Residents of Newbold are this week commemorating the 45th anniversary of the moment Cynthia “Madam Gobble” Payne was released from HMP New Hall, following her short-lived career as the North’s foremost purveyor of tea, titillation and the occasional clergyman in crotchless knickers.
While residents in Wardle remember her as a scandal, here down the M62 she’s revered as a pioneer, the Mary Berry of BDSM.
Her unassuming home on Newbold Hall Gardens, now a bland semi-detached tragedy with double glazing and no erotic swing, was once a mecca for the morally flexible and mildly incontinent. Regulars at Madam Gobble’s shindigs included solicitors, bingo callers, one disgraced former council leader and an RAF veteran who only answered to “Mistress Peggy”.
She burst onto the national scene in 1978 when a police raid interrupted one of her Thursday afternoon “luncheon socials”, which reportedly featured doilies, Battenberg, and a retired bishop tied to a clothes horse shouting “More lemon drizzle!”
At her 1980 trial, it emerged she charged £25 in exchange for a “luncheon voucher”, a euphemism so tragically British it now features in GCSE sociology textbooks. In return, punters received tea, sympathy, and an enthusiastic telling-off from a woman dressed as a traffic warden.
Convicted of running a disorderly house (though regulars insist it was absolutely immaculate, with a colour-coded dungeon rota), Madam Gobble was sentenced to 18 months in prison, reduced to four months after a judge admitted “She does make a fine vol-au-vent”.
Upon her release from Holloway, she flashed the V-sign at photographers, proclaiming “V for Voucher, V for Victory”, though insiders claim it stood for something far less printable involving a vicar, a vegetable, and a vacuum cleaner.
Undeterred, Madam Gobble leaned into her new celebrity status. She wrote books (Entertaining at Home: A Guide to Erotic Canapés), appeared on The Dame Edna Experience, and even ran for Parliament under the Payne and Pleasure Party, pledging to replace the House of Lords with the House of Lube.
Her reign finally ended after a 1986 party was busted for “excessive whooping”, during which 12 pensioners dressed as WW2 air raid wardens were discovered mid-orgy in the conservatory. “We were just doing the Charleston,” claimed one man, who was later fined for misusing a gas mask.
These days, her former den of debauchery has been converted into flats, each now selling for £400,000 and reportedly free from harnesses, though traces of glitter and latex occasionally emerge during heavy rain.
Locals still tell stories. “She put Newbold on the map,” said resident Folashade Alade, who now lives in what was once the ‘paddling parlour’. “House prices soared once the spankings stopped, but the community spirit’s never been the same.”
“She was filth, but in a thoughtful, catering-conscious way,” said one neighbour, wistfully examining a scorch mark in the shape of a bishop.
Madam Gobble passed away in 2015, aged 82. Her funeral was attended by mourners in PVC mourning attire, and her coffin was carried on a sex swing by six burly men dressed as dinner ladies. Floral tributes read “SEX”, “TAKE A TICKET”, and “GOBBLE GOBBLE, BABY”.
Her memory lives on, not just in scandalous anecdotes or regional house price graphs, but in the hearts, handcuffs, and Hotpoint tumble dryers of a grateful nation.
Reporting from down the M62, where the kettles are boiling and the safe words are laminated.
