Patrick Lane

Post date: 10-Feb-2021 09:46:23

Patrick Lane did not know any of the William Ellis boys until meeting Paul Ernest and his friends at Sussex University in 1966. Nor did he know anybody from the Witches’ Cauldron despite visiting the club many times (on his bicycle) as described elsewhere on this site.

His biography, Recollections of a Racketeer, was recently reissued by Lume Books. https://tinyurl.com/y6qqkz3y

The publisher’s blurb summarizes his life as follows:

Patrick Lane’s obsession with drugs began in his early teens. Nineteenth-century French literature introduced him to a world of hashish, opium, and absinthe, which he saw as a way of escaping his boring suburban English existence. Unable to find any hashish as a schoolboy in north London, he went to Morocco for supplies. Between school and university, he hitched around America in the mid-1960s, taking LSD with Timothy Leary and Larry Ferlinghetti. After teaming up with Howard Marks, they smuggled suitcases of hashish out of Afghanistan and Pakistan into Europe, and VW campers filled with hashish from Lebanon into California.

During the course of his extraordinary career, he witnessed a revolution in Afghanistan, an unsuccessful coup in Greece, the preservation of the monarchy in Nepal, and illicit arms deals with Saddam Hussein. Along the way, he befriended Wall Street bankers, Mafia dons (and Oxford dons), hashish-eating goats, dissolute English lords, and French peasants.

He was found guilty of drug-smuggling in 1988 and served two years in federal prisons in the US where he developed an abiding passion for Marcel Proust.

Upon his release from prison in 1990, middle-aged, broke, and disgraced, he managed to find an entry-level position (with no questions asked) with a large software corporation. Eventually he was able to redeem himself, and for many years traveled the world as a corporate executive for American conglomerates. This permitted visits to Phillip Howe in Sydney, Tony Barnett in Hampstead, and Paul Ernest in Exeter. Following the collapse of the software industry in 2000, he became director of the Continuing Education Department at the University of Miami. Since his retirement he continues to write and to teach wine appreciation classes as well as give lectures on Marcel Proust and the history of Miami, where he lives. Patrick’s many books are available at https://tinyurl.com/y5fa5ukk.

Patrick has been happily married to Jude for the past 50 years – their first date was the Rolling Stone’s concert in Hyde Park along with Paul Ernest and Dave Fry. They have two wonderful daughters and four beautiful grandchildren.

Patrick meeting Jude at the Rolling Stone’s concert in Hyde Park, 1969

Patrick with Paul and Dave Fry at the Rolling Stone’s concert in Hyde Park, 1969

The highlight of Patrick’s life during lockdown is his Thursday Zoom meetings with Paul Ernest and the ‘Friends of the 60’s’ in which all the challenges of the modern world, and all the mysteries of life are resolved in a warm miasma of civilized conviviality and bonhomie.

Reminiscences of Patrick by Paul Ernest

I first met Patrick in Autumn 1966 when I started at Sussex University. I sat next to Marilyn in maths lectures and through her met Maggie who I immediately fell in love with and lived with for almost 2 years. Though Marilyn I met Dave Fry at a club/disco on Brighton seafront (they were playing 4 Tops – Reach out I’ll be there – which was just out). Through Dave I met Patrick. He was (is) a very suave and debonair character and very, very bright. For his English major he had to write a critical essay on Richardson’s novel Pamela. The novel is written in letter form, and is quite an ethical novel about the seduction and betrayal of Pamela. Patrick’s bold essay was cast as a dialogue between Mick Jagger (our current 1960s libertine demigod) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (representing reaction and the old ways of thinking and behaving). It was a brilliant exercise in counterposing different contemporary worlds with their clashes of ideology and ethics. I was bowled over by its brilliance, and the tutors loved it too! I still have Patrick's article, published in a university magazine, about the hierarchy of superheroes from the animalistic (the Hulk) to the enlightened beings (Dr Strange) that populate the universe of Marvel, DC and other comic books.

For his 21^st birthday Patrick invited me and Maggie to join him for the weekend in his parental home (rather splendid) in Staffordshire. He drove us there in his Vauxhall Cresta which looked something like this!

Vauxhall Cresta of the 1950s

It was the nearest British car to the grand American sedans of the 1950s and 1960s.

We shot up the M1 and arrive at his parents’ house. I recall a nice supper and a chat with his father about Darwin vs. Lamarck. I was impressed with his savoir faire and his broad range of knowledge.

I remember listening to Pink Floyd singles in the nursery (large children’s playroom in which Maggie and I slept!). Singles like Arnold Lane and See Emily play! I don't recall the journey back but I’m sure it was fine! We had a high time for Patrick’s 21^st!

Later Patrick drove me to London in the same car and I bought a pound of Pakistani black and stowed it under my front seat. We drove back to Brighton at 2 am and were stopped by the police in the countryside near Redhill or some other god forsaken place en Route – on the A23. The police wondered what we were doing out so late and were quite inquisitive, and it looked like they might search us. Patrick got out and started chatting. He charmed them and within 10 minutes he was explaining to them his great regard for the police and how he had always wanted to join up. It was utterly convincing! He had (has) the gift of the gab and after 15 minutes we came to a lot of hand shaking, back slapping and well wishing and we set off again towards Brighton with a police escort for a few miles! Patrick on speed and me with my dodgy cargo!

In early 1967 (or late 1966) Patrick entered a competition with his then girlfriend Susan Tracy for the ‘coolest couple in town’. This was run by Town magazine and a dinner was held for the finalists at the GPO Tower or Talk of the Town of some other posh London eatery. When Patrick and Sue arrived they were met by 3 rather staid but suave older couples in DJs and bow ties. The rival couples thought themselves rather sophisticated smoothies. Patrick and Sue decided they didn’t stand a chance against them, so they drank, ate, danced, made the most of the situation. They acted naturally, without inhibitions, telling jokes and discussing the current cultural scene in Swinging London. Their vivacity (and good looks!) far outshone their rivals and to their amazement they won the prize of a 2 week beach holiday in Hawai’i.

The actor Susan Tracy in one of her many roles - see IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0870564/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) for her extensive list of screen credits

However the magazine folded and the proprietors told Patrick and Sue that they couldn’t provide the prize. A stiff letter from a solicitor changed their minds and Patrick and Sue jetted off for a wonderful holiday. It was great but everything at the hotel was so expensive so they were very frugal. Then they learnt all expenses were paid so they ordered every dish on the menu twice to be delivered to them on the hotel beach where they banqueted with nearby hippies and assorted beach bums.

Patrick and Sue as a cool couple in Hawai'i

The press reported the prize and the 'coolest couple' in typical 60s style

Returning they stopped off at Haight Ashbury, San Francisco for a couple of days and to experience the Hippie Revolution at first hand at its height! Patrick returned with many marvels that blew us away! Octagonal crystal glasses that made everything look like through a Kaleidoscope, and an original copy of the Velvet Underground’s first album with Warhol's pink banana on the cover under a yellow peel off skin. We were all wowed! Later I traded that album for 5 amps of meth!

In late 1966 or early 1967 I sold Patrick his first dealer sized piece of dope. As I recount on Neil Winterbottom's page, Neil introduced me to some East End wide boys with three nominally one pound weight sacks of lebanese red to sell. I think I paid something like £70 per pound for this lovely stuff. I offered my Sussex friends a piece of the action and a consortium of four was formed to buy a pound from me. As well as Patrick there was Dave Fry, Pete Bell and someone else (was it Niall Dunlea or Mick Hartney? I forget now). I let them have it at a wholesale price of £100 which was £25 each for 4 oz, well below the market price at the time. This was the introduction of Patrick, later to become Mr Nice's money man and brother in law, to his first go at dealing! As I recount elsewhere on this site I had given up dealing, smuggling and indeed smoking dope long before Mr Nice and Patrick hit the big time!

In 1968 Patrick and I got into rather heavier drug use. Although Patrick went a bit psychotic - he lined his rented room with silver foil and decorated it with his blood out of a syringe - he managed to hold it together enough to pass his degree in English and Philosophy. Speed as well as H and C were his poisons, and he would stay up for nights writing and revising. I remember him telling me how he came to like black instant coffee because he would drink it incessently well beyond the point when the milk, sugar (and meth) ran out, to fuel his nightime studies and escapades.

A mutual friend, named elsewhere on this site, recalls how he and Patrick invented a game, if you can call it that. It involves squirting your own blood out of a syringe in a parabolic arc over the partition separating one cubicle from the next in the Sussex University loos. And good luck to whoever gets doused in a rain of blood! The raconteur of this tale recounted it with distaste and amazement that this psychopathic entertainment was ever regarded as good fun! The same raconteur once told me that to shoot up in the loos at the Dilly he'd had to draw his water up out of the toilet bowl. His fleeting qualms shrank to nothing in the face of the need for a fix. Picadilly Circus underground station was truly one of the circles of hell. Oh, the squalid depths to which we descended! Eat your heart out, Trainspotting!

Around this time Patrick was a registered user and travelled around Brighton carrying a bag labelled DRUGS. The description was accurate but the irony was that they were legal drugs!

In 1969, after having been thrown out of Sussex myself (to return triumphantly in 1971, well, to return at least!) and Patrick having graduated and now or soon to be working as a General Arts Lecturer at North Staffs Poly, we all met up in London for the free Rolling Stones concert, 5 July 1969. Like the song, I was out of my head, but Patrick had his feet firmly on the ground, found love with Jude, and beamed happily. I don’t recall much, but I have photos including the one with Jude above, as evidence that it all really happened.

Mick Jagger performing with the Rolling Stones at the free concert in Hyde Park 5 July 1969.

Patrick Lane at the Rolling Stones concert

Dave Young, Niall Dunlea, Patrick Lane's back at the Rolling Stones free concert in Hyde Park Summer 1969.

Patrick with Dave Fry behind Paul (looking like a startled owl having caught a mouse) leaving Hyde Park, 5 July 1969

In his memoir Recollections of a Racketeer, Patrick describes how he was working with Sussex Tapes at this time, and how this found him in a four poster bed with Helen Mirren! An all too innocent escapade, I regret to report! What elan! What bounce-back. Even Raffy Nadal never recovered that fast!

By 1970 Patrick and I were both working in London. Patrick at Price Waterhouse training to be an accountant. I was clean and employed as a computer programmer at British Olivetti, and also learning book keeping for commercial applications. We used to meet up for a pint in the pub! Patrick was at our (Jill & Paul's) wedding 29 July 1972 (along with Dave Fry, Marilyn Wheatcroft, Alan and Christel Green, Philip Howe, Kate and Les Clackson, Peter and Diana Sayers, Geoff Conrad, Sue Ernest, Jules Holley, Richard Gates, Sue Barnett, and plenty of others). A photo of many of the wedding guests can be seen in the section Pictures not from Witches days.

Patrick adds: I did attend your wedding but Jude was not there. That’s because she and I had split up (temporarily, as it turned out) and she was living with Richard Lewis – the University of Sussex mathematician. Jude had taken him down to my Mill in the Dordogne. Alan and Christel were at your wedding and so I invited them down to the Dordogne on their motor bike – just to piss-off Jude and Richard. The photos you have used for Alan’s bio, were all taken down at the Mill, just a week or so after your wedding. Alan of course fell in love with the region and soon after purchased a property nearby.

Richard Lewis (1942-2007) was exceptionally bright, and Category Theory was his specialism, an abstruse and ultra-abstract form of algebra. Jill and I became friends with him 1971-73 during our sojourn in Brighton, when I was readmitted to Sussex and finished off my undergraduate studies. Several of us, like Dave Fry and myself, got quite good at the Japanese game of Go. Richard would give me a 9 stone lead, the biggest handicap possible, and still wipe the board with me. For all his extreme intelligence Richard was rather other-worldly clumsy. When invited to dinner at our rented house in Islingword Street you always knew when he had arrived because he invariably managed to knock the empty glass milk bottles off the doorstep with his rather uncontrolled wandering feet!

A while later Patrick invited us to visit him at his new carpet import business Hamdullah in Little Venice. Patrick showed us some marvellous tribal rugs. He travelled out east to source the carpets so I casually asked if he had brought any hash back from Afghanistan and he replied "Four hundred weight, but that was just a trial run!". Shortly after that admission he became much more closed mouthed about smuggling hash in, and about carrying large sums of cash around the world. I noticed he became very lean and mean, having mastered Karate, so that no-one in his business dealings could take his briefcase away from him by force. The Howard Marks years had begun! The details are history, recorded in Recollections of a Racketeer, and elsewhere.

He did let slip one tale about a bale or two of grass getting washed up on a Greek Island in the 1970s (not in Scotland, that's a whole different story!). He was sent in as the 'negotiator' and had to identify and locate the fisherman who had retrieved the dope and meet him. He dressed in his best gangtser suit and explained how he had the fisherman's best interests at heart and how much better off he would be if he accepted a large reward in return for reuniting the bales with their owners. The best threats are always the unspoken ones, delivered with friendly aplomb. Order was restored!

In the early 1970s we used to meet Patrick and Howard Marks at social events, most often dinners and parties in the marvellous studio built for Augustus John in Edwardian times, and rented by our old friend Alice Fairfax-Jones. In fact Alice had also been our landlady when we rented the house in Islingword Street, Brighton. Howard was very gregarious and he naturally drew in and became the centre of any social gathering around him, with his great charisma and Welsh charm.

Howard and Judy Marks (ne Lane) in Mallorca 1988

By 1989/90 I was a lecturer in mathematics education at the University of Exeter, preparing primary and secondary mathematics teachers. One of my primary teacher students was Emily Lewis and I soon found out that she was the daughter of Richard Lewis (although it turned out Howard Marks had actually fathered her - maybe around the time Richard was taking Jude down to the Dordogne!). Everybody was cool about it, so Emily had an extended family comprising members of the Lewis and Marks clans (also including the Lanes, since Patrick's sister Judy Lane, was married to Howard).

Naturally I asked Emily about all of our shared aquaintances and friends and learned that Patrick was in a Federal Penitentiary and due out soon. Getting his address in Miami from her I wrote Patrick a long and friendly letter. In his reply he told me that the letter had been one of the first things he had seen on release, and it had had reassured him that his old-time friends still had warm feelings and cared for him. (In the 80s he had become insufferable, temporarily, while he lived a profligate jet-setting lifestyle, flying around the world from one tax haven to another, with big bags of money! Very 80s!). So we reassumed our warm friendship with Jill and I visiting Patrick and Jude in Coral Gable, Miami 3 or 4 times and seeing him in England several times including Jill's fabulous 50th Birthday Party in January 1998 which had 150 guests - all our past and present friends who could make it. (Including Patrick & Jude from Miami, and Philip Howe and Sarah from Sydney.) One hundred of these guests' names feature elsewhere on these pages.

And so the circles within circles and connecting cogs continue to rotate, pulling us apart and bringing us back together again, as we row on downstream towards our shared future and separate destinies.