Neil Winterbottom

Post date: 18-May-2020 12:39:39

I met Neil Winterbottom in Rue de la Huchette, in Paris Summer 1963. We had brought back a rucksack of kif from Tangier and were selling some in that street to buy our dinner and pay our rent! I was with Tony Barnett and we were intruigued by this cool posh boy who carried a virtual pharmacopeia in his wallet. He had a beautiful cannabis flower bud, 6 jacks of horse and other stiuff I have forgotten. He didn’t bother with the horse himself and he was happy to let us have half of it! We had a lot of fun together and continued our friendship back in London. I recall smoking dope with him in his parent’s house in Redington Road, Hampstead with a policeman lurking in and out of the garage next door. This was because the serving home secretary Henry Brooke lived there and the bobby was his security.

I met Neil’s parents who were kind and hospitable and was impressed by the art they had on the walls including original works by William Blake and Fra Lippo Lippi.

We saw a lot of each other in the 60s. He was equally at home at the Witches and in some swanky Mayfair bar! I remember taking him to a rather down-market party in a basement flat off Hampstead Road near Euston (the usual kind we and our friends from the Witches had!). He was tall and elegant in a hand-made grey silk suit, while most others were scruffy in jeans and sweaters. After a while Neil stood up on a chair and sang “Oh for the wings of a dove” in a high falsetto. The stoned party goers lolling around on the carpet and sofa were gobsmacked. Neil had a great sense of the surreal!

Neil was a very interesting character with friends from every social class and interests accross the whole spread of human activities. He knew Jimi Hendrix and I once sat in the back of his (Neil's) mini, chatting with Rod Stewart. He drove Linda Keith to Stonehenge to witness sunrise one midsummer eve night but dozed off and wrote off the mini on a roundabout. Linda was in hospital, and her boyfriend Keith Richard used to visit her there. He threatened to take his revenge of Neil because of his passion for Linda (the greatest love of his life – in his memoirs) but it was an empty threat. It wasn’t Neil’s fault – just one of those foolish accidents.

Through Neil I met his friend Josh Macmillan, grandson of the PM. He was devastated by Josh’s accidental death a week later.

Later in the 60s he was involved first in the fashion scene (he owned a Kings Road man’s fashion shop ‘Dandie Fashions’) and then in the hippie scene - by co-owning Middle Earth – the psychelic club in Covent Garden. I remember lending John Peel who was DJing my copy of Velvet Underground and Nico after he put out a public request - and Maggi just happened to have it in her car outside! (A real shocker - can you imagine being able to drive into Covent Garden and park there - legally?)

One time around 1967 Neil called me over to his Mayfair pad because he had some East End wide boys as friends who had 3 lbs of Lebanese Red to sell, in those lovely little cloth bags. Neil got nothing out of it, he was just happy to help out two lots of friends. When I wrote them a cheque for £210 for the deal – they gave me a hard look and said “This better not bounce! We don’t want any nastiness!” My own sentiments exactly! When I actually weighed the score it was about 6 oz short of the expected 3 lbs. Neil reconnected us and they sorted me out with a refund.

We weaved in and out of each other’s lives throughout the 60s. He came to parties I gave at 15 Inglewood Road, West Hampstead. I recall him coming to Tony’s flat overlooking Parliament Hill in the early 1970s and Neil giving us a satsang on the Unified Family. He had joined the Moonies and travelled to the USA to work with them. Sometimes we were only in touch once a decade but we corresponded.

Sadly Neil died of cancer in 2019, and I missed the funeral through not checking Messenger regularly.

His neice Alice writes

I’m so sorry you only just heard Paul. Neil died after a short illness (bowel cancer). He had undergone various operations in the two years prior to his death including the removal of a part of his bowel. It was difficult to contact everybody he knew as we didn’t have access to his mobile phone. He was his wonderful self right up until the end. I once said to him in hospital “you never complain” and he just said “it’s not my way Ali”, which captures him perfectly don’t you think? He was such a gentle, wise and kind soul. I miss him terribly, and his company. He was just such good company.

I would love to do something for him once all this is over - a sort of memorial service. The funeral was very small and low key in the end, as I organised it with my Dad so we just did it in London. Whereabouts do you live?

I love the sound of the photos and the witches cauldron! Never heard of it!

Neil! You were quite something in the 60s and will be much missed! An elegant leader in fashion – and much more besides!

This is his Wikipedia entry under the mispelt name of Neil Winterbotham. So far I have failed in my attempts to correct it. And my new entry under the right name was deleted. (Spelling corrected here)

Neil Winterbottom is a British former fashion entrepreneur, one of the founders of the London fashion boutique, Dandie Fashions.^[1]

Dandie Fashions founded by Winterbottom and Tara Browne, an heir to the Guinness fortune, opened at 161 King's Road in November 1966. Browne died in a car crash the following month.^[2]

Winterbottom was also responsible, with Dave Howson, for the management of the Middle Earth club, an early hippie music venue in London.^[3]

Neil Winterbottom's name was sytematically misspelt in the article Neil Winterbotham.

Neil attended Westminster School and came from an aristocratic family. Photographs of Neil in dandy-style fashions in 1967 may be found online and held by Getty Images. Most of them were originally taken for an article in Life magazine featuring King's Road fashions, in 1967.^[4] He spent time in USA, Canary Islands but his main residence was in London. Sadly he died in 2019.

References[edit]

1. ^ "John Crittle: The Dandy Larrikin in London". The Look. Retrieved 6 July 2014.

2. ^ Julian Palacios (2010). Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd: Dark Globe. Plexus. p. 115. ISBN 978-0-85965-431-9. Retrieved 15 January 2016.

3. ^ Christoph Grunenberg; Jonathan Harris (2005). Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s. Liverpool University Press. p. 1968. ISBN 978-0-85323-929-1. Retrieved 15 January 2016.

4. ^ Getty Images https://www.gettyimages.ca/photos/neil-winterbottom?mediatype=photography&phrase=neil%20winterbottom&sort=bestwebsite. Retrieved 8 April 2020.

Here's a selection from our correspondence:

To Neil Winterbottom

Thanks for your nice message!

Hope you enjoyed the sunny Canaries!

I'm in Exeter but will be back in London next weekend for a few days . I'm a 20% professor at Brunel University so go there once or twice a month. And we still have a place in West Hampstead - I'm sure you visited me there in the 1960s. And Tony still has his flat overlooking Parliament Hill - I recall seeing you there at least once!

I've written down your mobile no. Do you have a landline in London? Do you still have a place in Ebury something? I recall visiting you there - and also recall a drawing by William Blake - or was that in your Redington Road house? I have a Blake print from Job - not the same as a drawing though!! He's one of my heroes

Do you have any photos from the 60s of yourself (probably not of us!). I still recall you on the cover (was it? - or inside) of Life magazine in your King's Road finery!

Best wishes

Paul

From Neil Winterbottom

Good to hear from you. I've given up my landline and now do everything on mobile (07828 546 187) - calls, email and web browsing etc. Soon (almost) everyone will be doing it, I believe.

I do live on Ebury Street (15 Laxford House, Cundy Street, SW1W 9JU), but you're probably thinking of 52 Chester Square, to which the family moved from Redington Road in 1965. It was a big white stucco house with a lift to the second floor, and is a four minute walk from where I now am. Those houses are now £10,000,000+, and only plutocrats can afford them. I satisfy myself with a two bedroom flat instead

The Blake drawings were sold a few years ago, bought at the Christie's Graham Robertson sale in 1949. I still have a Blake print of Leonardo da Vinci, and my father's collection of works on Blake, whom he loved passionately.

Ah - the King's Road 1967! The World Wide Web continues to throw up new images and words in its attempt to catalogue the known universe. I attach a recent find of me and Alan Holston outside Chelsea Town Hall in 1967 from a Swedish magazine article, which a friend sent to me (note the mandatory rolled-up copy of the Times under my arm). I was never interested in press clippings, so don't have much from that period, though I kept a couple of copies of the Life Magazine issue with me, John Crittle and Ossie Clarke etc.

I'm amazed you still have your West Hampstead flat, which I remember well. There was a wonderful party there in 1967 where I first heard Beefheart's wonderful Safe As Milk album and marvelled at the sight of a giant somersaulting Japanese tin toy robot. Incredibly, the Captain was to appear only a few months later at Middle Earth club, which I was "co-managing" with Dave Howson at the time, in one of the most intense and exciting sets I ever heard.

Do you also remember the heady days in Paris, with Tony and the fair Margaret, whose cherry was finally sacrificed to John Esam, a saturnine English poet? [Ed. NZ actually] We got through about eight kilos of the finest in a few weeks. The mind boggles at the mere thought of it...

So if you're in my area in the next few days, do call. I'm sure we'll find lots to laugh about!

With very best regards (and please also remember me to Tony),

Neil

Neil Winterbottom (left) & Alan_Holston on Chelsea Town Hall steps 1967. From a Swedish Magazine cover. Perfect dandie attitudes!

At the fashionable Hung On You boutique, Kings Road. Left is Neil Winterbottom, and second left is Ossie Clark. Dated 11 July 1967. Very sylish and cool. From a Life magazine shoot!

Neil Winterbottom 1967. Sharp dresser!

Michael Williams, Ossie Clark , Julia Cooke and Neil Winterbottom, 1967

Neil Winterbottom

Neil Winterbottom seated after he had left the Moonies and was in the antique carpets business. He was at a carpet conference or fair ACOR 3, in Santa Monica in January 1996. With Neil Winterbottom, of Santa Fe, NM & London (UK) are Mitchell & Rosalie Rudnick of New England Rug Society.

Pensive Neil

Neil in symmetry - with himself almost!

Neil Winterbottom. Did someone say tai chi?

Neil Winterbottom

Neil Winterbottom sitting out one dance!

Neil Winterbottom - Merry Christmas!

Neil working hard to hide his ecstatic nature!

On the Moonies

An alienated member wrote about the Moonies and their leader under the soubriquet of Lord of the Flies

“In the summer of 1969 the Unification Church in America had no more than 6 or 7 centers with a total membership numbering around 150. During that summer Neil Winterbottom from national headquarters in Washington D.C. visited the commune. He was English, about my age, bright and well read. He seemed more dynamic than my compadres in Berkeley."

"He suggested that I should come to the headquarters in Washington. I came back East to Princeton N.J., to visit my family, whose skepticism about my new found religion only strengthened my commitment. Their suggestion that this group might be a front for Korean neo-fascism was preposterous. I did not tell them then that I knew Moon was the Messiah. Time was short. The world had to be saved. I had found my work at last."

http://www.allentwood.com/essays/lordofflies.html

_________________________________________________________

Following a conference a book was put together on the foundations of unified science. This was based on an intruiging generalization of Mendeleev's Periodic Table. This generaliseation covered the full breadth of the humanities providing an Anthropo-Socio-Historico-Linguistic-Psychological basis. The volume proved messy and unwieldy and the editor called upon the editing and writing skills of Neil Winterbottom in probably his last act before leaving the Moonies.

According to the editor:

“Neil Winterbottom, abandoning his private pursuits for three months, made hundreds of astute corrections and improvements in the text, compiled the table of contents, the author's biographies, and assembled the alphabetical index. Then he flew to London and helped correct the proofs. During the weeks of this work his family entertained me most kindly and graciously.”

EDWARD HASKELL, editor 1972

FULL CIRCLE, The Moral Force of Unified Science

GORDON and BREACH

New York London Paris

What Generalization of Mendeleev's Periodic Table Anthropo-Socio-Historico-Linguistic Bases Psychological and Genetic Empirical Basis of the Periodic Table

Arthur R.Jensen

http://www.synearth.net/Haskell/FC/FC.htm#TContents

There is a 171 page document describing the Winterbottom family history. The name is understood to mean "The valley with the wintry climate". (Very literal!)

The family is traced back to 1777. Neil's father Alistair lived 1916-1997 and his mother Maria ne Kowalski married Alistair in July 1944 and survived until 2004. Neil's uncle Ian became a life peer Baron Winterbottom of Clopton in 1956. Neil was born 30 June 1945, and is survived by a younger brother Toby Horton.

http://susandoreydesigns.com/genealogy/clirehugh/Winterbottom.pdf