The tear gas hit and I thought: right, I’m in trouble now
Trampled. Dragged along the street. Left bleeding in a heap. Fashion doyenne Virginia Bates, 75, recounts how she stumbled into a Parisian riot
WHEN Virginia Bates set off for a fashion party in Paris on December 1st last year, she had no idea of the trauma ahead.
By the end of that fateful Saturday, this 75-year-old London fashion icon and grandmother of four had been trampled to the ground, kicked and beaten, during the yellow vest riots in Paris. She almost lost an eye when her head was sliced open, and suffered a shattered shoulder as she was knocked down by a stampede of protestors.
She’s still understandably fragile when we meet at her home in Chiswick, West London. She’s had surgery on her left shoulder and her arm is in a sling. The stitches above her right eye have gone, but only yesterday her doctor discovered her right knee was also fractured during the attack.
‘I’ve been walking on it for a month,’ she marvels. They can’t strap up the knee because she would lose mobility, so she’s been warned not to trip or fall as it heals naturally.
For a stylish woman, youthfully slender with a chic blonde bob, she has little care for her present appearance. She can’t wear make-up and is living in pyjamas and leggings because they’re the easiest things to pull on with one hand.
‘I’m just lucky to be alive,’ she tells me, making Earl Grey tea for us in the basement kitchen. ‘My surgeon can’t believe how quickly I’m healing. We’re good stock, us Sixties gals!’
Virginia, a former actress, is best known as the queen of vintage. In between acting jobs — she was in a Hammer House of Horror films as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange — she picked up Victorian beaded dresses, Edwardian coats and antique furnishings for a song.
Her famous shop, Virginia Antiques in West London, which ran from 1971 to 2013, attracted the likes of Helena Christensen, John Galliano and Donna Karan. When she finally closed the doors, she moved her treasures to her London home, but still sells pieces to private customers. SHE
has no intention of retiring. Last September, she staged a Follies-style fashion show for Transatlantic Fashion Week aboard the Queen Mary 2.
Three days before the Paris attack, she was attending a party to celebrate British fashion held by Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, at Buckingham Palace. The night before, she was at Claridge’s for a party hosted by Vogue editor Edward Enninful.
And yet the episode in Paris has undoubtedly knocked her confidence.
‘I’m just so jumpy,’ she sighs, and admits she’s considering trauma therapy. Fiercely independent, she has lived alone since her husband, actor Ralph Bates (best known for playing villainous George Warleggan in the original series of Poldark) died of pancreatic cancer in 1991.
Self- pity doesn’t suit her, she insists, but she feels more vulnerable. ‘The things that upset me are the things that trigger the memory, like fireworks going off on New Year’s Eve. I found myself weeping into my pillow. But I know I can’t control that: I just have to get over it.’
Virginia arrived in Paris by train at 1.50pm as the third weekend of protests was taking a grip. She says there was no warning from Eurostar to passengers that they were entering a danger zone.
Her plan was to drop off her luggage at the Hotel Raphael in the 16th arrondissement, the area sandwiched between the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, run some errands and then go to an early evening event, a small party on the eve of the big dinner the following evening.
‘I hadn’t really wanted to go,’ she admits. ‘Sometimes I get that 5 o’clock moment, when I think: “Do I really want to do that?” But I know that if I do, it will be good for me. I push myself because going anywhere at my age, on my own, is quite tough. And this was Paris!’ she chuckles.
Her taxi driver warned her some of the roads were closed off around the Arc de Triomphe but didn’t seem to realise the scale of the disorder that evening.
Protests against fuel tax had erupted in November when people across France donned gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’) to disrupt traffic, but these quickly grew into more general discontent aimed at President Macron. By the time Virginia visited, Paris was in the grip of serious violence. ‘After 25 minutes, I was in a war zone,’ she says.
When the taxi couldn’t reach her hotel, she got out and started walking, unaware this was taking her deeper into streets where protests were turning very nasty.
‘When I got out of the car, I saw some of the yellow jackets and people on the ground. I don’t know if they were beating them up. I was just frozen in disbelief.
‘I could see smoke ahead and I thought: “That must be cars on fire.” It’s probably naive of me, I’d obviously followed the protests on the news, but I hadn’t realised other opportunists were joining in.
‘ They just wanted to make trouble — nothing to do with the protests.’
She had never seen this kind of anger, this hunger for violence. ‘They were ripping up scaffolding and railings that go around trees and throwing them at cars and blowing the cars up.
‘Suddenly the tear gas started. I couldn’t see where I was going, my eyes were streaming, and it was in my throat. I was thinking: “Right, I’m in trouble now”.’
She knew she looked out of place in her cashmere coat and black Alaia skirt, ready for drinks.
‘I’m dressed for fashionable Paris. I stick out a mile. I’ve got my embroidered leather bag and my wheelie suitcase.
‘I’m the only woman in sight. It’s all men. They’re carrying poles and chucking them in the shops.’
The irony of her early Hammer House fame isn’t lost on her.
‘ I’ve been in horror films, covered in blood, where you’re running or being chased, or being murdered. But this was … out of control.’
She made urgent phone calls to her actress daughter Daisy in London and the people she was meeting in Paris to explain where she was. ‘It was a wide street, but I couldn’t see any of the road signs, just a McDonald’s on the other side,’ she recalls.
Back in London, Daisy was out with her children, aged nine and five, in the car. Virginia told her she was scared — ‘The first time ever in my life I’ve said that’ — but that she’d be all right.
Yet the next thing she was flying, as someone smashed her from behind.
‘I remember being thumped on the back onto the ground.’ She was lying dazed when a thief tried to take her bag.
‘I’m face-down, with one of the handles of my bag over my shoulder, and someone tried to grab the other handle.’
The thief dragged her along the rubble- strewn street. Some primitive instinct told her she wasn’t going to let go.
‘My life is in that bag. My passport, euros, credit card, my door key, diary. And my little bit of Mac lipstick that they don’t make anymore. I can’t lose that.
‘You sort of go potty,’ she smiles. It’s a feeling many woman will understand. ‘And actually I did manage to hang onto my bag.’
Another person helped her to kick the assailant off.
‘There was one kind person.’ But in that moment of victory, she realised blood was pouring from her head.
Later a plastic surgeon told her: ‘This wasn’t just pavement — this was something really sharp you fell on.’
She passed out with the pain and people trampled over her; ‘Later, I found footprints on my black skirt.’
It’s incredibly shocking that both her assailant and the thief felt they could attack a 75-yearold grandmother. Did they think she was much younger?
‘I don’t know. Perhaps from behind I could have looked like a 30-year-old with blonde hair. But I was a woman,’ she says, still shocked. ‘I was a woman.’
Paramedics took her in an ambulance to a street triage unit. ‘I asked where we were going and they said Avenue de Wagram, and I recognised that because that’s where John [Galliano] used to have his shows.’
In big cities like Paris and London, when there’s a bombing or a big catastrophe, they have areas where they’ll have a popup casualty, she explains.
‘Because suddenly, at the end of this little alley, there were floor to ceiling medical supplies with staff pulling out wrapped-up hypodermics and bandages. We were outside, with cobbles on the ground, it was freezing cold.’
Virginia wasn’t the only person hurt. ‘This guy sitting next to me, was bending over putting some of his teeth into a dish. There was a man with his leg hanging out. And another guy was naked apart from a plastic bag over his bits. He had three armed police around him, so he was a bit of a villain.’
She was bandaged and taken to hospital by ambulance, where nurses were running through blood- spattered corridors. The pain in her shoulder was ‘excruciating’ and she passed out while being X-rayed.
Ten stitches were put in the gash above her eye ‘with no anaesthetic’. Her French deserted her. ‘When the guy was stitching me up, I was just going: “Gentil, monsieur, gentil. Excusez moi, gentil.”’
In fact, Monsieur was anything but gentil. She thought the first needle that went in was just going to anaesthetise her.
‘This ghastly man was absolutely brutal. As he wiped the blood pouring down my face, he was pulling it.’
THEnext day, heavily bandaged, she took the Eurostar to London. Back home she retreated to bed. Daisy arranged carers for her ‘but they drove me nuts and spoke to me as if I was 110. “Oh you’re doing so well today, love, I’m so proud of you,”’ she mimics.
‘I wanted to say: “Do you know where I was three nights ago — Buckingham Palace!”’
Four days later she was admitted to the Edward VII Hospital in Marylebone, where she had shoulder surgery.
Doctors were also alarmed by Virginia’s infected head wound, and the thick, primitive stitches.
‘They really botched up my face in Paris. My English surgeon said: “My God this is shocking. We don’t see this kind of work any more. This is what you see on a battlefield.” So they had to redo the stitches.’
Today, the stitches are gone, but the sharp object on the pavement went into her bone. ‘ I’m still numb on my head and forehead. And I may not be able to move my forehead. Which is kind of great in a way, because I’ll never need Botox,’ she says dryly. ‘That’s always a plus.’
Black humour is her style. She’s known painful times: Ralph’s death at 51 came just six weeks after his diagnosis. But again, she refused to let it crush her spirit, and instead set up the Ralph Bates Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund in his name.
Will she go back to Paris? ‘Yes, but there is a side of me that is always going to be a bit anxious.’
Her goal is to get her injured shoulder back into her vintage Paul Poiret coat for an exhibition of Stephen Jones’s hats (she owns several) at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion in February.
‘We don’t want this all to be about the bloody accident, do we?’ she says, momentarily stern. ‘I don’t want to be a moaner. It’s about being a survivor.’
‘I can’t move my forehead. Great! I’ll never need Botox’