Prejudice is based on lack of information. That’s what Jim Stewart tells me in his flat on the South Coast as waves pound on to the beach outside the window… 

The truism is particularly relevant in Jim’s own case. The prejudiced would describe Jim as a perv who likes to get tied up. But, as the title of his own book responds, So I Like to Get Tied Up – So What?!!

The book describes Jim’s philosophy, developed throughout his life, of role play and fantasy fulfilment. “I have no deep philosophy, purely self-indulgence”, Jim, a modest gent, now 79, claims.

But others regard him more highly as an important but undervalued pioneer of gay sexual history. “He popularised bondage and sexual fetishism”, says Allan Dawson, who first met Jim in 1980 and has remained his friend ever since. “I hope he is rightfully recognised as groundbreaking.”

I’ll be happy to try and help set the record straight this month. In a nutshell, Jim realised, earlier than most, that some boys play rough games because they’re a sexual turn-on.

At a time when you could only buy handcuffs from government surplus stores, he formed the fetish gear company Fetters, which supplied many of the stores we know today – Zipper, the forerunner of Prowler, in London; RoB in Amsterdam; IEM in Paris; The Pleasure Chest in New York.

He was one of the founders of Gay Male S/M Activists in New York and later SM Gays in London. In his short stories he developed themes inspired by the five most important words in his life – escape, challenge, endurance, survival and restraint.

He insists that he disapproves of nothing. But he doesn’t like to be dictated to when it comes to what we do in our bedrooms. “I would say don’t do anything that doesn’t turn you on”, he declares. “I mean try everything, try it twice, then choose.”

Jim has led two lives, but they’re linked. Under other names he was a pupil at the Italia Conti School for stage brats, then a cabaret performer and a stage manager.

After National Service in the RAF he went into TV, first as a studio manager, later as a writer and director. He was a lecturer on theatre history until quite recently. Along the way Jim Stewart the bondage pioneer was developing.

“It’s a gradual thing, isn’t it?” he says. “I was playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians with two older brothers and their friends and I was always the one who was on the receiving end. I found, not only did I not mind it, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

That was before I knew anything about sexual arousal. I just liked power being taken away from me by people who were stronger than I was. Being able to fight and not win was the thing that turned me on for a long time.”

He became fascinated by escapologist Houdini and his daredevil feats. He admired pals who had Houdini’s spirit. “There were risk takers at school and they were usually the bad boys who got themselves into a bit of trouble and got out of it. These were the people I wanted to be like.

“I found somebody who was willing to tie me up to see whether I could escape or not and the first time I had an orgasm was during one of those sessions”, Jim continues. “He was quite happy to use that as a provocation and either do something about it or not do something about it.”

Jim makes it clear that his definition of sexual fulfilment is not the conventional one. “I’m not anti-sex at all”, he clarifies. “It’s just that my enjoyment of sexual arousal has never included sucking or fucking.

A good bondage scene doesn’t start for me until the person at the receiving end has cum at least once. That’s when the sexual teasing, tormenting, provocation begins.  Bondage and surrender of power sessions can go on for days.”

After World War II there was an underground buzz surrounding the stores that sold government surplus stock. “Lots of people went and trawled through the piles and took away stuff that turned them on mainly because the sort of guys they lusted after had used it”, Jim reckons.

He bought his first pair of handcuffs from a government surplus store in London’s Strand. “They were buying the surplus in massive amounts so that they could sell it as work gear to the South African gold mines.

After the war there was a huge stockpile of government surplus stuff, everything from a tin opener to a tank.” Other shops, like Quartermaster and Laurence Corner (now Squadron HQ), followed the trend.

They were all run by straight men who had no idea that their stock had fetish appeal. Jim took some delight in enlightening them. They didn’t mind at all.

“A good bondage scene doesn’t start for me until the person at the receiving end has cum at least once. That’s when the sexual teasing, tormenting, provocation begins.”

In 1976 Jim founded Fetters. “I’ve no business brain whatever”, he maintains. “But I couldn’t buy any of the things I wanted to buy. I went to Alan Selby [founder of Mr S], who was only just beginning, and asked him to make me a strait jacket.

He couldn’t see the point of it. But then neither could Rob of Amsterdam, neither could IEM in Paris. They didn’t see restraint as an end in itself. They could see restraint as a prelude to sex. They couldn’t see it as a turn on. It wasn’t their nature.

My nature was the surrender of control, manipulation, teasing, getting them horny, stopping them getting horny, allowing or not allowing them to cum. In the end I said, ‘Oh fuck this.’  I went off and cobbled things together. I was a stage manager, I was practical.”

Later he sold his strait jacket patents to the companies that couldn’t provide them. “They make a fortune out of them now”, Jim claims. He also invented the “sleepsack”, the tight sheath for long periods of confinement.

Fetters began in Jim’s house in Clapham, South London, and rapidly expanded. “It started on the top floor and finished up taking over the whole house”, Jim remembers. “At one point I moved out and lived somewhere else.

We had a notorious playroom where we could experiment. It’s where new items were tested for their efficiency and there were people who came purely to see whether they could destroy them or escape from them and of course when they couldn’t they were ready for the market.

Lots of people had a lot of fun and there are a lot of photographs on the Internet still to prove it.”

Fetters opened in New York in 1985, an inevitable move because Jim had been travelling to the US since 1960. He witnessed the birth of gay politics in San Francisco and, in 1975, the arrival of the first major gay fetish magazine, Drummer.

“They were the halcyon days of Drummer”, Jim says of the magazine in the 1970s. “They were more on the wavelength of ‘do your own thing’, not ‘this is how you should do it and if you’re not doing it this way you’re doing it wrong.’

I just felt that people were being conventionalised.”

Jim regrets that today we seem to have gone backwards. Once it was a case of “do your own thing” but now we love conformity. “Dare one say that it is all driven by commerce?” Jim suggests with sadness.

“One of the biggest reliefs in my life was when I stopped running Fetters and I could say to people, ‘Improvise. Do it your own way, see if it works for you’”

• Learn more about Jim Stewart’s world at www.houdini-connections.co.uk, Fetters is “the Savile Row of S&M outfitters.” Visit www.fetters.co.uk