Spiv on a grand scale

He insisted that he was not a pornographer but an entertainer, and told the Daily Herald that the Folies Parisienne (sic) — one of his early shows, featuring the ‘Harlem Nudes’ and their ‘taunting, scantily clad Native Mating Dance’ — was intended for family audiences, and that children were taken along by their ‘doting elders’. When he booked a celebrated American stripper to appear at the Raymond Revuebar (‘The Athenaeum of Strip Clubs’ — Spectator), she was appalled to learn that he and his wife proposed to let their five-year-old daughter watch the show.

This family image was rather dented by such assurances as ‘this theatre is disinfected throughout with Jeye’s [sic] Fluid’. The actor John Standing took John Osborne to see Pyjama Tops: ‘… the ghastliness of all those tourists in raincoats wanking in the stalls. I knew John would love it.’ Osborne was so impressed that he returned for two more performances.

‘I would feel much less easy with myself,’ declared Raymond of his empire of smut, ‘if I sold cigarettes and booze, because they are actually commodities that harm people.’ Actually he did sell booze and cigarettes — stolen ones, bought from his gangster friends ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser and Eddie Richardson. And while he posed as an ally of the Soho Society, buying up freeholds ‘to keep out the Maltese’, he forced out dress shops and restaurants with exorbitant rent increases so he could lease to Maltese sex shops.

In Members Only Paul Willetts, author of the well-received Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and North Soho 999, provides an extremely thorough biography of Raymond, who was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn, in Liverpool in 1925, and educated by the Jesuits. At 15 he left school to work as an office boy in a Manchester cotton mill, then as a drummer in a swing band on the pier at Withernsea, under the name of Geoff Raymond, and then as ‘a self-confessed spiv’ in the markets of Rochdale and Oldham.