Bignell’s world: the photographer at work

 I was going to do another post in my Interiors series this week. There were a couple of other ideas bubbling under as well but Tuesday rolled round and none of those ideas were quite ready so I turned to our old friend John Bignell. I looked for a selection of photographs that would show some of the range of his work. Bignell photographed the famous and the obscure, the artistic and the ordinary. As a jobbing photographer he worked to order but he also worked for himself.

 He did fashion shoots like this one:

A model (unknown to me but I’m open to suggestions) in a Chelsea street.

Then there were catalogue jobs.

I think this was part of a tryout rather than the finished work but Bignell thought the series was worth keeping.

He was also out covering feature stories like this one at Battersea Park Fun Fair:

That’s the Caterpillar they’re getting out of according to my wife who rode on it in its final days.

Here’s another feature, where he followed his friend Paul Raymond to Clacton. The Raymond showgirls pose for some publicity pictures.

When he was bored with the glamorous jobs he sought out more authentic subject matter.

A woman feeding birds in Dovehouse Green – behind her is the Miller monument which is still there in the centre of the green which was landscaped in 1978.

A boy demonstrating the power of reading outside the first Chelsea Library in Manresa Road. Bignell may have set this picture up but it still looks spontaneous.

This one is somewhere in Chelsea too I think.

Is the girl shocked at the price of coley, or worried that she might have to eat it? (Some people used to think that coley is just for cats.)

Sometimes Bignell concentrated on landscape:

St Mary’s Church, Battersea reflected perfectly in the shallow water at low tide.

This pair of images contrasts night and day:

Looking down the King’s Road from the roof of Peter Jones department store. (Bignell had a bit of a knack for getting to the top of buildings with a good view.)

And then there was just hanging out with the bohemian crowd, as in this party at David Rawnsley’s Pottery in 1960.

This lady is Lucette de Fongere, about whom I also know nothing apart from her name. As with all the Bignell posts I would appreciate any further information.

This is another carefully posed picture:

It features  Regin de Cerchard and his wife who is pretending to examine a painting of Chelsea Reach and Lot’s Road Power Station. Bignell had many friends  among the art and antique dealers of Chelsea. That was 1955.  Fifteen years later he had other artistic friends.

Once again all I can tell you is the caption: filming under Battersea Bridge.

My final picture this week is one of my favourites, taken in Woolworth’s in Victoria in 1959.

I think this is one picture which wasn’t staged. As he so often did Bignell had the photographer’s instinct to take the picture at exactly the right moment.

JB at the jazz club

John Bignell was sometimes a little unhelpful to posterity when it came to identifying pictures. You might get a penciled note on the back of a print or a short phrase on a batch of negatives. Sometimes you have to ask someone if you can find someone to ask or just make an educated guess. I started this post with a handful of photos of people dancing to a jazz band and they looked like they were having a good time.

The room doesn’t look like a club, more like a gallery or some curtained off room in a municipal building but by comparing details of the ceiling and wallpaper with a picture that was labelled I came to the conclusion that all the photos were taken in the same place – an upstairs room at the Six Bells pub in the King’s Road.

The trees visible through the window are still there. The Six Bells still exists too as part of the Henry J Beans chain of bars but there’s no jazz upstairs these days. These pictures were taken about 1959. Jazz was still popular then, more popular than rock’n’roll in some circles. Across the road there were plenty of students at Chelsea College and Chelsea School of Art all eager to drink and dance. As I’ve said before (see the Art School Dance on the complete list of posts opposite) the 50s was the decade when people started to have serious fun again after years of wartime danger and post-war austerity. The students and others in these pictures had grown up in “interesting” times and they were ready to party. An even bigger party was waiting for them in the next decade but they didn’t know that yet.

They were still conventionally dressed but starting to loosen up. Look at the women in the centre of the picture with her head thrown back. Or this group:

The band is the Mike Martin Band. They’re in a formal pose in the picture by the window but in the others they’re looking far more abandoned and have been joined by their vocalist Pat Adams who can be seen better in the picture below with his back to the audience.

The band played a form of jazz called mainstream which lay somewhere between the New Orleans style trad jazz and the newer styles.

The club at the Six Bells was run for several years by musician and cartoonist Wally Fawkes. As well as being a musical associate of George Chisholm and George Melly, Fawkes is also known as the creator of the cartoon strip Flook.

Flook, a talking animal whose exact nature I was never able to fathom had a series of satirical adventures scripted by Melly, Barry Took, Humphrey Lyttelton and others which was featured in the Daily Mail when it was still a broadsheet.

There are some later photos from 1966 or 1967 featuring Henry “Red” Allen, a famous American trumpet player.

As was often the practice he is playing with a “local” group, the Alex Welsh Band.

You can see from the background that some effort had been made to alter the decor of the room. Did Fawkes create the illustrations himself?

Sadly, Red Allen died soon after his British tour in 1967. The club itself didn’t last much longer despite the nights devoted to blues and other more popular forms of music. But it had a good run. You can find some memories of the club at: http://www.sandybrownjazz.co.uk/forumsixbells.html

And we can also remember through John Bignell’s photographs the nights of music and dancing in an upstairs room at a Chelsea pub.

Is that the woman we saw dancing on the left of the first picture, with Pat Adams taking a breather in the background underneath a strange looking painting? Once again Bignell demonstrates his talent for picking a good moment.

Postscript

I scanned most of the pictures myself, some from negatives. A couple of the others I had to convert from TIFFs which adds to the slightly grainy or overexposed look to some of the images. Also Bignell was working in a dimly lit smoke filled room. But I like them anyway.

I found the picture of Flook online but I can’t remember where. Sorry to the owner.

Postscript to the postscript

As well as writing this blog I also do a few pieces for the K&C Libraries blog. Here’s my latest one: http://rbkclibraries.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/empty-spaces-part-2-the-writing-on-the-floor/

They let me do my own photography.

John Bignell and the celebrities: fame in the sixties

Some of you may not have heard of John Bignell. I googled his name when I was preparing to write this and you don’t find much – lots of results about his book Chelsea Photographer and the inevitable reference to the picture he took of Claudie Delbarre a few days before she was murdered. (See the King’s Road Blues post if you want see the picture) But there’s very much more to John Bignell. He did street photography, news, fashion, art even a bit of glamour. He documented bohemian life in Chelsea from the 50s to the 80s. And like many London photographers in the 60s he snapped his share of the celebrities of the day.

Celebrity itself was a little different then of course.

A young David Hockney, sitting with the widow of Igor Stravinsky.

A couple of other shots in art galleries:

Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger in 1961 according to Bignell’s notes, then married (his fourth marriage, her third, and final one) The man on the left is David Tomlinson but I don’t think it’s the actor from Mary Poppins. (or is it?)

The man with the prominent nose is L S Lowry sharing an amusing story with an unknown gentleman and the already ubiquitous Richard Attenborough.

Another high class occasion:

Derek Nimmo (ask some old person if you don’t know) officiating at some formal occasion puzzling over an illegible note with Lady Limerick. This could be a literary occasion. There’s an impressive collection of old books in the background.

Bignell must have been on good terms with his subjects. He often took pictures in their own homes.

Chelsea resident, film and TV actor Harry Fowler, with his wife Kay. Mr Fowler who died earlier this year made an appearance in the short lived BBC2 Chelsea-based soap opera World’s End, which I’ve already referred to in a previous post.

This is one of my favourites among Bignell’s celebrity photos:

Charles Gray, another local, looking like a man who knows how to have a good time. He had a long career in acting, playing one version of the James Bond villain Blofeld (in Diamonds are Forever), at least three versions of Mycroft Holmes, on film and TV, and most memorably for me Mocata, the villain in the Hammer adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out.

Another classy interior:

A fairly young Ned Sherrin striking a pose while sitting down, possibly in the flat in Chelsea where he lived for many years.

Bignell found many of his subjects on the streets of Chelsea.

Ryan O’Neal examining a shop keeper’s pendant in a slightly disconcerting manner.

Sammy Davis Jr making his way down the King’s Road, possibly on his way here:

You can see him on the balcony. Has the crowd gathered for him, or is this a normal Chelsea Saturday afternoon back in the 60s?

You’ve seen a lot of male celebrities so far so here are a couple of famous women:

Jayne Mansfield with her daughter Jayne Marie at Victor Silvester’s dance studio on the King’s Road. Jayne Marie is unmistakeable I think. I got carried away with the caption Jayne Mansfield and daughter, thinking the daughter was Mariska Hargitay, star of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but it turned out to be Ms Mansfield’s first daughter. I can see the family resemblance though.

Just a little way down the King’s Road was the Chelsea Palace. Here Bignell took this excellent picture of another famous blonde actress.

Diana Dors in the dressing room with a man named Michael Keaton who looks very pleased to be on the receiving end of Ms Dors’s attention.

This post has been an introduction to John Bignell. I’ll be coming back to him again over the coming months to try and show you the full range of his work. But for now here’s the man himself behind the bar of the Six Bells.

And here’s a puzzle for you. Who on earth are these guys?

Are they an actual group, or just some likely looking hipsters Bignell gathered together for the picture, which is simply called Love is all you need?

So if anyone has any ideas please let me know. We’ve already eliminated Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch by the way.

King’s Road Blues part two

There has been a cinema on the corner of King’s Road and Old Church Street since 1910. This picture shows that part of the King’s Road. You can see the side of the cinema, the Marjorie Parr shop (Parr was a well known Chelsea art dealer) and interestingly what looks like a statue of a woman visible over the top of the van.

Was it something on the back of a vehicle?

The cinema has gone under many names. As the King’s Road Theatre it was the home of the first live version of the Rocky Horror Show. It has been a Ritz, a Curzon, a Classic, a Cannon and an ABC. It was also called the Essoldo when this picture was taken:

These were the days when cinemas showed one film at a time so there was room on the display board for “Can Hieronymous Merkin ever forget Mercy Humppe and find true happiness?” (1969, a musical featuring Anthony Newley and Joan Collins regarded by some as a work of genius but by most critics of the day as pretentious rubbish)

Moving east we pass Oakley Street. In this image you can see the wall that once marked the edge of the Old Burial Ground. The area was landscaped in the late 1970s.

You soon come to another cinema, the Odeon (Formerly the Gaumont). In 1972 another film with a long title was showing:

The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972, a French comedy thriller about a musician caught up in a spy caper) This view is looking west, the way we came. Turn around to see the view east with the Antiquarius building in its heyday.

And the recently deceased Picasso Café:

This picture by John Bignell shows a group of typically sixties King’s Road characters hanging out at the Picasso.

(It’s an excellent picture but it has a dark subtext. Claudie Delbarre the woman in the curly wig on the right of the picture was murdered a few days after the picture was taken. I wasn’t sure whether to mention this but the case itself is quite well-known and somehow you can’t look at the picture without thinking of the murder. I can’t anyway.)

On either side of the road there are individual shops rather than branches of famous chains.

And there are famous names among the pubs -the Chelsea Potter and the Chelsea Drug Store.

The Drug Store is one of the King’s Road’s most famous buildings. You can still see the late Victorian superstructure of the upper storeys from when it was known as the White Hart. The flamboyant sixties additions have created a unique building which has been celebrated in songs and in films. (The one which sticks in my mind was that scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex goes to pick up an album, among other things)

In the final stretch you go past the old fence of the Duke of York’s headquarters. I haven’t commented on the cars but here are a couple of Minis and a sports car I can’t identify. Suggestions?

At the opposite end of the road from last week’s branch, another Woolworth’s:

Near Sloane Square you can see a poster advertising the Daily Telegraph’s coverage of a referendum on the Common Market.

There are still many more pictures in our files. One thing that strikes me about these photographs most of which were taken purely to show what the buildings looked like is how ordinary the street and the people in it look. With the exception of the Bignell picture they seem to show a conventional high street in a big city. I suppose only the inhabitants of this time-zone could tell you how extraordinary the King’s Road was then, compared to the rest of London.

Some things about the King’s Road never change though. I’ve lived in Chelsea since the 80s and at various times I’ve seen Dustin Hoffmann, John Lydon, Michael Caine, David Puttnam, Bob Geldof, even Richard Strange walking in the King’s Road. There’s this double-take moment when you think “isn’t that….?”. John Bignell has captured that exact moment in this picture.

Have you unexpectedly come across a famous person in the King’s Road? And did you just smile to yourself and let them go without a word?

Acknowledgement:

I’ve mentioned the photographer John Bignell but the man who took most of these pictures was our own John Rogers, formerly our staff photographer now working freelance. His work has been invaluable for Local Studies in general and for this blog in particular.