Basil Newby and the Flying Handbag Empire

A childhood among the stars

Basil Newby was born in Blackpool on 1 October 1951 and grew up surrounded by showbusiness. His parents ran theatrical guest houses, the kind of place where the stars of the summer seasons stayed while they played the piers and theatres. Over the years the family's guests included Shirley Bassey, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, Hilda Baker, Norman Evans, Winifred Atwell, the Beverley Sisters and the Kaye Sisters. Hilda Baker, the family story goes, was asked to leave because her pet monkey was not house-trained.

By the time Basil was about ten, his parents had opened a country club in Kirkham, and watching the acts there lit the spark. He was sent to boarding school in Wales, toyed with studying law or teaching, and spent time at a training college in St Annes, but the classroom could not compete with the stage.

Bluecoat, shopkeeper and drag act

In the early 1970s, to his parents' embarrassment, Newby went off to be a Bluecoat at a Pontins holiday camp in Torbay. He loved it, and later joked that he was probably the only gay man in Torquay at the time.

Back in Blackpool he bought a fancy-goods shop on Chapel Street, close to the Promenade. It was already called Gone Gay, and the shop next door was called Go Gay, which tells you something about the cheerful innocence of seaside shop names in the 1970s. In summer it stayed open until two or three in the morning. He sold it after a couple of years, and the money helped pay for what came next.

He also had a brief go at performing, fronting a drag act called Basil St James Plus Two, with two girl dancers. His heart was not really in the working-men's-club circuit, and he was thinking about going back to Pontins when his partner suggested something bolder: why not open a gay venue? At that point, by Newby's account, Blackpool had just two places gay people could reliably go, Lucy's Bar and the Clifton.

The Flamingo, 1979

In 1979 Newby took the lease on the Flamingo, a top-floor club on Talbot Road opposite Blackpool North station. It had a seedy reputation. Its regulars were the "ladies of the night" and their customers, and when the new owner arrived some of them assumed he must be a brothel keeper. He kept the name, partly because he had been told it was bad luck to change it, and turned the place into Blackpool's first openly gay nightclub.

It was not easy. A brewery he approached for investment turned him down flat once it heard the idea. To get his licence from the magistrates he felt he had to keep quiet about his sexuality, because a gay man could be seen as an "improper person" to hold one. His solicitor reportedly told him he would be the first openly gay licensee in the country. In the end the money came from the sale of the shop and help from his father.

At first, curious faces appeared at the windows as people tried to work out what kind of club it was. Within a couple of years the queues were four deep. Gay and straight locals mixed with visitors who travelled from all over the UK, and the stage hosted big names from the 1980s and 1990s, including Grace Jones, Divine, Lily Savage and an early Take That. Newby later called the Flamingo the love of his life. You can read more about it in our history of the club.

Building the group

The Flamingo's success gave Newby the confidence to grow. He bought the ground floor of the same building, where a pub called the King's Arms became the Flying Handbag. Over the following years his company, In The Pink (ITP) Leisure, added bar after bar. At different times the group ran Funny Girls, the Flamingo, the Flying Handbag, Buzz, Roxy's and the Whippet Inn, and it leased out at least one other bar. By the mid-2010s ITP employed around 150 people all year round, and the Flamingo opened seven nights a week, Christmas Day included.

There were fights along the way. Newby has said he was refused a licence for another club around the time of Section 28, a refusal he put partly down to the mood of the era. He appealed to the Crown Court and won.

There were also years of hostility and grief. During the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s, engineers refused to repair the Flamingo's boiler because they were afraid of catching the virus. Newby has called that period heartbreaking, and he has said it shaped his determination to create somewhere where everyone was welcome.

Funny Girls

That somewhere was Funny Girls, which opened in July 1994 in a small corner unit at the Promenade end of Queen Street. It was all-male drag cabaret aimed squarely at everyone: gay and straight, hen parties and pensioners. Newby's philosophy was that inside the club everyone was equal, whatever their sexuality, creed or colour. The show was an instant hit, spread into neighbouring shops and helped turn Queen Street into a nightlife hotspot.

When the bar chain Walkabout showed interest in the Queen Street site, the council suggested Newby look at the derelict Odeon cinema on Dickson Road. He was nervous about its size and its position, but he bought the building for around £500,000 and spent millions restoring it. Joan Collins opened the new Funny Girls in July 2002. Our separate history of Funny Girls tells that story in more detail.

Compulsory purchase and the move to Queen Street

The biggest regret of Newby's career, by his own account, came next. The Talbot Road building that housed the Flamingo and the Flying Handbag stood in the way of the council's Talbot Gateway regeneration scheme, and it was compulsorily purchased. In January 2006 the Flamingo moved into the upper floors of the Odeon, with its entrance on Queen Street, and the Flying Handbag moved into a new building on the corner of Queen Street and Lord Street. The original building was demolished in 2007, and a supermarket now stands on the site. Newby has argued that the council knocked down the heart of the gay village, and that a blue plaque should mark the spot.

The compulsory purchase also left a tax bill of around £800,000 that would come back to haunt him.

Recognition

In the 2014 New Year Honours Newby was made an MBE for services to business and the LGBT community. By then he was one of the best-known faces in Blackpool, a cheerleader for the town who backed the failed campaign for a super casino and still argued for a longer Illuminations season and a big new arena. He never smoked or drank, and in 2016 he said he had planned to retire at 65.

The fall

It did not work out that way. In 2018 everything seemed to go wrong at once. Newby was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the disease that had killed his father and grandfather, and he travelled to Munich for proton beam therapy. He has spoken openly about struggling with depression during that time. In July the Flamingo's licence was suspended after a police review. The old tax bill resurfaced, and in September 2018 the group went into administration. Among its debts were more than £700,000 owed to the taxman and more than £300,000 owed to Blackpool Council.

In January 2019 the Lancashire brewer Thwaites bought the estate, including Funny Girls, the Flamingo, Buzz and the Flying Handbag.

"Baz is back"

The break did not last long. In August 2019, after a year spent recuperating, Newby bought Funny Girls, the Flamingo and Buzz back from Thwaites, announcing his return with a cheerful "Baz is back!" Thwaites kept the Flying Handbag, which it went on to refit and still runs. Funny Girls marked its 25th birthday that summer, Newby hosted a charity evening for Prostate Cancer UK that December, and in January 2020 he celebrated forty years in business. The Funny Girls cast, led by Betty Legs Diamond, even planned its first national tour in a quarter of a century.

Asked about Blackpool's attitude, Newby said he had never personally experienced homophobia in his home town, which he called very open-minded. He also credited the pink pound with regenerating Queen Street.

Handing on the baton

On 31 July 2025, in Funny Girls' thirtieth anniversary year, Newby announced he would retire. He was 74, both his sisters were living with dementia, and his partner of more than forty years, Ian, who had been a big part of the business, had had two heart attacks. Funny Girls went on the market at £3.5 million. He said the sale could take three months or three years, that the venue needed new blood, and that he cared more about finding the right people than about the money.

In January 2026 he confirmed the sale. The buyer turned out to be the theatre and bar operator Kane Oliver, whose team opened their first season in spring 2026. Newby said he hoped Funny Girls would carry on for at least another twenty years, and that he planned to spend his retirement on personal projects, including writing a book.

The legacy

It is hard to overstate Newby's part in Blackpool's story. He opened the first openly gay nightclub in a town where a gay man could be refused a licence, built a group that at its peak ran most of the scene, and created the drag show that made Blackpool famous far beyond the north. The gay hotels, he has said, followed the Flamingo, not the other way round. When Blackpool Council set out its plan to celebrate the LGBTQ+ quarter in 2023, he welcomed it, pointing out that the town had always had a gay village. He had, after all, built most of it.