If there was one thing that I picked up on quickly when studying newspaper coverage of punk between the years 1975 and 1995, it was that the tabloids bloody love a posh punk.
Seriously.
Here is a basic template for that kind of story.
The daughter/son of Lord and Lady blah blah blah
Has…
- Got a punk haircut and been suspended from boarding school
- Joined/formed a punk band
- Married Marianne Faithful while being a punk
- Died in murky circumstances while being a punk
Another similar template could also be used and applied to the offspring of the rich and famous who have displayed a (usually visual only) interest in punk:
The daughter/son of [actor/singer etc]
Has…
- Arrived at Heathrow in full punk gear and on rollerskates, hellbent on launching some kind of career off the back of this.
- Been done for shoplifting/cocaine dealing/streaking with pink hair
- Been generally naughty in some way
- Been evicted by their landlord, and presumably reported to the press by nosy neighbours.
You get the idea.
Given that I seemed to spend an awful lot of time sifting through the mundane and depressing in the archives (particularly when I hit the 1980s) it’s perhaps not surprising that the antics of a couple of women in the late 1970s/early-mid 1980s caught my eye.
Victoria Sellars, the lone daughter of Peter Sellars and Britt Eckland, appeared to have negligible connection to punk other than briefly dressing in a punkish manner. Initially this is what got her the dubious honour of being featured in The Daily Mail, but her later exploits - which ensured that she was tabloid fodder for years - had no connection to punk. This meant she came up in my search results time and time again, but it was for the following, not for being a punk:
- Starring in a Pink Floyd film
- Nude modelling for Playboy
- Cocaine dealing accusations
- Allegedly being a high class call girl
Clara Willan, who featured in the Daily Mail a number of times around the 1985-1986 period, was cut from a different cloth to Victoria Sellars: She was a 17 year old posh punk who carried a flick knife, did graffiti and was, by all accounts, living the kind of highly chaotic lifestyle that you’d expect from the average 17 year old girl living away from home for the first time.
She also just happened to be the dual inheritor of the Coleman’s Mustard fortune.
Her chaotic lifestyle, plus the fact that the money was being kept in trust for her and her brother until they were both 30, are presumably why her rent was in arrears, meaning that she was booted out of her flat in 1985. She was last seen in the tabloids complaining that all she had to her name was a fiver, and that she’d have to sleep rough or on a friend’s sofa.
It is possible, with a quick google, to find out what happened to both Clara and Victoria (both are still with us.) And it’s equally possible to form the conclusion that both are quite damaged people. The extent to which the damage sustained was as a result of their own unique circumstances and upbringing, or as a result of their being tabloid fodder for years in their youth, is impossible to say.
