You have to remember, I think this is important, is that all the bright young Scots in the
fifties were abandoning ship going to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America.
And here I was, a young American who decided to come here by, actually, my luck, I got
here and went to the university during the day, did my military service at night, and
started a bookshop.
Got demobbed from the military, got permission from the British government, the American
government to stay here, started a bookshop with selling my Volkswagen and a little bit
I'd saved.
I had no money.
I had capital, I think, 600 pounds total capital.
Wrote letters to all the publishers in Britain and America saying, I'm starting this bookshop.
It was next to the university that I was an honest fellow, I'd pay my bills, but it might
be slow sometimes, but I would pay my bills.
And the bookshop was a perfect location between the old quad and George Square, Charles Street,
which no longer exists, but it became a lightning rod, you know, it became a very important
point in the kind of the new Edinburgh, because in 1956 when I arrived, Edinburgh had fully
recovered from the Second World War yet, you know, there was still depression and rationing,
and I had, actually, I had, because of the military, I had pretty good income every month,
plus I didn't smoke or drink at the time, so I had cigarette and booze rationing with
a cigarette and booze rationing and a car, I was an extremely popular fellow.
And the bookshop was wonderful, it was the first time that the paperback had been treated
seriously in Britain before, it was just something you got at the train station, you know, when
you're making a train voyage, and not a serious book at all.
Bookshops who stocked paperbacks, stocked very few, didn't pay much attention to them,
and they were just in the back of the bookshop, you know.
So the bookshop became a meeting place, there was a gallery in the basement, a ground floor,
ground floor had a performance area where we did, we had the hit play of 1960, David
Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which Harold Hobson wrote, you know, he wrote
a piece that was bigger than the cover of this book in the Sunday time, saying that
the best production in Edinburgh was in the tiny bookshop, so I started the half, 369
High Street, which only had one year, the festival of 61, and we had a folk singer in
there and we had performances, coffee and, you know, coffee, coffee house is a good fine
tradition and people like gather around a cup of coffee and talking and meeting and
everything.
My partner in that bookshop, who shall remain nameless right now, left with all the funds
at the end of the festival, and my lawyer said, get out from underneath this or you're
going to be landed with all the bills, because we were a verbal partner.
I think we were written on paper or we were a partnership.
So I unloaded myself, which I felt sad and cheated by, but I didn't lose the bookshop.
And then I always say that the traverse is a result of mainly two women, Tamara Alferoff
and Jane Alexander, Jane Quigley Alexander.
Jane Quigley was an American student studying here and she was the star of the Drama Society,
the Drama Society, and she was also the head of the Edinburgh Festival in 1960 with the
Tennessee Williams Playoffice Descending.
And Tamara Alferoff was a student at Edinburgh University who had been walking down a street
in England and Tom Mitchell, a country farmer in England, stopped in his jaguar when he saw
her walking down the street and asked, where do you live, young lady?
And she said, I'm a student at Edinburgh and he started coming to Edinburgh all the time.
Because of my friendship with Tamara, she was the first person I met in Edinburgh, I think,
tomorrow, one of these accidental meetings in 1956, so I knew her quite well.
And Tom started coming to Edinburgh and, of course, he came to the bookshop because of
Tamara, you know.
And when he started buying property in Edinburgh, I think he paid 250 pounds or something for
the lawn market under the condition that he would develop it and repair it and put it
back and paint it and, you know, everything.
But it was still a good deal for everybody concerned for the city and for Tom.
And then Tom approached me and after the failure of, after I resigned from the Hof, I remember
sitting on a pile of rubble behind what became the first traverse, saying, what would you
like to do here?
And I said, I'd like to start a theatre club, but we can only pay you a shilling a year rent.
And it's going to be a club which will be owned by all the members, which is a legal
entity that I could deal with, you know, and I started approaching people like Sheila and
Tom and Ricky and others that we're going to make a theatre club.
And reason why it was a theatre club, because the licensing laws in those years was terrible.
You could only drink on Sunday if you were a traveller and you could only drink until
10 o'clock in a pub and the pubs were, generally speaking, pretty awful.
And also as a club, you could do this to the Lord Chamberlain, you know, you could put
on any play you wanted.
Before that, all theatres, the Lyceum, every theatre king had to send a script to London
for them to approve.
So as a club, we could do whatever we wanted and also as a club, people paid to join even
though it wasn't much, one or two pounds or something like that.
But that was income and we needed income and it worked.
The trappers became because of Tamara and because of Jane and because of wanting to make the
festival.
Ricky and I said we wanted to make the festival last all year round because of the licensing
laws and because we had a very good restaurant.
It became the center of the French.
Like Summer Hall is in many ways today, you know, it became a place where you could, everyone
gather and talk and meet and exchange tales and gossip and what have you.
I don't know what goes on in this thing called a brain but I went and had tea one day with
a friend called Bill Levy at his house.
He would, he would, been one of the editors.
He was doing research on Ezra Pound and he later did a book on Ezra Pound's war speeches
from Rome, I guess, and I went to have tea with him and I said, Bill, I think we should
start a sexual freedom newspaper and he said, well, what do you mean?
And I said, well, you know, sexuality is a very important aspect of human nature and
nobody's dealing with it and let's deal with it.
He said, okay.
And I said, we can't start it in London because Scotland the Art will close it immediately.
It will be considered obscene.
Let's do it in Amsterdam.
So I borrowed his phone and called a friend in Amsterdam who ran a pop newspaper and I
said, Willem, can we use your office to have, to make the newspaper suck?
And he said, sure.
And I said, you're a graphic designer.
He's a beautiful graphic designer.
I said, you're the graphic designer, okay?
He said, sure, okay, deal me in.
And then I got on the phone and I called up Jermaine Guerrier and I called up Hethkat
Williams and I called up, I don't know, somebody else.
And suddenly we had the newspaper and the Sunday afternoon it was, it was, it was made.
And we made the first issue in Amsterdam and of course Scotland the Art closed the London
office, which was just a post box, that's all it was, but they closed it immediately.
And but the nice thing about the paper is that, which is also was true with international
times as well, is that not only did we report the news, we made the news.
We made things and we made the wet dream film festival.
And the only place we advertised the wet dream film was in sock, our own paper.
And of course the film festival was a big success.
I was covering Cannes in those days for a California, an LA newspaper.
And so I went to Cannes and I put leaflets in all the press boxes and I gave them all
to directors who were making the festival and so it became world news.
Variety wrote about it and the first erotic film festival in Europe.
Maybe the first in the world, I don't know.
I think The Guardian called me the godfather of social networking.
And I think that was based on a number of things, but the main thing it was based on
was a series of books I did on Eastern Europe and Russia.
I did 10 countries and each one has a thousand people in it that you can meet.
So it was kind of pre-Facebook, Facebook.
I, I, I think the world is getting smaller in that respect, you know, I mean I have these
open house Sunday dinners and every Sunday there are people from, you know, Indonesia,
Australia, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, America, all coming to dinner.
They don't know each other, they're all coming to dinner.
And at the end of the dinner, many of them are trading cards and many actually leave
the dinner together and go have a coffee or go have a glass of wine and, you know, it
continues.
So I feel very pleased with that.
And, of course, friendships, love affairs, marriages, babies, jobs, trips, all come
out of it.
Well, my hero is Tom Payne and Tom Payne is the statue of Tom Payne in Paris, a full-length
statue quite near my house.
So I'm honored, I'm honored to be, that, that Deidre is even interested in doing it,
I mean, you know.
And I'm a yes-sayer, so when somebody comes to me with a project, I will almost always
say yes, no matter what the consequences are.
Sometimes disasters, but usually not.
Yes-sayers open the door to infinite possibilities.
I always use the image of a stone being tossed into a lake and the waves go out and you never
know how far the waves will go, you know.
That's what saying yes means.
No-sayers, the stone sinks and no makes no waves.
Have a great morning coffee.
