Jane Shearer

Post date: 31-May-2020 19:19:05

Jane or Janie Shearer and was a beautiful young girl, one of the regulars at the Witches. She joined up with the Burgess Hill lot and I thought she was one of them. She and her partner Timmy were a golden couple at the Witches. After an off and on start they married in 1966 and are still together 54 years later, living happily in Brighton.

Jane Shearer 1965. Gorgeous!

Janie was first taken to the Witches in 1963 by her close friend Ali Cooper.

Ali Cooper in 1965

This is Jane's account

I met Ali Cooper at school and we became inseparable. It was Ali who, in April 1963, took me to the Witches for the first time. We were very young then, not even quite 13 but Ali knew the place well, she was a Hampstead girl and her older brothers went there too. Ali and I were wild and precocious, the crew at the Witches seemed to take us to their hearts despite our tender years. I loved the place, I had found the acceptance and freedom I had been looking for, you could walk in any night and someone would welcome you and invite you to their table and wherever they were going next, be it down to the Roulette (later the Moon and Sixpence) or to any number of parties around Hampstead and beyond, everyone was welcome to tag along. Enter Gay Meakin and Pat Robinson, they went to the same school as us but were three years older, they left that summer, but the age difference didn't figure in this new, free, egalitarian community Ali had introduced me to. Pat and Gay were already regulars at the Witches and were friends of Frank and Julius who then lived at 52 Adelaide Road. Pat Robinson grew up in the same street as me in West Hampstead but it was our love of the Witches that brought us together. That first summer, 1963, Ali and I had a ball, so many great friends - Louie, Gina, Sharon Nassauer, Carmichael, Sue Clark, Max Hensar, Ed, Rob and Tim Summerson. I have an incurable habit of writing everything down and I still have lists of everyone I met there, or everyone who turned up at the parties. PPPs we called them - Permanent Party People.

Then in September we were at a party in Platts Lane, two boys came rolling down a wide staircase barely able to walk, laughing, fooling around and one caught my eye, I followed him into the room where dancing was going on, two girls doing The Shake in the middle of the floor (I think more than possibly Sue Whitman and Pauline Chalmers). I walked up to him and slipped my fingers into his mane, bold for me, I said "I like your hair". He replied with a lisp "So do I". This was just before the party was raided, the police poured in and we all jumped through a back window into the garden and legged it over the garden wall.

A week later I walked into the Witches and there he was sitting at a table, there began a 57 year relationship. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next week Tim took me to a flat in Chalcot Square where I met Paul DeMille, Pete Mc Veigh, Masha Kolomeitz, Alphonse, Graham Holman, Mally and Crispin Kitto, this was the Burgess Hill crowd. Now the template for the rest of my life was well and truly in place. I discovered the progressive ethos and more freedom. Before 1963 I'd observed amongst my then peers a combative polecat style of courtship between the sexes which baffled and horrified me, now I had discovered equality and experimentation in romance which bonded all people regardless of class, gender, race or background which rejected the restrictive mores of society that had gone before. I felt safe and able to express myself. All our spare time and much of school time too revolved around these two places, The Witches and Chalcot. Reg Conrad opened up the basement on Sundays for dancing, I don't remember any live bands at this point but there were plenty of fantastic records on the juke box, Reg was certainly good at picking and supplying the machine with good music.

Tim bowed out for a while and I dated Pete Mc Veigh and the winter turned into 1964 and new people began arriving at The Witches. Reg and Daphne, the owners, started to get twitchy, whether it was because they worried about finances or because they felt we were getting out of hand, I don't know, but they started banning groups of us on a regular basis. As the Spring progressed we'd sit on the pavement outside the pub opposite or wander down to the Moon but still managed to get into the Witches between bans. Then a rival opened just three or four shops along called The Sahara, a bleak, bare coffee bar, opened up on a shoestring, so much so they failed to take down the old proprietor's name over the shop, Gilbert Cranwell, so inevitably it became "Gilbert's".

By the autumn of 1964 we had all piled in there but we were still the Witches Crowd. Gay was with Dubs by now, one of the new arrivals at the beginning of the year. By 1965 we had pretty much lost The Witches as a rallying point and met in various flats around the area, principally 19 Winchester Road where Masha and Clappers, Paul DeMille and Lisa, Graham and Belinda Kitto, Nik and Rachel all lived over two floors at various times.

By the end of 1965 I was back with Tim, Bin Tivy came on the scene and made a couple with Pat Robinson. In 1966 we married and the scene comprised mainly of us ten couples Paul and Lisa, Gay and Dubs, Pat and Bin and Graham and Belinda. All from either The Witches or Burgess Hill or both. Ali was with Brian, who was a friend of Rob Andrews and in 1967 she gave birth to her daughter, Kate, a week after we had our son, Timmy. After living variously in West Kensington, Camden Town with Crispin Kitto and Battersea we landed in a basement flat in a beautiful Georgian Square in Hackney where the scene shifted and we were joined by Masha Kolomeitz and her children with all of the above visiting all week long. Peter Mc Veigh went to India. We stayed there until 1970. But now we're in our seventies and that's another story.

Jane and Tim Shearer atthe bar

Amazingly Jane made a list of her friends at the Witches in 1963 and still has it! She also had Ali Cooper's list. Here they are.

Jane's list of her friends at the Witches, from 1963

An amazing document; a list of some of the Witches crowd, Jane's friends, jotted down in 1963!

Timmy, Tim Shearer, Masha Kolomeitz and Jane Shearer - Clapton, February 1969

Tim & Jane Shearer, 2015