Thug on and off the screen
QUESTION Was the 1970s actor John Bindon a real-life gangster?
John Bindon’s menacing screen persona was based on his real behaviour consorting with London gangsters.
Boxing promoter Joe Pyle claimed the Kray Twins paid Bindon to ‘sort out a problem’ for them and ‘it wouldn’t be a kiss on the cheek’ and that ‘Bindon done a few jobs for me’.
however, others saw him differently. his agent, Tony howard, claimed he was ‘not an East End tough. he was a genial fellow welcome everywhere he went, from the highest to the lowest places.’
John Bindon was born in 1943 in Fulham, south-West London. he dropped out of school and earned the nickname Biffo for getting into fights.
his friend, the actor George sewell, recalled he was the funniest guy he knew, but had a vicious right hook.
in his teens, Bindon was sent to Wandsworth prison for possessing live ammunition. There he became a runner for Kray associate Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell who he adored, according to Bindon’s long- term girlfriend Vicki hodge, the daughter of baronet sir John hodge. The Krays would later have Mitchell murdered.
director Ken Loach spotted Bindon in a pub and cast him in his 1967 film Poor Cow. Bindon’s portrayal of a wife batterer and thief set the tone for his acting career.
his next big role was playing a gangster called Moody in nicolas Roeg’s 1970 film Performance, starring Mick Jagger.
Actor Billy Murray recalled how Bindon had organised a pub crawl with one of the cast and got into a fight with three people. The cast member came in the next day pale and shaking. Bindon swanned in and rattled a matchbox in the actor’s face. he opened it to reveal a thumb he’d bitten off in the fight.
Bindon was suspected of running a protection racket in West London, but the true extent of his involvement in the underworld remains uncertain.
his celebrated party piece was hanging five half-pint beer glasses off a certain part of his anatomy. he had affairs with a succession of models, Christine Keeler, Playboy Bunny serena Williams and david Bowie’s wife Angie. his most notorious liaison was, like his gangster career, shrouded in mystery.
Through Vicki hodge, Bindon moved in aristocratic circles and was introduced to Princess Margaret in the late 1960s at her home on Mustique in the Caribbean.
he boasted they had a fling, but Margaret later claimed they had never met — despite photographic evidence.
in the late 1970s, Bindon worked as security for pop and rock stars. he was sacked from Led Zeppelin’s 1977 tour for brawling with crew members, journalists and bouncers.
he developed an addiction to cocaine and heroin, and in 1979 was acquitted of the stabbing to death of gangster Johnny darke — allegedly for a fee of £10,000.
in 1982, he was convicted of threatening a student with a pavement slab and two years later was sentenced to two months in prison for holding a carving knife in the face of a policeman.
Bindon died of an Aids-related illness in 1993 at the age of 50.
Carrie Parker, Ipswich, Suffolk.
QUESTION What was the first e-book?
in 1971, student Michael s hart was given access to a giant Xerox mainframe computer in the University of illinois materials research lab. it was connected to ARPAnet, precursor to the internet.
When he was given a copy of the declaration of independence to celebrate July 4, he was inspired to type the entire text into the computer and make it available to download via ARPAnet. The file, which is considered to be the first e-book, was downloaded by six people.
hart went on to found Project Gutenberg to digitise cultural texts.
in 1990, sony launched the first handheld e-reader, the data discman, which could read e-books stored on Cd-rom. The first 20 were Japanese movie and travel guides, a thesaurus and dictionary.
The modern e-book, where books can be downloaded directly to an e-reader, appeared in early 1999.
nuvomedia’s Rocket eBook, which incorporated digital screens to reflect light like ordinary paper, was pre-loaded with Alice in Wonderland and the Random house dictionary.
its rival, softbook, which was backlit and functioned more like a tablet, came with Michael Wolf’s Burn Rate, an account of the birth of the internet, and Guy Kawasaki’s self-help book Rules For Revolutionaries.
Jim Mason, Crawley, W. Sussex.
QUESTION Where and how is the energy generated to keep the Earth turning?
PREsUMinG an object is turning already, the only additional energy required to maintain motion is to make up for frictional loss.
As space is frictionless, no additional energy is required for the Earth’s spin to continue indefinitely.
The energy required to cause the Earth to spin in the first place came from gravitational collapse when it formed from the primeval dust cloud.
This is similar to the way emptying a bath spins the water into a vortex as it gravitates towards the plughole.
The gravitational potential energy in the dust cloud, combined with any angular momentum it had before collapse, was conserved and converted into the Earth’s rotational energy.
But there is friction caused by the tidal force of the Moon and the Earth’s rotation is slowing down.
According to nasa, the time for one revolution (a day) is 2.5 milliseconds longer than 200 years ago. The lost energy is being transferred to the orbit of the Moon, which is creeping further away. Ken Wood, Newport, Gwent.
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