Date to remember: 83 years ago today, at approx 21.45, this fashionable and iconic venue was hit by two 50KG bombs with devastating consequences.
Being subterranean the Cafe was thought to be a safe place but by a freak of fate both devices found their way down to the dance floor via a ventilation shaft, exploding just in front of the band stand.
Thirty-four people died and some ninety more were seriously injured in one of the worst highest casualty incidents of the London Blitz. Among those who lost their lives was the famous band leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson who had only arrived there scant few minutes before the explosions. He was just 26 years old. Saxophonist Dave “Baba” Williams also perished.
Had it been an hour or two later the casualty list would have been far higher.
The Café de Paris nightclub was an icon of high society, including the young princesses and has been featured in numerous books and films over the past 83 years.
Added to the plethora of film and literature in which The Café de Paris is featured are The Bunch Courtney Investigations. Bunch muses while standing in the darkness outside of the Dower house in In Her Defence :
“…she suddenly yearned for a night at the Cafe de Paris, as she had in the old days. … Music and lights and human contact as an antidote to all of this death. Anything is preferable to this drip, drip, drip of lives leaching away.”
Listed Dead, meanwhile, revolves around a dinner club that meets there on a regular basis, and which Bunch suspects of harbouring a murderer in their midst – and where Bunch & Wright go to waylay their elusive suspects in person.
“Bunch arrived at the Café de Paris a little before eight o’clock. Dressed in her deep-green watered silk gown, silver shoes and arctic fox coat, she blended in with the evening crowd and drew a few casual glances only because she was alone. She grabbed a table near the edge of the room with a grandstand view of the staircase and dance floor where she could sip at her Martini as she waited for Wright to arrive. A haze of smoke already hung across the room despite the air conditioning as Snake-hips Johnson’s resident band began warming up for the evening’s entertainment, with his signature swing sound drowning out the noise of cutlery and diners’ chatter.”
Now that my current WIP has moved the Bunch Investigations on to 1942 the Café de Paris will not feature again, which is sad both because it no longer existed by that time and on a personal note because I had developed such a fondness for it.
The Cafe re-opened in 1948 but closed in 2020 and subsequently went into liquidation in 2022 – another victim of the voracious Covid pandemic! The venue since been bought and renamed Lio London.
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The first three BCI books Winter Downs, In Her Defence and Listed Dead are available in Kindle at the bargain price of 99p each.
While the latest book Deadly Plot is a steal at £1.99
All offers end on 31st March so if you haven’t read them yet now is your chance at bargain prices!
Jan Edwards 
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