I was now well and truly on my own and after several days of contemplation it seemed I had only one option. That was to stay in the business that I loved, find some new artists and, also, to try something new – I would become an agent as well as a manager.

I immediately applied for an agency licence from the GLC – the Greater London Council, which was then London’s governing body. All I needed now were some artists and clubs to book. I also needed bookers – the guys that physically got on the phone to sell the acts to the clubs and venues. For the time being, however, I would do it myself with my personal assistant.

During my early agency days, it was not only the booking and management of bands that took up my day, but also the acquisition of new venues and clubs. There were dozens of these clubs opening every week, from jazz and blues, to rock ’n’ roll. Part of my business was to acquire sole bookings, which meant that I would supply all the music that the individual club needed weekly. For this I would split the agency commission ten per cent with whomever owned the agency of the band being booked.

It all sounds pretty simple but in spite of the numerous clubs opening up, it was in the main a difficult process. There were many new agents, all jumping onto the bandwagon. So I had to isolate the manager or owner of a club, chat him up, have a lunch, and be seen in his club for perhaps weeks on end; all the time telling him what a great job I could do and how the bands or music I put in would greatly affect his customers, and therefore the success of his business. Over the course of several months, we built up a roster of perhaps forty venues, and we were soon booking hundreds of bands a week through our agency division.

It was one of these club owners, Jim Carter-Fea, who was to become a good friend and also my partner, albeit for a short time, in one of the most successful clubs in London.

Jim came to me one day and said, ‘How would you like to be a club owner?’

‘Sounds a good idea; where do we start?’ I replied.

‘Well, Bryan, I’ve actually found a venue on the Kings Road. Want to come and look at it?’

Twenty minutes later, we were parked outside a building about midway down the Kings Road, in Chelsea. There were no yellow lines then, only the freedom to drive and park where you liked. The entrance to the club was through a rather attractive gate, beyond a small but over-run garden. Standing magnificently and totally isolated amongst the hurly burly of the Kings Road, here was this beautiful Georgian building. It must originally have been a hunting lodge, or something as romantic as that, otherwise why would it be in this position.

The interior told another story, however – one of rack and ruin. I was told days later that the owners intended pulling it down to rebuild as offices. The ground floor and basement were a total mess – old mattresses and damp walls, with empty whisky and gin bottles strewn about like some disused distillery.

‘Jim, why are we here?’

‘This, Bryan, is our new club, if you want to come in with me.’

‘Jim, it’s a mess; what on earth could we do with this?’

‘Five hundred quid to clean it up, five good-looking girls behind the bar, an opening with a couple of your bands and you will have a huge club. There is, however, one major problem.’

Jim said that the owner would only give us a six-month lease with a three-month termination clause, because they wanted to pull it down.

‘Okay, let’s have a go,’ was my reply.

We opened the Pheasantry two weeks later, and within days it became one of the most popular clubs in London. The money kept rolling in and each night the queue to get in extended further down the Kings Road. Sadly, five months later we were given notice to quit our little gold mine and after only nine months it closed. The owners were convinced they had obtained planning permission, but this was not to be the case, and a preservation order was put on the building after months of argument. It still stands, thankfully, all these years later.

One evening, I was in another club having a drink with a lovely guy I shall call Mr X, whom I had met a couple of times before in various drinking establishments.

‘Brysey,’ he said. I was always called Brysey or White Morry – the white bit because they all thought I was extraordinarily lucky, and they seemed to associate white with luck. Anyway, back to Mr X.

‘Brysey, a couple of my mates are really interested in the club business and they reckon they’ll be booking tons of bands.’ He went on to explain that they wanted to start an agency and thereby get ten per cent commission from the bands they booked. The problem his friends were having was getting a licence from the GLC. To obtain a licence, amongst other things, you needed a clean record; in other words, never having been to jail.

The problem was, Mr X said, that his boys had done a bit of ‘bird’, nothing serious you understand, just a mix-up really. Anyway, his suggestion was that they would book the various groups and daily or weekly give me a list that my secretary would then convert into contracts. These were printed single-sheet agreements; she would simply fill in the club name, date, timings, money and so on, and for doing this we would split the ten per cent commission fifty/fifty.

Knowing how difficult it was to get sole bookings, I doubted if they would pick up a dozen clubs in a year. I really liked Mr X, and it would hardly be any more work for my typist, so I agreed to do it.

Within weeks, I noticed an ever-increasing pile of contracts, growing rapidly by the day. On the other side of my secretary’s desk was my small meandering pile that seemed to grow oh-so-slowly in comparison. I was soon in a quandary. Who were these sweet-talking guys? These upstarts, whoever they were, were becoming more successful than me at my own game.

Daily they would obtain sole bookings on a new venue. The pile rose ever higher until it began to resemble a New York skyscraper projecting forever skyward. The only good coming out of it was that I was making a lot of money. More than ever, I now wanted to meet the boys with the golden touch. I was beginning to feel an abject failure, as I just couldn’t compete.

I rang Mr X. ‘I want to meet your mates; they are doing a hell of a lot of business with me and I think it’d be nice if we got together.’

‘Sure, I’ll fix it up. I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.’

True to his word, he rang me two days later.

‘Brysey, the boys are going to see a new venue in Essex tomorrow and they’d love to see you.’

‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Let me know the address and I’ll meet you there!’

The place was a barn-like club, totally devoid of life, save for a bar at one end and a staircase leading up to three offices that hung on the end wall. The bar was awash with spilt beer. The beer mats sank into themselves as another full pint was squashed onto them. The whole vision was of a forgotten and forlorn building, the type you might see in the Australian outback.

‘Brysey!’ A hand suddenly appeared out of a quartet of giants; four heads turned towards me. ‘I’m glad you could make it, this is Ron.’ Another hand appeared and my little pinky disappeared inside. ‘Reg, Brysey.’

By the time he had introduced the next two, something started clicking in my head. It was the combination of those two names, Ron and Reg. I had barely lifted the gin and tonic to my lips, and as a bubble or two from the tonic burst up my nose, followed by that sweet bitter smell of lime, it hit me.

They were the Kray twins.

‘Bryan,’ said one of them, ‘we’re just going to have a chat with the manager.’

With that, two or three of them set off for the rickety staircase. My head was swimming, but it wasn’t the gin and tonic. All motion ceased, and I was momentarily cast in stone. The repeated words, ‘They won’t be long, son,’ vibrated in my head.

It was a large hand slapping my shoulder that brought me back to reality. Hardly a minute had passed when, over the sound of the music crashing round the barn, came a high-pitched scream, followed by a noise that sounded like a wet sack of potatoes being dropped on the floor above the bar from a great height. Suddenly a body appeared flying down the stairs. Bouncing once, twice, it landed for a second on the half landing before continuing its headlong descent to the bottom of that unsteady flight of steps.

It ended up sitting nearly bolt upright, head hung, until from out of nowhere a pair of boots followed by a hulking brute smashed into its ribs. It fell to its side and lay prone, and silence prevailed. A silence only found at the bottom of a huge ice crevasse.

In slow motion, I saw three or four human forms converge like lions onto the fallen prey. It was all over in minutes, the ice cubes had barely melted in my drink, the bubbles in the tonic water still had enough strength to jump right out of the glass.

They walked over to where I was standing.

‘Another sole booking, Brysey,’ one of them announced, beaming from ear to ear.

I looked at the crazed face of the speaker; the black-and-white images that I had just witnessed starting to change into jarring movements of colour. Disbelief and anger spread through my brain.

‘Well, Brysey,’ he continued blithely, ‘tell us about the rock ’n’ roll business. We want to break into it!’

I didn’t know whether they used the word ‘break’ as a verb, a pun, or a metaphor. I did know, however, that I wanted out, not next week, next month, but now. I’ve always believed that in business you can encroach the line, stare it in the face, sometimes even test it for its elasticity, but never, never cross it. Yet here I was on the borders of mob violence. I had been involved for months without an inkling as to what had been going on around me. I mumbled something inaudible and stumbled out of that hell-hole, the drive home unremembered, my nervous system shut down.

I awoke the next morning feeling like shit, with the images of the previous night slamming and then receding in my brain. I had witnessed, albeit in a microcosm, man’s inhumanity to man, and it was more than enough. I was getting out now. I picked up the phone, and it rang three or four times before being answered by Mr X.

‘We need to have a chat today, if possible,’ I said.

‘Sure, see you in an hour,’ came the reply.

He arrived wearing a dark suit, a crisp white shirt and a huge smile.

‘I want out right now.’

‘That could be difficult, Brysey. I’ll see what I can do. The boys don’t take kindly to people letting them down.’

My reply was just as simple.

‘Regardless of the consequences, I’m out. Go and talk to Ron and Reg.’

Two days later, he came to see me again.

‘No problem, Brysey. The boys thank you for what you’ve done and if you are ever in trouble give them a ring.’

He handed me a card with a telephone number on it and he was gone.

The other night had been a seed from which greater barbarity grows. The pile of bookings on my secretary’s desk shrank to nothing over the next couple of days and they did what they said. I never heard from them again.

Many years later, over a drink, I enquired of Mr X why the Kray twins let me go that easily.

‘Well, my son, you handled some of the biggest bands in the world. They love all that game, so they said OK.’

Oddly enough they are both buried at the end of Priory Avenue, the road in which I lived in Chingford after leaving the East End.

 

One of the rather more infamous and remarkable men I came across in these early years was Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Recently I have read much about him in the national newspapers being described as a ‘notorious millionaire slum landlord’ and having had a number of visitations by the local constabulary.

When I first met him, he was a youngster, about nineteen years old. Rumour had it that by the age of sixteen, he had built up a massive stamp collection reputed to be one of the best in England, and worth a small fortune. I believe we met because he wanted to invest (as did everyone else at the time) in the rock ’n’ roll business. He was always very dapper, in fact dressed more like a dandy, in a velvet coat, well-cut suit, shirt and tie, slimly built, always cocksure and whenever I saw him, always smiling.

I have to say that Hoogstraten, even at that age, always had the idea of running his own world; he would often talk about taking over a Caribbean island and, the strange thing was, I thought he meant it.

I met Hoogstraten on many occasions over the course of a few months, On one of these visits, I was listening with rapt attention to his descriptions of the histories of world stamps. By the end of this particular discussion, I had asked him how much a Penny Black was worth.

Like most non-stamp collectors, the only one I had ever really heard of was the Penny Black, the world’s first and most famous stamp. Again, like most other people, my assumption was that these rarities were valued in thousands rather than tens of pounds, but here was the expert telling me that you could buy them for almost nothing, only a few pounds each. True, some Penny Blacks in mint condition – the rare ones, that were clean with good, wide edges – were worth £1,000 or more, even in those days. As for the rest, they were counted in pounds.

It occurred to me that a Penny Black on the wall would carry about as much weight with the viewer as a Picasso. As I was trying to build financial credibility, and as I knew that everyone assumed Penny Blacks were expensive, I purchased a Two Penny Blue and a Penny Black from Hoogstraten. I then inserted them in a gold frame on a square of black velvet, and hung them resplendently above my head in the office. The whole process cost me a whopping seventeen pounds!

For the next week or two, rock ’n’ rollers, their managers and entourages came to view this great collection of philatelic beauty, each one gazing at them, wondering how I could possibly afford such extravagance. After week one, the community was talking up my stamps to the value of thousands of pounds. Two weeks went by and the dream was shattered.

I arrived one morning to find my secretaries in a terrible tizzy. A Topkapi-style operation had taken place. The thief had cut through the outer wall of the office to obtain entrance, then without a sidelong glance at the other valuables like a well-bitten biro, or a leadless pencil, and a selection of rubber bands all laying together alongside the clear plastic ruler, he grabbed and nicked those oh-so-valuable stamps.

I laughed for months afterwards at the thought of him presenting the stamps to one of those tiny little stamp shops in the Charing Cross Road, to be told by the proprietor with his half-moon glasses perching on the end of his nose, that he would give him about £9 for the job lot.

• • •

When Bryan had his encounter with the Kray twins in 1966, they were at the height of their notoriety as London’s leading gangsters. In the 1950s, Ronnie and Reggie Kray had formed a gang in the East End of London they called ‘The Firm’, specialising in protection rackets, armed robbery, hijacking and arson. By the early 1960s, they had expanded their empire to include extortion and fraud, as well as several night clubs, where they became part of the swinging London scene, mixing with film stars, singers and politicians. The twins ruled their gangland empire through fear and violence, inflicting vicious punishments on anyone who crossed them.

In one of their most infamous cases, in March 1966, Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell, a member of the rival Richardson gang, in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel. Cornell was said earlier to have called Ronnie a ‘fat poof’. Cornell was sitting on a stool by the bar, when Ronnie casually walked in and shot him in the head. The police could not find a single witness who had seen anything.

Later that year, in December, the Krays would help Frank Mitchell, ‘The Mad Axe Man’, escape from Dartmoor prison, but on Christmas Eve he disappeared, never to be seen again. Later it was claimed that he had been shot and his body disposed of at sea. Then, in October 1967, the Krays lured Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie to a basement flat in Stoke Newington, where Reggie tried to shoot him, but his gun jammed, so he stabbed him to death with a carving knife.

This proved to be the turning point. In May 1968, the Kray twins were arrested by Scotland Yard Inspector Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read and, once they were in custody, he was able to persuade several witnesses to give evidence. The Krays were each sentenced to a minimum of thirty years in prison. Ronnie was found to be legally insane and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, where he died of a heart attack in 1995. Reggie remained in prison until August 2000, when he was released a few weeks before his death from bladder cancer, at the age of sixty-six.

Nicholas van Hoogstraten became equally notorious. He started selling stamps to collectors at the age of eleven, although it is alleged that he hired his classmates to steal the stamps from specialist shops. When Bryan met him in the early sixties, Hoogstraten was already using the proceeds to buy cheap property in Notting Hill and by the time he was twenty-two he claimed to be Britain’s youngest millionaire.

He gained a reputation as a ruthless slum landlord, dismissing his tenants as ‘filth’, and one judge described him as a self-styled ‘emissary of Beelzebub’. In 1968, he was sentenced to four years in jail for paying a gang to throw a hand grenade into the home of a Jewish cantor in Brighton, whose son owed him a debt.

By the age of thirty-five, Hoogstraten was said to own more than two thousand properties, amassing a fortune while inflicting terror on his tenants when he wanted to evict them. In 2002, he was convicted of manslaughter after a business rival, Mohammed Raja, was stabbed and then shot in the head on his front doorstep by two men who had been hired by Hoogstraten. The verdict was overturned on appeal but, in a civil case brought by Raja’s family, he was ordered to pay them £6 million in compensation. Hoogstraten claimed he could not pay it, because he had handed all his assets to his children.

Following the trial, Nicholas van Hoogstraten emigrated to Zimbabwe, where he bought a substantial amount of land and rights in a diamond field, and became a close associate of the president, Robert Mugabe.