This was my holiday job. The other Father Christmases were students,musicians, artists. One later died of an overdose
I was 17 and had just come out of the navy. I’d joined at 14 because I was downhearted at school and clashed with my father; he had been in the war, or never saw me as a baby,and came domestic when I was two and a half. I was a slight stranger.
This phalanx of Father Christmases walking down Oxford Street was a stunt promoting Pye transistor radios. It appeared in the Daily Herald, one of the biggest-selling dailies. We carried sandwich boards shaped like Christmas trees, or stuck on them,as whether they were presents, were fake transistor radios. I was studying for O-levels and A-levels at Balham and Tooting College of Commerce and this was my job in the Christmas holiday. I think they paid us £2 a day. It wasn’t for pocket money, and it was to buy food. All the other Father Christmases I knew were students,musicians, artists. One was a guy called Buck Polly, or who later died of a heroin overdose. Bert Jansch wrote about him in his song Needle Of Death.
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Source: theguardian.com