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Modern Notoriety · West Wittering, West Sussex

Redlands (the Rolling Stones bust)

Keith Richards's moated cottage, raided by eighteen officers on 12 February 1967 with Marianne Faithfull wrapped in a fur rug. The trial produced The Times editorial 'Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?'; the notorious Mars-bar detail is an unevidenced later rumour, not court evidence or contemporary reporting.

StatusDocumented + folklore

Dateraid 12 February 1967

The peopleKeith Richards, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Chief Insp. Gordon Dineley

The siteRedlands house (private), West Wittering

Coordinates50.77861, -0.88778 (confidence 3/5)

The story

On 12 February 1967, eighteen police officers walked into Keith Richards's thatched house near West Wittering and changed British cultural history without meaning to. They were after drugs. They found a group coming down from an LSD trip to a Bob Dylan record, and very little else: four amphetamine tablets that Mick Jagger took responsibility for (bought legally in Italy by Marianne Faithfull), some hashish, and heroin belonging to the art dealer Robert Fraser. The tip-off is widely believed to have come via the News of the World, which Jagger was then suing.

The raid produced the most famous sexual rumour in British history, and it is entirely false. Faithfull, then twenty, had just had a bath and was wrapped in a fur rug. That is all. The tale of a Mars bar used in a sex act appeared in no charge, no court evidence and no newspaper of the day; it spread by word of mouth, possibly from police gossip, and Faithfull spent decades calling it a dirty old man's fantasy. It made the men legends and the woman a punchline.

At Chichester in June 1967, Jagger got three months, Richards a year. Then The Times editor William Rees-Mogg ran his famous leader, "Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?", arguing Jagger had been punished for being famous. On appeal the sentences collapsed. But Faithfull's life did not recover for years: she lost custody of her son, and lived homeless and addicted in Soho before her extraordinary comeback with Broken English (1979). The men walked away myths; she was destroyed by a lie.

More stories at this spot

The soaps they took instead of the cocaine

Among the odder details of the Redlands search: officers walked off with Keith Richards's collection of hotel soaps, apparently suspecting them, while — by his own later account — missing substances they simply did not recognise. The drug squad of 1967 was learning on the job, and the gap between the moral panic and the officers' actual expertise is one of the quiet comedies of the whole affair.

The Acid King who was never charged

Among the Redlands guests was a mysterious American, David Schneiderman, the "Acid King", who had supplied the LSD — and who vanished afterwards, his bag of chemicals conspicuously unsearched. Suspicion that he was an informer, working for the press or the police or both, has never been proven and never quite died. He died in 2004, taking whatever he knew with him.

Sources

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Documented history

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