Rarely is a book so disturbing & so shocking. Equally so, this unusually powerful opus has to be one of the most revealing & revelatory ever, & I mean ever, to be printed on the relating subjects & phenomena. It is absolutely indispensable to anyone researching or trying to understand the depth of the disorder & distortion, & the kind of preternatural corruption that lurks in the nexus of British power & beyond.
I think it is best to begin with an extraction from the books preface –
“on monday the 22 September 1975, six men were convicted at the Old Bailey on numerous sexual offences against boys. Charles Nicholas Hornby, 36, was fined £1,000 and jailed for 30 months, of the others, Basil Andrew-Coen, 39, and Malcolm Raywood, 43, were both jailed for six years; Andrew Novac, 29, for six and a half years; and David Archer, 28, for five and a half years. There is no mention of a sentence being handed down to the sixth man. His name did not appear in the newspaper reports at the time and has been redacted from documents held at the National Archives at Kew. The case became known as the Playland trial because the men had been involved in an organized rent boy racket run from the Playland amusement arcade just off Piccadilly Circus.
Charles Hornby, the man with the shortest sentence, was an Old Etonian and an underwriter at Loyd’s. Once and officer in the 9th Lancers, he owned a country estate in Gloucestershire and had been shooting with Prince Charles. Because of his position and background, the press predictably singled him out, and it was he who prominently featured in the headlines. The other defendants were described as “nobodies,” but they were in fact part of an underworld gang that managed the rent boy operation, whereas Charles Hornby was a Playland client. As an establishment figure, he served as sacrificial lamb, and his very public fall from grace deflected attention from reports that many other VIPs were also clients of an extremely sordid and exploitative business.
The Police investigation that led to the trial was deeply flawed. Its surveillance operation was limited to the activities of men roaming around the Playland arcade, and the arcade owners were never questioned. Neither were any of the senior underworld figures that police would of known were linked to Playland. The investigation remained superficial because figures involved in the rent boy trade were part of a Soho crime syndicate that had been paying a fortune to corrupt police officers all the way to the top. The trial judge accepted that many other people should have been in the dock.”
Anthony Daly (the author) came to London in 1975 from Derry, Ireland, as a 20 year old. A great lover of books, literature & music, this cultured & optimistic young man made the decision to escape the burgeoning madness of The Troubles (he had been present at the Bloody Sunday massacre by occupying UK troops) & pursue a new life in London working at the prestigious book shop Foyles in the cities center where he had already secured a position.
Shortly after his arrival, he is scammed by a street gambler in Oxford Circus, & losing all his money, the naïve & vulnerable Anthony is persuaded to join an affable stranger (Keith Hunter) for a meal with his friend, Old Etonian Charles Hornby. Misled, manipulated & then secretly drugged, he is then abruptly, violently raped by Charles whilst sexually assaulted & restrained by Keith.
After he regains consciousness the next morning, the victim finds that Charles also went to the effort of taking compromising & explicit pictures of Anthony’s forced abuse, which he then uses to blackmail him, along with the greater threat of having him framed for engaging in IRA terrorist offences (something that was serious at the time in such a fevered climate). Young Anthony is blackmailed into becoming a male prostitute & is sold or passed over to the Playland firm, a categorically grotesque & squalid gang running boys, including children, for prostitution out of an amusement arcade in Soho known as Playland. He finds himself in a veritable nightmare, run by some of the most debased fuckers from hell’s landfill. It is beyond belief. He manages to extricate himself from the gang when finding favour from a VIP client who takes a special liking to him, Sir Simon Hornby (remarkably, the older brother of Charles Hornby).
Thus “elevated”, Anthony begins being ‘shared’ among exclusively VIP circles. Sirs, Viscounts, Peers, Lords, Civil Servants, high ranking members of the military, intelligence & security officials, MPs – on & on & on.
It is, truly, deeply & intensely shocking.
The book is very hard to read from a heterosexual sensitivity. Its horrible. The author is not graphic or excessive with his descriptions at all, in fact, I think he attempts to curb or spare the worst of it, but he has a story/account to bare – & forgoing details or gratuity – presents the facts as they were.
Some of the worst episodes come from the VIP parties. It is unbelievable. Sent out to the likes of The Monday Club, a bizarre, noxious & disturbed Conservative pressure group that’s members included the dreadful & disgraced MP Harvey Proctor (Proctor does not, at least to my knowledge, feature in this book).
As Charles Hornby would summarize – “The Monday Club is what you might call a pressure group, a very powerful one, made up of like-minded individuals who are positioned somewhat on the right of the party. They see themselves as the custodians of the traditional Tory values and principles [boy raping]. I’m not a member myself. I’ve only been in the house a few months, but I did get an invitation. Please say you’ll come, Anthony. You’ll meet some wonderful people and make new friends. Its a great opportunity for you to be presented.”
many of these parties just descend into revolting, & I mean fucking revolting, obscenity, piled with drugs & inebriation. The MP’s, celebrities, dukes & earls showing there true colours in select secrecy. It is a madhouse.
Daly kept a diary throughout, which allows him to reconstruct & recall staggering circumstances & exactitude concerning the people & places involved in this filth. Again, the information & inner-workings you will be left with after reading this book are immense.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/28/gordonstoun-child-sex-abuse-search-for-victims
Some, if not the worst of disclosures is that of the antics & ideology of PIE – the Paedophile Information Exchange, an “above ground” lobby effort in the UK with strong links to the Conservative party that sought to legalize sex with children & argue that it was “normal” & “healthy”. Incredibly, the Conservative government tolerated this entity & actually granted them funding from public money under the Thatcher government (Leon Brittan is also heavily implicated in soliciting the group).
In the most harrowing chapter of the book, “Depraved”, Anthony is escorted to a new client, who it turns out, are a cabal belonging to the PIE. After hearing them speak tenaciously about their perversions & the objectives of PIE, he is forced to attend an event in a flat in Notting Hill presented as “the best show in London” under the duress of two of the firms enforcers & pimps. What follows is unimaginable. Two drugged children, aged 8 & 10 are introduced & unspeakable actions start to unfold. Daly loses it, reacts, & openly explodes with disgust & exclamation before being viciously beaten unconscious & sexually assaulted by multiple assailants of the group.
His experience mirrors that of what Michael Tarraga underwent as he was prostituted as a young boy in care to VIP abusers around the country.
Some of the dinner conversation with the freaks that attended that evening are recounted by Daly & need careful cogitation –
“We must stand up and demolish these myths about childhood sexuality. How people gratify their bodies with consenting others is their choice alone.”
one German attendee described is derision as thus – ”Your British laws governing the age of consent are a fallacy, a lie. It is essentially paternalistic. It is denying children their sexual freedom by imposing these protective restrictions upon them. Society needs to stop pretending. Adults and children can and should enjoy sex together.”
they go on to debate strategies for PIE which include “to lobby, to infiltrate, to identify and recruit those who share their passions and beliefs. Where necessary, Keith suggested they could use Playland rent [rent boys] to arrange badger-traps [human compromise operations/kompromat], then blackmail and suggest ways in which targeted individuals might be of assistance to PIE.”
“Consider the support we have. We have some very well-placed friends in key positions. They stand by ready to support our position in any way they can, albeit discreetly,, but nonetheless effectively. We must learn lessons from our dear friends in the wider gay community. We must attach ourselves to the gay rights and minorities’ agenda.”
“we must play the long game, take it step by step.”
It would be untruthful & wrong to accuse or persecute homosexuals or bisexuals for this madness, but I stress to you, beware the LGBTQ+ “agenda” …& ask yourself, what exactly does the “+” stand for?
What about the firm? The feculent, seedy, low-life shits & procurers that prowl Piccadilly hunting boys to provide to the toffs & others? There are too many alarming characters & insights here, but lets just display this excerpt for now – “Ronnie Kray had to go into hiding for many weeks to avoid having to appear in court as a witness to police corruption. Ron had an insatiable appetite for young men, and a fresh boy was brought to him every night. He had a sadistic streak and particularly liked boys who had no experience of men. He liked breaking-in the first timers and teaching them what to do. Ron even threw money at straight boys to take there girlfreinds out, on condition they sleep with him the next night.
But he was prone to delusional episodes and violent mood swings. One boy who had been delivered, and was more than a little drunk, made a joke that Ron took to be a slight on his manhood. Ron smiled, took the boy to bed and went to work on him. During the “sex play” that followed, the boy suffocated. His body was disposed of under a motorway construction. Some time later, Ron‘s driver, a young man, tried to blackmail him about it. He also disappeared, like ice in the morning sunshine. I thought about that rent boys last moments.”
there is a consortium of other gangs & characters as well as pornographers festering in the drain of Soho’s & “The Meat Rack”. It is very hard on the stomach, but this is what thrived with the sustenance of the establishment.
It also took the participation, wilful ignorance & cooperation of an indescribably corrupt police force. Again, Daly’s investigative precision & the documents he managed to reference deliver barely believable mega corruption & solicitation from the Metropolitan police…it is just unbearable. They new all about it, profited from it & they willfully facilitated the perpetrators.
The book is a bit of a mind shredder. The clarity of investigation, the information secured, the scale of it all, is difficult to process. In terms of truly & singularly monumental corruption & coverup, the polluted blood-lines of the United Kingdom, the darkest extremity of human vice or the dirty power & sub-cultural construct of the “ruling class” – this book is simply indispensable in its account. This country, & perhaps the world even, owes the author a huge debt of gratitude for having the fortitude & strength to bring this to our attention & assemble such an exigent trove of information & investigative results. This is a very’ very serious problem. It is rotting our world. It needs to be utterly extinguished with extreme prejudice & merciless hostility. For those that feel they “cannot deal with the subject matter”, the third & final section of the book “Time’s Fickle Glass” exits the sordid hell & recollective experiences of the author, now concentrating entirely on the aftermath of the trial in forensic detail. The cover up, the suppression, the downplaying, the falsification, the evasion of justice. It can be read without having to endure the homosexual horrors. I think everyone in this country should read this section of the book.
The sheer extent of it all.
Along with Alex Renton’s invaluable Stiff Upper Lip – secrets, crimes and the schooling of the ruling class & last call, Bruce Robinson’s They All Love Jack, you can really observe the magnitude of the monster, & understand how indescribably horrendous Britain’s top-down decomposition really is.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/12/child-abuse-at-prince-charles-former-school-scotland
This book will also supply a repletion of auxiliary information on anybody attempting to grasp the Jeffery Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell scandal & “pattern”.
Predictably, the Conservative party does not come out looking well. But that was really a predetermined conclusion, as that party is the main instrument that allows, aids & cultivates this insanity & is never far away from it’s worst episodes.
Just to think, that Boris Johnson, the current risible curse of that demonic party, has dismissed all these thousands upon thousands of raped,, trafficked & horrifically abused boys (& all the other children & adults) as “money spaffed up the wall” truly goes to encapsulate the density of the evil.
There are two versions of this book. I think? – they are identical, just with different names, design & with one being larger (in physical size, not length) than the other. There may be micro additions in The Abuse of Power edition (I have not read this version in completion, but have compared both books, which appear to be identical) that are not presented in the Playland.
Playland, Anthony Daly, Mirror Books, 2018, 361 pages
The Abuse of Power, Anthony Daly, Mirror Books, 2019, 431 pages