I have an archive of LGBT ephemera that I collected from about 1987-2000. It’s mainly Brighton-centric, but there’s one piece that I picked up in London that still still gives me the chills when I hold it.
The object in question is a Met Police flyer I rescued from the floor of The Colherne pub in Earl’s Court at the start of the summer of 1993. This was before the police had caught Colin Ireland, aka The Gay Slayer, for the murders of five gay men, some of whom he had picked up in that very pub.
I was around 28 at this time, on a solo day trip to London, and realised I was in the vicinity of The Colherne. I’d never been in The Colherne before (it had quite the reputation as a landmark leather bar), and I just wanted to experience it. I was vaguely aware of the murders before I entered the pub, but that wasn’t on my mind at the time.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon so there were quite a few men in leather and denim gathered outside the pub, and even more drinking inside. I was wearing a black leather biker’s jacket on the day, as I’d been hanging out with Brighton’s gay leather bikers the Sussex Lancers for a few years before this, so I felt comfortable and appropriately dressed to enter the pub on my own.
Leather as therapy
This may be over sharing, but I’d had some therapy a few years before. Brighton Gay Switchboard had put me in touch with a counsellor to discuss hyper-masculine spaces, which both scared me and attracted me in equal measure.
Anyway, his advice was to visit these places, talk to people, and demystify them. He was completely right about the demystifying – leather isn’t cheap so usually the men wearing it were financially comfortable, and they often stood around discussing opera rather than anything more salacious.
Back to the Colherne
I stayed for one drink, mostly avoided eye contact and did my best to blend into the background. At one point my lowered eyes caught sight of a flyer on the floor, slightly under a man’s boot at the bar. I could almost read it from where I stood, and it reminded me that the police were looking for a killer.
The gay community had learnt through experience to be deeply suspicious of the police back in the 1990s, especially the Met, and many would have been reluctant to come forward and talk to them. I knew it was a little macabre, but the flyer represented a very particular moment in time / history, and was something I wanted to get my hands on.
I bided my time and as the man moved away from the bar I briefly took his place. I put my drink on the bar and bent down to pick up the flyer. Once again I avoided eye contact so I wouldn’t have to explain myself. I quickly finished my drink and left.
It felt like a successful visit for me – I’d been to a fairly infamous pub, had a drink with some butch-looking blokes, nothing untoward had happened, and on top of that I had a souvenir from the experience.
Serial killer nerves
One of the things I love about ephemera is its ability to trigger memories. As I wrote this out I could almost feel what it was like to be back in the pub, and how nervous I was. It feels a bit weird to say now but I was nervous about simply being in that space, not about potentially bumping into a serial killer. It was only afterwards I realised that, without telling anyone where I was, I had deliberately walked into the favourite venue of a man who had killed five gay men in four months.
I haven’t seen the flyer I picked up anywhere online. There is another one with a blurry CCTV image alongside an artist’s impression of the killer (below), but the one I picked up was before the investigation had reached that stage.
Interestingly this later flyer includes an additional contract for GALOP, the Gay London Police Monitoring Group, suggesting the police had been made aware that some people would not want to contact them directly.
I guess this story speaks to the vulnerability of minority groups gathering together, and how places of relative safety can become targets for attacks: pubs such as The Admiral Duncan in Soho (1999) and clubs like Pulse in Orlando (2016).
Colin Ireland was apprehended on 21 July 1993 and given five life sentences for murder. It feels right to end this by remembering the innocent men who were killed that summer: Peter Walker, Christopher Dunn, Perry Bradley III, Andrew Collier, Emanuel Spiteri.
