Nightclub boss Stringfellow enters bible of biographies

‘The business model was to get customers intoxicated with overpriced drinks and to empty their wallets’

PETER STRINGFELLOW helped “shape British history”, Oxford University Press has said, as the “King of Clubs” is inducted into the bible of biographies.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography details the lives of those who have “shaped British history” – including such historical greats as William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill – and the reference work has now been updated with entries on more recent luminaries like Stephen Hawking.

The dictionary’s latest iteration includes an entry on Stringfellow, best known for his nightclub empire and for opening the first topless table-dancing venue in the UK.

The self-described “King of Clubs”, who died in 2018, takes his place alongside genuine royalty in the reference work published by Oxford University Press, together with a host of actors, artists, scientists and politicians.

His entry states that the self-made businessman from Sheffield was “the first club owner to be granted a fully nude licence”.

It continues: “The business model was to get customers intoxicated with overpriced drinks and to empty their wallets and credit cards for various levels of services, some more intimate and in private booths away from public gaze.”

Stringfellow, whose more conventional nightclubs played host to The Beatles and City bankers, is also described in his own words in the dictionary entry as a “sex-mad atheist”.

He began his career as a rock music impresario in the North. In 1980, having deduced that London was where the money was, he opened Stringfellow’s in Covent Garden.

Oxford University Press has indicated that Stringfellow is not technically the only club owner to be included, with Kate Meyrick, the “Nightclub Queen” of Soho in the 1920s, already in the dictionary.

Stringfellow has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography alongside physicist Hawking, former Liberal Democratic leader Paddy Ashdown, novelist VS Naipaul, and comedian Ken Dodd.

The latest update includes 243 additional biographies of men and women “who left their mark on the UK”, and who died in 2018.