, from Christ Church, Oxford. White had suspected Kim Philby of being the “third man”. There was rather more than three swinging bunnies. White died after a long illness at his home near Arundel in Sussex, on 21 February 1993; his wife, Kate, survived him. Dick died just after the North Wales Police found no evidence of a paedophile ring in north Wales/Cheshire, although more than 100 complaints of child abuse had been made; Mrs Mills failed to mount even one prosecution with regard to that although in April 1993, I was arrested and later that year found guilty of staring at a social worker… Thomas Tyrell-Kenyon and his dad Lord Kenyon died shortly after Dick White.
I have been remiss so far on this blog in not providing details of Richard Crossman’s family. Such info tells us a lot even though it is an everyday story of Westminster swinging folk. Dick Crossman’s mother was Helen Howard, a member of the Quaker family descended from the chemist Luke Howard; the family business was chemicals manufacture. Crossman’s father was Sir Charles Stafford Crossman (8 December 1870-1 January 1941), a barrister and High Court judge. Sir Charles was the third son of Dr Edward Crossman. Charles was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford; Richard Crossman was educated at the same establishments. After Oxford, Charles Crossman returned to Winchester as an assistant master for a year; the Crossmans were descended from the founder of Winchester, William of Wykeham. Charles Crossman was called the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1897.
Charles Crossman was junior Counsel to the Board of Inland Revenue, 1926–27, junior equity Counsel to the Treasury in 1927–34 and Counsel to the Royal College of Physicians, in 1927–34. In 1934, Charles Crossman was appointed to the High Court of Justice and assigned to the Chancery Division. Crossman sat on the High Court until his death in 1941. Although a Conservative politically, Charles Crossman was a close friend of future Labour PM Clement Attlee.
Sir Charles is ancient history now, but because advancement in law, like advancement in medicine, is so dependent upon patronage, the influence of Sir Charles Crossman remains. Lord Denning was a member of Lincoln’s Inn some 20 years before Charles Crossman died and Denning became a King’s Counsel while Charles Crossman was still alive. By the time that Charles had died, his son was working and recruiting for the security services, had served as the Leader of the Labour group on Oxford City Council and was clearly going to become a Labour MP soon.
Lord Denning was Master of the Rolls by the time that Miranda and Cherie became members of Lincoln’s Inn; their boss the crooked barrister George Carman QC was a member of Lincoln’s Inn…
Thus a great many serious criminals were untouchable no matter how great the evidence.
Now here’s something for the Ah the doctors they were wonderful contingent to think about. When Richard Crossman’s dad Sir Charles was junior Counsel to the Royal College of Physicians, the President of the Royal College was Bertrand, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn. Dawson trained at UCL and the Royal London Hospital (later known as the London Hospital), which were at the hub of the trafficking gang in the 1960s/70s, as discussed in previous posts.
In 1907, Bertrand Dawson joined the Royal Household as a physician-extraordinary to King Edward VII, an office he held until 1910, when he was promoted to a physician-in-ordinary under King George V until 1914.
Dawson was commissioned whilst he was Chairman of the Consultative Council on Medical and Allied Services in 1919 by Lord Addison, the first British Minister of Health, to produce a report on “schemes requisite for the systematised provision of such forms of medical and allied services as should, in the opinion of the Council, be available for the inhabitants of a given area”. An Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services was produced in 1920, though no further report ever appeared. The report laid down details plans for a network of Primary and Secondary Health Centres, together with architectural drawings of different sorts of centres. The report was very influential in debates about the NHS when it was set up in 1948.
On the night of 20 January 1936 as King George V was dying from bronchitis, his death was hastened by Dawson, who gave him lethal injections of cocaine and morphine.
“At about 11 o’clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers and keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr. 3/4 and shortly afterwards cocaine gr. 1 into the distended jugular vein […]”
Dawson said that he acted to preserve the King’s dignity, to prevent further strain on the family and so that the King’s death at 11:55 p.m. could be announced in the morning edition of ‘The Times’ newspaper rather than “less appropriate … evening journals”. One likes one’s death to appear in ‘The Times’ rather than the Bangor and Anglesey Mail, even if one’s Top Doctor has to speed things up a bit. To make doubly sure that King George would appear in ”The Times’ rather than the ‘Wrexham Leader’, Dawson telephoned his wife in London asking her to let The Times know when the announcement was imminent.
When this appeared in the Torygraph, a reader wrote in recalling a clerihew in circulation during Dawson’s life:
Lord Dawson of Penn/ Killed many men./ That’s why we sing/ ‘God Save the King’.
Dawson’s public stance on euthanasia was expressed later that year when he opposed a move in the Lords to legalise it because it “belongs to the wisdom and conscience of the medical profession and not to the realm of law”. Spoken like a true Expert exercising Clinical Judgement.
In 1986, the contents of Dawson’s diary were made public for the first time, in which he clearly acknowledged what he had done to King George V which was described by a medical reviewer in 1994 as an arrogant “convenience killing”.
In the Birthday Honours on 30 October, Dawson was advanced in the peerage as Viscount Dawson of Penn and remained in the Medical Households of King Edward VIII and King George VI and treated numerous members of the Royal Family and foreign monarchs, including Queen Maud of Norway and King Leopold III of Belgium. During the abdication crisis of 1936 Dawson was believed to have attempted to influence the retirement of PM Stanley Baldwin on health grounds, thereby to reduce pressure on the King to abdicate. Dawson ‘was undoubtedly indebted to and supportive of King Edward but the account of his close colleague William Evans [who originated from Wales, passed through Aberystwyth University and didn’t die until 1988, so will have been providing the gang with a helping hand] appears to clear him of any unethical manipulation in the matter’.
Dawson was physician and friend to both parties in the feud that was then taking place between the King and the Prime Minister. That Dawson, although initially inclined to the view that Baldwin should retire, eventually pronounced on the Prime Minister’s health from medical grounds exclusively, and uninfluenced by either political or moral considerations, was confirmed through his immediate acceptance of a young medical colleague’s opinion that the Prime Minister’s heart was healthy, which made Baldwin’s retirement on the grounds of his unfitness from heart trouble no longer tenable, so that any attempt to dethrone the Prime Minister on that assumption must fail.
The King Killer Lord Dawson of Penn married Minnie Ethel Yarrow, daughter of Sir Alfred Fernandez Yarrow, 1st Baronet, of Homestead, on 18 December 1900. They had three daughters:
- The Honourable Sybil Frances Dawson (1904-2 June 1977), married on 1 October 1929 David Eccles, 1st Viscount Eccles, and had issue
- The Honourable Ursula Margaret Dawson (1907-16 November 1999), married on 10 December 1927 Sir Ian Frank Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, and had issue, including Charlotte Mary Bowater, mother of the actor Damian Lewis
- The Honourable Rosemary Monica Dawson (1913-13 June 1998), married on 30 November 1939 Sir John Wrightson, 3rd Baronet (19 June 1911-1983), and had four children, including Sir Charles Mark Garmondsway Wrightson, 4th Baronet (18 Feb 1951 – ).
Murderer of the King Bertrand Dawson died in March 1945, aged 80. As he had no male heirs, on his death his titles became extinct.
I recommend readers to click on the links above and have a quick read about the descendants of Dr Dawson the King Killer, they are still very much with us, cluttering up the Lords, sitting on Committees re mental health policy, occupying positions as Directors and Chairs of big companies, charidees etc… I don’t have the scope in this post to detail them all, but I will flag up just one of them: Lord Dawson of Regicide’s great-grandson Damian Watcyn Lewis (born 11 February 1971).
Damian is an actor and producer. He played U.S. Army Major Richard Winters in ‘Band of Brothers’ and also portrayed U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody in ‘Homeland’ (which earned Damian a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award). Damian played King Henry VIII in ‘Wolf Hall’. Damian currently plays Bobby Axelrod in ‘Billions’ (2016-present).
Damian Lewis was born in St John’s Wood, London – Ronnie Waterhouse lived there at the time and virtually ran the St John’s Wood Society – the elder son of Charlotte and John Watcyn Lewis, a City insurance broker with Lloyd’s. Damian’s paternal grandparents were Welsh and in media interviews, Damian has flagged up the Welsh bit and how attached to Wales his father is, being a City broker and all that and furthermore Damian’s gran speaks Welsh. Is Damian’s nain Meri Huws?? Damian has stated that he “went to English boarding schools and grew up around people very much like Soames and in a milieu very much like the Forsytes'”, as all Welsh people do.
As a child, Damian Lewis made several visits to the U.S. to visit relatives during his summers, those Welsh relatives I expect. He was educated at Ashdown House School in Forest Row, East Sussex and at Eton. Damian graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993, after which he served as a stage actor for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Damian starred in one of Ibsen’s plays, ‘Pillars of the Community’ at the National Theatre in November 2005. It was after being spotted by Stephen Spielberg – who plagiarised my friends’ film script (see previous posts) that Damian starred in ‘Band of Brothers’. Subsequently, Damian Lewis portrayed Soames Forsyte in the ITV series ‘The Forsyte Saga’. In 2006, Damian appeared in Stephen Poliakoff’s BBC drama, ‘Friends and Crocodiles’.
Damian has appeared on BBC’s ‘Have I Got News For You’ as guest host several times; on 10 November 2006, 1 May 2009, 18 November 2010, 27 April 9 November 2012 and 31 October 2014. Just so talented, like Jo Brand the Strong Woman who also became a regular on ‘Have I Got News For You’. Jo the former psych nurse who worked in some of the most abusive institutions in the UK and who was a leading light in COHSE, the union who’s General Secretary once worked at Denbigh and whose officials accrued so much power by colluding with serious crime and the abuse of vulnerable people. See previous posts.
In 2009 Damian Lewis appeared in the lead role in ‘The Baker’ a film directed by his brother, Gareth. Such a talented family! Damian took a supporting role in ‘The Escapist’ which he also helped produce. He led the cast in Martin Crimp’s version of ‘The Misanthrope’, which opened in December 2009 at the Comedy Theatre, London. Other cast members included Tara Fitzgerald, Keira Knightley and Dominic Rowan.
Since 2016, Damian has starred as billionaire Bobby Axelrod in the Showtime series ‘Billions’.
Damian Lewis was given an OBE by the granddaughter of the man who was murdered by Damian’s great-grandfather in her 2014 Birthday Honours.
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On 4 July 2007, Lewis married actress Helen McCrory. They have a daughter, Manon (born 8 September 2006) and a son, Gulliver (born 2 November 2007). Damian and his family left England in the latter half of 2007 to live in LA, while he worked on the NBC-TV crime drama ‘Life’. After the completion of that series’ final episode in early 2009, Damian and his family returned to England to live in Tufnell Park, north London. The Windbags live in Tufnell Park; is Tufnell Park going to declare independence from England and become part of Wales?
In March 2010, Damian became a trade justice ambassador for Christian Aid. In May 2006 and June 2018, he played for England in Soccer Aid and played golf for Europe in the All*Star Cup in August 2006, both shown on ITV. Damian Lewis is an avid supporter of Liverpool Football Club.
Damian’s film director brother Gareth Lewis (born 25 January 1973) cut his teeth on the 2001 short, Tears of a Clown. He followed that in 2006 with a second short Normal for Norfolk which starred Stephen Campbell Moore and Tim Pigott-Smith. Gareth’s first full length picture was 2007 release ‘The Baker’ (also known as Assassin in Love), which he directed and wrote. As well as Gareth’s brother Damian, The Baker starred Kate Ashfield and Michael Gambon.
[That’s enough relatives of the King Killer – Ed.]
Richard Crossman had two brothers and three sisters and he was married three times, to: Erika Gluck, 1932-34; Inezita Baker, 1937-52; Anne McDougall, 1954-74.
Crossman’s sister Bridget’s daughter was Sue Bardsley, a social worker in the children’s dept in Barnet, who was married to the publisher Michael Nunn. There was an enormous problem when Crossman was running the DHSS of the neglect and abuse of kids in the care of the Social Services, but Crossman never mentions that, although there are many entries in his ‘Diaries’ noting the widespread neglect and abuse of psych patients, learning disabled people and the elderly, as well as of Top Docs constantly breaking the law, particularly with regard to the abortion legislation and the financial abuse of patients in long-stay institutions. Crossman noted that when he lunched with his niece, she reassured him that Barnet was a ‘good’ borough, so there were no problems with the care of children there, which Crossman was delighted to hear. It does rather suggest that Crossman and his niece knew that there were bad boroughs where children were not looked after as they should have been. Whether the children’s dept in Barnet was problem-free, as Sue Bardsley maintained, we don’t know. If there weren’t downright lies and cover-ups taking place, the DHSS approached every situation by being authoritarian, arrogant and simply in complete denial about the paucity of care provided for so many people. Barnet is in north London and the former Friern Barnet Hospital was located there; it was one of the old notorious abusive asylums (see previous posts), so Sue Bardsley’s observation that Barnet ran things properly was probably another lie from a social worker who couldn’t begin to admit how bad things were.
Reading Crossman’s ‘Diaries’ reminds me of the conversations and correspondence that I endured with Gwynedd Health Authority in the mid-1980s, some 10 years after Crossman’s death. You just couldn’t get anywhere with them, even when you produced solid evidence of serious wrongdoing, it was a surreal experience. None of them were prepared to countenance how inadequate their ‘service’ was and there was simply an attitude of ‘we run this, you are a charidee case and if you don’t like what is on offer the alternative is nothing’. There was no sense at all on their part that they were running public services paid for by the taxpayer. Years later the Hergest whistleblower told me that in one confrontation with Alun Davies, the corrupt manager of the Hergest Unit – who was a junior administrator when I first did battle with Gwynedd Health Authority – Davies had bellowed about ‘my staff’. The Hergest whistleblower had quietly said ‘Alun, we are not your staff, we work for the NHS and you are also an employee of the NHS’. Davies roared angrily and left the room.
I now realise that in the 1980s, I was battling many of the very same people who had been Crossman’s colleagues in various capacities in the 1960s. They ran the health and welfare sector for decades, the very same names; it was, as Crossman himself noted, an oligarchy who could not change their practices no matter what the stakes were.
Crossman’s extended family were, like him, privileged people and he maintained good relations with them. He wrote about a sister, Mary, in Oxford, who was married to a Charles Woodhouse. There was an Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse who in 1935 was appointed Assistant Director of Naval Equipment at the Admiralty; in October 1940 he became Director of the Local Division at the Admiralty; in March 1944 Woodhouse was appointed Director of Naval Ordnance at the Admiralty; after the War he was Second-in-Command of the Carrier Fleet and in 1948 he was made Commander-in-Chief, East Indies Station. Sir Charles retired in 1950. Whether this was the Charles Woodhouse who was Crossman’s brother-in-law I don’t know, but this pic summarises the attitude of the DHSS neatly:
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Charles Henry Lawrence Woodhouse
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Captain C H L Woodhouse ( left), HM King George VI(centre) and Admiral Sir John Tovey (right) aboard HMS Howe
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Crossman has an aunt, Mary Cowper, who lived in a grand part of London and he regularly stayed at her place.
Crossman had two children with his wife Anne, Patrick and Virginia. He had a stepson, Gilbert Baker, the son of his ex-wife Zita and he was on good terms with Gilbert and his wife Dorothy, who was an actress.
Crossman’s wife Anne had worked for the security services herself during WW II and she too came from a privileged family. In Sept 1969, the Crossmans took a break in the Lake District with Anne’s cousin (or it may have been the son of Anne’s cousin) Michael Haslett and his wife Isabel. Arthur Haslett, Michael’s father, was at Winchester with Crossman and worked as the science correspondent for ‘The Times’. In Sept 1969, Arthur Haslett was found dead on a mountain in Cumbria. Robin Cook and Dafydd’s mate William Bingley – Bingley lived near Cumbria – met their ends in similar ways. Cumbria was Willie Whitelaw’s domain who was as good a friend to Dafydd and the gang as Lord Hailsham was. See previous posts.
The Official Line is that Dai Bananas’ assumption of office as Home Secretary ‘heralded a reign of fear for male homosexuals’. A ‘stern advocate of existing legislation criminalising homosexual acts’, Dai started a campaign to “rid England of this male vice … this plague”, by dramatically increased arrests of male homosexuals through police surveillance and entrapment via the use agents provocateurs, tapped telephones, forged documents and the absence of warrants. The Dafydd and Gwynne Way.
Meanwhile, chez Richard Crossman, it was business as usual with both genders…
From 1,276 in prosecutions in 1939 for actual or attempted sodomy or gross indecency, a year after Dai had assumed the office of Home Secretary and – Cabinet Minister for Welsh Affairs of course – prosecutions had soared to 5,443 (ie. in 1952). Dai subsequently sanctioned the establishment of the Wolfenden Report into homosexuality, ‘but had he known its findings would recommend decriminalisation, it is unlikely he would have done so’. Not that anyone can be sure of that, what with all this condemning and prosecuting of bunnies by people who were either bunnies themselves or whose best friends were bunnies. Or mice.
I’m beginning to understand why Dafydd was just so hilariously mad, he was a relic from a by-gone age of when the security services were criminals and packed to the rafters with bunnies and mice.
During his tenure as Home Secretary, Dai Bananas was embroiled in the controversy surrounding the hanging of Derek Bentley. Dai controversially refused to grant a reprieve to Bentley despite the written petitions of 200 MPs and the claim that Bentley allegedly had a mental age of only 11. Dai Bananas ensured that Derek Bentley was executed four years after Dai acted as the defence Counsel for John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’ who was convicted of killing six people but claimed to have murdered nine.
Dai Bananas entertained hopes of succeeding Churchill as PM but once it was clear that Eden was to be Churchill’s successor, Dai sought the office of Lord Chancellor. In 1954 Dai was raised to the peerage as Viscount Kilmuir and moved to the Lords. Lord Kilmuir was a political Lord Chancellor, not restricting himself to his judicial role. Dai worked on many Government issues including the constitution of Malta which he wanted to become part of the UK.
The former PM of Malta Dom Mintoff was a member of the Maltese Mafia. Dom was a personal friend of Lady Juliet Bingley, of Richard Crossman and of the Jack Jones, General Secretary of the TGWU. Crossman and Jack Jones enjoyed the use of a house owned by Dom Mintoff for free holidays (see previous posts) although Harold Wilson kept Crossman’s stay there a secret, lest it reflect badly on the Gov’t. Jack Jones was always being accused of working for the security services, he might have been a secret bunny himself. If not, a mouse.
Dai Bananas led the opposition in the Lords to the implementation of the Wolfenden Committee report, which had recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. This was ironic, says Geraldine Bedell, the novelist who also writes for ‘The Observer’, since it was Dai, while Home Secretary, who had set up the Committee to consider whether the law should be changed. As Bedell also notes: “Perhaps he thought, by handing over to a Committee, to shelve the issue. Perhaps he assumed Wolfenden would find against, in which case, he chose a curious Chairman, because Wolfenden had a gay son, Jeremy.” See previous posts for more info re Wolfenden and Jeremy Wolfenden.
I think that it was rather more to do with all the confusion and hypocrisy with regard to bunnies and mice on the part of so many people.
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Jack Jones
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Dai Kilmuir still opposed liberalisation re homosexuality when a bill was introduced in the Lords by Lord Arran in 1965. See previous posts for details of Lord Arran and his completely crazy extended family. Says Bedell: “For the opposition, Lord Kilmuir warned against licensing the ‘buggers’ clubs’ which he claimed were operating behind innocent-looking doors all over London.” Dai Bananas told the Conservative backbencher Bob Boothby – who was known in Parliamentary circles to be bisexual and busy with Harold Macmillan’s wife Dorothy, John Strachey, Ronnie Kray and a number of other bunnies – that it was not his intention to legalise homosexuality: “I am not going down in history”, he told Boothby, “as the man who made sodomy legal.” Dai, you did.
Big Bunny:
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The Earl of Kilmuir
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Dai continued as Lord High Chancellor in the Govt’s of Eden and Macmillan, until Macmillan’s 1962 “Night of the Long Knives”, when Dai was abruptly replaced by Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney-General. Reggie, another period piece (see previous posts), was the dad of Dame-Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, DG of MI5, 2002-07 and who presided over a terrible mess. See eg. ‘I Spit On Your Grave’.
Viscount Kilmuir was made Baron Fyfe of Dornoch in 1962 to cushion the blow of retirement. Another title makes up for a lot in this world.
Ronnie Waterhouse relates an anecdote in his autobiography from his days as a young barrister, when a farmer in north east Wales caused a sensation by hiring Dai Bananas to act for him in a dispute with the local County Council over planning permission for some caravans on his land. The farmer wowed everyone by engaging Dai, who held the highest legal office in the UK, to act for him in a provincial scrap that would never have been worth Dai’s fee, even if the farmer won the case. In the event, Dai was double booked and had to delegate the job to someone else who was still very much a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but what interested me was the identity of the farmer. It was either the brother or the father of Beata Brookes, one of Dafydd’s buddies and an essential member of the gang until her dying day.
Most of north Wales knew Beata Brookes as the offensive Tory MEP for north Wales, 1979-89- she later defected to UKIP – who very nearly brought about the end of the Clwyd Tory Party when she and Sir Anthony Meyer went to war over Beata’s attempts to bag the nomination as the Tory candidate for the safe Tory local seat. See previous posts. Years after the Beata vs Sir Anthony war, David Jones was selected as the candidate for, won and still retains the seat. The David Jones who spent all those years working as a solicitor in Ruthin and then Bangor and worked in the Bangor practice when Jones’s senior colleague in that practice Elwyn Jones (not Lord Elwyn-Jones, but Elwyn Jones the son of Sir Elwyn Jones, another bent solicitor who doubled up as the Labour MP for Conway) was part of the conspiracy to shaft Patient F with regard to his new baby. See previous posts…
Beata Brookes’s previous was even more fascinating than that civil war in Clwyd. Beata was the daughter of a farming family from Clwyd, the male members of whom were all Freemasons. The Brookes family were also leaders of agricultural and countryside sports organisations. As a young woman Beata reached high office in the Young Conservatives, where she got to know Peter Walker, later Lord Walker, the Tory wet who was nevertheless relied upon by Thatcher as the strategist to defeat the NUM strike of 1984-85; Walker was chosen for the job of Energy Minister at the time because he had the dirt on Dafydd and the ring, George Thomas and all those in south Wales who were involved in crime to conceal that lot. See previous posts.
When they were young, Walker and Beata Brookes found out about the embryonic trafficking of young people from Wales to England. Beata the farmer’s daughter, who had completed agriculture courses and studied at UCNW, decided to become a social worker. Lucille Hughes was of similar vintage and also took up social work after graduating from UCNW. Dafydd was beginning his career in medicine… Beata worked as a social worker for Denbighshire when Gwynne the lobotomist was busy and Bertrand, Lord Snowdon et al were having a party. By the 1970s, Beata’s commitment to the local community had resulted in her sitting on Clwyd Health Authority, on the Clwyd Social Services Committee, on the Family Practitioners Committee, on various professional bodies concerned with the regulation and disciplining of health and welfare professionals and of course on most of the charidees for the disabled in north Wales.
Beata the People Trafficker, who’s family hired the Lord Chancellor himself when the local County Council asked them to relocate some caravans. It’s the Gang all over; touch us and we’ll brain you.
The Brookes family were very similar to the Mars-Jones family. Farmers and Freemasons from north east Wales, big wigs in the eyes of the locals but then got even bigger when one of the kids moved up a notch; Beata in the Tory Party, Sir William Mars-Jones in London legal circles. See previous posts.
Dai Bananas was in Gray’s Inn. As was William Mars-Jones. As is Michael Mansfield! There really WILL have been some frantic telephone calls after I wrote ti Michael Mansfield in 1993 about Gwynedd Social Services; particularly as my lawyer in Bangor Alwyn Jones knew that I was going to write to him, Alwyn gave me the address of Took’s Court, Mansfield’s Chambers. Alwyn who’s first wife was employed as a lawyer by Gwynedd County Council…
We’re the paedophiles’ friends and you can’t get us.
Gwynne, Dafydd, Beata, Lord Kenyon, Mars-Jones and the most unlikely helpers.
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Jack Jones
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Gang-rape, child porn with bestiality, the murders of witnesses. Anyone from the Tory Party or Gray’s Inn want to leave a comment on this blog in explanation?
Dai Bananas was of course mates with Dafydd and Gwynne’s gang who ran the paedophile ring which didn’t exist and was one of those who had concealed their criminality for years. Dai will have been providing legal advice on matters other than caravans in Farmer Brookes’s fields as well…
Another point of note re Dai Bananas’ career: Dai played a leading role in the Nuremberg trials, Dai being the Deputy to Chief Prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross. Dai was the man who cross-examined Hermann Goring and Dai dined out on that for the rest of his life. Lord Elwyn-Jones was also involved with the Nuremberg Trials. Some of the Top Docs who protected Dafydd and Gwynne were as well, most notably Wilfred Abse (see post ‘O Jones, O Jones’) who was one of those who in 1941 examined Rudolf Hess with regard to Hess standing trial. These were dishonest men who were involved in very serious crime, misused their positions as well as their networks and ruthlessly used their roles at Nuremberg to meet all criticism of their activities with the biggest How Very Dare You imaginable. The irony is that it was at Nuremberg that the ‘I was just doing my job’ excuse was deemed to be no defence. When I challenged a bent CPS solicitor in Bangor Magistrates’ Court about her knowing that I was being fitted up, she yelled at me ‘I am just doing my job’. Patent F cheerily shouted at members of the gang on occasions when he was told that they were just doing their jobs ‘That was not an excuse at Nuremberg and it is not an excuse now’.
Gang rape of children; child porn with bestiality; the murders of witnesses; secret filming of NHS patients which later appeared on the internet as porn.
Anyone for Nuremberg?
Dai Bananas’ grandson is the film director Tom Blackmore.
‘Photographs ay he said knowingly… Could be, could be taken on holiday.. or with that hidden camera in the ‘clinic’…’
Corrupt Judge Huw Daniel, friend of Dafydd and Gwynne – as was Huw’s father, the theologian J.E. Daniel (see post ‘Tan yn Llyn’) – photographed some years after Huw’s camera was stolen by a victim of the gang who burgled Huw’s house, made a full confession to the police, was never charged, but was Referred To Dafydd:
After the death of Dai Bananas in 1967, his widow Sylvia married another Cabinet Minister, Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr (20 June 1900-28 January 1976), styled Lord Buckhurst until 1915 and sometimes nicknamed “Buck De La Warr” after that. Herbrand was the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party, although he ended his political career by serving as Postmaster General in the last Tory administration of Churchill.
Apart from his career in national politics, De La Warr was Mayor of Bexhill-on-Sea, 1932-34, a JP and Deputy Lieutenant for Sussex. Lord De La Warr was twice married. He married firstly Diana, daughter of Henry Gerard Leigh, in 1920. After Diana’s death in March 1966 he married secondly Sylvia, Countess of Kilmuir. Lord De La Warr died in January 1976, aged 75 and was succeeded in the earldom by his elder and only surviving son, William. Sylvia died in June 1992.
William Herbrand Sackville, 10th Earl De La Warr (born 16 October 1921) married Anne Rachel Devas (grandniece of a former PM Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman). His children are:
- William Herbrand Sackville, 11th Earl De La Warr, born 10 April 1948
- Hon. Thomas Geoffrey Sackville, born 26 October 1950
- Lady Arabella Avice Diana Sackville, born 20 June 1958
In the autumn of 1987, the Earl offered to sell Ashdown Forest, the real-life setting of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, to East Sussex County Council at a below-market price of £1.2 million. As young children, the future Earl and Christopher Robin Milne had played together there. Milne himself joined conservationists to prevent the forest from being sold piecemeal to private owners, and to oppose an application by BP to drill for oil there. The sale to the County Council was concluded after the earl’s death, making the forest public land. On 9 February 1988, at age 66, Earl De La Warr died after falling under a tube train at St Jame’s Park Station. An inquest ruled the death to be a suicide, with a jury finding that the earl had been “anxious and upset over hurricane damage to his estate.”
In 1988, the NHS finally acknowledged my complaint about Dafydd and the gang and began planning the rigged investigation. The gang were also busy throwing bombs in my direction via the Cancer Research Campaign for whom I was working; my boss Prof Vincent Marks was the brother of Dr John Marks, the President of the BMA who was at war with Ken Clarke in the Dept of Health. See previous posts… Alison Taylor was writing to Gov’t Ministers, Mary Wynch was still pursuing her case and Dafydd’s partners in crime had caused the Cleveland Child Abuse Scandal. Police investigations into the abuse of kids in care were beginning right across the UK.
One of the 9th Earl De La Warr’s sisters was Lady Avice Ela Muriel Sackville (d. 1985), who married Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of MI6, 1939-52. One would have thought that somewhere among all these ‘intelligence chiefs’ there would have been someone who would have stopped the sexual assaults on children and two madmen at the North Wales Hospital. Clearly not. The effects are still with us today, as lame idiot after lame idiot wails that They Were All Lying To Get Compensation, because Taid was in it up to his eye-balls and Taid bagged his grandchildren jobs by remaining friends with Gwynne and Dafydd.
Sir Stewart’s parents became friends of King Edward VII and the King was rumoured to be his biological father. In 1939 Stewart Menzies was appointed Chief of SIS (Secret Intelligence Services). He expanded wartime intelligence and counterintelligence departments and supervised codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park, overseeing the work of cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turning.
Alan Turing may have done something worthwhile, but there is a great deal of myth surrounding Bletchley Park. As well as employing Alan Turing, many of the staff at Bletchley Park who later boasted about their time Fighting Hitler and Decoding Messages did no such thing. There was a contingent of upper class uneducated young women – including Trumpers and Sarah Norton, who later married Lord Astor but was dumped in favour of someone else once Sarah had produced a male heir – who had nothing beyond basic secretarial skills but were placed at Bletchley Park by their families to convince the nation that the Upper Classes Were Contributing To The War Effort. By Trumpers’ own account, she and her mates did sod all at Bletchley Park. They were teenaged girls who were bored out of their heads, had no idea what the work was all about and spent their time messing around and going off to London partying. See post ’95 Glorious Years’.
The people who did do something at Bletchley Park and in the associated services tended to be Clever Men – although there were a few Clever Women as well – such as Asa Briggs, Richard Crossman and others. Just look at what they did in their roles with the security services once WW II was over. What an abuse of position and what a cover: I Worked At Bletchley Park! As good as I Was Involved With The Nuremberg trials. I’m also ensuring that those gang raping abducted children are never ever removed from professional positions or even Parliament and I’ll be conducting vendettas against anyone who challenges us until the day that I die.
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The Lord Briggs
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Before WW II, the SIS had been a relatively minor and uninfluential branch of the British Gov’t, but to budgetary pressures between WW I and the Depression. Menzies, was promoted to Major-General. Menzies coordinated his operations with Special Operations Executive (SOE), British Security Coordination (BSC), Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Free French Forces.
Here’s another mate of Dafydd and Gwynne’s who Worked In Intelligence during the war:
After WW II, Menzies reorganised the SIS for the Cold War. He absorbed most of SOE and was sometimes at odds with the Labour Gov’ts. Sir Stewart also had to weather a scandal inside SIS after revelations that SIS officer Kim Philby was a Soviet spy, although this came after Menzies had retired. It was on Menzies watch that Soviet agents penetrated MI6; Menzies was already the Head of the service when Kim Philby joined in 1941. Menzies’ primary selection criteria were alleged to have been whether the applicants were upper class ex-officers and recommended by another Gov’t department or known to him personally. The priority was to conceal the degeneracy of Menzies circles…
After 43 continuous years of service in the British Army, Menzies retired to Luckington, Wiltshire at the age of 62 in mid-1952. Wiltshire, the county run by Peter Morrison’s family who’s family seat was there.
Stewart Menzies’s first marriage was to Lady Avice Ela Muriel Sackville; they were divorced in 1931, when she left him for another man. His second wife was Pamela Thetis Garton (née Beckett) (d. 13 March 1951), fourth daughter of the Honourable Rupert Evelyn Beckett by his wife Muriel Helen Florence Paget, daughter of Lord Berkeley Charles Sydney Paget – himself a younger son of the 2nd Marquess of Anglesey – whom he married on 13 December 1932, suffered from depression and anorexia for many years; she bore Menzies his only child, a daughter, Fiona, in 1934.
The Pagets have given good service to the grander paedophiles’ friends for generations. In the 1970s, the Marquess of Anglesey was directly involved with the local Tory Party and the Anglican Church. See previous posts.
Sir Stewart’s third marriage was in 1952 to Audrey Clara Lilian Latham (Sir Stewart was her fourth husband), formerly wife of Sir Henry Birkin, 2nd Bt. (and two other men), and daughter of Sir Thomas Paul Latham, 1st Bt. Stewart and Audrey were both over age 50 at the time of their marriage and each had separate estates (his in Wiltshire, hers in Essex). For the most part they lived separately, but met in London for dinner each Wednesday. By his third marriage, Sir Stewart had two stepdaughters Pamela Buxton (wife of Lord Buxton of Alsa) and Sara Hanbury. It is also alleged that Menzies had a long-standing affair with one of his secretaries, which he ended upon retirement (and presumably remarriage) in 1952; the secretary apparently tried to kill herself at that time. Stewart Menzies died on 29 May 1968. By which time Dafydd had been running Denbigh for four years and had already hit ‘The Times’ as being at the centre of a major patient neglect scandal. Enoch Powell in his capacity as Health Minister had seen the state of things at Denbigh for himself in 1961, had stated his intentions to put a stop to it but was then leaned on to ensure that Gwynne, Lobotomist to the Royals and the Westminster Paedophile Ring, was allowed to continue in business. See previous posts.
Richard Crossman became Secretary of State at the DHSS on 1 Nov 1968. Dafydd and Gwynne’s futures were assured.
The 11th Earl De La Warr William Herbrand Sackville (born 10 April 1948) – styled Lord Buckhurst from 1976 until 9 February 1988, when he inherited the title upon the death of his father who fell under that tube train – is a financier in the City of London. The 11th Earl’s financial career began in 1976 as an investment banker working at Mullens & Co. For 24 years, he was a Director of Laing & Cruickshank and later of its owner, Credit Lyonnais Securities. The Earl was later a Director of Shore Capital and subsequently became a Director of Cluff Natural Resources. In April 2016, he joined hedge fund Toscafund Asset Management as a partner. The Earl is a member of White’s – as was Peter Morrison and David Cameron’s father – the Turf Club and Pratt’s. In addition to his work in the City, the Earl was a dairy farmer and as of 2016 continued to raise livestock at his family seat, Buckhurst Park in East Sussex.
Lord De La Warr is the creator of the Buckhurst Park sausage, a product made by Speldhurst Quality Foods (in which De La Warr owned a stake), sold nationally in the U.K.’s Waitrose supermarkets.
In 1978, Lord De La Warr married Anne Pamela, Countess of Hopetoun, a granddaughter of Admiral Sir Arthur Cavenagh Leveson, who has two sons by her previous marriage to the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow. She acceded to the title of Countess De La Warr in 1988. Lady De La Warr is the owner of South Park Stud, which breeds pedigree Shetland Ponies at Buckhurst Park.
They have two sons:
- William Herbrand Thomas Sackville, Lord Brockhurst (born 13 June 1979), is a hedge fund manager in the City and heir to the earldom. In 2010, he married Countess Xenia Tolstoy-Miloslavsky. Their son and heir, William Lionel Robert Sackville, was born on 24 January 2014. Their daughter Victoria Elizabeth Anne was born on 6 June 2016.
- Edward Geoffrey Richard Sackville (born 6 December 1980), is a bloodstock agent who co-owns international bloodstock agency SackvilleDonald. In 2013 he married Sophia Georgina Milton Akroyd. Their daughter Viola Idina Edith Sackville was born in July 2013 and their son Arthur Edward Mark Sackville in June 2015.
The second son of the Lord De La Warr who met his end under the tube train while the BMA, Ken Clarke and the Duke of Westminster were all at each others throats trying to personally benefit from the genocide in north Wales, the paedophile/trafficking ring being run from St George’s and the wider Westminster Paedophile Ring, is Tom Sackville. Readers may remember Tom Sackville from a previous post. Tom was on the scene of some very serious crimes, so he’s starring once more.
Thomas Geoffrey Sackville (born 26 October 1950) is a Tory politician. In 1979, Tom married Catherine Thérèsa Windsor-Lewis, daughter of Brigadier James Charles Windsor-Lewis. They have two children, Arthur Michael Sackville (b. 1983) and Savannah Elizabeth Sackville (b. 1986), both adopted. Like most of the other male members of his family, Tom was educated at Eton. He then went to Lincoln College, Oxford – as did Theresa May’s husband Philip, who is seven years younger than Tom Sackville – and began his professional career in merchant banking. Philip May is a banker.
Tom Sackville served as a Conservative MP for Bolton West, 1983-97. Tom was a junior Minister in the Dept of Health, 1992-95 under Secretary of State Virginia Bottomley and then in the Home Office, 1995-97 under Home Secretary Michael Howard.
Tom Sackville was the gofer during the years of the numerous assaults on kids in care and vulnerable adults, the fit-ups of complainants, the conspiracies, the perjury, the forging of documentation, the planting of evidence, when the lies were told about Dafydd retiring and the North Wales Hospital closing down, Tom was there throughout. Tom was in office when the deaths of Matt Arnold, Geraint Morgan QC, Bing Spear, Peter Morrison, David Ennals et al occurred. And of course Tom was on the scene when there was a genocide in north Wales during the run up to and then during the Waterhouse Inquiry.
I haven’t bothered to detail the en masse embezzling, lying, cheating and swindling on the part of senior people in Gwynedd and Clwyd NHS Tom, but if us Empowered Service Users knew that they were lining their own pockets and charging their telephone bills and other household expenses to the NHS, I’m sure that other people knew as well. Particularly those running the organisations that were complicit with the fiddles.
In 1985 Tom Sackville started the All-Party Committee Against Cults and on 20 October 2000 he became first Chairman of The Family Survival Trust, (formerly Family Action Information Resource, FAIR), an anti-cult organisation. In 1997 Tom ended Gov’t funding for the independent research group Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM). Funds were reinstated in 2000. In his article for The Spectator (2004), Tom accused INFORM and its President Eileen Barker of “refusing to criticise the worst excesses of cult leaders”, and congratulated the Archbishop of Canterbury for declining to become a Patron of INFORM. The allegations were described by INFORM as unfounded.
Would Tom’s interest in cults be at all related to the historical opposition of the Church of Scientology to psychiatry and to their attempt at exposing the criminality of Dafydd and Gwynne as well as the collusion of MIND back in the late 1960s and the subsequent flattening of the Church of Scientology in a rigged libel trial, carefully orchestrated by Dafydd’s mate Sir Kenneth Robinson and Dafydd’s umbrella Richard Crossman, assisted by some helpful lawyers, one of which was Ronnie Waterhouse and a bent judge who was Of The Gang’s Circle himself? No matter how outlandish the Church of Scientologists other beliefs are, they were quite right with regard to their accusations re Gwynne and Dafydd and co. The Scientologists still really loathe psychiatry and psychiatrists really loathe them. Tom was fighting a family battle there – and it wasn’t a battle that Tom deserved to win.
Children gang-raped and witnesses murdered Sackville and your own father ending up under a tube train almost certainly had something to do with it all… An international trafficking ring with a side-line in child porn and class A drugs, how can you justify concealing that lot?
In 2005 Tom Sackville was elected as Vice-President of European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism (FECRIS), an umbrella organisation for anti-cult groups in Europe and from 2009 Tom has served as its President.
Sackville is the current CEO of the International Federation of Health Plans.
Here’s Tom, should anyone wish to ask him questions:
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- ‘Will this be on the Special Arrangement Tom?’ ‘Yes please.’ ‘We’ll put you through to Ann Beynon then.’
‘Mind how you go Sir.’
- Rex Harrison owned properties in London, New York City and Italy. Having retired from films after ‘A Time to Die’, Rex continued to act on Broadway and the West End until the end of his life, despite suffering from glaucoma, painful teeth and a failing memory. In 1989, he appeared with Edward Fox in ‘The Admirable Crichton’ in London. In 1989/90, Rex appeared on Broadway in The Circle by W. Somerset Maugham, opposite Glynis Johns, Stewart Granger, and Roma Downey. The production opened at Duke University for a three week run followed by performances in Baltimore and Boston before opening 14 November 1989 on Broadway.
Rex Harrison died from the pancreatic cancer at his home in Manhattan on 2 June 1990 at the age of 82. He had only been diagnosed with the disease a short time before. Rex’s body was cremated, some of his ashes being subsequently scattered in Italy and the rest being scattered at his second wife Lilli’s grave in California.
In July 1989, Harrison was knighted by Lilibet. In the spring of 1989, Prof Geoffrey Chamberlain et al began publishing in academic journals with their old mate Ollie Brooke again, although Ollie had served a stretch in prison for child porn offences and the world was told that Ollie had long gone. Ollie’s affiliation on the journal articles was given as St George’s Hospital Medical School. See post ‘Too Many Pills’.
My post ‘The Night Of The (Dr Chris) Hunter’ details the extraordinary events throughout 1989 that were going on in north Wales without my knowledge, while I worked at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London. An enormous conspiracy was underway involving numerous Top Docs, social workers and others, many of whom I had never heard, who were giving ‘evidence’ about my dangerousness and the necessity to have me incarcerated in a high security psychiatric hospital. It all culminated in Nov 1989 when a ‘case conference’ was held about me, without my knowledge, by Dr Chris Hunter, a forensic psychiatrist of whom I had never heard – until I acquired the documentation pertaining to all this just over two years ago – which was attended by people who had never met me, giving evidence. Chris Hunter concluded that I was a psychopath, very dangerous and offered to write a Court Report for the gang stating this. I was not facing any charges at the time. Presumably in true ‘Blue Peter’ style, when those we know and love next had me arrested – which of course they soon did – Chris Hunter could produce the one that he’d made earlier.
Chris Hunter ran secure forensic units in south Wales and also worked at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside, the site of scandal after scandal and where a patient was beaten to death by Angels. The murder was investigated by Prof Robert Bluglass, a senior Angel from Bluglass’s own clinic in Birmingham and a senior Angel who worked for Dafydd. When I was in the North Wales Hospital in 1986-87, I was dragged down a corridor and assaulted by a particularly thuggish Angel, Stephen Rose. My subsequent complaint about Rose was initially met with lies. I presented more evidence. I then received a letter from Clwyd Health Authority telling me that there would be no investigation because Rose had left Denbigh and was now working at Park Lane Hospital. Park Lane was part of Ashworth, Ashworth was formed when Park Lane and Moss Side Hospital merged. See previous posts.
The ‘opinions’ of this bunch of lying sex offenders who would say anything about anyone were relied upon by Courts to determine who would spend the rest of their lives with Mr Savile in Broadmoor. Hunter died just a few years ago; most others who’s names are on those documents are still alive and many are still employed in health and welfare.
Peter Morrison became Thatcher’s PPS the month after Rex Harrison died in 1990. Rex died shortly after I was before the High Court in Cardiff but shortly before I was before the High Court in Chester. It was perjury all the way! See post ‘The Bitterest Pill’.
John Osborne’s final wife, Helen, to whom Osborne was married between 1978 and his death in 1994, is worth discussing in some detail. Osborne’s marriage to Helen was the only one of his marriages which didn’t involve mental cruelty or suicides or public fights. By contrast, it is alleged that Helen and Osborne enjoyed a long and happy marriage, two wealthy arty old dears. Helen fiercely defended Osborne’s reputation in the face of accusations that he was a total scumbag even years after his death and was capable of a great deal of How Very Dare Yous if a negative comment was made about Osborne.
Helen was a former arts journalist and critic for ‘The Observer’. She worked tirelessly to preserve and promote Osborne’s legacy until her death in 2004. Osborne died deeply in debt; his final word to Helen was: “Sorry”. After her death in 2004, Helen was buried next to Osborne.
Helen Osborne (11 March 1939-12 January 2004) was born Helen Dawson, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and educated at the Mount School, York and Durham University. Helen worked at ‘The Observer’ for the arts editor Richard Findlater, becoming drama critic and then arts editor.
The Torygraph obituary for Helen published in Jan 2004:
Osborne had decided views on career women, considering that they made too much song and dance about their lives. “They try too hard – all sorts of things get lost, and life becomes hectic, frenetic and unreal.”
And if they’re married to John Osborne, some of them kill themselves.
Helen Dawson, as she then was, was arts editor of the Observer, but she was happy to leave her career in London for life in the country with Osborne – and to cook his meals, walk his dogs and type his manuscripts, all without a backward glance. She and Penny Mortimer, wife of the playwright John, formed a jokey alliance called “Washout Wives”, a dig at the energetic professional Dr Miriam Stoppard, wife of Tom.
Dr Miriam grew up on a council estate in the North East and became an Angel in Newcastle. Then Dr Miriam discovered what Dafydd’s mates in Newcastle were up to and Dr Miriam never looked back. It was very, very unusual for an Angel to become a Top Doc in Dr Miriam’s day; even if the Angel was academically excellent, a great deal was said about the different ‘roles’ and ‘cultures’ and how Angels shall not pass. Dr Miriam passed because she had a lot of dirt on people and somehow she found out how to use it. Dr Miriam played the same game throughout her entire life and no doubt husband Sir Tom benefited as well. Sir Tom is now married to Carlo’s ex, Sabrina Guinness. Dr Miriam’s niece is Baroness Oona King, a friend of Uncle Harry’s nephew Ed from their days at Haverstock Comp. See previous posts for details of Tom, Miriam, Baroness Oona et al. All aboard, those who Know About Dafydd And Gwynne!
The Osbornes lived in a charming Edwardian house called Christmas Place at Edenbridge, in Kent, and decided in the late 1970s to visit London as little as possible, since they found themselves leaving at the interval at most West End plays. Instead they took to making long sea voyages to Hong Kong or San Francisco or Durban, Osborne finding shipboard life conducive to writing, as he embarked on volume one of his memoirs, A Better Class of Person.
For his 50th birthday in 1979, Helen organised a party for 50 at the Garrick and another for 150 friends and neighbours at Christmas Place.
As they lived simply in the countryside.
Osborne was still locked in mortal combat with two former wives and his detested mother, Nellie Beatrice. But he would issue lavish invitations to his annual summer parties – “Mothers-in-law, dogs, kiddies, Australians, Guardian wimmin welcome” – when the garden and meadows were filled with theatrical grandees, fellow playwrights, neighbours and jazz bands.
Simple country folk.
Osborne strode about squirearchically in a raffish striped blazer, while guests who ventured inside could note the neat box-files of correspondence which lined the stairs, labelled “Tax”, “Leeches”, “Loonies”, “Adolf”, “Colditz”, and so on (Adolf was the fourth Mrs Osborne, Colditz the National Theatre). Helen Osborne too had a short fuse, and could match her husband in waspish wit. But she nursed him through a virulent illness caused by rat urine around his swimming pool, and during his final decline.
There were so many rats pissing around that pool that Helen could never have identified the culprit.
Helen Dawson was born on March 11 1939 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and was sent to boarding school in Yorkshire. She read history at St Hilda’s College, Durham, where she wrote for the student paper Palatinate, edited by Hunter Davies. Afterwards she spent a year at Brown in the United States. In 1962 she joined the Observer, becoming arts editor and stand-in theatre critic. Her life had been changed, she said, by seeing Peggy Ashcroft playing Hedda Gabler in a sparsely-attended provincial matinee in 1954.
On her marriage she became stepmother to Osborne’s only daughter Nolan (by Penelope Gilliatt, wife number three and by far the longest-running of them all).
Osborne was tortured by chronic depression for much of the 1970s, “a black hole” when he was smitten by waning creative powers and fear of failure. In 1985, when the noise from Gatwick and the M25 began to get Osborne down,
It was unbearable, one couldn’t hear the jazz musicians blasting away in the meadows at the summer parties.
they left the home counties for Shropshire’s green valley of Clun, hymned by Housman as “the quietest place under the sun”.
Shropshire has lovely countryside but it concealed John Allen and a paedophile ring, Lord Kenyon, John Biffen and much more. A.E. Houseman’s poem ‘Shropshire Lad’ was about homosexual attraction. Not that Osborne was One Of Those. Or Ever Had Been.
They fell in love with the Hurst, a Regency manor house hidden from the road by a hillside; it had a sweeping drive, a lake and 30 acres of land. They arrived with three dogs, two donkeys and two horses, and set about indulging their joint passion for riding and hers for attending the races at Ludlow. Here Osborne, seated in a rattan peacock chair, found peace, and wrote his second volume of memoirs, Almost a Gentleman, but he also carried on sending barely legible, insulting postcards to those against whom he had a grudge.
Not much of a gentleman at all.
Helen embroidered a cushion for him with the legend: “It is difficult to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys.”
The neighbours must have been so relieved when the Osbornes decided that Kent wasn’t good enough for them, but then the poor sods in Shropshire had no idea what was coming their way. Not even Ralph Morris, who was running the sex abuse ring at Ludlow, where Helen attended the races.
She was with her husband when he died aged 65 on Christmas Eve 1994. When he knew he was dying, he had told her that he hoped she would carry on at the Hurst. So for the next nine years she remained there alone, dwarfed by its manorial proportions, and listening, she said, to clocks ticking and the dogs snoring. She also visited Osborne’s grave daily in the local churchyard.
Last June she wrote, for The Sunday Telegraph, about widowhood: “There are no road maps in this blasted landscape. When a marriage of unselfconscious mutual dependence is silenced, sliced off, you are on your own as never before.”
Particularly if you treat people as Helen Osborne did.
Helen Osborne supplemented her income from royalties (Look Back in Anger is still performed somewhere every night), by writing for The Daily Telegraph some highly acerbic and well-informed reviews of theatrical biographies, trying to “cock a snook at humbug at all times, as he did”. She once appended the words: “The fee from this article is going to the Helen Osborne Survival Fund.”
That should have been enough to have ensured that the donations stopped.
She fended off “vultures” who picked over her husband’s bones, railing against an unauthorised biography and defended his reputation.
Was there a reputation to defend?
(At his memorial service in London she had pinned a “no entry” notice to the railings of St Giles in the Fields, naming Arnold Wesker and Nicholas de Jongh as unwelcome guests.)
As the upkeep of the Hurst became financially impossible, she had to consider a change of use. Rescue came in the form of an idea from her neighbour over the Welsh border, Lord Gowrie, the former arts minister.
The multi-titled Grey Gowrie has links with the grander end of Dafydd’s network, the Robert Bluglasses, Sula Wolffs and Henry Waltons of the world, Top Docs who are doing it for the poor but somehow have built up huge art collections worth millions. See previous posts.
The Arvon Foundation needed another writers’ residential centre at which aspiring playwrights and screenwriters could attend courses. With help from the Lottery, Arvon bought the house, restored the outbuildings and allowed Helen Osborne to stay on as its tenant.
The National Trust solution for Arty People. Thanks to the mind of Grey Gowrie and the Lottery, Helen was able to carry on kipping in here without being evicted for er not being able to afford it:
The John Osborne Centre at the Hurst was opened by Dame Maggie Smith in March last year, and Helen Osborne served on the management board…
The Indie published an obituary for Helen as well:
Helen Osborne was a woman of enormous courage. When told she had cancer, she said: “It’s my fault. I know it. Too much drink and too many cigarettes.” It was this utterly matter-of-fact approach to all things that had first endeared her to her husband, the playwright John Osborne, of whom she was the fifth, and best-loved, wife.
Her courage was born of toughness, perhaps from her upbringing in Newcastle upon Tyne and Alnwick, a broken home, boarding school in Yorkshire, and thence to Durham University, where she read History and worked on a university newspaper edited by Hunter Davies. After a year at Brown in the United States, she joined The Observer in 1962, eventually becoming its Arts Editor. Her seven years’ reign there is unparalleled in recent newspaper history, for among her writers were Kenneth Tynan, George Melly, Penelope Gilliatt (then married to John Osborne), John Heilpern (now finishing a definitive biography of Osborne) and Peter Heyworth, all tough nuts themselves but somehow moulded into a single, opinionated, authoritative voice which commanded attention like no other arts pages at the time or since.
And so began a professional and personal partnership that lasted for almost 20 years, almost as long as his previous four marriages put together. They were an odd couple: he lanky, elegant, gentle (despite his unjustified “angry” reputation), insecure; she short, wiry, waspish, seemingly unglamorous, feisty – but “two peas in a pod”, she often said. Both adored champagne, dogs and horses.
When not transcribing John Osborne’s spindly, often illegible handwriting, Helen was to be found at Ludlow racecourse. Both hated bureaucracy and humbug (the one often an excuse for the other), vegetarians, campaigning non-smokers, the politics of this “poodle country” and the postcode. I doubt if she knew what thepostcode was for their house to her dying day.
Their house, when it was found for them by the wife of the playwright Peter Nichols, was a wreck – abandoned, unloved, bereft. Over the years, Helen made it a sanctuary, warm and comforting, the home that John Osborne had lacked possibly all his life…
The years of widowhood, however, were hard to bear. “There are no road maps in this blasted landscape,” she wrote. “Death is not divorce.” She visited Osborne’s grave every day; its inscription – “Playwright, actor and friend” – had been her idea. She will be buried next to the man whom in life she adored, and of whose memory she was the fiercest guardian. She once told me that her most treasured possession was an empty cigarette packet Osborne left by his bedside in the hospital where he died. On it, he had scribbled: “I have sinned.”
Osborne had died at Christmas. The house where they had first found happiness together, despite their not having children, which they both had wanted, was called Christmas Place. And it was at Christmas that Helen Osborne first learned she had inoperable cancer. During her last weekend at the Hurst, she sat in the kitchen, stroking the dogs, smiling across the Clun valley, absolutely at peace, serene almost, knowing I am sure that her job was done, and done well.
This very rose-tinted account of the lives of two really unpleasant people was written for the Indie by Tony Palmer. It wasn’t enough for the Indie, the playwright David Hare added a bit more:
Warm memories of Helen Osborne have inevitably centred on her loyal partnership with her husband, writes Sir David Hare, so it’s easy to forget that she was, briefly, as Helen Dawson, one of the best drama critics of her time. When I first started working in the theatre in the late 1960s, the shadow of Kenneth Tynan fell unhappily across his successors on The Observer, a few of whom struggled, without much distinction, to achieve similar impact by striking similar attitudes. But Helen took an opposite route. She wrote not from the point of view of an obsessive or an habituée, but rather as someone who was as interested in the world at large as she was in the theatre. She judged what happened on stage by what she had learnt from off it. This is still a surprisingly rare approach in the arts, and it provided Helen with a style which was lucid, calm and discerning.
When they moved to the Welsh borders, then there was no doubt that this was, for John at least, Waugh-like retreat. But Helen continued with shrewd book reviews for The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph, which carried no sniff of withdrawal. Her sense of humour, which was always uppermost, expressed her view of life. Shortly after John’s death, on her daily visit to his grave, Helen quietly broke the news to him of Alan Ayckbourn’s recent knighthood. She told me afterwards that she felt such rumbling from under the earth that she did not dare go on to report, from the same Honours List, on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s elevation to the peerage.
Now Helen is to be buried beside John, where she belongs, in the same Shropshire graveyard. Wit is rare, and witty couples are rarer. Each was the flint, and each the stone. Helen never telephoned without your feeling cheered up after, and you never saw her without wanting to see her again.
Amazingly for someone who disliked critics so much, Osborne married two of them: the other was his third wife Penelope Gilliatt (obituary, May 13 1993).
So what exactly was going on when the abusive unpleasant John Osborne married critics who influenced how the world saw him, particularly Helen, who dedicated her life after his marriage to Penelope Gilliatt to being Osborne’s PR woman?
Something in the water, and the bile, appealed; you have something to say about the world, or you don’t. Osborne did. So did Helen. Born Helen Dawson, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she was educated at the Mount school, York, and read history at Durham University. There she wrote for the student newspaper Palatinate, then edited by Hunter Davies, and acquired, via appearances in student productions, her fascination with the theatre. She then spent a year at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.
She joined the Observer as a 23-year-old secretary in 1962, but navigated the crossover into journalism. She was devoted to the then arts editor and writer Richard Findlater, helping him out, standing in for him, and guiding him through theatres and friendships. As drama critic for a year, she was wonderful – totally and unapologetically biased and usually unhelpful to new talent, unless she had met them at a party.
In the late 1960s, she became arts editor, and it was around then that I got to know her very well indeed. She set blazing standards, with a skill and waspishness unrivalled in anyone I ever knew. She could be funnier and wittier even than Clive James, the paper’s television critic of the time, and that really is saying something. And it was while working for the Observer that she first encountered Osborne.
For a time, she was best friend to Peter Buckley, an American who edited both Plays And Players and Dance And Dancers in the 1970s. “Why don’t we start one for gay butchers?” she asked me. “And call it Mince And Mincing?”
None of them were gay remember, especially not John Osborne. They hated poofs.
Together, in 1973, we heard the first Barry Manilow records in Helen’s spacious flat in Dorset Square, near Regent’s Park. When I became editor of Plays And Players, I turned up to prise copy out of her. This guy will be big, said Peter Buckley, of Manilow. Over our dead bodies, said Helen and I.
In 1976, we went together to the opening performances of the National Theatre on the South Bank. She loved Peggy Ashcroft in Peter Hall’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, and loathed Michael Blakemore’s production of Plunder. Ironically, she became a firm supporter of Blakemore, and a sworn enemy of Hall – along the lines of Osborne, who called him the Fu Manchu of Colditz-on-Thames.
Mind you, Osborne had a point, when Hall withdrew his play Watch It Come Down from the National’s repertoire; it had not been a success, to put it mildly, and most of us, even Helen’s friends, were simply Waiting For It To Come Off. The main thing about Helen was that she cared so much, and had such anger and passion. When she married Osborne, I lost a friend. Sucking up to the old rake was not in my repertoire; he became a bore without a reason, and I made sure I never crossed swords with him.
Because he really was a total shit and he was friends with Lord Snowdon, Roger Gilliatt and the rest of them…
I was never, alas, a proud recipient of Osborne’s nasty missives, always egged on, you felt, by Helen. “Stay clear of downtown Chichester,” the mild-mannered Benedict Nightingale was warned; “Fatso Morley’s next!” The Daily Mail’s dear little Jack Tinker was always addressed as “Ms Tinker”, and informed he had been promoted on death row alongside “Mrs [Nicholas] de Jongh”.
The couple first lived in an early 19th-century house, Christmas Place, at Edenbridge, Kent, and went on sea voyages while Osborne worked on the first volume of his memoirs. “Come to a party in Edenbridge,” said Helen once, “Australians, children and gays forbidden.” My wife and I were getting married, so we never went. I hardly spoke to Helen again.
Why did anyone else bother either?
In 1985, she and Osborne upped sticks for the Hurst, a house in Clun, Shropshire. Osborne settled into his second volume of memoirs, while still waging verbal war on his enemies. He died (obituary, December 27 1994), but she stayed there.
As she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph last year, it had been a marriage of unselfconscious mutual dependence. “I have tried to do the best for my husband’s memory and, especially, for his work,” she explained. “Sometimes, I have let him down lamentably. I have tried to stay true to his enthusiasms, to watch the ways of the world as warily as he did, and to cock a snook at humbug at all times.” She did. And boy, did she hate everything represented in show business by good folk like Sheridan Morley. She disliked cliquishness, clans and dynasties, and the idea that the theatre was more important than life. She was a beagle, true bred, as they say in Twelfth Night. Much better to have Helen as a friend than as an enemy.
Last September, she turned up with Helen Montagu (obituary, January 6 2004), the first great West End female producer, at the Donmar Warehouse first night of The Hotel In Amsterdam, an Osborne play rescued from obscurity by Michael Grandage’s production and Tom Hollander’s performance. Helen Osborne, I know, loved the production. So did Helen Montagu: “Much better than the original, daa-hhling!” she said.
For all their faults, and bitchiness, the old gals were still looking forward and gadding about.
Those old gals certainly were gadding about and they knew where the best places to gad were as well.
I knew someone who lived in the Osbornes’ neck of the woods in Shropshire in 1985, when the Osbornes decided that Shropshire was the place for them, very well. She was the UCNW student who has featured in previous posts, Ros, who lived next door to me in hall when I was in my first year at Bangor. Ros was one of the students who tried to kill herself after an encounter with Gwynne the lobotomist. Tony Francis concealed the problem that was Gwynne – and Ros’s mum’s complaint about Professor Andrew Radford who was handing out Firsts to students in return for sexual favours (see previous posts) – and told Ros’s mum that such a thing would never be allowed to happen again. Ros and her mum were left with the idea that Gwynne had been Spoken To. He had not; furthermore, Ros was then a marked woman because she was a witness, but she didn’t realise that.
Ros came from Shrewsbury and she never really enjoyed good mental health after the Gwynne business. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and spent the rest of her life well dosed-up, sometimes with dangerous combinations, so dangerous that around the time of Operation Pallial she managed to kill herself, although her mum had repeatedly warned the Top Docs that was what she feared would happen. When Ros died she was in the care of the mental health team in Greater Manchester, Tony Francis’s former colleagues who were running the ring linked to Dafydd and the gang, as discussed in previous posts.
Ros’s family lived in Shrewsbury and she spent a lot of time there because her family, in particular her mum, were left to look after her. She graduated in 1985 and she had a bad experience with Tony Francis in the summer of 1985, at pretty much the same time as I did. Francis did exactly the same thing to both of us; he had spent months giving every appearance of being a competent Top Doc who had no problem if patients needed time. Then he got very ratty, very impatient and with no warning told us that we were being discharged. Ros and I compared notes as it were and although it didn’t develop into WW III with her as it did with me – because Ros didn’t challenge Francis over any of it – the process was identical. Although at the sudden ‘discharge’ session, reassurances were given that we could return if we wanted, we couldn’t. I ended up having a major confrontation with Francis because I caught him out on a lie, but Ros did try returning a few weeks later – she had always felt that she should not have been discharged at that time and so abruptly – and she was told to get lost. Ros was also treated very badly by the Student Health Centre after the complaint from her mum about Gwynne; I heard Wood and Liz Stables making the most insulting, derogatory comments about her.
The gang would have good reason to have Ros marked out, because she quietly knew from so many sources that things were not as they should have been, although, like me, she didn’t join it all up. Ros had two older sisters whom she admired. One was a teacher in Hackney who had some knowledge of the dreadful conditions in which some of her pupils were living and the other sister, Anita, had graduated from UCNW in 1980; Anita was a sociable girl who had heard many of the Bangor Legends. More importantly, Anita had been a volunteer with Community Action (CA), a Students Union group at UCNW that undertook voluntary work, including at the Ty’r Felin home in Bangor, where the kids were being trafficked to Dolphin Square and other places. CA was the biggest and wealthiest student society at UCNW and it will have been run by the Gang, definitely. Students like Anita will have noticed certain things and not realised the wider picture; some other CA volunteers became social workers and joined the Gang. Tony Francis knew about Anita and her involvement with CA because Ros chatted about her a lot.
Anita got engaged to her boyfriend Alex, a forestry student, at graduation. Then Alex bagged his first job; in Craven Arms, the very place where the Osbornes rocked up in 1985.
Ros’s family were Anglicans and they were involved with the Church in Shrewsbury. I never heard Ros mention anything about Church molesters, but they were the sort of family who will have been involved with the debates about such matters when it became clear what the scale of the problem was years later.
Peter Nichols was appointed CBE in the 2018 New Years Honours for services to drama. And perhaps fairy-tales.
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Peter Richard Nichols
CBE FRSL
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To return to one of the people who was at the centre of this network of worthless tossers, but was eventually eaten alive by them, Roger Gilliatt’s ex-wife, Penelope Gilliatt. Penelope’s friend Betty Comden wrote an obituary for Penelope which was published in the in Indie in May 1993:
Penelope Ann Douglass Conner, writer: born London 25 March 1932; married 1954 Roger Gilliatt (died 1991; marriage dissolved), 1963 John Osborne (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1968); died London 9 May 1993.
What a glowing further career she might have had… we will never know. When she was forced out of denial about the blight that ruined her life, and made gallant attempts at recovery, they never worked. It is hard to picture her joining anything resembling an AA group and ‘sharing’ with others whom she undoubtedly viewed compassionately, but objectively, more as possible subjects to write about rather than fellow sufferers. I can just hear her saying with a smile crinkling the corners of her candid brown eyes, ‘Chaps ought be able to pull themselves together on their own, oughtn’t they?’ Yes, they ought, but it doesn’t often work that way. Most tragically, it did not for her… She was my dear friend and I shall never forget her.
Betty Comden (born Basya Cohen) was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti screenplays to some of the most successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed “Freed Unit” at MGM, Jule Styne, and Leonard Bernstein, and wrote the musical comedy film ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.
Betty Comden was born in Brooklyn, to Russian immigrants and observant Jews. Basya “attended Erasmus Hall High School and studied drama at New York University, graduating in 1938. In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green formed a troupe, the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Comden and Green’s first Broadway show was in 1944, with ‘On the Town’. Comden and Green headed to California and soon found work at MGM. They wrote the screenplays for ‘Good News’ and ‘The Barkleys of Broadway’ (which reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and then adapted ‘On the Town’ for Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, The duo reunited with Gene Kelly for their most successful project, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.
Comden and Green were Oscar nominated nominated twice and earned three Screen Writers Guild Awards.
In the early 1980s, Comden acted in Wendy Wasserstein‘s play ‘Isn’t It Romantic’.
Comden and Green were a creative partnership, not a romantic couple. In 1942, Comden married Siegfried Schutzman, a designer and businessman, who changed his name to Steven Kyle. He died in 1979 of acute pancreatitis. They had two children, a daughter, Susanna, and a son, Alan, who died in 1990. Betty Comden never remarried. Betty Comden died of heart failure following an undisclosed illness of several months at New York Presbytarian Hospital in Manhattan on November 23, 2006, aged 89.
Penelope Gilliatt had a relationship with Mike Nichols (born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky (November 6, 1931-November 19, 2014), an American film and theatre director, producer, actor and comedian. In 1966, Warner Brothers invited Nichols to direct his first film,’Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It won five Oscars and was the top-grossing film of 1966. Nichols’s next film, ‘The Graduate’ (1967) starred then unknown actor Dustin Hoffman, alongside Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross. It was another critical and financial success, became the highest-grossing film of the year and won Nichols the Academy Award for Best Director.
Mike Nichols’ films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins. He is one of the few people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards.
Mike Nichols was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky on November 6, 1931, in Berlin, the son of Brigitte and Pavel Peschkowsky, a Top Doc. Nichols’ father was born in Vienna to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Nichols’ father’s family had lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. Nichols’ mother’s family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were Gustav Landauer, a leading theorist on anarchism and author Hedwig Lachmann. Mike Nichols was a third cousin twice removed of Albert Einstein, through Nichols’ mother.
In April 1939, when the Nazis were arresting Jews in Berlin, seven year old Mikhail and his three year old brother Robert were sent alone to the United States to join their father, who had fled months earlier. His mother eventually joined the family, escaping through Italy in 1940. The family moved to New York City on April 28, 1939. His father changed his name to Paul Nichols. Before Dr. Paul Nichols had received his U.S. medical license, he was employed by a union on 42nd Street, X-raying union members. He later had a successful medical practice in Manhattan.
“Before he established his practice, he was a union doctor, and part of his job was X-raying union members, they didn’t know about shielding X-ray machines. And he died of leukemia at 44.” (in 1944)
– Mike Nichols
Nichols was married four times; the first three ended in divorce; the last ended upon his death. He also had a discreet 10 year affair with photographer Richard Avedon, according to Avedon’s studio director and business manager.
Nichols’ first marriage was to Patricia Scot; they were married from 1957 to 1960. His second was to Margot Callas, a former ‘muse’ of the poet Robert Graves, 1963-74. The couple had a daughter together, Daisy Nichols. His third marriage, to Annabel Davis-Goff, produced two children, Max Nichols and Jenny Nichols; they married in 1975 and divorced in 1986. His fourth was to former ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer, whom he married on April 29, 1988. Although none of his wives were Jewish and his children were not brought up according to a religion, they call themselves Jewish. His son Max married ESPN journalist Rachel Nichols.
In the early 1990s, one of the many Empowered Service Users who was living in destitution in the Bethesda area was a man called Tony who lived in a derelict school house in Rachub, with about 10 dogs. Tony’s heating was an open bonfire in the middle of the room, surrounded by the straw on which his dogs slept. A number of worried neighbours rang Gwynedd Social Services repeatedly, saying that they would not stand by and watch while Tony died; the Social Services and the local GPs refused to have anything to do with Tony. Tony had been a wealthy man, but had been fleeced repeatedly and was robbed, at knife point, outside the cash point in Bethesda, by a group of chavs who knew that he was a Nutter. After that, Tony was frightened to go to the cash point, so he withdrew all of his money from the bank – thousands – and stashed it in his derelict building. He then received a visit, from, to use Tony’s term, ‘robbers’. They were as well, the real thing, masked men, armed, who arrived at night. After that Tony lived in terror. He was still completely ignored by all of those who were paid To Help.
Tony was violently assaulted in the street and on most evenings the police from Bethesda would have to quell the disturbance outside his derelict building caused by yobs baiting him. One policeman in particular was vocal in his outrage that Gwynedd Social Services and the local GPs were allowed to refuse to help Tony in any way.
I was one of those who took Tony food when he didn’t have any. He used to show me his collection of photos from his younger days and there were a lot of him in TV studios. He had told everyone that he used to work in TV but he was denounced as an old nutter. Of course, rumours were spread that Tony was a Danger To Children. He wasn’t. After a year or so of utter havoc, Tony was taken in by a religious order in another part of north Wales. At no time did the NHS or Social Services lift a finger to help him, although he was clearly seriously ill.
A policeman later reminisced about the saga with Tony and said to me in amazement ‘did you know that he really was a TV producer? He knew lots of famous people’. Yes, I knew, Tony had shown me the photos. Tony had worked for ABC…
Tony had originally come from Manchester and had lived there during periods of illness before he arrived in Rachub. Dafydd’s gang had their linked empire in Manchester, upon who’s patch Ros was unfortunate enough to live after she left Bangor and became seriously ill. See previous posts. eg. ‘The Mentor’ and ‘Vested Interest Or Common Pool?’
Someone was waiting for Tony to be found dead while the police investigation into a possible VIP paedophile ring in north Wales was taking place. I wonder who and why.
The reason why there was so much debate in the late 1980s and 90s about ‘community care’ ‘not working’ – which indeed it wasn’t, it was chaos – was because those who were paid to provide the community care just would not do it. They flatly refused; these Experts had for years abused completely powerless people – often witnesses to serious crime – who had been incarcerated in institutions even more brutal than prisons and when the Experts were required to really ‘look after’ someone they couldn’t and they wouldn’t. They were never held to account and the public were left with the impression that the loonies were so uncontrollably deranged that it just had to be like this if they weren’t banged up.
Mike Nichols had a lifelong interest in Arabian horses. From 1968 to 2004, he owned a farm in Connecticut and was a noted horse breeder.
Over the years, Nichols also imported quality Arabian horses from Poland some of which sold for record-setting prices. Nichols died of a heart attack on November 19, 2014, at his apartment in Manhattan.
Another man with whom Penelope Gilliatt had a relationship was Edmund Wilson. Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895-June 12, 1972) was an American writer and critic who explored Freudian and Marxist themes. Wilson influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished work he edited for publication. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson’s death. Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His parents were Helen Mather (née Kimball) and Edmund Wilson Sr., a lawyer who served as New Jersey Attorney General. Edmund Wilson attended the Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1912. At Hill, Wilson served as the editor-in-chief of the school’s literary magazine, The Record. From 1912 to 1916, Hill was educated at Princeton University. Wilson began his professional writing career as a reporter for the ‘New York Sun’ and served in the army with Base Hospital 36 from Detroit, Michigan, and later as a translator during WW I.
Wilson was the Managing Editor of ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1920 and 1921, and later served as Associate Editor of ‘The New Republic’ and as a book reviewer for ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘The New York Review of Books’. Wilson’s works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He served on the Dewey Commission, that set out to fairly evaluate the charges that led to the exile of Leon Trotsky. Wilson wrote plays, poems and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism.
Wilson played a recurring role throughout Edna St Vincent Millay‘s life, from the time she was a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, 1921 to 1923, to the end of her life.
Wilson’s critical works helped foster public appreciation for several novelists: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov. He was instrumental in establishing the modern evaluation of the works of Dickens and Kipling. Wilson was a friend of the novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Edmund Wilson had multiple marriages and affairs.
- His first wife was Mary Blair, who had been in Eugene O’Neill‘s theatrical company.
- His second wife was Margaret Canby. After her death in a freak accident two years after their marriage, Wilson wrote a long eulogy to her and said later that he felt guilt over having neglected her. WHOOPS.
- From 1938 to 1946, Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy who, like Wilson, was well known as a literary critic. In an article in The New Yorker, Louis Menand says “The marriage to McCarthy was a mistake that neither side wanted to be first to admit. When they fought, he would retreat into his study and lock the door; she would set piles of paper on fire and try to push them under it.” This marriage resulted in the birth of their son, Reuel Wilson (born December 25, 1938).
- His fourth wife was Elena Thornton.
Edmund Wilson wrote many letters to Anaïs Nin, criticising her for her surrealistic style as opposed to the realism that was then deemed correct writing, and ended by asking for her hand – “I would love to be married to you, and I would teach you to write” – which she took as an insult. Except for a brief falling out following the publication of I Thought of Daisy, in which Wilson portrayed Edna St Vincent Millay as Rita Cavanaugh, Wilson and Millay remained friends throughout life. He later married Elena Mumm Thornton (previously married to James Worth Thornton), but continued to have extramarital relationships.
Wilson was also an outspoken critic of US Cold War policies. He refused to pay his federal income tax, 1946-55 and was later investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. After a settlement, Wilson received a $25,000 fine, rather than the original $69,000 sought by the IRS. He did not go to prison.
Selected by JFK to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Wilson, in absentia, was officially awarded the medal on December 6, 1963 by President Lyndon Johnson. However, Wilson’s view of Johnson was decidedly negative. Historian Eric F. Goldman writes in his memoir The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, that when Goldman, on behalf of Johnson, invited Wilson to read from his writings at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965: “Wilson declined with a brusqueness that I never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady.”
For the academic year 1964–65, Edmund Wilson was a Fellow on the faculty in the Centre for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.
Penelope Gilliatt’s companion for many years, Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924-October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ‘The New York Times’ from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. Canby reviewed more than one thousand films during his tenure there. Canby was born in Chicago. He attended boarding school in Christchurch, Virginia with novelist William Styron, and the two became friends. Canby died from cancer in Manhattan on 15 Oct 2000; the Waterhouse Report was published in Feb 2000. Vincent Canby never married.
Penelope Gilliatt’s sister is the sculptor Angela Conner who is married to John Bulmer of the famous cider family. Bulmer is a photographer who often videos and photographs Conner’s sculptures. The couple live at Monnington-on-Wye, where they breed and train Morgan horses.
Angela Conner (born 1935) is works in London. Conner has exhibited internationally and has large scale sculptures in public and private collections around the world. In her early career, Conner assisted Barbara Hepworth. Conner’s ‘Revelation’ at Chatsworth House was declared one of England’s best water features by ‘Country Life’.
Conner’s 129 ft water and wind sculpture ‘Wave’ at Park West Dublin is possibly the tallest kinetic water and wind sculpture in Europe.
Chatsworth House has a collection of 14 bronze busts of Angela’s located in the grounds, including portraits of Lucian Freud, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, Harold Macmillan, Roy Strong and John Betjeman.
Angela Conner was commissioned to sculpt from life Lilibet by the Knights of the Garter to celebrate Lilibet’s 80th birthday.
In 1982 Angela Conner created a memorial fountain to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference following World War II. It was repeatedly damaged, so Conner raised funds for a second memorial, ‘Twelve Responses to Tragedy’ which was dedicated in 1986.
It was in about 1986 that Tony Francis wrote to numerous people about my insanity and the terrible ‘allegations’ that I had made about Gwynne, stating that under no circumstances must any Top Docs agree to see me because I would probably murder them if they did before turning the gun on myself and ‘this case can only end in tragedy’. When I finally accessed this letter in 2005 which had been CC’d to the usuals – BMA, MDU, the world and his wife etc, I told Brown by e mail that my case can only end in tragedy and Brown observed ‘It has – for them’. I had no idea at the time that my e mails were being hacked and the likes of Miranda and the Digger were reading them and would have read that comment of Brown’s. Sadly there was a tragedy in 2005; Brown’s mum was found dead. Brown’s mum who was at Durham University at about the same time as dear old HUNTER Davies, Helen Osborne’s mentor, the Hunter who for years had a home in Cumbria and who made much of hanging out with the Beatles and with famous footballers, including Wayne Rooney and Paul Gascoigne. The Wayne who endured the bad publicity over the sex workers and the Paul who was constructed as a Geordie Star just when Dafydd’s partner gang in Newcastle were under investigation re the abuse of kids in care.
Hunter is still alive so perhaps he can shed a bit of light on why so many of those who bumped into him along the way are not.
Angela’s monument ‘Twelve Responses To Tragedy’ stands in the Yalta Memorial Garden in South Kensington:
Figurative work of Angela’s includes:
Laurence Olivier Statue, National Theatre, South Bank, London
The Queen Mother, Cheltenham Racecourse
Charles De Gaulle, Carlton Gardens, London
- David Stirling, Doune, Scotland, and Hereford, England
Elizabeth Frink, Chatsworth House
- Noël Coward Statue, at Firefly Estate, Jamaica
- Roy Strong
- Collections 14 of Angela Conner’s Bronze Busts at Chatsworth House
Now for Two More Responses To Tragedy. Among the layers and layers of people cluttering up the DHSS while Richard Crossman used it as a vehicle for the Westminster Paedophile Ring, were two mandarins who haven’t received a mention yet. Ron Matthews, Crossman’s Private Secretary who had been the Private Secretary of Dafydd’s mate Sir Kenneth Robinson before that who knew about Gwynne the lobotomist as well as the rest of the very serious crime and ensured that no-one at all disturbed Dafydd and Gwynne was replaced by John Cashman when Ron left the post of Private Secretary to Crossman. John Cashman had served as Kenneth Robinson’s Private Secretary, 1962-65, so like Ron Matthews, Cashman worked at the coalface with Dafydd and Gwynne for years.
Cashman was a Bachelor, with whom Crossman was impressed: a ‘knock-about lively individual…a tough nut, clever not smooth and I think he will be more interesting and value for money. He’ll get nearer to me and he’ll get on with me better [as compared to the other choice of candidate]…’ John Cashman joined the Civil Service in 1951, served as Crossman’s Private Secretary, 1969-73 and was then appointed as the Under-Secretary with responsibility for the Computers and Research Division at the DHSS. Yet another tried and tested vampire given access to the data and personal details of possible targets…
Sir Philip Rogers was someone else who knew how important it was that Dafydd and Gwynne should be left well alone; Sir Philip was Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, 1964-67 and then Permanent Secretary at the DHSS, 1970-75. In 1976 Sir Philip became the Chairman of the Outward Bound Trust. He died in 1990.
The kids in care in north Wales were taken on many Outward Bound and similar trips and holidays. It was very good PR, taking troubled youngsters on exciting mountain walking/climbing or kayaking trips. It wasn’t all bad, many of the kids did enjoy such activities, but there was a problem with predators sneaking in under the radar and as usual, nothing at all was done when complaints were made. By 1976, the children’s home business in north Wales really was booming as a result of the Children Act 1975; John Allen’s business rapidly expanded and children’s homes were opening up constantly, hidden away in isolated rural locations. The Programme Of Activities boasted about for marketing purposes included Outward Bound courses. Who better than to have at the helm than a mandarin who had colluded with organised abuse of people in the care of the state at the highest level for years? Phil the Greek was involved with Outward Bound for many years.
Someone else who knew about Richard Crossman and his funny little ways, from the excessive consumption of gulls eggs and claret in London clubs through to the running of the Westminster Paedophile Ring and the concealing of the most serious abuse, including deaths, of NHS patients, was Wini Lakin, Crossman’s election agent for over 10 years. Wini’s papers are held at Warwick University.
- Winifred Lakin was born in Wrexham in 1907 and settled in Coventry with her husband, Harry, in 1930. She worked for the Mutual Trading Company and he was a draughtsman at GEC. In 1955 Wini won a seat for Labour on Coventry City Council and served until 1967. In 1972 she was again elected and represented Longford Ward continuously until 1988. Wini served as Lord Mayor of Coventry, 1986-87. She was also a member of many committees, was a governor of a number of schools and carried out voluntary work well into her 80s. Wini was a member of Warwick University Court and was awarded an honorary degree in 1988. From 1959 to 1971 Wini acted as election agent to Richard Crossman MP. She and Harry had two children, Brian, who predeceased her and Shirley. Winnie Lakin died on 28 December 2002. Wini’s obituary appeared in the ‘Coventry Evening Telegraph’, 2 January 2003.
Here’s Wini doing her Lord Mayor bit surrounded by children. Bechod!
Wini became Lord Mayor in the year in which Ollie Brooke was convicted and imprisoned and Dafydd illegally imprisoned me. In 1988, the year in which Wini was awarded an honorary degree from Warwick University, the NHS finally agreed to investigate my complaint against Dafydd and the gang. The investigation was conducted in 1989 by Dafydd’s mate Professor Robert Bluglass – who grew up in Warwickshire, went to Warwick School and spent most of his life and career in Birmingham, which until it became so big was in Warwickshire – and Dr Colin Berry, a psychiatrist from the Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry. See post ‘Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE’. Dafydd’s partner gang ran a trafficking ring in Coventry and Birmingham. Bluglass is now a Director of Compton Verney, one of Europe’s finest art galleries, in Warwickshire. See previous posts.
