Striptease: the erotic female body and live sexual entertainment in mid-twentieth-century London

On a rainy Friday evening in the autumn of 1961 a young policeman turned into Walker’s Court, off Soho’s Brewer Street in London’s West End, and went into a strip club, advertised from the street with a neon sign as the Raymond Revuebar. A narrow, early nineteenthcentury alley that was ‘busy by day, even busier and more garish by night’, Walker’s Court epitomized the compressed nature of Soho’s local economy, where cafes, hardware stores, and wine merchants co-existed alongside a thriving commercial sex trade. Dressed in plain clothes and acting under the alias of James Edwards, a draftsman from Fulham, Sergeant Derek Caiels was posing as a punter for sex. Caiels joined a sizeable queue of well-dressed men outside the club who included European and American tourists and London businessmen, as well as English provincials down for a night on the town. He showed his newly-acquired membership card at reception, paid 15/6d for a ticket, climbed the stairs to the club’s lounge bar and ordered a beer. Judged by the standard of many West-End strip clubs, the Revuebar was expensively furnished, hosting a restaurant, a fully equipped theatre, and a casino. The promoters promised