A photo of Jason Dors-Lake, taken from his Facebook page

I’ve been meaning to post this for some months now, but lockdown has had a way of distracting me with work that came from nowhere, so as life gradually gets back to normal, I can now catch up on my blog posts. When I heard of the passing of Jason Dors-Lake I was genuinely saddened. I only actually met Jason a couple of times in the mid-1990s (or thereabouts) in Ibiza in a nightclub, and brushed shoulders with him London. We were both in the same circles back then; we were both in bands, both into the dance scene, though my musical background was firmly in the Independent/Britpop music scene by then. I remember then thinking that he was going to famous, and his parties were becoming legendary, all manner of band-types and dance DJs were hanging out with him. Life has a way of taking you down other pathways, so this brief connection ended and became lost in the past, our lives taking different directions.

Fast forward twenty years, and I was talking to a guy I know on social media about book ideas, and he mentioned that he knew a guy in London who had some amazing stories and there were some strange esoteric and Masonic-like things that had gone on in his life. He was talking about Jason Dors-Lake. I messaged Jason, and we began to exchange emails. Jason was the son of the actress Diana Dors and actor Alan Lake, he was born in the same year as I was, and lived a rather privileged lifestyle in Orchard Manor, situated in Sunningdale, Berks. Jason told me that his mother’s grandfather had been a Freemason and there were esoteric symbols in Orchard Manor, some can be seen in a photo of the indoor swimming pool, which Dors had decorated with Egyptian imagery. The famous celebrity parties that were held at Orchard Manor in the 1970 exposed Jason to much life in his early years, and his stories of secret two-way mirrors that would film the sexual activities of the guests have been previously written about in various books and newspaper articles.

The indoor swimming pool at Orchard Manor. Credits to follow.

Diana Dors died in 1984 of cancer, and her husband, Jason’s father, committed suicide six months later. This tragedy changed his life in an instant, and after spending a few years with his half-brother in the US, he returned back to London in the late 1980s with little money. The idea of a book developed around the more mysterious esoteric elements of Diana Dors and Alan Lake; his mother had left a coded cipher that was supposedly the instructions for a secret bank account, the cipher was pigpen, but had no key. So, there was quite a lot to look into, and our conversations took us back to the 1990s of course, especially our time in bands and the music scene.

However, my other writing projects began to take over and in that year (2016) I began working on my Lost Rites and Rituals of Freemasonry book, along with a few other writing projects. I lost touch with Jason, and a planned meeting in London didn’t take place. I know he had straightened himself out at the time we were chatting; he had struggled with alcohol but had said he had put it behind him. I heard after his death, that he had started drinking again after witnessing the Grenfell Tower fire in the summer of 2017, and this time he hadn’t managed to get back on track. He died in September 2019 after his 50th birthday.

Jason was always very approachable, extremely polite and full of fantastically entertaining stories, not only from his days at Orchard Manor but from his life during the 1990s in London in the music scene. His light has gone out far too early, and I hope he is finally at peace and is with his Mum and Dad once more.