A businessman who decided to capitalise on the sexual revolution with condom machines hoped to make a packet. but it was not faulty products that were his downfall, recalls James Morton



As the months went by in my early days of practice in north London, senior partner Simpson and I became increasingly estranged. He rented rooms across the road where I was to see my clients in case they mugged the elderly ladies who had taken to spending happy afternoons doing their macramé in his waiting room.

Simpson was also entering a phase where he saw himself as an entrepreneur and much of his time was spent jointly organising a sports day for schoolboys in the Christmas holidays with one of his new business clients. I met the client over lunch with Simpson, and I did not warm to him. I regarded him as more in my field (criminal law) than Simpson’s, but my employer could not see it. He was a commercial client – even if he did fail to wipe away the egg yolk he dribbled down his chin when he ate Veal Schnitzel à la Holstein – and so was a cut above any of the punters I might introduce to the firm, particularly organ grinders with incontinent monkeys.


But pioneers are rarely as successful as their imitators, and the client was a good example. It was the 1960s and the dawning of the era of sexual freedom. So, years before they became established in every pub, club and airport, the client had the very good and socially beneficial idea of installing machines selling contraceptives in the lavatories of public houses. These would be rented to the landlords and refilled by Simpson’s client’s staff on a regular basis. They would also collect the cash from the machines and this naturally led to what the client saw as shortages, for which he blamed the landlords.


In turn the machines – I know nothing of the efficacy of the contents – could be described as jerry-built. They tended to confiscate coins, while refusing to ante up the product. The landlords declined to pay the hire – they wanted their agreements rescinded. The client wanted them sued for non-payment.


And so Simpson employed a most engaging man who sang in operetta to conduct the debt collecting. Generally he appeared touring in Lilac Time as Schubert, which required him to grow his hair in what was then thought of as the Viennese fashion. I suspected they all wore wigs in those days but naturally I was not consulted.


In the weeks when he was not in Scarborough or Blackpool, he issued the county court summonses. However, there were endless quarrels about the length of his hair, which he refused to have cut on the reasonable basis that it was required in ten days’ time in Torquay and could not be re-grown that quickly.


The end of the condom dispensing business came when the client was making a tour of the lavatories inspecting his machines. On one, next to the stamped legend ‘British Made’, some wit had written: ‘So was the Titanic.’ This infuriated the client and he began scratching it off with a nail file.


He was hard at work when the landlord discovered him on his knees in the lavatory. This led to an immediate misunderstanding and, when that had been cleared, the explanation that it was the client’s machine and he could damage his own property was, I suspect, faulty in law. Personally, I rather thought that since it was leased the lessee was, for the purposes of the argument, the owner.


Not that the client saw it that way. Scuffling broke out; the police were called and naturally saw the matter in the same light as the landlord of the house where they spent many happy off-duty hours.


I was sent for, but the client could not be made to appreciate the benefits – cheaper, no publicity, possible conviction avoided – of the quick bind-over I obtained, against a fully contested trial for assault and criminal damage at Quarter Sessions. Worse still was that Simpson sided with the client, seeing the bind-over as lost potential earnings.


Back to the sports day, which was a fine concept. The idea was that energetic little boys and no doubt a few of their sisters would be given a shilling or two by their parents to take a penalty kick against the local team’s goalkeeper. There would be golf putting competitions, cricket lessons, table tennis competitions and autograph signings – just the ticket for a day out during the school holidays.


The hall was booked months in advance, the sports personalities engaged at substantial fees, security men were on stand-by to collect the huge takings. Simpson was in a frenzy of excitement all day. It was he who was to arrange the time the security men – in the form of Schubert and the clerk who had lost his teeth in the war – were to set off.


But ultimately, there was no need for Schubert to interrupt his debt collecting. For some reason Simpson and his partner had not known that the dates of the school holidays had been changed that year and the boys had already returned to school on the Monday. Some seven people – apart from the paid performers – had arrived.


It was after that Simpson, bloody but unbowed, invested in a button-making factory.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist