Cynthia Payne

Died: November 15 2015

THE life of Cynthia Payne, who has died aged 82, might have remained unremarked – if hardly unremarkable – had it not been for the visit of the police to "Cranmore", her net-curtained house at 32 Ambleside Avenue, London SW16 1QP in December 1978.

When the constabulary, who had had the house under surveillance for a fortnight during which they noted the arrival of 250 men and 50 women, finally knocked on the door, they found 53 men, many queuing on the stairs, and 13 women, most in various stages of undress, inside.

Cynthia Payne's trial for running "the biggest disorderly house in British history" needed no sensationalising by the tabloids – the ingredients for sensation were already present and irresistible. The (exclusively middle-aged and elderly) men in the habit of frequenting Mrs Payne's – she insisted on the prefix – were said to include MPs, barristers, vicars, bank managers, policemen, an RAF squadron leader clad in fishnets and at least one member of the House of Lords.

The contrast between the suburban locale, featuring Dralon sofas with antimacassars, artificial coal fire and glasses of sherry, and the outré sexual services on offer – whips, canes and bondage – was accentuated by some almost surreal details. Clients paid in Luncheon Vouchers (purchased from Mrs Payne for £25, redeemed by the girls for £8), there was a discount for OAPs, and a supper of poached eggs was provided after business was concluded.

At the end of the trial, Mrs Payne got 18 months, a £1,950 fine and the same in costs, and an indelible reputation as the quintessentially English madam. Indeed, the Englishness of the whole thing was not only catnip for the newspapers but created a good deal of sympathy for her.

As the public and commentators pitted their natural censoriousness and hypocrisy over sexual matters against their fondness for absurd bawdy, they tended to conclude that Mrs Payne's story belonged in a tradition that included Chaucer, Confessions of a Window Cleaner and the postcards of Donald McGill.

Her defence barrister argued that the men involved, not Cynthia Payne and the women at her house, should be prosecuted. She was defended by the journalists Auberon Waugh, who pointed out that "at least no dogs were killed" (referring to the Thorpe trial, another cause célèbre with sexual overtones around the same time) and Jeffrey Bernard, who thought her "the greatest Englishwoman since Boudicea". The Labour MPs Sam Silkin and Tony Benn were among those signing a Commons motion supporting her; at a later trial in 1986, the Tory MPs Anthony Beaumont Dark and Sir Nicholas Fairbairn deplored the prosecution of "a bit of harmless fun".

On appeal, her conviction was upheld, but her sentence reduced to six months. Cynthia Payne walked out of jail into a Rolls-Royce, a scrum of photographers and a secure position as a celebrity commentator on all matters sexual. It resulted in an autobiography, a book on (rather specialised) etiquette, Entertaining at Home, two feature films, a couple of runs at parliamentary seats, a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Festival and careers as an after-dinner speaker, chat-show and diary column fixture, agony aunt and purveyor of sexual accessories.

Cynthia Payne was born at Bognor Regis on Christmas Eve 1932. Her father was a hairdresser on liners, working the Southampton to Cape Town run, and seldom at home; her mother died when she was 11, and Cynthia and her sister were brought up by housekeepers.

Her convent school found her unruly, and expelled her, and after a brief attempt to follow her father into the tonsorial arts, she worked as a waitress and a shopgirl and generally ran wild – a period described in David Leland's film Wish You Were Here (1987), which starred Emily Lloyd. Leland also wrote the screenplay for the previous year's Personal Services, which documented her career as a brothel keeper and starred Julie Walters.

At 17, Cynthia Payne moved to London and took up with a married man, by whom she had a son, Dominic, who was eventually fostered but whose education she financed (as well as later arranging for him to lose his virginity with one of her employees). She had a second son, given up for adoption, and, by a different boyfriend, a series of abortions. She eventually left him and not long after, met a prostitute who asked if she could rent her room during the hours she was waitressing.

Soon Cynthia Payne was "on the game" herself, but found working as a "maid" taking bookings easier, and renting rooms which she sublet to other girls considerably more profitable. After two years running a string of such rooms, she bought a small house in the south London suburb of Streatham, outwardly respectable but near a notorious "red light" area around the Common. In 1974, she moved to Ambleside Avenue, which she bought with her "sex-slave", the transvestite retired Squadron Leader "Mitch" Smith, with whom she lived until his death in 1981.

In 1986, just before the release of Personal Services, Cynthia Payne's house was raided again; this time, she was acquitted. She ran for Parliament (representing the "Payne and Pleasure" party) in the Kensington by-election of 1988 and at the 1992 general election in Streatham. As well as her books, chat-show appearances, a foray into sexual merchandise and her show at Edinburgh in 1992, she harboured hopes that Andrew Lloyd Webber would write a musical about her.

She never married.

ANDREW MCKIE