Cynthia Payne

Born on Christmas Eve 1932, Cynthia Diana Paine (known professionally as Cynthia Payne and ‘Madam Cyn’)  – the elder child of Nelson and Elizabeth Paine – first discovered the importance of a woman in a man’s life when she was 11.

Her mother died, and her father was forced to come home from his job as a ladies’ hairdresser with the Union Castle line. Now a widower, her father turned to drink, later confiding to Cynthia that he desperately needed a woman.

An early rebel, the young Cynthia was constantly in trouble at school for talking dirty and used to go around with a gang of boys.

Later, she got hooked on parties while working as a waitress in London and got together with friends for regular orgies. She later admitted, “Prostitutes always fascinated me, and sex always fascinated me.”

When male guests offered to club together and pay a fee for the parties, Cynthia invited a lesbian couple to add spice to proceedings with a sexy floor show. But her behaviour, and the habit of getting pregnant, earned her the sack from numerous jobs, and she ended up as a prostitute’s maid.

She started to enjoy her new career when she realised she could make older men happy with just a cup of tea, a chat and a snack.

After two years and three abortions, she had saved enough for a house in Streatham where she began hosting sex parties in 1956. Through contact magazines, she assembled a selection of girls to entertain her guests.

The girls she chose were not the most glamorous women, but the most sympathetic and understanding – enthusiastic amateurs rather than jaded professionals.

Her first proper brothel was in London’s Great Portland Street. It was open five afternoons a week. But after four court appearances between 1965 and 1976 for brothel-keeping (for which she was fined a total of £350), she lost the lease.

Soon, she had bought the suburban sex palace that was to become so famous. The large house at 32 Ambleside Avenue, Streatham – which she called “The house of 1001 Delights” – cost Cynthia £16,000.

The address hit the headlines when police raided the place in 1979 after watching 249 men visit in 12 days, including a peer, a parson, policemen and an MP.

At the subsequent court case, the luncheon vouchers Cynthia handed out as admission tickets to her parties passed into public mythology. They entitled guests – who had to be aged 40 or over – to food and drink, a lesbian floor show, and sex with a girl of their choice.

The popular hostess was fined nearly £4,000 and served four months in Holloway Jail, still mourning the recent death of her father.

Emerging from prison to step into a friend’s Rolls-Royce, she became an almost respectable celebrity.

She gave public lectures, served as an agony aunt for Men Only magazine, and had her life story (An English Madam) written by Paul Bailey, a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for literature.

Cynthia was celebrating the end of shooting a film based on her life when the vice squad raided another of her famous parties in May 1986.

The movie, Personal Services, was directed by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame and starred Julie Walters (pictured) as the Madam Cyn character.

Reports of the subsequent trial read like a comedy: ‘Man Falls in Bath With Trousers Round His Ankles. It’s Like Piccadilly In The Rush Hour’. And the presence of Monty Python’s Terry Jones only added to the sense of hilarity.

She was acquitted, and the end result was that the police looked even sillier and Personal Services enjoyed a boost at the box office.

Cynthia summed herself up by saying, “All my life I have wanted to see people enjoy themselves. To have a drink, a laugh – and eventually end up with someone of the opposite sex”.

“If I am remembered for anything, I would like it to be for having run a really nice brothel”.

Cynthia Payne died at King’s College Hospital, London, on 15 November 2015. She was 82.