Licenced….to save you money.
For someone who a few years later was swanning around in a flashy sports car, Austin Powers- like, with mini-skirted 'chicks', Michael Noel Henshaw, started modestly in 1960, as the accompanying driving licence shows, with a 1942 black Austin saloon. Henshaw was the former tax inspector and show business wannabe who became the ‘cool accountant’ to so many media luvvies in the swinging sixties and seventies, including the Fab Four, the Pythons, playwrights like David Mercer, David Hare and Simon Gray and writers that included Alan Sillitoe, Ted Hughes and Basil Bunting. He even sorted out the tax problems of William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg.
Born in Derby in 1930, Henshaw attended the local Bemrose school, where his appearance in a Shakespeare production (he is third from the left in photo ) at the age of 16, hints at an early taste for showbiz. After National Service he took the civil service exams and joined the Revenue at Shepherd’s Bush as a tax inspector, while at the same time taking a part-time course in law at London University. His big break came when his childhood friend John Dexter, who had come to London as a theatre director, introduced him to the playwright Arnold Wesker at the Partisan Coffee Bar in Soho.
