Category: Lost LGBTQ+ spaces

An oral history collected by Paul Green as part of the In Living Memory project, Where to, now the sequins have gone?

In the interview, Ian discusses his time performing in the award-winning cabaret act, Katrina and the boy and his memories of the lost gay bars of Lewisham that thrived from 1970s-90s.

Transcript

Rosie (interviewer):  OK, so I’m Rosie Oliver and I’m recording an interview today on 12th August at Deptford Town Hall, and I’m speaking to Ian Elmslie. Ian, can you spell your name please?

Ian (interviewee):      E-L-M-S-L-I-E.

Rosie:  Perfect. And it’s I-A-N.

Ian:      I know, there’s only so many vowels a name can have.

Rosie:  Yes.

Ian:      [Laughs] I-A-N.

Rosie:  I-A-N. Brilliant. OK. And the purpose of this interview is for the Avant Gardening Bijou Stories Project: Where To, Now the Sequins Have Gone? which documents the gay bars and communities that existed in the Borough of Lewisham particularly in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. And it will give rise to creative projects that include a podcast which may feature some of the material from this interview. But the interview is also for the wider umbrella programme, In Living Memory: A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham, and an oral archive that’s being developed for that. So that’s the preamble, let’s start.

Ian:      Right.

Rosie:  Ian, just in a word or two could you just introduce yourself?

Ian:      My name is Ian Elmslie, I’m a recently turned 60-year-old performer, author, former teacher, prison liaison officer. Anything where they’ll open a door and have me, and have me chat, I think I’ll go into. [Laughs]

Rosie:  OK. And we are interviewing you because you were part of an act. Tell me about that act.

Ian:      I was in, 1990, under the – or under the orders of one Lily Savage, I united with an old drama school pal called Katrina, and we formed an act called Katrina the Boy, thinking – you know, Savage has said he’ll get us a couple of gigs, “Oh, we’ll just see what happens, maybe do one or two,” and it became a 10 year career where we took one week off a year. And we were just working throughout the whole of the Nineties. We just worked and worked and worked in every single gay bar that was, and maybe will ever be, but it was an extraordinary time. A very, very special time to be working on the gay cabaret circuit.

Rosie:  OK. So before we get into your experience in the Borough of Lewisham, tell me a little bit. Give me a flavour of the act; what was it about?

Ian:      [Laughs]

Rosie:  What were you doing?

Ian:      Well we were – in retrospect, because I had no knowledge of the gay cabaret circuit at the time, you know, Savage spoke about, “Oh, I’ll get you gigs on the gay cabaret circuit,” and this meant nothing to me at all. And it’s only when I started working on it and going to places like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and the Black Cab, and the Royal Oak, and The Two Brewers for the first time in my life – I’d never been in them as a punter, the first time I’d ever gone in as a performer. And I realised after a few months how unusual we were as an act, because at the time it was all drag queens, most of them lip-syncing to other people’s songs, and the occasional stripper thrown in.

So to have a loud-mouthed blonde woman singing live and being very funny, and a gay man sitting at a piano not taking his clothes off was at the time really quite revolutionary. And so the first time we ever played venues, when we walked on stage you could see people just going, “What is this? What are they going to do?” And then we gave it to them. Whether they wanted to have it in their lives or not we gave it to. And I think the fact that we were – it was the right time for something new and different and funny and quirky and live. We were completely live which was a big challenge to some of the venue sound systems. [Laughs].

Rosie:  So what songs was … Katrina was singing, right?

Ian:      Katrina was singing.

Rosie:  I mean tell me a bit more about the act. Give me a feel for it.

Ian:      There was nothing we would not do. There was no style of music we would not invade and take as our own. Yes, you could have the typical Sixties girl singers; a lot of Dusty, a bit of Sandy, a bit of Mama Cass, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, but then we would do Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hart, and Noël Coward. We’d do glam rock. Sometimes we would finish our set with Devil Gate Drive by Susie Quatro. I think the night we finished with Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen you just saw the audiences jaws just go, “What?” Musical theatre we looked at; we did some original songs. Disney Nights we used to do, Country and Western Nights, there was nothing we would not have a bash at if it worked with a piano.

Because all we had was a piano with a built-in drum machine, and so the song had to have strong lyrics, strong melody, it couldn’t rely on arrangements. So we spent a lot of time listening to a lot of songs to find out ones that made us laugh and were topical. We tried to find songs that were possibly going to reflect what was happening in the world at the time.

Rosie:  Can you give me an example of a song that you might have sung that had a resonance?

Ian:      Gosh almighty. Oh, OK. [Laughs] I mean when Fergie was caught having her toes sucked by someone on holiday, we found the song Popsicle Toes. And I mean you just tried to find songs that – Katrina had a fair old gob on her, and it helped if she could set up the songs in a funny way, and if they were topical. Our first song that we ever did at the RVTR opening gambit was Cruella De Vil which of course we dedicated to Margaret Thatcher with a Phantom of the Opera intro to let them know that this is what we thought about her.

So we would make political jibes and jests, and just observations of what was going on. If we could find a song that was timely, you know taking the theme tune of the old TV show Raw Hide but doing it as if the Pet Shop Boys were doing it. So you’d take this like Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin Country and Western Song and marry it with a very Eighties disco treatment, and making the audience laugh just with the fact that we’d taken an old song and slammed it up to date. That was a lot of fun to do.

Rosie:  Can you paint a visual picture?

Ian:      Of the two of us?

Rosie:  Hmm.

Ian:      [Laughs] Ah, now I will have to pinch a line here from the legendary Victor Lewis Smith who used to write for the Evening Standard. He used to do the television criticism in the Evening Standard. And it was kind of law that if you hadn’t been slated by Victor Lewis Smith you really weren’t anybody because he was caustic. And he once referred to Katrina – he’d seen us on the telly doing a dreadful game show, and we acknowledged that it was an awful, awful game show, The New Mr and Mrs. I shudder in the memory; we had to film 52 episodes in two weeks, it was just – we got paid. But he described her as looking like Gazza in drag, which I thought was hysterical. And she did have very cropped peroxide blonde hair flipped up at the front with a Tin-Tin quiff.

And when we first started working she was a big woman, 16 stone and proud of it, and with a mouth on her. She was kind of so Dawn French met Alison Moyet met Jo Brand, that’s what we’re talking. In your face, took no prisoners. Whereas I was sat very quietly behind the keyboard, and my stage outfits over the years very quickly morphed into me just wearing a vest and jeans on stage. Not for any predatory reasons, that I was trying to seduce the audience, but actually because the venues were so hot that I could just go, “Oh.” And I don’t like things around my arms when I play the piano, so a vest and jeans. And I didn’t have to carry a wardrobe bag either.

Less things to carry; I had quite enough to carry, so it served our purposes that this very loud, colourful ebullient woman was out front making people laugh, and I was slightly removed and quite silent at the back of the stage which occasionally makes you quite intriguing, especially to a gay audience [laughs] thinking – [laughs] and calling – because I was The Boy. Some people didn’t even know my name, so that again gave me a certain mystery. [Laughs]

Rosie:  Wow. Fifty-two episodes in two weeks.

Ian:      Oh.

Rosie:  That sounds insane, but that’s a [unintelligible 00:08:54].

Ian:      Yes, but by the end of the day, believe me, five episodes, you didn’t care if they knew anything about each other or not. [Laughs] She used to walk on and just go, “Ooh, nasty blouses.” [Laughs] We didn’t say that; you just thought it. [Laughs]

Rosie:  [Laughs]. OK, so moving on to Lewisham, what brought you to Lewisham?

Ian:      I moved to this area in 1984 when I was a drama student. I was a drama student in Sidcup, and you just searched for digs that were along the train line that took you into Sidcup. I always felt very sorry for people who went to St John’s, they must have stood on the platform and just watched trains going because it was forever like, “This train does not stop at St John’s.” [Laughs] Poor drama students. But I moved to Lee in 1985 after one year in Chislehurst. I became resident in Lee in 1985 in a shared flat, and that’s when I staked my claim on Lewisham for many years.

Rosie:  And was that before or after Katrina and the Boy?

Ian:      That was before. I mean I met Katrina at Rose Bruford’s, and so we were friends then, but that was a good five years before we started working together.

Rosie:  OK. So before we jump into Katrina and the Boy performing at the local pubs did you know the local pubs here?

Ian:      I didn’t. And again, it became a voyage of discovery because you tend to think that you have to go into London if you want to go to a gay bar. Which at the time, being a student, money was tight, and so if you could get into anywhere free you went for it. So I was tempted to go into the London to the Hippodrome on a Monday and Heaven on a Tuesday because I could get free tickets. And as I said, I didn’t know about the Lewisham scene until the Nineties, till we started working on it. Until I went to the Albany Empire in Deptford, and people would talk about The Castle in Lewisham in a way that didn’t make me particularly want to go and visit it I’d say. [Laughs] And that was all I knew of gay bars in Lewisham certainly in the late Eighties. That’s all I knew.

Rosie:  So you didn’t know them as a punter, but you did know them as a performer. That’s how you got to know them.

Ian:      Yes, that’s the first time I ever saw these places was when I walked in with my gear to set up, and you just went, “Ooh, OK. Flock wallpaper. Marvellous.”

Rosie:  [Laughs] OK, so tell me which one had a flock wallp- – I mean tell me which venue can we start with?

Ian:      Well, I had to start with where my heart lay and lies which is the Queen’s Arms. I’d known the governor, Joe Thompson, from The Gloucester in Greenwich, that’s when we first met. And he was very famous because he’d won the pools, and that was quite glamorous because you often hear about people winning the pools, but you never actually meet anybody who does. But Joe won the pools. And I think he used part of his winnings, [laughs], I think he bought hairdressers in London called Bonne Arrivée. I think he just invested in places, and I think had enough to eventually lay his feet down in the Queen’s Arms.

And I loved the Queen’s Arms. It must have been the smallest gay bar in the world. It was like being in somebody’s living room, this central bar with this horseshoe bar going on around it. The music was not blasting out because what’s the point, it’s tiny, so it became a lovely place to go and chat with people. It was a very chatty bar, a very family bar, and they did quiz nights going on there. Fiercely competitive at times, really competitive, which is always good to see. And of course we performed there.

And when you played in the Queen’s Arms you didn’t feel like you were going into battle which some venues could be. Nobody was exploring Ecstasy at that time in the Queen’s Arms, it wasn’t that type of place. And nobody was actually out on the pull there. They’d come for a quiet – not a quiet night out, but a safe, gentle, chatty, hopefully fun night out, but it wasn’t necessarily going to end up in them going home with somebody, so your audience for the cabaret was very attentive.

And when an audience is attentive, you can play everything from your catalogue because they’re with you, they’re enjoying it. And if you’re singing a song that they don’t know, it’s three minutes of their life, they’re not going to like go, “Boo” and run screaming out of the building or screaming at you. So it was such a joy to play there. And the bar staff were just an absolute joy because they knew everyone. And everyone had their particular places where they used to sit and stand. I sat by the bar by the flap, down there, and they knew that I would have a pint and a half of Guinness when I came in because I was driving to go there. And that, to me, is the mark of a great bar when the staff know the customers by name and their bevy. There was never any trouble there ever. I didn’t even see a raised voice in their bar apart if they were joining in with the songs. [Laughs].

Rosie:  Yes. Yes.

Ian:      And I think it did have flock wallpaper. [Laughs] But it was just – so you felt like you were in your granny’s front room, but there was something very comforting about that. It was clean and jolly and so welcoming.

Rosie:  Yes, and someone we spoke to last week was saying it was just this real mix of people.

Ian:      Oh yes, they were all ages. I mean it’s one of my – I not going to – sorrows – my observations of the scene now that it tends to be, “There’s the Bears’ bar,” or “there’s the Twinkie bar,” or, there’s the this bar, and everyone feels the need that they have to go and be with their group of people, and only them. But I love a venue that that’s mixed, you know completely mixed – ages, sizes, looks, genders, straight, gay, whatever. Bring them in, that’s how we learn about people, and that’s I think how we can change people.

Rosie:  Do you have any memorable performances in the Queen’s Arms? Was it Arms or Head?  Arms.

Ian:      The Queen’s – oh, the Queen’s Arms. Yes, I would hear Josie Thompson, “Oh, welcome to the Queen’s Arms.” He had this incredible voice like Peggy Mount. He just was really down in his gut. And sometimes his introductions to the act would sometimes last about half the length of time that the act were going to be on. Because he liked to big up the Queen’s Arms and say what a welcoming bar it was, and how we have the top cabaret. And you’re sitting there going, “Can we go on now, please?”  [Laughs]

But bizarrely enough, my most memorable night of doing cabaret at the Queen’s Arms was with a singer called Jamie Watson. Katrina, towards the end of our time together, was doing quite a lot of TV. She was doing a programme for UK Living called The Sex Files which was taking a lot of her time. We were individuals, we allowed ourselves and each other to do things outside the act. It would’ve been stupid to say, “No, you can’t do that.” And so I started working with – doing the occasional gig with a male singer called Jamie Watson, and we did a jazz set together. A predominantly jazz set together. And I remember my boyfriend at the time hearing us rehearsing and saying, “Who’s going to want to listen to this?” You know, “These old songs,” he said. And I think he was worried that it was just going to die on its arse. [Laughs]

But we did it for the first time at the Queen’s Arms, and to see people standing there and really listening to an old song by Rodgers and Hart, He Was Too Good all mixed into a Bacharach and David song, A House is Not a Home, so you’re presenting this medley of what it’s like when a relationship comes to an end. And people were openly weeping because they were in the venue which was sympathetic to cabaret and was an integral part of the evening. People just think, “Oh, I’m going to just listen to this song that I don’t know.”

And once you listen to words written by Lorenz Hart and Hal David you’ve got proper – this ain’t Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, these are great lyrical songs that tell our story. And the fact that Jamie was singing, He Was Too Good To Me. It was a gay man, like myself, in trousers, singing specifically about being a gay man, and that’s quite rare, even now, for a male singer to sing “he, he, he, he, he.” Even Elton John was singing “she” for heaven knows how long. It took George Michael a while to specifically sing “he.” So I’d always think it makes such a difference especially to young people in an audience to hear someone singing “he”.

And I remember the response at the end of the evening, and my boyfriend was there at the same time, and I was really pleased, and he was like really stunned at the response because it was genuine, it was warm, and it was an appreciation of music. It hadn’t been a particularly funny evening because they were used to Katrina and I being quite funny, but it was “Listen to these songs, these songs are great songs and they tell our story,” so that it was a big tick in my memory book. I remember that evening with real pride, as I do with the work I did with Katrina very much so.

I received a compliment the other day from a governor of a venue that we used to play at in the Nineties, and he said, “Your act was so innovative,” and that, to me, is a real compliment, the fact that we never did other people’s songs. We were always searching for something new and something challenging, and the audience responded to it which was a big relief.

Rosie:  It being in the Queen’s Arms was a very receptive, attentive, sympathetic audience, and you weren’t fighting with them.

Ian:      Mm-hmm.

Rosie:  I wonder if that’s a segue to The Castle maybe.

Ian:      [Laughs]. Yes, believe me, we never did cabaret in The Castle. I don’t think they ever did cabaret in The Castle. The Castle was just – I went in there once with a friend and it was just bizarre because you had to walk through. I mean some venues had a gay night. The Castle had a gay bit, and so you had to walk through the front part of the bar which was the straight section – and we’re talking Catford here – to get to the gay section at the back. So anybody walking through the front bar was – going to the back bar – wasn’t going there for any other reason apart from the fact that that was the gay scene. So to run this gamut of eyes, the ones where I was not shouted at – we were not shouted at when I went in there, I was just aware that we were being looked at. It was like walking through like a haunted house with the pictures in the frames, like the eyes just moved as you were walking through.

But we weren’t disturbing their game of pool. I think we stayed for one drink. If you asked me to describe it, I really couldn’t apart from just thinking I think it was a bit spit and sawdust, just a plain bar. Why the manager decided that it was going to be somehow financially beneficial to him to have a gay back bar, who’s to know. But I’m sure some people have had a jolly down there. [Laughs] I’m not quite sure I did; I didn’t feel the need to return. [Laughs]

Rosie:  No. And you never got the piano out, no?

Ian:      I never offered my services to entertain the troops, which actually is quite unlike me because I used to play at a straight wine bar in Lee Green called Casablanca every Friday night and got adopted by the pub. And I believe they were electricians, plumbers, interesting crowd, but I became – and I use the words with care, you know, the pet poof. And if anybody came in, you know a stranger – and like because I was making Boy George look plain at the time, and with sequinned gloves, the hair was God knows what, I’d look like I just dived headfirst into the Max Factor counter at Boots, I mean everything was going on. But if anyone gave me grief you would just see these people rise up and stand in front of them and say, “You know he may be a poof but he’s our poof,” which I really liked. But whether that would’ve happened in The Castle, I don’t know, but it did in Lee Green.

Rosie:  And what was the name of that act?

Ian:      I was just on my own.

Rosie:  It was just you. It was just Ian.

Ian:      It was just Ian the Poof. [Laughs]

Rosie:  Ian the Poof.

Ian:      But it goes back to what – that at that time, in the mid-Eighties we’re talking, and in retrospect maybe that did take guts, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything particularly brave at all. Maybe, in retrospect, I was really like putting myself on the line there, but I really didn’t care. And as long as I entertained them, they didn’t mind. They didn’t mind at all. And I spoke to the governor only the other day, and actually got the chance to say, “Thank you very much. At a time when we weren’t particularly welcome in venues, for various reasons, that you invited me to play in your bar. You made me part the family, and you protected me on the very rare occasion if anyone gave me a mouthful.” So kudos to him.

Rosie:  Hmm, that’s fascinating. What about the Roebuck? Did you ever perform there?

Ian:      The Roebuck I did go to a few times, and that was … Again, you just had to steal yourself a little bit when you went into The Roebuck because everything the Queen’s Arms wasn’t The Roebuck was. The Queen’s Arms was very cosy, very friendly, very gentle; The Roebuck you always felt that something was about to happen, and it wasn’t going to be necessarily pretty. It just had this slight tension going on there. Not between the fellas I have to admit, it tended to be between the women. And that’s not being misogynistic or anything, it was just – it just had that vibe that if anything was going to kick off it would usually be accompanied by a pool cue, and words would be said, and they’d be above an alto key. [Laughs] I never witnessed a full-on brawl, I just heard enough to know that that’s what occurred. And the couple of times I went there, I just felt this isn’t really my place. Not really my place. I’m sure that there were some people there it was their idea of absolute paradise. But for me, get me back to the Queen’s Arms please.

Rosie:  OK. But you did perform there.

Ian:      Well, we didn’t perform at the Roebuck. I don’t think that even they did cabaret. I think in the vicinity it was only in Lewisham and it was only the Queen’s Arms that did cabaret. And whether that was a financial decision, because you know, they’ve got to pay the act. Whether they thought the punters wouldn’t go for it, I don’t know. And when Stonewall came along – we’d parted professional company by that point – and I know they had a pounding disco that went on in the Stonewall bar, but I don’t think even they did cabaret.

In the late Nineties it was this weird curve, and I saw it coming when the drugs really started to come into the clubs, and cabarets started to become almost an interruption in the evening because people wanted the boom-boom-boom-boom because they were – their pill was kicking in. And so someone coming on and singing a Dusty Springfield song, or saying, “Here’s a lovely bit of Noël Coward,” [laughs] really not quite what they wanted. And certain breweries brought in policies that did not make it easy for acts to perform in pubs.

Rosie:  Yes. Yes, that’s so interesting, that dance drugs, all of that, killed cabaret on the gay scene.

Ian:      Yes, I saw it happening, it was just bizarre. And I found myself having to dumb down the act. And I choose that phrase with care. You look, you think you’re playing this place on a Friday night, they’re not going to go for the Summertime number, they’re not going to go for anything that’s too wordy, and so we ended up doing – and we used to call it “singy-songy songs.” You know, if they can join in and sing along, as long as we’re still enjoying what we’re doing but don’t get obscure, you just – you know, keep it up, keep it bright, keep it gay because you know that they’re going to not hold their attention.

Rosie:  But thinking back to, for example, being at the Queen’s Arms.

[00:26:23 – 00:26:31 – Interruption]

Rosie:  For the record, it’s one of the hottest days of the year – of the millennium.

Ian:      And going to get worse. [Laughs].

Rosie:  [Laughs] Could you give me a ditty, Ian, of maybe something – give me a taste of the act, or maybe like at the Queen’s Arms? Just a line or two.

Ian:      What? Oh gosh.

Rosie:  Just to give a little –

Ian:      Well, for example, now Country and Western, you can’t go wrong with Country and Western. I mean the titles are just so great. You know, what was my favourite country songs? I’ll be Getting Over You When The Grass Is Growing Over Me. It’s brilliant. And I Knew I’d Hit Rock Bottom When I Woke Up On Top of You. I mean it’s just superb. And there’s something so funny about Country and Western which someone described as three chords and a tragedy. But we used to do this Patsy Cline song called Tra La La La La – ting – Triangle. And so we bought a triangle, and Katrina had it, but she did have to say to the audience, “This is quite a quiet instrument, so when I hit the triangle, you all shout “ting.””

So for a start we’d get them bobbing up and down because it’s country – and bo-di-bum, bo-di-bum – so they got to bob up and down. And then they’re shouting “ting.” Then they got to slap their thigh, pretend spitting on the floor. So in one song you’ve got a lot of audience participation going on over a silly little country song that nobody knows called Tra La La La La Triangle. We added an extra verse at the end for gay measure [laughs] to really make the triangle really multi-gender identity. That was quite fun to do.

Rosie:  Do you remember the words for that verse?

Ian:      Oh gosh. No. Oh, no, I’m ashamed to say I can’t. It’s been so long ago. And there’s one song that we used to do which I’m particularly proud of. Lloyd Webber had just bought out Sunset Boulevard. I’m not really a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I wasn’t a fan of that show. And one night I just started to do a rewrite of one of the songs from Sunset Boulevard. I’m thinking, “Oh, let’s continue this story.” So it went from that into Three Little Maids from School by Gilbert and Sullivan about these three actresses all of whom played Norma Desmond. Then we went into – Petula Clark took over, so we took Downtown and added new lyrics to that bit. And then we finished off with Take That Look Off Your Face, but change the words to “Take That Show Off The Stage.” You know, so you just played around the lyrics.

And it was a big old song to do; you’ve got four movements in that song to get through, and Gilbert and Sullivan were quite complicated to play, especially when it’s a [Patterson? 00:29:17]. Was it Three Little – Three Little – again, I’ve forgotten the words, it’s been so long ago. [Laughs] But it told the story of this show, my views on it, these three actresses fighting about it, Petula Clark coming in, and then just a commentary about Andrew Lloyd Webber saying, “I must be mistaken, I’m sure … ” Oh, sorry. What was it?

“I must be mistaken, [unintelligible 00:29:43],” but just “But haven’t I just heard that song before? I’m sure it was sung at the end of Act One, Andrew Lloyd Webber I know your score. Take that show off the stage, I can see through your style.” That’s about as much I can remember at the moment.

But plucking up the courage to do that song in certain venues, especially for the first time because you thought, “Are you going to get it?” “Are you?” “Are we going to get it right?” “Argh.” And the first time we did it – sounds a cliché, you know – the roof just blew off because nobody had heard anything like it. And it was clever, and it was funny. So I’m proud of the rewrites that we did. But sometimes what you really enjoyed seeing people do was just sing along with a song that maybe they hadn’t heard for a while. You know, It’s Getting Better by Mama Cass, it’s a great song and it was a great opener, and it was such a positive opener.

And as an observation from the Nineties, with everything that was going on in that decade that had been birthed in the Eighties but just exploded in the late Eighties and Nineties, I think every cabaret act realised that they were responsible for being the tonic for the troops. That we could actually walk into a bar and go, “Yes, I know there is all this crap and shit happening outside that is awful, but just for three hours we’re going to stand inside a bar and we’re going to have a bit sing, and a bit of a drink, and a bit of a dance, and then we can go out and face it again.”

But I think we all acknowledged at that time, “Keep it up.” You know, we weren’t going to sing tragic songs at the time, so to see an audience at that time singing along with What’s New Pussycat, or our favourite – because I’m a lifelong Donny Osmond fan. Donny Osmond changed my life. And when we used to encore with Puppy Love, and you would sing the first line, “And they called it puppy love” and then you couldn’t hear the rest of the song because the whole audience was screaming. And seeing these great burly men going “Aaaah,” and reaching their arms out to the stage as if they were Osmond fans was hysterical. Hysterical.

And that’s my joy of remembering, of having that ability to reach inside somebody’s nostalgia buckets and pull out a pearl and go, “You haven’t heard this one for a while, have you?” and now you are free to scream as much as you like, then go out and finish the shit in the outside world.

Rosie:  Ian, what you said, I just loved, and then someone sort of put their – I don’t know what it was.

Ian:      A cleaning device.

Rosie:  A hoover or something. [Laughs] And of course, everyone can hear the words perfectly clearly, but I just wonder, would you mind awfully just making that point again about –  you know, you were saying about the context being the Eighties, and perhaps just to clarify for people who don’t know about the politics of the Eighties and what was going on, and how it was a refuge to boost morale and that kind of thing.

Ian:      Oh, god, yes.

Rosie:  Would you mind awfully?

Ian:      Of course not. I mean during the Eighties, and being right at the forefront of – we started the Eighties with such hope. There were groups like Bronski Beat and Culture Club, and I mean even it was a few since Tom Robinson who was such a hero of mine, but it just seemed like there was this change, and people became more accepting. And a lot of straight people had now gay friends, and they were embracing us. And then – wroooom – in comes – and let’s quote those damned papers, The Gay Plague, and all that fear rose up again.

And Thatcher, and of course Section 28 was just driving us back and back and back. And all that progress that we had made just seemed to be being whipped away from us. Which is why the pubs and clubs became so important because they became, “This is our space, this is our home, and we need each other at the moment.” And that the overused word – phrase, rather – “gay community,” I really started to feel it, that we realised that nobody was going to fight our corner for us, we had to stand together and shout together. And I was really lucky at the age that I was that Tom Robinson Band taught me that, yes, I could be gay and angry that I didn’t have to have this victim label on my forehead. I was allowed to be angry and shout about what was happening.

So going on the Section 28 marches, and fighting for, you know, when they dared not to give us an equal age of consent. They compromised and gave us 18. And I remember an unusual ally, Edwina Currie, at a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, saying “That as a woman, if someone told me I could have some but not all equal rights they’d walk away bleeding.” And I thought, “Good on you, girl. Good on you.”

But then in the Nineties, when I started working in a scene that I didn’t really know about, but that we were so embraced by so warmly, and you felt the responsibility at that time to provide people with a distraction, a release, a relief from all those headlines, all the funerals, all the grief that we were going through at the time. So just for a few hours we could stand in a pub with a drink, having a laugh, having a sing-along, having a bit of a dance, and it was like topping up your battery. It was like, “Right, I can go out and take another week of Daily Mail-isms and stupid ignorant statements because we’ve been topped up. I’ve had my battery topped up; I am not alone,” and that’s all we need to learn in life.

And it’s such a journey for every gay person that we go through, and every gay person still goes through it now. People say, “Oh, it’s so much easier now,” but as a former secondary school teacher for 15 years, and the number of students who came out to me – I was an out, gay teacher, who are they going to come out to, me. But seeing them do that walk across my classroom, and I know what they’ve come to say, but they have got to say it. They’ve got to have that elevator coming up from their gut which feels like you’re being sick, and – to say those three words.

But at that time, nobody – we all need to feel that we are part of a community, and that people have got their arms around us. And in the Nineties, from my position on the stage, which was such a privilege to see, and seeing people supporting each other. And believe me, I saw people becoming more ill over … If we were playing at a venue, say, once a month, you would see – you would see a deterioration in people. And it fills me up now. And then one week they wouldn’t be there. But to see people standing with them, and holding them, and cuddling them, and for them to come to the dressing room and say, “Oh, you really made me laugh tonight. I love that song.” Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And that might be the last time you ever saw them, but you know that you have done something at the time when we felt that people weren’t really – they weren’t helping us that much. We had to find that within our community.

And that’s why I will always support my local bar. I won’t go into town, I’ll go to my local bar, that’s my tribe, that’s my chair, this is the place that I want to say, “This place has to stay open.” Because there is somebody down the road who is plucking up the courage to come in here for the first time, and they’re probably standing outside the door now, looking at the door. And we’ve all done it. We’ve all done it. And if they hear laughter, or if they see – they hear people singing along, chances are they’re going to go in because they think, “I will be safe here.” You know that whole Evan Hansen that’s going around at the moment, you know, “You will be found.” Very clever thing to use as a hook for that musical. “You will be found.” Because there’s a whole generation now thinking, “Where do I belong?” “Where are my people?” “Where will I be found?” And we find them.

Rosie:  OK, so we’re back in the room. The battery just ran out and we’re back in the room. And I was just explaining, Ian, how there’s two sides to this project. One is memories and reflections on that scene which you’ve shared with me wonderfully, and the other is – I mean the name of this project is Where To, Now the Sequins Have Gone? And I wondered what you feel now about what’s available.

Ian:      Oh, that’s an interesting one. I think we are possibly sitting in front of the biggest buffet in the world, and we don’t know where to start. I actually showed a friend of mine the other night the number of flags that there now are, and the number of titles for groups that they now are, and three-quarters of them I don’t know what they mean. I love the fact that I apparently am now labelled. I’m a demisexual. Do you know what a demisexual is?

Rosie:  No, I’m intrigued.

Ian:      No.

Rosie:  Tell me.

Ian:      And there’s even a flag; they’ve designed a flag. A demisexual is someone who can only have a sexual relationship with someone with whom they’ve already formed a strong emotional bond. So in other words, no cruising, no cottages, no sauna, no, that’s never been my way and never will be. But I love the fact that somebody somewhere has come up with this label and designed a flag. Not asked me. I would’ve had paisley all over it. But I worry that people are searching for an identity and there is almost too much choice.

I had a brief [unintelligible 00:40:36] as a school governor, and all girls’ school, and they had a Pride group within the school which I thought, “Ooh, that’s pretty impressive.” And they invited the gay school governor to come and see one of their meetings; of course I went along. And I sat next to this 12 year old girl – so we’re talking Year Nine – and I know Year Nine. As a teacher, I don’t know, they hate everything – they hate themselves, they hate their parents, they hate school, they hate the world because they are a mess of hormones. And this girl was having an open argument or an open heated debate with herself about whether she was lesbian, bisexual, polysexual, or asexual.

And I couldn’t help but think, “You’re 12. You’re 12.” And it’s the only time I ever put my hand up in the meeting, because I was there to observe. And I put my hand up and they went, “Ooh, ooh, Mr Elmslie,” “Yes,” and I went – and I just looked at her and I said, “You will know when you fall in love with somebody. That’s when you know who you are.” Because it’s not about what you are, it’s not about the label. You have fallen in love with someone and that’s when you will know. It might not last, it might be love that only lasts a year before you discover another part of yourself.

But I think I worry that there is so much emphasis or now who am I – what am I, and I think people are losing sight of who am I. I identify as Ian; I’ve identified as Ian since single figures. I knew I wasn’t like other boys. From the earliest I wanted to be a ballet dancer at the age of eight when I should have been wanting to be a fireman. I knew. Being an Osmond fan you didn’t say that on the playground; I did. I came out when I was 16 at a boys’ public school in the mid-Seventies. [Laughs] That took some guts. But I’ve never felt the need to brand myself apart from this is who I am. If I choose to wear makeup, which I still do, does that make me gender fluid or non-binary, no, it makes me Ian on a Friday because I want to do it today.

And I know it is necessary, I know it is, and everyone is going to find their pathway to who they are. I just worry that it’s an ever increasing maze at the moment that it could occasionally lead to a dead end when it sometimes simplify. Edit. Edit your life, [laughs] as you said about writing a book, but which I know, but everyone is on their journey. And whatever anyone has to do to get them to the person that they need to be – not wants to be, that they need to be, that they have to be – do it. Do it. Explore, experiment, call yourself a … That’s how I see things at the moment. But then I think, “Oh, am I just old.”

Rosie:  Well I think it is a big question that people of all generations are asking, aren’t they?

Ian:      Hmm.

Rosie:  And I think we’re all reflecting on our pronouns and all of that. But I guess slightly swerving back towards the bars, I guess one of the questions that we want to ask with this project is finding out about the role that those gay bars like the Queen’s Arms had for people in a really tough period – particularly the Nineties as you said; the Eighties and Nineties – they’re all shut; most of them are closed down now.

Ian:      Yes.

Rosie:  And what has that done to our sense of community, a), and b) what’s the impact on us as individuals?

Ian:      Like too much in society it’s pushed people towards their phones. You know, everyone is just now face down, face down over a phone all the time, and often their lives are focused on their phones. And it makes me sad, and the one local gay bar that I do still go to, the George and Dragon – which I love. I love the George and Dragon. I’ve known the governor 30 plus years. Salt of the earth. Still puts on cabarets. He’s a great, great man. So much time for the duchess. But there will be that time like you see people on their phones, sometimes even when they’re with – in company. And you think, “Turn it off. Look up. Look up.” But the loss of the local gay bars I think is incredibly sad.

Of going to a pub where it is your space and you do feel safe, and you can have a drink, and play pinball. I used to love playing pinball in The Gloucester in Greenwich. I loved it. Having a quiz, having those things that are not what I call the Kleenex Syndrome where you pick people out of a tissue box and blow your nose on it and then throw them away. I think this whole – making anyone – I loathe this disposable society that we’re into, and it’s not just things, it’s people as well. It’s like, “Oh, you’ll do for the night.”

And that’s harder to do if you’re going to a pub and you’re seeing the person that maybe you were a little bit offhand with the previous night, thinking, “Well I’m never going to see them again because they were just on my phone,” and actually they’re drinking over the other side of the bar from you, and they might be next Thursday, and the night after that. So in a way you almost have to modify your behaviour, and get some social skills going on in there, and not treat people quite so – oh, callous is the wrong word, and cold is the wrong word, but actually take some time to get to know people. Go back to a bit of old dating. That beautiful flirtation that used to happen in bars where someone catches your eye, and you spend about five minutes pretending not to catch theirs, and just looking at every part of the room apart of them.

Then you think, “Right, I’ll have a go,” and hopeful that you’ll get that quick eye contact back again, and then, “No, I’m not looking, not looking.” And then it might be a little bit longer, might a little bit of a hint of a smile, maybe the raise of a glass even, and that’s when you know you’re in. And that beautiful dance of dating that happened in bars doesn’t happen anymore, and that’s such a shame because you’re just judging people by statistics. It’s like the old Victoria Wood sketch about Hellmann’s mayonnaise. “Now are you happy with your wash?” You feel like you’re just filling in a checklist, and you get to that survey and go, “Oh no, sorry.” “Oh, if you’re five foot six, no, sorry.” But that five foot six might be the person that makes you happy for the rest of your life.

Rosie:  Yes. Quite. Yes.

Ian:      It’s quite bizarre. And so I miss the very personal – you know, when you’re sharing the same air, sharing the same space as people. And the fact that the venues have gone one by one by one by one is really sad. And I worry that the young people who think that they might have to behave a certain way, that they might have to go into town and into Compton Street, and go to G-A-Y, and have to wear a crop top, and have to have a belly button ring, but “I’ve got to be like this,” because I look around and there are so many people here, and “Oh, I’ve got to look like them,” when in a smaller venue you didn’t have to do that, it was much less pressured. So I worry. [Laughs] I worry. [Laughs]

Rosie:  And I wonder if there’s a generation thing as well. You know, I mean because partly what’s coming across to me is a slightly beleaguered older generation feeling that our venues have gone, our pronouns are all in question –

Ian:      Hmm. Sometimes bad grammar.

Rosie:  [Laughs] Sometimes there are apostrophes in all the wrong places.

Ian:      [Laughs]

Rosie:  Plurals and singles. And you know, “Where’s my place now?” Do you feel that?

Ian:      Ooh, I’ve always felt like an outsider, always. And even when I was really at the heart of the gay cabaret scene I always felt like I was slightly outside of it. You know, because Katrina was the front woman, loud, blah-blah-blah-blah, and I was this the piano player, and so people inevitably talked to her. Maybe about me, sometimes, because I used to drive her up the creek. She’d say, “I’m not his dating agency.” [Laughs] But I’ve always felt that I was just slightly outside of things. And that might be choice; maybe I’ve chosen that as well.

I think sometimes I prefer looking and observing rather than being right at the heart of it. I’m going to plug now; it’s why I called my book A Marvellous Party because I felt that I’d been invited to this marvellous party where all of my heroes – everyone that I looked up to and idolised since year dot – were in the same room and I got to meet them. I got to meet … But it wasn’t about me. It’s almost like I was standing at the edge of the party going, “Wow, aren’t I lucky to be here?” As opposed to the person swinging off the chandelier or dancing on the table, I’ve never wanted that. But as I age, I am quite content to still be an outsider.

What I object to is being made to feel like an outsider by a community that I’ve battled really hard for. Because over lockdown I had no excuse but to record an album of original songs – loved it – called Old Boyfriends. Very specific songs about old boyfriends. A lot of them very funny, some of them bit more poignant. Composed it, recorded it, released it, everything. Got some lovely gigs above The Stag Theatre Bar which now is permanently closed. You know, our one LGBT specific theatre space in London has had to close its doors.

But all these venues who say, “We are all about inclusivity, we are all about celebrating diversity,” not when you are 60, you write your own songs, you perform at the piano, and you do them in trousers. Not a hope in hell. No one will give me a gig. If I was doing it in a dress and singing all that jazz, like they all do, I’d get a gig. But it’s just very interesting. Whether it’s ageism, whether it’s the fact that I wear trousers, whether it’s original material, I don’t know. But not offered a gig, even with my history, and that’s interesting. When you are made to feel that you don’t belong by your own community that’s tough.

And I do like seeing theatre. I saw a play recently called Riot Act, Alexis Gregory, verbatim theatre, three characters – one an original Stonewall Bar survivor, one drag queen probably in his, say, Seventies, Eighties, and one an actor activist – and all giving their perspective of standing up and making a stand. And one of the characters is just saying, “You young people, if you see an older person in a bar, go up and talk to them. Find out where you came from. Find out your history. Because they did a lot of marching and a lot of shouting and a lot of demonstrating, and put up with a lot to enable you to have the freedoms that you enjoy which you probably still moan about and say you haven’t got enough.”

But if you can walk through the streets of London in a miniskirt, a lot of people did a lot of work to do that, so go up and talk to them. Don’t just leave us sitting in a corner, thinking, “Oh, there’s flies buzzing around their head.” [Laughs].

Rosie:  Yes, and I think that goes to the whole topic of that intergenerational connection and conversation, and where can you have that.

Ian:      And I don’t know. I don’t. And when bars and communal places go, you don’t go there. I mean it is interesting at The George, there is a real mixture of ages that go in there. And it’s a very respectful bar The George and Dragon, and that’s all down to the governor. And the fact that cabaret still goes on. I think cabaret, bizarrely enough, is such an inclusive thing, you know, encouraging people. I think it was Joyce Grenfell, who I adore – adore her – she said that when she used to sing in wounded troops hospitals when she was – during the wartime, and she said that “what people really want in times of trouble is to sing together, quietly.”

You know, if they’re lying in the bed, you know, it’s why We’ll Meet Again is such a prominent song. It’s not vocally taxing, it’s not Roll Out the Barrel, it’s this very gentle melody. And sometimes when I see the drag queens in bars singing a song that everybody knows, and see people singing along, it’s such a beautiful thing. And more of it. But when these places disappear, that feeling of, “Oh, we’re all singing together,” goes, and I’m singing next to somebody who doesn’t know all the words, but I only know the chorus. “Wow. You know more than I do. You’re older than I do. How’d you do?” You know, have a chat. Have a chat. So important. So important.

But we’ve got reach out our hands to people. And vice versa. But, again, I was so lucky in schools. I spent my day – [Laughs] I know some people might think this as purgatory – with teenagers, [laughs] you know, with all their stuff. And they were always – they could ask me any question that they liked. They had an out gay teacher; they could ask me anything. I remember this one lad in Year Nine asked me quite a personal question and I answered him. And he went, “You’re not embarrassed at all, are you?” I went, “No,” because I haven’t been embarrassed since I was 10.

I felt sorry for the people who weren’t like me in a way because I’m going to have way more fun than you. [Laughs] Thank you, David Bowie, who pointed out that screen and said, “If you are an outsider come and join my gang because we are going to have so much fun.” We are going to have so much fun, and thus we did. But yes, I will always have this desire within me to let people gently know what they don’t and maybe they should.

I love going into prisons and reading bits from my book to a book club of prisoners in Thameside Prison. It’s great, but you ask them about their heroes; “Who’s influenced you?” “Who would you like to have dinner with?” “Who would you look up to and think, “wow, I’d really like to meet you?”” and then you read. And it is just one of the most rewarding things when you go into a space where a lot of people wouldn’t go and think, “Oh no, they’re going to get to me, they’re going to be horrible to me,” and they’re not. Because we all want to learn about people, and so we should, but in bars, in clubs, you got that opportunity.

If you’re standing next to somebody, ordering a drink, you might spark up a conversation and – shock horror – make a new friend that lasts, that lasts your life. And again, that’s another legacy that will be lost by bars going. I worry about longstanding life-enhancing friendships that were forged in bars. I bumped into my favourite barmaid from the Queen’s Arms the other day, Zara. She’s with a girlfriend now, they’ve got a baby together. We will be buddies till the day we drop, but if it hadn’t been for the Queen’s Arms I never would’ve met Zara. Never. I never would’ve met her beautiful son.

And you know, she shouts at me now, and she calls – because we used to joke about having a baby together; I was sperm, she was womb. I’d walk in, “Hello sperm,” “Hi womb.” [Laughs] The baby’s going to have fab hair, she’s got these fabulous ringlets that used to come down to her [unintelligible 00:57:29]. [Laughs] But now she has got a baby, you know, and so the other day, walking home to where I live, what do I hear from the other side of the road, “Oi, sperm.” [Laughs] I do hope some granny overheard it and went, “What? Where?” [Laughs]

But these friendships that were formed – and talk about the Queen’s Arms, when Joe Thompson died – and it’s damned near an anniversary that he passed away – and that turnout at his funeral filled the entire church in Hither Green. You know, both floors of Hither Green and it was standing only. And then there was a wake drink in the Rose and Crown in Greenwich. And it is wonderful seeing people that you hadn’t seen for decades, because once that bar closed, like any bar closes, people dissipate because it was the one place that people used to come together.

It’s like when The Cheers bar closed, where did those people go? And then suddenly we’re all in the same room again, and we’re greyer, and we’re bigger, but you look in the eyes and the eyes do not change. The eyes never age. And to see these people again, under such sad circumstances. But he pretty much individually created that beautiful space where people could meet and make friends for life, and that’s the loss of … If bars disappear where do people go? We lose our alternative living room.

Rosie:  Wonderful. A sad point to end on I think. [Laughs]

Ian:      [Laughs] I think I should make a joke now. [Laughs] [unintelligible 00:59:14] a filthy gag.

Rosie:  Because I think for completeness, you did mention your book, so do you want to just say a few words about it?

Ian:      Oh, I had to.

Rosie:  What it was, what it’s called and everything.

Ian:      My publisher [laughs] will never forgive me if I …

Rosie:  Yes, quite.

Ian:      I’d left teaching, I’d lost my brother under the worst circumstances, I was completely flat-lined. I love my job, and I just didn’t know what I was going to do next. And a week after I finished teaching, Cilla Black died, and I just – and I’d been with her six weeks previously at Paul O’Grady’s 60th birthday party. And it was the second time I’d been in the presence of showbiz royalty. And so I just wrote this thing about what it was like playing the piano in front of Cilla Black because she’s seen everything. And when you’re looked at by Cilla Black you know you were looked at. And people responded to it, and they said, “Oh, that’s really good. That made me laugh, made me cry, made me think.”

And I thought, “I’ve met a lot of famous people. Let’s just write. Every Saturday let’s write a ticklish remembrance of meeting somebody famous.” But I realised I was writing about my heroes. I was writing about meeting Donny Osmond, meeting David Bowie, meeting Quentin Crisp, Tom Robinson, Armistead Maupin, George Michael, Boy George. Yes, I know, it’s bonkers. And all these people who, in my little outsider land, had just – what I call – thrown down the trail of breadcrumbs. You know, when you’re lost and someone says, “OK, you’re lost, come this way. Come this way. I’ll guide you out the woods.”

And so each chapter was, you know, “The day I met Quentin Crisp,” “The day I met Boy George,” “The day I met … ” blah-blah-blah. And I only realised about three-quarters of the way through that I was writing a book, and also I was writing – because the centrepiece is about the Nineties and working on the gay cabaret circuit, and realising that I was writing a period of our history that could be lost if it wasn’t written down, because so many people who should have written their stories didn’t. They died, or just never found the time or the wherewithal.

And so I wrote what I call a 320 page thank you letter to my community, to my heroes, called a Marvellous Party. And it’s about how, again, we can’t get through this life on our own. We are not strong enough; we need people, whether they be friends, whether they be celebrities, to help us along the way. We can’t do it by ourselves. And I’m so gratef- – and to have the opportunity to say to these people whose records I’d heard, whose books I read, “You changed/saved my life. You gave me a clue how to survive public school, how to survive my parents’ disapproval, how to become better at my job, how to become a better teacher, how to become a better communicator.”

You know, we are permanently in a classroom through life, I think. We are reading, we’re listening, we’re seeing, looking at art that goes, “Wow, that’s a life altering thing.” And I never intended to write a book, but I’m jolly pleased that I did. And my favourite [of you? 01:02:45] – and I will finish with this line from a fellow drag queen of the cabaret circuit, the wonderful Miss Millie Mop who looked like seven foot of Marge Simpson in a blonde beehive – and he said, “You’ve written down what the rest of us were too drunk and drug-fucked to remember,” [laughs] which is the best review ever. [Laughs]

Rosie:  Excellent. Well, we can end on that.

Ian:      We shall.

Rosie:  [Laughs]

Ian:      I gabble away.

Rosie:  Wonderful. And I don’t know if I caught this on tape, I don’t think you did actually – talking about being drunk and drug-fucked – and you, as a performer, were seeing this sober.

Ian:      Completely.

Rosie:  Yes.

Ian:      Yes, we just didn’t drink on stage. I just couldn’t have done my job as well as I wanted to if I’d been remotely sozzled. So, yes, I was taking it all in. I’ve seen people at their best and their worst. [Laughs] But of course I don’t remind them – much. [Laughs]

Rosie:  Excellent. Well, Ian, you’ve been an absolute star.

Ian:      I’ve loved every minute. [Laughs]

Rosie:  Well, I’ve loved every minute. Thank you. Really. Wonderful.

Ian:      My pleasure.

Rosie:  Thank you so much. So unless you have anything else that you’re burning to say.

Ian:      [Laughs] Love each other, just love each other. Please, please, please love each other.

Rosie:  Love each other. Get that, Goldsmith Archive. OK, I’ll press stop.

[End of recorded material at 01:04:08]

 

(W17)

If for any reason you wish to withdraw your name or memory, contact us at engage@gold.ac.uk

An oral history collected by Paul Green as part of the In Living Memory project, Where to, now the sequins have gone?

In the interview, Richard discusses his memories and experiences of the lost gay bars of Lewisham that thrived from 1970s-90s.

Transcript

Rosie (interviewer): The day, today’s the 8th September, and this is an interview with Nick. Nick, can you tell me your full name and spell it. Spell your surname.

Richard (interviewee): It’s actually Rick. Rick Stableford, R-I-C-K, and Stableford is S-T-A-B-L-E-F-O-R-D.

Rosie: Rick.

Speaker 3: Thank you. [Laughs].

Rosie: Sorry about that.

Speaker 3: Start with what’s your name.

Rosie: My name’s Rosie Oliver, and this is for the Bijou Stories: Where To, Now The Sequins Have Gone? exhibition and the archive at Goldsmith. So I’m going to really train the mic on Rick.

Speaker 3: [Laughs].

Rosie: And, Rick, if you could just introduce yourself, and what brought you to the show today?

Richard: Oh, right, so yes, I’ve lived in Lewisham for about 40-odd years and seen many changes. And a flyer was given out for the Drag Race, and that’s where I first heard about it, and so I came. So, yes, I investigated and found out. I literally only live just up the road, so I came down to have a look around, and also to volunteer because I think it’s good to give something back to Lewisham, isn’t it, you know.

Rosie: Yes. And obviously you have some memories of the gay venues in Lewisham, and I wondered if you would share some of those. I mean which one was the one that you’d go to most often?

Richard: Oh, I think one of my favourite memories was when I first came to Lewisham there was a group called the Gay Men’s Drama Class which was an adult education class run by [ILEA? 00:01:45] in the London Education. And I got to make friends here, and through that class, and we used to just scream about, you know what I mean, it was so much fun. And I remember there was a gay disco at The Albany, and the guy who ran the class also set up that disco. And one day he – I don’t know how, we all went round his flat, and we all dragged up [laughs] in the most sort of charity shop drag. It wasn’t particularly good; it was just like slung together drag. And we all put makeup on each other and things like that.

And [laughs] like there was about five or – no, it was probably about 10 of us in all, and we just paraded up Deptford High Street in drag in the late afternoon, walking up. And I just remember it as a really happy moment thinking, yes, “We’re here, we’re queer,” or whatever, so walking to this disco.

Rosie: Do you remember the reactions you were getting from people in Deptford High Street?

Richard: I don’t think I really looked for many reactions. I avoided eye contact I think. I can’t remember, we were just supporting each other and having a laugh with each other really, you know what I mean. People got out of the way, [laughs] I remember that. We were a group walking up, and that’s one of my – probably – you know, it kind of I felt I have arrived in Lewisham kind of feeling, you know what I mean. It was it was good, yes.

Rosie: And when was that roughly?

Richard: Oh, it’d be about ‘88-ish. Around there. ‘88? Yes, it would be ‘88 I think, or ’87. ‘87, ‘88, that kind of time. Yes. Yes.

Rosie: Excellent. So did you go to any of the pubs either with them or with other people?

Richard: Yes. Yes, I went to lots of pubs. It was like, yes, I went to all of them really. It’s like, yes, I’ve seen them all come and go over the years. It’s like even the ones that only lasted a month, it is like, yes, I went to all of them. Some I preferred more than others, but some stayed later – stayed open more than others, so they – [laughs] I went to those as well. So it’s like, yes, depends on whether they’re selling alcohol really. [Laughs]

Rosie: OK, so can we run through them? Which one do you want to start with?

Richard: Oh, well, in Lewisham of course there’s The Castle, Stonewall, 286 or whatever it’s called, 186. Was it 186 or 286?

Rosie: 286.

Richard: 286, that’s it. The Castle, The Queen’s Arms. Oh, there’s The Phoenix of course, and what other ones were … There’s ones in Catford as well that have come and gone. And there used to be a nightclub on Forest Hill, wasn’t there, for a while. And yes, they’ve all come and gone, but I think probably it’s The Castle that was the one that I loved, you know what I mean. Yes, it was a good local feeling there, you know.

Rosie: OK, so I never went to The Castle. Paint a picture for me as to what it was like.

Richard: Yes, as you may know, it was straight at the front and gay at the back, and so you had to walk past the pool tables and run the gauntlet really. [Laughs] To think, “Oh my God, I’ve got to be with my people in the back.” And in the back I remember it as curtains you walk through, I think, but I could be wrong. I think maybe they came a bit later, maybe. And at the back it was – yes, it was a disco or – and it was just people sat around on tables, smoking in those days. And yes, smoking drugs even, you know what I mean. It was like, yes, it was a very relaxed atmosphere, and yes, and people just got on, it was good fun, although there were fights. [Laughs]

And the fights, there was always a fight, and nearly every other night [laughs] something – it was like – and, yes, if someone had probably looked at the wrong person, or whatever, over the time and it would be like some slappy fight going on. Yes, it was usually over as soon as it started, you know what I mean. It wasn’t huge fights, but it’d be like a couple of broken glasses, and you’d think, “OK, we’ll all move down this end of the [laughs] bar,” you know. But that gave it an edge which made it exciting, you know. Yes, I liked it.

Yes. The Ship and Whale as well. You remember The Ship and Whale as well? That was a gay pub for a while, yes.

Rosie: Where was The Ship and Whale?

Richard: That was in Rotherhithe. Yes, yes, that a fun pub. Yes, I used to know – I went out with the barman there. And also Goldsmiths Tavern. I always remember going to Goldsmiths Tavern actually. First time I went there I was [laughs] – there was this – I think it’s the first time I saw a male stripper in London, [laughs] and I’m like … And I was chatting to my mate, we were on the bench chatting away, and I wasn’t really – the stripper was taking ages taking his clothes off, so you got bored. You think, “Oh, come on, get to the exciting bit.” So I was chatting away to him, [laughs] and then the next thing I knew there was a foot on either side of me, [laughs] and this package slapping against my face. [Laughs] I was saying, “What do I do? What do I do?” It was very funny. It was very funny, you know.

Rosie: Is that tea-bagging?

Richard: No, it wasn’t tea-bagging, he still had a leather thong on. It was the leather thong that was slapping against my face. I was thinking it’s very funny.

Rosie: OK, where else was … Did you go to The Queen’s Arms?

Richard: Oh, yes, The Queen’s Arms was literally my local. I lived – well, I still do live about two minutes from it, and I used to treat it as my front room, basically. [Laughs] I always remember during one particularly bad splitting up with a boyfriend scenario I used to go there after work and drink, [laughs] have a drink, and I couldn’t be bothered to go home. And I used to drink till about 11 o’clock at night [laughs] and get really drunk. And yes, and I’d go home, fall asleep, wake up in the morning with a hangover, and Cinders – do you remember Cinders? Yes, you would. Cinders used to phone me up and say, “You left your work bag here again,” [laughs]. So I used to have to pick my work bag up, going back to work, [laughs], go to work, come back, and do it all over again the next night really. [Laughs].

Rosie: Now was Cinders – because I thought Cinders was barman at The Castle, but was he? You said you left your bag here. Was he the barman at The Queen’s Arms as well?

Richard: Yes, yes, he did The Queen’s Arms. He was a barman at many. There was also a very short-lived gay pub up near – you know where the BP garage is, it’s up around the back there. I can’t remember what it was called, it was very short-lived. He was a barman there as well. But I was actually – when I first came to Lewisham he was my neighbour, just by chance, you know, just coincidentally. And I was working as a teacher at the time, and I used to come home really tired, really – you know, it was hard work. And he’d always shout, “Rick,” [laughs] whenever I walked – and he just cheered me up every time. You’d kind of think, “Oh, I am home,” you know.

Especially in those days it was Clause 28 and all that stuff, and you felt bit oppressed really, you know what I mean. And so it was nice just having a camp gay welcome when you walked past his flat. Yes, it was nice.

Rosie: Yes, because I’ve heard someone else talk about him shouting out from the window above the – was it the Admiral Duncan up in Compton Street?

Richard: Yes, yes.

Rosie: Yes. So I just like this idea of this projected voice. [Laughs]

Richard: Yes, so he had a very loud projected voice, yes, he was always welcoming. And yes, he used to do champagne breakfasts before Gay Pride. And because he was my neighbour he used to always pop down and have a bucks fizz or something, you know what I mean, and wish everyone a happy Pride before trolling up to London or Brighton, wherever it was.

Rosie: And tell me about the Roebuck.

Richard: Ooh [laughs] that was a seedy place, really. Yes, it smelt. The first thing that got you was the smell. It smelt like your worst public convenience really. [Laughs] And it had the more rent boy side to it, you know what I mean. It was very Eighties in décor, it was all pink and greys. But towards – I think it closed, what, about 10 years ago maybe, or maybe a bit longer. Anyway it went to be The Phoenix, and closed, and it still had the same décor, you know, like that piney pinky-grey stuff, and it really got grimy and horrible.

The great thing about it though was downstairs was a disco and it would stay open until four o’clock in the morning, you know. And so, yes, when all other pubs have failed you can always go there for a last – a late night drink, you know. And I remember [laughs] taking my – we had a work’s night out, you know me with my straight colleagues. This was when I wasn’t a teacher, I had another job, and I took all my work colleagues there because it’s like, “Yes, let’s go for another drink. Yes.” And they all loved it, we had a great time there, it was a fun night. It was their introduction to the Lewisham gay [laughs] scene was The Roebuck.

But the last time I ever went there, I went there with a mate of mine and you knew it was on its last legs a bit because the – like we were playing pool, me and my mate, and the landlord came up to us and said, “Oh, we’ve got your membership cards.” And we’re thinking, “Hey, what membership cards?” You know, we never applied for it or anything. And he gave us two random membership cards for these two people that we’d never heard of, but I suppose – but it apparently let us in whenever we wanted, or let us in without paying admission or something, you know what I mean. And you knew that that was the last, you know, because why would they give us this? I think they were really desperate.

Yes, yes, it was a shame it was shut down because it was a bit of an institution, but a sleazy one really. A smelly one really. I just remember the smell was – yes, you didn’t want to use the toilets there. [Laughs]

Rosie: Can you tell me about a big night out where you’re going from one place to the next in Lewisham?

Richard: Oh yes.

Rosie: Did you have those?

Richard: Oh big time, yes.

Rosie: And tell me about the sequence and what would you be doing at each different place?

Richard: All right, yes, well it’s like the big night out. It was great because you used to get the bus to Greenwich –

Rosie: From?

Richard: – from Lewisham. Yes, get the bus to Greenwich. You’d start off at The Rose and Crown or The Gloucester. It was The Powder Monkey as well there, wasn’t there, for a short time. I never really liked The Powder Monkey; it wasn’t my scene. But you used to do the trolling between The Rose and Crown and The Gloucester, and then go to – oh, what’s that one? Oh the one on Blackheath Hill. George and Dragon. Yes. Sorry. [Laughs] And see the drag act there; that would be about 10, 11-ish. And then from there go on to either The Phoenix or Stonewall which would be open till three or four in the morning, you know what I mean.

Rosie: Stonewall was what became of The –

Richard: – Castle.

Rosie: Castle.

Richard: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2: [unintelligible 00:14:27].

Richard: Yes, Stonewall became The Cas- – The Castle became Stonewall, yes. Yes, so, yes, it would be like a – you know, the chatty social bit of the evening would be at The Rose and Crown, The Gloucester, and that was a great time because you’d troll between the two pubs. They’re literally only 50 yards apart, aren’t they, and so you’d see everyone in one and, “Oh, I’ll see you in a bit,” and you’d see them in the other one. I tell you it’s almost like a soap opera; same people but in different combinations in different pubs, you know. And then you’d see a bit of show at The George and Dragon, and then a bit of a boogie at Castle Stonewall sort of thing. It was Stonewalls really in those days, yes, and that was a big night. That was kind of fun.

Oh, and end up at The Cast- – you know, if you really wanted a big night, end up at The Queen’s Arms because there would be a lock-in there, you know. I remember when The Queen’s Arms opened, it was like [laughs] we had a march from Stonewalls to The Queen’s Arms. Because they were both owned by Josie, weren’t they? [Laughs]. And we actually had the Gay Pride march and a great – you know, a banner and things, and it was literally just up the road. [Laughs] But they wouldn’t stop the roads for us.

Even though we had a police presence we had to walk on the path. And it was probably about 50 of us or so just walking up, and then we got there, and of course I think Cinders was working in the bar, and suddenly 50 people arrived all wanting a drink and thinking, “Yes.”  It was a really small bar, and it took a bit of time to get served, you know.

Rosie: Yes, someone mentioned how you might spill out into the garden or the street and …

Richard: What, at The Queen’s Arms?

Rosie: At The Queen’s Arms, yes.

Richard: Yes, yes, yes.

Rosie: And there were chains and trip hazards and all sorts.

Richard: Yes.

Rosie: Do you have any memories of that?

Richard: Yes. Yes, there was that. I always remember the day after the Admiral Duncan bombing, yes of course everyone in Lewisham was worried about Cinders. And he was actually in The Queen’s Arms the next night, and he had a few bruises and cuts on him. And I remember chatting to him and he said, “Yes, I’m fine.” He was all right which was good, because the first person you think of in these – it’s a bit like with the Admiral Duncan thing, he was a bit – you know, he was the landlord there, so he probably was the one that was the last person to leave or something, so it was a bit worrying.

But yes, it was great to see him in there. I just remember him sitting outside having a fag and being quite cool about it, really, you know what I mean. Not too upset, you know what I mean. It’s like well that’s what it appeared to me anyway.

Rosie: One of the things that Paul has been interested in exploring with people, I mean from his own experience really, is how the communities were built around the pubs and how everyone would support each other in difficult times. Whether that was the Admiral Duncan situation, or obviously HIV/AIDS. Was that something that you felt was important?

Richard: Yes, when I first came to Lewisham I felt it. I was new to London, new to the gay scene as such, and the London gay scene, yes, it was … As I say, you had the Gay Men’s Drama Group and things like that, it was really useful. And going to Out Dance, or If, as it became, in The Albany was – it was a great club. [Laughs] There was these – I can’t remember his name. I can’t even remember, it’s like their names. Anyway, it was these three gay guys who would dance and almost – I think it was just pre-Vogue days, you know what I mean, but they knew all the Madonna dances.

And so they’d get up and do the Madonna dances. And Oscar who ran the club, you know, they’d get people dancing in a way, you know what I mean. They’d break the dance sides, and I know they – [laughs] And Oscar actually used to let them in free because they – but they took it incredibly seriously actually with the dancers. [Laughs]. You know, “Excuse me. Excuse me,” you know, and get to the bar. “We’re the dancers, we need a drink now, sorry.” [Laughs]. And it was just all really fun. Yes, it was a fun night out.

And yes, with HIV. I’m trying to think about HIV and AIDS though. Yes, there was obviously lots of – you know the Metro Centre in Greenwich was a big plus. And also The Positive Place in Deptford was set up. I don’t know how true this is, but what I heard which I think is quite interesting, is – because I heard it from somebody who was involved in setting up The Positive Place. And the reason it was set up was because The Lighthouse was so far away, you know, and you may as well go to Brighton or something. To get to West London would take an hour and a half, so to have somewhere local – and it was a great idea.

And they got funding from Greenwich, Southwark, Lewisham to help fund this thing because obviously people from all those boroughs would use it. But one borough wouldn’t give any funding because they didn’t have people with HIV and AIDS in it, and that was [laughs] Bromley. They would not. And this is how rumour had it anyway. And you do hear quite anti-gay things coming from Bromley, like when they tried to set up a gay pub there was a petition against it. And also about the Bromley Court Hotel, about how they wouldn’t have people – they wouldn’t do civil partnerships there even though they were licensed. And Bromley Council said, “Yes, that’s all right, you can do that,” even though technically they were lic- – you know, they got the license from the council, you know.

But yes, so I know friends who used – and, yes, I went there for a couple of social dos and things at The Positive Place, and it was a really useful space for people with HIV and AIDS. It was, yes, very, very useful. I think it’s when the Metro Centre started, was it, at The Positive Place? Maybe. Maybe, I’m not sure. I think they were involved in it anyway.

Rosie: Can you shed on why and when the various bars and pubs closed?

Richard: Why and when, hmm. Oh, well, yes, there were ones that just lasted overnight. There were fly by night pubs that were gay, as particularly as pubs generally closed, you know what I mean. They still are, aren’t they, you know what I mean, but sometimes a pub in its last dying days, if you like, would have a gay night just to see – to get people in, you know. But the main pubs, obviously The George and Dragon is still going strong. Yay. But The Phoenix shut about – I think about 10 years ago with all that new development in Lewisham, you know, all the new – well, it was all part of that I think.

And Stonewall’s probably – no, Stonewall’s – I think the last time I went to Stonewalls was actually [laughs] around the Olympic time, 2012, and they did a breakfast. Because a friend of mine, he actually managed to hold the torch. They had a relay race to – you know, the Olympic torch came through Lewisham, and he did it for his charity. And so we all went and supported him, and then Stonewall said they would – or I think it was 286 then – do a breakfast. [Laughs] It was tinned mushrooms. [Laughs] I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but [laughs] yes, you know, [laughs] it’s like – yes. Yes, I can’t eat them. I’ve never eaten tinned mushrooms since. I don’t think I – you know what it’s like. It’s not something you can – you know, they’re not –

Rosie: It’s something that shouldn’t even be tried.

Richard: Yes, exactly. [Laughs] Yes. Exactly, yes, yes. And they tried, do you know what I mean, but I think that was one of the last times I went there. Yes, that was early, sort of 10 o’clock in the morning having breakfast. So they tried to put it on, you know.

Rosie: Yes, so did you get the sense that it was on its last legs as a venue?

Richard: Yes, I think the tinned mushrooms [laughs] made you feel that. “Yes, I don’t really want to come back.” Oh no, I think I went there a couple of times afterwards and did some [laughs] drunken karaoke with a mate of mine. And I remember we sang, I Know Him So Well. [Laughs] And I know it must’ve been on its last legs because I would only do karaoke in an empty pub, [laughs] you know what I mean. I wouldn’t let Joe Public suffer my dulcet tones, you know [laughs] what I mean.

Rosie: So we’ve got The Phoenix which was The Roebuck and other things closes, as you recall, as a result of all the redevelopment in Greenwich.

Richard: I think so. I think so.

Rosie: Yes. And then you’ve got The Castle which becomes 286, and Stonewalls, which is closing around the time of the Olympics.

Richard: Yes. Yes.

Rosie: What about The Queen’s Arms? Would you remember when that closed?

Richard: That closed just before I think. That closed before, I think it did, probably about – oh yes, they had a … Yes, that closed probably about two years before that, maybe 2010, something around that time, because it’s now flats isn’t it. So yes, if those walls could talk. [Laughs]

Rosie: And why do you think all these venues folded?

Richard: I think it’s too far. I think the rise of the gay app, there’s that side. And also the general – you know, people – generally pubs are closing, aren’t they, you know what I mean, it’s straight and gay, you know, so I think there’s that side as well. It’s a shame because they were of the time, they were fun, there was a community spirit, you know. And it’s great that this archive is recording those times for – because it was a fun party time really.

I think that anything – you know, that it seems to be less of a social thing now, it’s all people – you know, people meet other guys on the gay apps, and so, you know what I mean, and there’s less fun getting together stuff, you know what I mean, and such.

Rosie: I mean where would you look for that? In Lewisham?

Richard: [Laughs] Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I think there’s things like this which hopefully will take off. And I think there are certain places, like there’s now The Fox and Firkin I go to, and that’s very gay friendly. It always was, as I was saying to Paul, it was like when you got kicked out of Stonewalls by Josie you went to The Fox and Firkin. Or if you had an argument with Josie you went to The Fox and Firkin and you had your own little table. There was contingency tables there of people that were the ex- – or who had enough of the landlord there and so they went to The Fox and Firkin. And so it was always gay friendly. You could always kiss your partner there and hold hands or whatever, so yes, I felt it was fairly inclusive.

And they have queer markets now and things like that there, and gay friendly nights there now and things, so – and it’s quite a social do, so there’s something there. But they also have very straight nights as well, but so you have to pick and choose a bit.

Rosie: No, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that The Fox and Firkin stepped in [laughs] to fill that role.

Richard: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It was always there a bit, you know what I mean, it was always there. It was always you went to The Fox and Firkin, and if you really had – you know, because there’d be gay people there. It’s something that you kind of knew through the years, you know. Yes, it was fun.

Oh, there’s the other gay – I forgot to talk about the Dover Castle and the – and what was that other pub – and the Goldsmiths Tavern, and – oh, this is going back some – and the – what was it? What was the one on the corner called that’s now a noodle house? Oh, I’d like to call it The Phoenix but I’m not sure.

Rosie: So let’s start with the Dover Castle and where that was – is/was.

Richard: Dover Castle was in Deptford, it was on the main street, and that was a fun pub. It was edgy and everything, and it was the one that The Deptford Dykes used to drink there, you know what I mean, and they were a force to be reckoned with, you know what I mean. You didn’t want to argue with them. I was talking to a friend of mine about The Deptford Dykes the other day and he’s like, “Oh wow, yes, I forgot all about them.” And he never lived in Lewisham, but he’d heard of them, you know what I mean.

Rosie: Is this a specific moniker, people called themselves The Deptford Dykes?

Richard: Yes.

Rosie: Or is that what you called the dykes in Deptford?

Richard: No, it’s what they called themselves. Yes, it was like they were hard, you know what I mean. I think it all stemmed from the housing in the [Peats? 00:29:09] Estate, you know how it was hard to let housing, and in the end it was let to lesbian and gay people because they couldn’t – the GLC at the time couldn’t rent them out to anyone really, you know. Yes, which is amazing when you think of it now, it’s beautiful flats on the river. OK, they’re councily but, you know, there’s nothing wrong in that. But yes, The Dover Castle used to be great fun. So I remember seeing drag acts there like Adrella, and yes, maybe even Lily Savage there, I don’t know. I remember seeing Adrella there a few times, and yes, it was a fun time until it exploded.

[Laughs] You know what it’s like, until the pub – do you not know? He’s like, “No.” Yes, it [laughs] – well he woke up, there was an ex- – you know you hear on the news, right, “Explosion in Deptford,” or something, “mind the traffic.” Because it’s on Deptford Broadway, in the A2 as such, and it’s like – [laughs] – and there was a gas explosion. No one was killed, great, you know, but whether it was an insurance job or whatever, because again these pubs did – this was – but this was early on. This was probably mid-Eighties, no, probably mid- – no late Eighties, probably, maybe early Nineties I’d say. And so it’s a brand new building there, and it’s not a gay pub or anything.

Rosie: I mean I’m not sure if Deptford High Street’s … Is that in the Borough of Lewisham or Greenwich? But in any event –

Richard: It is in the Borough of Lewisham, yes.

Rosie: It is in Lewisham, OK, well we need to know more about these Deptford Dykes. Tell me more.

Richard: [Laughs] Oh, I don’t know a lot because I was scared of them as well. [Laughs] It’s like [laughs] “You don’t mess with The Deptford Dykes.” But I think they were motorbike loving dyke people who played pool, and they were very much your butch dyke, if you like, you know what I mean. Yes, you didn’t mess with them, I know that. So I don’t know a lot about them really, but yes, I’m sure, yes, there must be pictures of them and things.

Rosie: But you would go to The Dover Castle, there’d be men there as well. And what was it like?

Richard: Oh, fun. It was just a fun pub, you know. It was just, yes, a fun get drunk pub, you know what it’s like.

Rosie: And what was the other one you mentioned? Oh, yes, Goldsmiths. I think you mentioned the whole striptease, but tell me more about The Goldsmith Tavern.

Richard: Oh, Goldsmith’s Tavern was great, it’s where Vic Reeves started. And yes, so they had cabaret nights as well as fun nights. Yes, it was a nice old pub as well, and you went in the back room for the gay cabaret, as such, with a stripper or a drag queen or whatever. It’s going back some that.

Rosie: So it was basically a sort of mixed/straight pub that had gay nights, gay cabaret.

Richard: Yes, yes, yes, it had something different each night. I think Thursday nights might have been the gay night I think, yes. I think so. But yes, because it had a gay night it meant it was gay friendly on other nights as well which is good. It was fun. And there was 309. Remember 309? That was the gay sauna, that was in the late – that only shut about five years ago maybe or so, you know.

Rosie: Where was that?

Richard: That was opposite The Goldsmith’s Tavern, you know what I mean. I don’t think the two were open at the same time, you know what I mean. The gay sauna was open maybe towards late Nineties I think, probably, for 10 years or so. Yes, so you had all the facilities, you know. You could have a drink then go for a bit of fun down [laughs] the sauna, then go to a drag show, so both [unintelligible 00:33:03].

Rosie: Yes, and I mean not to be incriminating anyone at all, and naming no names, but I think you did mention Hilly Fields earlier.

Richard: [unintelligible 00:33:09].

Rosie: Did she? Yes, tell me about that.

Richard: There was Ladywell Fields. Ladywell Fields.

Rosie: Ladywell Fields?

Richard: Yes, well Hilly Fields as well. Hilly Fields – no, Ladywell Fields was – yes, until they put new lighting in, the bastards, and shut the cottage. That, after being in The Castle/Stonewalls, whatever, especially on summer evenings you used to get a few tins and go down the Ladywell Fields. Or even if you was feeling a bit randy you’d go down there, and yes, it didn’t really matter what the weather really. [Laughs] And, oh, if you picked someone up in The Castle/Stonewall and you couldn’t be bothered to take them home. [Laughs] You know, you’re just [unintelligible 00:33:55], “Hey, there’s a bush round the corner,” [laughs] you know. It’s saves all the having to make coffee in the morning, you know. [Laughs]

Yes, but since then they’ve … It was one – do you know Ladywell Fields? It was like there was two sides to it, the one that was well lit, and the one was not well lit, so you can guess which side was the more adventurous side really. And, yes, but now both sides are well lit, so it is no longer – and also, yes, I think a few trees have been thinned out as such, so it’s not what it was. And also the cottage is closed. But yes, well it’s closed. I think it’s open occasionally, but it’s not what it was. [Laughs]

Rosie: I mean, Rick, you’ve given me so much.

Richard: I’m sorry.

Rosie: No. No, no, no, but there’s no else here is there. Well, no, I’m not saying stop it. So what else? What else have you got? Have you got any stories, specific stories, of nights, evenings when you were in where something particular happened?

Richard: They’re all a bit of a blur because it was so alcoholically driven, really. Yes, I can’t – none kind of – ooh, I don’t know. I don’t know, I’m trying to think. Yes, you want them specifically to Lewisham, don’t you really?

Rosie: Well any of the venues that we’ve talked about?

Richard: Yes. Yes. Ooh, I remember – now this is weird, this is kind of – like when I split up with my boyfriend, and it wasn’t a very – one of my many boyfriends [laughs] – and it was an acrimonious split. We weren’t happy, it wasn’t a happy time. And he got a mate of his – I don’t know if you can use this, but it’s like he got a mate of his to do a strip in the – to be a strip- – he was a stripper – to do a strip in a my local pub, in The Queen’s Arms. Not the Queen’s – The Queen’s – yes, The Queen’s Arms, yes. And it just felt weird that he – because the posters were all done in my boyfriend’s handwriting, you know what I mean, and you think, “Why has he done this?” It was a bit freaky. I don’t know why that came up to mind, but it was a weird night.

Rosie: So how about three – maybe three words, or three thoughts about each of the venues? So three words to describe The Castle.

Richard: The Castle, oh, fun, edgy [laughs] I’d say, and, oh, druggy. [Laughs]. I remember it being a bit druggy in my time. But not hard drugs, soft drugs. Class B – C drugs like cannabis was quite a thing. It’s South London, “Hello?” [laughs] you know what it’s like. So I probably – I hope I don’t get into trouble for that, but yes.

Rosie: But you’ve mentioned no names.

Richard: Yes. Yes.

Rosie: What about The Roebuck? Three words for The Roebuck.

Richard: Oh, [laughs] smelly, [laughs] Eighties, and grimy I’d say.

Rosie: And The Queen’s Arms?

Richard: Oh, local. Oh, yes, kind of – yes, it was just familiar, and it was open all night. [Laughs] Is that one word? [Laughs] Open until you got chucked out by Josie. [Laughs]

Rosie: I’ll allow that. I’ll allow that.

Richard: Yes, I remember knocking on the – you used to go to a pub, and you used to have to knock on the door, and depending on what mood Josie was in he would let you in or not let you in. Or it depends on whether you had an argument with him recently, because he was a bit of a fiery temperament at times, you know.

Rosie: Which ones have we missed? I mean the Goldsmith’s Tavern was …

Richard: That was nice old pub that had strippers and things. Yes, it was a nice pub. But yes, I miss that pub. Yes, and The Dover Castle. We’ve done The Dover Castle haven’t we?

Rosie: No, tell me about it. Give me some words for that then.

Richard: Dover Castle was, yes, scary, [laughs] a little bit with the Deptford Dikes, and the – but great cabaret. Good cabaret.

Rosie: And tell me more about that.

Richard: It would have the major stars like Adrella, yes, and –

Rosie: Lily Savage?

Richard: – Lily – I think Lily Savage. She probably did on her way up, it’s like their thing. And yes, and the strippers. It was always strippers. Oh, the strippers were great in those days; they used to have two strippers on stage at the same time doing what two strippers on stage could do at the same time. Yes, you didn’t want to drink out of those bottles, you know what it’s like. It was outrageous. Yes, you know what it’s like. Yes. Yes. Yes, you can guess what they did. [Laughs] Yes, but they were fun, dark times.

Rosie: Can you paint – ooh –

Richard: Yes, yes, I don’t know if I should say this, but The George and Dragon used to have a naughty night as well, a naughty Sunday I think. Sunday afternoons where it was a naked day. But that pub’s still going so I don’t know whether I should say anything, but –

Rosie: Everything in the archive’s going to be confidential.

Richard: Yes.

Rosie: Yes, yes, yes, but I’m curious about this naked – because presumably this is naked acts or naked punters?

Richard: [over talking – 00:39:55] Punters. The punters would be naked. But yes, the thing is that we all know each other. [Laughs] It’s all like, “Oh hello, [unintelligible 00:40:02] I saw you down the market,” you know what it’s like. It’s like “Oh, who are you going out with now?” that kind of thing. So in terms of anonymous sex it didn’t really exist. I think I only went once, and I’m thinking, “No, it’s all a bit embarrassing because we know each other so well.” [Laughs]

Rosie: You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who’s mentioned The Dover Castle, so can you describe it, like where it was, what it was like as a building, as an interior, and that just kind of stuff?

Richard: It was quite deep as a bar; it had pool tables in it. It was on Deptford Broadway, just up from – you know where The Positive Place is? If you imagine Deptford Broadway, opposite there, that kind of area. It’s a brand new buil- – well, brand new, Eighties building, Nineties building there now.

Rosie: What, was it like an old Victorian pub?

Richard: No, no, it was more I would say Thirties maybe. Architecturally, it wasn’t very interesting, it was like –

Rosie: So you walked through the door.

Richard: You walked through the door, there’d be a pool table with The Deptford Dykes on, and [laughs] she’d go, “Leave them, leave them, they’re happy,” you know what it’s like, “they haven’t had an argument yet,” you know what it’s like. Yes, and then you’d just have a drink and there’d be – and it was one of those bars where the drag queens would be on, and they could walk round and chat to everyone, and get everyone involved and things, you know what I mean. It was fun.

Rosie: Do you remember who the barman or women were, or who ran it?

Richard: You’re going back years and years now. You know what it’s like. Yes, sorry, I can’t.

Rosie: When are we going back?

Richard: I went there from about ‘85 to maybe 1990-91 when it might have been demolished, exploded, wherever. [Laughs]

Rosie: Well, Rick, it’s just been a brilliant interview.

Richard: Oh good.

Rosie: I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Richard: Oh. Oh, brilliant.

Rosie: No, fantastic. Any other thoughts? I mean we can pick this up again.

Richard: I would like to talk about the pantomimes. They were funny, because I love a pantomime. And Rose Garden and some friends of mine –

Rosie: OK, hang on. Because people have mentioned the Rose Garden, but I need you to introduce – say who this person is.

Richard: Oh, Rose Garden is – you know, she’s – oh, I think – I know – well I don’t know Rose Garden personally, but when I was – you know how I mentioned I was a teacher, and I wasn’t a very happy teacher with Clause 28 and all that sort of stuff. And I didn’t want the pupils to find out I was gay because it might’ve been seen as promoting homosexuality or something. And I was a Primary School teacher, the first thing they asked you is, “Have you got a girlfriend?” and all that sort of thing, you know. And so I wasn’t happy.

And I used to go, and Rose Garden used to be a hairdresser. I don’t know what his name is, but you know, Rose Garden. And I used to always walk past, and that was just near Charing Cross station, and that was on my commute to the school that I taught in. And I used to see him, and I always used to think, “Oh, that is a happy person,” you know what I mean. And I think it’s before he did drag, you know what I mean. And I used to think, “Oh, that’s a really happy person. He’s a happy gay hairdresser camping it up in – just having fun in London.” And I was thinking, “I’m in the wrong job here; I’m not happy.” And that was my first introduction to Rose Garden really.

And then I found out he was a drag queen, and he ended up living – well, knowing people in this area. And he – with a couple of friends of mine, as I say – did the local panto at the … It started at The Queen’s Arms. I think they did two ones at The Queen’s Arms. And they were brilliant pantos. I remember he did – oh, it was at the time that Kirsty McCall died, remember, and he did a – and his number was In These Shoes which I think was one of her last hits, you know what I mean. It’s like one of her last records, and yes, it was really moving.

Because she died around Christmas as well. He obviously rehearsed it before knowing that [laughs] she died. And it was a really fun panto because it got people involved, all sorts of people, amateurs as well as other drag queens. And yes, and oh, what’s his name? I can’t remember his name, but yes, Paul knows it. He used to always do Triangle. La la la la la – ting – triangle, you know, that was one of his songs.

Rosie: Oh yes, we’ve interviewed him. Ian.

Richard: Ian?

Rosie: Do I mean Ian?

Richard: No?

Rosie: From thingy and The Girl?

Richard: No, no.

Rosie: Oh no, no, no. Someone else?

Richard: So he was a barman. He was the barman there.

Rosie: Oh, OK.

Richard: He – Mrs – I can never remember his name. He’s one of these people that’s got grey hair, so he always seems a bit older than he actually is, you know what I mean. But yes, yes, he always did Triangle which was always – yes, he was always like, “Yes, triangle, triangle,” even though he was like – it’s kind of fun, you know. And they did two pantos at The Queen’s Arms, and I think they did one at one or two at The Castle/Stonewalls. I think it was Stonewalls in those days, yes. And that was fun.

Rosie: And because I mean people have said – so Rose Garden, am I right in thinking Rose Garden’s thing was that they would dress up as the queen? Or did they do many things?

Richard: Oh no, that’s Pete Morgan. That’s Pete Mor- – do you know Pete Morgan?

Rosie: Oh, OK, so I’m confusing the two. So tell me, who was Rose Garden and what was their shtick, and who was Pete Morgan?

Richard: Oh, Rose Garden’s still going as a drag queen. And yes, he does stuff with – [laughs] one of his – I always remember seeing him at Gay Pride – Brighton Gay Pride before it was as massive as it is now. And he did a number of – I’d like to think it was “Rain.” It was like “Rain on a wedding day,” you know that song, Ironic?  I think it’s that song. And he used to get a water shooter [laughs] and spray it at everyone.

But yes, at Gay Pride Brighton he used to deliberately go for the people from Lewisham. You knew you were in for it. As soon as he started pumping that water shooter thing you’d think, “This is it.” But yes, he’s, he’s from, I think he’s from Northern Ireland, and he’s a lot of fun. You know he did a lot for the gay scene in Lewisham, I think, in terms of he spent time putting this panto together if nothing else. You know, he did that, which was brilliant because really he was the professional in the company that kept it all together really, you know what I mean, which is good.

Rosie: So Rose Garden is doing all kinds of drag professionally.

Richard: And then Pete –

Rosie: Pete Morgan.

Richard – yes, yes, yes, he’s a proper Lewisham drag queen. Yes, I don’t know if he’s still going. I think he is, I don’t know, and he used to just do the Queen, really. But he [laughs] used to do – you know, of course everyone applauds when the queen comes on, you know what I mean. And he’d get out a – he used to say, “I’ve got a speech,” [laughs] and he’d get a – I always remember that, he’d take it out of his handbag, you know, the queen’s handbag, and say, “My speech is two pounds of potato,” [laughs] and it’d be a shopping list. And he’d go, “Oh sorry, wrong one,” you know. So yes, I think he was involved in opening things like when Castle became Stonewalls, or when Stonewalls became 286. I think he was involved in those ceremonial – [laughs] like in a partial ceremonial kind of way.

He does really like the Queen as well when he puts a wig on, that’s the thing, so yes. Yes, his boyfriend used to always hang around as well. His boyfriend had massive tattoos and things. You used to think, you know, when you’d see them, you’d go, “Interesting couple.”

Rosie: Any other thoughts? Reflections?

Richard: Not off the top of my head, no. It’s like I haven’t [unintelligible 00:48:31].

Rosie: I mean one thing is, this is for Lewisham, and we are looking at Lewisham. And do you think that Lewisham was a special case, like had a particularly vibrant scene? Or did you feel it was different? I mean obviously Bromley was a nightmare.

Richard: Yes.

Rosie: But did you feel that Lewisham had an identity?

Richard: Definitely, yes. Yes. It was like it was the first area outside Central London. I mean you could chat to your mates saying, “Shall we have a drink? Shall we just stay local tonight? Or should we go up to London?” And London would be a big night out; it’s like Heaven or whatever. And whereas the locals, it gave you that choice which was … And also you’d get people coming from Abbey Woods and Kent, and people like that coming, and they’d come to Lewisham so that was their big night out which is interesting. So it had a draw there, you know what I mean, I think.

And The Castle was seen as one of the oldest gay pubs in London, I think, if not the old gay pub in London. I think that was one of its selling points is it was an institution, you know. And it’s a shame it’s completely closed now, isn’t it, but there’s nothing. It’s like you can’t even go in there to see the ghosts, you know.

Rosie: I feel that that’s the headline here, “Can’t even go to see the ghosts.”

Richard: Oh right, oh yes. [Laughs]

Rosie: That’s a good soundbite.

Richard: Oh, well maybe. Maybe. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[End of recorded material at 00:50:17]

 

(W16)

If for any reason you wish to withdraw your name or memory, contact us at engage@gold.ac.uk

An oral history collected by Paul Green as part of the In Living Memory project, Where to, now the sequins have gone?

In the interview, Marc discusses his LGBT community activism following the 1999 nail bomb attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho.

Parts of this interview are featured in a podcast produced by the project entitled Where to, now the sequins have gone?

 

Transcript

Paul Green (interviewer 1):                      … is in Mark’s home/office in New Cross, and the purpose of the recording is, it’s for the In Living Memory Programme, A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham, and it’s specifically for the Avant-Gardening Bijou Stories Project, Where to now the Sequins Have Gone? which documents the gay bars and communities that existed in the borough of Lewisham, particularly in the ‘70s to the ‘90s. And this will give rise to some creative projects, which include a podcast, and some of this might make its way into that podcast, so that’s the context. So before we start the interview, could you just introduce yourself? Say, “I’m Mark Healey.” We need that.

Marc (interviewee):  So, my name’s Mark Healey. I’m 52 years old. I’ve lived in this current place since 2007, but I moved to London in 1993. I’ve been out since I was 17 years old, and so that’s over 35 years of LGBT activism, and I’ve done over 31 years of police/community LGBT engagement, working with various offices to try and improve things for the LGBT community.

Rosie (interviewer 2): Fabulous. OK, well, Paul, do you want to start with the questions?

Paul: Yes. I think it’d be great just to start with the organisation you set up following on from the nail bomb attacks, which were targeting the wide diversity of London. And because, like I mentioned to you before previously, I was a friend of Cinders, so I used to – ironically enough, my partner worked really near Brick Lane. I worked in Brixton at the time and used to go to the Admiral Duncan, so all three of the attacks hurt me. It’s like, there’s things that caused concern. So I’m really interested in how you set up the organisation, because I know it was very much a response to the nail bomb attacks. So if you can just explain more about why you started it, how you started it, what you’ve done since you began it, and just freestyle your thoughts on all of that, that would be brilliant.

Marc: OK. I’ll start by setting the scene in the sense of taking a step back. So when I first tried to come out, I made the wrong connections, and I ended up getting abused by a really old man in London. And that put me off for a year, and I was in the closet for another year, and then I came out through the NUS [student? 00:02:27] movement. And it’s through their NUS LGBT campaign that I actually learnt the skills of community engagement and the importance of gay rights, lesbian and gay rights, human rights, and got involved in the activism side of things.

I lived in Reading at the time, so I set up the first lesbian and gay centre, the London [Road? 00:02:47] base. I set up an awareness disco during the times of Section 28 when it was illegal for the council to promote LGBT issues, but I was running a lesbian and gay awareness disco. And it was called that purposely, because they were listing it in the council brochures, so it was technically breaking the law. But it was great, and we got away with that for nine years. And I ran a drop-in group in the back of Reading International Support Centre, which was before the days of safeguarding, was just bringing a local group of young people together, and we used to watch videos, read books, and go on London away days to London, and all sorts of activities. So it was really building the community.

The centre closed down in 1992, and I moved to London to go to the University of North London to study policy studies, and I wanted to learn how to run community centres. It’s also worth saying that, back in 1990 and ‘91, I’d met Ashley Wells, who was one of the fore-founding figures in the Lesbian and Gay Police Association, and then Paul Cahill was one of my early boyfriends, and he became the chair of what became The Gay Police Association. So that had a direct link between me and the work that they were doing. I remember going to Hendon Police College and playing the gay victim role with some of the police officers, to teach them about homophobia and things like that. So moving forward in time, I was working at Selfridges.

My boyfriend was Lee, was working at Comptons, and the bomb went off on Old Compton Street. And Paul was actually the sergeant in charge of Soho, so I knew several of the gay police officers in the Soho area as well. Now, because I grew up in the pub trade and Lee was working in Comptons, I always used to drink at the Admiral Duncan, and get drunk, meet him at the end of work, and we’d go home together, and we had a really lovely relationship. Now, on the night of the Admiral Duncan, I was working late. I was doing a late shift at Selfridges. It was a bank holiday weekend. The bars were all really busy, and we heard that – even in Selfridges, we heard the sound of the explosion.

Now, Selfridges is the type of organisation, it’s been bombed in the past, so they have procedures in place. So they shut down the building and we do a security alert, do bag checks. So we were all stuck in the building, but news travels very quickly, and Selfridges is one of those places that, if something happens, like wildfire it just goes around the whole staff networks, and within a short space of time, I knew that a pub on Old Compton Street had been bombed. My first thoughts were of my partner, Lee. My manager at the time said, “Well, we’ll try and get you out as quickly as we can, but we have to wait until we’ve done the security checks.”

I got out, managed to get in contact with Lee. He was fine. He was a bit shaken up. He’d just been at McDonald’s around the corner, walked into Old Compton Street, half-eating a – biting into a burger, when the bomb went up. He was fine. I then got in contact with Paul and arranged to meet Paul in Soho. So I’m travelling from Selfridges to Soho. Meet him. Now, obviously there’s all the chaos of everything that’s happening, and just as soon as I got close to the site, I met Paul. By that time, there was a police van on Dean Street at the side entrance of St Anne’s Church, and that was used as a control room for the operations.

And I just realised straight away that, actually, it was all too busy, and I just needed to get out of the way, so I went straight home. But obviously, I knew Paul. I knew some of the first gay police officers who were the first to actually go into the Admiral Duncan and start helping people. I knew Cinders. So, there’s a photo of the front of the Admiral Duncan, and a lot of people actually missed one of my friends, who was actually crawling out of the venue. So he was caught up, and he later became a police officer himself.

After the nail bomb attack, I took some time off Selfridges, and I volunteered on the police van for a couple of weeks, just giving out teas and coffees, and chatting, informally chatting to people whilst they were waiting to speak to the – and it was the gay police officers, again, who provided the service in this police information van. And I was just hanging around, not formally, but just informally, just chatting to people and working with them, in a sense. After that in, I think it was just after 2000, Lord Alli, who was the first gay Muslim in the House of Lords, was involved with Paul, with I think it was Richard Stone who was involved in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, in setting up a meeting at the Limelight Nightclub, which is – I’m trying to think of the location.

It’s off Shaftsbury Avenue. It was a very famous venue in the sense that, on Sundays, it was just packed out, and it was a good, fun place to be. But they organised a public meeting where they were setting up a Westminster LGBT Forum, and that’s when the Westminster Forum was formed. And because I knew people, I thought I might as well step forward, and got nominated, and got selected as one of the 12 people involved in that forum. So the forum met for probably – I was actually elected as chair, and chaired for about 3.5 maybe four years, and then I dropped out. And I think at that time, I’d burnt out of doing the gay activism in London that I was doing.

Was doing my own stuff for a few years, and then coming up to the tenth anniversary, I read an article which basically said the anniversaries cause pain and suffering. There’s not the support for the people involved, so therefore we’ve decided that, after the tenth anniversary, there’ll be no more gatherings in Soho, and we’ll play the anniversaries down. And my gut reaction was like, “That’s just awful, because if the anniversaries are causing pain and suffering, people need help. And if people need help then the community needs to stand up and look after those people.”

So it rekindled that real sense of duty that we had to do something. Now, I didn’t want to be confrontational because I knew many of the survivors, and I knew the sensitivities, and the sense of the struggles they had gone through in the sense of coming to terms with what was happening. I’d never actually been to any of the gatherings, because they had a gathering in St Anne’s Gardens. I didn’t go to those, because I’d always – because I wasn’t in the pub at the time, I always felt a bit of an outsider. But I had been to the reopening of the Admiral Duncan when that was done on Old Compton Street.

So I was there, and there were speeches outside the venue. So, I set up a Facebook group, and I called it 17-24-30 because that’s the dates of the three nail bomb attacks on Brixton, Brick Lane, and Soho. And I just thought like 9/11, 7/7, if you say those dates, people know exactly what you’re talking about. But if you said 17-24-30, nobody knew what it was about. Most people would think about the gay bomb, or maybe the Black bomb or the Asian bomb, but weren’t associating the three together. And I just thought it was really important to do something that actually brought all three communities together.

So I set the Facebook group up, and I was just going to provide a space where people could stay in contact, share photos. I thought I could go down to the gardens and take photos of the flowers blooming in spring, so as it was coming into April, there’d be a pleasant reminder of the places where the anniversaries used to take. And, that opportunity just to connect and stay connected. And to my surprise, 2,000 people joined that group within the space of a month, and to me that said, “Yes, we do care. We want to be involved. We want to stay connected, and we support what you’re doing.”

And so, I went to Craig, who was the manager of the Admiral Duncan and said, “Look, Craig, I know you’re ready to step down,” and he’d been carrying the anniversaries for quite some time. He was a very close friend of Cinders, so he had taken it really personally. And I would say he was really struggling with the sense of responsibility of actually keeping something going, but also that need to step away and look after his own mental health and well-being at the same time. He wasn’t too trusting of me to begin with, so I had to build that trust up with him. And I basically said, “Look, if you want to step down, I’m happy to stand up and to keep this going, and I think we’ve got enough support to do this, and do this well.”

So we started planning for the 11th anniversary, and I had a quite a big team of people who were involved, and who were interested in being part of that, but at the same time, I was thinking, “If we’re going to do Soho, we must go to Brixton and Brick Lane.” So I spent some time going down to those two locations, checking out the site. I gave out information to all the local shopkeepers and the businesses, and just said, “Look, this is what I’m doing.” I also did a window campaign, where they could put a sticker up in the window to say the anniversary was happening, and if you needed to report hate crime, there’s the police number, the council number.”

And so I spoke to the local councils, the local police teams, and local people where I could. Brixton and Brick Lane, because nobody died – so Brixton about, I think it was 39 or 49 people were injured. Brick Lane, there were about 13 people injured, and Soho was about 70 or 80 people. But no one died in the first two bomb attacks, and so they had their first anniversary, and then the anniversaries faded out. Whereas Soho, three people were killed, so Nik Moore, John Light, and Andrea Dykes, who was pregnant at the time. And so, I think that’s why those gatherings continued as long as they did. With Brixton and Brick Lane, we settled into a pattern where we would light three candles, and we would give out hate crime information to people, and just talk about what happened, have a moment of silence.

And without fail, every year in Brixton and Brick Lane, people have come up and said, “I was here.” And so, there was a Black woman with her daughter, and she came up and she was, “I was actually pregnant with my daughter at the time that the bomb went off.” And I ended up having this conversation with her daughter about, “And this is what happened,” but trying to put it in child-friendly, appropriate language, which was a little bit challenging at the time. But it was also quite a really beautiful thing to be in that situation to do. There were two gay men who were on Old Compton Street when the Admiral Duncan blew up, and they’d been knocked off their feet and they were scared, and they ran home.

Now, they turned up at the 11th anniversary and spoke to me at the end. And they were in tears, and it was like, “Because we were outside, we never felt we were included, or welcome to come along to the anniversaries. And one of the reasons why the 11th was more outreaching, I think, was because what I realised is, the people in the Soho, that group is getting smaller and smaller every year, so to keep them connected we needed to open the invite so that young people came and got involved and started making those connections, and everybody felt welcome so we could actually build it each year, rather than letting it shrink each year. And that’s what’s happened.

So we’ve kept that, so it’s now, this year is the 23rd anniversary, so it’s the 24th anniversary next April, and we’ve maintained probably about 100 to 150 people who gather in Soho every year. Brixton and Brick Lane are smaller, so we go from anything from three to probably about 40 people in Brick Lane. That was probably the biggest time in Brick Lane. And, kept the relationships with the local councils and the authorities as well, which is really important in a sense, because it has a knock-on effect, in the sense of not just remembering those we lost and those who need our ongoing support.

But also making sure there’s that educational side of actually, well actually, the council and the local police have a job to do to make sure this never happens again, so we need their council leaders to put statements on their websites, to talk the talk and walk the walk, and do the actions that actually remind people, and keep everybody together. And I would say that’s worked pretty well. Now, sadly, in this – and I used to know Cinders, so drinking in the Admiral Duncan, he was such a fun-loving guy.

Even after the nail bomb attack, one of my favourite memories is actually him, second floor window leaning out, just hollering down the street. And he was chatting to somebody literally through mid-air, with a whole audience of Old Compton Street listening, probably. And, that’s the sort of soul he was. He was just outgoing. It’d be “Hi, sweetheart,” or “hi, darling, how’re you doing?” And just a totally welcoming character. So when he was killed, that was an awful, shocking incident, and that was five years later.

Rosie: Can I just pause you there? Just so it all makes sense to people who don’t know, Cinders was the barman in the Admiral Duncan. And was he – what was the impact of the Admiral Duncan attack on him specifically?

Marc: I wasn’t that close to speak on – so I don’t think I’m the right person to speak on his behalf, but from what I’ve heard second-hand from his closer circle of friends was, he was caught, again, between the public face of actually being brave and actually looking after everybody, but also quite tormented by what had happened, because it was such a horrible experience to go through. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to expand beyond that.

Rosie:  No, it’s fine. Just to fill in the gaps in the story there. And he had been the barman in The Castle, which is one of the Lewisham pubs that we’re looking at.

Marc: Yes.

Rosie: Yes, OK, just so people understand how it all connects, yes. And then he was murdered a few years later.

Marc: Yes. So, he was attacked in a so-called happy slapping incident where a group of young teenagers, there was a couple of girls and a couple of boys, had gone round attacking people and filming it, and it was part of a youth craze where people would go round doing this and then share the videos with other people. And he was, I think, one of four attacks that they’d committed. They’d attacked a tramp. There was a woman that was attacked and somebody else. And then finally him. He was hospitalised, and died from the internal – yes, he’d just been so severely beaten, he died from the injuries that he sustained.

When it actually went – and everyone perceived that to be a hate crime attack at the time, but the judge decided that it wasn’t a hate crime attack because of the other attacks that’d happened. It was just the wrong place at the wrong time. But I think even to today people would still perceive it as a hate crime attack. There was a big vigil in St Anne’s – and St Anne’s Gardens has always been that place where people do go. So there was a vigil and about 1,000 people turned up for Cinders in St Anne’s Gardens. And that was quite – I remember standing there with Mark [Hames? 00:18:26], who was the owner of XXL, the big nightclub.

So yes, that was a really horrific experience for the whole community. Jumping back to 2009, which was the 10th anniversary, in that year Ian Baynham was a gay man, 62 years old. He was out and proud. He was just in celebrating a new job, had travelled with his friends to Trafalgar Square, just got off the bus, was walking up past South African House when he was verbally abused by three young people, who happened to be from Croydon. And I know that because I currently work in Croydon doing some anti-hate crime work.

One guy and two girls. Now, they were abusing him homophobically. He challenged that. The guy thumped him once, he hit his head as he went to the floor. Knocked unconscious. The two girls savagely carried on kicking him whilst he was unconscious, and then fled the situation. As an organisation, we heard of what went on and we saw the footage, and so we shared that across our social media as widely as we could to try, with The Manhunter, yes, to catch those people. And luckily, they were caught.

Ian was in a coma for four weeks, and then I got a phone call from one of his friends to say, “Look, Ian has died. We don’t know what to do. What do you suggest?” And I thought, “OK, let me speak … ” Because I attend, with my Soho connections, I attended – Westminster had a police community engagement group that happened once a quarter, and it just so happened that they were having that meeting that week. So I went to that meeting and on the route, I drew a candle. And I just thought, “Why don’t we do a vigil for him?”

Now, that was also, another friend of mine had organised a vigil. There’d been two gay people shot dead in Tel Aviv, in an LGBT community centre, and so there’d been a short vigil for them on the South Bank. And that was attended by about 30 or 40 people, so it was a small event, and that’s what I think inspired me to do the vigil for Ian. I was thinking, “We’ll do some candles, have a moment of silence, get people together and pay our respects.” But it actually snowballed from there. We put it on Facebook, and by the following day 100 people had shared it. Within the next two weeks, 29,000 people shared it around the world.

And when it came to, on the 30th October when we had the vigil in Trafalgar Square, 10,000 people turned up. Now, we had literally two weeks to organise that. We were offered space in the [Coo Bar? 00:21:10] in Soho, by Gary. And so, we met downstairs in the basement. I put a shout out for volunteers, and we literally had 20 people turned up from various sectors of the community. I gave a speech about, “OK, we’ve got a short period of time to organise this. We’ll organise into five or six groups to focus on different aspects.”

Thankfully, people from Pride in London got involved and we had the operations team. So, Trevor and a few other people, who really knew what they were doing when it comes to operations and stuff. So they helped with all the logistics in the sense of, “We need to think about stewarding. We need to think about equipment.” And we were putting through our social media all these shout outs for everything that we needed. And, it just all came together. We raised enough money to cover, to pay for the event, because we had to do security.

We put on a two-hour show, in the sense that the first half was – and we invited people from all the different hate crime strands, so disability, faith, gender identity, sexual orientation and race, to come along and speak and share their experiences with the [science? 00:22:22] in the middle. And then we has a shout out for the choir, so we had a diversity choir, the Pink Singers, London Gay Men’s Chorus all came down and performed. And all of this is caught on film as well. And it was really a moving, lovely event for London.

And then we did the London Vigil between 2009 to 2012, but the audience dropped from 10,000 to 4,000 to 2,000 to 1,000. And what I learnt from that is, actually, unless there’s a big incident where someone’s killed or seriously attacked, the community doesn’t tend to have the motivation, or ongoing motivation to turn out and to keep on pressing the demand that we need to have in place, to keep hate crime on the table. So I thought, “OK, how do we keep the pressure on, but reduce the … ?” Because there’s a big burden to put on an event, we had to raise about £5,000 each event, just to fund the whole thing.

So I thought, “OK, if we stop doing the vigil in Trafalgar Square, and invest our time contacting the councils and getting them to do stuff,” and that’s where I came up with the idea of National Hate Crime Awareness Week. And the idea is a week of action to encourage the government, the authorities, which is the government, police and councils, key partners, which is the community sector, the charity sector, all those anti-hate crime organisations, and representatives from the communities affected by hate crime, to all come together and do a week of action, where they tackle local issues.

Because you can’t prescribe, “OK, this year, yes, we’re going to focus on race hate crime or disability hate crime,” because what’s happening around the country, there’s local needs. So sectarianism is different in Northern Ireland than it is in Scotland, and so on. So we really had to create something that allows everybody to do what they want to do, on their own terms, but also has that cohesion of being a national event. So, it actually amplifies the need of this country to really focus and tackle hate crime as an overall problem.

And the great thing was, for the first number of years, so the outgoing Labour Government were very supportive. So I was invited to Downing Street by Gordon Brown. I met David Cameron, and he was very supportive, so we had a letter of support. Theresa May was the home secretary, going on to be Prime Minister, got a letter of support from her. But it all stops with Boris. So Boris was the Mayor of London. He was supportive at that point, but as Prime Minister, he has failed to step up and give us any support whatsoever. So there’s been no national statement of support from the Prime Minister since he’s been in office, which I think is absolutely appalling.

We get statements of support from across the political spectrum, and it’s not just the Conservatives that have let us down. Jeremy Corbyn did two letters out of four years, so we need to work with the Labour Party as well. So at the same time, we’re trying not to be political, but we need to make demands of political parties and say, “Look, this is a problem for all of us. We need you at the table.” And it started with a lot of support. It’s dropped off. COVID has made it a little bit more difficult. I think the other thing to add there is, with the vigils inspired by Ian, what happened following that, is that when we started in 2012, we started with 80 councils across the country involved in the National Week.

We got national funding in 2017, which allowed us to do more outreach. So by 2018, we had 300 of the 400 Councils involved in the National Week. That was the high point. And it’s dropped off from there. So actually, a shout out for funding. We need funding to up our game and get more councils back on board. But we also need all the communities to rally and lobby, and get those key partners round the table again, I’m currently working on plans for this year. St Paul’s was really generous. They offered us, free of charge, to use St Paul’s, and we’ve had a service of Hope and Remembrance since 2012, where we have Diversity Choir come and play. They do three songs. We have usually four speakers, one representing the Mayor of London, one representing the national police, one representing a community affected by hate crime, and myself on behalf of 17-24-30.

And we’ve created a tradition, that we get a victim’s family to light a national candle of hope and remembrance for those affected by hate crime. So starting in 2012 with Nik Moore’s family, so his mum, Peggy, and Carolyn came and lit the candle together. The following year we had Ian Baynham come – Jenny Baynham lit the candle for her brother, Ian Baynham. Sylvia Lancaster lit it for Sophie Lancaster, who was a goth, who was kicked to death for wearing goth clothing. And that was where Greater Manchester Police recognised alternative subcultures as a form of hate crime, but we’re still campaigning to get the government to recognise it across the whole of the country. And the Sophie Lancaster Foundation is still fighting in Sophie’s name to keep that going.

We remembered Mohammed Saleem, who was a Muslim, who was knifed on the way back from prayer by a person who also did nail bomb attacks against three mosques in the Midlands area. There was the Stephen Lawrence, we marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, which actually fell in line with the 40th anniversary of Altab Ali, who was a Bengali Muslim who was attacked in Whitechapel, and which actually, his death actually prompted some race work that happened around that time, to tackle racism in the West End. So it all ties in with the history of Cable Street and all that sort of stuff. And so, we have that national focus at St Paul’s. We remembered all the disabled people who were listed in the first Hidden In Plain Sight report, which was about disability hate crime. We remembered 20 disabled people who were murdered in a care home in Japan.

Now, Japan doesn’t recognise disability hate crime at all, and this guy literally took their lives because he felt that disabled people didn’t have the right to breathe, that they were a waste of resource. And that’s how shocking and horrific hate crime can be at times. I’m trying to think what to add on there. So, this year we’re, coming out of the COVID pandemic, we’re focusing on South and Southeast Asian hate crime. So working with an organisation called CARG, which was born as the COVID Against Racism Group, but has now changed to the Campaign Against Racism Group.

And On Your Side is a national service that was launched a couple of days ago, to actually provide support for South and Southeast Asian communities to report hate crime. Because, they’re a very polite community in general, who tend not to report, and tend to deal with their own issues in private, and we need to encourage them to step forward and actually get the advice and support that’s available for them as well.

Rosie: Wow, you’ve done a lot.

Paul: Fantastic.

Marc:  Yes, that just touches on it. So in the sense of – so, throughout the year, we run an annual Hope campaign. And Hope is about – H is hate crime awareness, making sure everyone knows what it is, and how to deal with it. O is operational responses, so it’s actually two parts of that. The first thing is, how are the police – what’s their operational response to hate crime? Are they set up to deal with it properly? Are they responding the way that we would expect them to do? But also, our own personal responses. So if it happens to you or me, what would we do if we were a victim of hate crime, or if it happened to our friends and family? We need to be prepared, because actually being prepared, it’s like fire prevention. If we’re aware of it, we can hopefully prevent it, which takes us on to P, which is P for prevention.

So where it’s happened before, let’s map it, hotspot it, and then put the measures in place, allocate the resources so we can prevent it happening again. And then E leads us on to everybody around the table. So it’s everybody included, so nothing for us, without us, which comes from the disability hate crime sector, is one of their statements, which is really an important principle to everything that we do. It really has got to include everybody, because we can’t speak for everybody without their voices coming through.

We do try and – so, I’ve also set up a Rainbow Boroughs project, which is about reaching out across the LGBT community so that we have the infrastructure in place across London so if another Admiral Duncan happens, or Ian Baynham happens, or Cinders, then we can communicate very quickly and respond to those situations. And that put me in the right place at the right time, so when the Pulse nightclub shootings happened, I was the guy who spent 24 hours sat on a computer pulling that whole event together, working with, I think it was six or seven other people.

They were doing the public-facing stuff whilst I was pulling in the politicians, the police and the council connections that I had, and the LGBT connections, to actually make sure that we organised … Because what people don’t realise is, 15,000 people descended on Soho. That didn’t just – it did happen, but it didn’t just happen, because in the background there were 20 people who met at St Anne’s Church to become the stewards, and we gave them quick steward training so they could help with crowd control. We had the resources that we had for the London vigils, the steward jackets and so on, that we gave out to people so they could do that. And we had people with the skills who could pass those skills on. And then I was there managing the politicians, taking them to the Admiral Duncan and then taken through the crowd, away.

So they went to St Anne’s Gardens, there’s a photo of them, and that brings us back to the 17-24-30 and the anniversaries. So we’re making sure that they know that there’s a triangular bench which represents the three communities that are attacked, united against hate, that they know there’s the three cherry trees that are planted in that garden representing John, Andrea, and Nik, and so, that history is just not forgotten. Ties in with LGBT History Month, all the important LGBT dates. We’re working on a community calendar that actually has the dates for not just the LGBT community, but other communities as well, so that when those dates are happening, we can put out information that actually helps raise awareness of the different issues involved.

Rosie: Can I interject?

Paul:  Yes.

Rosie:  Sorry, yes. [Unintelligible 00:33:28] attention. The 15,000 people gathering, was that in 1999, or was that when you did the ten years on?

Marc:                     That was in 2016.

Rosie: So can I scroll you back to 2009? Just because we’re quite interested in – sorry, not 2009, 1999, just after the Admiral Duncan nail bomb, and we’re quite interested in how the community – how that affected people, and how they came together. They’re not necessarily the same thing, but would you comment on that?

Marc: I think there were a couple of public events that brought everybody together in Soho. So there was speeches that were held on Old Compton Street, which I think were organised by Outrage, because you had Peter Tatchell there. You had someone from a Jewish organisation, you had Sue Sanders from School’s Out, and there were a couple of other communities that were represented as well. So there was like a speakers’ day.

Another event that was organised was, with all the flowers that were laid outside the Admiral Duncan, they needed to be moved round to Soho Square, and so all the members of the London Gay Men’s Chorus volunteered, and they picked up all the flowers and then transported them round. So about probably 100 people all helping to move the flowers and lay them not in St. Anne’s Gardens, in Soho Square, and actually took up a big chunk of Soho Square for all the flowers that were laid.

Rosie: And in terms of how it affected people, there’s this sort of spontaneous, people coming with flowers. I just wondered what your memories were of that both in terms of people acting and doing things, and reflecting inwardly.

Marc: I think after the Brixton bomb, everybody was really – there was like a nervousness and anxiety spread across London, in the sense of like, “What’s going to happen next?” And at the time, there were some groups who were making fake claims, that they were behind the bombings, and that just added to the whole atmosphere that actually, this is – it’s awful, but it could – it’s going to get worse. And so, by the second bomb, I think everybody was – I mean, I remember feeling nervous myself. I don’t think I expected the LGBT community to be attacked at that point, so it was shocking.

But at the same time, there was, I know there was a sense of dread that I felt, because it was horrific. The attacks were horrific. I don’t know if you know the background to the three attacks. So there’s a book called, I think it’s Mr Evil, which tells the story of David Copeland, but he didn’t really plan very well. So with Brixton, he arrived three or four hours before the attack took place, and he’d basically packed a duffel bag with, I think it was 1,500 nails, put crap in, or excrement in. So, he didn’t want to just maim people, he wanted to cause infections, and really, really cause problems for people.

Now, with that package, he’d planted it at the bus stop outside the Iceland store. Someone saw the package, moved it around to the side of the Iceland store, unpacked the bomb and stole the bag. So, one of the jokes is, it could only happen in Brixton, that somebody would steal the bag that contained the bomb. But that was crucial, because that bag was evidence that the police then were able to look on the CCTV, and they trawled the CCTV, and eventually they narrowed in on this white guy wearing a baseball cap, with the bag, because he’d been down four or five hours beforehand, going up to Brixton library, going to the town hall, walked around the shops, so he was caught on CCTV.

So as Brick Lane was happening, the news reports about the identity were starting to fall into place, as I said, The Manhunt, but they hadn’t identified who he was yet. The second bomb went off. Now, with that, he was planning to target the Asian markets. But what he didn’t realise is, they’re not on the Saturday, they’re on the Sunday. So he’d gone down on the wrong day, was carrying this bomb around and decided, “OK, Hanover Place,” he’s going to dump it behind a van, which he did. Somebody again found the bomb. Thought, “Ah, I’ll take this to the police station,” and picked it up, put it in the boot of the car. Drove round the corner to Brick Lane.

Opposite, there’s [Weaver Ward? 00:38:06] Police Station or hub, which used to be there. As they got out to cross the road to say to the police, “I’ve got a bomb in my car,” the bomb exploded. And that hit the Sweet and Spicy restaurant, which was on the corner. So, I think about eight people were injured inside, including family members, and then some people on the street. And again, every year, we get people who remember that happening, and coming down and talk – sadly, the family who owned the restaurant have now moved on, but we’ve worked with each new group of people who’ve gone into that space.

We’ve said, “This historically is where this happened.” So we’ve educated them, so they know and acknowledge the act of remembrance that we hold each year. Brick Lane was the only site that, until the 20th anniversary, didn’t have a plaque. So that was one of the things we campaigned for and then Tower Hamlets put the plaque in place for us, so that’s really good.

The Soho plaque, talking of plaques, the Soho plaque actually went missing one year, and we think because it was a brass plaque, that someone nicked it to – you know, metal theft. Or it could have been a hateful act, we don’t know. But we raised the money to replace the plaque. The three cherry trees, one of them in the corner doesn’t get enough sunlight, so we’ve tried to – the local councillor at the time pointed this out, and we’ve tried to get the trees trimmed so that there’s more light. And then, we had to get the tree replaced at one point with a new tree, but it’s still not growing as well as we would hope it to grow.

But there’s all this, with these sites, it’s not just about putting a plaque in place or putting a memorial. Actually, if you put something in place, there’s a lifetime of actually looking after that plaque and that memorial, otherwise you’re not actually paying the lifetime respect to those people that you’re remembering. So there is more to just raising money for a bench or a plaque, or whatever, and people don’t think about that.

Someone said, “One day, I hope you work’s not needed.” And I said to them, “Well, even if we resolve hate crime, there’s still a lifetime of victims, and their families and their loved ones, and their lost ones, that we need to stand with for that lifetime.” So we’re looking at another 80 or 90 years before the memory of hate crime, and the awfulness of what it is, passes from humankind. So it’s like, yes, so the work I do, and that everybody needs to do, needs to be done for years and years ahead.

Paul: And sadly, because I was looking at figures, I was looking through crime figures in Greenwich, and I saw that actually homophobic hate crimes increased in Greenwich a couple of years ago. And so it’s still really – we think there have been improvements, but there’s still a lot of work to be –

Marc: So, with hate crime figures, there’s two figures that we would look at. So there’s the recorded hate crime figures that the police produce, and then there’s the estimated hate crime figures that have come out of the England and Wales Crime Survey. It’s a survey that’s conducted every two years, so 50,000 households, and from that they get the estimated level. And that level is really quite high, and the recorded police level is quite low at the moment, so there’s the hate crime reporting gap, which is the gap in between.

And what we want to do is increase hate crime reporting until it meets the estimated level, and then we can say, “Actually, job well done. We’re actually recording everything that’s happening.” Now, Stonewall and a number of other organisations, Gallop, have done hate crime studies, and they know that one in five LGBT people are not reporting hate crime. The figures for trans people are equally as bad. The figures for disabled people are also very low. So we know a lot of hate crime doesn’t get reported at all.

There’s a number of barriers in the sense that it can be quite an emotional, sensitive process to go through, in itself. So, some people just want to – they experience the hate crime and they just want to forget about it and put it behind them. And the process can be re-traumatising, in the sense of if you think going to court, giving your witness statements, and so on. But there are organisations who can help soften that, and help you through that process. With hate crime, so we’re looking at – so hate crime has significantly – so if we look back over nine years, we’re talking probably about 30 or 40,000 whereas now it’s 120,000, was the figures I’ve got. And I think that’s figures that are produced by the Home Office.

So they produce an annual report on hate crime figures. So yes, three times as much hate crime is being reported now than nine years ago. The other figure to look at is what’s called Sanction Detections. So a Sanction Detection is when a case is reported, it’s investigated by the police, and then it goes through the criminal justice system and has a court outcome. So, it’s found guilty or not guilty, or dismissed in some way, shape or form. Now, the Sanction Detection rate has dropped considerably, so Amnesty did a report where they’ve looked at, it’s dropped from 28 percent five years ago, to about 14 percent. So if you think, 1.5 in ten people are getting a Sanction Detection that’s marked off at the end of the day.

So that’s 8.5 people are not even getting through the criminal justice system. And then, that 1.5, they’re not necessarily getting a good outcome, because it may go against them. So, unfortunately, why would people bother reporting hate crime? We’re at that stage now, where it’s so bad, it can work against. And that’s why, one, we need to encourage people to report stuff, but two, put the pressure on the police to actually increase Sanction Detections, improve those investigations, work with the Crown Prosecution Service to actually make sure more cases see it through the courts, and come out with those convictions, because it’s the convictions that will act as a deterrent to stop it happening again. Yes, so that’s a big thing on Sanction Detections, really.

Paul: This is a tricky question. I don’t know how you’d feel about it, but if you think I’m off track on this, just say. I’m thinking, because there’s been a lot of negative publicity about the police in the last year, really, about the way they treat people from ethnic minorities, gay people and stuff, do you think that there is still a role for the police in working with the community, or do they need to improve that? How can they improve it?

Marc: Absolutely, there is a role for the police to work with the community because, can you imagine a world where there was no relationship between the police and the community, how awful that would be if we’re still subject to these crimes, and how would we respond and deal with them? So we need the police to be on our side. The Admiral Duncan was a real big turning point, in the sense of police/community relations, because at that point the police realised they really needed to work with the community and have us on side.

Also impacted by – so, there were some big murder cases, so Dennis Nilsen, Colin Ireland, and I think there were a couple more, where the police, to solve those crimes, knew they needed to have the relationship with the community, to get the intelligence to be able to catch those perpetrators. And some of those cases, they dealt with badly back then as well, but back then was probably ten times worse, as to what’s happened today, but the Stephen Port case is appalling.

Now, after the Admiral Duncan, you had the Westminster Forum and other forums set up. But at the same time, the police created a role which was an LGBT liaison officer role. And that was fundamental to improving relations over the last 20-odd years. Now under Commissioner Dick, the LGBT liaison officer role was done away with, and what’s happened, the relationship between the police and the community has got worse. It’s been impacted by the Stephen Port case. There is a documentary, and it’s well evidenced that the police had massive failings on how that was resolved.

And the Independent Police, IPOC, have reopened their investigation to look again at how the police handled that, because they had signed it off, but now they’ve realised new evidence has come to light, so then they need to look at it again. There’s a lot of work to be done to improve police relations. We need the LGBT liaison officer roles back in post. It was never perfect before, because they had – so the idea originally was to have fulltime officers in all the 32 boroughs, so they had a network of people, but some of them, they were paid, some of them were voluntary. Then there was a lack of resources.

And what we really need is people at the top of the police who have a commitment to community engagement, not just with the LGBT community, but across all communities, because when one community suffers, we all suffer because it has the knock-on effects across all our communities. And that sense of injustice, and it just pulls down the whole standard of service when one group’s treated unfairly compared to others. So we need the LGBT liaison officers back in post. We need a commitment that they should be funded and given time, and by funding, I mean paid to do the job, given time to do the job, and access to resources and training so they can deliver the job well.

They need to be going to the hate crime forums. They need to be going to the LGBT community groups. They need to be going into bars and clubs, and building the relationship up between the venues and the customers, so that when things happen, there’s a quick response and there’s a good response, and everybody’s working together. And when that’s happened, it’s worked really well.

I’m trying to think of – I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but there was an LGBT liaison officer, Graham, at the Vauxhall, Royal Vauxhall Tavern. And he would get up on stage. He’d be involved in raffles, he would have the mickey taken out of him in front of the whole crowd, and he’d play along. But through that role, trust was built up. He was one of us, who was in the police, working for us. And we went through a period of time where there was really good police/community relations, but in recent years that’s got worse, and we need to look at why it’s getting worse, and address those issues.

Paul: Yes, because when the Charing Cross Police Station stuff came out, I thought that would put community relations back for not just LGBTQ, but for people of colour, for everyone, because they would then feel they couldn’t report hate crime.

Marc: Yes.

Paul: So I think that it’s definitely –

Marc: Yes. I was really shocked by the Charing Cross, but basically because Westminster has been through all this homophobic crap before. So, if you remember, I was talking about the gay police officers who were the first to go into the Admiral Duncan. So they were part – so Gay Police Association started off life as the Lesbian and Gay Police Association, as four people, which is Ashley Wells, Jim Murphy, someone Bradley – no, Ashley Wells, Tony Murphy, Jim Bradley and Mark Burke, were the four gay police officers. And then remember, at this point, it’s illegal to be gay in the police. It’s not accepted at all. So they had a private meeting, had a barbecue, and then they started doing social events where more officers came together.

They did two riverboat cruises on The Thames, and I happened to be on the second one on the 5th October 1991, which is where I met Paul. Now, the press found out about that, so it all appeared in, I think it was The Sunday Mirror, ship of shame, and all these jokes about gay police and stuff. The riverboat police had been really helpful because they had steered us to the police docks. We’d all got off, and you can imagine, I mean, there was about a hundred gay men and four lesbians, and we all ended up going to the Reflex nightclub in Putney for the rest of the night. So there was the starting of that. Paul then became the chair, and changed the name, and it became the Gay Police Association. That lasted for quite a few years.

And then there were issues, and that collapsed, so the funding that the Staff Associations within the [met? 00:50:56], were all defunded, and that caused things to collapse, and not just with the LGBT, but with the other communities as well. Now, taking a step back, so those gay police officers who’ve been involved in these organisations were doing really progressive outreach within Soho. But then they started getting hate mail at the police station through the internal police system, and it was believed that it was other police officers who were directing this hate at them. Paul had his car scratched in the police car park.

Now, the only people who had access was police and police staff. He had a phial of petrol sent to him at his home address. Yes, he was quite targeted within the job, but he was a pioneer. He was the first gay copper on the front cover of Gay Times, and did a tremendous amount of good work during his period of policing. I was fortunate enough to sit on the Gold Group that was dealing with the abuse at West End Police Station, And I led a campaign, so I was thinking, “How can we show our support for the gay police officers who experienced hate crime?”

And I came up with the idea of, why don’t we all wear a blue ribbon? Because, you had the red ribbon for HIV, and you had other ribbons for other causes, and so I picked up on the blue ribbon. And so I spent a couple of months developing this blue ribbon campaign, and we had a police van on Old Compton Street, we were giving out these blue ribbons. And it actually helped put pressure on the police to reform and get their act sorted out. And I think, actually, we need something like that now, to actually say, “Look, we support the LGBT officers and the Black officers and the Asian officers, who we need to be in the job to make it more representative of our communities.”

But we also need to challenge and put pressure on, “You need to reform and sort these issues out.” And I think that worked really well at the time, but is needed now, so maybe that’s another job I’ve got to add onto my list of jobs. Yes, but now, police relations is at an all-time low. Saying that, there is good work being done. So the model of policing across London has changed, and this was – it changed under Boris Johnson, who signed it all off, to cut costs. And so we went from 32 police boroughs to 12 BCU areas, which is Basic Command Units. So Hackney and Tower Hamlets are one police unit. Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham are another BCU unit.

So you’ve got 12 borough commanders. Under them, they had hate crime officers. As they lost the LGBT role, it was assumed that the hate crime coordinator role would take on the LGBT work, and they would be out-facing community engagers. However, without consultation during the pandemic, that role has been changed to [H cops? 00:53:58], where they’re inward looking, looking at the hate crime cases that are coming through the system but not doing the outward engagement work, which is what we need to be in place.

So there’s campaigning for LGBT liaison officers to be restored, but also to have the hate crime role restored so it’s an outward-looking, engaging role, rather than an inward looking – they do need to look at the cases going through, and improve their Sanction Detection rates, don’t get me wrong, but that’s part of the job. It’s nothing without the engagement, because without the engagement, it all falls down. Now the Met Police have done a couple of recruitment campaigns, where they’ve done – they’re looking for more women. They’re looking for more Black and Asian people.

Now, following Stephen Port, you’d think, “Why are they not asking for more LGBT people?” They’ve dropped the ball. If you’re doing recruitment campaigning, make sure it’s inclusive, because you’ll have Black and Asian LGBT people. You’ll have women who are also LGBT. They should be thinking more than one-dimensional. They need to think intersectional about all the strands, and how they make themselves more welcoming and inclusive of our community. I really believe in the difference between a police force, which is without the consent of the people, and a police service, and the Metropolitan Police, we need to remind them, is the police service that is accountable to the community that it serves.

Paul: Yes, totally. It’s all been quite heavy. I was just going to ask you, could you talk about the Olympics as a nice little … ? It’s like the end of the news, isn’t it, “Now, we’ll look at … ”

Marc: Yes, so leading up to the Olympics, there was the torch, the baton relay. So, I got – during that process, I actually got four letters from the Olympic Torch organisers to say, “You’ve been nominated to carry the Olympic Torch on behalf of your charity.” And then I started getting the rejection letters, in the sense of, “Sorry, your nomination’s been discontinued.” So three got discontinued, and then the fourth one was like, “Yes, you’ve been accepted to carry the Olympic Torch.” So I was recognised in the sense of all my anti-hate crime and LGBT community work, to carry the torch, and I carried it on the 23rd July, which was the day before my mum’s 70th birthday, and it’s exactly ten years ago last month.

So, it was the day before her 70th birthday. She’d just been diagnosed with breast cancer, so I had the decision in the sense of, “Do I run with the torch, or do I pull out to look after my mum?” And thankfully, I chose to run with the torch because, actually, it was an amazing event for her, to uplift her spirits. And yes, as well as being good for the charity and for the community. Now, I ran on the same day as Doreen Lawrence, as I said, had to get up really early in the morning, go to – I forgot the name of the – it’s the Lewisham Centre, and I think there were about 22 people in my group, who were on the Olympic bus.

And then we all took our turns to get off the bus, claim the flame, and then pass the flame on. And the person behind me was a member of the Jewish community, and it was a lesbian in front of me, and so it really felt – and you had the Black and Asian people in the group, with Doreen and the young Mayor of Lewisham. So it really felt lovely, in the sense of, as a really inclusive stretch of carrying that Olympic torch. Fantastic day. Now, Steve Thompson, who was the owner of 286, which is the gay bar that used to be in Lewisham, said, “I’ll host an after-party for you.” So, we had this event where we literally just – so after carrying the Olympic torch, the first thing I did was, I met up with Ryan, who was my partner at the time. We went to Blackheath and met up with a couple of other people, had a drink just to chill and relax.

And then I said, “Look, I need to go into Soho because I need to go to the site of the cherry trees and just pay my respects. Because the whole point of – I’m getting emotional now – the whole point of carrying the torch was to remember those people who weren’t there, because they’d been taken from us because of acts of hatred. So it was really important to show my respects to John, Andrea, and Nik, and to Cinders. So there’s a photo of me with the torch by the cherry trees.

And then the other thing was about, OK, so I’ve got this special experience, but this isn’t about me, it’s about our community. So I literally went to all the LGBT bars, so to Comptons, to The Duke of Wellington, to the King’s Arms, and was literally giving everybody an opportunity to have their photo taken with the Olympic Torch. And I probably had, in a couple of days, about 1,000 or 2,000 photos of – the local chippy had my photo up behind, with me, the Olympic Torch, and then standing side by side. The Asian newsagents just down the road, also I had it with their family, and other venues in in the Lewisham area. So I really spread the torch as widely as I could, and that was a lot, a lot, a lot of fun.

And then during the Pride, I went to Brighton Pride and to London Pride with Olympic Torch, and carried it as part of the parade, in those Pride parades. But yes, it was great piece of recognition, which also takes me on to how important it is flying the flag. And I think sometimes there’s lots of debates going on, which are always from quite a privileged position, because we’re all out. We’ve got our access to services or some services, maybe not great services, but we’ve taken that step. And we’ve always got to remember, there are people who don’t have anybody, who don’t have any connection, who are at risk of falling into the hands of the wrong people, like I did when I first came out. And remember, I talked about falling into that trap.

And all I do is, it’s about creating those doorways so that people can access, and step out, and connect in a safe way with that community. And flying the flag is so important. I think actually that ties in with Tom Daley, and what he did at The Commonwealth Games this year, was absolutely amazing because he really – and you heard it in the interview, there was a BBC documentary, but you can hear it in what they’re saying, of how important it is to give symbols of hope to people who are really isolated and disconnected, and recognise that actually we’re all coming from that position of privilege.

So, when we’re umming and ahing about flags and stuff, actually, what are we taking away when we ask all these companies to start taking down the rainbow? Because there’s the corporate consumerism side of using the rainbow flag, but actually, when HSBC used the rainbow flag in this country and changed their logo, think of all those countries where it’s illegal, where they might see the logo changes, it might just be for a month, but that single glance might be enough to say, “You’re not alone.”

Rosie: Can I ask you – oh, sorry.

Paul:  And I think your work’s been recognised as well, when you’ve just been named as one of the 50 most influential LGBTQ people in London.

Marc: Yes, by London Friends. It came as a bit of a surprise. So I got a I got an email from Monty, who’s the CEO of London Friends. He said, “We’d like to have you as one of our 50 LGBT Londoners,” and I’m not a Londoner. I was born in the Midlands, so Basingstoke was my preteen years, and then Reading and Slough. And so, I moved to London in 1993, but I suppose I’m an adopted Londoner. And I think once you’ve lived in London for a certain period of time, you become a Londoner anyway. And so, I certainly feel very privileged to be recognised there.

But London Friends, looking back at the history of that great organisation, so that came out of the campaign for homosexual equality, and the work they were doing in the sense of providing a helpline and support services, again recognising those isolated individuals who need to connect with our community, takes us right back to signposting. S, a great honour to be recognised, and amongst some really great people as well. There’s so many people who need recognition though, because there’s not enough of it within our community.

And I think we need to recognise the struggles of LGBT people, not just contending with everyday life and the rubbish it throws at us, but also, if you want to stick your head up and actually try and move things forward, the challenges you have, even from within your own community sometimes, to make a difference and to make things happen, because you get people saying … So, when I was campaigning for the lesbian and gay centre in Reading, the first reaction I got was, “Oh, you’ll never do it. It’s not achievable.” And it took me three years from like 17, 18 to 21 to campaign for it and to make it happen. And it’s just, I think I was just bloody-minded in the sense of, I’ve set my sights, it’s going to happen.

But we need to find ways of actually, how do we support the bloody-minded people in our community to be able to achieve their dreams, and push things forward and make things happen, but also guarding against – so I think there’s fundamentalists in every community who actually go beyond pushing the boundaries, and actually push a bit too far. So there’s a fine-tuning of how far do we need to go that’s in balance with all the other communities around us, so that actually there’s a harmony across all communities?

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: Can I ask you a question?

Paul: Yes, I’ve my questions.

Rosie: Yes, don’t want to interject. No. We’re particularly interested in the local pubs in Lewisham, and I don’t think you have much of a relationship with them. I’m right in that, aren’t I?

Marc: Yes. So historically, Soho’s and Vauxhall are probably the two areas, and Earl’s Court, when I – so, my first experience of London venues was back in Reading, I would organise away days, gay day away days to London. So we’d all meet up at Reading Train Station, and then I would ask the Reading Train Station to put an announcement out. So, “Would all the people … ?” And so we did this to London Pride one year so, “Would all the people going to Lesbian and Gay Pride in London get on the next train at platform five?” And they read the announcement out twice, and the whole station just came to a complete stop.

And I still have this image of this woman and her child, and the woman’s putting the hands over the child’s ears to stop the child hearing about this lesbian gay Pride event. Because the group I had, we came up to London quite a few times, and we used to go to places like Comptons on Old Compton Straight. So when I first started coming to London, it was Comptons, Old Compton Street and Brief Encounter. And there were the two places I’d go back and forth between. So this was pre-the opening of Ruperts bar. Or Rupert Street.

So Rupert Street was the first LGBT venue that had clear glass windows which, shock, horror, you could see who was inside the venue. Because, all the other venues beforehand had frosted or shaded windows. I think even Comptons you couldn’t see into the bar, but you could see out of the bar. And the door on Comptons used to be on the left-hand side and there used to be a central bar in the middle of the venue. So you had one side, which was street hustlers, and a little bit more seedy, and then you had the other side, which was the tourists and other side of the LGBT community. So it’s like chalk and cheese within this venue. And so, yes, it was an interesting venue to go to.

Comptons itself had been bombed during the war, and so its upper floors were out of action, and so they then refurbished and opened up the upper floors, and that’s when they remodelled the downstairs. So that was, yes, a real big improvement to that venue in the sense of the space, I guess. I drank in the Admiral Duncan a lot, drank in The King’s Arms a lot. In 1994, I used to work for a very brief period of time, at Brief Encounters.

That was probably about three months, and then I went to an NUS LGBT conference, and we went roller-skating, and I fell over and fractured my arm so I couldn’t pull the pints, so I had to give up the bar job. I then worked at [79 CXR? 01:07:16], Charing Cross Road, which was a late-night bar. And that was a lot of fun. I worked there for quite a few years before moving to XXL, which is probably one of the biggest gay men’s gay nightclubs, apart from Heaven, I would say. So Heaven, I think, is the biggest, which has a capacity for about 2,000 people. I think the XXL had a capacity of 1,000 people at The Arches near London Bridge and then it moved down to …

Rosie: Was is Blackfriars?

Marc: Blackfriars, yes, the Blackfriars Bridge just by there, and I think its capacity increased to about 2,000 when it was there. But I worked at The Arches, the London Bridge site. And at one point, I was the longest serving member of staff. I think I did over six years.

Rosie: So in a sense, you’ve always kind of gravitated to central London.

Marc: Yes.

Rosie: And we were quite interested, and we were talking to someone last week about this, about the impact of the closure. Obviously, pubs have closed everywhere, but they’ve certainly closed in Lewisham, and local pubs have closed. And you, representing the community, how has that impacted your ability to connect with the community, and your sense of the community’s coherence, I suppose?

Marc:  I think we’re living in real challenging times. I mean, since the pandemic, I don’t really go out on the scene as much as I used to, because I would go out Monday to Friday, and weekends after work, and got in a lot of debt, I spent a lot of money doing that, because it’s a really expensive lifestyle, living on the scene, so to speak. And then, working on the scene as well, which I think, working on the scene was really useful because it actually gave me the opportunity to connect with lots of people, and I really took pride …

So, when I had the passion about setting up community centres, then I couldn’t do it, I moved to London, did the course, and ended up working in retail, which it really wasn’t … I mean, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the be all and end all of what I wanted to do. So actually working in gay bars was my sense of community. So, whereas you get some which are just a commercial enterprise, for me it was really greeting people, looking after people. You’d get people who’d come with their problems and talk to bar staff. I think there’s a real opportunity for a scheme to actually do more training with bar staff so they’re more skilled up, to actually provide that, our domestic violence, hate crime, all those issues, the bar staff are perfectly placed to signpost those people to services. That’s a golden opportunity. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t – again, it’s another thing on the list to do.

So probably, in recent years, it was more Royal Vauxhall Tavern that I would go to, and Vauxhall area. But yes, I’ve changed since the pandemic, so I’m not as confident going out, as I was. So I still think, COVID, still the risk is out there. I’ve had COVID now, so I’ve experienced that. My partner has had it twice. My partner’s not out. So my partner is Bengali. He’s from the Muslim community. From a very religious family as well, to the point that he’d never celebrated his birthday until we met. So I’m 52, he’s 27, so there’s a big age gap between us as well, and lots of cultural differences. So when I mentioned about Grease and Olivia Newton John, he was like, “Who’s she?” So yes, yes, outrageous. His gay card has gone completely.

But I mean, actually going out with someone from a different culture and background is great because it’s made me rethink about how I engage different people, and the things that I’ve taken for granted or assumed. Because, I think we all assume that, because we all live in this country, we all go to school in this country, that we all experience popular culture in the same way. And so, the Muslim community and the white community will, side by side, will all have the same experiences, and actually that’s not true at all. And how do we create bridges between those communities, so that a gay Muslim Bengali will feel comfortable going to some of the venues that we’ve got on the scene?

Rosie: And that makes sense, that with the scene contracting and getting more central London, you know, what’s happening to the people in the suburbs? And from your point of view, representing the community, how are you reaching out to them? Is it all social media or how does that work?

Marc: So, over my lifetime, I’ve established a really good infrastructure of social media, so I’ve probably got about 30 different profiles that I manage. So I’ve set up an individual Facebook page for each of the 12 BCU’s. One for the City of London. I’ve got the Rainbow Boroughs group. When London Stands with Orlando was happening, I set up that page for that group. I set up an SOS campaign for the LGBT venues to try and connect across the country. Wasn’t as successful as I was hoping it to be, because I thought there’s a really strong chance to connect them more, but it hasn’t played out. And sometimes, you have to try something, and it will work. Sometimes you try it, and it will fail, but you just keep on going.

I mean, with social networking, I think one of the risks is, we’ve got so many venues, groups and organisations that’ve closed down, which have existing social media that is still in place. Now, you could look at that romantically, “Oh, isn’t that nice that exists?” And so it that history, time lock, or the time capsule of what happened. But what of the people who are still connected? How do we connect with them, communicate with them, tell them about new opportunities, but also those isolated people who we need to connect, how do we make sure that they connect with the live, ongoing, outward looking, connecting services that exist?

So there needs to be some mechanism for saying, “OK, if you’ve shut down your social media profile and no longer want to manage it, can you pass that to Bishopsgate or to us, or to other organisations so we can absorb that membership and that history, keep what needs to be kept, but also make sure that the dead ends where people get stuck are removed?’ So, yes.

Paul: That’s a really good idea. Yes, I like that.

Marc: Yes, because I know with websites, when you stop paying for them, they tend to get taken down, and historically, some websites have been preserved and kept for the future. And they’re a great resource when they’re available, but again, it’s having the foresight to think, “OK, we need to capture this.”

Paul:  Yes. But also keep the links alive, and the signposts, isn’t it?

Marc: Yes. Yes.

Rosie: Wow. That’s a life of service.

Paul: Yes. Yes, I think that’s all my questions.

Rosie: Thank you so much.

Marc: You’re welcome.

Paul: That’s fantastic.

Rosie: Yes, really great. Phew, it’s hot. OK, well, we’re ending the interview now, yes?

Paul: Yes, yes.

Rosie: OK, all right, then. I’ll press stop.

Marc: o one thing we didn’t touch upon is the sense of how Lewisham has been really central to – because I live in Lewisham, all this work has been based in Lewisham. So it’s literally, in my flat, I’ve got a big kitchen table, I’ve got six laptops, and people come, volunteers come round, we sit around the table. We look at what needs to be done, and then we work on projects together. And that can be, yes, I’ve taken some photos over the years. It’s quite beautiful. It’s as I’m working, take a photo over my shoulder of these other people all working on stuff. And things we’ve done is things like a National Freedom of Information piece of research.

So we contacted every council and every police service and said, “Look, what are you doing about hate crime? Is it in your community safety plan? Do you have a bespoke plan? Who’s your hate crime lead? Can we have the contact details? How much money are you putting towards tackling hate crime? Are you taking part in National Hate Crime Awareness Week? Did you take part last year or in previous years? Do you have access to resources? So, ten basic questions, and we did that. So we did London councils in 2016, did the wider UK councils in 2017.

We then repeated the process in 2019, but included all the UK police services. So we can look at what’s the difference between 2017 to 2019 pre-pandemic, and we’re just in the middle of one now for 2022, so we can look, OK, what’s the difference between before the pandemic and after the pandemic? Because, one of the real risks is that, with the attention on COVID, people have cut services elsewhere, and with all the cuts that are coming through, and the Great Depression that’s coming our way – and it sadly looks like it’s going to be a real bad time for a lot of people, what’s been cut?

And what often gets cut, and what’s been cut over the last ten years, is that where you had bespoke hate crime officers who really had expertise, they’ve been merged into anti-social behaviour teams or community safety teams. So, that specialism is diluted, and not only does that person have to deal with hate crime, they’re dealing with anti-social behaviour, they’re dealing with violence against women and girls, they’re dealing with other strands as well. So the volume of work that’s focused on tackling hate crime in our communities has gone down, and that expertise lost. And that’s something that, we need to fight back at some point and say, “Actually it’s a growing problem.”

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: Is there something about Lewisham? I mean, here you are, you’ve got this big hub in Lewisham. Does it feel like a good place to be operating from as a borough?

Marc: Yes. So, Lewisham’s really good connections in the sense of, if you think from – so I live in New Cross Gate, so I can jump on the 36 or the 436, and get to Vauxhall within half an hour. I can jump on the 453 into Soho, and the 21 bus to London Bridge area. So the bus – obviously, so I’ve lived – so when I first moved to London, I was living in Brent, and the Harrow area. Then I moved to Holloway Road, and that part of London, so when NUS was there. For me, that was great to be near NUS at that time of being involved in NUS.

I got elected onto the National Committee, so I was actually a representative responsible for London for a year, networking all the schools, all the colleges, and FE and higher education colleges. I then moved East London, so I was living in Leighton and then Romford. And then I split up with a partner, and a friend of mine, who happens to be an estate agent, had a self-contained bedsit in Brockley. So Brockley was the first place I really got to – I didn’t have to live with somebody else. I could live on my own.

So, I lived there for three years, and then I got into another relationship, which unfortunately didn’t work out, which ended up me living where I’m living now. Yes, I live on Besson Street. Really good transport locations, yes, and that makes it easy to get to, so it’s been a great place to work from. But yes, all of this work has come from my kitchen table, and with a great group of people who’ve come from time to time, and worked with me.

Rosie: Cool.

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: Great. Well, it is very much a sort of hub here.

Paul: Yes. It’s amazing.

Rosie: Flipcharts, post-it’s, everything.

[End of recorded material 01:19:54]

 

(W15)

If for any reason you wish to withdraw your name or memory, contact us at engage@gold.ac.uk

An oral history collected by Paul Green as part of the In Living Memory project, Where to, now the sequins have gone?

In the interview, Cliff discusses his memories and experiences of the lost gay bars of Lewisham that thrived from 1970s-90s.

Parts of this interview are featured in a podcast produced by the project entitled Where to, now the sequins have gone?

 

Transcript

Rosie (interviewer 1): OK, so this is an interview on the 4th August 2022, at the Caroline Graveson Building at Goldsmiths College, and it’s an interview with Cliff Pereira. Cliff, can you spell your name, please?

Cliff (interviewee): The surname, or … ?

Rosie: Well, I’m assuming it’s C, L, I, double F.

Cliff: C, L, I – it’s actually Clifford, but everybody on the scene calls me Cliff. So it’s Clifford, C, L, I, double F, O, R, D, and Pereira, P, E, R, E, I, R, A.

Rosie: Great, thank you. And Cliff will be talking to me, Rosie Oliver, and Paul Green here, which I think is quite easy to spell. Sorry, Paul. And Paul is from Avant-Gardening, and the purpose of this interview is to find out from Cliff information for a project that Avant-Gardening Bijou Stories are doing, called Where to now the Sequins Have Gone? which documents the gay bars and communities that existed in the borough of Lewisham, particularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and it’s part of a bigger programme called In Living Memory, A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham. So that’s the preamble. Over to Paul.

Paul (interviewer 2): So shall I just launch into a couple of questions, yes? And then we can – if I ask something stupid, just tell me to shush. So I’d like to start by saying, when did you start going onto the scene in Lewisham?

Cliff: Oh, when did I start going onto the scene in Lewisham? Actually quite late. I really struggled with being gay, but more because my main struggle in my life was not being white, and living in Britain. So growing up, the sense of identity for me was layered, and my sexual orientation was low on the priority list, because I can hide who I am sexually, but I can’t hide who I am physically. So I knew something was different about me, but I didn’t know what.

So I went through life. In my 20s, I worked in a very male environment in the Middle East, almost like an army situation. Eight guys living in one long hut. Very macho. No real room to talk about sex. And when there was discussion about sex, it was about going to Bangkok – aptly named – or Manila, or one of those places and having all these women available. So there was a lot of pressure to conform to that, which I struggled with, and so I tended to do my trips without my workmates. And I also went out there and did kind of history research and things like that, because I wasn’t really interested in what was being sold to me.

And it was only after I came back to the UK, went to university in Northern Ireland, I was still conforming to that. So I had a string of girlfriends at university. It was not particularly difficult, because it was almost four women to one man in Northern Ireland, and the Irish are very friendly [laughs]. So it wasn’t a difficult situation, but I was never happy with whoever I was in a relationship with, but not sure why.

And I came back to London in 1990, and started working in London, and I was first introduced to the gay scene by my gay boss, who realised that I was getting very drunk because I was struggling with coping with things, and as a result, turning up to work late or missing work or whatever. And so he took me to The Brief Encounter, and while he went to get our drinks, somebody started to converse with me, and asked me what I was into, and it was too much, and I totally flipped and left. And the next day, my boss was very worried about me and, “Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.” And I said, “No. I went home and thought about it, and the way I reacted means that you’d touched a point there, and so I just need to work on that.”

And then somebody told me, “Oh, go to Gran Canaria and you can have a wonderful holiday there and explore your gay sexuality or whatever it is, whether you’re bi or gay, whatever.” And I went there, and again, I found it a bit too much, especially when I opened the curtains to my villa once, and found somebody lying naked in there, just sort of on my patio. And I opened the door, and like, “What are you doing here?” He said, “Come and join me.” I said, “No, get away. I’m not having any of this,” [laughs].

So it was steps, and I was totally unaware that there was a scene in Lewisham until my housemate, who worked as a postman told me about it. Now, I suspect my housemate was bi, but he never really talked about it. And I thought, “Really? There’s this place in Lewisham?” And he said, “It’s called The Queen’s Arms, and it’s a gay pub,” and he was talking quite openly about it. So I wandered into The Queen’s Arms and found, “Oh, not only is this a gay bar, it’s in southeast London, and it’s quite friendly.” And that’s how I met the whole community. So that was about ‘97. ‘96, ‘97 maybe. Yes.

Rosie: And was that when you started exploring your sexuality, or had you already … ?

Cliff: By that point, I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t bi, but I was gay. But how to act on the gay scene was still – how to navigate the gay scene, how to take note of the way people acted, the codes, if you like, of the scene, was still quite difficult. My boss had also taken me to a pub in Earl’s Court, and I remember walking in there, and there were all these guys in leather, and again, it was just too much. Firstly, they were all big guys. They were all older than me, at least the ones I saw. And I wasn’t actually aware that there was such a thing as a leather scene until then. So it was, again, a little bit too much too quickly.

I think what I was missing is a mentor, and I have to say that at that particular period of time, things like Pride were mentioned, but they weren’t as big as they later became. But I couldn’t see me in any of those things. Whenever I saw those on TV, they were all white, and they were mainly male, too. There were very few women on those images, the media coverage. And to be honest, even in pubs in central London, you never saw Black or Asian people on the scene. So I struggled with that a lot, because I found I felt an oddity on the scene. I felt like I could be here, but not completely.

And there were things that were said which I didn’t like, as well. I remember going to a place called The Attic Bar. It’s in Theatreland. It’s opposite Rules, the restaurant. I think it’s the oldest restaurant in London, right? And I went in there, so this bar was upstairs, and it was tiny, but everybody who worked in Theatreland knew it, and they would all sneak upstairs. And it was quite friendly, because it was just like a normal bar. It wasn’t like The Brief Encounter. It wasn’t targeting a certain younger demographic. It wasn’t loud music. It wasn’t dark, and, you could sit and have a conversation with somebody, and make friends with people. But that was completely a white scene too. So everywhere I went, I couldn’t see myself on the scene.

And I also found it very odd, because I was never into Abba [laughs]. I know that sounds really weird, right? And I was never into Abba, because growing up in Bexley, my very good and [gothy? 00:10:01] cousin was crazy about Abba at a time when I was into more kind of soul music and stuff like that. So I was like Kool and the Gang and that kind of thing, and she was crazy about Abba because they were so wonderful and blonde, and all the rest of it. She was also crazy about the Osmonds, so the combination of those two things were like, to me, ugh. And I just turned off, and then I get to this gay scene, where you have to like Abba, you’re gay. And then I also had to own up to not liking Ikea as well, so that’s like, “Oh, are you sure you’re gay?”

But I did meet a lady at The Attic who once said to me, “I’ve never met one like you,” and I didn’t get what she meant by that. And so I asked her, and she basically said, “I’ve never met a person of colour who is gay.” And it was like, “Right. So, what am I supposed to do with your problem or your issue, or whatever it is? It could just be a statement.” And then she actually came onto me and tried to snog me, and a couple of the gay men stepped in and said, “No, no, he’s ours,” [laughs]. So it was very confusing times, because not only could I not find my place, but it seemed to be that the scene had a problem with finding my place too, so it was both ways.

The Queen’s Arms in Lewisham was quite different, and I think that was because Josie, who ran it, had this Irish background, and he would always be closed for Good Friday, and he would close early on the Thursday. He was very keen on, if somebody died, on having a special occasion, or whatever. And I think it’s his own immigrant experiences, either his or his family’s, that came through in the way he ran the pub. So he saw the pub as a place for minorities, and that really came through. I mean, I don’t know anything about his sexual life at all, because I was never asked, or he never told, so that’s fine. But it did come across that he was very accepting of people, and that’s what I found most appealing about the pub. But also, I enjoyed the lock-ins. That was always great fun.

Paul: Yes, I think what’s interesting, you mentioned that the bars are very scene – like the leather bars. When I first went into The Queen’s Arms, I noticed it just felt like just walking into any old pub. You just saw a cross-section, men, women, and there were people of colour in there as well, which you would expect in Lewisham. And it felt more like it’s just an accepting place –

Cliff: Yes.

Paul:  – where you just go, have a drink, meet people, catch up with your mates, and it wasn’t somewhere where you went, specifically, to go on the pull, I didn’t think. It was more of a –

Cliff: And I think, against places like The Brief Encounter, or the leather bars, or the other bars in Earl’s Court, for example, which was the centre of things at that time, there were more women, as well, in Lewisham, so you got this sense of, “This is a normal place. This isn’t like a sectioned off community. It’s not a bubble.” It’s just normal people who happen to be gay or lesbian or trans, or whatever they want to be, and actually, nobody actually asked you, “Are you this, that or the other?” Nobody boxed you in. And that, I think, was its appeal, that you could be – but is that not an immigrant way of thinking as well? I can be British, but I can also be Bengali, or whatever, right? So it’s this idea that these boxes don’t really exist. We can have multiple identities at the same time. And I think this is why I say that it’s Josie’s own background that was imprinted on the scene in that pub, and it came through very clearly.

Paul: Yes, because I remember that Joe was very protective, perhaps, of his clientele.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I know that some years, at Christmas, people who he thought were on their own, he would, “They’re coming upstairs for Christmas dinner,” things like that. So it’s almost like he created his own little family there, do you think?

Cliff:  Did Josie create a family? Yes, definitely. I mean, he certainly looked at people like – can I mention the people?

Rosie: Very good question. It will be treated confidentially. If it’s a good story, then you could just use generics, a young man …

Paul: If it’s who I think it is –

Cliff: Can I just use their first names, or is that –

Paul: Yes, it could –

Rosie: Yes, anything on tape will be treated confidentially, but if we want to use it for the podcast, we need to be more careful about how we describe people.

Paul: Yes, because [we take? 00:15:55] … Are you going to say Sara?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Because, I’m going to interview Sara anyway, so we can.

Cliff: Yes. So I mean, there were people like Sara, who he really thought of as his own daughter. And to a certain extent, even Marcy was like, “Our Marcy.” And he would say that, “Our Sara, our Marcy,” which is very – if you’ve lived in Ireland, that’s really the way people talk about family. You’d say, “Our Sean or our Patrick, or [Porruck? 00:16:31],” or whatever. And he was very much that way of thinking of the community as extended family, and also taking an interest. If somebody new came to the door, and a Polish guy came through the door once, and we didn’t know at the time he was Polish, and this guy kind of hang around, and didn’t order a drink straight away.

So Josie said, “Well, Cliff, you’ve lived all over the world. Go and talk to that guy and find out who he is. What’s he doing here?” So I said, “OK.” And I started talking to this guy, and he actually ended up being my lodger for three years, and I went out to Poland and stayed with his family. And so, that’s the sort of thing that was happening. It was never a closed door. Josie would find somebody to break the ice, somebody to approach the new person through the door. So you never actually felt like, “I shouldn’t be here.” Somebody would always talk to you, whereas I do remember going to, is it CXR?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: And being there for ages and not talking to anybody because it’s a kind of pickup scene where, if you talk to somebody or somebody buys you a drink, that automatically means that you have to reciprocate in some way, right? Whereas this was a pub where you could have a whole conversation and you don’t actually have to go home with anybody, because you know you could come back two days later and meet the same person. And I think that, in many ways, that was a healthier way to start having relationships because the people that you met there were people that you would encounter again.

And if it didn’t work, it didn’t work, and there were plenty of people there that – there were a couple of people there that I could never work out who was going out with whom, because I’m sure it was changing through time. I remember, one year, meeting up somebody, and then they were saying, “Oh, I’m with so-and-so,” and then, a year later, “Oh, we’ve split, so I’m with that person.” And I said, “Well, who’s the other person with?” “Oh, I’m with them.” And it’s like, “Oh, OK, there’s a lot of swapping going on here, but not in a malicious way.” Not in a way that people felt jealous, but in a way that felt safe. It wasn’t so much about one-night-stands, it was more about actually having a relationship and a community.

Paul: Do you remember, some people don’t remember this pub, but the John [Warden? 00:19:35].

Cliff: No.

Paul: It’s funny, because I remember, it was over the road from The Queen’s Arms, just straight over the road, behind what was the leisure centre back in the day, with the plastic pipes that people used to fly down, and then there were all those things, “Don’t go on the plastic pipe. People put razor blades in it.”

Cliff: OK, I do remember it, because you had to walk up from the High Street to get to the George and Dragon. You went past it. Or you could do anyway.

Paul: Yes. Yes, because Cinders was the bar manager.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Bar manager, barmaid.

Cliff: I never actually went in there. I’m not sure why. I don’t know. Yes.

Paul: It’s interesting, because I’d identified it as one of the pubs in Lewisham, I think because I went there. It did just vanish. I think one day, we went for a post-Pride drink in there, and Cinders was behind the bar, and then the next day we went down, and Cinders was outside, like everyone’s gone, it’s no longer here.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I think the management just disappeared. So maybe it wasn’t such an important pub as I’d pictured it being in my own mind. I’m thinking, where else would you have gone in the area?

Cliff: So in the area, so there were two men that ran The Rose and Crown in Greenwich, and so that was another pub I would go to. I did once go to The Castle, but I didn’t like it. And then, I remember having a long chat with Josie about the future of The Queen’s Arms, and I said to him the dynamics were changing in terms of who was coming through the door, and I said, “If you want to keep attracting younger people, then you need to offer some sort of dance space, and there isn’t the space in The Queen’s Arms.” And he thought about it, and he said, “Yes, I think I agree with you.” And then when the Greenwich University started really gearing up, and particularly the – was it a dance school or something?

Rosie: Laban?

Cliff: Yes.

Rosie: Was it Laban?

Cliff: In Deptford, right?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: Yes. When that started picking up, there was this influx of younger people to the area, but also a very clear LGBT community. And that was about the time that Metro II started to be working in the area. So all that kind of coalesced, and then he took it on and opened Stonewalls, which has a special space or place for me, because I went out to dance there one night and that’s when I met my partner of 20 years now, this year, and my husband of ten years, so it’s a very special place for both of us. And so, my husband actually lived in Heather Green, so still part of the borough. So I think that change occurred because the demographic of the gay community in the borough was changing.

Rosie: Where was Stonewalls?

Cliff: Stonewalls was kind of just beyond the fire station, and across the road.

Rosie: The Catford Fire Station?

Paul: Lewisham.

Cliff: Lewisham.

Rosie: Lewisham Fire Station.

Paul: Yes, as in Bridget Jones’s Diary, when she tries to come down the fire thing.

Rosie: OK.

Paul: It was The Castle before, wasn’t it?

Cliff: Yes, and I did – yes.

Paul: It was The Castle, then it became Stonewalls.

Cliff: Yes. I did go into it when it was The Castle, just once, but I didn’t really like it. But I did also used to go to the place that Kim was running, which was near the shop that sold fabrics, which I think is still there in Lewisham.

Paul: [Saachi? 00:24:08] Fashions.

Cliff: Yes. And there was a little road beside it, which I don’t think is there anymore, and there was a car park or something beyond there. And then, there was this little place there, The Roebuck, and there was a dance place underneath it. But it was quite a rough and tumble place, and it was very interesting. There were lots of lesbian fights there with snooker cues, was – I think people would say, “Go there and get hit by a snooker cue,” and things like that [laughs].

Paul: I do remember that.

Cliff: Yes. And it wasn’t the kind of place I’d go to pick up anybody, I can tell you that much.

Paul: I’m remembering upstairs, which they thought was really classy. It was sort of like –

Cliff: But it wasn’t.

Paul: With sort of like garden furniture or something, wasn’t it?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: And then you’d go down.

Cliff: And into this dungeon, basically, yes.

Paul: Yes. And it was like karaoke and women fighting.

Cliff: With a horribly sticky floor. Your shoes stuck on the floor.

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: OK, we’re back in the room. Sorry about that. We had a mic issue. We were talking about lesbians brandishing snooker cues.

Paul: Snooker cues.

Rosie: In, where was it?

Paul: It was the Roebuck, which later became The Paradise.

Cliff: I can’t remember it as The Paradise.

Paul: Well [laughs] …

Cliff: I can’t see it as The Paradise.

Paul: I was going to say, I can’t really imagine it ever being a paradise either.

Cliff: No.

Paul: So it was rebranded as Paradise. Interestingly, when I was talking to Marcy, she was saying, and I thought the same, there’s absolutely no – when you walk past where it was, there is nothing to remind you where it was anymore. Because I was looking at it, I was like, “Where actually was it?” Because, there’s still the old back of the shopping centre there, and then there’s these shops and Sarky Fashions, but the actual footprint of the Roebuck has vanished.

Paul: No, the road’s vanished, and so has – in fact, that whole row of buildings has totally vanished, and the only reference point is Saachi Fashions, because that was on the corner. So it was literally beside Saachi Fashions, which is still there, and has been going for ages. And I know when we had fancy dress parties amongst the community, that’s the place we would go to, to buy material to make our – I remember us dressing up as the Brokeback Mountain boys, I think it was. I’m not sure we carried that off very well, but anyway. So, we were trying to make these cowboy chaps out of something that looked like leather, but wasn’t. And that was the place to go and get all this exotic material. You could be Tarzan or anything, get your fake leopard skin and everything. Glittery stuff, no doubt, for the Duchess at George and Dragon. I’m sure his frocks came from there.

Paul: Whips them up himself. I’ll just make … He will hear this. I just remember it mainly from – because [unintelligible 00:27:30] referred to it as Saachi Fashions, as in like, “Oh, you’re looking good today.”

Cliff: Yes. Yes.

Paul: So the road, but I mean, Marce, she’s been commenting on the spaces, because I think she put a post on of what was The Castle in [2006? 00:27:51], and Stonewalls, now is going to be like a sushi place. And I think she took a photo and was like, “All these spaces have gone now,” and she get also mentioned how there’s no – not even a ghost or a trace anymore of the Roebuck. It’s just been eradicated. And I went with a couple of the artists I’m working with to look at The Queen’s Arms. That, you can still tell, was a pub. So it’s nice that there is still some reference to it there. The other place I remembered when I had a meeting the other day was The Arizona.

Cliff: Ah, that rings a bell, The Arizona, but I can’t figure it. I don’t know where it was.

Paul: Catford.

Cliff: Ah, OK.

Paul: Catford, Broadway.

Cliff: So I never ventured into Catford. I did try once, and I think I got lost and there were just so many dodgy people around, that that was it. The other thing was, getting from Catford back to Bexley was never easy. You had to go through Lewisham. But getting from Lewisham to Bexley – so when the night buses were not available, which is going back a while, I used to actually walk all the way to Welling from Lewisham. And then when the N89 started, then I could just catch it, and it was easy to get home, because that was a pretty regular service. And the buses were practically empty, because almost everybody had got off by then. So that made a big difference, but I do also remember when the police station was put up.

Paul: In Lewisham?

Cliff: In Lewisham, and the bus stop was in front of the police station. And then, this peculiar event once, where somebody got, I think, shot at the bus stop in front of this police station, which is really bizarre, like of all the places. But as time went on, I do recall that Lewisham began – like, you heard police sirens more often. And by the time I left the UK, so round about 2002, I’d stopped going to the bars in Lewisham, and basically started to go to the George and Dragon. That’s an approximate date. I’m not sure of the exact date. So we met in Lewisham, but then I think it wasn’t long after that, that Stonewalls shut down or changed its name, or whatever.

But I think also, we were like a couple by then. We weren’t so much looking for a teenager or a young peoples’ hangout to go to. So our own needs had changed, and what I, at that point, really enjoyed was always the cabaret nights, with all the drag queens. And the singsongs at the George and Dragon, which I always loved. So it’s something I really missed later on in life, because in Canada, they mime, they don’t actually sing. And yes, they look good, but there’s something missing. And the banter is very, very British, and it just doesn’t happen there.

I did once meet one person on the drag scene, who’d actually – I can’t remember her name, but she had done the south London circuit, and she actually had emigrated to Vancouver. And she tried the banter there, and it never quite worked the same way. People were too offended, people didn’t laugh at it. So yes, it’s something that’s very British, that was very much evident here. I don’t know if it still exists in London or whether it’s just disappeared. I don’t know.

Paul: What, with this project we’re looking at, it’s not just memories of the spaces, but what happened to them. Not actually, why did they – when did they close, but what do you think, perhaps, was behind some of the closures? Was it financial, a change in … ? You touched on change in demographics. Do you have any thoughts on what might have led to these places all closing?

Cliff: Well, certainly. I think, and maybe it’s a global thing, speaking from – so I work in Hong Kong. I work at the university. Very few of my local Chinese students would declare themselves as being gay, but I don’t hide my sexual orientation there, but I don’t display it either. So it’s like, is it relevant for me to lecture you and tell you where I am? No, I’m here to lecture you on a subject, and the subject’s not me. OK? But a lot of people come out to me, and I get the sense that the role of the pub has changed.

And I think it’s online apps. Now, I’ve never used Grindr, so I don’t know how it actually works or anything, but I know that most of the gay people that I’ve encountered in Hong Kong and in London, who are in their 20s, spend most of their time on apps of some sort or the other, and that’s the way they meet people and ditch people, I have to say, which to me, is not the way that I relate to people. And as I’ve said, what brought me to The Queen’s Arms, and therefore, what brought me into Lewisham from Bexley, was the availability of this face-to-face encounter. And that way of community relations can only exist with face-to-face encounter.

What we see on social media today is not actually the same thing, and because you can zap somebody off just because they’ve said something that you don’t like. So essentially, you’re creating a bubble which leaves out people that may have a different view to you, but you’re actually blocking the view. So your perspective of yourself and of the community around you, becomes very boxed in. So this is completely what I didn’t want, coming out, and I find that this is now prevalent. And I think that’s probably been the biggest demise of gay pubs throughout the world.

Paul: I totally agree with what you said. And it’s almost like if you’re going online to meet someone, you just meet that person. There isn’t any interaction with other people who, if you’re having a chat with a couple of people, then somebody else would join in, they overhear you. In the pub, somebody would be like, “Oh, I went there,” or blah, blah, blah, and you’d start this interaction going. There’s be people, like you said, who you’d disagree with, and you’d just build up this sort of network, wouldn’t you, of people who you became friends with?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: So that builds the communities within the pubs, didn’t it? And I don’t think there is a digital equivalent of that, because there is a certain distance when you’re using an app or whatever.

Cliff: Yes. Yes, and I also think, at the same time, there has also been a movement of people. I mean, speaking for myself, I now no longer live in London, but there are people that I know from the metro, when I was working with them, who would have come to pubs in the borough because they were gay, but who now live in Houston. And so, if I pass through Houston, or they pass through Hong Kong, we meet up.

So that, too, is based on an initial face-to-face relationship, which has now gone global, but where we use the social media to keep in touch. But the social media has not created new friends for me to have internationally. What it does is, allows me to keep the friends I made. And I think there is a big difference there. I’ve met very few people online, that I could say are very good friends of mine, whereas I’ve met loads of people face-to-face, who are global, that are very good friends of mine. And that’s not to say I’ve been to bed with them, or anything like that. It’s to say that I’ve met them in the safe space of a gay pub, and I think that’s something that we’re missing now.

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: Can I interject? Just cycling back to the safe space of The Queen’s Arms, for example. Could you walk me through it? Take me through the door. Who are you seeing? What’s going on? What kind of people are there? What are you hearing, smelling, all of that?

Cliff: OK, so what would normally happen would be that I would finish work, go home to Bexley, and then catch the 89 bus. Get off at the bottom of – is it Blackheath Hill? Blackheath Hill Road. By the bowling alley, yes?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: And then I would walk around towards the High Street, and up the road to The Queen’s Arms. I would be aware that there were other pubs and things I would pass, but they were places that I would never actually go into because I would never have a need to go into them. And then there was this climb up the hill. Sometimes, I would maybe, if there was something else happening or somebody else around, I may go to another venue, but most times I’d go straight to The Queen’s Arms. And I was always aware that there were these chains on these bollards or something in front, which I do remember somebody falling over and knocking their teeth out on [laughs].

Paul: It wasn’t It was Peter Jones, who spent Christmas Day in Greenwich Hospital, because we had to take a little Christmas dinner round for him.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: And like, “Here you are,” and he was just sitting there looking really miserable and a bit tearful. And then the carol singers came round, and he was like, “Oh, fuck my life,” sort of thing.

Cliff: Yes. The lights were positioned on The Queen’s head, which was the sign above, rather than on the ground. So if you’re coming from outside, it’s a dark night, it’s winter, you could easily miss those little chains, and trip over them. And, actually, I know somebody who was coming out and tripped over them, and then we had to take her to the hospital. And that was supposed to be my night of good luck, but it never really happened, so it was hospital care instead.

Paul: Those chains were a menace.

Cliff: They were a menace. And if you went there at night like I usually did, then you’d come through the door, and they would – the doors were usually closed because Josie was quite strict about neighbourhood, and noise pollution and stuff like that. But, there were always people – so the bar was in the middle. It never smelled of anything that I can remember, whereas the Roebuck, mm, yes [laughs]. There was a horrible smell there, and I don’t know whether it was due to flooding, because the lower floor was below street level, and actually on level with the river, the [Quaggy 00:40:42]. So whether there was flooding in there or whatever, but it always smelled musty.

Not The Queen’s Arms. If there was any smell, it would be the beer smell, I would say. Yes, he usually used to say, “Oh, this tap’s not working, or the barrel’s finished,” or something. And once, I remember him showing me how to change the barrel, in case he was short of staff. So I actually learned something new. I never knew about things like that before [laughs]. And I learnt how to pull a pint as well, so that was great. But yes, you walked in, the bar was in the middle, and there were two sides to it. And right on your left-hand side, there was a corner stage, which is where people like Rose Garden would perform.

But it was impossible to keep people like that on that stage because, firstly, the stage was very small. And secondly, every drag queen I know has never stuck to a script of any sort, and never stuck to a place of any sort. They’d always move around and that was part of the whole act, to go around and tease people or pick on people. So if you had any sense, you’d stay far away from that zone, and if you were cute, you’d probably go to the front because you know you’d be made the centre of attention, somehow or the other, and if you wanted to get noticed, that was the place to be, at the front. So that was basically how it was. I would always find somebody that I knew in there. There was this really nice guy that always drank red wine, and had these two beautiful dogs. I think they were Afghans.

Paul: I remember him, yes.

Cliff: And he used to call him his ladies. And, they were Afghan hounds with these long, pointed nose, and their hair was always beautiful, and they always stuck their nose up, and they really did look like posh ladies. And he was always there with this glass of red wine, and a great person to chat to. I do remember him passing away, and being told by Josie that he’d passed away, but I don’t remember the actual date. But there were people like that, that were – they were just nice people. You could just sit next to them and have a chat about almost anything.

There were people like Mark, who was crazy about tennis and Wimbledon, so you could talk about sports, which was not a thing you’d talk about in The Brief Encounter, because that was too macho, right? And there were there were lots of people with diverse range of interests, and I think that’s the big part of its appeal. There was also a guy that used to dress up as the Queen, and I think he’s still around because I saw pictures of him in social media, and he really looked the spitting image of the Queen, except he swore like hell. And the more he drank, the more he swore, but that was that was – yes.

Paul: Didn’t he just turn up randomly though? It wasn’t like they’d invited him, would you come dressed as the Queen.

Cliff: No, he would just turn up.

Paul: He would just arrive, wave regally, get drunk.

Cliff: Yes. The only time he did turn up specifically was, it was some sort of coronation event or something, some commemorative event, and being The Queen’s Head, we had to have the Queen, right? And he wore all the stuff, and he had the crown and the wig. But it’s the profile that he has, which is just the Queen’s profile. And he would start off with some real, proper jokes that he’d obviously written and rehearsed, but as he drank and he started to slur, and then he would swear and all kinds of stuff like that, and it actually got quite funny watching him do that.

I think, at one point, he had a heart attack or something, because he was absent for a year or two. But I think it was the Queen’s birthday, as well, that he used to come, because it was June, right, that we celebrate the Queen’s birthday? And, if I remember, it was mid-summer, and once he came out – and in the summer, there used to be these two benches at the front of the pub, and he would start talking to anybody walking around in the street. And I remember kids looking in and saying, “Mum, mum, look, it’s the Queen.” And he would give them this royal wave. It was quite funny, actually.

And by the way, his teeth were not real. They were dentures, because they fell out once, which was really funny, yes [laughs]. Yes, so there was a huge range of people, different ages, people that worked in banks, people that worked in theatre, all kinds of people. And it was always fun. I mean, for me, there were two people there that provided the non-white space for me that I was looking for or the diversity space. One was Marcy, and the other one was Sara, and so, I kind of felt more comfortable there. But there were lots of people there that were great fun, and that I’ve kept in touch with, so yes. There were even people who used to do some editing for me, like Paul.

Paul: Proofreading.

Cliff: Yes, proofreading, yes.

Paul: I remember, it was a very small space, wasn’t it?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I mean, it was a tiny pub, and there was a garden out the back which I’d remembered when I saw an advert.

Cliff: We used to have a barbeque there.

Paul: Yes, but one thing I saw though on the –

Cliff: Because one year, Josie – the person who was supposed to help him with the barbeque didn’t turn up, and so I said, “Well, I do this every summer for my mum and dad,” and I stepped in. But yes, he used to have this one summer barbeque every year, yes.

Paul: Yes, because I can sort of remember the garden, but then there was this flyer, it said there’s cabaret plus fireworks in the garden, and I was like, “There’s a health and safety … ” I mean, fireworks in that, it’s probably like window box with 20 people standing on it, somebody trying to let off fireworks. I’m like, I think health and safety probably didn’t have quite the same import in those days, when they wanted to have fun, did they?

Cliff: No. No. It was always fun watching the drag queens take their act out of the building and start to talk to people in the street, because in those days, you still couldn’t be yourself totally in public. And I’m saying that, and even today, 20 years later, my husband and myself would rarely, in fact, never hold hands in Bexley Borough because it’s a borough that is gay-free, if you like, in that it has no gay bars and practically never has had. It’s tried a few times, but nothing’s actually worked out. And even its HIV services were shifted over to Lewisham Borough or Greenwich Borough, so it’s like you just go over Shooters Hill and you’re in a completely different zone where you can’t be yourself as a gay person. And so, to see somebody, then, go out of a gay bar and start this banter with people in the streets, is quite liberating, I guess. It very much is, “I’m here. I’m Gay and I’m here. What are you going to do about it?”

Paul: Yes. Yes, I think there was quite a lot of that, wasn’t there, though?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Just randomly, the drag queens would go out into the street.

Cliff: And with all of the bars, with Stonewalls, with The Castle, as you say, they would go across the street to the firemen, and wave at them, and have a laugh and a joke, and talk about how hunky they were or whatever. And terminology was different, people didn’t use words like, “Buff,” at the time, or whatever. Again, even in the Roebuck, people would go out on the street there as well –

Paul: To get a bit of fresh air.

Cliff: – which was a lot more risky, considering where you were. But that was part of, I think for me, that was the appeal of Lewisham. And that increased over time, because as I started to get into Black and Asian history, I went to meet a person called Joan Anim-Addo, who wrote the first book on Lewisham’s Black history, and I met her here in Lewisham. So it gave me a sense of, I may be gay, and I have this pub to go to. I may not be white, but my presence here is not something new. So I felt very much that Lewisham was giving me something that Bexley was not able to provide at that time.

As time went on, I wrote my own book on Bexley’s Black and Asian History, and very much looking at how Joan did her book. Sadly, Joan passed away, I think more than ten years ago now, but I think her daughter may have taken up some of that work in Lewisham. But it’s interesting how my relationship with the borough became more intense over time, rather than less intense, considering that I was actually living out of the borough.

Rosie: You mentioned – sorry, Paul, to interrupt.

Paul: No, no.

Rosie: You mentioned – both of you, actually, before we started the interview on tape, about how these pubs played a role supporting each other through the HIV crisis. That might be something to explore specifically in relation to The Queen’s Arms, or whichever pubs.

Cliff: So with regards to the HIV crisis and the pubs in Greenwich, and well, the pubs in Lewisham specifically, I think when I first started to come to The Queen’s Arms, everybody knew about HIV. Everybody was still in the AIDS crisis period. And I know that there was generally an acknowledgement that it existed, but it wasn’t actually talked about much. And it was with the arrival, really, of the Walk For Life, where people from the pub would actually do the walk and then meet at the pub afterwards. And that wasn’t just – I think it started with The Queen’s Arms, but later on it included very much the George and Dragon, too, because they used to have their own walking team.

Rosie: What was the Walk For Life?

Cliff: The Walk For Life was a sponsored walk to get money for HIV and AIDS in London. It was mainly headed by Terrence Higgins Trust, if I remember correctly. But it was a Government thing. The walk itself didn’t take place in any of the outer London boroughs. It took place in central London, usually. It later became a walk that started off near City Hall and finished there, so they would do this round trip through the city and come back to City Hall. But it was something that I did for quite some time after a friend of mine in Kenya contracted HIV, locked himself in his room and died, not of HIV, but of starvation.

And I realised at that time that, as I said before, Nelson Mandela called this a poverty, called the whole HIV situation as a result of poverty. And in that case, it really was because it was a poverty of understanding from his own community that led him to lock himself away. It was a poverty of his bosses not accepting him as a person with HIV, and AIDS in the end, that led to him losing his job. The medications were available, but they were so expensive in Africa that people couldn’t afford them. So it made me realise that this is very real. This is somebody that, I worked in tourism at the time in London, and he was my contact agent in Nairobi.

So for something to happen to a person who I’ve met, who I’ve hung out with, I’ve had a drink with, even though he’d never come out to me, but I knew, and then for him to die in such a tragic way, which didn’t have to be. There was everything around in the world for this person to live. And so, I then started to do the Walk For Life every year, and that was really – this was before Metro came on the scene in southeast London, and this was really the way the community started to be more orientated towards the needs of the HIV+ community, both in the UK and beyond.

At around, I think it was about maybe – it had to be in the late, mid-90s, the Harbour Trust was set up in Woolwich. Lewisham and Greenwich, I think Greenwich and Bexley were a joint healthcare initially, but then Lewisham was part of that. And that was the hub for people with HIV, and it was run initially by gay men. Sadly, I know that at least two of those have passed away. I became involved with them in around about 1998, ’99, and then later became director there. And so, I then started reaching out to the pubs. Now there was one pub in Woolwich, too.

Paul: Woolwich Infant?

Cliff: No. It was it was bang in the centre of town. Yes, I can’t remember exactly. I think it where one – near the station somewhere.

Paul: I know where you mean I can’t think what it was called.

Cliff: Yes, I can’t think the name.

Paul: Sort of heading towards Plumstead way, yes, yes.

Cliff: Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, so I started reaching out to the pubs to support the Harbour Trust because, as a trust we needed to – we did have a core amount of money provided by the boroughs, but we needed extra money because the number of people that were coming in were increasing by almost 150 percent per year at one point. And at the same time, the demographics of the people started to change from gay people to gay and straight Black communities, primarily African, from Uganda and from Zimbabwe.

So by that point, Metro had started to work with the young people that had come into Lewisham Borough as a result of Greenwich University, etc. And I realised that there was this disconnect between Metro, as a provider of support for LGBTQ people, and particularly for young people facing difficulties with coming out, against the fact that it had no coverage whatsoever for people infected with HIV. And so, I waited for a while, and then a new director came, a guy called Greg, came over from Australia. And Greg was really – I think I met him in the first week he arrived. And there was a pub very near here.

Paul: Goldsmith’s Tavern?

Cliff:  It was up on the road that goes up the hill from New Cross Station. The Rosemary’s Arms.

Paul: The Rosemary Branch.

Cliff: The Rosemary Branch, that’s it. And that was that had been run by two friends of mine for a very short time. I think they had real difficulties with the rents there. And they tried to make it work, anyway, and so Greg arrived from Australia, took up this new position, and I arranged to meet him there, and just give him a map of the pubs in southeast London from the point of view of Metro’s outreach, but also as a way of providing funding by events for Metro.

And at that point I raised the issue about this disconnect between the HIV+ community, who are also LGBTQ, but also against the community that saw itself as LGBTQ, but were non-HIV. And I said, “Well, this is just ridiculous. This shouldn’t be happening.” And he actually didn’t know that this issue existed because he just stepped into the position, until he started looking at the paperwork. And then, he realised that the initial paperwork did not cover HIV. We don’t know exactly why, but he did put it to the board to try and change that, and some of the board actually resigned over it.

So he found himself in this difficult position, where he wanted to make change, and he needed a full quorum to do this. So he said, “Would I mind stepping down from my director’s position at the Harbour Trust and joining the board at Metro to enable this transformation to occur?” And I did, and consequently Metro changed things. But it worked good for the Harbour Trust, too, because as a result, the Harbour Trust then, as years went by, needed a larger canopy, if you like, to work under. An organisation that had the capacity to apply for grants, etc, because we only had two actual workers at the Harbour Trust, social workers.

The rest of us were all volunteers, and from Greenwich and Lewisham and Bexley Boroughs primarily, so these three boroughs. So what actually then happened was, Metro accepted to include the Harbour Trust as an organisation under its own umbrella, and that’s enabled it to really blossom and get more funds. They were able to open outreach stations, and even though the people that originally worked in Bexley are now based in Vauxhall, or with Metro, they still had an outreach in Greenwich town, which covers Lewisham. It also meant that the outreach from Metro, with the pubs, now provided money for local services for HIV people in these three boroughs.

Rosie: Sorry, you mean the pubs were fundraising?

Cliff: Yes, so Metro was fundraising in the pubs. And so, you had this situation where people like Josie would be approached and asked, “Could we have a fundraising event?” Sometimes he would set it up himself, there would be people like Pitstop, which would hand out condoms, and provide information about sexual health across board, but also directions. So they were signposting people to different other organisations, either in the borough or beyond it.

And basically, the publicans, Paul at the George and Dragon, all of these people – I think Kim also had one event at the Roebuck, too. Maybe it had changed its name to Paradise then, I don’t know. But people were having these events and raising a lot of money. I mean, at times, over ₤500 pounds a night would be raised, which would go straight to the Harbour Trust or to the Metro funds, which would eventually go to the Harbour Trust anyway. So it was a great way of the community accepting that it had a responsibility for its own.

And with that, we did start to see a more diverse gay group coming to these pubs as well, because it – I mean, I’m not going to name any names, but there are so many people that I know from the pubs who were HIV+, but who would never have said anything in the pub. But the money coming from these events made them feel that they were not being stigmatised or they were not kept outside, and they could see genuinely that the pubs and the clientele were supportive, putting their money where their mouth is, you know, and not just saying, “Oh, I’m up for this or whatever,” but literally raising money. And the acts were very, very important for that. All of the acts were wonderful people, and such a range of people as well, different ages, all kinds of weird names. Was that something Hide?

Paul: Tanya Hide.

Cliff: Tanya Hide.

Paul: Who’s still doing the George and Dragon, yes.

Cliff: Yes. Yes, there you go. I mean, all kinds of people. And then there was a Black act, as well. He lives somewhere across the river in Limehouse or somewhere. He used to do Shirley Bassey and stuff like that. I can’t remember his name now.

Paul: I remember there was a Black woman who sang in The Queen’s Arms quite a lot, because Joe would always make everyone, “Shh,” when she was going to do I Will Always –

Cliff: She used to do the Sade songs.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: And I Will Always Love You for an encore, and Joe would like, “Shh. No, no talking.” It’s like, “You mustn’t speak.”

Cliff: Yes, dead silence.

Paul: Yes. I can’t remember her name off my head.

Cliff: And the last thing she ever wanted was a load of gay men singing at high pitch notes.

Paul: Yes, joining in.

Cliff: Yes, drowning her out, yes.

Paul: Yes, more dramatic.

Cliff: All being dramatic Madonnas or something, yes.

Paul: Yes, bet she’s like, “Oh, my God.” One thing we spoke earlier about, and can we just go back to, is Mandy and your time in the George and Dragon, when Mandy would signpost people.

Cliff: Yes. I think publicans were very important on the gay scene, because very often, gay people don’t have somebody that they can talk to when things get really rough. And they try to drown their sorrows, some people do, with drugs, which only makes things worse. But most people in that period of time would go to a pub. And they would try and drink themselves to forget their troubles. That’s usually the point where the person behind the bar, like Mandy, would spot that there’s an issue and she’s basically doing a counsellor’s job, but doesn’t know she’s doing it.

And she would chat with them, find out what the problem was, and knowing that I was working with Metro – so I went on to work both with the Harbour Trust, but also with Metro on various projects of theirs, and running a drop-in centre for positive men for almost ten years. So she would say, “Cliff, this person,” blah, blah, blah, or she would tell the person, “Go and talk to Cliff.”

And I would just give him my card and say, “Ring me tomorrow or wherever. We have a drop-in. Come and talk to us, because I’m not going to talk to you while you’ve been drinking, and this isn’t the place to be talking about this either.” And we would – that would be closed, and she would never let on to anybody, so people really trusted her. So it’s been great to see that she’s taken that out of the bar, and actually got her qualifications to act in that position professionally. It’s wonderful to watch her career, really.

Rosie: So Mandy was on the bar at –

Paul: The George and Dragon.

Cliff: At the George and Dragon, yes.

Rosie: And now she …

Cliff: I think she I think she currently works within the National Health. I know she was doing that, but I haven’t checked her out recently, yes.

Rosie: That’s fine.

Paul: Is your friend on Facebook, Twitter, or …

Cliff: She is on Facebook, yes.

Paul: I’ll try and – because yes, I always used to really like Mandy. I think she was very popular.

Cliff: She was very popular.

Paul: And she was a character on the scene, wasn’t she?

Cliff: Yes, yes.

Paul: She was like strong Northern Ireland accent.

Cliff: Very strong Ulster accent, yes.

Paul: Yes. And I haven’t seen her. I think she was –

Cliff: I should say Ulster accent.

Paul: Yes. It was – as soon as you’d say, “Mandy,” people would do the Irish accent, wouldn’t they?

Cliff: Yes, yes.

Paul: And like, “Oh, that Mandy.”

Cliff: That Mandy, yes.

Paul: I haven’t seen her for a few years, but I’d really like to track her down for this because I think it’s another really good story.

Cliff: And a different perspective.

Paul: From behind the bar.

Cliff: From behind the bar, yes. Almost sounds like a logo in itself, doesn’t it? From behind the bar.

Paul: Tales from behind the bar.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Oh, I dread to think what some of those bar people saw.

Cliff: Or heard.

Paul: Or heard. Yes, I mean, I remember some fantastic times. It just really made me laugh, when in the Queen’s Arms when I think somebody had – as Marcy said, she was like, “I was barred every other week.”

Cliff: Yes. So Josie’s thing, whereas Mandy was like, “Ulster,” this and that, Josie’s thing was, “You’re barred,” and he would like, do this. And every week, it was the same person, right?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: I mean, Kim was one, wasn’t she, that I think maybe got barred once or twice or something? And I mean, Beverly, never. But that’s another thing. There were people that came in, like Beverly and Allison, who had their sons there, and these little kids would be around us and we were part of their family. And you know, as years went by, they would grow up and they would get married, and they would have their own kids. And we’re still in touch with them. And in a funny sort of way, I still think of them as family because I still remember them as little kids wandering around. But there was never this thing of, “Oh, they’re lesbians, or they’re the lesbians’ kids or whatever.” No, they were just kids, and they were part of us, and that was it.

And even now that we’re all over the world, and we’re online, we’re still very supportive. If you look at the people that Marcy chats to, whenever she’s having a down time, it’s people everywhere that are there for her, and keep her going. And vice versa, because I do think she’s quite an icon for people who are facing difficulties of whatever sort. And those people that used to go to The Queen’s Arms are now getting to their 50s and 60s, and maybe even later, and so we’ve all got issues, health issues that come up. So it’s people like Marcy that become a way of seeing a positive force in our lives, and it helps us to deal with whatever comes up. But yes, that support network, it may be in a different medium now, but it’s still there.

Paul: And it stemmed from back in the day, yes, when we all met each other.

Cliff: From the pub, yes.

Paul: And built those relationships.

Cliff: Yes. Yes.

Rosie: Can I just follow that up, really?

Cliff: Sure.

Rosie: So this project is called Where To Now The Sequins Have Gone. You’re connected with people that you met back in the day, and you can keep in touch with them on Facebook or whatever, but where would you go? I mean, I know you don’t live in London, but if you were visiting London, where would you go to meet other gay people, or your community?

Cliff: Where would I go to meet people now in the gay community? To be honest, I don’t actually know because I was last in London in October, and I went to the Rose and Crown. And there were a couple of people that I knew from back in the day, but the place didn’t feel particularly gay. Now, Cinders had a place across the road from there on that corner of Greenwich Park. There was a pub there.

Paul: The Gloucester.

Cliff: Yes, and she ran that for a while. And then, of course, she moved to Compton Street.

Paul: The Admiral Duncan.

Cliff: The Admiral Duncan, and that terrible affair when it was bombed. And I think she was injured at the time.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: But somebody died, if I remember correctly.

Paul:  Yes.

Cliff: So as a community, we started off in Lewisham, but as we’ve gone out, we’ve also all had to face different issues of the wider world, whether it’s beyond Lewisham into other parts of London or other parts of the world. And so, sadly, I have to say, I don’t know where I would go now in London. And certainly, on this visit, I haven’t been to any gay bar in London. That’s also because of COVID as well, so there’s two things at work here, which has also closed a lot of bars in Hong Kong that couldn’t possibly continue when expats left. And that was due to harder COVID restrictions. So it was the expats that were keeping these bars running, and they had to shut down. So the whole scene has – maybe it would have gone online anyway, but COVID has forced it to do it quicker and sooner. And I think that that’s really sad. I mean, I honestly don’t know any gay bars in London now. So I wouldn’t know where to go, which is kind of sad.

Paul: Yes, because I don’t go to the bars in Soho or anything, because they’re just not for me. You know what I mean?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: You feel like they’re very much a young persons’ –

Cliff: Possibly the only bar that I am aware of, but I haven’t been to for a while, is Comptons, because particularly in the afternoon or early evening, you do meet people that formerly were out in the bars in Lewisham, but now work at jobs in central London. And so, they’d go for a quick drink there before coming back, because there’s nowhere to go in Lewisham now. So, the bar scene’s retreated to Compton Street, essentially, and the surrounding areas of Soho, and it’s dead in Earl’s Court. It’s no longer a gay area, really, like it was. And so yes, that’s kind of where things are at the moment. I don’t want to go to those bars because I have to protect my mum. So I don’t take undergrounds, not that – I could walk from Charing Cross there, but yes.

Rosie: Shielding for Coronavirus?

Cliff: Shielding, yes.

Rosie: One of the theories is that one of the reasons that there are fewer gay bars is because we’ve all gone, “Right, the world is so accepting, we can all hang out in the Fox and Firkin,” or something.

Cliff: Yes.

Rosie: Do you see those venues as places that you could go with your partner, with your gay friends?

Cliff: That’s an interesting question. What sort of venues would I go to in terms of the ordinary pub? Now, I was talking to somebody about this just yesterday. She’s from Zimbabwe, and she she’s my master’s colleague, from when we did our master’s together. And we were in Welling, and I was trying to explain to her, in the safe surroundings of an African restaurant, that there are there are several bars in Welling that I would never go into because they were so racist. And those bars are still racist. And you know that when you walk past them, you know the looks you’re getting, you know the little snide remarks that you can see being made, so you’re really aware of it.

Most, I would say, I would say 50 percent of the bars anywhere have shut down and turned into supermarkets and things. But even those that surround, that survive, there are still very racist bars. So I would never have gone into those bars anyway. And I very rarely went into bars in Bexley because of that. So my bar world no longer exists in the suburbs. It only exists in the centre of London, where I would go, I feel I can go in and sit down with my husband and have a drink, or meet up with people, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that in the suburbs.

Rosie: And it’s complicated interaction, right, but it’s as much to do with race as to do with sexuality?

Cliff: Yes, we are a biracial couple, a biracial gay couple, and we have had our issues in that. I mean, we had a lot of issues in Canada with getting my permit of residency, which is why we left Canada and went to Hong Kong. And then when we arrived in in Hong Kong, I could only get a permit to stay there if I had a job there. And at approaching 60, that was not going to be easy. So I initially got a permit by working with the university for no money. So as, I guess, an assistant role, very much needed in the university, but no funding.

Then I got fed up with that because I got pulled up by immigration because they didn’t process my visas. And I thought, “Well, I don’t really want to have a black mark at immigration in China,” right? So my husband works for a Canadian company which is very pro-diversity and equal rights, and there were two cases in Hong Kong involving foreigners who were married to locals. One was a lesbian couple, one was a gay couple. And Hong Kong still has the British system, where if it’s passed by the courts, then it becomes Law.

And they won the case, so Hong Kong started to recognise overseas marriage, and therefore because it doesn’t say in Law who you’re marrying, it just says if you’re married overseas, you’re married in Hong Kong. And so I now have a spousal visa attached to my husband’s in Hong Kong, which means that it doesn’t matter whether I’m working or not working, I have a visa and I can stay. Before, I had to get out of the territory every six months, so I’ll go to Macau, get a new stamp on my passport and come back. During COVID, of course, we can’t even travel to Macau, so this change – so we were amongst the first 100 gay couples in Hong Kong to get spousal visas. And we’re pushing the doors with other organisations, clubs and things.

We’re kind of saying, “Look, this is the Law in Hong Kong, therefore if I have membership on whatever terms, my husband has to have the same.” And we’ve actually done that with a few clubs, and they were like, “Uh … ” And then they said, “OK, that’s the Law, right.” So it’s funny to think, but it’s the support of places like Lewisham that give me the energy and the determination to push for these international changes, really. And I know I’m not the only one. I know there are other people from the borough who’ve also faced issues in other parts of the world, and have also pushed boundaries.

I know somebody else who lived in Lewisham Borough, who went to the States, to Texas. And, they’re a biracial, gay couple, too, and they’ve also been pushing boundaries there. So it’s funny to think about a place like Lewisham having such a huge influence, but like I said, Joan’s book on the Black and Asian history of Lewisham Burrough set the scene for other boroughs. And as a result, English Heritage produced a book on the Grand Estates which included ones in Bexley that was written by me. But it’s built on stuff that was from Lewisham. And it sort of set the scene for the wider world, or the wider Britain.

Rosie: And that tone has been set at the local authority level, or would you think just generally?

Cliff: Oh, further. I mean, English Heritage –

Rosie: But I mean, starting in Lewisham, it’s the community, or it’s the local councillors?

Cliff: I think it’s community, so it’s very roots-based. It’s the communities of Lewisham, which, as far as I can remember, was always a multi-ethnic, diverse place, at least as far as I know. So when I first arrived in England, it’s way back in ’71, and we moved to Bexley, we actually did our shopping here in Lewisham, because the old shopping centre was the only real place in this whole area to actually get the things we wanted. And Lewisham market had the foods that we couldn’t get, plantains and stuff like that.

So this was the place to come as immigrants, to get whatever we wanted, and definitely the main shopping area for this whole area. Even Woolwich did not compare in those days, and Bexley, I mean, it still is a 95 percent white borough, but it was even more so when we arrived. And so I know my mum had trouble getting jobs and things, but it’s Lewisham that provided that function and that support just by being Lewisham.

Rosie: Yes. And you’re commenting here really in relation to issues of racial diversity and inclusion, rather than from spearheading an acceptance of gay people, or do you see them as sort of overlapping?

Cliff: I think the acceptance of ethnic diversity came before the acceptance of sexual diversity, and I think that’s, as I touched upon earlier, that’s a thing about, you can hide your sexual identity. After all, in most cases, not all, sex happens behind closed doors. And so there was, I can’t hide the way I look. And I’m reminded about that when I come – I recently came through Gatwick, so my husband goes through the gates, the auto gates, but my passport won’t let me go through the auto gates because the facial ID does not work well with darker skin.

And I posted it on Twitter as an issue and so many other people said the same thing. So on entering the UK with a British passport, I’m still segregated by this system. So if you think about that level of not acknowledging diversity that’s still there, then it’s not saying, “You’re gay, that’s why you can’t come in.” It’s saying, “You look different, that’s why you can’t come in.” So you have to show your passport, answer questions to get into the country that’s supposed to be yours.

So it works in stages, I think. I think, even, I would say that the racial point is one point, but perhaps sexual equality, too, is another point. Women’s rights, which we’re very much involved in because my husband works in textiles, and 80 percent of his company’s workforce are women. And so, we’ve put a lot of money into schools specifically for girls in Kenya, and helped set that up. Another friend of mine, actually a school friend from Bexley, has set up HIV schools in Uganda. So this area and this community has actually had tentacles elsewhere, but I believe that it’s the grassroots support in this area that’s giving individuals the strength and the capacity emotionally to be able to do these things.

Rosie: Cool.

Cliff: Cool?

Paul:  No, I think that’s true, because doing this project, it’s brought up a lot of things about the cultural – Lewisham’s culture aspects. And also, I’ve come across Gay Sweatshop’s set up, and did a lot of work in the Albany and so on, and it’s really radical, the work they did. But it was supported locally. People went to it. They’d go to [Out 01:28:50] dance at the Albany, but they also go and see a performance by Gay Sweatshop or something, and then go to the pub to chat about it afterwards. And again I think there was quite a radical undercurrent in a lot of what’s gone on in this area. Also, the anti-fascism movement which was so strong in Lewisham.

Cliff: Absolutely. And the current movement. I know there was, this weekend, there was some sort of demo or march about the changing laws in the UK, and things like the Rwanda issue, and stuff like that. So all of these things, you don’t hear anything from Bexley because it’s a conservative borough, and you hear slightly less from Greenwich. I think in many senses, Greenwich has more money. It does have areas that are very deprived, but it also has very, very rich areas, whereas things are a little bit more equal in Lewisham, but there’s always been this … It was like, at one point, I would say I would identify the announcements at Lewisham Station as being coming from somebody from the Caribbean, then at another time they were from somebody from East Europe, then at another time they were African. And you can hear all these accents at Lewisham Station and it’s like, “Right, I’m arriving at a very different place,” whereas Bexley Heath Station still sounds as it did in 1971.

Paul: Hello. You’re alighting in –

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: That’s a fantastic point, yes, when you listen to announcements in Lewisham, there was all this, the Caribbean accents and –

Cliff: Or a very camp accent, for that matter which, in New Cross Station, I remember arriving there, and the guy that was on the train, it was the underground train that goes to East London. Is that East London line? I think, yes.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: So he was a friend of mine, Rob, and he is from Lewisham, and he was the train driver. And he spotted me getting the train, so he made an announcement on the train to say, “And for Cliff, coming on the train,” and this sort of thing. And where else does that happen?

Paul: Did he work on DLR for a while?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Yes, I know him, yes.

Cliff: Yes. He’s now become a monk.

Paul: No.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Oh. Well, that’s surprising.

Cliff: He’s too handsome to be a monk.

Paul: Yes, I mean, I didn’t know him that well –

Cliff: He’s joined the Franciscans.

Paul: Oh, right, wow.

Cliff: Yes. It’s been a very interesting journey, but I’m very happy for him, because he’s happy. It’s where he wants to be. And yes, so we’re still in touch online, yes.

Paul: Yes, I didn’t know him that well, so I didn’t know he’d got this spiritual side.

Cliff: Yes. I mean, there have been sad occasions. One of my friends from the borough, who actually lived on one of the blocks just up here, passed away and was dead for a week before they found him. And the only reason that they found him was because I hadn’t heard from – I knew he was going home to see family in the northeast, which was a little bit of a toxic environment, which is why he was in London. So we’re still seeing London and Lewisham as a place of refuge, you see? And I hadn’t heard from him after Christmas, and I thought, “This isn’t right.” And he’d come out and seen us in Vancouver, and I thought, “Something’s not good here.”

So I asked another gay person, also in New Cross, to check on him. And they said they couldn’t get in touch with him, and then I asked Rob to go to the flat. And, people hadn’t seen him, and they hadn’t seen his cat. Now that’s worrying, because if he’s gone away, he would have – he loved his cat. He would have given his cat to somebody. So the police came and knocked down the door, and he’d literally died watching TV. The TV was still on, and he seemed to have had some massive heart attack or something.

And it was quite devastating for all of us, I think more so because it’s not the death, because working with HIV and AIDS, death was quite prevalent at one point, and there’s enough people I’ve sat with, or sat with family members and watched somebody pass away. But it was the fact that he died alone, and it was a whole week before anybody knew. And there’s me in Hong Kong trying to get it actioned here. So I think that really hit all of us very badly because it was like we ought to be in touch with each other more. There’s the technologies there to allow us to do that, so that none of us find ourselves in this situation.

Rosie: When was this?

Cliff: This was – so I was in Hong Kong, so it would have been six years ago.

Rosie: Right.

Cliff: Yes.

Rosie: And I mean, you must have thought, “Well, who’s looking out for him on the ground?” because it was you raising the alert from Hong Kong.

Cliff: Yes. And yes, Rob took it very badly because they were really good friends, and Rob actually found a home for the cat, because he had cat food and stuff, and the cat was OK but you know … Yes. So, there have been some sad times and I think that is an indication of the demise of the pubs, because this person would have been going to a pub and people would have seen him, and then suddenly he wasn’t there. And if there’d been more pubs and it was … I think this wouldn’t have been quite so bad. I’m not – you can’t guarantee death. You’re born to die, I say. One thing you’re guaranteed when you’re born, is that you’ll die.

Paul: It’s Lana Del Ray over there.

Cliff: Yes, it’s true though, right?

Paul: Yes, absolutely.

Cliff: So you don’t know when it’s going to happen, but you hope it’s not going to be you on your own, and you hope that people will find you if you do die on your own, right? But a week is a long time, and yes, it’s kind of sad.

Paul: I think back in the day, if a regular in The Queen’s didn’t turn up, you’d been, like, “Oh, have you seen … ?” And somebody would say, “Oh, they’re on holiday,” or they’re this or that.

Cliff: Yes, and people used to take holidays together.

Paul:  Yes.

Cliff: Yes, so I took a holiday in Gran Canaria, and I was sitting in a bar, hoping to pick up, and along comes Rose Garden, recognises me and says, “What’re you old whore doing around here?” I was so embarrassed, with the broad, loud, Northern Irish accent, lots of effs thrown in because you can’t do a Northern Irish accent without that. And I didn’t pick up. Obviously, I mean, I had bad press there. But I do know that a lot of the drag queens used to do this – is it August or some point where they used to all go to Gran Canaria and they used to do this big drag thing there? And there was a particular pub that they used to go to. So even in those days, there was an extension from Lewisham to the Gran Canaria, yes.

Paul: And something that I noticed that’s revived this year, which is good, is the drag race.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Because that’s another fundraise for the Metro.

Cliff: For the Metro, yes.

Paul: Or it has been in the past.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: And I didn’t realise it was back, but it’s back this year.

Cliff: Yes, it is.

Paul: So I was like, “Good.”

Cliff: And that’s, again, from Greenwich Town, right?

Paul: Yes, it’s starting outside The Rose and Crown again. And interestingly, because you’d said about the Rose and Crown, and over the last 20 years, it’s switched from being a gay bar to a straight bar, to gay bar to a straight bar. They went straight during the Olympics, obviously then they’d get more visitors. And then, I think they found it hard to get the gay crowd back in because I think they almost lost trust with people.

Cliff: Well, the management’s changed several times. It was also a bar that was trans accepting, because one of the bar people there was part of the trans community for a while.

Paul: Worked in the print shop?

Cliff: I don’t know where she worked.

Paul: Yes, I think I know who you mean.

Cliff: But the fact that the bar did that, had a bar person from the trans community, actually says a lot because this is the person that’s out there in front of everybody, rather than coying in the corner or something, and would actually stand up for her if she had flak from anybody. I thought that was brilliant, and it’s great to see it in this area because it’s a continuation of the same pushing boundaries that, for me anyway, is what Lewisham represents. I think also, within this area, is also – I know the bar is actually technically in Greenwich, right?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: But I kind of – boundaries were artificial anyway. But I think even Greenwich Museum could do more. Compare it with the Museum of London, that employs people with disabilities on their front desk, I think, again, it’s a statement, but it’s also accepting that look, the person’s doing the job, this isn’t tokenistic. You know, so yes, I’m all for that.

Paul: Yes, definitely. Well, I think –

Cliff: Do you have any … ?

Paul:  – I’ve exhausted my questioning. I can’t think of anything else. Rosie?

Rosie: Yes, no, I mean, well, lots came out.

Cliff: Was there anything that you wanted to talk a bit more about?

Rosie: Yes. Well, so something actually was the two of you, right? Tell me how you got to know each other, scrolling back, I think it was, to The Queen’s Arms.

Cliff: Well, you had two friends, and Chrissy with the ball. I’ve never –

Paul: Oh, I know, yes, with the little – yes.

Cliff: Yes, I’ve never known her full name, but I just call it Chrissy with the ball, because she had this pendant, this ball pendant.

Paul: Yes. And people used to play with it, and they used to …

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: But then it knocked all of her front teeth out, didn’t it?

Cliff: It bounced up and hit her teeth, yes.

Paul: Because I think she’s in competition with Marcy for who got barred the most by Joe.

Cliff: Because she got very rowdy when she was drunk, yes.

Paul: Yes, she got rowdy, she vomited on the floor once, and Joe was like, “Oh, my God.”

Cliff: And again, this is a person that, I couldn’t care whether she was bi, gay, or whatever. She was just Chrissy with the ball, right? And I think that was very much the pub’s way though. We never really labelled anybody. It was very fluid in a way. Even with Marcy, I never asked her, and I don’t care. It’s just Marcy, right?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: So it was the same. So she was with you and …

Paul: Jonathan.

Cliff: Jonathan, that’s it. Yes, so I did meet Jonathan just once after I left London. I came back once and I met him, and I almost didn’t recognise him. He’d done a lot of manscaping, like he just transformed himself, and I was like, “Is that you?” Yes.

Paul: Yes, because he’s got a beard now, and he lives in Greece now.

Cliff: And he pumped himself up, and he had this, like … Which he never had before. He completely changed. But yes, it was like you three were always together because you shared the house.

Paul:  We all lived up at Hither Green Lane, yes, so we’d just trudge on down to the pub together.

Cliff: Yes. So that’s how I got to meet them. And then, I asked you to edit my notes on Zheng He. Now, I first went to Hong Kong in 1986 to research Zheng He, as you know from the notes, and I now lecture on Zheng He at the same university that I researched at. So I’ve got a full circle.

Paul: Wow. Definitely, yes.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Yes, that was, yes, just doing the proofreading and stuff.

Cliff: So that is that was really the start of the, I would say, the profession that I currently work on, or in. So again, it was down to the contacts in the bar. And I’m sure there are other people with similar stories, that that went there.

Rosie: Sorry, how was it down to the – I mean, obviously Paul did a fantastic piece of editing for you.

Paul: Of course.

Cliff: Yes. But reading his proofreading, and reading the finished article made me realise that I had actually done something important that nobody had done before the famous Gavin Menzies came out with his book. And I’d actually done that a whole decade or two before that. And I’ve ended up working on a cruise line between Muscat and Singapore, lecturing on that on board and onshore, all kinds of exotic places in the Indian Ocean. So, it’s opened doors for me, and it’s actually established me as the specialist on this 15th century Chinese admiral, who sailed to East Africa, and I’m the expert on him and East Africa.

Rosie: OK, right.

Paul: Fantastic.

Rosie: OK, well, we won’t digress, but yes.

Cliff: No.

Rosie: But I guess, other things, you talked about the lock-ins, that’s what you liked about The Queen’s Arms.

Cliff: Yes.

Rosie: What was going on in these lock-ins?

Cliff: Lots of drinking. Yes, there was actually never sex in the pub, which I think a lot of people thought that, because we would say lock-in, and they would think, “Oh, what’s going on in there?” But Josie would never allow that, so it wasn’t that sort of pub. And there wasn’t a dark room or anything like that, so it was all above board. But we would get very, very drunk, and if there was a drag queen, then the show would go on. At which point little legs and myself would get onto these two tables beside the stage and do this kind of formation dancing with – so we were both little guys, and it would be like, “Get your shirt off. Get your shirt off.”

Paul: Get it off, Cliff. That was Marcy. It’s like, “Behave.”

Cliff: And Josie also – this is quite funny, actually, but I think it’s – I wouldn’t normally talk about it, but I think it’s quite funny. So one day we were playing bingo or something. No, we were doing the quiz. We had a quiz night. Was it Friday night, or something?

Paul: I can’t remember.

Cliff: Well, once a week, there was a quiz night and I was in charge of – I think because we had groups, didn’t we?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: And teams, and somebody put down some name for the team. So when I write my name, Cliff, when I’m being arty and farty about it, I kind of do this C like this, and L straight down. So the C is like an arrowhead, and L is just a line, a vertical line, and then an I, which is another vertical line, little dot, and then the F is two vertical lines coming down further, and then I just put a line across it. So Josie read it out as Clitty, and it stuck, and he’d shout, “Clitty.” And I just got used to it in the end, and just responded to it. And then at another time, I can’t remember who it was, but there were two guys that, I’m not sure if they were together or not, but they were always drinking together. And one of them – and this is not so nice – thought that being the only Asian in the pub, he called me Githa from, is it Coronation Street or … ?

Paul: I think it was, yes.

Cliff: One of those soaps. And again, Josie would say, “Githa,” [unintelligible 01:47:16]. But then he would go back to, “Clitty.” And people just took this for granted. There was – it wasn’t – but new people coming in would be like, “What? Your name’s Clitty?”

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: Yes, I’m Clitty.

Paul: He really did rule the pub, didn’t he?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I remember one time, somebody had been barred, and went in, and Joe was like, “Can I have a word in the garden, please?” And we were just standing by the door, and the garden door was open, so we could hear, like, [muttering]. Then we heard like a [slapping sound], and it’s like, “Oh,” then they came back in, and he said, “He slapped my face, but I’m allowed back in again.

Rosie: Joe?

Paul: Yes, the landlord slapped his face, and like, “There, don’t it again, but you can come back in.” So it’s like, people with pubs say that wrong, but it just sort of fits, doesn’t it, that whole quite high camp pub –

Cliff: Yes, yes.

Paul: – you get your face slapped, you’re allowed back in the pub again.

Rosie: What do you think they were doing that justified the … ?

Paul: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Cliff: It could be that somebody was being a bit too amorous in the in the pub, so he was, “This isn’t that sort pub.”

Rosie: What were the grounds? Yes, what were the grounds for being barred? What would he bar you for?

Cliff: Oh, God, anything. Anything that Joe didn’t like.

Paul: Yes, too drunk, you dropped something.

Cliff: Too drunk, dropped something. I never got barred.

Paul: I remember the time when – oh, I did when I walked into the door one time.

Cliff: Did you walk into the door?

Paul: And it was like, when I walked in, he was like, “You walked right into my door, and I had to check it to make sure it’s all right, and anyway, you’re barred.” And I was like, “But I don’t remember.” He was like, “You don’t remember, my arse.” And I also remember Christine one time, because it was the pub quiz, and I think Joe was reading the questions out. Chris was a bit pissed and fell asleep. So he was asking the question like, “In 1955, who was … ” And then heard this [snoring] from Christine who’d fallen asleep with her head on the bar. So he was like, “In 1955, who was the – Christine, you’re barred – who was the … ?”

Cliff: Yes, he used to do that, yes.

Paul: Because I’d, “Chris, you’ve been barred.” She was, “Oh, fucking hell.”

Cliff: And you talked about coming into the bar, so if the quiz was already underway, then … Like, I was on your team several times because Christine was off her face or had fallen asleep or whatever.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: So they were, “Cliff, Cliff, join us.”

Paul: We need someone more compos mentis.

Cliff: We need somebody, yes [laughs]. And the questions were a good mixture, they were quite a wide selection.

Paul: I don’t think I ever won.

Cliff: It was all kinds of things. It was sports and drama, and opera and God knows, everything was in there, wasn’t it?

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: Yes, it was good. Yes.

Rosie: One of the things that has come up when people talk about difference between bars now and in the past, is that there’s also venues where you go just for the event.

Cliff: Yes.

Rosie: You go for the act or whatever, whereas The Queen’s Arms was a mix of evenings where you’re just drinking, chatting, and evenings where there’s events and quizzes. Is that right?

Cliff: Yes, it was a mixture. I think I would come there whether there was a quiz or not because there’s nothing at all in my borough, so this is my nearest hangout. And I honestly didn’t know a single gay person in my borough. That’s why I say it’s the gay-free borough because it’s like…

Paul: A woman I know described Bromley as being like that, she said, “Oh, there aren’t actually any gays allowed in Bromley,” so I think it’s that, like Bexley, Bromley.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: But maybe it’s that people gravitate in general to the more liberal – well, or move to –

Cliff: Well, when I started working with the Harbour Trust, one of my roles was to provide stats to the boroughs, like how many people from each borough have we got registered, etc. And actually, there were a lot of gay people in – because Bromley is one of London’s largest boroughs, so it’s quite spread out, but its population is not as dense as Greenwich or Lewisham. And then Bexley is like halfway between the two. But the thing is, there are lots of gay people there, and there were lots of HIV+ people there.

And then when I also did a quick survey on one of the – is it Squirt or something like that? One of these gay apps, for a better word. And what I was trying to do was to put in postcodes, and seeing how many people came up so we could target services. So I wasn’t interested in people’s names or anything. I just wanted to know for each postcode, how many people were on the site so we could target outreach services, etc. Because, there’s no other stats that – you can find almost everything online from a census for a postcode, but you can’t find this.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: So how do you know that these people are there? And how do you get hold of them before they become HIV+, to make sure that they take care of themselves? I mean, today we might be doing the same for monkeypox or something, right? It’s the same process, to try and get ahead of whatever you’re dealing with. And I was really surprised, like Catford and places like that. Catford was one place, Dartford was another. A lot of gay people. Woolwich, a lot of lesbians. I think it was once called the Lesbian Capital of London, yes.

Paul: Really?

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I never knew that.

Cliff: And then when I’d thought about it, and I remembered the pub that we were talking about, in Woolwich – I think it was The Infant.

Paul:  Yes.

Cliff: The Woolwich Infant.

Paul: It did have another name.

Cliff: For a while.

Paul: Yes. It became the Woolwich Infant for a bit, I think.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: But it was called something else as well.

Cliff: Something else.

Paul: It’s changed its name.

Cliff: Yes. And actually, most of the people that went there were lesbians. And it was busy, I think, on the Monday, and that had to do with wherever they worked or whatever. I don’t know what – yes. So it had different timings to the other gay bars and a very different clientele. But maybe Sara would tell you more about that because – Kim, definitely because she was involved with that, so yes.

Paul: Yes, I’ll have to – because Kim, like I said, “Can we do an interview?” And she was like, “I’m really busy at the moment, and I can’t find the time,” but I’ll try and encourage her to drop along too. So Rosie’s going to be on site in the confessional in the exhibition space recording peoples memories.

Cliff: Yes. But I’m sure Beverly wouldn’t mind.

Paul: I think, yes.

Cliff: I’ll put you in touch.

Paul: Yes, I think Marcy’s actually –

Cliff: Oh, she’s doing that.

Paul: Because I think she started taking on – starting to do some outreach for me.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I was like, “Fantastic.”

Cliff: Yes, no, because these people are all part of Marcy’s support circle anyway, so it’ll be good for Marcy to do that, yes.

Paul: Yes, because I saw she’d done a post talking about this project, and saying, “Contact Paul or myself,” and I was like, “Great. She’s just taken the initiative, and trying to get her friends to come to her.”

Cliff: Yes, good. But she really needs to feel that she can do something, so this works really well.

Paul: Yes Oh, I’ve got so much she can do, because like I said, I was saying to her, “I’d like you to be involved in the tea dance project,” which we’ll want to do over the autumn and winter.

Cliff: Who was the girl that used to come in and sing those Sade songs?

Paul: I can’t remember her name. I remember she was –

Cliff: Very thin.

Paul: Yes. I think she was young. Young, Black girl.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: I can’t remember.

Cliff: And she did have a very beautiful voice.

Paul: Yes. Oh, she was very good. Yes.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul: Yes, I remembered, she was one of the people, I’d think, “Oh, she’s quite good,” because there were a couple who were a bit ropey.

Cliff: Yes, yes.

Paul: I remember. Yes. I remember there was one Black drag queen who sang some great songs, but she couldn’t hold a note for the life of her. It was like, [unintelligible 01:56:09].

Cliff: But you see, again, you see we’re talking about this mixture of queerness and race at the same time, in the same venue. And yet, we don’t even know if this girl was queer.

Paul: No.

Cliff: It didn’t really matter. It was that kind of space. So, very accepting space, I would say.

Paul: Yes.

Cliff: Yes.

Paul:  I always thought it was, yes.

Rosie: Well, Cliff, you’ve given us so much.

Paul: Yes.

Rosie: Yes. Thank you so much.

Paul: I’m glad I’m [unintelligible 01:56:42]. No, that’s brilliant. Thank you, Cliff.

Rosie: Yes. Thank you.

Cliff: No problem.

[End of recorded material 01:56:51]

 

(W14)

If for any reason you wish to withdraw your name or memory, contact us at engage@gold.ac.uk

An oral history collected by Paul Green as part of the In Living Memory project, Where to, now the sequins have gone?

In the interview, Geoffrey discusses his memories and experiences of the lost gay bars of Lewisham that thrived from 1970s-90s.

Parts of this interview are featured in a podcast produced by the project entitled Where to, now the sequins have gone?

 

Transcript

Geoffrey (interviewee): Geoffrey is my full name. Geoffrey Peter Murray.

Rosie (interviewer): And Murray, M, U …

Geoffrey: M, U, double R, A, Y.

Rosie: Cool. And Geoff is with me, Rosie Oliver, and I’m part of the Bijou Stories, Avant-Gardening Bijou Stories project, Where to now the Sequins Have Gone? which documents the gay bars and communities that existed in Lewisham, particularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. And we’re doing that, and we will be producing a range of creative projects, including a podcast, and some of this interview may make its way into that podcast. And we’re part of a bigger programme called In Living Memory, A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham, and that’s documenting oral histories, different oral histories of post-war Lewisham. So, that’s what the purpose is of this interview today. But now, let’s get started on the interview. So Geoff, could you just introduce yourself? Just say who you are.

Geoffrey: As I say, my name’s Geoffrey Peter Murray. Nearly 64. Quite a complicated family history, because my father was in the army, therefore I was born in Hong Kong. Travelled around with my father. We went, we stayed in Germany a couple of times. My brother was born there. My mum and dad got married there, but that was in 1949, just after the war. But my mum and dad’s story [unintelligible 00:01:47] long, long story, which maybe we can talk about later. One of my last schools, or the school before last, I was in Germany for that school, and then just before the exams we had to come back. So that sort of interrupted my education, not that my education was that good anyway, but … But because we were in Germany, obviously German was part of my exams, which meant that I had to go to the girls’ grammar [laughs]. And of course, all the teasing you got from the boys, as you know, “Oh, he’s off to the boys’ grammar.” Well, I was quite happy, but I mean …

Rosie: So it was just you and loads of girls.

Geoffrey: Just me, yes. But anyway, after that, this is when we came back to England.

Rosie: Where was that, locally?

Geoffrey: In Maidstone in Kent. In fact, my parents still have got the – they’d sort of settled down, and they decided Maidstone was going to be the place to do it, and that was in about ’67-ish when they bought the house there for about 3,500. And then I sort of, I suppose, discovered I was gay, experimented and things. Never really had a great many friends, because as I say, it was almost difficult making friends because you were always moving around. And when I went back to Maidstone thinking that all my friends that were there three years ago, well, obviously they’d moved on. Some of them, I could connect with, but some of them, no interest at all. Different things. I then started work. I worked for a jewellers for 16 years.

Rosie: Was that down in Maidstone?

Geoffrey: No, it started off in Chatham, which is the next town, and that’s one of the places where they had quite a few gay bars in Chatham and Rochester. So when I did start experimenting, that was the place to go. I think there was one pub in Maidstone, but I don’t think I ever went to it. Not for any reason. It’s just …

Rosie: Sure, yes.

Geoffrey: It wasn’t convenient, sort of thing. I lived on one side of town, and it was on the other side of town, so getting home could’ve been difficult if it’d been a late night. Especially with Maidstone with the buses, I mean, they’re dreadful, but that’s another story. But then I had a couple of boyfriends. My first serious boyfriend was a guy called Stanley, and that was in about ‘79. I was about 20. He was about 30, I think. But he’d been married, and he had two kids, and anyway, after a couple of years – in fact, I moved out of my home. I moved, I lived with Stanley for about a year and a half, or a year, and then things weren’t going … As far as I was concerned, they were going all right, but he obviously was [wandering? 00:05:42].

Rosie: Right, and that was when you were living in Chatham?

Geoffrey: No, I was actually living in Gravesend at the time, but as I say, working with Samuels, you’ve got obviously thousands, hundreds of different branches all the way around the country. So I’ve done, I think, about ten different shops. I was a manager of one in Bromley. I was the manager of another one in Kilburn.

Rosie: All over.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So what brought you to Lewisham?

Geoffrey: I’d split up with a partner and he was living in Clapham. And then, because I was working in Woolwich, I got a bedsit. I had the bedsit for about a year, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was nice. And there was a gay sauna across the road, so you know … Not that I ever went to that either, but apparently there was a gay sauna across the road. That was in Plumstead. But the owners decided to sell the property, so it meant that I was homeless. I’d already, when I was living in Greenwich, I’d signed onto the council list. And I took them up to, obviously when I got my letter, I took that up to them. And I had a friend who also worked for Samuels, and he was also gay, but we weren’t … I think he fancied me more than I fancied him. We went on holidays together, and things like that, but it was never – it was purely – as far as I was concerned, it was purely platonic. I think he wanted a bit more but … And so we’d got this – we were offered a place in the Ferry Estate.

Rosie: That’s down in Kidbrooke, right?

Geoffrey: Kidbrooke, yes. And we thought, well – and it was shared, so the two of us were sharing it as a gay couple, or two gay people, and it was also taking us off the homeless list, and it fulfilled their criteria for LGBT and all the rest of it, even in them days.

Rosie: Which was, now we’re in the early ‘80s, are we?

Geoffrey: Yes. It would’ve been about ’82. And we’d look through the local – every week in the pubs, you used to get all the gay papers. Depending which pub you went to, some only did one, some did about five of them, some did ten. Just depends which ones you went, The Ship and Whale, and things like that. And we also went to a club in Black Fen.

Rosie: Where’s that?

Geoffrey: It’s going out [unintelligible 00:09:08] way.

Rosie: So the A2 or something like that?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: OK, A20.

Geoffrey: But there was a there was a gay bar there on a on a Tuesday or whatever, because gay bars were not – there was very few of them were 24 hours gay.

Rosie: Right. OK, yes.

Geoffrey: So occasionally, you’d get one from – one would say, “Oh, we’ll have a gay Tuesday or a gay Thursday, and we’ll get a disco in, and bring some money in.” I mean, that’s basically what a publican wants. So anyway, so on the back of these papers, there’s always a listing of all the pubs that are around. But anyway, so we, “Oh, there’s one in Lewisham, The Castle.” And we thought, “Well, it’s only a bus ride away. We might as well go.” So we get all dolled up, pop into The Castle, and that’s where history was made [laughs].

Rosie: Right. Well, we need to get involved in this history. What was it like in The Castle? Walk me through it. Take me through the door. What would I see? Who would be there?

Geoffrey: Well, The Castle, it’s still there, but I mean, it’s maybe under a different – apparently it’s going to be a noodle shop or something, so I hear. But The Castle’s opposite the fire station. It’s almost the dead end of town, but it’s opposite the swimming baths. You’ve got the Roebuck, which is a nice, busy pub, but there’s not really a lot along that main drag. You had a main door and there was a side door, and the gays used to use the side gate, the side bar. It was sort of like – I can’t describe it, but it was just a passageway. The bar was there, and the passageway here. You came in, and there was a glass, or maybe a wooden panelling to separate the two, with a little doorway.

Rosie: So gays to the side, straights –

Geoffrey: Gays to the back and straights to the front. But the thing that’s always got me is that if you were in the straight bar and you wanted to go to the toilet, you had to go to the gay bar. Now obviously, that causes a bit of fun for the customers, you know, “Are we going to get touched up?” Because, this is what they were all saying, or this is what all their friends were saying, “Oh, don’t go in there, mate. You’re going to get touched up.” But one of the nice things about The Castle, especially after you’d been there a while is, people used to come in the straight end, and because they had pool there, so it was busy, again, it was a pub where the landlord wanted to make money, so there was things that not necessarily were 100 percent kosher. If you wanted a lamb chop or a steak, you’d go and see somebody, and for a pint, they’d get you your meat for the weekend. That sort of place. Obviously underhand, you know?

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: But there was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on, let’s put it that way.

Rosie: And so in the gay side or the back of the pub, how did you react to this straight people thinking, “We’re going to get touched up,” was it funny to you, or did you find it problematic?

Geoffrey: No, obviously when I first went in there, because it was just, I suppose, so different because it was – I mean, The Castle was supposed to have had the longest bar in in London because it went from the door right to the very end. But obviously, it got shortened over the years. It was still a long bar. It’s still probably as long as this table, five metre, ten metre long. As I say, it’s a long bar, and they had a dumbwaiter, and I think that, the dumbwaiter was the thing that actually stopped them moving – they couldn’t move the bar any further because of the dumbwaiter.

Rosie: Which is what, bringing food from the kitchen?

Geoffrey: Food. You used to holler out there and say, “Is Shane up?” He was one of the sons.

Rosie: So the landlord lived …

Geoffrey: The landlord lived upstairs, and I think he rented a few rooms out, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure.

Rosie: And who was the landlord?

Geoffrey: Well, when we first – on the 27th February 1983, when I walked in there, there was a guy that was, let’s put it this way, even more dodgier than dodgy. He was well-known as being sort of like – and as I say, that’s why I say, if you wanted your meat, you’d just pay a pint. Len, I think his name was. A lot of people had got great praise for him as a lovely landlord, but I think maybe he was getting a bit old, and he didn’t bother. He didn’t clean his pipes. We’ve got a lovely photo of us sitting in the back garden bit, drinking out of cans because the beer was dreadful. You didn’t drink it because it was awful.

Rosie: Right. So that was Len.

Geoffrey: Yes. And then, Dorothy and Michael came in. Dorothy and Michael were – well, she’s an – well, I mean they were – he apparently was an ex-CID of Ireland or something. He was quite high up in the police in Ireland, and taking retirement or decided to change, or whatever, and took this bar on. They’d a couple of kids, Shane, and I can’t remember the other lad. But Dorothy was a typical mother, an Irish mother. “Oh, what do you want, boys? Oh, you know, we’ll get you home.” Because, obviously when you’ve had a few beers, especially when you’re cycling home from Lewisham to New Cross, it’s … And it just was a magical place. As I say, there were so many different things that were going on. I mean, I say it was magical on 27th February ’83, because that’s when I met Wally, my life partner.

Rosie: OK, so that’s why you remember the date.

Geoffrey: Yes. That’s our anniversary. Apparently, according to him, I never moved out.

Rosie: Right.

Geoffrey: But, there he was at the bar. It was February. He was there in a vest. Lovely and brown. A bit hairy. I’m not really that keen on hairy, but hmm. Had a ponytail. Very thin, very thin, ponytail, plaited just like one dread. Found out he’d just come back from India. Anyway, I yanked his ponytail and said, “Oi, can you let me get in the bar?” And at the end of the night, I said, “Well, if you’ve got a shirt and a tie, I’ll come back.”

Rosie: Which he had?

Geoffrey: Which he managed to find, which is quite surprising for Wally, because Wally was sort of like the life and soul of the party. Wherever you – everybody loved Wally. He just was involved in everything. He seemed to be the centre of everything that was going on. Not necessarily anything important going on, but he was always … We used to go around to our friend, Robert’s and things like that, and stay there. In fact, my bracelet is Robert’s.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: So, very close friends with Robert, and he’s the one who worked here.

Rosie: Worked here, here being …

Geoffrey: In the [unintelligible 00:19:11] Town. Hall.

Rosie: Yes, OK. So The Castle for you is magical primarily because that’s where you met Wally.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: But I mean, it was rough. You wouldn’t go in there with your Gucci shoes, let’s put it this way, because they’d get stuck to the carpet. In fact, the carpet we’ve got in our front room is the same carpet as they’ve got in The Castle.

Rosie: And what was that carpet like?

Geoffrey: Red, with splotches on it all over.

Rosie: I’m not sure if I’m thinking of the right pub, if it was The Castle, but tell me what it smelled like, the pub.

Geoffrey: Smell like, that’s a strange one. I’ve never thought about that.

Rosie: Because one of the pubs, someone was telling me, always smelled like it had been flooded, and sort of musty. It might’ve been the Roebuck. Maybe it wasn’t The Castle. If it’s not something you remember –

Geoffrey: No, I mean, as I say, it was struggling. It was a pub that was struggling, and it really needed the help that it got, and with having the gay community. And the gay community at that time sort of flourished, because that was a time of gay people coming out, and going out to different places. And obviously, in them days, there was obviously less places to go, and there was no internet. The only way to find somebody, I think, if I remember, there was actually a post-box thing in the back of one of The Gay Times, or whatever it was, “Male seeking male,” sort of thing. But it didn’t really happen. It never really worked. So the only way to meet somebody was to either go to your local or, as we often did, we did tours. We were always at the – I mean, Wally was at The Castle’s – well, we were always at The Castle on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch, our friend, Colin, used to do a disco. But again, it was an enormous, big – it was a big pub. I wouldn’t it was smelled. There were sticky floors, the toilets were not particularly clean. It didn’t smell like maybe going across to the – whatever it’s called over there.

Rosie: Yes, let’s forget about the smell. It’s just really –

Geoffrey: If there was a smell, it was probably of illegal substances.

Rosie: Yes, and tobacco, I guess.

Geoffrey: And of course, tobacco, but there again, as a smoker, it didn’t worry me so much.

Rosie: Yes, but that’s such –

Geoffrey: But there again, I’ve got my own opinion about tobacco.

Rosie: Yes, but that’s such a difference between pubs today, isn’t it? In the old days, pubs just used to smell of booze and fags. I don’t know if The Castle was typical of that.

Geoffrey: Yes, it was definitely a booze and – and as I say, occasionally you’d stick to the floor. But that, logically, there would have been a busy night the night before, and therefore drinks get spilled.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: So maybe it was a popularity of the pub that made it …

Rosie: So you were telling me about the tours. You’d be there Friday, Saturday. Sunday, you’d go there for lunch.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: There’d be a disco. There’d be a disco on a Sunday, yes.

Geoffrey: Yes. But then, you see, it all got ruined when they had all day Sunday drinking.

Rosie: Because, why was that ruining –

Geoffrey: Well, because it meant that you had to be there between 12 and three, whereas now it was open from 12 ‘til 11, so people drifted in at different times, therefore you didn’t see – the popularity of the pub between 12 and three, there was no point going in there at 12. One time, you used to get there for 12 o’clock because you’d have three hours of meeting your friends. Not so much the drinking, but it’s seeing your friends. But, once they opened the pubs all day, it was almost sort of the end of a Sunday afternoon, because people would get there at three o’clock because they knew that they had all afternoon. They didn’t have to get up, if they’d had a rough night before.

Rosie: Yes. So you wouldn’t have everyone there together at the same time.

Geoffrey: Yes, so that almost ruined it, in a way. But there again, I suppose probably other pubs would probably say that it was wonderful to have the all-day opening.

Rosie: Yes. And so what would you then – because you were talking about doing a tour, so I’m imagining that means that you then would go on to another pub from The Castle.

Geoffrey: No, I mean, sometimes we did a wee pub crawl. It would be The Castle. As I say, there wasn’t that many. The George in Deptford, and then The Rose and Crown in Greenwich. And maybe occasionally we’d go to The Ship and Whale, because The Ship and Whale was a wonderful old pub.

Rosie: Where was that?

Geoffrey: In Dockside.

Rosie: You mean up in Woolwich, or down in Deptford?

Geoffrey: No, to be honest, I don’t even know where it is now. I could probably find out [unintelligible 00:25:44], but as I say, The Ship and Whale was a wonderful old pub. Again, it was a dockers’ pub. Therefore, because it was a dockers’ pub, you’ve got rent boys and things like that. But it was just a really great pub. Yes, The Ship and Whale, write it down, because that’s one of the …

Rosie: Yes. Because, Paul hasn’t mentioned it, which I think suggests to me it’s not in within Lewisham Borough, but does that … ?

Geoffrey: No, it’s not in Lewisham, but it’d be Greenwich, probably. I think. But as I say, there wasn’t that many. Another one we used to go to, there was one in Deptford. In fact, there was two in Deptford. There was one on the left-hand side of the road. I can’t remember what that was called. But that got burnt down. And that was always – no, it –

Rosie: Well, I’ll tell you, here are the ones that Paul has mentioned to me. Obviously, The Queen’s Arms, The Roebuck, The Morden, and the Bird’s Nest. He wasn’t sure if that was a lesbian bar.

Geoffrey: Yes, but you see, these are all Lewisham ones, aren’t they?

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: Some of them, I recognise, but I haven’t been to. I haven’t been to some of them.

Rosie: OK. Did you go to The Queen’s Arms.

Geoffrey: Well, in fact, I always blame us for closing – or Wally, for us going away to India in ’93, for closing down The Castle, because Dorothy and Michael decided to – I think they decided to sell up, and they got new people in. They had it for a few years and … No, maybe I’m jumping ahead. But Dorothy Michael decided to retire, and they sold it. And it carried on a little bit longer. Then we went to India, and by the time we came back from India, it wasn’t there. I think it was 286. Could have been 286, which is the number of The Castle, but that was another name of it, was 286. And then, when we came back, The Castle wasn’t there so we had to go to The Queen’s Arms.

Rosie: Right. And what did you – tell me about The Queen’s arms, how would you describe it? How would you compare it?

Geoffrey: Well, from going from an enormous, great, big venue to a sort of like sitting room, it was very strange. It was nice, the fact they had this nice seating out the front, even if it was on a hill. But I mean, it was big enough for doing what it was, which was to sell beer and snacks, and for gay people to meet. But I never really like The Queen’s Arms. And also, that hill used to kill me. Even then, it used to kill me.

Rosie: So what were you getting at The Castle, then, that you weren’t getting at The Queen’s Arms?

Geoffrey: Well, I think at that time, we were less going into the pubs anyway. Actually, I was looking through my photos yesterday, and after about ’92, ’93, ’94, then we were – even Wally wasn’t going up to the pubs, it was only sort of like … Quite often, he would go – he would always go on a – he would nearly always go on a Friday because that’s when The Castle was there. But once The Castle was stopped, then we didn’t go anywhere.

Rosie: Yes. I guess I’m trying to explore what –

Geoffrey: Even though the people – obviously didn’t – I had to go up to the Queen’s, had to go up there. But it’s just, I don’t know, maybe it was a younger crowd. I don’t know. Maybe it was –

Rosie: Down at The Castle?

Geoffrey: No [unintelligible 00:30:42].

Rosie: I guess I’m just trying to get at what was special about the castle. What made it different? What made it such a magical place for you, apart from Wally, obviously?

Geoffrey: No, really, I suppose in some ways, The Castle was a bit of a shithole, but I mean, it was a nice shithole, and a shareholder. I mean, it was a nice shithole and people liked it. And it was just – and also, I liked it because the fact is that you had straight guys in there. And what was also nice is that occasionally, people would come in and they’d have one. One week they’d come in, and they’d have a couple of beers at that end. The next time they’d come in, they’d be sitting in the middle of the bar, and the third week, they’re down our end. So it was a way of slowly introducing people.

Rosie: Yes, yes.

Geoffrey: Sort of like, “Oh, I’m going to The Castle.” “Oh well, yes, it’s a woofters pub, but it’s got great pool there, and you know I like my pool.”

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: So they had an excuse to go there.

Rosie: So this those would be people, perhaps, who thought they were gay but weren’t out.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: And felt that it was somewhere where they could make that transition.

Geoffrey: Yes. And that was one of the nice things, and because it was in the centre of town, it made it more accessible, because The Queen’s Arms was up there, The Roebuck, well, I think that – as I said, by that time, we’d almost stopped going to the pubs because it’s too expensive, basically. Having said that, I’ve always said – I used to drink Special Brew. A can of Special Brew in the 1980s was about £1.20. A pint in the pub was about ₤1.50, ₤2. Ten years, 20 years later, a pint of Special Brew or a can of Special Brew was still £1.20, and it was £4 in a pub.

Rosie: Yes. No.

Geoffrey: And this is what I don’t understand.

Rosie: Yes. No, I –

Geoffrey: As I say, my idea of having a pub, and we’re drifting, would be to have vending machines all the way round or on one side, enormous, great, big extractors, no staff, and people could smoke. And they get their can out of the vending machine for 50 pence, a pound dearer than it is in the shop, but no staff, just CCTV, but no staff.

Rosie: That would be what you would like to see.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So it’s more of a place –

Geoffrey: It’s a place where, if you want to smoke, you can. And also, you’re getting a decent price of beer. But we’re completely drifting off. If an off-licence can sell it for £2, I can sell it for £3, and you can smoke inside.

Rosie: Yes, that has changed things a lot, hasn’t it, smoking?

Geoffrey: But you can’t have staff.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: Because supposedly, they don’t like it.

Rosie: It’s protecting the staff, that’s the reason. Right, well, let’s get back to the staff, because you mentioned Dorothy.

Geoffrey: Michael.

Rosie: And I think what you were saying was that she was a kind of mother figure.

Geoffrey: Yes. Yes, she was. I mean, that’s why one of the reasons why, on the Pride flags, it’s always Dorothy’s Darlings. I mean, obviously Dorothy, with the old insinuation, “I’m a friend of Dorothy’s,” it was sort of like … It was perfect, actually.

Rosie: Yes. Now, you mentioned the flag.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So let’s go through that story then. And I think that’s the one for The Castle Trust in 1991.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So can you tell me about The Castle Trust? Because, that’s what this was – how it started.

Geoffrey: To be honest, I don’t know a great deal about The Castle Trust. I wasn’t personally involved. I knew about it. Apparently, Wally was, but I never really knew, secretive meetings, and just an excuse to have a couple of beers, I think, to be honest. An also, you see, The Castle Trust, when it opened – because there was a lot of people that were – one of the people that – one of our good friends, Chris, we were going to go to Agadir on holiday, four of us, Robert, Chris, Wally and I. And we we’d just about booked the things, and Chris came up and says, “I’m HIV,” and within six months, he was dead. So it was beginning to start to affect us. There was people that couldn’t afford the heating, couldn’t get food.

Rosie: Because … ?

Geoffrey: Because of just not being able to.

Rosie: They couldn’t work.

Geoffrey: Well, no, just physically not being able to actually get up, and actually put a kettle on and do these things, because they were so weak, or weren’t necessarily the sort of people that actually cooked. A lot of people either rely on their partners, or they go out to restaurants and things. And therefore, it was felt we had all these – quite often, in the disco bits, it was for the charity raising and things like this. And so it was decided to set up the trust to help the locals who could. I think they sent letters off to Elton John and people like this, to try and get a bit of – well, we’re having a raffle, have you got anything that you can give? And he gave three tickets or four tickets to one of his shows. And therefore, that raised a lot of money for The Castle Trust, which then helped people. And as I say, unfortunately, I don’t know who – obviously, A, it was pretty much secret who they were helping anyway, because of the stigmatism of it.

Rosie: But the fact that it’s called The Castle Trust, what was it in relation to The Castle Pub? I mean, is that where it all started?

Geoffrey: Yes, I think it was a guy called Tony O’Donovan. And as I say, there was a whole load of others, and they thought, “Well, we’ve got to –

Rosie: They were locals?

Geoffrey: Oh, yes, it’s all locals. All locals in the pub. It was quite funny, actually, because when we got married, first time under Ken Livingstone, we had to invite – we invited whole load of people for the reception, but you were only allowed 30. Well, everyone we knew is Tom, Jane, Mary, Fred. I had no idea of surnames. So everything, even your best friend who you’ve known for five years, you still probably wouldn’t know their surname, because it was never – it wasn’t relevant.

Rosie: Yes, you were just chatting down the pub, and yes, you don’t need –

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: But yes, I know you’re not really involved in The Castle Trust, but just in a nutshell, it was set up by punters –

Geoffrey: By local gay folks that wanted to help, that wanted to help themselves, wanted to help others, sorry, that were suffering from the terrible inconveniences, even little bits that they could do.

Rosie: Yes. And obviously, Wally was involved in that, but your involvement, at least Paul said that you were doing this banner. Can you tell me about the banner?

Geoffrey: Yes, well, when The Castle completely closed down, my friend, Brenda, and she was one of the people that was also part of the trust, she decided that she wanted to take the – because it was obviously history, because there was actually three banners. Steve took one, which is the one I gave. Jamesy took one, and somebody else took the other one, so they were split amongst the committee members. I think Jamesy was the one that actually made them.

Rosie: And were you involved in making them?

Geoffrey: No, no. No. I’m just the lucky recipient of it.

Rosie: OK, so you’re keeper of the banner.

Geoffrey: I was keeper of the banner, yes.

Rosie: But you weren’t involved in making the banner.

Geoffrey: No, I was never involved in –

Rosie: Or carrying the banner?

Geoffrey: Yes, I’ve carried the banner, yes.

Rosie: OK, so just in a nutshell, tell me the story about the banner. Why was it made? Who made it? What for?

Geoffrey: Well, it was the same, it was to promote the Castle Trust, because at that time – basically, the reason the Castle Trust folded was because they became so – there became so many other, you know, Terrence Higgins Trust, that all funnelled all their energy into there, so therefore, what’s the point in putting five quid in this bucket when, if it goes in the Terrence Higgins bucket, it can go all over Europe or England or wherever? So it was just basically that they swallowed up the Castle Trust. And that was the reason why the banners were made, to promote The Castle because it was just a great pub. Because, as I say, there was all sorts in there. There was a bus driver that used to dress up in female’s clothes, and there was all sorts in there. It was punks. It basically got the dregs of the society.

Rosie: Yes. That’s interesting.

Geoffrey: It wasn’t – it was not salubrious. It was not. It was thick with smoke.

Rosie: Smoke. Yes, but I think that’s really interesting, it brought the dregs of society together.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: And they had something in common. Is that how you saw it?

Geoffrey: Yes, yes. Because basically, they wanted a drink, and that’s where you could get a drink. If you were prepared to pay pub prices, then you could come into The Castle and you could get a drink.

Rosie: Yes. And just for the record, the banner – sorry to bang on about the banner, but the banner was for Pride?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: ’91?

Geoffrey: ’91, yes, actually [unintelligible 00:43:53] because we were trying to work it out, what year it was, but it actually says on the banner, ’91, in the heart, I think it is.

Rosie: Pride.

Geoffrey: Yes. Well, the first time we went out, because we all used to meet on the Saturday, and the pub would open at nine o’clock for coffee. Irish coffee, of course. A wee bit of brandy and whatever, fortifiers. And I wasn’t there because I was working, because I worked in the jewellers, so I had to work bleeding Saturdays. I hated it. I would get home from work, nice and sober, an all the rest of it, and come home and find five people in my front room, and they’re all flipping drunk. And that was fine but …

Rosie: So they’d have been at the pub.

Geoffrey: Well, they’d been at the pub all day, and come back. I mean, to be honest, not many of them came back to our place. It was too far away.

Rosie: And Paul –

Geoffrey: No, that’s where I was going. That’s what I was going to say. One of the times we left, apparently we got a police escort from The Castle to Ladywell Station, because we walked along from The Castle, or they walked along. I wasn’t there. They walked along from The Castle to the Ladywell Station, and the police, I suppose because they were taking up too much room, causing an obstruction or whatever, decided to escort them. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

Rosie: That was for Pride, was it?

Geoffrey: Yes. Because, I mean, that was the big thing that we went to. Wally supposedly had gone on the first or the second pride. He’s had eggs thrown at him, and all sorts. In fact, I was going through the photos yesterday, and on one of the Prides, we were going along, we were passing a building site. And these two, there was a guy in a lorry, and he was a bit nasty, basically, slurring words and all the rest of it, and the police came along and said, “Look, sorry, mate. It is their day. You’ve just got to shut up today. Tomorrow, you can be like that, but today, you’ve got to be nice. Because we’ve got to be nice to these woofters.”

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: It’s like, put up with it for a day and we’ll be happy.

Rosie: Yes. That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about, the role that these kinds of pubs like The Castle had, did you see them, given what the rest of the world was like, as a kind of refuge? Or how did you see the pubs? And what was it like outside of the pubs for you as a gay man in the early 90s?

Geoffrey: Well, coming out of the pub, waiting for a bus stop, there’s a bus stop basically just outside the pub. And you knew that you’d be kissing someone one minute, and as soon as you’d come out, it’s a double life. And as soon as you come out of the pub, you know that, hang on a minute, you’ve got to – who’s going on there? Who’s following me? Lewisham has not, never has been 100 percent safe area, and some people are not particularly keen on gay people, and they’ll make it known.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: So it was always a – I personally, again, have never witnessed it. My partner reckoned that he, when he was coming up our road, that there was a family at the bottom of the road, and they were not particularly keen on gay people, and every time he walked past there, he used to get abuse. But I personally have never had any abuse, I don’t think. Maybe I can’t hear it [laughs] because my hearing’s not that good.

Rosie: I guess, do you think that’s partly, did you tone it down, when you were just in the world at large?

Geoffrey: Yes, but when you’re coming out of The Castle in sequins and pearls, it’s quite difficult. Don’t get me wrong, there was one day when we went to the Rocky Horror, which is up in Catford. We went to town. And the bus trip from across the road up to the Catford Station was like quite hilarious. But there was obviously some people that sort of like, “Huh?” Dare I say, even I find it strange, even though David Bowie’s been doing it for years, apparently, a man wearing a dress. It just seems strange to me, but I mean that’s –

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: I think I’m getting a bit old for this world, and I begin to misunderstand. I don’t understand anything anymore.

Rosie: Yes, things have changed, haven’t they? One of the things The Castle Trust, it’s obviously a lovely example of the gay communities coming together and supporting each other, yes.

Geoffrey: Supporting, yes.

Rosie: Yes, and were there other examples? I mean, did you feel that was a really important thing at the time, and the pubs had a role in that?

Geoffrey: Yes, because as I say, because at that time, the systems weren’t in place to help people that became HIV, let alone once they develop AIDS. Shortly after, I don’t know when it was, but the benefit system for example, if you’re disabled and suddenly you’re living on 60-odd quid a week, and you need to have the heating on 24 hours a day, you can’t pay for it. The system works better now because of HIV, and the Government included that. In some ways, well, fortunately, I’ve got a friend who is AIDS, and he used to get a lot of benefit, a hell of a lot of benefit. You’re talking hundreds. And some of them are still getting it.

Rosie: But back whenever it was, in 1990, you were filling a gap.

Geoffrey: Yes, because there wasn’t anything for these people, and that was the only way we could help our friends, was to try and raise a little bit of money. I’m not even sure how much money was even ever raised, because I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t actually involved.

Rosie: And what sort of things were you doing, or they doing to raise money? I think you said they were having discos, raffles.

Geoffrey: Yes, there was raffles. There’s a picture, I went through my photos and downloaded a whole load on my phone, and there’s one of Cinders in a bath of custard.

Rosie: OK.

Geoffrey: Like a bring and buy sale in the pub, a car boot sale in the pub. And then there was knock the donkey over, all these – anything that someone could think of to try and bring a little bit of money in, or to try and encourage people in off the street or wherever it was, to come in.

Rosie: Now, you mentioned Cinders, and that’s someone that we haven’t really talked about.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Tell me about Cinders. Who was he? What was he like?

Geoffrey: Cinders was a lovely guy. He first, if I remember correctly, he first started – we can say I knew Cinders, but I didn’t know him that well. He was somebody that was there and around, but I was never really that in his company, as such. People would probably say I was, and I don’t remember it, or whatever, but Cinders started in The Castle as barman. And then from there, he just – well, again, he was a – because again, he made the place fun. He was obviously very young, everyone was fancying him, and all these sorts of things. But he was – and obviously then he went on, and went up to the Duncan.

Rosie: We’ll pick that up in a moment, yes, because that’s a whole other story.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes, because I’ve never seen an image of him, he was young, he was fun –

Geoffrey: Young, blonde boy, 22, something like that, maybe even younger than that. But he would get involved in anything that the pub was doing. He was sort of – as I say, I’ve got pictures of him lying in a thing of custard. I thought – because I know that Paul was interested in not necessarily seeing Paul lying in a bath of custard, but –

Rosie: But that was just for fun?

Geoffrey: That was the sort of thing, yes.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: And as I say, fancy dress, a lot of it, A, I can’t remember, and B, a lot of it, I was working, you see.

Rosie: You weren’t in all the time.

Geoffrey: I only got one day a week off, or two days a week, so it was –

Rosie: Yes, of course. Is there anything you remember, personally, that you remember about him, how he spoke, anything unusual, funny, or memorable, his manner?

Geoffrey: No, I can’t say I do. I probably could think of something in about an hour’s time, or whatever.

Rosie: Yes, well, don’t worry. If, when the mics, on, you do, just pop it [unintelligible 00:56:17]. So yes, so he was barman, he was fun, he was –

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes. And then he got a job …

Geoffrey: Up in The Admiral.

Rosie: Yes, in the Admiral Duncan.

Geoffrey: Yes. I think he got a job before that in somewhere else, but I think that’s where he eventually was, up in the Admiral Duncan. But again, a place where we went maybe once or twice, but never really – not really our area of town, and up there, the prices were even dearer.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: Because, Wally was on benefits, and I was working, so therefore it was a bit difficult. My money didn’t spread that far, and obviously, his money definitely didn’t spread any farther. In fact, once we got married for the second time, I was completely crippled.

Rosie: Financially?

Geoffrey: Financially, because it all fell on me, whereas before, because Wally was – Wally lived in a rented flat – well, we still live in a rented flat, but obviously, he was getting benefit for that. As I say, once we got married officially, legally, we lost all that. So don’t get married unless you’re both working.

Rosie: Yes. I didn’t know that was the impact on benefits at all.

Geoffrey: Oh, yes. It’s ridiculous.

Rosie: So any other memories of the bars round here, the Lewisham bars and clubs?

Geoffrey: No, I mean, the person who should be mentioned if you’re mentioning The Castle is old Tom.

Rosie: Who is he?

Geoffrey: He was thew cantankerous old barmaid – barman – barmaid, I was correct the first time [laughs]. No, as far as we know, he was straight, and apparently had a girlfriend called Ethel, I think. But, he was just a character. He was pencil behind the ears, always had a Guinness on the go, and he would slowly work his way through [unintelligible 00:58:56], and it would take him hours to do something for five minutes. But therefore, I mean, there was always the banter, obviously, between the bar staff and Tom, because Tom was not the sort of person to … You had to move around him rather than …

Rosie: But he was working there. He was just not very –

Geoffrey: Oh, yes, he was – well, again, I think the story started off that he was really – I think this goes back again to the days of Len, when the pints were so bad, and Tom came in one day, and he said, “I’ll have a pint,” then he says, “what the … ?” He says, “Well, can you do any better?” He says, “Yes.” He says, “Well, there you go. That’s your job.” I think that’s how he got in, because that’s what he was, he was a barman. He used to get the barrels and –

Rosie: Clean them.

Geoffrey: Well, that was an excuse to spend five hours downstairs in the basement, having a few more beers, I think. But he was one of the characters. Don’t get me wrong, there was quite a few characters behind the bar. There was Russel, there was loads of them. But I mean, my memory for names was not that good, especially now.

Rosie: Yes. When you think back to that era, how do you reflect on it now? And, the pubs in particular on that.

Geoffrey: There’s some wonderful things that are happening now, because I was going to see a friend the other day, and I got up to Lewisham [unintelligible 01:00:47] train station, and there’s two young boys with their arm round each other, and kissing and holding – all romantic and all the rest of it. And I thought, “Wow, isn’t that beautiful?” And then, for some reason – obviously, he caught my attention, so I was not necessarily staring at him, and his friend got his pass out or something, and showed that he went on these student passes. And I thought, “God, does that mean he’s only 16?” I said, “That’s even more beautiful, that they can be together,” whereas, well, when I grew up, the last thing I wanted to be was – I wouldn’t say a dirty old man, but an old man living on my own and having nobody.

And I had 33 years of beautiful friendship, and now I’ve gone back to being the old man living on my own, with hardly any friends, so it’s been quite difficult. And with the pubs not being around as much, even though there’s The George, The Rose and Crown, that’s about it, that’s the only two bars. And so, therefore, there’s not a chance – it’s not so easy to meet somebody. But having said that, I suppose there’s Grindr and things like that, but do you necessarily want … ? Is it sexual gratification you’re after, or is it a chat?

Rosie: So where would you go now to meet people? And I don’t mean necessarily to pick up, just to socialise with other gay people?

Geoffrey: I don’t, to be honest. [Unintelligible 01:03:04]. I’ve almost become a recluse. And with my health not getting any better, as I say, I struggled to come walk here. I’ve got great hopes of wanting to go to India this year, A, because I can’t afford the fuel bill, and B, because the 400 quid will just about pay my flights, or it used to. But I don’t know if I’d be able to cope in India, with the actual walking.

Rosie: Yes. So with all the pubs, most of them having shut down, you’re saying there’s just nowhere for you to go, here.

Geoffrey: I’m not saying there’s nowhere. I mean, as I say, if I wanted to go to Lewisham or to The George, then there are places to go. But personally, I’m not sure I’m necessarily wanting – I don’t think I want a sexual relationship with somebody, so therefore … But I need to have something for my own personal mental health.

Rosie: Yes. And do you see The Rose and Crown and The George as places where you could find that kind of community, or do you see them as differently?

Geoffrey: I’m just thinking, if you’re young, single, and all the rest of it, then there’s no problem, you can go out and meet somebody. But once you get to the older stage, especially if you’ve had a relationship, and for some reason, it’s either failed or the person’s died, it then makes it much more difficult to get to the care inside, because as I say, you … I mean, our very best friends used to live within 100 yards of each – within 100 yards or a couple of 100 yards. Now they’re down in Maidstone. So now, any of the friends that I used to have from The Castle days, there’s not many of them that are actually still in Lewisham, because a lot of them have moved out.

Rosie: Yes. Do you stay in touch on – do you use social media?

Geoffrey: Yes, I do do my Facebook, but even that, I’ve given up almost. I’ve got a nice garden, but I looked at it the other day, and I thought, “Well, my plants are over, I should’ve taken a picture last week or two weeks ago,” because they’ve just gone past their best, and I didn’t take them. Well, that’s not like me. I’ve lost, just completely lost interest, I suppose.

Rosie: In everything?

Geoffrey: Almost.

Rosie: Right. Right. Oh, I’m so sorry.

Geoffrey: [Unintelligible 01:06:44].

Rosie: No, well, I feel like it’s a big issue. It’s not just you. I think that’s really the purpose of this –

Geoffrey: No, but I’m saying – this is what I’m saying, for the older, gay person – I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can’t imagine it’s easy for the older, straight person, if they’ve lost their partner. I don’t know.

Rosie: Well, we are talking to people who’ve started a social club in Deptford called The Triangle. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

Geoffrey: No.

Rosie: They haven’t yet got a licence. At the moment, they’re just opening for occasional events, but it’s an example of an attempt to start something up new, in response to all the closures, really. But if you’re on Instagram, I don’t know if you’re on Instagram, you can follow them and you can see what they’re doing. They’re called The Triangle.

Geoffrey: The Triangle.

Rosie: The Triangle, Deptford. So at the moment, it’s just occasional events, but they’re hoping to get a licence, and to be open a bit more. But, that’s just one example. It’s not really a pub, it’s more of a kind of social club.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes. OK, well, Geoff, you’ve been so generous in your memories, and remembering, and reflections. As you were talking to me, is there anything else that you’re thinking, “Oh, God, I should’ve mentioned that?”

Geoffrey: Oh, there’s probably lots of things I should have mentioned, and probably lots of things [crosstalk]. We did day trips to Alton Towers, we did day trips to Brighton and Bournemouth, and places like this, either groups of us, or I think there was a couple of coach trips. We definitely went to Alton Towers a couple of times, because obviously, that way the kids could come as well, because obviously some of the girls had children. Not many of the boys did, mind you. And that was the other thing, what I loved about it, it was just because it was so inclusive. There was everybody there. There was gay – there was straights, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transexuals, almost everything. And they all could meet there. And I’m sure there must be still places that are going for these people, but to have straight and the gays, this is what I always thought was the most unique thing about The Castle.

Rosie: And you say that you went on trips, so that was organised by the pub, or the people there?

Geoffrey: No, I mean, a lot of it wasn’t. Sometimes, there was bits, but it was sort of like there was an organising committed. People decided, “Oh, let’s do this,” so all right, “I’ll do it.” And it was probably them that started The Castle Trust, that started … Because, some people are very organised, and they could do things like that, and it’s in their work. Tony, I think Tony O’Donovan, he did an awful lot of things like this. And in fact, I did contact him, and asked him, because I didn’t really know about The Castle Trust, and he told me – he didn’t really say a lot about it when I asked him about it, but there again, it’s so long ago, he’s almost probably forgotten.

Rosie: Yes, but the same sort of people that were setting up the trust were saying, “Let’s go on a day trip.”

Geoffrey: Yes, but it was just a case of, “Oh, we fancy going … What’re we doing next Sunday, or next Saturday?” And we’d, like, “Oh, we can get the train, or we can … ” A couple of us had cars, so there would be a convoy down the motorway, sort of thing, or up to Margate or somewhere like that. But we always used to – but it was groups of us, like me and Robert, or me, Wally and Robert are going off to Margate tomorrow. Anyone fancy coming?” And the chances are, maybe there’s four or five people who say, “Oh, yes, why not?” So we’d all jump on whatever means of transport was there. It wasn’t necessarily organised, as organised. I mean, obviously when it was, say, to Alton Towers, that was obviously organised, and things like that. And the Pride was organised. I mean, because quite a few years, we had The Castle t-shirts.

Rosie: Tell me about those t-shirts, what was that for? If you’ve got some pictures, do show me.

Geoffrey: I’ve got some pictures, yes. I didn’t tip these, so yes, it keeps going very quick.

Rosie: It was very annoying. It’s going dark as well, isn’t it? OK. So, what’s this picture, then?

Geoffrey: That’s one of The Castle. What year is that? 1989. It’s probably disappeared, has it?

Rosie: No, it’s all right. Yes, this is [unintelligible 01:12:32].

Geoffrey: Yes, that’s ’89, and there’s Cinders, in fact.

Rosie: OK, yes. So can you describe for someone who isn’t in the room with us now, what you’re doing, what this picture is?

Geoffrey: This is a photo I took, or somebody took in the ’89 Pride, or it was a gathering in The Castle. That’s with our – I think that was the first banner. And there’s just a whole group of people that are all taking – basically were going to do the Pride march from The Castle up to Hyde Park, and then down all the way through. Stupid phone. That is one of me. That’s one of me holding the banner.

Rosie: Oh, wonderful. That’s 1992.

Geoffrey: That’s the ’92 one, is it?

Rosie: That’s what it says on the banner, yes.

Geoffrey: That’s the ’92, yes. And then I’ve got another one. That’s the banner that I gave.

Rosie: Yes. Pride ’91.

Geoffrey: ’91.

Rosie: Yes. So this will be Dorothy’s Darlings, it says.

Geoffrey: Yes, Dorothy’s Darlings, The Castle Trust, ’91.

Rosie: So you would be marching from The Castle into centre of town.

Geoffrey: Yes, because sometimes it started on the embankment.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: Depending, obviously, the different years it started.

Rosie: Different routes, yes.

Geoffrey: Yes. But as I say, I went through them all, but it’s difficult to sort of … And because they’re all on a side, I was going to swap them round, but sometimes if it –

Rosie: It’s a nightmare, the way the phones just flip things, isn’t it?

Geoffrey: It’s quite difficult, actually, taking a photo, taking a picture of a photo.

Rosie: On a screen.

Geoffrey: On, well …

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: On the actual computer, it’s impossible because I get lines on it.

Rosie: Yes. No, will you be able to share those photos with Paul? You can email them to him.

Geoffrey:  Yes, what I’ll do is, I’ll send them to Paul.

Rosie: Brilliant, yes. That’s fabulous, yes.

Geoffrey: But no, I mean, it’s a shame they’re all … This, for example, was a picture of Cinders in his bath of custard.

Rosie: So, where is he? Is that in the bar?

Geoffrey: That’s down at the stage, down at the stage end. That’s another picture. That’s the two of them.

Rosie: Who’s he? You don’t know –

Geoffrey: That was Tony O’Donovan, with that. The naked picture is Cinders.

Rosie: OK.

Geoffrey: That’s just a usual crowd.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s better.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s Wally, there, and in fact, he’s wearing a Castle Pride –

Rosie: OK, yes.

Geoffrey: Yes, he’s wearing a Castle Trust …

Rosie:  Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s another one of Cinders.

Rosie: OK.

Geoffrey: Dressed up. And that’s a whole load of us at The Castle.

Rosie: Can I see that one? Yes. So the bar, was it the same bar staff just serving at either end of the bar?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Just sort of moving between the two?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So Cinders, for example, would’ve been serving the straights at the front, as well as the gays at the back.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: Oh, yes, I mean, he served – that was, well … Cinders, that’s Wally, a picture of Wally, if the damn thing would stay still.

Rosie: Yes. Nice picture. Yes.

Geoffrey: That was Dorothy.

Rosie: So, what –

Geoffrey: For her birthday.

Rosie: OK, it’s her birthday. So that’s in the pub?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: So, for someone who can’t see this picture, what’s going on there in that picture?

Geoffrey: You’ve got a gentleman there who’s – he’s actually still got his thong on. It was her birthday, and so everyone celebrated her birthday, obviously. And so, we decided to get a stripper in, because I mean, she was up for it, and there’s no problem. And this particular picture is her spreading cream onto his genital area, and also his chest.

Rosie: Excellent.

Geoffrey: I did take another picture without clothes on, but I thought, “Well, that’s pushing it a bit.” That’s another one. That’s another picture with a whole group of us. I’ll tell you what, let me do it this way. Where’s it gone? That’s better. That’s better, they won’t move now.

Rosie: OK, wow.

Geoffrey: This is Wally, with his kilt.

Rosie: Nice.

Geoffrey: This is our friend, Robert, and a group of The Castle people.

Rosie: Where would you be there? Do you remember?

Geoffrey: That, I think would either be – it could be Vauxhall. There was a thing just behind the Imperial War Museum in Vauxhall. Why isn’t it working?

Rosie: Was that sort of a party, or a Pride thing?

Geoffrey: Ah, that’s another – again, so we’ve got two different types of t-shirts there, the Pride t-shirts.

Rosie: The Castle in the middle.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: And then –

Geoffrey: Castle Lewisham, Pride ’91.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey:  And there was also the black one.

Rosie: Which is also a Castle one? It looks –

Geoffrey: Which was also The Castle, also for ’91.

Rosie: OK, yes.

Geoffrey: I think it was a friend of ours, Bridget – I think this was the official one, the black, the black and gold and the pink. I think that was the official one, but this one was a friend of ours, Bridget, who was a local dustman for Lewisham Council, Derek Bennet, I think his name was, but he was always known as Bridget. In fact, there’s a great picture of him, put his hand up Wally’s kilt in one of the … There’s another picture of us at a festival, with me.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: And with Robert. Oh, damn thing, what’s wrong with it? That’s one of some of the events that you’d get along the street, just on Pride.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s, again, another Castle banner one. Me holding the ’92 banner.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s the Pride ’93. That’s us going off to The Rocky Horror.

Rosie: Excellent.

Geoffrey: This is Chris, one of the persons who first died of AIDS. And Wally, and Robert. That’s old Tom.

Rosie: Pencil behind the ear, as you said.

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: But that’s old Tom. That’s a prison equality.

Rosie: Prison equality?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: What was – I can’t –

Geoffrey: Well, to give, for example, give condoms in prisons.

Rosie: OK, yes.

Geoffrey: So that there was safe sex in prisons.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: There’s a group of us all going off to Pride. Wally –

Rosie: So what we’re seeing here, it’s men and women, right?

Geoffrey: Yes.

Rosie: Yes, a mix of people. And I think what these photos are bringing to the fore is that the community around that pub, it was quite politically active as well. You were quite involved in –

Geoffrey: Oh, yes. I mean, it was probably more the lesbians that were the ones that would, A, organise things … Probably they were probably more involved with the actual starting up of The Castle Trust, because they saw the hardships that people were going through, and obviously, being – it’s sexist, but women, more empathetic to the feelings of others, therefore they felt more – not guilty, but they wanted to help.

Rosie: And in terms of Pride, obviously it was – is it still – anyway, political, and yes –

Geoffrey: Well, no, but you see, after about ’84, it all became paid events. You had to go to Alexander Palace, and then you couldn’t go in with beer, you had to buy it in there, so you couldn’t take your own beer. It just became a complete money-making thing. It’s the same with Brighton. We used to go to Brighton, because that was, A, a beautiful day out, hopefully, weather-wise, but it was a lovely show, and it was good entertainment, but it’s become so popularised now … I think it was ’84 when Radio 1 decided to host Pride. Well, that’s great for getting it out in the population, but when you’ve got to pay whatever the price is, to get in … All right, yes, you’ve got wonderful acts, but you know …

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: So people stopped going to Pride because you can’t – I think they even said that on the television the other day, that up ‘til about ’84, it was a free party. But after ’84 – maybe I’ve got the dates wrong, but after that, you had to pay to get into the place, you were restricted on what you could drink. You had to buy it there, there was no case of … Because you may not like what they’re selling.

Rosie: Yes.

Geoffrey: As I say, we used to like drinking strong beer, so for us to go to a place where you could only get three percent beer, was like pissing in the wind.

Rosie: Yes. What’s the point? Yes.

[End of recorded material 01:26:17]

 

(W13)

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