It wasn’t a sophisticated plan: steal the picture, sell the picture, spend the money. What – as they say – could possibly go wrong? One of the reasons it wasn’t sophisticated is that we weren’t sophisticated; I was sixteen and my best friend, and accomplice, was seventeen. The irony was that we really didn’t need the money. Yup, sorry, I don’t know what to tell you: we were posh boys from wealthy families, privileged in every way. And nothing we were into would have been improved by having more money. We wouldn’t have known what to do with it. All we really wanted was girls.
It was 1978 and I was what was called a ‘weekly boarder’ at Westminster School, an exclusive, private school in the heart of London. My parents were abroad, so I spent weekdays at school and weekends with my gran. A tiny, white-haired widow, she lived in a mews house in Maida Vale; a life of delicate china cups and saucers, and Radio 4, and unwavering routine, and never swearing. The worst anyone ever heard from her was “I hope you have bad dreams!”. She had a genteel Edinburgh accent that neither my parents nor I had inherited. Needless to say, she only knew the fake, paragon version of me.
Anyway, Westminster School backed on to Westminster Abbey. In fact, our morning assemblies were in the abbey itself and my ‘house’ – the school was organised into Hogwarts-style houses – sat in a transept next to Poets Corner. Every morning, I was surrounded by memorials and busts of writers like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens, and loomed over by pale marble statues of other be-robed literary luminaries, usually with an open book in one hand, the other hand limp, in a kind of flounce of indifference, as if writing was almost too easy. Back then, of course, I didn’t give a shit about any of that. Also, I say “every morning” when, in truth, most days I skipped Abbey to join my mates in a local greasy spoon.
Westminster in those days was a very white school, which, I should point out, is pertinent to this story. By the way, remember the word pertinent, it’ll come up again later. There was one boy whose mum was Jamaican, a couple of Indian boys, and one Sri Lankan, but almost all the rest of us were white Londoners. So almost no one of colour...and no girls.
I don’t know whether I was racist back then. I don’t think so. I mean, I hope not, obviously. I didn't want to be then any more than I do now. The thing is, I’m actually slightly suspicious of anyone who proudly proclaims themselves not to be. Nowadays, I regularly try to test and correct myself on any unwitting prejudices. But back then, I had no notion of whether I was racist or not, and no way of testing myself either. My world was mono-racial. I’m blonde and fair-skinned and my best friend, Cam, my co-protagonist in the caper, was ginger-haired and freckled.
Then, one fine day, reggae and, specifically, Bob Marley, entered our world, and promptly became our ‘thing’. Having a ‘thing’, Cam and I thought, any ‘thing’, would attract girls. It wasn’t that girls liked reggae – if anything, the opposite – but it was crucial, nevertheless, to have a ‘thing’: to be the fencing guy (no surprise that Westminster had a fencing team), or the hat guy, or the ham radio guy. Any ‘thing’.
The revolution began like this: One of our house prefects had been to the concert at the Lyceum Theatre in London that was recorded and became the iconic ‘Bob Marley Live!’ album. One day he played it for us, while providing a vivid commentary of the whole experience. By the time we got to ‘No Woman, No Cry’, we were gone! That bass, that weird organ, that voice reaching out to us, and those cool lyrics! We’d found our ‘thing’.
Only prefects were allowed record players at school, which neither Cam nor I were, so we had to play our reggae albums at my gran’s on the record player she called a gramophone, and that had settings for 33’s, 45’s and 78’s. So that gran wouldn’t be able to make out the lyrics, we played them at a low volume. But we needn’t have worried. One morning at breakfast, as she was cutting the crusts off my toast, I realised she was lightly singing International Herb by Joseph Hill, except she was singing: “I love it, I love and I love it, man, the Internationale.” My worry was that one day she’d ask me what ‘The Internationale’ was.
We started off with albums, but soon we were going to concerts: Aswad, Steel Pulse, Burning Spear...Every weekend. Usually small concerts in out-of-the-way venues, pubs mostly, sometimes university bars. It could be a little scary when you first walked in, but then you grew accustomed to the fug of weed smoke, and the cagey stares, and you loosened up. We were tourists in the reggae world: timid, respectful and curious, and I guess that showed. If anything, we were a novelty: very young, uber-white and possibly, even, a couple. Certainly no threat. And anyway, everyone was stoned and mellow, including us.
To explain my recurrent red eyes to gran, I invented allergies first to Cam’s mohair jumper, then to pollen, and to horses. She bought antihistamines for me, and eye-drops. She was, actually, a sweetheart. After one concert, when I came home in the wee hours and demolished an entire packet of Ritz crackers that would have lasted her months, she started making sure that there were always Ritz crackers in the cupboard. To show my gratitude, I’d take care to nibble at them in front of her, when I didn’t even like Ritz crackers.
But to get on with how our great art heist came about, one night Cam and I went to see a reggae artist called Dillinger at Dingwalls Dancehall in a cobbled corner of Camden Lock. We’d made our way to the bar, and I’d just squeezed to the front. It was always a toss-up who’d order. Cam was older but I was taller. As I waited for our drinks, a Rastaman thrust me a huge, conical joint, freeing up both hands so he could reach through and grapple together an improbable number of Red Stripe lager bottles. Cam and I tracked him as he wandered off, delivered the beers to his table, then returned to retrieve the joint.
“Thanks, man.” He looked us up and down.Then, as he took the joint: “Ya want a toke?”
Cam played it cool: “Sure.”
I didn’t: “Oh Yes, please!” As if I’d just been offered jelly at a children's birthday party.
The Rasta laughed. “Come wid me, boys!”
He led us to his table and introduced us as his “young friends”. A couple of the group acknowledged us with disinterested nods, but mostly they’d already turned their attention to the stage where Dillinger had just started his set with his trademark cover of ‘Cocaine in my Brain’. I started mouthing the words. Someone else arrived with more beers, including a couple for Cam and me and, somehow, we were in.
It turned out that the Rasta was called Tony. I guess he was thirty-odd, with sharp cheekbones, tidy dreadlocks, and a warm Jamaican accent. We soon came to refer to him as ‘Dreadlocks Tony’, to set him apart from, and above, any other Tonys we knew. At the end of the night, we went back with him to his squat in swanky St Johns Wood. It was a huge, detached, Moorish-style mansion, ironically called Alhambra Cottage, with horseshoe-arched windows and arabesque motifs. There must have been six or seven bedrooms, as well as various reception rooms converted into more bedrooms, and a population that appeared to fluctuate between five and twenty.
For a period of a few months we hung out there a lot. I never knew exactly what it was that Tony liked about us. Cam could roll a very decent spliff, and we laughed at his jokes, but also, I guess, we had some ‘book learning’, and that seemed to intrigue him. Plus, we knew our stuff about reggae. To impress him, we showed him Cam’s copy of Prince Buster’s 1968 single ‘Take it Easy’ (Cam’s pride and joy), and my precious copy of Bob Marley’s ‘Catch a Fire’ album, in the original cover shaped like a Zippo lighter, that hinged open like one.
Tony’s job in the house was to cook; mountains of rice topped with a dollop of corrosively spicy, meat gravy. He liked to call it goat curry, even though it was most often chicken. “Soul food, because,” in Tony’s words, “you can’t fuck on an empty belly.” Cam and I nodded sagely, hoping to convey that we’d done loads of fucking. Anywhere between eleven at night and three in the morning, the squatters in residence, and their partners and friends, magically started to drift into the kitchen to be fed: guys (mostly) and girls; black (mostly) and white; stoned (mostly) and in various states of dress and undress. Night and day didn’t have quite the same boundaries in Alhambra Cottage as elsewhere.
Meanwhile, back at Westminster we showed off to the greasy spoon crew about ‘Dreadlocks Tony’ and squat life. To judge by the interest they showed, it seemed that maybe reggae wasn’t our ‘thing’, but ‘Dreadlocks Tony’ was: the palatial, Moorish house, the curries, the half-naked girls, the musicians jamming in the sitting room, the shopping bags full of weed. I’d taken to wearing a wristband in Rasta colours: red, yellow, and green, signifying blood, gold, and nature. Gran remarked: “Very snazzy, I’m sure.”
At the same time, we were showing off to Tony about the rarified families our school friends came from: one was the son of a cabinet minister; another the son of a household-name Hollywood producer; another came from a dynasty which owned a bank that bore the family name. But the one that really resonated with Tony was Cam’s friend Donny Kleinveldt, whose father owned platinum mines in South Africa and who lived in a mansion on The Bishops Avenue, a.k.a. Billionaire’s Row.
In truth, Donny wasn’t a member of the greasy spoon club, but we did sometimes hang out with him, and swim in his pool, and play on his grass tennis courts. His father also had an art collection that hung throughout the mansion, and included a couple of paintings even I recognised (a Picasso and a Monet), as well as – highly pertinent to this story – a lesser- known, but just as valuable, Rubens drawing; a reddish-tinged sketch of a naked woman coyly twisting away from the artist.
I don’t remember who first suggested the idea of stealing the Rubens, but I could hazard a guess. This was the Seventies, the height of apartheid, and all white South African men were Tony’s enemies. Two years earlier, Tony Greig, a South African who’d somehow become captain of the England cricket team, had boasted that he was going to make the West Indies team grovel. “Grovel”! Over that summer, the West Indies pummeled England, but the word used by their South African captain, which had been widely perceived as a racist slur, had passed into legend. My school friends and I were doing our bit for the anti-apartheid movement by, when we remembered, boycotting South African oranges and grapes.
Meanwhile, Tony had his own course of retribution brewing. We had the book-learning, but he had the street smarts, and we were in thrall to him. Cam maybe even more than me. So we were easily led. Tony and Cam were going to do the dirty work, while my role was to
make a copy of the drawing from a folio in the British Library, so they wouldn't nab the wrong picture. Once the Rubens was in our hands, we’d store it in a luggage lock-up at Euston station. Our roles pretty much reflected our personalities: Tony assertive and first-in; Cam the enthusiastic follower; me the eager tag-along. Doberman, Labrador and Collie.
The great art heist went down like this...
On the allotted evening, when we knew Donny’s parents were going to be out, Cam spent an awkward couple of hours at the swanky Bishops Avenue mansion pretending he got on better with Donny than he did, smoking premium weed that Tony had supplied, listening to records and watching Donny’s dad’s porn videos. Then, at eight o’clock precisely, the doorbell rang; Cam made sure to answer it with Donny; and – Enter Tony!
Nearly half a century on, I’m still glad I wasn’t there to watch Tony swing a pantomime punch at Cam’s stomach, or to witness Cam doubling up and falling backwards in a piece of bogus over-acting straight out of a school play. Likewise, I remain relieved not to have seen Tony push past Donny and stride around the house as if looking for any random treasure to take. Again, I have no doubt the pretense would have been cringe-inducingly hammy. Eventually, Tony lifted the Rubens off the wall, popped it into his backpack and left, leaving Donny and Cam to call the police.
It was no Ocean’s Eleven, but we didn’t think it needed to be. Job done! Or not...
The police’s suspicions must’ve been raised from their first interview with Cam, whose performance, once again, would have been less than Oscar-worthy. Although maybe they knew all along that the theft was both the work of total amateurs and an inside job. Either way, the next day two officers came to Westminster School, commandeered a room and, along with the headmaster, summoned the greasy spoon crew one-by-one. By the time they got to me, they already knew all about ‘Dreadlocks Tony', the only black adult any of us were acquainted with. Every member of the club had pointed the finger at Cam and me. They’d had no choice. We’d been so public about our exciting new friendship. We had, as Hamlet's saying goes, been hoist by our own petard. It was all so obvious that the investigating officers seemed to find our ineptitude wearying.
Donny was rightly and immediately exonerated. Then his father’s people were involved and a deal done with Cam and Tony to return the Rubens. In exchange there would be no criminal charges, but Cam would not return to Westminster after the summer holidays. Tony was given an official police caution. In the wake of the robbery, my efforts to keep a low profile consisted of ditching my Rasta wristband and removing from my bedroom wall the poster of Bob Marley smoking a giant spliff. Gran was greatly pleased. “Smoking! It’s not a good role model for young men. And how do those people wash that hair!”
Meanwhile, having surrendered the Rubens – which never even made it to the Euston lock -up, only as far as the back of Tony’s cupboard – Tony went missing. In the following weeks, Cam and I visited Alhambra Cottage a couple times and rang the doorbell, but there was never any answer. From anyone. The house was empty. The last time we went there, we saw two big men trying to lever open the front door with a crowbar. They didn’t look like coppers. We walked on, casual as you like, crossed the road and hurried away. We heard later from one of his fellow squatters whom we ran into at a gig, that Tony had ‘pre-sold’ the Rubens to some Dutch criminals, who now wanted their money back, or the Rubens, or Tony’s head on a pike. He claimed that Tony had gone to lie low in Jamaica. We never saw him again.
Cam was duly expelled. Like the proper pal he was, he never said a word about my involvement. Meanwhile, Donny’s dad moved him to a different school and, in a private dressing down from our headmaster, I was warned off contacting either him or Cam ever again. The latter half of that didn’t stick; Cam is, to this day, my best friend.
I’d never mentioned to Gran that Tony was black. It just wouldn't have been worth it. It wasn't that she was racist. Well, I suppose that technically she was…probably…but only in the way that so many white British grannies back then were. The family had long since got used to her go-to euphemism for black people, which is that she’d describe someone, say, behind the counter at the Post Office, or later on in life, her carers, as having a “lovely smile”. When we’d tut and roll our eyes, she’d get exasperated and exclaim “I don’t know what we’re supposed to call them nowadays!”
“Well not ‘them’” for a start, gran!”
“Is it... ‘coloured’?” She’d ask.
“No! And you only ever need to mention someone’s race…if it’s pertinent.” (That word again!)
And there's the moral of the story, if there is one. If only we’d just called him Tony.
Jonathan Hall is a multi-award-winning screenwriter/producer, with over twenty years’ experience in films and TV. His musical feature film SOLO! (writer and producer) was produced in 2018, won awards around the world, and is now available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc. Earlier in life, he founded cult cricket brand Millichamp & Hall. More recently, with his wife Cassandra, he founded the renowned La Montaña, home fragrance company. He now lives between Brighton in the UK, and a remote, mountain village in Spain.
What a fabulous tale!