Really O/T but can't help admiring the Party Trick
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 10:40 pm
Was checking out some stuff on Get Carter with Michael Caine (yep, the brilliant film only matched by The Long Good Friday) and found this about one of the actors, John Bindon, in the Telegraph.
Scroll down to see his Party Trick !!!!!!!!!!
"Despite a recent slew of books about old-fashioned 1960s gangsters, there remains an appetite for the Good Old Days, when criminals wore flannel suits and took liberties with one another, rather than today, when they wear tracksuits and take liberties with us. Perhaps it is just another sigh of nostalgia for the 1960s, but violence did not seem so random then, and there is something rather cosy, nowadays, about reading of men who enjoyed consensual fighting for something other than money.
John Bindon was just such a man. He grew up in Fulham - then a rather more rugged borough than now - and from an early age showed a propensity for aggro. As is the case with most of these gangsters' stories, he came from a poor background, but was, under the circumstances, "very well brought up" by a loving mother.
This did not, however, stop him from stealing a bicycle as soon as he was old enough, and soon he was running a gang of urchins. One thing led to another and his misdemeanours became more serious. He beat up a coal deliveryman when he was 13 years old and soon his reputation as a hard man was assured. A life of crime awaited him, the highlight of which was his involvement in the robbery of a "cursed" emerald from a jeweller in Hatton Garden.
Two things set Bindon apart from your average petty criminal. The first, according to Bindon's many friends, and rather over-egged by his biographer, was his "outrageous" sense of humour. (Much of the evidence for this is of the "you had to be there" variety.)
But no doubt surrounds the other thing. It rears its head when he was only 14 and already spending time in boozers. After a few pints (how many is unknown), he would perform his favourite party trick, a routine used many time in pubs across the world over the next 40 years: "I'd hang five half-pint beer glasses on me manhood. Everyone would ask how it's done beforehand so I'd put them out of their misery and thread my old chap through the handles of the glasses." It is a fact, attested to by the many who saw it, that John Bindon had a large chipolata.
His terrific cheek and enormous chipolata, combined with the climate of the time - when the King's Road was the centre of the world - soon got him noticed beyond the fashionable pubs and clubs of west London. He started acting small parts (hee-hee) - always, to his chagrin, villains - in films that included Performance, and he had numerous affairs with models. Soon he found himself rubbing shoulders with high society, most especially Princess Margaret, with whom he was photographed on a Mustique beach wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Enjoy Cocaine".
Quite what went on between Bindon and Princess Margaret on the island remains - sort of - a mystery. According to Wensley Clarkson, Bindon was "incredibly" discreet, of course, but one old flame "broke a 30-year silence" to reveal that Bindon had told her he had slept with the princess.
He remained fantastically secretive about what had happened on Mustique, but back in London he admitted to friends that "PM" sometimes sent a car to pick him up for "love trysts" at Kensington Palace. By the end of the book it emerges that, despite being leaned on by some "spooks" Bindon assumed were from MI5, he had told almost everyone he ever met about his royal fling.
Oddly this may have saved him some serious trouble later on in life. He mysteriously escaped jail on numerous occasions, most seriously when he found himself on trial for the murder of another villain in the improbably named Ranelagh Yacht Club. The actor Bob Hoskins, a personal friend, is credited with saving him from a life sentence by making the jury laugh, but Bindon was sure that the palace was behind it, even if, from Clarkson's plausibly confusing account of the incident, a murder conviction would have been harsh.
There is no doubt that Bindon had an enormous effect on the people he met. Sometimes this was unwelcome and unhealthy, but Clarkson has gathered together a sufficient weight of numbers prepared to testify to Bindon's plus points so that, despite the author's languid tabloid prose (sex, for example is always "steamy" and taken in "bouts") and his admirable indifference to the facts of the matter, John Bindon emerges as a true gent, if a ferociously violent one with an unsettling sense of humour".
I also found out about this incident in another website.
He got a gallantry medal from the Police for saving a guy from drowning in the Thames by diving off Putney Bridge. What he failed to mention was that he pushed the guy in to start with!!!
Scroll down to see his Party Trick !!!!!!!!!!
"Despite a recent slew of books about old-fashioned 1960s gangsters, there remains an appetite for the Good Old Days, when criminals wore flannel suits and took liberties with one another, rather than today, when they wear tracksuits and take liberties with us. Perhaps it is just another sigh of nostalgia for the 1960s, but violence did not seem so random then, and there is something rather cosy, nowadays, about reading of men who enjoyed consensual fighting for something other than money.
John Bindon was just such a man. He grew up in Fulham - then a rather more rugged borough than now - and from an early age showed a propensity for aggro. As is the case with most of these gangsters' stories, he came from a poor background, but was, under the circumstances, "very well brought up" by a loving mother.
This did not, however, stop him from stealing a bicycle as soon as he was old enough, and soon he was running a gang of urchins. One thing led to another and his misdemeanours became more serious. He beat up a coal deliveryman when he was 13 years old and soon his reputation as a hard man was assured. A life of crime awaited him, the highlight of which was his involvement in the robbery of a "cursed" emerald from a jeweller in Hatton Garden.
Two things set Bindon apart from your average petty criminal. The first, according to Bindon's many friends, and rather over-egged by his biographer, was his "outrageous" sense of humour. (Much of the evidence for this is of the "you had to be there" variety.)
But no doubt surrounds the other thing. It rears its head when he was only 14 and already spending time in boozers. After a few pints (how many is unknown), he would perform his favourite party trick, a routine used many time in pubs across the world over the next 40 years: "I'd hang five half-pint beer glasses on me manhood. Everyone would ask how it's done beforehand so I'd put them out of their misery and thread my old chap through the handles of the glasses." It is a fact, attested to by the many who saw it, that John Bindon had a large chipolata.
His terrific cheek and enormous chipolata, combined with the climate of the time - when the King's Road was the centre of the world - soon got him noticed beyond the fashionable pubs and clubs of west London. He started acting small parts (hee-hee) - always, to his chagrin, villains - in films that included Performance, and he had numerous affairs with models. Soon he found himself rubbing shoulders with high society, most especially Princess Margaret, with whom he was photographed on a Mustique beach wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Enjoy Cocaine".
Quite what went on between Bindon and Princess Margaret on the island remains - sort of - a mystery. According to Wensley Clarkson, Bindon was "incredibly" discreet, of course, but one old flame "broke a 30-year silence" to reveal that Bindon had told her he had slept with the princess.
He remained fantastically secretive about what had happened on Mustique, but back in London he admitted to friends that "PM" sometimes sent a car to pick him up for "love trysts" at Kensington Palace. By the end of the book it emerges that, despite being leaned on by some "spooks" Bindon assumed were from MI5, he had told almost everyone he ever met about his royal fling.
Oddly this may have saved him some serious trouble later on in life. He mysteriously escaped jail on numerous occasions, most seriously when he found himself on trial for the murder of another villain in the improbably named Ranelagh Yacht Club. The actor Bob Hoskins, a personal friend, is credited with saving him from a life sentence by making the jury laugh, but Bindon was sure that the palace was behind it, even if, from Clarkson's plausibly confusing account of the incident, a murder conviction would have been harsh.
There is no doubt that Bindon had an enormous effect on the people he met. Sometimes this was unwelcome and unhealthy, but Clarkson has gathered together a sufficient weight of numbers prepared to testify to Bindon's plus points so that, despite the author's languid tabloid prose (sex, for example is always "steamy" and taken in "bouts") and his admirable indifference to the facts of the matter, John Bindon emerges as a true gent, if a ferociously violent one with an unsettling sense of humour".
I also found out about this incident in another website.
He got a gallantry medal from the Police for saving a guy from drowning in the Thames by diving off Putney Bridge. What he failed to mention was that he pushed the guy in to start with!!!
Remind me of the guy on the nudist beach who goes for the ice-creams and doughnuts, as his hands were full with the ice-creams, you can probably guess how he carried the doughnuts 
