Ready, Steady, Go!: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool

At 15, he dropped out of school altogether and started a series of unpromising jobs: copy boy at the Fleet Street offices of the Yorkshire Post, carpet salesman, shoe salesman, window dresser, time-and-motion man at the tailoring firm where his father worked, and debt collector. He developed a taste for jazz and spent nights checking out the music and women at the handful of venues the East End offered someone his age. His musical interests were underscored in his oft-quoted quip about his roots: ‘You had two ways of getting out in the ‘50s – you were either a boxer or a jazz musician.’ So perhaps it was inevitable that he followed an artistic muse, especially as he quickly learned how ill-suited he was to make a living with his fists: ‘The Krays, the Barking Boys and the Canning Town Boys were the three gangs at the time,’ Bailey remembered. ‘They weren’t gangsters, they were just hooligans. They just went around beating people up if you looked at them wrong in a dance hall. I got beat up by the Barking Boys because I danced with one of their girlfriends. They left me in the doorway of Times Furnishing.’

Bailey’s aimlessness was finally punctured by the call-up: in the spring of 1956, he was ordered to report for a physical for the National Service. He tried to duck it – he stayed up two nights straight and consumed a huge quantity of nutmeg (‘Someone said it made your heart go faster’), but it didn’t work. He might have requested assignment to a photographic unit, but that meant a longer hitch than he was ready to sign for. In August, he reported for basic training in the Royal Air Force, and by December he was stationed in Singapore as a first-level aircraftman with duties such as helping to keep planes flight-ready and standing guard on funeral drill.

On the whole, Private Bailey found the situation pleasant enough. ‘I had a good time in the National Service,’ he confessed years later. ‘I hate to sound like a right-wing middle-aged man, but I think it was very good for me.’ There were, he admitted, drawbacks: 'The snobbery! They had a toilet for privates, a toilet for sergeants and a toilet for commissioned officers, as if all our arses were different. It made me angry, the way we were treated, almost like a slave. You were dirt compared with an officer.’

Indeed, it was a run-in with an officer that would prove pivotal in shaping Bailey’s future. He was still on his jazz kick – his ‘Chet Baker phase’, as he later deemed it – and trying to teach himself to play the trumpet. But when an officer borrowed his horn and failed to return it, he was forced to seek another creative outlet. Cameras could be gotten cheap in Singapore, so Bailey – who’d been as enamoured of the photos of Baker on the trumpeter’s album jackets as of the playing inside – bought a knock-off Rolleiflex. He was sufficiently hard up for money that he had to pawn the camera every time he wanted to pay for developing his film, but he had caught the bug.

The camera suited Bailey’s growing bohemianism. He had begun to read, and where his barracks mates had pin-up girls hung over their beds, he had a reproduction of a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar. His pretensions didn’t go unnoticed. ‘I did used to get into fights,’ he said. ‘But because I was from the East End I could look after myself. I also had the best-looking WAAF as my girlfriend, so they knew I wasn’t gay.’

When he was demobbed in August 1958, Bailey acquired a Canon rangefinger camera and the ambition to make a living with it. He applied to the London College of Printing but was rejected because he’d dropped out of school. Instead, he wound up working as a second assistant to photographer David Olins at his studio in Charlotte Mews in the West End. He became a glorified gofer (not even glorified, actually, at £3 10s a week) and was therefore delighted a few months later to be called to an interview at the studio of John French, a somewhat better-known name and a man who had a reputation for nurturing his assistants’ careers.

French, then in his early 50s, was the epitome of the fashion photographer and portraitist of the era: exquisitely attired, fastidious, posh, and gay (although, as it happened, married). ‘John French looked,’ Bailey remembered, ‘like Fred Astaire. “David,” he said, “do you know about incandescent light and strobe? Do you know how to load a 10×8 film pack?” I said yes to everything he asked and he gave me the job, but, at that time, I didn’t even known what a strobe was. We became friends and after six o’clock Mr French became John. One night I asked him why he gave me the job. “Well, you know, David,” he said, “I liked the way you dressed.” Six months later everyone thought we were having an affair, but in fact, although we were fond of each other, we never got it on.’

In fact, French – ‘a screaming queen who fancied East End boys’, according to documentarian Dick Fontaine – was the first person to really recognise something special in Bailey. Partly it was his bohemian style – Cuban-heeled boots, jeans, leather jacket and hair over the ears – all before the Beatles had been heard of; partly it was his aptitude for the craft. French liked to compare his young protégé to the unnamed hero of Colin Maclnnes’s cult novel about bohemian London, Absolute Beginners (a savvy insight) and he was perfectly willing, as he had with many previous disciples, to see Bailey get ahead in his own work.

‘He was an incredibly decent type of man,’ Bailey would say of his mentor after French died in 1966. ‘I don’t think he was very good as a photographer, but he had a good attitude. His photography sort of slowed me down a bit, because I had to break away from his way of doing things, but I benefited from his attitude.’

Years later, he would say ‘I owe my success to two gay men, really, who told me I was wonderful and pushed me. Being a Cockney and working class, I was an outsider, and in those days gays were outcasts, too. So we felt an affinity. Anyway, John French introduced me to the picture editor of the Daily Express, and John Parsons, the art director of British Vogue – the second gay man – saw my pictures in the newspaper and offered me a job at the magazine.’

It was in the Daily Express, in fact, that Bailey published his first really important photo: an image of the model Paulene Stone wearing a dark knee-length skirt and a bright turtleneck mohair sweater and crouching on the leaf-strewn ground to commune with a squirrel who was nibbling on an ort. Terence Donovan, who didn’t yet know Bailey, was among the people who reacted strongly to the image, pronouncing himself ‘disturbed by its freshness and its oblique quality’. On the strength of that shot and a few other striking pictures, Bailey found himself hired in May 1960 as a full-fledged photographer at John Cole’s Studio Five, earning £30-40 a week.

The money came in handy, as Bailey had in February of that year married Rosemary Bramble, a typist he’d met at Soho’s Flamingo Club a few months previously. The couple lived in a small apartment near the Oval cricket ground in South London. Bailey’s salary wasn’t grand, but it was good, and when John Parsons of Vogue called on Bailey later that year to ask him about joining the staff of the magazine, Bailey refused because he was doing so well with Cole. ‘They were offering me less per week than Woman’s Own was paying me per picture,’ Bailey remembered. ‘I didn’t realise that Vogue was different from any other fashion magazine … I thought it was just another magazine that used pictures. I wasn’t that interested in fashion and preferred reportage and portraits, but fashion gradually took over because of Vogue.’

The next time Parsons asked, though, Bailey agreed. His first small piece appeared in the magazine in September 1960, followed by full-page work the next month and, in February ‘61, his first cover. The Bailey legend was about to be made.

Bailey’s arrival at deluxe fashion magazines couldn’t have come at a more perfect time to suit his ambitions. The media business, so long a stolid presence in English life, had grown increasingly itchy in the preceding years. English magazine culture was in the throes of an invigorating shake-up that had begun in the least likely of places. The Queen, a 100-year-old society magazine, had undergone a radical change at the hands of its new owner/ editor, Jocelyn Stevens, who transformed it from a dry lifestyle report for the upper classes and those with a passion for following their lives (Stevens sniffed that the old Queen was all about how to ‘knit your own royal family’), into the most vital publication in the country, with fresh concepts in photography and layout and a wry new attitude toward its putative subject: British tradition. Queen began branching out into areas that had never before been within the purview of a society magazine: articles about the Cuban revolution, a four-issue photo essay about Red China by Henri Cartier-Bresson (who was then hired by Stevens to cover the annual Queen Charlotte’s débutante ball ‘like a war’) and a series of articles and features that tried to capture the changing mood of Britain. In one, a parody of the Eton College Chronicle (Stevens had attended the school), the establishment of the day, insofar as The Queen saw it, was ridiculed as a bunch of schoolboys. In ‘59, an entire issue was dedicated to the ‘Boom … Boom … BOOM’—the new decorators, dress designers, cars, art treasures and overall lavish living (When did you last hear the word austerity,’ the lead article asked, and then went on to chronicle England’s rise as a producer of advertising, a consumer of champagne and a piler-up of consumer debt); surveys were published on the New Thinkers (including fashion designer Mary Quant, satirist Jonathan Miller and interior designer Terence Conran), the Challengers (including actor Terence Stamp) and New Faces; charts of ‘Who Revolves Around Who’ were run. Within three years, the magazine had nearly tripled in size to accommodate all the advertising its heat had drawn.

Queen encouraged an upsurge of native British talent, including, of course, photographers, none of whom would become more spectacularly famous than Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who had parlayed an admirable career as a photojournalist and society portraitist into the most amazing coup of all: marriage to the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, in one of the most celebrated matches of the time.

The wedding between the commoner (who took the name Lord Snowdon) and the princess was held up as a principal exhibit for the claim that England in the early ‘60s was becoming a ‘classless’ society in which wealth and breeding didn’t matter as they had done only a few years before. Promulgators of the theory pointed to the appearance of members of the upper class in such formerly outré professions as show business, fashion boutique and nightclub ownership, as well as the vogue for lower-class accents among the upper classes and the initiation of new styles in clothes and dances not by the aristocracy but by working-class youth. ‘There was a jolly collision,’ remembered Mary Quant. ‘People came together, and they tended to be rather one extreme or the other. Both were smart; the boring thing was to be anything in the middle.’

The effect, especially on the upsurgent lower classes, was miraculous, utterly transformatory. ‘In France,’ reflected Terence Stamp, ‘they have that saying, nostalgie de la boue, which refers to aristocratic men who like to shag washerwomen. In the ‘60s, amongst ourselves, our age group, there was an absolute coming together. And what made the coming together was basically music and dancing. In a way it was a new aristocracy. But the main thing was that there was suddenly access between the classes. Had the ‘60s not happened, I would never have been able to spend the night with a young countess because I would never have met her. And as the great Mike Caine once said to me, “You can’t shag anyone you don’t meet.” Rather Aristotelian logic!’

For the upper classes, the idea that a centuries-old stasis was coming unsettled could be either exhilarating or alarming. Young people from moneyed, privileged families felt impelled to change with the times—and as many seemed to greet the situation with a sense of liberation as with desperate entrenchment in old ways. ‘People with country houses either assimilated or vanished,’ remembered David Puttnam. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number who got in. They were quite few, and you knew who they were, and they assimilated, quite successfully in some cases.’

Of course, the idea that England’s centuries-old traditions of class prejudice had suddenly vanished was a canard that effectively couched the stifling reality in a country where birth still trumped ability in virtually every case. As the ‘60s emerged, proponents of the theory of classlessness could point to the likes of Quant and Stamp and the Beatles and a dozen other exceptions – people who’d broken into a new class where talent and the wealth that followed success mattered more than who your parents were. But it was inarguably the case that this meritocracy – with its members-only restaurants and nightclubs – was just as exclusive as the old upper class of money and birthright; you might no longer have needed to be born to position but earning it was, probably, a harder and rarer feat. And, entrance to the new world only lasted as long as the traditional elite chose to allow it. “The rich people let us play in their back garden for a few years,’ said tailor Doug Hayward, ‘and then they said, “Right, lads, very nice, you’ve all had a good time, now let’s get back to it.”’

Still, there was a loosening, and it was accompanied by another shift that made the rise of the Baileys and Quants and Stamps possible. English society, the British were more and more frequently being told at the dawn of the ‘60s, was becoming more permissive – and if the reality was only that England was loosening up as much as the Continent and the States already had, it was nevertheless more true than thinking that the Royal Family were happy to fit in with the mob. There was the evidence of teenage promiscuity: more talked-about if not more practised than in previous generations. There was the soon-to-be-available birth control pill, a boon to sexual adventurers the world over and finally available to Britons at the start of ‘61. And there was the embarrassing blow to censors in the ‘60 prosecution of Penguin Books on obscenity charges for the publication of a paperback edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel written by D. H. Lawrence in ‘28 but banned in Britain ever since. It was a ludicrous, last-century business, with the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asking jurors in his opening statement: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ and debating the novelist’s use of such words as ‘womb’ and ‘bowels’ with literary critics who had been called as witnesses for the defence. After a five-day trial and several days of adjournment, during which jurors read the novel, a three-hour deliberation led to Penguin’s acquittal; a week later, a new edition of the novel, dedicated to the jury, sold more than 200,000 copies in twenty-four hours – and five times that during the coming year.

And while Griffith-Jones was making an ass of himself in an Old Bailey courtroom, Englishmen of his stripe were being openly mocked on West End stages: satire, a brand of hipster comedy initially practised by Americans like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl but alchemised into a vital, all-encompassing movement by young Brits, was the rage. Four well-bred young men – comedian Peter Cook, polymath physician Jonathan Miller, history teacher Alan Bennett and the Oxford-educated pianist Dudley Moore – were goring every sacred cow of British life in their smash-hit stage show, Beyond the Fringe. A revue that spared neither the Crown, nor the Prime Minister, nor Shakespeare, nor memories of the war, nor sexual mores, nor Britain’s geopolitical role, it liberated and legitimised years of anti-establishment grumbling and inspired a pan-cultural explosion of new venues for acid commentary: Cook’s Establishment Club in Soho, where an even more scabrous review was held; the wicked magazine Private Eye, and a hit TV series, That Was the Week That Was (starring David Frost, that old person’s idea of a young person), which capped (and, indeed, pricked) the satire boom by making subversive humour a weekly staple of domestic life.

'This was very new indeed,’ remembered Alexander Walker, then reviewing films in the Evening Standard. ‘Very quickly, an atmosphere of mockery and cynicism regarding public life and “our betters”, to use the Somerset Maugham phrase, was created.’ But in spreading, satire, of course, lost its bite. Peter Cook, the boy wonder, the sharpest and, at first, most successful satirist, watched with chagrin as something that had begun as an undergraduate impulse to mock and deflate became an institution: ‘The heyday of satire was Weimar Germany,’ he reminded people, ‘and see how it prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler!’ But if his invention didn’t crush the status quo, it certainly knocked it back on its pins for long enough so that several similarly subversive new strains of culture could emerge.

In the context of these social and moral upheavals, Bailey’s photographs seemed particularly vital. One of the things that John Parsons had surely noticed was that Bailey’s work had more of a sense of movement and energy than that of most of the British fashion photographers who’d preceded him. In part it was the young man’s inherently brash attitude, which bled into his pictures to create out of his models seemingly normal human beings, not inaccessible mannequins removed from the world of the viewer. ‘Bailey was user-friendly,’ remembered sometime snapper Dennis Hopper. ‘The models seemed to love him. A lot of fashion photography is how well you get along with people. And Bailey had a good bedside manner. He seemed to be able to be on the level with a lot of different types of people.’

But in part, too, it was Bailey’s affection for the work of American masters like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, whose photos he studied for technical details, small effects and emotional impact. By the spring of ‘61, Bailey had taken the lessons he had learned from his masters and put them to work in a new idiom. He had acquired a 35mm Pentax camera, which liberated him from the tripod and allowed him to shoot his models in a kind of erotic dance (imitated in Blow-Up and the Austin Powers films). ‘He was sort of like El Cordobés when he worked,’ remembered Terry O’Neill, who took iconic photos of the expressive, energetic Bailey conducting a fashion shoot.

Away from the studio, in environments such as the grandstands of a racetrack or the busy streets of a city, Bailey’s new cameras allowed him to shoot wherever the fancy struck; Vogue fashion editor Marit Allen recalled jumping into ‘Bailey’s brand-new Jaguar E-Type and taking off on the M1 to go to Liverpool to photograph girls in clothes at the Cavern because it would be fun, it would be a riot, we should do that maybe. And just picking up girls when we got there because we liked them.’ The result was extraordinarily fresh imagery—a whole new feel for Vogue, for the men’s magazine Man About Town and for advertising clients such as El Al, BOAC, Fortnum & Mason and the synthetic fabrics manufacturers Acrilan and Terylene.

As for Bailey, it all amounted to a ticket to a new life. He always joked about his motives for signing on with Vogue – ‘It did allow me to pursue my three main interests: photography, women and money’ – and probably he told a lot of truth in the jest. But he also relished the opportunity to work at a machine-gun pace – he developed a reputation during these years as a workaholic, and never lost it – and to try new techniques once he’d earned the confidence of his editors. ‘Fashion is a good way to explore photography,’ he explained. He wasn’t pretentious about it exactly: ‘I didn’t really think about it as art. It just seemed a nice thing to do. I’ve never really been clear what art is. I couldn’t believe it when Vogue gave me a contract to photograph women and get paid for it.

‘They – from Mars or wherever they are – said I wouldn’t be a fashion photographer because I didn’t have my head in a cloud of pink chiffon,’ he bragged. ‘They forgot about one thing. I love to look at all women.’ As his stock rose at Vogue and elsewhere, he became a kind of craze – the cute Cockney who took such wonderful shots. ‘Up at the Vogue studio,’ he remembered, ‘one of the editors actually patted me on the head and said, “Doesn’t he speak cute?”' (And he added with a characteristic giggle, ‘Three years later, the managing director was asking me if I could move my Rolls so that he could get his Rover out.’)

It was, in many ways, a calculated posture: Dick Fontaine, who grew friendly with Bailey over the years, noted, ‘He’s a deeply serious person, and I would say that to him, and he’d say, “Fuck off. I just wanna make money, have a good time, have dinner, drink a lot, fuck a lot.” All true, of course.’

Bailey used his reputation for lower-class cheek to his advantage. ‘All the posturing with the editors – “I’m not going on that gig!” – was always to do with something else,’ remembered Fontaine. ‘Bailey just would be the court jester, playing the trickster.’

And he cavorted as much with his subjects as with anyone else. Within a year of Bailey’s arrival at Vogue, jazz singer and pop critic George Melly sat for him, and he recalled the excited atmosphere the photographer brought to the session: ‘Here was this unposh, blatantly heterosexual young man dressed all in black … David made no attempt to disguise his Cockney accent – I suspect he may even have put it on a bit – and jumped around like a grasshopper taking what he called “snaps” of us from every angle, rather than setting the whole thing up in a stiff, formal way like most fashion photographers did in those days. I remember he used lots of funny expressions when taking pictures like, “Lose that arm, Chief.”’

Melly was in the studio to be photographed with one of the magazine’s newest models as part of a feature Bailey was shooting for the ‘Young Idea’ section. The idea for the feature was to photograph the new girl in a variety of outfits alongside a number of men who were just making a splash on the London scene: Kenneth Tynan, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, David Frost, Vidal Sassoon, Terence Donovan and Stirling Moss included. There was a problem, though: Claire Rendlesham, Lady Rendlesham, the magazine’s imperious editress, didn’t want to use the girl he had in mind. Bailey fought her and finally won out on the condition that he would reshoot the feature no questions asked if, as Rendlesham feared, it didn’t turn out well enough.

The girl was Jean Shrimpton, and, soon after Bailey photographed her with all those up-and-coming men, she would transform in his hands into virtually the first model in England to become famous solely on the strength of posing for pictures. ‘Prior to then,’ journalist Peter Evans remembered, ‘a model was an anonymous creature. One or two might have had a name but mostly because they were society girls. The top models were either married to or were themselves aristocrats; they could afford to do it because it wasn’t a highly-paid job.’

Shrimpton wasn’t well-educated or rich or from an old family. She had attended Lucie Clayton’s modelling school, which she entered after indifferent tuition at the Langham Secretarial College. Barely 18 years old when she first set eyes on Bailey, she was, in her own phrase, ‘waifish, coltish and cack-handed’, but she was a stunning natural beauty – if uncultivated – who had been turning heads in her native Berkshire since childhood. She was only slowly making her way into the modelling world, but it would be hard to imagine that someone as perspicacious as Claire Rendlesham didn’t see her obvious potential.

Bailey noticed it right away in late ‘60, when he walked into a Studio Five shoot that Brian Duffy was doing with Shrimpton for Kellogg’s cornflakes. ‘I looked in his studio and saw this vision,’ Bailey remembered. ‘He was taking the picture against a blue background. It was like her blue eyes were just holes drilled through her head to the paper behind.’ Afterwards, he had a chance to ask Duffy who this fabulous girl was and the older man warned him off: ‘Duffy said, “Oh, she’s too posh for you.” I said, “Well, we’ll see about that, mate.”’