The Chelsea socialite who vanished into thin air

In the late 1960s, my family had a chichi little apartment in Chelsea. Though actually, we didn't; the apartment belonged to a family friend called Barrie Stonehill. But we stayed there over the years so often that I felt like it was ours.

Barrie had the demeanour of a secondary character in a Noël Coward play, and a laugh that started out as a soft rumble before building to a booming roar. Maybe 6’ 4” with a permanent tan and beautifully manicured fingernails, he smelt of Brylcreem and spicy cologne. He never attempted to hog the limelight, but effortlessly commanded attention. 

Barrie only used the Chelsea bolthole when living it up in south west London. He spent most of his time in his permanent residence: a sprawling five-bedroom apartment near Marble Arch, home to his ancient Austrian mother, her English nurse, their American housekeeper and — as dad would tell me — the ghost of a child wearing a Victorian nightie, who used to flit around the long, dark corridors after sundown. I only visited that apartment with my dad a couple of times, in my early 20s. I didn’t meet Mrs Stonehill or her nurse, but the housekeeper bought us sherry and stale biscuits while we waited for Barrie in the drawing room. I never stayed overnight, so I never met the ghost. 

I gradually lost contact with Barrie over the years. I moved away from London, as did my dad, and I had a big social life of my own. I guess I didn’t realise the importance of keeping in contact with special people from your past — you think it'll all last forever. Now, I don’t even have a photograph of him. 

But after my dad passed away in 2021, I found myself becoming a curator of memories that I won’t allow to fade, many of which inevitably involve our London days… and Barrie. I regret not spending more of my last few years with dad gently nudging his increasingly fractured memory bank, but his death made me determined to find the missing pieces of the Barrie jigsaw. 

In a way, this is a search for a ghost. If Barrie is still alive today, he’ll be heading into his 90s. But Barrie was always ageless, with a kind of supernatural vibe about him that makes me think perhaps he wasn’t quite of this world. And in a way, he wasn’t: he belonged to a London long vanished, full of glamour and promise. Did Barrie disappear along with it?

Returning to the King’s Road

My first thought is to scope out Barrie’s Chelsea pad, on the second floor of a handsome, art deco block called Meriden Court, just off the King’s Road. Back in the day, the resident porter seemed to spend 24 hours a day behind an imposing desk in the marble-tiled entrance hall. Beyond that, the antique, wood-panelled lift and thickly-carpeted corridors gave the place the feel of an upmarket hotel. 

The flat itself felt more compact than you'd expect from such a build-up, especially in comparison to our rambling, ramshackle family home in Liverpool. 

There was a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a tiny main living space with a pull-down bed hidden away behind dusty louvre doors. It was decorated with sweeping sage velvet drapes and soft furnishings. The kitchen, however, was the kind you’d expect to find attached to an MOT garage: dark and poky, with utilitarian cupboards and no sign of anybody ever using the dangerous-looking Baby Belling cooker. 

But who needed to cook when we had the King’s Road on our doorstep? Just a short stroll away there was the Picasso, the Great American Disaster and the legendary Chelsea Kitchen, with its smoky, low-ceilinged basement full of women wearing Liberty-print silk frocks and men in crushed velvet jackets and corduroy bellbottoms. Barrie was never one of those men, though. Barrie was always impeccably dressed, as if he was on his way to dinner at the Connaught, even when he was drinking coffee in the Picasso at 11 in the morning.

I take the trip to Meriden Court not long before lockdown. Though much has changed, Chelsea Manor Street still holds so many memories: the scuttle and clank of the Post Office sorting depot that used to be on the corner of the street, which would wake the whole family up at 6am sharp. The bustling street cleaners on permanent duty. Layer upon layer of apartments, whose occupants’ lives had been both a complete mystery and a constant fascination to me. 

Nobody answers when I ring the bell to Barrie’s flat. Later, I find that the property was sold in 2021, and has changed hands several times since then. There is no porter in the reception area, just potted plants and a polished, empty desk — remnants of times gone by.

I go around the corner to the cafe in the Farmers’ Market on Sydney Street, where I worked as a waitress for a year or so in the early 1990s. Like everything around it, the cafe has been revamped. When I worked there, you could get a cappuccino for a quid, but it wasn’t unusual for regulars to pay with a crisp five-pound note and tell me to keep the change. Barrie was one of those regulars. 

I ask my young waiter if he might be familiar with an elderly gentleman called Barrie Stonehill, who used to visit the cafe two or three times a week. “No, sorry,” he mumbles. I know that I am clutching at straws. My cappuccino costs a fiver, before the tip.

Cocktails at Dolphin Square

I next turn to Barrie’s old haunts. He loved the Hurlingham Club, an elegant private members’ club set in acre upon acre of manicured greenery on the banks of the Thames in Fulham. When our family rocked up in our floaty paisley shirts, sleeveless afghan coats and Jesus sandals, Barrie's fellow club members must have thought he'd hooked up with an alternative, 1970s version of the Beverley Hillbillies. We were treated like royalty, though (“Welcome back, Mr Barrie!) — and oh, those scones! 

When I contact the Hurlingham Club to find out what they know about Barrie, the response, from a lady called Monica, is prompt and courteous: “I think I found his old file on our system, but he is no longer a member.” Well, at least I know he existed, to the Hurlingham at least. And off I go again…

Perhaps I’ll have more luck at Dolphin Square, a famous 1930s apartment complex in Westminster whose bar Barrie frequented. But instead, I spend 20 minutes staring blankly at their website, particularly the pages for the Terrace Bar and Cafe. It’s nothing like the place I recall visiting with my dad and Barrie, all those years ago. 

My most distinct memory of Dolphin Square takes place back in 1983, when Barrie suggested that we meet for cocktails at the bar (which, according to dad, looked a bit like Glasgow’s Gorbals district looked back in the 1970s) before dinner at the Phene Arms on Cheyne Walk — a fairly typical night out with dad and Barrie.

Harold Wilson, Princess Anne, Christine Keeler and Charles de Gaulle: Dolphin Square’s former residents all paled into insignificance for me, an avid Boy George fan who knew that the flashback scenes in the video for Culture Club’s breakthrough single “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” had been filmed in the bar overlooking the complex’s health club pool. 

One year after that video was filmed, there I was, sitting in an elegant, distinctly grown-up, but somehow rather claustrophobic little bar overlooking that same pool. The waiter met us with the simple greeting of “cocktails?”, to which Barrie responded “of course!” — no menu proffered, no choices discussed.