About Me.
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“I was the youngest of four. We were crammed into a couple of rooms, in a tiny basement flat in Buckingham Road, Brighton. My brother Tony was two years older than me and we only had one pair of shoes between us, so whoever got the shoes first, could go to school. At home, I’d sit in a cupboard, drawing cartoons. My mum slogged her guts out, bless her. She worked three or four jobs. She was a proud Yorkshirewoman. She always looked immaculate, and made sure the front step was scrubbed every Sunday. It was a happy place, but after a time she just couldn’t keep us all.
Tony and I were taken away and brought up in Barnardo’s homes, and foster homes. It was a tough life, but they gave me some paints and let me get on with it. I was only about ten, and I could do sketches, watercolours, oil paintings, copies of anything. Mum visited once. I went back to live with her when I was fifteen, but her boyfriend beat me up, so I screwed the electric meter and got a job in the circus, looking after a herd of elephants and a flock of camels. We toured around the country. I was a bit like that David Essex character in the film, ‘That’ll be the Day’. It was exciting. We had money and girls, and I used to paint giant pictures of wild animals on the circus backdrops and trucks. But I had a craving to go to London and be an artist, so I left. I was homeless on Shepherd’s Bush Green for a while, but I met the Kray twins in Portobello Road and painted a portrait of their mum. They loved it! I worked out that if I painted pictures on old canvases and aged ’em, they’d sell like hot cakes. Then I met Sam. He was shifty businessman, older than me. He was great fun and a great man. We’d hit the auction houses and galleries together with a pile of rubbish old pictures (we called them ‘potboilers’) but with one or two of my ‘antique‘ paintings thrown in. We’d pretend to be a pair o’mugs, a father and son, doing house clearances, and look totally shocked when the experts told us, ‘This is a Samuel Palmer’ or whatever. Then they’d sell it for four or five grand, and me and Sam’d split the profits. And remember, this was back in the Sixties and Seventies when the weekly wage was only about twenty quid. And we used to flog a couple of my fakes every week! We must've sold hundreds of 'em over the years. We just loved the buzz of the auction room. They were good times. I got nicked and did three spells in prison, and when I came out I got invited to a lot of Variety Club celebrity dinners. They’d auction my pictures off to raise money for charity. I’ve raised over seventy grand for them. Not bad, eh, for a boy from Brighton with no shoes! There are so many stories… I met my ghost writer Tony Valentine through a mutual friend, the actor Chris Ellison who played Burnside in ‘The Bill’. Tony is a scriptwriter, and he offered to write my biography. We did it all over the phone during the Covid lockdown. I’d tell Tony stories from my life and he’d write it all up in book form. And it’s a brilliant book - even if I do say so myself.” |