Baron's Court, All Change Read online

  Baron's Court, All Change

  by Terry Taylor

  ebook edition published 2012

  Baron’s Court, All Change was first published

  by MacGibbon and Kee in 1961

  and by Four Square/NEL in 1965

  3rd edition published 2011 by New London Editions

  © Terry Taylor, 1961/2011

  Introduction © Stewart Home, 2011

  New London Editions is an imprint of Five Leaves Publications

  PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW

  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

  ISBN: 978-1-907869-70-9

  Five Leaves acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England

  For my favourite gym instructor

  Introduction

  Many novels are forgotten and more or less disappear from circulation. The majority of books to suffer this fate more than deserve it. A handful of them are classics and eventually find their way to wide circulation. One of the most famous examples of this is Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, which made little impact on publication but became a canonical example of modernist literature after being rediscovered and championed by the surrealists. Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor is a very different type of lost classic. It created a bigger splash than Maldoror, but by the late sixties had faded from view and most people’s memories. It provides an accurate account of the drug subculture in London at the end of the fifties. The realism and hep talk of Baron’s Court shocked many readers when it first appeared in 1961, but would have raised far fewer eyebrows in the aftermath of the summer of love. That said, it is only more recently that it has become possible to appreciate its historical significance.

  Now that Baron’s Court is being republished there is little need to describe the novel or its plot. Instead I‘ll explain how I came across the book and why I’ve spent nearly a decade talking it up to almost anyone who’d listen. The first time I’d have come across Terry Taylor’s name was when I read Tony Gould’s Colin MacInnes biography Inside Outsider in the eighties. Gould devotes a couple of pages to Taylor because he was the inspiration for the unnamed narrator in the most famous MacInnes novel Absolute Beginners. Gould doesn’t call Taylor the world’s premier mod, but this claim might be made for him on the basis of his fictionalisation within the pages of Absolute Beginners. That said, one of the crucial differences between Absolute Beginners and Baron’s Court is that while MacInnes sympathetically portrayed youthful modernists without being a part of their scene, Taylor writes about them with an insider’s eye and knowledge. If I’d come across a used copy of Baron’s Court soon after first reading Gould’s MacInnes biography, I’m sure I’d have picked it up. Instead what Gould wrote about Taylor gradually faded and I’d forgotten it by the time I re-read Inside Outsider a decade ago. If Gould had written as much about Baron’s Court as he did about its author, I’d have filed it alongside British youth culture novels of a similar vintage such as Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis and Awake for Mourning by Bernard Kops.

  Unfortunately a copy of Baron’s Court failed to fall into my hands at that time, whereas pretty much every other example of the drugs and youthsploitation genre I heard about I picked up not only easily, but for a song. This was a period in which I was reading all the fiction I could find based around the counterculture and youth cults. Terry Taylor came to my attention for a second time about ten years ago when I started researching the life of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her connections to the counterculture. I discovered she’d been close to Taylor in the 1960s, and as luck would have it, around the same time a very battered paperback copy of Baron’s Court came into my possession courtesy of a book exchange stall. Reading the novel for the first time was a revelation. Here was a book about drug dealing first published in 1961 that not only mentioned LSD, but totally transformed my understanding of early mod culture. The smartly dressed working-class modernists in their Cecil Gee shirts smoked ‘charge’, while the middle-class ‘trad dogs’ in their ill-fitting sweaters were popping amphetamine pills. And making matters even better, the book just romped along. It was a great piece of story telling.

  Having read Baron’s Court, I wanted to know more about the writer. Although my mother had died in 1979, there were still people around who’d been acquainted with Taylor in the 1960s. Unfortunately no one was able to help me trace him and several of my mother’s friends told me that they‘d heard he was dead. I put Taylor’s story together as best I could from both print and oral sources. It ran something like this. Terry Taylor had been born in Kilburn, West London, in 1933 and got into modern jazz and smoking ‘charge’ as a teenager. In 1956 Colin MacInnes got talking to Taylor in a drinking club in Berwick Street. At the time MacInnes was living above Gallery One in D’Arblay Street and Taylor was working as a passport photographer in Wardour Street. Gallery One was owned by Victor Musgrave, whose wife Ida Kar was an important post-war photographer. At this time John Kasmin (a famous gallerist in his own right in the sixties) was Kar’s assistant. Ida had an open marriage with Victor and after MacInnes introduced Taylor to her, Terry became her lover — despite an age gap of 25 years between them. Meanwhile Kasmin became Kar’s business manager and Taylor took on the unpaid role of her photographic assistant.

  The atmosphere at Gallery One around this time was extremely bohemian — you could call it a little piece of swinging London a decade before the rest of the city started to rock. This atmosphere oozes out of a series of pictures Kar took of Taylor getting stoned after a photographic session for the little known jazz singer Judy Johnson. These extraordinary images appear to have been hidden from public view until I included them in the exhibition Hallucination Generation at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 2006. I guessed Ida Kar must have taken quite a number of pictures of Terry and eventually found them in the archive of her work held by the National Portrait Gallery. At the time I was searching for these works the NPG hadn’t included them in their online catalogue of Kar holdings because they had no biographical details for Taylor, which I have since been able to provide.

  For a time, Taylor took to living at Gallery One, but eventually he moved on to Notting Hill. After this relocation, Victor Musgrave introduced Terry to Detta Whybrow when by chance both turned up in D’Arblay Street at the same time. In conversation Taylor and Whybrow discovered they lived close to each other in Notting Hill. Shortly afterwards Terry called on Detta at her home and they became lovers — an affair that continued from the late fifties until the mid-sixties. Baron’s Court was published in 1961 and from then onwards Taylor spent a lot of time in Tangier. In his memoir Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, American beatnik poet Johnny Dolphin describes how he got heavily involved in a magic group formed by Terry Taylor and various Berbers which met in Tangier to materialise thought forms. The process combined smoking grass with magic and the practice was brought back to London.

  By the mid-sixties Terry, Detta and the circle around them — including my mother — were very interested in LSD. Detta persuaded a chemist she knew called Victor James Kapur to make LSD for her when it was still legal. The acid is said to have been very pure and an intense tripping scene developed, as well as much street dealing. Of course, it wasn’t long before LSD was banned and a series of police raids in November 1967 led to Detta and some of her friends appearing on the front page of The Times and at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court over drug offences. Kapur received the heaviest sentence of nine years at the Central Criminal Court in May 1968, and was removed from the Pharmaceutical Register later that year. Both Terry and my mother were out of London when the busts took place, and as far as I can tell had left the UK before the drug became illegal. My mother was in Paris. Terry was st
ill spending a lot of time in Tangier.

  It amazed me that this circle of early countercultural ‘freaks’ and the first LSD manufacturing bust in the UK had fallen out of the history of the British underground. It was a major omission in the many books I’d read about the subject. I chased up the newspaper stories about the bust after first hearing it as oral history. I also clued up researchers such as Andy Roberts about this fascinating hunk of lost history — enabling Roberts to do further research in the police files and include it in his 2008 book Albion Dreaming: A popular history of LSD in Britain. I’d already written about Taylor on my website, and I’d also made a couple of hundred photocopies of Baron’s Court and passed them around, since I absolutely adored the book and wanted to see it widely read. Incredibly the only person I came across who’d read Baron’s Court before I slipped them a photocopy was the journalist Jon Savage. Even polymath novelist Iain Sinclair — who knows London literary obscurities like no one else I’m acquainted with — was unaware of Taylor’s youth cult classic until I brought it to his attention.

  I knew that Terry had left London permanently in the early seventies and it was there that the trail I was following in the hope of finding him pretty much went cold. I contacted Tony Gould who told me that although Taylor had helped him with his MacInnes biography, he no longer knew how to get in touch with him. My mother’s address book contained a couple of entries for Taylor in North Wales. I fired off letters but received no replies. Next I used the electoral roll to locate everyone I could with the name Terry Taylor in Wales, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Manchester and a few other places I thought this elusive author might be living. Still I had no luck. By chance, in January 2005, I met Johnny Dolphin, mentioned earlier, who was very keen to discover what had happened to him. Not long after this, out of the blue, I got a message from Taylor himself, via the email contact form on my website. Terry said he liked what I’d written about his book online. I’d established contact at last – and had the chance to ask Taylor about the many crazy rumours I’d heard about him.

  When we spoke on the phone Terry came across as a down-to-earth bloke, albeit one with many incredible stories to tell. Shortly after this I was lucky enough to find a first edition hardback of Baron’s Court at a bargain basement price. Meanwhile, Terry provided me with a manuscript copy of an unpublished novel called The Run. It was set in Tangier and covered the same scene Esther Freud records in her book Hideous Kinky, but from the point of view of an adult insider. The Run was every bit as good as Baron’s Court, All Change.

  Returning to the early sixties, in Tangier Taylor had been hanging out with the likes of William Burroughs, and as a result he’d become interested in developing his writing in a more experimental direction. This didn’t go down well with Terry’s publisher when he offered them a book entitled The Dancing Boy as a follow-up to Baron’s Court. His editor at MacGibbon & Kee told him to rewrite his second novel as a conventional narrative. This advice was ignored and that’s why Taylor currently only has one published book to his name. In the various personal upheavals Terry has gone through, he lost the manuscript of The Dancing Boy, but The Run from the early seventies still survives. Although William Burroughs picked up the nickname El Hombre Invisible, I think it fits Terry even better than the author of The Naked Lunch. Taylor might be a countercultural face but he can also blend into a background and look natural anywhere. On either side of the eighties and throughout that decade, Terry and his wife ran a highly successful sandwich shop in the seaside town of Rhyl, North Wales.

  Moving forward to the twenty-first century, my efforts to create a buzz around Baron’s Court by writing about it, and circulating photocopies, eventually began paying off. Nearly everyone I gave a xerox of the book was incredibly enthusiastic about it. I was also receiving abusive email from bibliophiles who were frustrated by their inability to obtain an original copy of Baron’s Court. My favourite came from a used book dealer who told me that in twenty years of trading this was the first time he’d found it impossible to locate a commercially published title of such relatively recent vintage — and he begged me that the next time I found a novel I wanted to enthuse about and promote as a lost cult classic, would I please refrain from picking on anything as obscure as Terry Taylor’s work! Copies did turn up occasionally but usually at quite a price. When Repton Readers first offered a hardback edition of Baron’s Court for sale on Amazon in 2009, they asked a whopping £238 plus postage for it!

  So why did a far-out drugs novel like Baron’s Court fall through the cracks and disappear from view for forty odd years? I’d see its main problem as being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. Nonetheless, it only needed a handful of cult fiction fans who’d been born after Baron’s Court was first published to learn of Terry Taylor’s life story, for interest in both him and his book to rocket. Add in that Baron’s Court described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, and that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and those who’d heard about this were soon itching to get their hands on the novel.

  The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback by Four Square in 1965 is difficult to explain. Four Square bought the rights within weeks of Terry landing his hardback deal and he’d expected them to issue a mass-market edition in 1963. Perhaps they got cold feet about the subject matter but with the burgeoning drug culture of the midsixties considered it too hot a property to be allowed to fall completely out of their publishing schedule. By then ‘with-it’ editors were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject.

  With a little help from me, and a lot of word of mouth recommendations, interest in Baron’s Court has been building for a few years now. With its republication this lost classic can finally reach a new audience who will be able to see its historical significance. Just as importantly, it is a fast and furious read that you won’t want to put down. Baron’s Court now has a longer and more exciting public life ahead of it than its stranger than fiction past! Among other things, it is a hipster Bible that remains forever ‘younger than yesterday’. Which makes the book rather like its author. Terry Taylor is still pursing his interest in jazz and taking time out in places like Morocco and Goa. It may be forty years since he last lived in a big city, but he remains the hipster’s hipster! Some are hip, while others write knowingly about being cool without being able to live that way themselves. Terry’s accomplishment is to have done both brilliantly!

  Stewart Home

  October, 2011

  Chapter One

  Square

  “It's all a lot of nonsense!” Mr Cage said, beaming at me from across the shop. “You’ll have to buck your ideas up, John.”

  For the twenty years he’d been manager, every shop ‘boy’ had been given the name John.

  “Because if you don’t it’s going to affect your work, and Down and Company wouldn’t be very pleased about that, would they?” I carried on brushing the hat, pretending not to have heard him.

  “Well, would they?” His voice a little louder this time.

  “No, sir, they wouldn’t, I suppose.”

  “Then, get all this tommy-rot out of your head. Soon you’ll be bringing all those spirits into the shop with you, and then what would we do?” Annoyed at my silence, he added: “I’m sure you want to make this shop into a seance-room, like the ones you visit every night. I’m seriously concerned about you, John. It’s not right for a young lad of your age to go on like this. I’ll have to bring you a copy of the Bible to read. That’s the best thing for you.”

  As he was talking, a customer came into the shop, and I felt relieved to get away from him for a few minutes. After I’d served the customer I thought that would be the end to our conversation. But no. He came over, his huge frame towering above me, and his small pink eyes looking as friendly as they could. He started again. “I don’t want to lecture you, but it’s for your own good I’m telling you this. Take up some healthy interests, like ot
her fellows of your age. Join a youth club and mix with youngsters like yourself, instead of all those neurotic old fogeys at this Spiritualist Society of yours. Believe me, my boy, you’ll be as mad as they are before long.”

  He knew I wasn’t taking any notice of him so he turned offensive again. “Well, make sure it doesn’t affect your work,” he roared, “or I shall have to report you to Head Office, and you know what that’ll mean!”

  At last five-thirty came. I felt like a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis. Freedom at last. I hurriedly left the shop, wearing the dark grey hat I was forced to wear like all the other employees of Down & Co. As soon as I was out of hat-spotting distance, I took it off and carried it like I always did. Being only sixteen years of age I was selfconscious about it and knew that I looked stupid. Mr Cage had the same opinion, but it was one of the many rules of Down and Co.

  At the bus stop the same old faces were queueing up. The same old faces, waiting for the same old bus, in the same old street, every day. To make it more sickening they were happy faces, too. They looked as if they felt privileged to work in dreary shops like the one I worked in. I tried to blot them all out of my mind. I wanted to forget, just for a few hours, that I was part of them. To kick them clean out of the old thinking box — pretending to myself that they had nothing to do with me.

  “Good day at work?” I heard a voice behind me say.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said to a future zombie, that was about my own age, and worked in the tailor’s shop next to the bakers.

  “What’s the matter with you? You look as though you’ve just been given the sack,” he said with a bloody stupid grin all over his bloody stupid face.

  “I wish I had,” was my reply.

  “You’d never get another job like that one if you had. Down and Company’s one of the best firms you can work for. They’re established, they are, and don’t forget their pension scheme. It’s one of the best in the country.”