Glamour To Fall:Jean Sporle and The Golden Age Of Soho.

Yesterday evening I found myself sitting in an upstairs room in a pub on the outskirts of Soho. The curtains were drawn, the lights were low, and a few dozen men and women (mostly the wrong side of fifty, many considerably older) were sat watching black and white projections of topless, and naked, women cavort about.

'Standard' you may think. But you'd be wrong. This wasn't even an event for the more discerning masturbator. I wasn't rubbing my hands excitedly up and down my trousers Vic Reeves style but I was, in fact, learning some interesting history - and nobody can tell me different. I'd joined the ever reliable Sohemian Society in Fitzrovia's Wheatsheaf pub for a talk called Soho's Golden Age of Glamour. A talk that would be delivered in the form of a conversation between art book publisher and writer Yak El-Droubie and guest of honour Jean Sporle.

Jean Sporle, now 89 years old and with a memory that most people half that age would envy, is one of the few faces from the 1950s Soho scene left around and she's had a fascinating life (even if she, herself, describes it as "boring"). Most famously, she was a model in the early days of Kamera magazine and she went on to appear in films too but the Sohemians were here to hear her tell her life story in her own terms - and that's something she delivered with no little charm or humour.

Now living in Eastbourne, Sporle grew up in Hammersmith (though she was evacuated to the distinctly non-rural Manchester during World War II, well - at least it wasn't being bombed as much as London) with a mother who couldn't read or write. When the war ended, Sporle married her childhood sweetheart Mike. 

She was just twenty years old and after about a year Mike left her for another though they did, Sporle was eager to let us all know, remain friends until his passing a couple of years back. Fun was had back in those days at the Hammersmith Palais where band leader Joe Loss was just hitting the scene. Back then jiving (and gyrating) were strictly prohibited (foxtrots were the order of the day) but Sporle and her friends used to sneak a little jive in when Loss played his signature tune, Glenn Miller's In The Mood.

On a day trip to Clacton, Jean Sporle won £5 in a beauty contest (her friends had told she should give it a go:- "you're the best we've got") and this inspired her to try to get into modelling. Her typing job above the Oxford Street Littlewoods seemingly not providing enough job satisfaction.

She started by doing pin-ups for various Gerrard Street and Jermyn Street based agencies and appeared in Spick And Span magazine under the assumed name she had been given - Leslie Dae. Her biggest rival on the modelling scene during that era was Shirley Anne Field who went on to forge a long career in film and television from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Peeping Tom, and Alfie to My Beautiful Laundrette, Last Of The Summer Wine, and bickering antique dealer sitcom Never The Twain.

Glamour photographer George Harrison Marks and his model partner Pamela Green lived on Gerrard Street (not, as yet, Chinatown though a few Chinese shops were starting to appear) and Sporle fell in with them, both professionally and socially - even briefly living with them in Hampstead. She agreed to do 'pin-ups' but turned down the nude work she was offered - until she didn't. She trusted Marks and Green! First going topless and then full frontal. Although, the laws and morals of the time meant that the bottom bits were always airbrushed out.

When Marks started Kamera magazine, Sporle took a job in the office which made it easy for her to make herself available for any modelling work that came up. Green became Sporle's mentor and, now, Sporle cannot speak highly enough about Green. She was also very complimentary about Shirley Anne Field who she called "lovely" on numerous occasions.

Marks, too, was somebody she had nothing but kind words for. He'd begun his career as a street photographer before branching out into 'glamour' and celebrity photography. The office/studio on Gerrard Street became quite a hang out and often Bruce Forsyth, Stanley Baker, Diana Dors, Michael Caine, Harry H. Corbett (dirty old man) and Anthony Newley could be found hanging around there. Sporle even dated Newley though, she was quick to say, purely platonically. Newley was very much in love with Joan Collins.

Across the road there was an Italian restaurant called Peter Mario's where boxer Henry Cooper could often be found ("parmesan Mr Cooper?", "yes, splash it all over") and on nearby Wardour Street the cool cats and kittens could be found shaking their things at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go nightclub, which later shortened and abbreviated its name to the Wag!

Sporle told a few stories from the era including the time she saw a stabbing when buying food for Marks's pet mynah bird from Berwick Street market and how the shop attached to the office and studio used to sell copies of Kamera magazines and how almost everybody who bought one told them it was for "a friend". Obligingly, the shop assistants placed their copies of the magazine in brown paper bags so the 'friend' could enjoy a nice surprise.

Sporle got a walk on part in Cliff Richard's first film, 1959's Serious Charge. It's the film with Living Doll in it, though Cliff only played a minor role. Sporle received £80 for two days work in Borehamwood which was very good money back then - about forty times the average wage in the UK at the time. For this she needed to film her scenes three times. For the American release, she had to wear a slip. For the British release, bra and pants. And for the French release, the boobs were out.

But around about 1962, Sporle decided it was time to wind down the modelling (glamour was edging ever more into pornography so Sporle hung her boobs up) and took a job at the cosmetics company Estee Lauder. Her adventures weren't quite over though as she fell in love with a chap called Dickie Dark who was an ex-con who'd done eight years for manslaughter and hung around with the Krays.

Sporle, who seems to see the best in everyone, describes Dark as a "petty villain" and she was once so naive she couldn't work out why he was heading out to a golf course at 11pm at night. Let's just say she ended up with a lifetime's supply of Pringle sweaters. On one occasion, Dark took her to Vallance Road in Bethnal Green where she had a cup of rosie with Violet Kray and on another occasion Reggie Kray tried to buy her a drink in a nightclub. The nightclub was either called Winston's or Churchill's. Jean Sporle couldn't quite remember. One of the few things she'd forgotten.

After that, Dickie Dark and Jean Sporle went to run a pub, The Fortune Of War, in Essex and years later Sporle found herself living in Spain before returning to the UK and Eastbourne (a place, incidentally, where my friend Dave Fog - the man who introduced me to The Sohemian Society - is moving to today) and though her life no doubt continued to be interesting that was where our story ended.

We watched three of her films (lots of boobs, all very artsy but with some very of its time comedy shoehorned in) and there was a Q&A that took in The Day The Earth Caught Fire, Pink Floyd, Peeping Tom (again - Pamela Green appeared in it too), Barbara Windsor, the days of the 'casting couch', Basic Instinct, the nudist camps of Watford and St Albans, and the Eastbourne branch of Boots.

With that, and asides in the talk about Danny La Rue, the Great Train Robbery, slum landlord Peter Rachman, and plenty of  "salt of the earth" prostitutes it had been as satisfying an evening as I could have hoped for. A little look at a small slice of life in a time that now feels a very long way away. Thanks to The Wheatsheaf, thanks to The Sohemian Society, thanks to Yak El-Droubie, and thanks, most of all, to Jean Sporle for bringing it all so vividly back to life. Now - turn the lights back on.