Ah, 4 December: 45th anniversary of the raid on Cynthia Payne’s house in Ambleside Avenue, Streatham, in which police found men (including, apparently, a Lord, an MP, and some vicars) queueing on the stairs waiting to pay for sex with luncheon vouchers.
According to the Times, the luncheon voucher (which cost them £25 as they entered the house) “entitled them to food, drink, striptease show and a choice of girl to go to bed with”. There were “sex films and refreshments in the conservatory”.
Its obituary of her said she was “a chirpy, no-nonsense, middle-aged brothel keeper”, neatly pinning down the secret of her success and the reason why large parts of British society took to her. This didn’t seem sordid, so much as suburban, taking place as it did behind net curtains.
The fact that she apparently offered discounts for pensioners helped this image. As columnist Sarah Baxter said (in the first piece):
I have had a soft spot for Cynthia Payne ever since my husband went round to photograph her at her suburban home — or “well-run bawdy house” as it was called in court — in Streatham, south London.
A matronly Madam Cyn greeted him in her nightie and then squeezed into her bondage gear. “Just help me do up the top, would you, dearie?” she asked. He didn’t know where to look but carried on with his magazine photoshoot as best he could.
Finally, as they were saying goodbye in the hallway, she whipped open a cupboard door, thwacked a man (who was tied up inside) a few times, and closed it again without saying a word. Only then did my husband realise they had not been alone.
Her early life — expelled from a convent school for ‘waywardness’, ‘bunk-ups’ with men who didn’t want to use condoms, backstreet abortions — inspired Wish You Were Here, and the later stuff went into Terry Jones/Julie Walters film Personal Services.
The films were dark in places, but it was fitting that they were comedies. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, when a prostitute herself,
Her preferred advertisement in telephone boxes was ‘Erections & Demolitions’
An article about her and the law says she was working in a café when
a smartly dressed woman in her forties asked to use her digs to see clients whilst she worked. She received payment for her service and earned more than she did as a waitress.
Apparently, when she progressed to owning a large suburban house, neighbours didn’t complain, but police got an anonymous letter and began 12 days of surveillance, during which 249 men and 50 women entered and left the property.
In court, she was represented by human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson, faced 21 charges, and pleaded guilty to three of controlling prostitution, and one of not running a brothel, for which she had previous convictions, but, controversially, “keeping a disorderly house”.
Cynthia Payne’s legal team appealed her sentence on the basis it was excessive and her case appeared before the Court of Appeal in 1980. Cynthia had of course run brothels for a living and the offence of keeping a brothel had not in the prosecution’s view given them sufficient scope to prosecute her. The simple offence of keeping a brothel would have only allowed a magistrate to sentence her at most to six months in prison and so they relied on an offence which existed at common law, one that was so old that it was not even in statute, the offence of keeping a disorderly house. The definition of that offence dated back to 1751 but the offence itself dated back to the time of Henry III, when parliament became concerned that a group of women had set up a brothel just south of Fleet Street and close to a Friary.
The article that’s from is interesting on the… ins and outs of the law (sorry, not sorry), and the difficulties of framing legislation that protects people from exploitation — an “area of law many feel is ripe for review but remains untouched”.
By the 1980s, too famous to run a brothel, she brought out a book, Entertaining at Home, and became an after dinner speaker — and then her house was raided again “after holding an ‘end of film’ party” for Personal Services.
This time, she was acquitted and not stung for huge costs — and she got to appear on The Dame Edna Experience and be asked “What is a transvestite?”
She was mostly known for being game, happy to pose for photographers with, um… fruit — and to attend Samantha Fox’s 21st birthday party at Stringfellow’s and have her picture taken with a Princess Diana… er, ‘lookalike’.
…and she kept giving interviews, including one in which ‘Mrs Merton’ asked of her sex parties “What gave you the idea, Cynthia, that it would be popular?”
…and one in which she explained the luncheon vouchers thing to the Grauniad’s Tim Dowling:
Originally, she said, in exchange for an entry fee, she gave her clients little plastic badges from Rymans. The men gave them to the girls upstairs and the girls later redeemed them, as proof of services performed, in exchange for payment. It was a simple accounting system but it was badly compromised when some of the girls started buying their own badges at Rymans. In the search for a form of currency that could not be so readily counterfeited, Payne came upon a box of old, out-of-date luncheon vouchers. When the police raided her 1978 Christmas party, every man had a luncheon voucher in his pocket, which helped give the scandal its indelible comic tint.
Then, of course, when she died, local newspapers found fascinating links which allowed them to use her name to shift units:
Geoffrey Robertson remembered her for the Independent, saying his favourite cartoon prompted by the trial
depicted a vicar in bed with a prostitute, confronted by a perplexed police officer. ‘I demand to see my solicitor,’ says the vicar, ‘who is in the next bedroom’.
…and her house? ‘Luxury’ flats.
Obviously.
