ON April 12, 1965, the Echo's teenage trainee snapper Ian Wright went to the Globe in Stockton to photograph the Tamla Motown tour, which featured a stellar cast: The Supremes, made up of Mary Wilson, Diana Ross and Florence Ballard, plus Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Little Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Georgie Fame.
However, the promoter Harold Davidson rather arrogantly believed that the tour would sell itself and banned any press coverage – even at the Globe, which had become Ian's second home he was there so frequently, but on this occasion he was turned away.
After learning his trade on the Echo, Ian went with Harold Evans to the Sunday Times and ended up working for the paper in America. He got a house in Los Angeles and, by chance, one of his neighbours was Mary Wilson.
Ian was back at the Globe last week (above) to launch his new book about the restored venue. In the book, he tells how he was chatting to his neighbour, as you do, and he mentioned that he had once tried to photograph her in Stockon.
And she mentioned that, of all the shows in all the world that she had performed, she, too, remembered that night at the Globe.
The Supremes in 1964: (left to right) Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson and Diana Ross
She remembered seeing a “Dusty Springfield type” hanging out backstage, giggling and laughing like a schoolgirl. Later, after the show, she spotted her on the bus where she was cuddling up to Georgie Fame – he then was at the peak of his fame, having just scored the first of his three No 1s with Yeh, Yeh.
The tour manager, Dick Scott, told the stars that the bus was going to taken a detour for supper.
“We turned down this winding drive to this magnificent mansion,” Mary Wilson told Ian. “We all disembarked marvelling at its splendour. Then we heard music. It was jazz, coming from within.
“Up the many stone stairs into this magnificent entrance hall.
“All I recall was the candlelight and the servants taking our coats and presenting us with monogrammed plates and cutlery wrapped in a napkin. They escorted us to the dining room where there was a fabulous buffet laid out, and the combo was playing.
“The band leader introduced himself and the band members, said he was delighted we had come, and we all sang a couple of songs, and about midnight, Dick Scott called time. The bus ride to the hotel, I recall, was not very long.”
That was all Mary Wilson knew.
Ian, a proper pressman, knew far more. He knew that the magnificent mansion was Wynyard Hall and that the giggly “Dusty Springfield type” was Nicolette, the Marchioness of Londonderry, the wife of the 9th Marquess of Londonderry.
Nicolette – known as Nico – was born in 1940, the daughter of a wealthy London stockbroker and a Latvian baroness. She was one of the last debutantes to be presented to the Queen and by the time she was 16, she was engaged to the 9th Marquess, 20, who had inherited the Wynyard estate two years earlier when his father had succumbed to alcoholism.
Nico and the marquess, who lavished a fortune on restoring Wynyard, had two children, but then in early 1965, the marquess saw the cute, 22-year-old singer from Lancashire doing Yeh, Yeh on Top of the Pops.
Yeah, yeah, thought Nico. She was smitten. She sought him out in London, and hooked up with the tour.
When it came to the Globe, she must have arranged for the stars to come back to her place – and the leader of the band, the Eton Five, was her husband, Alistair Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 9th Marquess.
In 1969, Nico gave birth to her third child, Lord Castlereagh. The suspicious marquess confronted her, a blood test was performed, and Fame was identified as the father.
The divorce in 1971 was a front-page sensation, particularly as the ex-marchioness immediately married her pop star at Marylebone Register Office.
Sadly, she took her own life in 1993 by jumping off the Clifton suspension bridge near Bristol. She left a note saying she had “no purpose in life” once her children had left home.
Ian’s story doesn’t end there. The morning after the Globe gig, he turned up at the stars’ hotel, the Billingham Arms (demolished in 2015 for an Aldi) to see if he could get some pictures as the tour bus left for Newcastle City Hall.
But there was pandemonium. Little Stevie Wonder – aged 15 and, of course, blind – had gone missing. Ian spotted Dick Scott giving a description of the missing lad to the Billingham bobby.
“He’s black, 14, 4ft 11, weighs about 95lbs, wearing dark glasses, a yellow jacket, black shirt and pants, white shoes and a cap,” replied Dick.
“The bobby standing astride his bike said: ‘Don’t you worry, nobody else fits that description in this town. I’ll soon find him, sir”, and pedalled off in search of Little Stevie Wonder,” says Ian in the book.
An hour later, exactly at noon when the bus was scheduled to depart, Stevie Wonder nonchalantly walked up to the Billingham Arms carrying a large paper bag. Unaware of the fuss, he’d gone off to see the sights of Billingham.
“Embracing Stevie with delight,” says Ian, “Dick Scott squashed the contents of the paper bag and the juice from the fresh fruit inside ran all down the front of Stevie Wonder’s jacket.”
Curtain Up: The Globe, 1935-1975 by Ian & Lauren Wright, costs £25 and is available from The Globe at Stockton.
READ MORE: HOW MICK JAGGER WAS BLOODIED AND NEARLY BLINDED AT THE GLOBE
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