A SQUARE RIFE WITH SPIES AND SCANDAL
Scandal At Dolphin Square: A Notorious History Simon Danczuk and Daniel Smith The History Press €28 ★★★★★
One address in London has attracted more celebrities and criminals, and sometimes celebrities who are criminals, than any other. Dolphin Square, a block of spectacular 1930s flats by the Thames in wealthy Pimlico, consists of 1,200 dwellings, ranging from chic little pieds-a-terre to three-bedroom family homes. The square’s Art Deco architecture has made it a familiar location for TV period dramas such as Poirot.
As Simon Danczuk and Daniel Smith explain in this rollicking romp of a book, Dolphin Square has been home to everyone from Sid James to Princess Anne by way of Oswald Mosley, Charles de Gaulle, Christine Keeler (right), Shirley Bassey and an array of politicians.
Spies also figure very strongly in this book, probably because MI5 and MI6 are just around the corner. There is John Vassall, a mildmannered Admiralty clerk who sold secrets to the Soviets. It was his flat in Dolphin Square, clearly out of the reach of Vassall’s modest income, that gave the game away when the authorities came calling in 1962. Before the Second World War a wonderful pair of spinster sisters called Ida and Louise Cook risked their lives by regularly setting out from Pimlico to Germany, where they smuggled out expensive jewellery and furs belonging to Jewish families who were in danger of having everything confiscated by the Nazis. As Ida would note years later: ‘The funny thing is we weren’t the James Bond type – we were just respectable civil service typists.’ Other women in Dolphin Square were the opposite of respectable.
There was Sybil Benson who, in 1972, was exposed by the People newspaper for running ‘a torture house’ out of her flat. Here she catered for the many male Establishment figures who liked nothing more than popping round for a good flogging. Other female residents took a more confrontational view when it came to defending the new permissive society: in 1965 three women decided to go skinnydipping in the square’s swimming pool. Slipping through the fingers of a police officer, each was fined £2 ‘for using insulting behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace’. Less light-hearted are the many accounts of the residents who died in their flats without anyone knowing, sometimes for weeks. For older residents who spent decades in the square, there is a lingering sense of sadness and decay baked into the magnificent brickwork of London’s most celebrated housing estate.