10) Into the Provinces – The Private Shops 1978-82
Before launching into Mr Sullivan’s unique escapades it will be useful to first sketch in the landscape that immediately preceded them, and this means briefly revisiting Appendix B of the already-discussed (and top secret) Dec 1969 Customs Report “List of Importers Concerned With Indecent or Obscene Books”. At first glance the two pages in question merely offer a bland A-Z of apparently random names and addresses, but a closer look seems to reveal an existing – if still fairly sketchy – national network of covert smut-distribution. Let’s crunch some numbers.
There are 54 individual names listed, but many are attached to the same handful of addresses, hinting at a maze of diversionary tactics and/or frontmen. Conversely, a few names are linked to multiple local addresses, again perhaps suggesting deliberate home / warehouse type subterfuges. If we cut through this bewildering muddle there are in fact only 40 individual addresses listed, 24 in the London area and 16 in the Midlands / North.
We can largely ignore London, as the relevant names were in all likelihood chiefly supplying Soho (or private mail-order). A few old friends can nevertheless be picked out: Ben Holloway in Acton W3, Ralph & David Gold in Whyteleaf, Surrey (actually the southernmost address featured), Charles Skilton in Wimbledon SW19, and Arnold Miller in Hackney E1. The Gold brothers were (and remain) close cronies of Sullivan, though eventually sold their publishing / distribution empire Gold Star in 2006. Arnold Louis Miller (1922-2014) is latterly best-remembered as a busy exploitation film producer 1961-74 (famously collaborating with Michael Reeves), but also ran a pulp-magazine distribution business ‘L. Miller & Co’ as a sideline, belatedly prosecuted in 1970 for importing US horror comics. Two even more unlikely mainstream firms popping up are twin paperback houses New English Library in Holborn EC1, and Tandem-Universal in Knightsbridge SW3. Both energetically targeted the emerging youth-culture market – NEL most famously with its Skinhead series and T-U with a raft of deliberately sleazy non-fic – though what dodgy material they were caught importing remains unclear (though NEL were the first to daringly paperback Harold Robbins).
Four other south-east names are also worth mentioning: JF Arora of Southend On Sea (likely covering the east coast) and H Richards of Maidenhead (ditto the Home Counties), plus a pair of Herts outfits located just outside the tube network, J Wilkins of Potters Bar, and K Hooker (Colonna Press) of Hemel Hempstead. The remaining 16 names are all in the Midlands / North, and it is these characters we are really interested in.
The clearest way of cataloguing this little crowd is to gradually work our way north via nine key towns and cities, as follows:
1) Birmingham AW Mitchell of 145 High Street, Aston. This one (being barely six miles outside the present writer’s hometown) is of particular interest, but the address no longer exists – though must have been adjacent to one of Brum’s biggest and most popular Edwardian pubs, the Bartons Arms at 144 (where your author spent many happy youthful hours, few of which he can now recall very clearly).
2) Leicester Randle Court Printers of Melton Road.
3) Derby W Bailey of Brentford Drive / S Booth of Bedford Street / A Crosse of Lower Dale Road / M Hartshore of Percy Street. Who knew Derby was such a seething hotbed of iniquity?
4) Stoke on Trent F Bath of Pembroke Road, Blurton / E Brownsword of Courtway Drive, Sneyd Green.
5) Sheffield LT Palmer of Bowshaw Estate, Dronfield / JK Hobson of Dover Road.
6) Manchester E Burns of Victoria Street & Sandy Meade, Prestwich / Anglo-American Book Co. of Roman Road, Failsworth
7) Bradford Arthur Dobson of Manchester Road & Bradford Road, Oakenshaw. (Dobson was the character prosecuted in 1969 for importing and selling My Secret Life and was also involved with the Anglo-American Failsworth address noted above).
8) Bridlington P Haddock of Bessingby Way. A slightly isolated location, so possibly supplying much of the north-east (?)
9) Glasgow Renfrew Wholesale Book Co. of Ark Lane & Stockwell Street & Renfrew Street. The sole company north of the border, so presumably supplying most of Scotland.
What does all this tell us? That there was an established supply-chain running up the spine of England which – in addition to mail order – must have dealt with a network of local shops. Exactly what form these early shops would have taken can be discussed later, though they were certainly operating on a strictly under-the-counter basis. However, the REAL retailing revolution outside the capital began in 1978, and was driven by just one man, whose brash career we now need to consider in some detail. David Sullivan didn’t invent selling sex, but he was the first person in Britain to dare sell it openly on the High Street, and made a fortune in the process.
Sullivan was born in 1949 in Penarth, just south of Cardiff on the Glamorgan coast, and grew up on a council estate. His father was in the RAF and the family were posted out to Aden for a year at the end of the ’50s before returning to settle in Hornchurch, Essex, which Sullivan still considers home turf. By his own account he was a ‘dunce’ at school before beginning to apply himself in his early teens, and left with ten ‘O’ levels followed by three ‘A’ levels from Watford Grammar school. A 1962 report from his form-tutor commented “David shows signs of leadership and the ability to organise… He is going to meet with great success if he continues in this vein” which proved entirely accurate. By 1967 when he went to study Economics at London University’s Queen Mary College he was already running a successful business.
This was a mail-order outfit selling old football programmes and souvenirs, which made him “a couple of thousand pounds… enough to buy a Ford Capri”. Fellow St Mary’s student Bernard Hardingham was impressed with his drive and ambition, and when the pair graduated in 1970 became his first business partner. Sullivan initially joined the Baron Moss advertising agency, but although the sales techniques he picked up there would soon prove invaluable, he and Hardingham quickly decided there was no future in working for someone else. Casting around for ideas, the pair first came up with a scheme to launch their own financial magazine, Investment Quarterly Journal, but after some preliminary work realised they weren’t quite sure how to take this forward. Then the inevitable Fateful Moment occurred. Sullivan read a News of the World profile of Bob Guccione (only just returned to the US after a dozen years working in London) and reasoned that if Guccione could build a massive fortune based on selling glamour photos, so could he.
The duo pooled their entire savings of £200, hired a photographer, four models and a studio on Oxford Street, and ended up with an A3 contact-sheet featuring the 20 best poses. They advertised this as “Twenty Nude Lovelies for a Pound!” in various suitable magazines, but sales were initially slow, since – as they soon grasped – they weren’t offering anything sufficiently different to stand out from the competition. So, to quote Hardingham, “We decided to offer 200 pictures for a pound. The fact that it was ten sheets the same may have disappointed some customers, but nevertheless it certainly generated a tremendous response.” This was the first example of a disarming brand of shameless chutzpah that would quickly become a Sullivan trademark. Short, stocky and with the general appearance (and occasionally demeanour) of an irritable bulldog, in his own words “I went from earning £1,700 a year to £800 a week”.
Do you remember the 1980s?
The pair set up Subdean Publishing Ltd based in a tiny office in Godwin Road, Forest Gate E7, and Sullivan used his expertise selling football memorabilia to purchase a mail-order list of about 50,000 names and addresses. These were then hit with weekly mailshots for products from a bewildering variety of companies, all of which he and Hardingham owned. Many legendary scams date from this period, including stapling new covers onto old copies of Health and Efficiency to suggest they were imported Danish hardcore, and advertising a magazine featuring ‘women, dogs and horses’, then sending eager customers back-issues of Hare and Hound. Very few such disappointed punters were realistically likely to complain to Trading Standards.
Within 18 months of being set up Subdean had cornered 90% of the UK’s mail-order sex market via a combination of Sullivan’s outrageous sales tactics, shrewd business sense, and truly ferocious work-ethic – he and Hardingham worked twelve hour days, six days a week. The next obvious step was to launch their own magazine, and Private appeared in 1972. This was sold through newsagents for the first time (via established distributors Moore Harness, plus a dedicated in-house sales team) and – backed by one of Sullivan’s typically punchy campaigns – was an immediate success. It was swiftly followed by at least 20 others including Blockbuster and Climax, but the duo then hit their first major bump. They were prosecuted for sending Indecent Literature through the post (an offence under the Post Office Act) and decided to pragmatically plead Guilty at the local Magistrates Court, receiving a £700 fine as a result. But the police weren’t finished with them yet, and followed this up by launching coordinated raids on all Subdean’s premises, this time charging them with far more serious offences of publishing obscene material and conspiring to send obscene material through the post. Now they had no option but to fight, and accordingly ended up in the Old Bailey. Again they diplomatically pleaded Guilty, but forcefully argued that what they were selling was simply ‘contemporary literature’. The judge was sympathetic and they were fined a nominal £50 each, with the police reprimanded for wasting the court’s time.
By this point Subdean’s vast mark-ups (sometimes approaching 1000%) were generating huge sums, and the pair were employing 15 staff. Further expansion followed when (after months of negotiation) the Sunday Times agreed to take Subdean’s advertising. As Hardingham explained “We were buying remaindered stock from Granada Publishing, legitimate stuff like antique books and The History of English Frigates. And we were then able to introduce things like the ABZ of Love. It meant we could add to our mailing list those who didn’t have the courage to go into a sex shop”. By the end of 1972 the pair had about £300,000 spare cash in the bank, and their accountants were strongly encouraging them to invest in the property market. They accordingly set up two new companies, Boufond and Eurohols Properties, the former buying new or nearly new houses around the Forest Gate area for furnished rental, and the latter more speculatively acquiring properties with Sitting Tenants, in the hope that the latter might be persuaded to move out and the buildings sold on for a quick profit. Encouraged by early results the duo widened their exposure still further, using Subdean’s massive income stream to raise ever-larger mortgages, buying up several big blocks of flats on the South Coast. Then the Secondary Banking Crisis of winter 1973-74 sent property prices tumbling through the floor and they suddenly faced ruin.
Everything they had worked so hard for was wiped out virtually overnight. Most of the properties they owned were barely worth the mortgages that secured them, and many were now worth far less (in the 1973 equivalent of Negative Equity). Still reeling from this, the pair were then hit with a massive back-dated tax-bill under the old Shortfall regulations, which dictated that if a company’s profits were invested in something other than the business itself (ie Subdean’s publishing empire) they were liable to the top-rate of 83%. For Hardingham – about to get married and increasingly disillusioned with the sex industry – this was the final straw. He bailed out altogether, while Sullivan faced the crushing prospect of having to start from scratch all over again, with little to show for three years’ hard work.
1977 + Mary Millington. So Mary, what first attracted you to multi-millionaire David Sullivan?
But he wasn’t the type to give up, and had managed to hang onto both the Forest Gate office (along with its sex shop directly beneath) and the fragments of the Subdean operation. In June 1975 he set up a fresh company, Roldvale Ltd and launched a new magazine called – with typical bravado – Whitehouse. This set itself apart from its top-shelf rivals on two fronts: first it undercut them on price, and second it drastically upped the ante in terms of explicitness. Whitehouse became Sullivan’s flagship title and was soon followed by others including Playbirds and Park Lane. The next step was to become a movie mogul via veteran glamour-photographer George Harrison Marks (1926-1997 – Marks actually coined the term ‘glamour’ c.1958). Having shot a couple of films in the ’60s, Marks had an old sex-comedy script lying around called Come Play With Me which Sullivan offered to finance providing it could feature his then-girlfriend (and top model) Mary Millington. Shot over four weeks in Oct 1976 for £83,000, Come Play With Me ran for three straight years in Soho (‘The Mousetrap of the Moulin’) and eventually made about £3m.
This part of Sullivan’s career is already well-documented elsewhere, so a brief summary can suffice here: Come Play With Me was quickly followed by three further films starring Millington – Playbirds, Confessions From the David Galaxy Affair and Queen of the Blues – before the sequence was abruptly terminated by their depressed star’s suicide in Aug 1979. Two ‘tribute’ films followed – Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions and Mary Millington’s World Striptease Extravanganza – before Sullivan attempted to launch a new leading lady, his latest girlfriend Julie Lee, in Emanuelle in Soho. But with grim irony Lee also died (in a car crash in May 1983) and the end of this particular road were two short films shot back-to-back in a disused Croydon nightclub in early 1983 – Hellcat Mud Wrestlers and The Female Foxy Boxers – which surely require no further comment. By this point the rapid decline of the entire British film industry (with vital subsidies abolished and cinemas closing on a weekly basis) meant its cash-generating potential had become negligible, and Sullivan simply cut his losses. Fortunately he already had something else going on, and it is this new venture which is the real focus of our interest here.
Cowley Road, Oxford, March 1981
In Sept 1978 Conegate Ltd – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Roldvale – was set up with three very capable directors on its board: Brian Richards, David Reed, plus Sullivan’s original secretary Christine King, all overseen by Sullivan’s older brother Clive (generally known as Frank). The basic strategy was simple: to analyse the existing eight-year’s-worth of mail-order addresses to pinpoint provincial towns and cities where a High Street outlet looked a viable proposition. To test the water, the very first Private Shop (as they were largely dubbed, though a few were alternately branded Sven Books) opened at 81 Wardour Street, Soho on the site of Epicerie Francaise, once one of Winston Churchill’s favourite eateries (the elderly sisters who ran it were offered £20,000 to sell up). Like all Sullivan ventures, frills were kept to a minimum – the windows were boarded up and the frontage painted solid black, with a large white ‘Private Shop’ signboard mounted above the door. Interiors were generally dingy, with bare floorboards and cheap shelving displaying the stock. The books, magazines and films (later videos) were largely produced in-house by Roldvale, while sex-aids and lingerie came from outside suppliers. All featured astronomical mark-ups.
The Private Shops expanded rapidly across the country at an incredible rate, causing outrage and dismay wherever they went. Tunbridge Wells was typical – according to local vicar the Rev John Hurst “I believe sex shops and similar things are really destructive of family life. I also think they’re a threat to womanhood. They treat a woman as an object, almost like a plastic throwaway cup. This is the lifestyle that’s presented, and to many, many Christian people this kind of attitude to sex is a threat, undermining marriage principles and the Christian gospel”. Local pensioner Mrs Kathleen Davey (presumably no relation to the Dustman) agreed, though in a slightly more down-to-earth fashion: “I have to pass the sex shop in Vale Road to go and get my pension, and I think it looks sinister. I don’t know what’s behind the dark windows but I’m quite sure it encourages undesirable people to come into this part of the town”. The ensuing protests often forged unlikely political alliances between younger radical feminists and older, more conservative Christian campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, but Conegate tended to view it all as priceless free publicity, reinforcing each shop’s arrival and precise location. It also prompted one long-running in-joke whereby new managers interviewed in the local press would all dutifully give their name as John Holmes. This was obediently reported up and down the country for months, until the journalists concerned finally grasped they were being teased.
One of the most striking aspects of the operation was the speed at which Conegate could move. Once Eamonn Connolly, Sullivan’s property manager, had identified and purchased a site, things happened much faster than most locals anticipated. According to Paul Price, one of the original Area Managers “They used the same team to buy the premises, to equip them, to fill the shelves and open the shops. It only took a matter of days”. Another senior manager, Martin Kennard, backs this up: “They weren’t ready for it, they didn’t know what the hell was happening. They were hit with a very efficient machine that was selling sex. All of a sudden, the Private Shop name came up, the windows got blacked out and Bang, there was a sex-shop in your town… When a place first opened it made a lot of money purely and simply because of the initial interest. People wanted to see what one was like. Sex shops are synonymous with Soho, and everybody knows about Soho, that it’s a dark and dangerous sort of place. All of a sudden you’ve got a little bit of Soho in your home town, and people were curious to see what was going on behind those blacked-out windows.…” Regardless of how true this was, it was certainly a fact that for every placard-carrying protester marching around outside there were half a dozen customers inside happily spending money.
There was only one occasion when Sullivan actually backed down, and he immediately regretted it. Conegate had purchased a shop in St Helens near Liverpool for £15,000 and had begun conversion, when Charles Oxley – chairman of the Merseyside Community Standards Association and a respected local figure – offered to buy it back for £20,000 on the understanding that Conegate agreed not to set up another site within five miles. Sullivan took the money but was instantly kicking himself: “I was soft. I talked to this nice Christian gent and let him persuade me. I could have earned up to £50,000 a year from that site. By the time I’d paid for the cancelled advertising and the manager I took on, I only had a few hundred pounds left”. He wouldn’t make he same mistake twice, and when Oxley tried a similar tactic in nearby Southport, Sullivan demanded at least £20,000 profit, a sum the MCSA had no way of raising.
In its first full year of operation Conegate declared a profit of £850,000. This astonishing sum was partly due to most of the shops being bought outright for cash (with only a handful mortgaged), but was also a result of the cutting-edge sales-techniques managers were routinely trained in, based on the then-recent (and still controversial) retail strategy of ‘trading up’ – essentially persuading the customer they’ll get a better overall deal if they buy further discounted products. One of Paul Price’s key responsibilities was to train new staff in this: “You’d show them the techniques, you’d show them the patter, and you might even go into the psychology of laying out expensive packs on the magazine racks and flamboyantly saying ‘Pick another one out at half-price…’ so they’d spend another forty or fifty pounds. It was extremely high-pressure selling. There have been cases where people have come in to spend ten pounds and gone out after spending three or four hundred. If anybody was found not trying to trade up it was probably a sackable offence”. Kennard confirms this: “Trading up meant taking the customer to the maximum price you could get from them…. Most customers who went into a Private Shop were scared stiff. It was the first time they’d been into a sex shop in their lives, and if you were a good salesman you could talk them into buying other things. My best take was from a customer that came in for about £15 worth of magazines, and we took him to £175”.
And just what sorts of magazines were these? Old habits die hard, and they were effectively softcore masquerading as hard via sensational-looking covers – shrink-wrapping meant they couldn’t be properly examined until the customer had got them home. Sullivan was even prepared to borrow the names of genuine Danish brands like Rodox and Color Climax to reinforce this illusion, leading to a surreal episode in 1979 when the real (and very irritated) Rodox Corporation took legal advice on potentially suing Roldvale for copyright infringement / passing-off. Their English barrister had to point out an unfortunate irony: a trademark can only be enforced if the owner actively intends to use it, and with their product permanently illegal in the UK Rodox were simply not in a position to do this. Sullivan, although acting with flagrant dishonesty, was keeping within the law in refusing to offer genuine hardcore, and no English court was likely to find in favour of a plaintiff trying to protect the copyright of something they couldn’t actually sell here in the first place. Rodox were forced to drop the idea, and just had to grind their teeth.
This is not to say that customers didn’t frequently come back to complain, but there was even a strategy in place for that, though it required considerable bottle on the part of the manager. The aggrieved individual would be taken to one side and reassured that the offending material was ‘strictly for the punters‘. Since they were clearly a Connoisseur they would then be offered much better, harder material from ‘out the back’, though only at a price. According to Kennard “If a customer came back and rucked about the quality of a magazine then you’d pressure-sell them even harder. I’ve had customers that have spent £15 come back screaming and shouting that we’d sold them rubbish. So we’ve sold them another pack and they’ve forked out another £15 or £20 and walked away very happy about it“. There was a downside to all this though – managers were relentlessly monitored and tested to make sure they were simultaneously (A) pressure-selling as hard as possible, and (B) not pocketing half the resulting takings, and staff-morale became increasingly difficult to sustain. While bonuses were paid when a shop hit its targets, the targets were then simply raised next time in a never-ending cycle. According to Price: “The managers soon became disillusioned, which was why there was such a high turnover of staff. They might have been conning the public but the company was conning them”.
After his experiences with Subdean, Sullivan was paranoid about police raids potentially crippling the business by seizing all the stock, and took elaborate precautions to prevent this. The main warehouse was a nondescript building on Faraday Road in Stratford E15, which operated rather like the Tardis in reverse – a carefully-placed false wall concealed two-thirds of the interior, so that the visible floorspace looked misleadingly small Access to the hidden part was via an electro-magnetically controlled door big enough to take a forklift, the control to which was concealed beneath a fake fire-alarm button. James Bond here we come. Every morning a fleet of unmarked transit vans would call to supply different regions of the country, each being met by their respective Area Manager who would transfer the gear either to the shops themselves, or (more often) to a network of so-called ‘stash garages’, located in quiet residential streets (and frequently registered under a false name). According to Price “When I started I had four which I used to change regularly. I only actually used one, but all the others were full in case the police hit more than one shop at a time”.
As for the raids themselves, as Kennard explained “The first time you were in a police raid was very frightening, because you didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly you’d have half a dozen police walk in and slap a writ on the table and start seizing everything. At first it’s quite scary, but after a while we handled so many raids it became a complete and utter joke. As fast as they were taking stuff out of the front, we were restocking from the back via the stash garages”. Staff caught in a raid were routinely advised to describe themselves as Sales Assistants only, in order to avoid possible arrest. Having given a statement, they were then almost always just left in the shop to continue trading. Sullivan would not tolerate unnecessary risks, and – with piquant irony – any staff caught selling genuine hardcore on the quiet were immediately sacked on the spot.
Smithdown Road, Wavertree, Liverpool May 1981
The Private Shops were very rarely situated on actual High Streets and were usually slightly outside the centre on a minor arterial road, their presence tending to add to the often already bleak / run-down feel of such places. Taking the present writer’s hometown as an example, one of the main routes out of Walsall’s centre is Stafford Street, which runs from behind what was the old ABC cinema on Townend Bank due north for about half a mile to the junction with Hospital Street (where it abruptly becomes Bloxwich Road). Stafford Street has always been fairly rough – you needed nerve to drink in some of its pubs like the Prince, the Seven Stars (which resembled something off the Falls Road) and the Sportsman – and featured dozens of poky little shops and cafes, many of which seemed frozen in time (one plumbing wholesaler offered an ancient window-display of pegboard-mounted taps and fittings so thick with dust it could easily have dated from the War).
In addition to these popular tourist attractions, Stafford Street also played host to both of the town’s two Private Shops. The first – between 1982-85 – was at number 67, a tiny single-unit on the.west side between Blue Lane East and Short Acre Street. Why it barely lasted three years is a mystery, though it presumably just wasn’t making enough money. Twenty years later the company tried again and opened another one a few hundred yards nearer the centre in a larger double-unit at 21-22, directly opposite The Prince. This one lasted eight years, 2005-13, and was most likely killed by the recession – the site is currently Fletcher’s Cake Studio. The original shop at 67 has changed hands numerous times since 1985, and in the last decade alone has sequentially become Premier Appliances, the Sentinel Cafe, and (currently) Inclusive Healthcare Solutions. Both are now surrounded by a wasteland of ruined, boarded-up shops and scruffy vacant plots where things have been demolished but not actually replaced by anything else.
Returning to our original thread, in late 1981 – after just three years’ trading – Conegate was able to report profits of £2m and a growing portfolio of over 100 shops, virtually all of which had opened in the face of concerted local opposition. Even its opponents had to concede that the business was astonishingly well-run, but – as we have seen in the earlier section on Soho – nemesis was lurking just around the corner.
There can be little doubt that the Local Government (MIscellaneous Provisions) Act of 1982 was to a large extent specifically devised to bring down Sullivan’s sex shop empire. The bill originally had two separate prongs: a local authority could refuse a licence if they considered either (a) the applicant unsuitable, or (b) the location inappropriate. Sullivan as noted already had a couple of minor Obscenity convictions, but these could most probably have been glossed over had he not been disastrously charged in 1979 with living off immoral earnings. Lengthy delays meant the case took almost three years to get to court, but the outcome was clear from the start – if he was convicted, Conegate was surely finished.
The charges against him were in two parts – first of directly receiving a percentage of prostitutes’ income, and second of openly advertising their services in his magazines. Two premises were involved – the Park Sauna in Romford Road, Manor Park and Nicole’s Sauna in Kentish Town Road – managed respectively by husband-and-wife co-defendants Stephen and Bridget Foster, along with assistant Cecil Jackson (accused of delivering the money). The police proved that the staff in both establishments habitually offered ‘extras’, and while Sullivan admitted visiting them he claimed this was purely for a relaxing sauna and he was quite unaware of any sexual undertones when printing their adverts. Nevertheless, the police had followed Jackson from the Park Sauna to Sullivan’s office on Upton Lane, and when arrested outside the unfortunate Mr J. was found to have £400 in his pocket and a further £1,800 in a briefcase, which he explained was his own money that he just happened to be taking for a walk. The jury did not need long to find all concerned Guilty, and in April 1982 Sullivan was sentenced to nine months in Ford Open Prison.
Conegate had been planning for just such a contingency, and had run a very vocal three-strand protest campaign – Brian Richards coordinated popular ‘Support Your Local Sex Shop’ petitions and letters to the press, Clive Sullivan lobbied Parliament to water down the bill’s provisions (due to their supposed ‘impractical’ nature), and – more pragmatically – the company went on a mad buying spree to acquire as many shops as possible in the event that some later had to be closed. At its peak, the firm was running 128 outlets (and owned the freehold of 100 of them), making it the biggest chain of its type in the world. Another calculated wheeze was to get some titled Nobility onto the board to lend much-needed credibility, and both Earl Grey (of the tea company) and Major Peter James (of the Royal Worcestershire Regiment and latterly the prison service) were persuaded to add their weighty names to Conegate’s letterhead.
David Gold and David Sullivan at West Ham, April 2020
Sullivan appealed his conviction and was released after 71 days, the judge commenting that although the lower court was right to impose a custodial sentence, three months would have been sufficient. The ten weeks concerned certainly gave Sullivan plenty of time to reflect, and – according to some associates – he emerged from prison a changed man. In a bombshell announcement at the end of the summer he informed the press he had sold Conegate to Brian Richards via an earn-out agreement, and was no longer in the sex business at all. He had officially retired.
Many people were sceptical, with plenty (particularly within Conegate itself) wondering how on earth Richards could possibly have raised the cash required – Sullivan had previously floated the idea of an outside sale with an attached price-tag of £10m, and the book value of the assets alone was put at £4.5m. Nevertheless, a new company, Quietlynn, was registered with Grey and James agreeing to join Richards on the board, and all the assets being formally transferred across. However a subsequent investigation revealed that the existing 100 freeholds were in fact still held by Conegate / Roldvale, and furthermore Conegate was continuing to quietly acquire new ones well into the late-80s. Draw your own conclusions. Another major restructure in 1983 placed everything under the control of a new management company, Limetime, run by Christine King and Clive Sullivan, but there is really no need for us to take this story any further than its founder’s apparent exit. Whatever the precise circumstances, his legacy is assured.
Ironically enough the dramatic saga of the Private Shops is now practically a footnote in Sullivan’s career, with what came later generating even bigger headlines. In a nutshell, he first reinvented himself as a press baron, launching the Sunday Sport in 1986 & Daily Sport in 1991 before selling both titles in 2007, then soon afterwards became a football club owner, buying (in partnership with the Gold brothers) Birmingham City in 1993, then (with David Gold alone) West Ham in 2010. Others are better placed to discuss this part of the story.
In terms of our basic topic, dirty books were already falling out of fashion by the time Sullivan established Conegate, but the Private Shops certainly stocked them and – at least during the early period in question – in some quantity. In addition to the more colourful in-house publications on display, there were always a few shelves of the crudely-photocopied US hardcore paperbacks already discussed, with their distinctive blue or green plain-card covers, wobbly letraset titles and handwritten spines. These typically sold for between £5 – £10 each, with a few pre-loved examples later turning up in the dodgier secondhand bookshops that every provincial town and city used to boast. And it is with these grimy, long-vanished and already half-forgotten establishments that this disgraceful story really draws to its natural close. Are you actually going to buy that mate, or just stand there looking at it all day?
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(11) Credit On Return – The Book Exchanges 1954-95
— Epilogue – Dirty Bookshop Ghosts