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THE MENU

This was the menu during the later times when we were there. I remember Spaghetti Bolognaise at 2/6d. Now confirmed by earlier menu

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

(Note 2s 6d is equivalent to 12.5p)

Extract from 3rd page of Chapter 8

A review of a book from CNJ starts with memories of the Witches Cauldron

Belsize Remembered: Memories of Belsize Park. Compiled by Ranee Barr and David S Percy, Aulis Publishing, 2017. Review by Dan Carrier.

IT was, says Mel Wright, a “likely cellar dive” for an early 1960s RnB club. Found in the basement of the Witch’s Cauldron in Belsize Lane, it had “arty posters and tables with candlelit wine bottles, also dreamy student girls looking like Jean Shrimpton, reading Penguin paperbacks and who I imagined lived in a nearby Belsize bedsit”.

The drummer’s memories of late nights in NW3 are part of a collection of stories from the neighbourhood collected in a new book, Belsize Remembered.

From grand 19th-century homes to mid-20th century blocks, from the delis run by German émigrés to beat clubs that gave young students somewhere to meet, Belsize Park’s diverse range of streets and houses has offered a home to an equally diverse range of people.

The social history of the neighbourhood has been drawn together by the anecdotes of people like Mel who have made it home – and it reads like a wonderful requiem for a London village in the 20th century.

Compiled by Ranee Barr, a poet and historian who has lived in Belsize Park for more than 40 years, and photographer, film-maker and graphic designer David Percy, who has lived in the area much of his life, the book started in 2012.

http://camdennewjournal.com/article/the-secret-life-of-belsize-park

The Witches Cauldron has all sorts of meanings and memories for folks

Rod Jones writes about:

The London Folk Clubs

...

Another character on the scene was a pre-hippy hippy guy called Mox, a harp player with shoulder length hair, elephant cord hipsters and a big cloth bag of harps tied with a drawstring who gigged sometimes with Jo Ann Kelly (I sat in with them once at the Witches Cauldron in Belsize Park) and claimed to have played with Alexis Korner. No-one seemed to know much about him - rumour had it he slept on someones' floor.The other day I did a Google search for him and it seems that he went on to play with Vivian Stanshall of Bonzo Dog fame. Everybody knew of him as just Mox and no-one knew his surname. However, on the pages pulled up by Google, there was a single reference to a Mox Gowland who lived in Paris and taught and played harmonica. A search on Mox + Gowland pulls up several pages which suggest that he is living in France on a permanent basis and has become something of a Harp guru.

Mox saw this paragraph on this page and contacted me with an update. He subsequently appeared as a guest of honour at the 2005 NHL Autumn Festival at Bristol running a workshop and appearing in the evening concert. I have to be honest, when I first knew him in the 60s his harp tone was thin and reedy. Now it is HUGE and he has a tremendous stage presence (Every day, in every way, I get better and better - 40 years of such days will do that!)

One of my fondest memories from that era was seeing Joanne Kellys' performances at the Half Moon and other locations such as the Witches Cauldron. She had a huge voice on a par with Bessy Smith or Janis Joplin but, like many blues greats she is no longer with us although her brother, Dave Kelly is a member of the Blues Band and often appears with Paul Jones, also a member of the Blues Band as well as the president of the NHL.

http://www.bluebullfrog.net/Blues_personnally.htm

Thanks to Crispin Kitto for pointing this out!

Gordon Hawtin posted this on 30 July 2020

The Witches Cauldron

I knew the Witches Cauldron was in the cellar at 52 Belsize Lane NW3 during the 1960s, It used to have a massive Black Witches Cauldron on the front of the building as you went in and that Cauldron was still there when it became a Restaurant called Daphnies. Singers and groups who frequently played at the Witches Cauldron were Alexis Korner, Jo-Anne Kelly, Champion Jack Dupree, Martin Carthy, Teddy Brown (also known as Johnny Christian), the Frugal Sound - who had a small hit with the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, Hampstead Ray Charles and the Jet Set, the 2 of Clubs (Bob Grant and Don), C-Jam Blues. Savoy Brown playing there, and Duffy Power. The Witches used to close quite early after midnight. The building is seen briefly in the 1967 film A Smashing Time, staring, Lynn Redgrave, Michael York & Rita Tushingham later after it became Daphnies. and is now a Dry cleaners, called Pyramid. Next door was Conrads Bistro, and it used the same Kitchen, the Chef was called Elvis. Now pyramids dry cleaners.

Playing with the Idle Hands in the mid-1960s was an exciting and joyful experience. We had plenty of work. Much was around our north London base (Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green…), where we played well-paid birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs and so on for the offspring of wealthy parents. Quite frequently, it seemed, the police would show up in the early hours of the morning following complaints from neighbours about the noise level. Not surprising, I guess, given that we often played in a marquee in daddy’s garden.

The rest consisted of regular (but miserably compensated) club gigs – mostly the Witches Cauldron of blessed memory in Belsize Park, and the wonderful Marquee in Wardour Street, Soho. Alongside the slave-labour wages in those clubs, there was always the chance that we might get spotted and be given fabulous recording contracts.

One evening, after our set at the Marquee, I settled down with a beer to listen to the headline act – John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. As usual, good, I thought. But not especially so. The Idle Hands was a pretty good band too.

Then, in the middle of their set, on slouched a young guy with longer hair, shoulders hunched, back to the audience. He plugged in, twiddled a bit, turned round, and took off.

It was Clapton. Eric. Slowhand. God.

This was a kind of virtuosity so far out of my league that it persuaded me that I should no longer be dedicating my life to becoming a career rock-musician.

Maybe there was some other way in which I might excel. But what?

POSTED BY ROGER NEILL AT 09:19 

HTTP://ROGERNEILL.BLOGSPOT.COM/2011/02/#4085169822268172870

CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL

The Review - FEATURE

Published: 22 October 2009

Carry On radical – a woman of her time Maggie Nolan tells Dan Carrier of her journey as an actress from Bond beauty to political theatre 

HER body was painted gold and graced a million posters around the world.

Maggie Nolan was promoting 007. An up-and-coming actress, and her role as Dink in the smash hit 1964 Bond flick Goldfinger made her a household name, led her to posing for Playboy, and then further outings in the Carry On franchise. But despite good work as a screen siren, Maggie knew she was more than a pretty face and wanted to prove it. It led to her becoming a political radical, a Bond Girl turned feminist. Now, 40 years on, she is set to make a return: Maggie appears in a cameo role in a new film, Three To Tango, which is about three women who live in Belsize Park. “I’m a Dame in it,” she says. “I have been told that if I’d kept on acting I could have become one, like Judy Dench. Maybe it is not too late...”

The film has yet to gain a distribution contract, but has been shown at the Belsize Park Everyman. Starring Toyah Wilcox, it considers how women are portrayed on screen – an issue close to Maggie’s heart.

She never set out to be an actress, and recalls it all started when she was working in a coffee shop in Belsize Village, the Witches Cauldron.

Playwright Tom Kempinski would come in to play chess and they fell for each other. “Tom said to me – you shouldn’t be a teacher, you should be an actress,” she recalls. She took him at his word. “He introduced me to agents and I started doing some modelling,” she says.

But as was the way with young women acting in that era, she had little say over what she was doing. She was offered parts and her agent said yes or no.

“They never directly spoke to me. I was so passive – we all were in those days,” she says. “I simply did what I was told to do,”

Maggie was born in Hampstead. Her Irish, working-class parents moved to London from Waterford before the war. “I grew up in an environment where people entertained each other,” she recalls. “I was always being asked to do a song and dance routine.” And although Maggie had done well at La Sainte Union school in Dartmouth Park, she was not encouraged to go to university. Instead she decided to become a teacher, and was working at the Cauldron temporarily before starting her course.

Her first TV appearance was opposite Roger Moore in the 1960s TV series The Saint. She also met Tony Curtis, who became enamoured with her. “He was so keen on me, he rang up my mum and asked if I could go to Italy with him to be in another film,” she remembers. “I couldn’t go – Italian Equity wanted an Italian woman.”

Roles came thick and fast: after just a year of work, Maggie was cast in Marcel Carne’s Three Rooms in Manhattan opposite Maurice Ronet. Carne, renowned for his wartime film Les Enfants du Paradis, spotted ­Maggie’s acting ability, and she ­continued to land West End roles and appear in TV series.

Then came Goldfinger. At first, producer Cubby Broccoli, who had asked her along to his headquarters behind the Curzon cinema in Mayfair, said he simply wanted to use her as a gold-painted lady for the opening title scene. But although Maggie was used to doing what she was told, and agreed to the two-week photo shoot, she also asked for a role in the film. Aged just 19, she was cast as Bond girl Dink, and filmed with Sean Connery in Miami.

A role in A Hard Days Night with The Beatles followed, and then it was the Carry On films. She soon was a vital member of the Carry On gang, but it wasn’t always easy.

“I faced a lot of animosity,” she remembers. “I grew up simply not being liked by other women. I really struggled to get close to other women, especially in show business. Frankly, I was just so tall and attractive. I’d walk in and all the women there would raise their eyebrows and then ignore me.

This did not apply to Barbara Windsor. “Babs was all right – she was down to earth, an East End girl,” says Maggie.

But the Carry On experience left a sour taste in the mouth, not just from the degrading, misogynistic nature of the films. It was the awful pay. “I got £100 a week,” she remembers. “None of us ever got any royalties. There is a Carry On film being screened once a minute, every minute around the world, and the producer and director became extremely rich from its success. But none of the actors got anything at all.”

Maggie’s career began to change in 1968. Her husband had been in France and watched the Republic come within a whisker of being overthrown by students. She began to become politicised, helped by attending weekly discussions with other actors, artists and writers in the Socialist Labour League. It set her off on a new route. The League established toured Working Men’s Clubs with cabaret shows, and produced a pageant of working-class history at the 10,000-seater Empire Hall at Wembley.

She was no longer interested in being a model or actress who was told what to do by men. She quit the big screen, and after spending time renovating a farmhouse in Spain, she found another artistic vocation. She has created collages due to be displayed this month at the Brick Lane Gallery.

“I was going through all my old ‘stuff’, and I came across many portraits taken of me during the 1960s and 1970s,” she explains. “I didn’t want to throw them away. I began creating photomontages, recycling into artistic representations of myself as a young woman. It was an emotional experience as I was both mourning myself as I was and the career I had. The images only came together as I was assembling them – they seemed to take a life of their own. I realised they said more about the period and being a woman at that time.”

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That's our Mox from the Witches!