Hippie ... what's That?

In the summer of nineteen sixty-six I was working as an assistant for London Photographer Mark Hamilton. I had left the American army in Germany a few months before, and I was still adjusting to life in England.

One day a call came in for a photographer to go to the Ruislip Lido and shoot a photo record of an insurance company’s annual outing. Mark was a top London advertising photographer and wasn’t interested of course, so the job came to me. Great!

I still had a car, a carryover from my tour in the Army, a lovely Borgward Isabella Combi which I bought in Germany before I left. I packed my photo stuff in the car and made my way to the Ruislip Lido some twenty miles outside central London. After a complicated journey I arrived an hour or so later and found fifty or a hundred employees partaking in various activities like tug-of-war, three leg races, boating and general knees up nonsense that was typical of summer company outings at the time. Of course I photographed it all and did my best to do a good job.

Scattered among the guests were a handful of rather odd characters who were obviously part of the hired help. I say odd, one or two of them were very odd indeed. For a start they had very long hair, often tied with a band around the forehead. They were wearing very colourful shirts and tie-died Jeans with the lower leg seam split and filled in with coloured floral material. Loops of beads seemed to breed around their necks.

The apparent ringleader of the group was a lanky and quixotic character call Desmond, closely followed by Ivan, a very charming and unassuming Irish chap. There were several others there as well, but their names are long forgotten. Having been hired via Man Power (a low-end casual employment agency in Notting Hill Gate) they were doing all the odd jobs like washing up and cleaning the site after the very large afternoon banquet. I’m not sure why, but I was quite attracted to these colourful people, and we chatted at length in the washing up tent as the day was winding down. It was decided that I would give them all a ride back to London and to a friend’s house who apparently had some hash, and we could all have a smoke. At that time, I was quite a novice, but I had tried marijuana once or twice before and had liked it, so it was agreed.

There were about five or six of them all together, but we managed to squeeze everyone into my little combi in those pre seat belt days. As we were getting ready to set off, Des came running up excitedly carrying a large cardboard box. “It’s the roast lamb” he bubbled, “let’s take it with us to Robbins place, He’ll love it!”

A brief look in the box revealed a complete lamb carcass which, from what I could see, looked pretty well picked over, but Desmond insisted that it had loads of meat on it and we should take it with us as a surprise for Robbin. There was little arguing with him, so we put the box in the back and set off.

Robbin lived in Russel Square, in the heart of central London, and we were at least 20 miles away. It was a very dark night, it was foggy, and no one was around. It was very slow going. There didn’t seem to be a direct main road in those days or we didn’t find it, and we went from village to village to suburb mostly following road signs. As we got into more built-up areas we encountered street lighting. Odd as it seems now, the convention in London in the middle sixties was to switch off your headlights in areas lit with street lighting. Cars and busses were expected to move around with just their sidelights on, headlights switched firmly off. The theory was that street lighting was good enough and that vehicles were easily defined by their sidelights. If approaching traffic used even dipped headlights, the theory went, it blinded oncoming traffic, so switched off they were. Approaching traffic would even flash their objection if you had inadvertently forgotten; very moody. Moving slowly, as we were, through those monochrome suburban streets, in the fog and gloom, was very Dickensian, I almost expected to see Oliver Twist or the Artful Dodger lurking in the shadows. The gloomy streets and intersections went on and on. Whether we ever actually got lost or not I don’t know but we travelled for what seemed like hours before we finally arrived in Russell Square.

Robbin lived on the top floor in one of the five story blocks that lined the square. After ringing the bell and some chatter back and forth from the street to a small balcony on the very top of the building, a key drifted down attached to a handkerchief, slowing it down to prevent it breaking when it hit the pavement below. Key in hand and door opened, we eagerly lugged the now rather odorous box up the five flights of stairs necessary to reach the intended flat.

Robbin opened the door, rather sleepily as I recall, and Des proudly opened the box and said “Look what we have brought you man” in a very enthusiastic voice.

Robbin peered cautiously into the box, curled his nose, stepped back, and sighed “Ah Des Man … I’m a vegetarian.

…

Surprisingly, we were still invited in and we settled down for a mid-sixties social: sitting on the floor, drinking lemon tea, listening to Dylan and yes, passing joints around. Twenty minutes later I was beautifully stoned, perhaps for the first time in my life. Sadly, it was short lived and I started to feel queasy and found myself heading for the toilet to fight off a wave of nausea. I remember hanging over the bowl, thinking how annoyed I was having got so nicely high, but having to suffer for it. A portent of things to come as it later turned out.

For better or worse I became good friends with Des, Ivan and the others. A few weeks later I moved out of my cold-water room in the Brecknock Road and moved into the ground floor flat of a rather dilapidated terrace house in Tavistock Crescent, Notting Hill. The same house where Desmond lived. Des was now my upstairs neighbor.

It didn’t take me long to merge into this alternative culture. I was young, un-attached, a long way from home, and lonely. This new group of people were lovely. I really liked hanging out with my new friends, sitting cross legged on the floor and drinking lemon tea while listening to Bob Dylan or Frank Zappa and smoking dope. I seemed to have found my place in 1966 London, at least for now.