Freddie Mills. Acrylic Painting on Canvas
Freddie Mills was a famous boxer in the 1940s and 1950s. After retiring from boxing, he appeared on radio, television and on the stage and ran his own Soho nightclub in the 1960s. This was often frequented by London Gangsters who held him in high regard.
murder or suicide
Gossip suggested that he was involved, along with another man, in a series of murders of working girls.
On 24 July 1965, Mills was found dead in his car, parked in an alley behind his nightclub. A fairground rifle was found in the car with Mills, who had been shot through his right eye.
*Artist Doug Kemp with Freddie Mills painting
Murder Or suicide?
There was some unusual behaviour of people at the scene and the death was initially assumed to be murder but it was later ruled as suicide. Some suspicion still lingers that the death was actually a gangland murder.
Sharp angular panels
The painting contains sharp angular panels, some intersecting the central portrait that is based, loosely, on the singer Michael Holliday, and a car of the period, with a slumped body, representing the death scene.
On the left is a bright yellow panel with a full-length image of a red-haired woman dressed only in her underwear and shoes. This, perhaps, serves as a tribute to the working girls of the area and their often perilous profession.
A bright orange panel on the right acts as a counterbalance and contains the outline figure of a man who would be looking at the viewer, should he actually have a face.
This might represent some possible unknown assassin but it could also reflect the anonymity of so many people in and passing through Soho around the time.
Michael Holiday
At the same time Michael Holiday committed suicide while on a boat and Freddie was found dead in the back seat of his car in Soho and was said to have also committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle through his open eye, many people did not believe this.
Following his death, the murders of the working girls stopped.
Frederick Percival Mills (26 June 1919 – 25 July 1965) was an English boxer and the world light heavyweight champion from 1948 to 1950. Mills was 5 feet 10+1⁄2 inches (179 cm) tall and did not have a sophisticated boxing style; he was more of a slugger and relied on two-fisted aggression, relentless pressure, and the ability to take punishment to carry him through, and in more cases than not these attributes were sufficient.
Mills excelled first as a middleweight, and most successfully as a light-heavyweight boxer, but also fought as a heavyweight. He was described as Britain’s biggest boxing idol in the post-war period and was a highly popular media personality after his retirement from the ring.
Read more about the Freddy Mills on Wikipedia
Following the death of Freddy Mills, several lurid conspiracy theories arose, such as that Mills, who was married with children, had been arrested in a public toilet and charged with indecency, and that his suicide had been staged by Chinese gangsters who were seeking to take over his club.
In 2002, a book about Mills by former journalist Michael Litchfield contained allegations that at the time of his death he was about to be exposed as the serial killer known as “Jack the Stripper”, the unidentified person responsible for the eight Hammersmith female form murders in 1964–65. The victims, all prostitutes, were found undressed in or near the River Thames, leading the press to nickname the killer Jack the Stripper (a reference to “Jack the Ripper”).
Two earlier murders, committed in West London in 1959 and 1963, have also been linked by some investigators to the same perpetrator.
Despite “intense media interest and one of the biggest ever manhunts in Scotland Yard’s history” the case remains unsolved. Forensic evidence gathered at the time is believed to have been destroyed or lost.
Litchfield also claimed that Mills had had a homosexual relationship with singer Michael Holliday, and possibly also was sexually involved with notorious gangster Ronnie Kray.
