Lambeth Fantastical
January 2024
The Starman and the Satanic Novelist
Happy New Year and welcome to the first Lambeth Fantastical Blog of 2024.
To kick off the year I'm celebrating two of Lambeth's finest exponenents of the fantastical, both born on 8th January, a birthday they share with Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Stephen Hawking, and William Hartnell (the first Doctor Who). David Bowie and Dennis Wheatley both had long and productive careers in their chosen fields and both often delved deep into the fantastical for their inspiration.
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones on 8th January 1947 in Brixton. He spent the first five years of his life in Lambeth before moving with his family to Bromley. (The image that accompanies this blog is from a picture I took of the local mural displayed as a tribute to him in Bromley's Glades Shopping Centre.)
When he began his career in the mid 60s he changed his name to David Bowie to avoid confusion with Davie Jones, the English member of American pop band The Monkees. From the outset he referenced fantastical elements in his work. His debut album "David Bowie", released in 1967 on the same day as the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" has several tracks which explore fantasy tropes - "We Are Hungry Men" is set in a totalitarian regime based on cannibalism, "There is a Happy Land" depicts a surreal adult free world that children have invented beneath a field of rhubarb, while "Hey Mr Gravedigger", which starts with the lines, There's a little church along the way / It used to be Lambeth's finest array, is about a serial killer who murders children.
His other output in the 60s included his tongue in cheek "The Laughing Gnome" and 1969's "2001 - A Space Oddity", inspired by the moon landings and the movie version of Arthur C Clark's "2001 - A Space Oddysey"
But it was his trio of million selling albums from the glam rock era of the mid 70s that truly saw him take inspiration from the fantastical, in particular science fiction. "Ziggy Stardust", "Aladdin Sane", and "Diamond Dogs" seemed to my teenage mind back then to form a trilogy with a linnear storyline. In Ziggy Stardust the eponimous Starman comes down to Earth to warn us that we only have five years left to sigh in. The line When the kids had killed a man I had to break up the band from the title track suggested to me a foreshadowing of the next album "Aladdin Sane" where the former rock star stuggles on the verge of insanity while around him the world teeters toward oblivion at the end of the predicted five year period. "Diamond Dogs," partly inspired by Richard Matheson's "I am Legend" and the Charlton Heston big screen version "The Omega Man" depicts the scary, post apocalytic world which ensues once our five years are up.
I would guess it was never Bowie's intention that these albums were to be regarded a trilogy but my own imagination created that storyline and it's stuck with me ever since. Certainly "Diamond Dogs" started off with a very different premise. Bowie's idea was to create a stage show based on George Orwell's "1984". But Orwell's widow refused permission for him to bring this to fruition. So he was forced to take a new direction. The album, however, still includes a track entitled "1984".
Bowie's later work veered away from the fantastical, although the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" does revisit the character of Major Tom, the lost astronaut featured in "2001 - A Space Oddity".
Bowie was also an occomplished actor. His fantastical roles have included the alien in the 1976 film version of Walter Tevis's "The Man Who Fell to Earth", The Goblin King in Jim Henson' s 1986 puppet fantasy "The Labyrnth", and a vampire in the film version of Whitely Strieber's "The Hunger".
Born exactly half a century earlier on January 8th 1897, Dennis Wheatley, lived in Brixton Hill, Streatham until he was sent to boarding school at age eight. His father was a wine merchant with a business in Mayfair. Wheatley was subsequently expelled from Dulwich College for forming a secret society.
He was a prolific author and secret societies and secret agents were often the raw material of his works of fiction. His espionage agent Gregory Sallust, depicted in a long series of novels, is said to have been one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond. He also wrote science fiction, including "They Found Atantis" (1936), the apocalyptic "Sixty Days to Live" and Star of III - Omen (featuring an alien race) in 1952. His historical adventure series featuring the character Roger Brooke are set during Napoleonic times.
He is perhaps best know for his occult horror stories. When he decided to explore supernatural themes in his work his research included a lunch with notorious satanist Aleister Cowley, whose mother resided for a number years in Streatham, and a meeting with the Reverend Montague Summers, author of the 1926 publication "History of Witchcraft and Demonology". These encounters convinced Wheatley that there was a truth in the notion of the supernatural and in the preface to a number of his occult novels he issued dire warnings about the consequences of dabbling with the unkown.
He later came to be considered an authority on the occult and the supernatural and edited a series entitled "The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult" which included fiction by the likes of Bram Stoker and non fiction on occultism, including works by Cowley himself.
A number of his novel were made into movies. Most famously two Hammer horror films starring Christopher Lee "The Devil Rides Out" and "To the Devil a Daughter'. More recently "The Haunted Airman" starring Robert Pattinson and based on the 1948 novel "The Haunting of Toby Jugg".
Wheatley was known for his, often extreme, right wing, conservative views. His first Gregory Sallust novel "Black August" is set against a communist take over of Parliament and the subsequent collapse of the monarchy. In it Sallhurst joins forces with the grey shirts, clearly based on Oswald Mosley's black shirts, to form a heroic resistance movement. In one of the later Sallust novels the character has an evening meal with Hermann Goring, who is incredibly depicted as a man of honour who is opposed to the killing of Jews.
Two weeks before his death Wheatly saught absulution for his daliances with the occult from his friend, The Bishop of Peterborugh. Long before that, in 1947, he left buried in his garden a letter to posterity. When it was dug up he had made some accurate future predictions such as the five day week and the raising of the school leaving age to 16. But he also suggested that the UK would be living under what he described as a socialist tyranny where the lazy working classes were pampered and employers are now no longer allowed to run their businesses as they think best but have become the bond slaves of socialist state planning. The letter went as far as recommending people should ambush and murder officials of the regime.
Wheatley was cremated in Tooting and his ashes are intered in Brookwood Cemetery. However, by the time he died in 1977, he was far too late to have been transported there on the Necropolis Railway.
January Lambeth Fantastical Walk - In The Footsteps of Jack London
In 2024 I will be leading a Lambeth Fantastical themed guided walk on the last Saturday of the month at midday. A good few will be in Waterloo but I will also be venturing further afield in Lambeth.
The first walk will be based on prolific American author, Jack London, who visited Waterloo in 1902 while researching for "The People of the Abyss." Jack also has a January birthday, having been born on January 12th 1876.
More information and booking details can be found on the Eventbrite link below.
For regular updates on walks and other fantasical matters follow #LambethFanstical on Facebook.
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