THE NIGHT THE BISHOP WENT ON A STRIP CLUB CRAWL OF LONDON'S FLESHPOTS

Dear night clubbers,

Peter Stringfellow

          The death of the “King of Clubs,” Peter Stringfellow revived memories of our daughter Belinda Abbott’s brief strip club waitressing career. Convent school educated she was a sweet 21 year old, who had left Johannesburg to see the world, when she got a job at Peter’s London Stringfellows Club.

          She hadn’t been there long when this man surprised everyone. He arrived dressed in a Bishop’s cassock and a mitre.

          “Stringfellows was packed, but it felt like the parting of the Red Sea as astonished revellers made way for me,” he was quoted as saying. “I paused for a moment and the club’s best looking waitresses draped themselves all over me and pouted professionally.”

           One of them was our Belinda.

          The story with our daughter and another girl in the main picture with the Bishop was a page lead in London’s Daily Mirror. No names of the two waitresses were given in the caption, so when Belinda sent us the cutting I replied: “Which one is you? P.S. What does a Bishop wear under his cassock.”

          The Bishop turned out to be none other than Daily Mirror reporter Chris Hughes. The article claimed that he had proved that “bishops REALLY are God’s gift to women.”

Peter and his admirers

          It began: “After years on the town with the lads I found out at last what it felt like to be Mr Right. Well Bishop Wright actually.

          “Forget corny chat-up lines, after shave and wads of money,” he wrote. “If you want to pull the girls dress up as man of the cloth.     

 “I swopped my suit for holy vestments for six hours – and by the end of the evening I had been to Heaven and back.”

          According to his holy orders he claimed that his final test was a visit to Stringfellows night club in London’s West End. By that time he was “in mortal danger of falling from grace.”

          Belinda is now Belinda Glynn a fashion designer in Melbourne, Australia.

Celebrities (Belinda is third from the left) at the 2017
Australian Open in Melbourne. A far cry from waitressing
in a London club

          The Club’s website boasts that “Peter has made Stringfellows the most famous Gentlemen’s club in the world offering the epitome of fine dining and certainly the most beautiful girls that you will ever have the pleasure of meeting.”

Belinda now

          At the start of his entertainment career Peter booked the likes of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix to play at his clubs. After opening Strngfellows in London in 1980 he launched other clubs in Paris, New York, Miami and Beverly Hills.

          Stringfellows hosted such celebrities as Rod Stewart and Tom Jones.

          Peter died of cancer earlier this month aged 77.  He married three times and is survived by his wife Bella and four children.

          Regards,

          Jon, who has never been a bogus Bishop but he has always been a real Abbott.