Iggy Rose was one of Syd Barrett's girlfriends in 1969.
She is most famous for being the model on the Syd Barrett album: 'The Madcap Laughs'.
Nicknamed Iggy the Eskimo, it was rumoured she was part Inuit.
One day, in 1969, she disappeared out of Syd's life and was not heard of ever since.
Almost four decades later, the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit started to mess with things.
Its five years mission: to find Iggy and bring her back to the spotlights.
And guess what, with some invaluable help from many, many friends... we did...
Beginning 2017 Iggy Rose decided to leave social media. She died peacefully on the 13th of December 2017,
just before her seventieth birthday. Wishing you good luck, Iggy, wherever you are.
We don’t have to introduce Emo to vintage Pink
Floyd scholars. Apart from an incredible memory, he seems to have an
almost infinite Floydian picture archive. At regular intervals, he posts
these on one of his (many) Facebook pages.
New Iggy Picture Found?
In December 2023, Emo posted a (censored) picture of a topless woman
sitting next to a man in a garden, claiming this is Iggy in the early
seventies.
The picture is cracked in many places and has faded after all these
years. It shows a skinny woman looking at a man on her left. At first
sight, one can doubt that this is Iggy.
Iggy look-alikes
Over the years, we have received pictures of people thought to be Iggy.
For instance, the pictures of Sheila
Rock that were shot by her then-husband, Mick
Rock, in Syd’s garden, were once believed to be Iggy. (See: Rock
around the Blog, 2009.)
We have had the ‘Iggy or not’ discussion with almost every new Iggy
picture that has been found in the past.
The new picture shows a pretty skinny woman, and this isn’t really how
we remember Iggy from other images from that era. But pictures can
deceive. The quality is such that the woman’s face is partially rendered
invisible by some shadowy patches.
The story
What makes us believe this is Iggy is the background story told by Emo.
According to him, the picture dates from the early 1970s and was taken
in Brighton. The man sitting next to Iggy is a certain Geoffrey,
whom we know nothing about. Emo explains:
I can’t remember Geoffrey’s second name. There are other pictures in the
garden. I’m going to look for them. There are a couple of friends, a
sister and brother, John and Sally...
Pete Brown
got some in Spain, I think; that’s where he is now. And he has got some
of Syd as well, in Wetherby Mansions. He’s going to try and find them.
He’s got some of Syd, I think, on the market square in Cambridge, which
would be 1964. He took them when he was fifteen and Syd was eighteen.
Syd was sitting on the fountain.
But he does have several of
Iggy, walking through the garden. And a couple of her laughing, if we
can find them. She looks really thin here, doesn’t she? Let’s see how
many people will tell, that’s not Iggy! If you zoom in on her face
you’ll be able to see her features.
At this point, Emo added some details about Iggy that we won’t publish.
These details (known to us) make his testimony more than believable. In
a chat from many years ago, Iggy remembered having met Pete Brown in
Brighton.
Someone described me as a loose cannon, never knowing what might come
out of my big mouth or when I might explode, like a dormant volcano.
That was from Pete Brown, whom I met in Brighton, where I went after
London. He used to hang out with Syd and the Cambridge set.
Mark Palmer
Back to Emo:
It's the early seventies, and she looks as if she has lost a lot of
weight. Not how chubby she was when she was at that hippy farm, with
Henrietta [Garnett], a real go-getter, and Sir Mark Palmer, with his
horses. I know about most of her life; Jenny Spires told me most things,
and I heard bits from Syd [Barrett] and Duggie [Fields] as well. She got
really thin by the time she was with Syd.
Emo is referring to aristocrat Mark
Palmer, who organised a horse and wagon quest to Port
Eliot in St. Germans, searching for UFOs and mythical Arthurian
places along the way. Iggy, who hung around the English Boy
agency at that time, joined the caravan and can be seen in a documentary
from that time.
Next to Iggy, there were a lot of underground celebrities participating
in the wacky adventure. Emo Moore further explains:
Henrietta [Garnett] was incredibly beautiful in the sixties, an
upper-class English lady. She died a couple of years ago [2019]. Mark
Palmer was a really sweet guy; he was so gentle, a true hippie. He made
my stomach go funny because he was so laid back, and I started to go
laid back. 1967, 68, 69. Because I was always in Chelsea, so was he in
that period.
When I worked for Ossie Clark, I saw him all the
time. He passed through to go to English Boy. He was still involved, but
he wasn’t as involved as when he started it.
English Boy
Sir Charles Mark Palmer opened the English Boy modelling agency in 1965.
It was located above the Quorum store, owned by Ossie
Clark and Alice
Pollock. They asked Iggy to model for them, but she refused.
Although a loudmouth, she was very shy. But she kept hanging around the
English Boy agency. Iggy explains why:
I had such a crush on Mark Palmer, lovely Denzil, and all the pretty
boys and girls from the English Boy agency. Denzil was THE Ultimate
Cool. He was an unrivalled leader. The sharpest dresser in hand-made
Italian silk suits and the finest Italian shoes. Denzil epitomized style
and elegance. He was the dandiest of the dandies. He made Beau
Brummell look shabby.
It’s still a mystery to us who this Denzil character was,
but here is a sample of the fine specimen that English Boy contained.
Hippie world
The 1960s were a wonderful time, if we may believe Emo:
It was a bit hippie-jive. All these groovy places. Groovy pubs and clubs
and rock ‘n’ roll dance places. Bookshops and all these clothing shops
and underground meeting centres. Lots of things were going on, and
normal people wouldn’t have known what happened in a lot of the
bookshops. The films were in the basements and the backrooms, sometimes
in the main shop when it was a big movie with a lot of people.
It
started in 1964 when I was passing across these amazing, unique places
with ‘Hey man, what’s up, man’ [Emo imitating Neil
from The
Young Ones]. That type of vibe...
Henrietta Moraes
Henrietta
Moraes was a muse of the London art (and drugs) scene in the
fifties. Known for her hedonistic lifestyle she effortlessly entered the
kippie underground of the sixties, where she hung around with Mark
Palmer and his crazy followers. She wrote a book 'Henrietta' where she
describes Palmer's quest through England and Wales. Although Iggy
claimed they knew each other, there is no trace of Iggy in these
memoirs, but neither is there of the other Henrietta (Partridge).
This probably proves that Mark Palmer organised different caravan quests
in different years and with different people. One that was documented in
the 'Hippies
at the Port Eliot Estate in St Germans' documentary, with Iggy and
Henrietta Partridge. Another one (probably) without Iggy, but with
author Henrietta Moraes taking notes to appear in her autobiography. Emo:
I don’t know the other Henrietta [Moraes]. I have never seen her. If I
had seen her, I would have recognised her. It sounds like it would’ve
been a wonderful place where they were all hanging out with Mark Palmer.
He had a couple of those gipsy caravans. I think he was riding around
one in London when he was going to court or something.
Mark Palmer (2)
Palmer was once arrested for cannabis possession and showed the judges
he was a real British aristocrat, with a flair of eccentricity...
Palmer left the courthouse in a horse-drawn cart bedecked in
chrysanthemums; ‘the metamorphosis,’ said somebody who knew him as a
somewhat straighter fellow, ‘was so complete as to transcend mere
affectation.’
In the book ‘Ready Steady Go!’, author Shawn
Levy describes these aristocratic upper-class hippies:
Some of the most high-born among the Stones’ new pals would soon take on
new lives as caravaners, travelling through the countryside in
horse-drawn carts, dressed in hippie-gipsy gear, smoking dope,
practising free love in the fields, and attempting to make contact with
UFOs, which they believed still followed ancient ley lines - magnetic
landing strips, in effect, built into the landscape but lost to
centuries of ignorant civilisation.
The youthful Sir Mark Palmer,
who had attended Eton and Oxford and served as a page at Queen
Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation (his mother was a lady-in-waiting), was the
most celebrated of the lot. Although he ran a modelling agency - English
Boy Ltd. - from his home in Radnor Walk, Chelsea, he joined up with a
posse of itinerant rich folks who eschewed baths and roofs and
responsibility for a life of giddy freedom, caravaning about the
countryside in a movable commune of like-minded spirits.
Mark Palmer and his friends started different journeys around England.
According to Henrietta
Moraes, he travelled for four years before settling down and
starting a horse farm. By then, Iggy had long left the hippie brigade,
for reasons she explained in her typical style:
I’ve done the Hippy commune with the lentils and mantra, bongo bashing,
and tuneless flute playing. There were lots of plonk and unspiritual
drugs. I just craved the bloodiest steak. I’m not a diabetic!
Sally, Emo, Syd and Iggy
Emo Moore:
I only met Iggy twice. She looked really cute, though. At Syd's during
those two weeks. Once with Sally and Syd, and another time with myself
and Syd. Syd looked completely somewhere else, and I didn’t get
introduced to her. Otherwise, I would’ve spoken to her. Because they
were both deadly silent, sitting apart in Syd’s room, I left after ten
minutes, both times, I think.
Iggy, deadly silent? Now that’s a weird behaviour for her. Both must
have been pretty high that day, silently floating above that bi-coloured
floorboard.
The Church wishes to thank: Iain Emo Moore, Iggy Rose, Miss Peelpants. ♥
Libby ♥ Iggy ♥
Sources (other than the above-mentioned URLs): Levy, Shawn: Ready
Steady Go!, Broadway Books, New York, 2003, p. 235-237. Moraes,
Henrietta: Henrietta, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994.