Deviation Posting – The Bank Job, Michael X and Me

I finally found a copy of the newish British movie The Bank Job about the Princess Margaret orgy photos, the Baker Street bank job of 1971 and Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X. It’s a good movie with some nice recreations of London in the early 1970s and very watchable (well, Saffron Burrows is in it and she is very watchable).

As a part-time historian then it’s nice to recall a small part I played in history when I was a baby and that means I have a special interest in the film as I have a strange connection to Michael X. In the late 1960s my Dad was an environmental health officer with Islington Council in north London. We lived just up the road in Enfield at the time. Michael X had set up shop in a building he called The Black House. In the film I think they show this as being in West London somewhere but it was in fact at Highbury Corner on the Holloway Road. Michael X had added an extension to the property without planning permission and my dad had the rather unenviable task of having to pop along there and tell him he had to take it down. Michael X was always quite good at annoying people and insisted my dad and his colleagues take their shoes off. He then refused to take down the rather haphazard extension and so my dad had the even more unenviable task of then informing Michael X that he’d have to get a court order to force him to take his illegal extension down.

Michael X was not best pleased by this and proceeded to rant and rave at my dad and his colleagues before threatening that if my dad proceeded with the court order then he and his followers would come and kill my dad and his family (i.e. me). I was only a baby at the time so don’t actually remember any of this but for a few weeks we apparently had a police car stationed outside our house and I do vaguely remember some uniformed policemen coming into the house for a cup of tea with my mum. I don’t think anyone really thought Michael X would do anything but they provided some protection anyway.

Eventually the Black House burned down mysteriously and Michael X left Britain to return to Trinidad where he was eventually hung for some murders which perhaps indicates that the police were sensible in offering my family some protection. Watching The Bank Job it was obviously fascinating to watch a representation of Michael X who fortunately never did come and kill me.