Hot Art (11 page)

6.

BRIGHTON KNOCKERS

“I became very good at a bad thing.”
PAUL

P
AUL HENDRY
, a.k.a. Paul Walsh, a.k.a. Turbo Paul, a.k.a. the Turbocharger, was born in Brighton in 1964, one year before the first Art and Antiques police squad in the English-language world was established there.

I visited Brighton on a couple of occasions: wandered from the train station down through the Lanes to the pebble shore, where the grand white Brighton Pier stretches out over the sparkling water. On a sunny day it feels like a perfectly formed and packaged childhood memory from an old movie. The pier is white, like a big cruise-ship deck, and weighed down with stalls hawking doughnuts and hot chocolate, piles of candy, carnival rides, and games. Across the water, in the distance, lie the remains of a second pier. That pier was destroyed by fire; many residents suspect arson. Its charred husk lies deteriorating, a half-sunken pirate ship abandoned in the shallows—and a perfect physical symbol of the split personality that is Brighton. In one sense, Brighton is an easy getaway from the sprawling gloom of London—cheerful, relaxed, and semi-quaint. But there's a darker edge to its cheerfulness, and it was on that edge that Paul grew up.

Paul told me he was given away by his birth mother and adopted into a family on the outskirts of the resort town. He was raised as part of the lower class that serviced the hotels, shops, and restaurants where the rich paraded in the summer months. His family lived in a three-bedroom apartment in the council estate of Moulsecoomb, built in 1918 for English soldiers returning from the First World War. He remembers seeing posters advertising the units as “Homes Fit for Heroes.” That wasn't how Paul perceived his circumstances.

“People who are born poor stay poor,” he said. “The place where I grew up was built for cannon fodder. And that's what I was supposed to be—fodder for a consumer society.” As a kid Paul played around on the piers, did cartwheels on the beach, and ate doughnuts in the sun. And because he lived on the seedier side of town, he recognized early that Brighton was a transient place.

“A lot of people would come to Brighton and do things they would never do in London. It's the kind of place you'd take your mistress for a dirty weekend. Brighton is certainly not the kind of place that inspires work. There's always someone wandering around on holiday,” he said. Paul would see the “English gents” strolling along the piers, but he also saw the hookers at three o'clock in the morning “with bright red lipstick and short cut skirts, rubbing their crotches.” On its surface Brighton was its own postcard, as advertised, but on the edge of that picture was a carnival of souls.

Paul dropped out of school and had no prospects. He had little formal education, few skills, no contacts, and he didn't have a vision. He was, though, attracted to the wealth that he could see all around him, in the pockets of the tourists flooding his home turf.

“I wanted money. And in my neighbourhood, there was the right way to make money, and there was the fast way. I found the fast way much more attractive,” he said. “You have to understand the history of the place to know that the criminal element was right there, all around me, waiting for me.”

Brighton is only seventy kilometres south of London, and its beach is famous for all-day, all-night rock festivals. Fat-boy Slim played here in 2002, in what turned into a legendary party—more than 200,000 people showed up to dance. The beach got trashed.

The shore was first settled around 1000
CE
, but it was the rock stars of the eighteenth century who made it famous— royalty. In 1783, England's Prince Regent visited Brighton, and he fell in love with it. Later, after he was crowned King George
IV
, he constructed an extravagant Royal Pavilion in the centre of Brighton that functioned as a sanctuary during his reign. George was famous for womanizing, and he probably did a lot of that in Brighton. The king often retreated to Brighton's shores during his rule of the expanding empire, while his ships brought back amazing riches from the far reaches of the planet—bronze, silver, gold, and other treasures from conquered civilizations.

His presence acted as a magnet for the British aristocracy, who flocked to Brighton and constructed summer mansions. In 1841, a new railway made the trip from London to Brighton more comfortable and faster. Weekend trips from the capital were now possible. A steady flow of urban visitors arrived, as did row upon row of manors and houses, their facades painted in bright colours—whites, creams, yellows, pale pinks, and blues—like lines of seashells leaning toward the sea. The rich moved in, and so did their service industries: dressmakers, courtiers, and antique dealers.

The dealers set up shops in a labyrinth of narrow streets just a stone's throw from the king's pavilion. That area became known as the Lanes, and as the population and reputation of Brighton grew, so did the steady stream of customers in the Lanes. The merchants there did a fast business with the aristocracy and the upper middle class, who needed to decorate their new homes.

“A long time ago these lords and ladies built these big houses on the seafront, and they furnished them with antiques and paintings,” said Paul. “That's where it all started. Antiques were always big business in Brighton, and there's always going to be someone who figures out a way to exploit that.”

By 1864 the Grand Hotel faced the sea, and other hotels followed. Construction began on two great piers that stretched out into the water, first the West Pier in 1866, then the Palace Pier in 1899. These elegant white structures that floated above the waves became the symbols of Brighton's cheerful disposition, as were the candy shops that sold the now famous Brighton Rock—long sugary-white sticks infused with swirls of reds, blues, and greens (they are delicious on a sunny day).

Between 1800 and 1900, Brighton's population swelled from 7,000 to 160,000, and after the First World War the population grew again, this time with returning soldiers and their families searching for the same qualities that a king had once craved: a quiet, clean, bright place to live near the sea. The British government supported this less affluent class of newcomers with affordable housing. The estates of Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb—where Paul grew up—soon dotted the outskirts of the city.

A group of those returning soldiers formed the core of a new criminal element that operated in the shadow of the resort culture, providing the kind of perks some vacationers were looking for—drugs, girls, gambling: all the obvious vices to entertain a tourist for a weekend. This was Graham Greene's territory, the underworld he chronicled in
Brighton Rock
. “All of this criminal history came before me, and it was part of the foundation that formed me. That became my world,” Paul said. It was the other Brighton, of housing projects and petty criminals who circled tourists and subsisted on pickpocketing and scamming.

“That was the beginning,” Paul told me. “But it kept growing. During World War
II
gangs of scavengers and mercenaries used Brighton,” making it their jumping-off point for quick trips into London during the Blitzes, to raid and pillage empty houses while the population took refuge in bomb shelters. They stole furniture, antiques, food-ration coupons, and anything else that was valuable. “They'd steal the shoes off your feet if they could,” said Paul. “But they always came back to Brighton, a safe haven where they were out of reach of London police and the British military.”

Many of the criminals who took refuge in Brighton during the war found it comfortable, as so many other people had before them. Brighton's air and water became legendary as a healing ground for tired urban souls. Tourism remained its lifeblood, but by 2000, the population of Brighton had almost tripled from the turn of the previous century, to over 450,000.

“So there were these two worlds,” said Paul. On its surface Brighton was idyllic. It was a sunny slice of real estate in a famously rain-swept country where the upper middle classes of London could retreat during the summer months for fresh air and fun in the sun, to stroll down the beautiful white piers sucking on a piece of Brighton Rock. In the other Brighton lived the merchants and families who worked the service stalls, as did the bourgeoning criminal class.

“By the 1960s, Brighton attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists a year, some of them from as far away as America, who were drawn specifically to the Lanes, to tour the antiques,” Paul told me. For almost two centuries these two worlds—the upper crust and the working class—existed quietly beside each other, conveniently detached. In 1964, the year Paul was born, those two spheres collided in a new way.

“
THIS IS HOW
it happened,” Paul said. In the middle of Brighton, just a few minutes from the train station, is a big shopping mall called Churchill Square. Outside the mall are about a dozen food vendors, including one that sells delicious Cornish pasties. The mall itself is pure suburbia. Before the mall, there had been a large open-air market, filled with hundreds of stalls, where locals could stroll to buy fresh produce. “That market was home to all these fruit and vegetable sellers, before my time,” Paul said. “They had a singsong patois: ‘I got strawberries-strawberries-strawberries-for-sale.'”

The market was loud and dirty and served a community need. It also provided vital employment for its vendors and their families. But as Brighton grew and commercialized, the city council had ambitious plans. In 1964 it voted to close the market and make way for the massive American-style shopping centre—progress.

“The vendors suddenly found themselves unemployed and, according to city planners, obsolete. Those vendors weren't about to go quietly. They'd been hawking produce to Brighton for decades,” Paul told me. “Something unexpected happened. Something unforeseen. The vendors adapted. They were forced into becoming entrepreneurs overnight.”

In the following weeks and months, a sound echoed all over Brighton: fists knocking on doors, up and down the rows of cheerfully painted houses. The merchants were still singing, but they were wandering through the streets, roving door to door, selling their fruit and vegetables direct. The residents of Brighton enjoyed the new service. Why not? It was a welcome convenience—free grocery delivery.

“What happened next happened quickly,” said Paul, who had heard the story told many times. “The fruit sellers realized that some of those people were less interested in buying produce and more interested in selling the junk that they'd accumulated for more than a century in their homes—cracked dishes, old fridges, scrap metal, a set of old chairs, peeling silverware, and all sorts of trinkets. Stuff.”

The smart merchants adjusted, and some people who had never hawked fruit or vegetables joined in. Produce wasn't needed to make a living. What was required were social skills, powers of negotiation, and an eye for “good junk.” The roving merchants created a crude and more intimate predecessor to eBay. Family heirlooms changed hands quickly on doorsteps, for cash on the spot. For many people this was just another added convenience—a way to clean out their closets and cupboards and earn a little money while they did it. It wasn't even necessary to haul anything to the curb for the garbage collection. The merchants, or “knockers,” as they became known, carried it away for them. Free grocery delivery, plus 1-555-
GOT
-
JUNK
service, combined.

It was a win-win situation for residents and merchants, or so those residents thought. “But you know people,” laughed Paul. “If they can exploit a situation, they will. And they did.”

Brighton was, and is still, under the jurisdiction of the Sussex Police. Their jurisdiction stretches over a large section of the coast, including Hove, Eastbourne, and Horsham. Brighton is its largest urban centre within that jurisdiction. By the end of 1965, the Sussex Police were receiving a high volume of phone calls from angry Brighton residents. Houses were being burglarized, and at far higher rates than ever recorded in Brighton's history. All the usual things were going missing— cash and jewellery—but thieves were also targeting such items as antiques, lamps, clocks, and sometimes even landscape and still-life paintings. Sussex Police did some investigating: the break-ins were an unintended consequence of the rise of the knockers.

The business model had evolved in a matter of months, from fruit to junk, but the merchants were no longer standing on the front steps of the houses they visited. Instead people were inviting them into their living rooms to inspect the wares on offer. On the surface, knocking was a service, but now the business model had another layer.

Knockers spent their days wandering through houses and buying families' refuse, and they ended their days at the Lanes or the North Lanes, selling the junk to savvy, educated antique dealers. The dealers could discern between lesser and greater varieties of junk, and they were finding some incredibly valuable merchandise. “Ah, but there was something else going on now,” Paul continued. “The information was also moving to more insidious circles, from the knocker to the criminal down the block.” Knocking turned into a devious game that allowed thieves to peek at the inventory inside the houses of the upper middle class. It was a plague on the houses of Brighton, but it was a godsend for Paul.

In the 1960s, art theft was still an eccentric crime, relegated to the file of international mystery. The Sussex Police believed they were dealing with a local nuisance, and one that could be contained. Sussex's five man art theft unit did not possess the foresight or resources to stop what was happening. The problem was not contained. The movement was still going strong when, in 1979, Paul joined the fraternity of knockers working the streets of Brighton. He spent his first few days with a family down the block—a father and two sons who showed him the tricks of the trade. Soon Paul was happy to go knocking on his own.