It was 1976. I had read an article in the London Evening Standard by a girl called Emma Soames, which said that uptown girls in New York City were going downtown to this roller rink in Brooklyn called the Empire.
"And Bunty says?"
She thought it sounded great. Because where we were then, it was zero money. She had to go to Portobello Market, where she had a stall, every day at five o'clock in the morning to put bread on the table. So anything that sounded like a possible way out of that was good for Bunty. She was completely excited about it.
Now this is the point in this 2021 retelling of his 1990 novel and his appearance on BBC-TV, where he began to imply that Paul Shaw was really Ian Cowper Ross, and Charles Edward Ross was really Jim Shaw, and then Liam O'Mahoney who was really Ronan O'Rahilly, began to call Jim Shaw 'Jimmy', followed by anoraks who turned 'Jimmy' into 'Jimmy Ross'.
But not only is this where the lies refer back to that Ian Cowper Ross novel of 1990, and the follow-up BBC-TV show, it is also where Ian Cowper Ross begins to expose his entire fraudulent storyline!
In order to see his lies exposed, it is only necessary to recall some basic facts of life.
Ian Cowper Ross was a late teen who crashed an expensive motorbike into a shop window. Then he crashed a Jensen car head-on into a bus and lost one of his natural feet. A hospital stay gave him an artificial metal 'foot' which resulted in his friends calling him 'Flipper'.
Up until th
is moment in time this spoilt kid had just quit an expensive private school at Repton where his older step-brother had attended and then been drafted during 'Call-up' conscription into the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), after which he started a car wash, a restaurant with a small theatre on King's Road in Chelsea. He had a sense of dry humor, because when he died on August 7, 1985, he wrote his own epitaph that can still be found, but barely readable, that is inscribed on his tombstone.
Their father, Charles Edward Ross had been a director of a Scottish dry-cleaners where he promoted local franchises using new dry-cleaning equipment. Charles Edward Ross moved to Chelsea when the Scottish owner of the dry-cleaners moved his head office there, and then he moved to Reynards Wood which had been part of a farm in Surrey. Then he became involved with the sales side of Jensen Cars with a factory in Birmingham. It was a failing car firm that the Norcros Group of companies took over for a time, before John Sheffield as head of Norcros, dumped it back on the market as a flop.
Meanwhile, the layabout kid named Ian Cowper Ross had been in court at Derby due to his taking and wrecking a Jensen car by sending it head-on into a bus. The judge looked at Ian's miserable record, noted that he was still living at home with his parents, and so the judge took away his driving license and fined him.
Now it is to cover-up his own miserable track record, that Ian Cowper Ross invented a story that began when he visit a London club and met Stephen Christopher Moore who was playing records. Ian's aim was to get Moore to introduce him to a model who came to be known as Bunty that frequented this club.
Instead, Ian is supposedly introduced to Ronan O'Rahilly via Stephen Christopher Moore at a coffee shop called Kenco, who Ian calls Kenya that is located on King's Road where his older step brother has a car wash and restaurant. But Ian does not seem to know that the coffee shop he calls Kenya, has changed its name to Kenco.
But the preposterous story invented by Ian only becomes more absurd at this point, because his industrious father now gets a bank to hand Ronan O'Rahilly a case full of cash, even though he has never met him before, and who disrespectfully calls him 'Jimmy', and is of recent Irish extraction and has been working for Peter Rachman in the London gang world of the Kray Twins.
From this initial meeting comes Radio Caroline, if you believe Ian's nonsense.
In reality Ian has been working at Stevens Press Ltd in a very junior capacity in order to pay off his court fine. Ian got the job after his father asked John Sheffield for a favor, because Sheffield controls Jensen Cars through his Norcros cartel. That is how Ian got hold of a Jensen car in order to crash it into a bus. Since Sheffield is the father-in-law of Jocelyn Stevens, this was not a big chore to get his son off his back and into an office job with Jocelyn Stevens who has also bought shares in one of the three subsidiary arms of Norcros, with each one buying shares in lessor companies such as Jensen and a firm making dry-cleaning equipment.
Ian Cowper Ross has no money of his own. He is a useless layabout sponging off others. He does get introduced to Bunty who was a fashion model. By the time the two of them, Ian and Bunty hook-up together, she is reduced to running a market stall on Portobello Road that she has to attend at five o'clock in the morning.
Therefore to buy into Ian's novel that he wrote years later, and then published after string-pulling by Bunty's aristocratic mother, requires the mind of a true believer who will believe anything spun by a con man like Ronan O'Rahilly, and he was backed-up by the spiel gushing out from under Ian's typed words like an overflowing river.
So you have the inspiration, you want to do something different and you are the spirit of a revolutionary. You love anarchy. You love all of that stuff. What do you do now?
A rather strange form of question from a person who is obviously dedicated to making money in business, because an anarchist is more of a wrecker than a builder. But Ian Cowper Ross is not his chosen friend, or business partner. Ian Cowper Ross is his wife's birth father.
Well, I went to New York with my late brother-in-law, Perry (Eliot). He was very grand and lived in a wonderful estate he owned and all that. But it turned out that he was bored stiff and wanted to do something exciting and he said: "I'm coming too. I'm coming with you."
This very brief introductory paragraph to the person that Ian Cowper Ross calls 'Perry', and to which has been added the surname of 'Eliot' in parenthesis, requires a great deal of explanation, because it is hiding a wealth of knowledge about who Ian Cowper Ross became after the year 1966 when he married Bunty Lampson.
So let's begin with remembering who Ian Cowper Ross was, before he met and married Bunty Lampson. Ian was the son of Charles Edward Ross who had been sales director for a Scottish laundry which expanded into dry-cleaning using automation, and turned the original shop in Scotland, into the parent of a dry-cleaning franchise business. It became the largest firm of its kind in Scotland and then in England.
Charles Edward Ross also became involved with the sales side of the Jensen Cars factory based near Birmingham in the Midlands of England. At the time his second son Ian was in the process of leaving a private school at Repton, he managed to get hold of a Jensen car and crash head-on into a bus by driving on the wrong side of the road. This cost him a foot and gained him the nickname of 'Flipper' when surgeons attached a metal contraption as a replacement for his human foot. After hospital Ian landed in court at Derby where he was fined and his father got him an entry-level job in sales with Stevens Press Ltd, owned by Jocelyn Stevens.
Again, to recap. Jensen Cars was a failing company bought by the cartel known as Norcros managed by John Sheffield, father-in-law of Jocelyn Stevens. After a relatively short time Norcros gave up on Jensen and dumped it back on the market.
But prior to his marriage to Bunty Lampson in 1966, Ian Cowper Ross was a gadfly anarchist lacking any interest in business and having no real income of his own apart from his junior position with Jocelyn Stevens. He then met Steven Christopher Moore in 1963 who was a club DJ, and Moore then introduced Ian to Ronan O'Rahilly.
Ronan O'Rahilly had landed in London during 1961 with little money in his pocket. His Irish father had a family business and he had sent Ronan to London to find an investor, which the family business desperately needed. Being Irish, having no money behind him and arriving in a country that prejudicially despised the Irish as drunks, Ronan got a job working for Peter Rachman who straddled the world of the wealthy and the world of the poor via London's gangland dominated by the Kray Twins.
In other words, by 1963 when Ian Cowper Ross first met club DJ Steven Christopher Moore who had also arrived previously in England with his mother whose surname he carried because his father had died before he was born, neither of them had any money worth speaking of. Moore then introduced Ian Cowper Ross to Ronan O'Rahilly who was in London looking for monetary investors on behalf of his father in the Republic of Ireland.
Ian's father Charles Edward Ross, had a older son named Charles Cowper Ross by a previous marriage, and he was an entrepreneur like his father. Son Charles, elder Ian's step-brother was in a business partnership on King's Road in Chelsea which owned an automated car wash with rather a unique design that was also being franchised by its owner, as well as a restaurant and club which staged its own entertainment. Step-son Charles also hovered on the edge of show business trying to promote his own musical. Having a BOAR military background and a successful private schooling at Repton, which Ian lacked, the two sons of Charles Edward Ross had nothing in common.
Ian Cowper Ross was a 'sponger' by choice of profession. He fed off the success of other people. His choice of wife was no exception, and his wife's reason for marrying Ian is one of those strange quirks that is difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, that marriage appears to have withstood the test of time.