As an 18-year-old, Harry Barnett secured his first Soho job, opening and shutting the curtain which hid the dancers from punters at ‘Shakey Sheila’s’ strip bar in Gerrard Street. 

“The girls weren’t allowed to move during the strip tease or we would be in breach of the public obscenity act,” he says. “So we would close the curtain and the girls would change poses and loosen their clothes, then we’d open it again. 

“That’s laughable when you think of what lap dancing clubs get away with now. But it shows you that what is deemed acceptable changes with the times.” 

It was the early 60s and Harry, who is now  67, was at the start of a long, successful career cashing-in on the demand for sex in London’s red light district. Starting as a doorman at Shakey Sheila’s, Harry worked his way into the lucrative – and illegal – adult book trade, films and later ran a lap dancing club. 

Decades of experience of bawdy and boisterous Soho has left him with something of a libertarian streak exercised during the public morality battles of the 70s, when adult bookshops became a target of moral outrage for conservative Britain, and more recently against the Government’s smoking ban. 

Last year Harry fell foul of Westminster Council after inspectors claimed he allowed customers at his upmarket club HeyJo Club and Abracadabra Restaurant in Jermyn Street near Piccadilly, to smoke, prompting an outraged legal appeal. 

People doing what they like as long as it’s harmless was a mantra writtennin the seedy alleyways, unruly drinking dens, cabaret bars and strip clubs of Soho of the
60s and 70s. “There were several of us running the blue book shops and I can honestly say we didn’t for a second think we were doing anything wrong. 

“We were just popping across the channel to Holland, buying the books and smuggling them back here for sale to a public that wanted them.” 

The proof, says the chain-smoking grandfather of 12, is in the eye-watering sums he raked in during the early days by marking up each 25p Dutch magazine to £5 for the British punter. “We would do half-price sale or exchanges on old books. One of them I marked with a pen to track how many times it was sold and re-sold over six months – I made £1,000 from it, a huge amount of money back then. 

“But there was buckets of money to be made, I could take £4,500 on a good day.”
The bookshops would sit in the back room of a non-descript shop front giving them the “forbidden fruit” allure they no longer have today.

But printing cash through illegal activity inevitably caught the eye of the police, in particular the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad which was charged with upholding public morality. 

Luckily for Harry and the handful of other pioneering porn merchants – including the legendary Paul Raymond and the ‘Prince of Porn’ Jimmy Humphreys – there was an easy way to avoid prosecution.

“We paid the coppers off,” he says. “All the bookshops would meet every week and throw a few thousand pounds into the kitty to pay off the coppers. 

“The police would come down to the clubs and bars and have a drink. At Christmas we’d even send a lorry full of turkeys and bottles of scotch down to West End Central station – they used to fight over who got the biggest birds. 

“Which is hilarious when you think about it, but for a while it kept them off our backs.”
That was until 1977 when one of Scotland Yard’s biggest-ever corruption cases engulfed the head of the Obscene Publications Squad – nicknamed the Dirty Squad – under the command of Bill Moody.

The result was a flurry of convictions of coppers and local businessmen and a clean-up of the Soho sex industry from which the area’s more dubious trades has never fully recovered. 

Amid the fall-out Harry fled to Australia, only to return in the 1980s to help his friend and current business partner Dave West set up the now legendary tax-free Calais booze wholesaler of ‘Eastenders’. 

But he has never lost his fondness for the hazier, more colourful days of Soho. 

Shorn of today’s upmarket cafés, restaurants and generic bars, the area bustled with pubs where theatre-goers rubbed shoulders with actors and comedians, buskers would strum to the delight of queuing theatre-goers and impromptu singalongs and shows would entertain drinkers.

At the heart of the Soho economy operated the prostitutes, strip bars, peep shows and adult book stores which brought customers into the area, mopped up by the legitimate businesses such as local delicatessens and independent shops, he explains. 

“It was an amazing, anything goes sort of place. Full of fun and characters just like a red light district should be. I barely recognise it now.” 

Harry reserves a special disdain for Westminster Council, forged over his former years operating on the fringes of the law, and what he says is its jobsworthy approach to Soho, which has wrenched out the area’s soul. 

“Bit by bit they want to regulate away the fun, the spontaneity and it’s hurting the businesses because less people want to come and spend their time in Soho, exactly because it’s like anywhere else,” he laments. 

“This is the only major world city that hasn’t got a red light district. It’s a shame, because let’s face it, the public will always want one and will find it somewhere else.”