I’m not always the biggest fan of the social historian Dominic Sandbrook but his piece in the Times (16th March 2024) on Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s drugs bust in West Wittering in February 1967 is interesting. Both men were found guilty and despatched to jail except they weren’t. Rees Mogg Senior then editing the Times produced an Editorial supporting them and they were in effect let off.
The reason for Sandbrook’s interest is that a film and a play were produced in 2024 about the drugs bust.
My interest stems from checking to see if Keith Richards still owns Redlands, the Grade 11 listed mansion he brought in 1966 in Chichester. The answer is that 58 years on he does and still spends some time there.
Indeed in recent years he has complained about a public footpath that runs in his view too close to the property. The local planning authority was not impressed.
As Sandbrook notes the judge in the original trial of RIchards and Jaggers was biased against them because he didn’t think they were fit and proper persons to own such a property. They were after all just pop stars not part of the traditional ruling orders.
It was and is a matter of class and touches upon the thesis that Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson put forward in New Left Review in the 1960s that Britain had had an incomplete bourgeois revolution leaving landowners and the aristocracy with much power.
But what happens when the Rolling Stones Keith Richards becomes and stays one of those landowners?
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