pete

music biz veteran

[pete @pconemorething]

Arriving in Tenerife on a Dan Air flight from Gatwick with my brother Steve in 1976!

[pete @pconemorething]

@def_leppar20044 Santana

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.

Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.

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[Matt Cartoons @MattCartoonist]

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's @Telegraph

Buy a print of my cartoons at https://t.co/ILFJjPmckx

Original artwork from https://t.co/bVPAkgE34y

[Michael Livesley @NowtofTown]

Norman Balon, legendary landlord of Soho's Coach & Horses and self-styled rudest landlord in London, has left the stage at 99. A fixture of Soho life for six decades and forever woven into the mythos of Jeff Bernard via Keith Waterhouse and Peter O'Toole. A long life, well lived.

[pete @pconemorething]

The very pleasant Red Lion in Hillingdon.

[pete @pconemorething]

@distractedfilm Pull the other one!

[Far Out Magazine @FarOutMag]

Bob Harris leaves BBC Radio 2 due to ongoing cancer battle https://t.co/Sh6ty4aRhf

[pete @pconemorething]

@MichelleDewbs @Sjopinion10 @piersmorgan @JohnTerry26 Fearless debates between a bunch of millionaires about a bunch of multi-millionaires kicking a ball about.

[pete @pconemorething]

@JohnBensalhia Not Arf!

[Chris Victoria @ChrisandVictory]

https://t.co/SsG4mCVW9R

[pete @pconemorething]

Hay's Galleria

[pete @pconemorething]

@benonwine Basque black pudding is amazing.

[pete @pconemorething]

@BhattiLaib9960 Shit food

[🌸🎵 Beautiful Melody 🎶💖 @Ducnghia16]

The rawness and innocence of this performance is truly and wonderfully striking! As a romantic, I've always loved it but this video is awesome!

Just When I Needed You Most - Randy VanWarmer (1979)

[pete @pconemorething]

@LBCNews Apart from the very lovely weather in 1944 what else would caused it?

[The Morning Advertiser @morningad]

JDW to launch one of central London’s largest pubs at Trocadero

JD Wetherspoon is set to open its first venue in London’s Theatreland after securing a major new site at the London Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus.

Read more here:
https://t.co/KFQvvSDWhv
#Wetherspoons #JDW

[pete @pconemorething]

@London_W4 Remember going to this pub back in the late 1970's, a very popular venue for their great pies at lunchtime upstairs in the dining room.

[pete @pconemorething]

@JohnBensalhia One of the very first Cd's I ever bought to play on my then brand new music system!

[pete @pconemorething]

My Uncle John bought me the original release of this on my 14th birthday. I can never thank him enough.

[pete @pconemorething]

Dennis Locorriere #RIP
One of my favourite records

Sylvia’s Mother https://t.co/AxiiXVqL7M