Alan Shoobridge

Post date: 23-Dec-2020 19:23:23

Alan Shoobridge

Who was Alan Shoobridge? What was he all about? What went through his head in his brightest and darkest moments? What can we uncover about him 50 years after his death?

Drawing of head of Alan Shoobridge from above, c 1963 by Paul Ernest

Doing a web search for Alan Shoobridge only comes up with one link, an individual named in the Panama or Paradise Papers, as part of the Offshore Leaks investigations. This particular Alan Shoobridge is named as a Shareholder of Dr. Ferrel Finance Limited in British Virgin Islands with the address Deggendorfstr. 38 40235 Duesseldorf, Germany. Indeed, what is presumably this same Alan Shoobridge is on Facebook, listed as living in Duesseldorf. I messaged him to see if he is a relative. However, afterwards I discovered that in December 2020 the 192.com directory comes up with 313 Shoobridges in including 16 Paul Shoobridges (the most common one) but only one Alan Shoobridge, this one, who is therefore most unlikely to be a relative of my friend Alan Shoobridge. There are also historical Shoobridges of senior rank in the navy, and in the governance of Australia. But all were not distinguished - a certain Peter Shoobridge was convicted of 4 murders in Australia in 1997 (according to Murderpedia).

One of the notable if minor sports enthusiasts at William Ellis was Tim Selwood who went on to play for Middlesex, before going on to coach Finchley Cricket Club. Tim lists Alan Shoobridge and the future literary agent John Rush as his closest friends at school. The website Wikiwand mentions these friendships and adds that like Rush Tim had marked political interests but these appear not to have impinged on his career. However all this information has now been taken down from the web and appear only in cached versions.

Alan Shoobridge was a student at William Ellis Grammar School, located at Parliament Hill, North London. He was quite sporty in a casual way when we first met, it came easy to him. But Alan also had a penchant for mischief and trouble. He found that his own house key also opened the door to the first floor school stockroom, and by hanging out of the window and shouting to friends down below, he brought himself to the attention of the school authorities and was caned for his misdemeanour. (Caning consisted of being hit on the open palm and fingers of your hand with a bamboo cane; usually 6 strokes).

Alan Shoobridge high jumping at William Ellis school games. He coulda been a contender!

When he was young Alan lived with his mother in a flat in Priory Road, West Hampstead, on the Kilburn side of Abbey Road. In my mid teens I visited him there more than once, although I can’t recall meeting his mother. There was never any mention of a father. I never knew if his mother was a war widow or a single parent.

Alan hung out at the Witches Cauldron, like the rest of us. He went off travelling with John Duchin, Tony Barnett, Richard Gates at least to Paris, if not beyond, Summer 1961.

John Duchin. Richard Gates, Alan Shoobridge - Summer 1961 in Paris

John Duchin, Alan Shoobridge, Richard Gates, Paris 1961. Getting into the rhythm of things! I think Tony Barnett took these pictures.

While at William Ellis we experimented with drugs, both in and out of school and Alan was certainly part of this. In the XYZ of Drugs under C is for chloroform, I describe our use of this stupyfying liquid, used medically as an anaesthetic. We pinched it from the biology lab, regularly. Mr Pond, our zoology teacher remarked to the class about the amazing evaporation properties of chloroform. "I put a whole new Wichester Quart into the cupboard, and overnight half of it has evaporated!". I wasn't sure if he was wigging us or genuinely perplexed.

I recall Alan Shoobridge putting a hankie soaked with drops of chlorofrom into his mouth. Alan passed out in the corridor and as I was dragging him along the highly polished parquet flooring back to the lab by his legs a master (as the teachers were then called) asked me what I was doing. I explained that Alan was just feeling a bit faint and I was just taking him back to the classroom. I was allowed to proceed. The things we got away with at school! I guess they thought it was just a lark!

Whatever was going, Alan loved it and wanted more!

Alan Shoobridge peering over the shoulder of Paul Ernest, 1963 (During our mod phase - centre parting, tab shirts, etc - and when we discovered heroin)

Alan Shoobridge and Paul Ernest, in a photobox at Swiss Cottage Station 1963

I think Alan studied social sciences like Economics, British Constitution and maybe History for A Levels at William Ellis. He certainly wasn’t a scientist like me, Tony Barnett, Peter Sayers or Philip Howe. But he was one of our circle of chums. He was very bright, and had the most scathing tongue among us. His put-downs could be as sharp as a whiplash. But his studies didn’t light any real fire of interest in him and he lacked social ambition or drive. None of us were ambitious, but most of us were pulled along by strong interests, which ultimately led to career paths.

Not Alan. After school, he drifted in and out of jobs that were beneath him. He was a bus conductor, and other forgotten time-filling jobs. Apart from his friends his greatest passion was drugs and getting out of his head. He was restless so that he mostly he did not develop a bad heroin habit, although he was registered for some years. He was also always a very cool dresser, ahead of his time. In the mid 60s he started wearing a gold stud earring in one ear, with a small blue sapphire. No-one else did this at the time. He was slim, cool, fun and always casually well dressed. But he was accident prone, as if he didn’t really care about what happened to him. I remember him wandering around Portobello Road around the winter of 1965, smart, in a dark blue cashmere coat one Saturday. He had half of his week’s earnings in his pocket in a crisp £5 note. But somehow it fell out, and he was sad if accepting. Alan was careless about himself and his things. If there are no real accidents, as Freud says, maybe he was punishing himself, or did not think he was worthy of self-care. Or maybe his learned helplessness was a cry for help and love; he needed to be shown he was worthy of love.

Alan and Tony were hanging about outside the Duke of York pub near Goodge Street where we used to go to score heroin in 1963-4. A couple of policement thought they were acting suspiciously and searched them. They had a small amount of pot and got their first bust.

Alan Shoobridge and his girlfriend Penny

In the mid 60s Alan emigrated to Australia. We didn’t hear from him for a while, although we got the odd letter. I think he went there to make a clean break from the London drugs scene, possibly with his mother's encouragement. I recall one letter in which he wrote of large fields of cannabis growing just a bus ride out of Sydney. I don’t know if he planted them himself or just came across them and harvested some for himself to use and sell. The next news I heard was that he was deported from Australia back to Britain on a ship that went via the Panama canal. He told a story of visiting a brothel and seeing a donkey performing. He bought some grass to smoke and true to form left a plastic bag with the seeds on top of his clothes in his suitcase, forgetting to throw them away. On arrival customs pounced on them and he was busted again for dope.

He was deported from Australia because he was caught breaking into doctors’ surgeries out of hours to steal prescription pads. He used these to forge prescriptions to obtain narcotics from chemists. You can take the boy out of the drugs (scene), but you can’t take the drugs (desire) out of the boy!

Alan also recounted how he got very depressed on the voyage out, leaving all his friends and what he loved behind. On getting drunk one night he started slashing with a razor blade at the inside of his elbow where all the veins run. He was found in a pool of blood, bandaged up, and spent the rest of the voyage in the brig. He carried a star shape scar inside his arm thereafter. The whole episode was a sign of his lack of self-regard.

Alan Shoobridge in 1966

Throughout much of the mid 1960s Alan hung around London, renting rooms in North London, working various casual jobs or just getting by. He lived day to day, drifting, seeing friends, having some girlfriends, getting stoned. But he also travelled and he had certainly been to Morrocco a few times and then or later wintered in Marrakesh.

In July 1967 Alan and a bunch of others including me, Maggi, Peter, Tony Jackson, David Medalla and the Exploding Galaxy dance troupe got day jobs blowing up balloons for the set of The Bliss of Mrs Blossom. This starred Richard Attenborough and Shirley MacLaine, and was partly filmed at Alexandra Palace, were we were helping to build the set. For several days we cavorted with the 1000s of balloons we filled with air and some with helium that made up the huge film set. We were very stoned and some people repeatly thew themselves into huge mounds of ballons popping them, despite the protestations of the supervisors roaming around the hall. On July 7th the scene was filmed.

Filmed scene The Bliss of Mrs Blossom

Richard Attenborough stood on a platform on the head of a huge bust of a woman and during filming the breasts inflated. Unfortunatly one grew much larger than the other! There were streamers, a marching band, the Dagenham Girls Choir and a procession of beautiful woman and others marching around the huge hall, as well as further live beauties with inflating bras dangling from roped harnesses hanging around the stage area. It was truly trippy!

Closeup of the scene in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Richard Attenborough standing on top

Some of the dangling over-inflated beauties

It was not a notable movie but they paid us well and we had a great time!

Summer 1967 my mother Elna, my sister Sue, my girlfriend Maggi Gearson and I all drove down to Ibiza in Elna’s car, an Austin A40, I think.

Maggi Gearson

Me and Elna in front, and the other three smaller ones in the back. Alan, who was much liked by all three of these fine women, came with us. We drove down through France and took the ferry from Barcelona. Once in Ibiza, Alan and I hit the chemists to buy over the counter drugs, like preludin (speed), sleeping pills and tranquilisers, and morphine with atropine tablets.

As a drug enthusiast when you take morphine with atropine you hope you will get the morphine high without too much interference from the atropine. Before we bought it Alan Shoobridge had told me it was available over the counter – he had been there before - but it gave him 'barbed wire'. I didn't understand this side effect until I saw his difficult passage down the high street after taking some, that Summer 1967. He was, dipping down, stepping high with his feet, and twisting his body around and to the side. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Oh, I'm just trying to get through - they've strung fucking barbed wire across the road, again." Atropine is so strong it dominates the morphine and gives you unpleasant hallucinations! The sufferings we had to bear in the name of pleasure! I never took as much of anything as he did on this trip. I had my lovely girlfriend Maggi with me. When the time came to go home Alan stayed on in Ibiza. He had nothing to go home to.

On returning to England in 1967 Steve Moss filled Alan’s empty place and we drove home together. First we took the ferry to Valencia and Maggi and I had stateroom AA, all fitted out with luxurious marquetry wooden furniture, for a few shillings more than economy class. From Valencia we drove north, stopping at the Prado museum in Madrid to see the marvellous Goya and Bosch, and El Greco (whose mannered painting style I never really did get), and visiting the fine Cathedral at Burgos continuing our drive northwards.

Alan had stayed on in Ibiza and I recall him writing and asking me to send him some H. I bought a birthday card with a thick cardboard print of a horse stuck on the front. I bought a grain and hollowed out a cavity in the back of the cardboard, enough to take 6 jacks on a strip of sellotape. He appreciated the horse inside more than the Trojan horse I sent it in. Well, at least I thought that it was witty!

Alan came back to the UK now and then but mostly he was ligging around Europe and North Africa. He passed several winters in Marrakech. I last spent extended time with Alan during Summer 1969 in Tangier. I was rather out of my head having had speed induced hallucinations in Tetuan and when I arrived in Tangier. In the XYZ of Drugs under A is for Amphetamine I describe my amphetamine psychosis in Morocco. Fortunately I stopped shooting up speed and calmed down a bit and then who did I bump into in the Casbah? My old friend Alan Shoobridge! I was so happy to see a dear friendly face and we spent the next 2 or 3 weeks together before I flew home to the UK.

I kept my cheap room up on the open top floor of a hotel in the Casbah, but spent all of my time with Alan. He was shacked up with his French girlfriend in another cheap hotel, taking all the drugs he could afford. Our staple was paregoric, a tincture of opium with camphor dissolved in the alcohol so it could not be injected. You could buy it over the counter. William Burroughs describes chilling it until the camphor has separated out and formed a crust on top, and then extracting and injecting the remaining liquid. I had followed that technique, previously. Alan had a simpler solution. You heat it up in a metal ladle or large spoon until it is boiling and then set fire to it. Both the camphor and alcohol burn off and you are left with a black opium deposit. This dissolves easily enough in water, you suck it up through a ball of cotton wool to filter it, and hey presto, you are ready to go!

I had money to pay for my share but to pay for his Alan would send his girlfriend out importuning in the European quarter of Tangier. She would ask gentlemen for money for her favours and then run off back to Alan with the cash. We didn’t discuss it but I gathered that some johns caught her and demanded their pound of flesh! It wasn't my business, and I said nothing, but I wouldn't treat any girlfriend of mine that way!

We had a great time but it was also physically uncomfortable. The stainless steel needles we used were blunt, and even rubbing them on the side of a safety match box to sharpen them left them hurting my arm. Also the shots, the dissolved opium deposits, were making me feel sick to my stomach (my liver more likely) and it was all starting to be a pain. Not Alan though, I loved his company.

I flew home to London via Gibraltar, but when I arrived home I was diagnosed as multiply infected. I had hair lice, crab lice, pink eye, hepatitis A or B, and was a suspected typhus carrier. After diagnosis I was sent to Coppetts Wood isolation hospital in Muswell Hill. I made a pact with the doctors to stop all drugs and I did. Forever, apart from one slip in the Autumn when I had some coke. I had been smoking cannabis pretty well daily since the mid 60s and stopped that too. However the THC dissolved in my body fats took weeks to wear off, and I had some marvellous high dawns looking at the sunrise through my hospital window. I tested negative for typhus in the end and was discharged. But I had discovered how marvellous being straight is, after the worst 18 months I had lived through.

From that Autumn onwards I sought to change my life. It took me 4 months and 100 letters of application to find a good job as a computer programmer with British Olivetti. and during that time my mother looked after and supported me. At her behest I also restarted my affair with Lamorna Heath who would visit me in West Hampstead. I'd first met her at Sussex University Autumn 1968. Lamorna went on to marry the writer Patrick Seale, write a novel (Candida Rising, 1978) and bear a daughter Delilah Jeary fathered by Martin Amis, as well as an older son, Orlando, before her untimely death in May 1978, when her children were aged 2 and 5.

Lamorna Heath - what a beauty!

Alan came back to the UK and I recall seeing him late 1969 or early 1970 when he visited me in West Hampstead. I was straight but he was not. He had few personal possessions but owned a stamp collection and asked me to store it for him, when he went off on his travels again.

Later that year I got the news that he had had a dirty shot somewhere in Northern France that developed into septicemia. He was taken to hospital too late by his girlfriend and died there from blood poisoning. He was 25 years old. He would now be 76, as I write this.

Reflecting back, whatever made up Alan's soul is still mysterious. What existential horror was he fleeing? He rarely expressed anger, perhaps his anger, if he had any, was turned inwards. It is hard to see his life as anything other than one of self-despite, of self-hatred. His utter lack of care for his self was manifested in his carelessness, his allowing harmful situations to develop, and his chasing out-of-his-self experiences, mini-deaths and ultimately oblivion. I don't think anyone could have helped Alan, something deep and dark drove him. In his heart I think he felt unloved and unlovable, in a way that no friendships or loves could compensate for.

All his friends miss and mourn Alan. He was a very bright, stylish, loyal and sincere friend, but one with an unquiet heart, a death wish. Afterwards Maggi came to me and told me that Alan had said that he would leave his stamp collection to her, to add to her own, so I passed it on. She mourned him but sadly she too was dead within the year. I think Tony still has Alan’s stamp collection. The only surviving, tangible memento, apart from some memories and pictures. Well, at least he found peace in the end.

There is something I have not put forward enough. Alan had a great sense of humour, a biting wit. One could have great fun with Alan and laugh and laugh until one's sides split. Let me end by rembering his smile, his laugh, his great sense of humour!