Keith Richards bought Grade II 16th-century Redlands for a reported £20,000 in 1966; raided 12 February 1967, charges followed later

Late on Sunday 12 February 1967, 18 police officers arrived with a warrant at Redlands, the thatched house Keith Richards had bought at West Wittering in West Sussex the year before. The case that followed became, in the words of The Argus, “one of the rock world’s most infamous drug busts”. The police and court papers behind it sat in a file at the West Sussex county archives in Chichester for some 30 years, and The Argus, reading the documents after the Public Records Office lifted the embargo, set out the size of the raiding party and what officers took away.

No one was arrested that night. Charges came later, against Mick Jagger, Richards and the London art dealer Robert Fraser, and they produced a trial at the quarter sessions in Chichester, custodial sentences for all three men and a public row about the way the law had been used.

A 16th-century farmhouse listed in 1958

Redlands was a protected building long before a Rolling Stone owned it. The Historic England list entry, number 1026078, names it Redlands Farmhouse, grades it II and carries a listing date of 5 June 1958. The official description is short and dry: a “C16 timber framed building with red brick infilling and diagonal braces on first floor”, with a thatched roof and casement windows, “some of them original with wooden mullions”, two storeys, three windows and an “addition of one window bay at north end”.

A description often cited from Pevsner’s Buildings of England calls the house large and moated, with a timber-framed 16th-century centre and brick and flint wings, all under a thatched roof. Some later accounts of the drugs case have given Redlands a higher grade and medieval fabric. The list entry supports neither.

Richards has written in his autobiography that he bought the property in 1966. The figure usually attached to the purchase, £20,000, comes from a 2019 Rolling Stone account of his early escapades rather than from any contemporary document, and is best treated as a reported price.

The purchase fitted a pattern among British musicians who suddenly had money in the second half of the 1960s. John Lennon took on a Georgian estate outside Ascot, paying £145,000 in 1969 for 72 acres at Tittenhurst Park. George Harrison bought a decaying Victorian mansion with caves and grottoes, taking on Friar Park in 1970 for £140,000 and spending the rest of his life restoring it. Richards bought earlier, and he bought a listed farmhouse rather than an estate.

What the police files say about the raid

The sequence that led officers to the door began in print. In February 1967 the News of the World published an article alleging that Jagger had been witnessed taking and smoking drugs at a party in London. Victoria Evans, searchroom archivist at the West Sussex Record Office, set out the next step in a post of 13 September 2024 drawing on the archive’s court records: on 12 February the police received a tip that drugs were being used at Richards’s West Wittering home, and a raid was carried out. Drugs were found at the premises and taken in as evidence.

Officers armed with a warrant arrived at the house late at night and seized 27 exhibits, among them minute traces of cannabis resin, several incense sticks and four speed capsules found in Jagger’s pocket, according to The Argus account of the archived file. Marianne Faithfull was in the house and was referred to in trial coverage only as Miss X.

Who led the raid is less settled than the date. Several later histories of the case name Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher. The Argus, reading the official file, names Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley as leading the officers who arrived at Redlands. The accounts differ, and what both support is the number at the door that night: 18 officers.

Three months, twelve months and two appeals

The charges, in the wording of the court record, were precise. Michael Philip Jagger was charged with possession of four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methylamphetamine hydrochloride without being duly authorised. Keith Richards was charged with permitting the premises to be used for the purpose of smoking cannabis resin. Robert Hugh Fraser was charged with possession of 24 tablets of heroin.

The three were summoned to the magistrates’ court in May and released on bail until the quarter sessions at Chichester at the end of June. Judge Block presided, Malcolm Morris QC led the prosecution and Michael Havers QC appeared for the Rolling Stones. Fraser pleaded guilty on the first day. Jagger was found guilty and remanded overnight, and Richards was found guilty. Fraser was sentenced to six months, Jagger to three months and Richards to 12 months.

The sentences did not survive appeal. At the end of July the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, reduced Jagger’s sentence to a conditional discharge for 12 months, saying there was no evidence he had been dealing in the pills. Richards’s appeal was granted in full and his conviction was overturned. The Argus, summing up the file, recorded public uproar about the case and noted that the two men spent only 24 hours behind bars.

The house went on being a house. Richards kept it, and The Argus noted that he still spent much of his time there when visiting England; in 1998 he gave £30,000 to the village hall appeal in West Wittering. Redlands remains a private home, and a listed one, its entry on the national list describing nothing more dramatic than red brick infilling, wooden mullions and thatch.