A chirpy, no-nonsense, middle-aged brothel keeper, Cynthia Payne achieved notoriety as the “Streatham Madam” after police raided her south London home in 1978 and discovered a sex party in full swing.
Payne pictured in 1985 at her home in Streatham, where her sex parties were compared to being at “a regimental dinner and dance without the dinner”
She was found hosting a dozen girls, some scantily clad, others naked, and more than 50 men — including a member of the House of Lords, an MP, accountants, solicitors, barristers and businessmen — behind the net curtains of 32 Ambleside Avenue. When her case came to trial in 1980, it caused a media frenzy. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison for running “a disorderly house”. Memoirs, films and a decade of more lurid parties and raids ensued. In all of them, the immaculately coiffed Payne — or “Madam Cyn” as she was dubbed — was the star.
During the first raid, her male clients were found queueing on the stairs and clutching “luncheon vouchers” for which Payne charged £25. “That entitled them to food, drink, striptease show and a choice of girl to go to bed with,” she later explained. There were sex films and refreshments in the conservatory. The police said that during the 12 days they had observed the premises, they had seen 249 men and 50 women enter. One officer told Payne that the giveaway was when she was spotted leaving a bakers with dozens of bread rolls.
Tony Benn was among 30 MPs to sign a motion deploring her imprisonment. On appeal she served six months in Holloway Prison, but remained cheerily unrepentant: “Even in there I was busy matchmaking everyone,” she said. “I would go to chapel on a Sunday to escape my cell and the vicar would be struggling not to smile as he said, ‘Hello, Madam Cyn’.” On her release, she was picked up by a former client in a Rolls-Royce and gave photographers a V-sign: “V for victory, V for voucher!”
She soon had messages from Terry Wogan’s researchers wanting to interview her, while Jeffrey Bernard described her in The Spectator as “the greatest Englishwoman since Boadicea”. A biography, An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne, was written with Paul Bailey, and, in 1986, the story of her life was turned into a film, Personal Services, starring Julie Walters. She boasted of meeting Sean Connery and Shirley Bassey.
Payne was not ready for retirement. The unofficial wrap party for Personal Services ended with another raid by 30 police officers, who, she said, burst into her house “like a rugby football team”. Two had been posing as a transvestite and a “dirty country gent”.
She denied ten counts of controlling prostitutes and taking money, but made no secret of her parties. Her defence described her as a “glorified social worker”. She said she held parties “because basically I was lonely. I think everyone else who came was lonely too.”
She gave discounts to pensioners. She also insisted that not all her guests wanted to go upstairs. “Some people are interested in coming along just to sit and watch.” Others enjoyed being her male “sex slaves” and helping with household chores like hoovering and gardening in return for “a little bit of caning, insults and humiliation”. She said that, after wild parties, they were “very useful for cleaning up the next day”.
When one police officer described having seen women disappearing upstairs in leather mini skirts following introductions to men over plates of sandwiches — not to mention “lesbian floor-shows” — Payne responded by saying that even the Duchess of York wore leather these days. After the jury was shown an assortment of canes, whips, a dog leash, studded belts and chains, the judge, Brian Pryor, QC, quipped: “It is notorious that judges have led sheltered lives, but I can’t see the significance of a wooden bead necklace or, for that matter, the other items.” At the end of the 13-day trial, Payne was cleared. She sent the judge a copy of her biography, with the inscription: “I hope this bookk will broaden your rather sheltered life.”
Of her own role at the parties, Payne insisted that she was “too busy” making sandwiches to indulge in sex. “And anyway, to me it’s just like having a cup of tea,” she said. “After two abortions, I am not particularly interested in sex, but I know it makes other people happy.”
Cynthia Payne was born in Bognor Regis in West Sussex in 1932. Her father, Hamilton, was a hairdresser on an ocean liner. After her mother, Betty, died of cancer, her father returned to open a hairdresser’s shop and take care of the 11year-old Cynthia and her sister, Melanie. However, she claimed that he drank and showed little affection.
As a girl, Cynthia was in constant trouble at school for “talking dirty” and preferred the company of boys. Her father sent her on a hairdressing course, but she was thrown out for showing a lack of interest. By the age of 15, she said that all she wanted was to “fall in love and go with a bloke”. She worked as a waitress and moved to London at the age of 17 as a shop assistant. Two years later, she had a son, Dominic. After another affair, a second son was given up for adoption; she also had several abortions.
To earn money to send her son to school, she took a job as a maid for a prostitute and soon decided to become one herself. She placed an advert in a tobacconist saying, “Huge Chest for Sale”. She realised that she preferred talking to her clients and that they liked her because they “knew I wouldn’t be that marvellous on the bed, but at least I’d give them a cup of tea and a chat, and cheer them up”.
Using a small inheritance from her mother, Payne began running her own brothel in a terraced house in Streatham in 1969. This time, she put another advert in a sex contact book, Rendezvous: “Afternoon parties for tired businessmen. Must be over 40 because wisdom comes with age.” She received hundreds of letters — “policemen and lawyers. I remember a bank manager that used to like having mud smeared all over him.” The girls her clients liked were older women in flat shoes and no make-up. “Some of them used to walk in here with their boobs hanging out. I used to go mad.” She insisted that they “show their legs in a nice skirt”; she also interviewed each woman to make sure that they were sympathetic listeners.
Her solicitor once claimed that Payne’s parties were “like a regimental dinner and dance without the dinner”. Signs around the house read, “Please Adjust Your Dress Before leaving” and she made her guests poached eggs on toast to sustain them. Her rooms were filled with china ornaments, lace and tapestries, as well as riding crops, baby oil and piles of revealing photo albums.
For many years, she had a relationship with Squadron Leader Robert “Mitch” Smith, who she described as more of a “father figure”, but a “bit of a kink” who “liked to be caned and whipped”. She said that he helped her to buy the detached house on Ambleside Avenue. He died in 1981. Her son Dominic, who attended his mother’s parties as a young man, became a chartered accountant. He survives her, with her other son, Glenn, who, as an adult, sought her out.
Of being raided by the police in 1978, Payne recalled: “I knew it was the end of my life as it was, and I was enjoying my life.” She hoped to get the laws on brothels changed. “The way my little house was run definitely saved marriages, it didn’t destroy them. It’s good for society that there are brothels.”
She wrote a book called Entertaining at Home and also stood for parliament in 1988 in a by-election in Kensington. By the 1990s, she was selling “glamorous underwear for the older and larger woman’’. She became a popular afterdinner speaker and was once even asked to deliver her thoughts on the “Big Bang” for a supper in the City.
She owned two mink furs, kept her nails polished and wore a wedding ring — a hangover from being a single mother in the 1950s. She liked to say that Joan Rivers once told her to repeat “Money” not “Sex” as she had her photograph taken, which was often. She enjoyed eating a Mars Bar in bed, but was averse to alcohol and disliked the mornings. She never married. “The biggest love affair I’ve had through my life is with the public and the press.”
Cynthia Payne, madam, was born on December 24, 1932. She died on November 15, 2015, aged 82