‍IT WAS a quiet domestic get-together; singer Marianne Faithfull told the police as she sat naked with just a fur rug wrapped around her. She had just stepped out of the shower and couldn’t find a towel.

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‍Rolling Stone Keith Richards meanwhile, who had taken LSD, the night before, thought the police officers at his front door were uniformed dwarves and let them in.

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‍It was February 12, 1967, and pop royalty, The Rolling Stones were winding down from a party the previous day. Their single ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was rocketing up the Billboard Top 100 in America and the money was rolling in.

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‍And so began the media circus of the Redlands’ drugs bust, the outcome of a media vendetta that was to involve false stories about sex with a Mars bar, incense sticks and a travel sickness pills.

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‍It was to provoke a national outcry.

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‍The raid at Redlands, Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ West Sussex cottage, followed a tip-off from News of the World which had been in a libel dispute with Mick Jagger, who was at the ‘get-together’.

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‍The paper had published an article headlined: ‘Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts That Will Shock You,’ which falsely claimed Jagger used drugs. But the reporter had mistaken Stones guitarist Brian Jones for the lead singer.

‍When Jagger sued for libel, the newspaper sought to gather evidence of drug use to defend itself in court, leading them to target the Redlands gathering.

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‍The grass thought to be behind the tip to the newspaper was Keith’s own chauffeur, a Belgian named Patrick, who later disappeared. Keith was paying him handsomely. “But the newspaper got to him,” the Stone was to say. He added that Patrick had been ‘dealt with’.

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‍It was also widely believed that it was all an establishment plot to ruin the band once and for all. The headlines the following week in the tabloids, were all about the ‘wild drugs and sex orgy’ at Richards’ home. In fact, the guests were winding down from an LSD trip the day before.

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‍The band was seen by the establishment and the older generation as rebelling against the expectations society put upon them. They were accused of glamourising the cult of sex and drugs and speaking out about changing the world. The Summer of Love was approaching.

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‍Twenty police officers who had been hiding in the bushes, knocked politely on the door of the cottage at 7.55pm.

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‍It turned into a surreal experience as Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women’ played repeatedly on the stereo system and the group laughed while police collected incense sticks and miniature hotel soaps, used they believed to cover up the smell of cannabis.

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‍Marianne simply slipped off the rug to be searched near a table with Mars Bars on it, a standard snack for people coming down from an LSD trip and needing sugar. This led to a false, urban legend that police caught Jagger eating a Mars bar out of her vagina. Both Marianne and Keith have since claimed that this story was entirely fabricated by the Press to add to the campaign against the Stones.

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‍Beatle George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd left shortly before the raid and it was believed officers had waited for them to go, treating those ‘nice boys’ the Beatles as ‘off limits’ compared to the Stones. It would have been too damaging to arrest someone with an MBE this way.

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‍Officers found some amphetamine tablets in a green velvet jacket (which Jagger claimed were his, probably to protect his girlfriend Marianne) and a small amount of hash. But they returned the hash to him with an apology, thinking wrongly it was dirt.

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‍Another name in the frame as the man who tipped off the police was David Schneiderman, a mysterious American drug dealer known as the ‘Acid King’. He disappeared to California.

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‍Crowds of protesters sealed off the court at the West Sussex quarter sessions, where Keith was sentenced to 12 months in prison and Mick Jagger to three months.

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‍The sentences caused an outcry over unfairness. Even The Times condemned the prison sentences in a leader that quoted William Blake’s ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel.’

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‍Eventually Lord Parker, the lord chief justice, quashed the jail sentences saying no proper evidence of hashish smoking had been found during the raid. And the pills in Jagger’s pocket were prescription drugs.

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‍It became a pivotal moment in 1960s British rock history, triggering a backlash against the establishment and winning the band even more fans.

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‍HIGH SOCIETY LIMPS ITS WAY

‍INTO THE PAGES OF FASHION

‍IF WE think some fashion trends today are barmy then spare a thought for newspaper hacks who worked on a fashion trend in 1860 which seemed just plain daft to me.

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‍It started in Edinburgh and spread to the West Country, and then it made headlines in London — it was society women walking with a fake limp!

‍They called it the ‘Alexandra Limp’ and it was probably the only fad to be born in a sick bed.

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‍Alexandra of Denmark was the bride of the Prince of Wales, and already a 19th Century fashion icon. The clothes she wore were always copied, along with chokers that concealed a scar on her neck. She was the Diana of the day.

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‍And when a bout of rheumatic fever left her with a pronounced limp that was copied too. In the well-do-do hotspots of Britain, trend-setting women began clumping about in a style that suggested they’d recently stood barefoot on burning coals.

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‍At first, it was a DIY affair. Women would simply grab odd shoes to help them totter effectively. But shopkeepers soon realised there was money to be made from wildly mismatched footwear, with one high heel, and one low.

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‍The Northern British Mail in Glasgow seethed: “A monstrosity has made itself visible among the female promenaders in Princes Street. “It is as painful as it is idiotic and ludicrous.”

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‍The fashion editor went on: “Taking my customary walk, observant of men, women and things, I met three ladies. They were all young, all good-looking — and all lame!

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‍“At least, such was my impression, seeing as they all carried handsome sticks and limped. But I could discover no reason why they should do so.

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‍“Indeed, one decent woman expressed her pity as she passed. But then I heard another young woman say to her companion: ‘Why that’s the Alexandra limp! How ugly!’”

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‍The Dundee Courier and Argus was no less contemptuous. “Some remarkably foolish things have been done in imitation of royalty,” the newspaper tutted, “but this is an act which involves a spice of wickedness as well as of folly.”

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‍Tombstone gunman, dentist and gambler Doc Holliday with Wyatt Earp

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‍GUNMAN DENTIST WHO BECAME WYATT EARP’S CLOSEST FRIEND

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‍THE DYING man looked down at his bare feet sticking out of the blankets on his bed. “That’s funny,” he said, looking at his toes.

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‍They were the last words of notorious gunman and gambler Doc Holliday who always thought he would die in a gunfight with his boots on.

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‍The legendary Wild West killer and lifelong friend of Tombstone Deputy Marshall Wyatt Earp, died with his boots on from tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on November 8, 1887, aged just 36.

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‍And in a revealing Press interview I have just unearthed from an American magazine at the time called ‘Human Life’, the legendary lawman, gunfighter and gambler Bat Masterson, wrote an article about the Doc’s life and what he was really like.

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‍Masterson became a prominent sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph in the early 1900s when his Wild West days were over. This is what he said: “Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man.

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‍“Physically he was a weakling who could not have whipped a healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a go-as-you-please fist fight, and no one knew this better than himself.

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‍“This was why he was so ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty. He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarrelling, and, among men who did not fear him, was very much disliked.”

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‍Masterson went on to say that the Doc possessed none of the qualities of leadership such as those that distinguished such men as Wyatt Earp. And he seemed unable to keep out of trouble for any great length of time. We go on to learn that John Henry Holliday, was born a weakly boy with a cleft palate on August 14, 1851, and had to be fed by his mother with an eyedropper and a spoon.

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‍His uncle was a doctor in Atlanta who performed surgery on him, and his mother spent years training him to conquer a speech impediment before she died of tuberculosis. She also instilled in him Southern etiquettes, which would forever be part of his charm.

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‍At 20, Holliday earned a degree in dentistry in Pennsylvania, and hoping the climate in the American Southwest would ease his chest symptoms, he moved to Arizona to set up as a dentist but drifted into gambling.

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‍Wyatt Earp was a manager and part-owner of the gaming concessions at the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone and Holliday got a job there as a gambler playing for the house. It was considered one of the most elegant saloons on Allen Street.

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‍One night the Doc saved Earp’s life during a saloon confrontation and they became close friends. Holliday’s lover was Mary Horony-Cummings, known as Big Nose Kate, a Hungarian-born prostitute, gambler, and businesswoman who stayed loyal to him throughout his life, even though they were renown for their drunken fights.

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‍In Tombstone, Arizona, gunfights and killings however were commonplace. The town paper had a regular column for such things with the headline: ‘Death’s Doings.’

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‍The paper was morbidly named ‘The Tombstone Epitaph’ and it reported that at around 3pm on October 26, 1881, Earp and Holliday spotted five members of the Clanton-McLaury rustling gang in a vacant lot behind the OK Corral, wearing guns that were banned.

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‍The famous gunfight lasted just 30 seconds, and around 30 shots were fired. No one was sure who fired the first, but most reports say that the shootout began when Virgil Earp, the town’s Marshall, pulled out his revolver and shot cowboy Billy Clanton point-blank in the chest.

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‍Holliday then fired a shotgun blast at rustler Tom McLaury’s chest. Wyatt who was deputising for Vigil, wounded Frank McLaury with a shot in the stomach.

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‍Frank managed to get off a few shots before collapsing, as did Clanton. When the dust cleared, Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead, and Virgil, his brother Morgan and the Doc were wounded. Two others in the gang ran for the hills.

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‍Sheriff John Behan of Cochise County, who witnessed the shootout, charged the Earps and Holliday with murder. A month later, however, a Tombstone judge found the men not guilty, ruling that they were “fully justified in committing these homicides.”

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‍The townspeople, however, were split and many saw the Earps as just killers.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍13 April. 2026

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