No. 21 - Turquoise-blue and Sandals

'Nothing of the Sort'

On Wednesday, October 24th 1934 at the Old Bailey, Carmen Fernandez stood in front of the dock, where she was to dance the Rumba, just to give the jury some idea of its nature. The Recorder, Holman Gregory KC had the following exchange with counsel:

A flyer for the club [National Archives].

“She will not do it in this court!”

“But this is expert evidence…”

“Perhaps it is, but she will do nothing of the sort here.”

The exchange took place at the trial of Jack Neave (aka Iron-foot Jack), and club promoter Billy Reynolds, following the police raid on their nightclub in Endell Street, Seven Dials, on 25 August 1934. 104 people were arrested and taken before the magistrate at Bow Street, but only 26 were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. The Weekly Dispatch reported that the revellers included people in uniforms, evening wear and fancy dress as well as ‘ordinary working men and women,’ a regrettable mixing of the classes.

A New Bohemia

The Caravan Club was a small, dimly lit basement, with cheap Eastern tapestries draped over whitewashed walls and hanging from the ceiling, to give the impression of a sheik's tent. The furniture consisted of rough divans, old dining chairs, armchairs and pouffes, with barrels adapted as tables. The music was provided by Charlie, the accordion player, and in the semi-darkness, the atmosphere thick with smoke, men and women danced until dawn. It was Iron Foot Jack’s ambition to create in London a new Bohemia, modelled on Paris’s Latin Quarter.

Iron Foot Jack [British Newspaper Archive]

Neave was given the soubriquet ‘Iron Foot Jack’ because of the surgical boot with iron supports that accentuated his already eccentric look. His long black hair, part braided, hung over his shoulders. He wore a frock coat, a black stock tie, a shirt with a soft frilled front and a black, wide-brimmed fedora. His striking appearance may have impressed Bohemians, but it didn't endear him to ‘respectable society’.

The police received several complaints including the following handwritten note:

SIR

RE: 81 ENDELL ST WC2

AT ABOVE ADDRESS THERE IS THE CARAVAN CLUB(?): ONLY FREQUENTED BY SEXUAL PERVERTS: LESBIANS AND SODOMITES. IT’S ABSOLUTELY A SINK OF INIQUITY. YOUR KIND AND PROMPT ATTENTION IS RESPECTFULLY CRAVED BY SOME RATEPAYERS OF ENDELL STREET.

Such complaints inspired police surveillance, leading to the raid.

At Bow Street and the Old Bailey, all prosecution testimony was that of policemen, who had attended the club incognito several times before the raid. The Daily Herald reported “Chief Inspector Dodds said that when the police entered the dance-hall, people were dancing by just moving and wriggling their bodies.” Is that not what dancing is? Dodds is surely dead, but should he visit any club in 2025, he’d probably die all over again.

The Caravan Club [National Archives]. Note the box on the wall for customers to leave tips for Charlie, the accordionist.

Defence Counsel asked whether people who performed the Rumba were considered indecent, and offered the demonstration that Mr Gregory would not allow in his court. At the earlier Bow Street hearing, Detective Sergeant Dorey had gamely imitated a ‘woman-like’ dance he had seen a stout man do at the club. The magistrate saw nothing indecent in it, and the witness was forced to agree.

The Raid

The police still insisted that men were dancing together ‘in an indecent manner to the accompaniment of an accordion.’ Two were observed 'wrapped in each others arms and caressing each other on a divan', for a rather specific ‘hour and eighteen minutes.’ Another was overheard asking to borrow a powder puff from a lady-friend, and several referred to each other using female names. Some of the women were sitting on men’s knees and embracing each other, one even had the audacity to smoke a pipe. The police considered all this behaviour to be ‘of a grossly indecent character.’

The Caravan Club [National Archives]

The Herald reported that when the police began making arrests one man pulled a letter from his pocket, hastily tore it up and cast it under a divan. He knew that any written expression of affection between men would be considered damning evidence. The pieces were recovered, pasted together, and the letter was found to contain ‘endearing terms.’ And it wasn’t only written words that condemned. The Director of Public Prosecutions, testified that “Men were talking in effeminate voices. Their conversation was mostly on matters of sex, and was of an indecent character.”

PC Mortimer described the cabaret - “A man naked to the waist passed burning papers over the upper portion of his body and the lights were extinguished.” Under cross examination Mortimer conceded that it was the kind of act often seen at country fairs or performed by street entertainers before a theatre queue. Given the makeshift drapes and the preponderance of cigarettes, the place was a fire risk that, unlike the allegations, might actually have merited investigation. But moral rather than physical safety was the prime concern of the police, whose charge was that the club was staging 'lewd, scandalous, bawdy and obscene performances and practices to the manifest corruption of the morals of His Majesty’s liege subjects.’

PC Mortimer was successful in one respect. A man who called himself Josephine urged him to come again the following night, and promised “I will get myself up in my turquoise-blue and sandals.” This revelation, read from the officer's notebook in that voice policemen tend to use in court, prompted stifled giggles from some of the defendants, and indeed the papers reported that many of those charged seemed to be treating it all as a huge joke. Imagine that.

As for ‘His Majesty’s liege subjects’, they were lapping up the scandal in the newspapers, and in the streets. During the initial hearing, outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, mounted police dispersed a crowd of over five hundred people, many of them porters from nearby Covent Garden market, who laughed, jeered and cheered at the accused. There was some spitting, but the crowd was mostly good-humoured. As each of them emerged they were greeted with cries of “Hello darling” and “Come on Tilly!”

Verdicts

The Daily News 27 October 1934 recounts verdicts and sentences [British Newspaper Archive]

76 people were discharged through lack of evidence, among them three from Croydon, a girl of 19, and two labourers aged 21 and 22. They may have escaped prosecution, but by then their names and addresses had been published in The Croydon Times, so it will have been no joke for them.

From the twenty-six committed for trial at the Old Bailey, three including the accordionist and a sailor were released at the Recorder’s behest before the jury went out. When asked whether he had seen anything ‘undesirable’, Charles Lewins, the club musician, replied that his mind was on the accordion, an instrument which required a lot of concentration. The sailor from Chatham was asked “Did you see anything improper when you saw men dancing together?” He replied “No. I have seen two or three hundred men at a time dancing together aboard ship.” The young woman acquitted with them testified that, apart from the man she came with, she had danced only with an undercover policeman.

'Den of Iniquity'

During his summing up, Holman Gregory made a point of apologising to the four women jurors that they had to be exposed to such an ‘unpleasant case.’ When the verdicts were returned, the Recorder described the Caravan Club as ‘a vile den of iniquity that was corrupting the youth of London to a very considerable extent.’ Jack Neave, the real force behind the club, was found guilty and sentenced to twenty months’ hard labour; Billy Reynolds, the money behind the club, to twelve months’ hard labour; and a young shop assistant with a recent conviction for soliciting was sentenced to three months hard labour.

I should say that by 1934 ‘hard labour’ did not involve manacles, a ball and chain or breaking rocks. London Prisons of Today and Yesterday (1933) explained - ‘...the prisoner, if medically fit, and under 60 years of age, is deprived of a mattress and sleeps on a plank-bed the first fourteen days of his imprisonment. Otherwise there is no essential difference between imprisonment with and without hard-labour.’

Six young defendants were found guilty of aiding and abetting the main culprits and sentenced retrospectively to ten days imprisonment, meaning in practice their instant release, on condition they promised never to enter such a club again. Ten others were found not guilty. Four who missed the original trial were later acquitted too, but only after spending a week in gaol for failing to appear when called.

A Triumph for Respectable Society

In its editorial, The Evening News expressed relief that the ‘unsavoury case’ was over, saying that there was plenty of ‘harmless and pleasing’ entertainment without this ‘nastiness.’ It went on to comment: “Much of the fervour of the early Nazi movement found its inspiration in youthful disgust with Berlin and Munich Nachtlokals; London can do well enough without any cheap imitations.”

The Illustrated Police News's sensational summary of the ‘amazing scenes’ covered in the trial is a pathetic indictment of the attitudes of the class that led British society. Police judgements as to what was improper were accepted by the court. That they could be shocked by men dancing with men, with men using female nicknames, with behaviour that, in their buttoned up opinion was ‘improper’, beggars belief.

In my view the only truly disgusting aspect of the Caravan Club affair is the attitude of the police, the courts and the press. Only half a decade later they would begin to encounter things that were truly shocking as the Second World War exposed what real depravity looked like.

The raid is featured at the end of my first novel Until the Real Thing Comes Along.