Henry Moss is a restaurateur who has an eaterie located opposite the British Museum which is very popular with foreign tourists. Fifty years ago, we first met when he and his partner were in a different part of London, dealing with different tourists in a somewhat different business. A very Jewish business indeed.

The people who go to his place today come invigorated with the intellectual stimulation of ancient history and culture. In March 1966, his customers were, on the whole, younger. Their interests were not the sort you could find in the British Museum, at least not unless you wanted to view togas and the flowing white dresses carved on to marble statues.

In the '60s, skirts were shorter than they had ever been and men's hair longer. London, Time magazine decreed, was swinging and Moss and I were swinging with it - if in somewhat different directions. Or at least from different angles. He and his partner, Harry Fox, were trying very hard to get arrested - which will be explained later. Certainly, that was part of the business. Or that's what I myself, a young freelance newspaper reporter, told them - and how right I was.

The place was Carnaby Street, a small thoroughfare in Soho, close to the Palladium and the William Shakespeare pub that had suddenly become the focus of the world's press. It was my job to get the focus, well, in focus.

Their shop at No 29 was one of the places in which Jewish businessmen, who in another age might have been doing something very different, gave new meaning to the clothing business, a trade that in more formal times was dominated by M&S, Burtons and, in London, hundreds of small, frequently Jewish retailers selling clothes made in equally small factories and workshops.

Police came to clear the crowds but no one wanted to move

Moss and Fox had both had those small factories and were looking for something more interesting. So were other people in what was familiarly known as the shmutter game.

They were making fortunes from garments that were certainly more shmuttery than most other clothes in the shops - but still had the mark of high fashion about them. Warren and David Gold, who had opened the then world-famous Lord John shop, and a lesser-known entrepreneur named Nat Spiegel, whose style - and shops, Paul's and Mr Carnaby - were more conventional, were among those who had struck cheap velvet and worsted gold.

Fox and Moss had recently met on a cruise and both agreed on two things that Carnaby Street - to use a phrase much in use in the journals of the day - was where it was at for men's fashions, and that there was no reason why the road couldn't equally become a magnet to girls and slightly older women, too.

Out of that, their shop - it had to be called a boutique -was born. The name, not to be confused with Lord John over the road to whom it owed no relationship, was Lady Jane. I was brought in, on the recommendation of my friend Owen Barnes, to publicise the place.

The PR idea that created the stir and made Lady Jane the most famous of all the Carnaby shops came to me while I travelled home. I was standing at a bus stop, casually watching plaster models in a dress shop being changed. What if we gave it a 1960s touch? Let's, I said blushingly, have live models, real girls and have them change in and out of Lady Jane produce in the window? They jumped at the idea.

I had alerted the press, but there was no notice to the public. The girls went into the window, the window dressers with their pin cushions stood by with a bundle of clothes and a couple of passers-by started watching. Within half an hour, there were so many people blocking the street that cars and taxis (those taking the world's newspapermen) couldn't get through.

The police came to stem the crowds but no one was interested in moving. In the end, Fox was arrested for causing an obstruction. He appeared at the Marylebone Magistrates' Court and there were more cameramen. The Daily Express and the Mirror had two-page spreads on the proceedings in and out of the window. The next day, Moss was also arrested. Said Moss: "We used to take it in turns to fall into the policemen's arms. It was the most fantastic publicity for us." And for the street.

When, in that non-PC age (fortunately, for them non-PC didn't stand for no policemen), they opened an even smaller boutique called Lady Jane's Birdcage and strung a girl up in a particularly large cage from the top storey, that got them into the press and the police court too. "We knew that that sort of thing would get us into the papers more than just showing clothes," says Moss today. I went with the two - Fox died a few years ago; Moss says he is the only survivor of the age - to America where we caused a similar stir in Brooklyn, New York.

They thought of buying a race-horse called Lady Jane but eventually decided that there were far cheaper ways of getting arrested. Like Henry standing for parliament in a by-election as an "Independent Carnaby" candidate.

Of course, he lost his deposit. But it brought more customers in - including stars like Jayne Mansfield who demanded a Lady Jane dress for her trouble. Of course, she got it. Other women were less cheeky. All they wanted was a yard of labels - which the shop charged for. Naturally.

Spiegel was more conventional, although he would, to my disgust, call PR "propaganda". I remember him asking his own business partner who had attended a dinner at which the Tory grandee Sir Keith Joseph was a guest: "What was he like?" Spiegel, was expecting some kind of political judgment. "Double-breasted lapels on a single-breasted dinner jacket," was the answer. That got into the papers, too. I wonder how.

He did want the fashion pages onside though, and, thanks to my wife taking a "Nehru jacket" to the Daily Express for me there was half a page in the newspaper. He liked that - and hardly objected when I persuaded a Methodist minister to become the Carnaby chaplain. It stirred both the Evening Standard and the Methodist Recorder. For some reason, the JC wasn't interested.

"We were all very Jewish in our ways of life", Moss remembered as he checked through the menu of his "Munchkins" restaurant. "The Jewish owners, in particular, were good friends. We were rivals, but there were no rows. When the Six-Day War broke out, we all put 'We stand by Israel' posters in our windows." It made a change from live window models.

A goodly proportion of Lady Jane's takings were given to Israel and it could be said a couple of naked women had paid for a gun or two without ever knowing about it.