What a story! In the era that you’re talking about, what classed as “hardcore”?
Erect penises, people having sex, penetration; that was strictly forbidden and illegal, but it was all being sold under the counter. Most of it was imported from the continent, where there were more relaxed attitudes, and it wasn't really until 1960 that Britain started to build their own trade. The reason it happened in Soho was because, as one interviewee put it, no one comes from Soho. It's a melting pot of different cultures and characters, so there were transnational networks. The French in Soho had familial networks who would send in or smuggle in porn that would be sold for huge amounts of money in Soho's bookstores.
Did you manage to speak to anyone from the Metropolitan police?
Well, there was the Obscene Publications Squad and they were the people who were tasked with enforcing the obscenity laws of the time. I spoke to one police officer who was working at the time and I asked, why was corruption rife? He just said to me, very simply, because the pay was shit. But it's more complex than that, I think. The police of the time and the criminals of the time; there wasn't much to separate them. A lot of them were working class; they drank at the same pubs and were part of the same networks, so they were in contact with each other. They mutually existed, in a way. So by having criminal networks the police could make cases, because they knew what was going to happen, because they were associated with members of the underworld. It was a benefit to the criminals, too, to know the police and what was going on. They came from the East End or from South London. They were the same culture, almost, and when the anti-corruption came in they tried to change that. That's when you saw police being brought from different communities and cultures and trying to change the way in which policing was done.
So they were very close together and that created the opportunities for corruption. That’s what I discovered from speaking to journalists who worked in Soho and from looking at all the newspapers, all the legal documents and the investigation into this corruption.
Then how did the UK become such a big player in the hardcore porn world?
Porn could be made here providing it was done behind closed doors and for export-only. I think [the growth] has something to do with the swinging sixties in Britain and the way that Britain was perceived internationally at the time. Particularly London and Soho were seen as having a permissive culture with great music, great fashion. There was something that was internationally very attractive about London and about Britain. That became a market saleable commodity. The porn of the time – these 8mm films called “rollers” – or even the photographs, the Soho Postcards, seemed to capture this zeitgeist, this cultural moment. So Britain suddenly becomes mass producer of 8mm porn by the latter half of the 1960s from nowhere. The films were smuggled into America where the copy was then reproduced and sold in the back pages of magazines over there.
Was it significant that the films were on 8mm?
Before the 8mm culture of filmmaking there was a 16mm culture, which had quite a limited audience. 8mm was really important because that was a domestic technology. It gave people the access to watch films in their home. 16mm projectors were really expensive but 8mm was cheaper, and people had disposable income after the war because of the post-war affluence. These were all really important conditions for why it grew.
Who was making the early films?
The early people seem to have a professional background. They just transferred their skills from, say, photography to filmmaking. People such as Mike Freeman who come in around ’67, Evan Philips, Ivor Cook…
Where does the BBC come into it?
In 1970 a Scottish pornographer called John Lindsay comes on the scene. He’s the only one who actively courts media attention. By the 1970s we still have this permissiveness of the ‘60s, but it’s almost like the moral boundaries are still being understood. People like John Lindsay were using this as capital. He was approaching it from a more countercultural perspective; saying that porn was countercultural. He used morality as a justification, like, “We're doing this to change Britain's restrictive censorship laws. We’re freedom fighters! We're fighting against the system!”
At the time, The Open University used to deliver their teaching materials late at night on BBC Two. So you would stay up to watch your course on the BBC. A sociologist called Geoff Esland was doing a series called Dirty Work about people in work that is “deviant.” Because John Lindsay is appearing in newspapers, Geoff contacts him and says, I’m from the BBC and I’d like to film you making a porn film. But it's going to be softcore, isn't it? John Lindsay agreed to make a softcore film.
But I found a legal document from the police investigation into this, and John Lindsay went against the agreement and made a hardcore film. The BBC paid for this film to be made and paid John Lindsay to make it. I have all the receipts and everything like that, but I can’t find the film, Street Poker, because it was destroyed… we think.
How did you choose and find the people that you interviewed for your book?
It was a challenge. I met someone whose family was associated with the Soho bookstores and he opened his little black book of contacts and told me I was five years too late; they’re all dead.
Some people I contacted didn't want to speak. They said they'd left that part of their life behind. Most people had died. What transformed things was finding the newspaper articles and the legal documents. The police had interviewed all these pornographers, so I had all these transcripts of interviews with these people who’d now died. I was able to use those, although I realised that they also probably lied to the police, so you take them at face value but then corroborate them with other sources like newspaper articles. That allowed me to build up these pictures. I also spoke to people who were the solicitors involved in the law cases.
What about the performers?
I was very careful approaching performers because I didn't want to dredge up their past. I just don’t know if or how they could have consented to making these films. It wasn’t like today, where if you make porn there’s this evidence of consent, records of everything. A performer from then could be a grandmother now, and they might have had a very difficult, traumatic experience. Some of these people were told that the films would be sold abroad only and not in the UK, which wasn’t true.