Outside Whitechapel’s Blind Beggar pub, a crowd has gathered, listening intently to a gesticulating man in a flat cap. A man who must be a tour guide of sorts.
As I get closer, edging down one of east London’s more untameable thoroughfares, it appears the guide is none other than the actor Vas Blackwood – most famous for his role as Rory Breaker in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Instantly recognisable from his nasally, Caribbean-Cockney inflections, Blackwood now hosts guided walks around ‘gangster London’, taking American tourists and amateur criminologists to spots such as The Blind Beggar, the pub where Ronnie Kray famously emptied a 9mm Luger into George Cornell’s head back in 1966.
Today, though, Blackwood’s customers are in for a serendipitous treat – akin to booking a Banksy tour of Bristol and stumbling across the man himself, aerosol in hand. Because, this isn’t just another regular Saturday at The Blind Beggar. It’s the public memorial for one of British life’s most confused and controversial figures: Dave Courtney.
Although he came to refute the term, Courtney was the ‘celebrity gangster’ extraordinaire. His persona lasted the best part of three decades, spanning pulp paperbacks and podcasts. He was an omnipresence at faux-crime events across the country, holding court at unlicensed boxing events and golf club dinners with Roy Shaw and Bruce Reynolds. He appeared on everything from a Big Narstie freestyle to an array of zero-budget crime movies shot chiefly on industrial estates, such as Killer Bitch and the seminal Triads, Yardies & Onion Bhajees!. He made branded content videos for Vice and appeared on an episode of Sky One’s Brainiac, trying to crack a safe in what I remember as a purple velvet suit. He acted in a ‘blue movie’ or two, including the comedy-porno Lock, Cock & Two Smoking Bimbos. There is even a Rancid track named after him.
Britain has an interesting habit of glorifying its organised criminals and Courtney made the most of this national fetish. His Plumstead McMansion, known as Camelot, which had deactivated guns, blunt swords and pictures of himself all over the walls, became a kind of Graceland for small-time villains and hybristophilia sufferers the nation over. In his basement, he hosted everything from film premieres and bare-knuckle fights to happy hardcore nights.
But while Courtney’s status as a minor celebrity is in no doubt, the gangster part of his brand remains shrouded in controversy. Despite being known as the ‘Yellow Pages of the underworld’, many saw him as a dilettante at best, a grass at worst. His detractors, including the infamous ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, goaded and undermined him, often pointing to his work as a bin man for Southwark Council. In a YouTube comment under an upload of Bermondsey Boy – an early 90s documentary which depicts his time as a south London debt collector – someone who worked on the show details how Courtney staged most of the events.
The terms ‘wannabe’, ‘bullshitter’ and ‘Walter Mitty’ are never too far away when discussing Dave Courtney. And while he had his brushes with the law, they are far from the ‘ordinary decent criminal’ ideal. In 2000, he was implicated in a case which involved planting drugs in a woman’s car in order to win a custody battle for her husband. If the pettiness of this act didn’t do much for his credibility, the trial’s revelation that he was a registered police informant was even more damaging.
Despite this, Courtney seems to have maintained the respect of some serious (but largely deceased) figures, including Lenny McLean, Freddie Foreman, Roy Shaw and Joey Pyle Senior. There is no doubt that he ran the doors at several London clubs and also supplied heavies for Ronnie Kray’s funeral. The walls of Camelot may have been adorned with props and fakes, but last October, when his cases of cancer and arthritis got too much to bear, Courtney did use a real shooter – on himself.
