“This was a few weeks after she was noticed by a friend brushing hair off the floor of a hair salon in Bayswater. She came in and she was 15 or something, did lots of pictures. I called her in July and spoke to her Dad- he said ‘Lesley doesn’t live here anymore, she’s gone off with a model promoter- Justin de Villeneuve’. She called me later- ‘Let’s do some more pictures’ and she came round and looked completley different her hair was platinum and Justin said ‘Every time you use a model you must use Twiggy- I’m gonna make her famous’. A few months went by and he said ‘I’ve heard about these photographs you’ve taken of Twiggy, have you got any more?’, I said ‘Yeah, lots- we did a whole shoot’ and he said ‘If you ever publish any of these photographs that you took before I met her- I’ll see to it that you never work again and you’ll never walk again.’
At that time I shared a studio with three other photographers- and Justin got friendly with one, David Stanford, and when I went to India for six weeks, I came back and my file had been jemmied open and all the photos, negs and contact sheets of the Lesley Hornby shoot had been stolen. The only photo left was a tear sheet from a girly magazine.”