by Don McCullin
I emerged from the RAF with the dizzying—and complimentary—rank of Leading Aircraftsman and an African General Service medal, which was a bit of a laugh. I had also, in theory, seen the world. As well as my postings in Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus, I had made flying visits to Aden and to Khartoum, where I caught a breathtaking glimpse of the Nile. But aside from such glimpses, I had mainly seen a world I didn’t want to know—a world bounded by a barbed wire perimeter fence.
If I failed to become an RAF photographer, I did make an important acquisition: my first camera. Someone had said he could get marvellous bargain ones on the milk run to Aden. I decided that this was a better destination for my life’s savings of £30 than a pair of lionskin drums. So I became the owner of a brand new Rolleicord. It was one of those twin reflex cameras that you hold up to your chest and look down into. I had no notion then that that was the camera used by the great photographers of the Thirties, Bill Brandt and Brassaï.
I recouped some of the outlay almost immediately by taking aerial photographs of RAF Eastleigh on one of my Harvard rides. I made 150 postcards to sell off in the camp at a shilling each. The sergeant of the photographic section came in just as another batch was going through the developing fluid, and he started to create. ‘Someone’s on a bloody good racket here,’ he said, ‘and I want to get to the bottom of it.’ He didn’t mind my having a racket of course, he was just narked that I hadn’t cut him in.
I ran short of cash when I got back to Finsbury Park. And I came across this object that didn’t seem to have purpose or place with me. I couldn’t think of anything I could use it for. So I made £5 by pawning the Rolleicord.
My mother said to me one day, ‘What happened to that lovely camera?’ I told her. She said. ‘That’s terrible,’ and she went off and used her own money to redeem the pledge. What happened as a result of that generous act was to have a dramatic effect on my life.
7. THE MURDER
It took a remarkable set of circumstances to put me back on the road to photography, and they revolved tragically round a murder.
At first, when I returned from national service, I felt as if I had never been away. The world of Finsbury Park had not changed, neither had its characters. In my absence my mother had had a difference with the man who lived upstairs. He was in the habit of coming home drunk around midnight and taking the belt to his little boy. One night my mother took the law into her own hands and broke a large chalk ornament (won at the Hampstead Fair) over the man’s head. There was blood and chalk all down the stairs. She had gone off in the police Wolseley with the bells ringing and was later bound over to keep the peace. I think the child was glad of her intervention.
One notable event had taken place in Fonthill Road—the first West Indians had set up home in Finsbury Park and many of the locals were not pleased. I found them to be nice, gentle people.
Larkins in Mayfair took me back and decided to make some use of my smattering of photographic knowledge by setting me up in a little dark room to copy line drawings. I learned to process the film in my own way, and got to know the artists and animators much better. They were a delightful crowd. The kick-or-be-kicked attitudes that had got me through national service satisfactorily seemed less convincing here. What I am describing of course is the slow beginning of a liberal education for a person who had no recourse to books. Trying to read only made me feel foolish. When I was twenty-one my entire library consisted of two little books my mother had bought for a shilling each when I had been in short pants—one on painting, the other on wildlife.
The Guv’nors, 1950s
The Guv’nors were still lolling round in greasy-spoon cafes, feet on the tables, weaving their fantasies. The only visible change was the new taste in Dillinger-style hats. Once I had got my camera out of pawn, they were only too keen for me to produce glossy cinema-still photos of them in their new images. Then I ventured more ambitious pictures of them in different locations. I enjoyed handling the camera but had no thought of what to do with the photographs beyond entertaining their subjects.
The favourite hangout was a little cafe in Blackstock Road run by a stout Italian woman with a pretty daughter called Maria. ‘Can we have Maria’s tits on toast?’ the boys would ask, and the mother would say, ‘Come on, boys, be serious, be nice, don’t be naughty.’ The popularity of this exchange straddled my service career.
Gray’s Dancing Academy in the Seven Sisters Road was now the Saturday night venue. Anything less like its name was hard to imagine. Ex-wrestling champion Bert Aserati, with ears like clenched fists, was the bouncer who could block the door with his huge bulk. The gang paid lip-service to him because they respected him, though even Bert could not be everywhere at once. The place acquired a reputation for drawing George Raft and James Cagney types from all over north London, who came with the sole intention of taking on the local hard nuts. Often they would end up laid out like dead bandits in one of those old-fashioned American photographs. Gray’s was in fact rather like a speakeasy, the obelisk revolving lights at your feet incessantly, as if there were a thousand mice trying to get out of the building.
The girls would come there thinking they were meeting Humphrey Bogart at the kasbah. I too was allured by that atmosphere. I was also allured by the girls. It was at Gray’s that I met the prettiest girl I had seen in my life. She was blonde, with huge eyes, and her name was Christine. She had come on a tentative expedition with friends, from Muswell Hill, which was considered a rather upper-class area by our standards.
I knew she was my girl straight away. I nearly had a brawl with another bloke who also liked her. He was quite good-looking and kept taunting me: ‘I can have her any time.’ He didn’t. I wound up with her and I found she was a lovely girl. We didn’t have a lot in common. She was very bright, with eight O-levels, and could have gone to university if she had been pushed. She worked in an office at London Bridge which imported groundnuts and other things from Africa. She understood French and could work a telex machine, but her origins were not intimidating. Her father was a postman, and she lived in a council flat with its own bathroom. I persuaded her that I loved her, and I became her steady boyfriend.
In those days there was a firmly set-out path for a young man to follow. First he got the violence out of his system, then he went out with a girl for a two-year period before he married her and settled down. To my surprise, Christine’s parents accepted me as her regular chap, deceived perhaps by the wholesome effects of my mother’s garden hose. Yet, despite her civilising influence, I had not reached the end of my wild youth. I went for a bloke one day who started pestering me at a bus stop and at the end of the fight foxtrotted with Christine and a broken lip round Hornsey Town Hall. But the most bizarre fight was my last in Finsbury Park.
We were on our way home from the funeral of a girl who had committed suicide over one of the local boys, and were in an emotional state, when one of the hard nuts in the back of my old Ford Consul demanded a pee in the Holloway Road. In his haste to run off up an alleyway, he broke the wing mirror. I got out of the car and called a name after him. I should have gone for him while he was peeing for that is when it is most difficult to carry on a fight, but I was not fighting mad, only annoyed. The next thing I knew was him standing before me, flourishing a brick in front of my face. I managed to hit him in the ribs, and then I grabbed the brick and hit him across the head with it. I kept on hitting him as the blood oozed from his head. I felt it was either him or me.
Then I said, ‘Have you had enough now?’ His reply was to smash his head into my face. As we stood there, both pouring blood, he said calmly, ‘I think that’s about even.’
We got back into the car, and I drove him to the Royal Northern Hospital to get his head stitched up. I didn’t know him well but he always had a friendly greeting for me after that. Christine was unnerved by this sort of violence, but she remained loyal to me. Arriving home at Fonthill Road from one of our regular
dates at the cinema, we found my mother, unusually, still up. She had news.
‘That gang you hang around with at Gray’s,’ she said. ‘They’re in trouble. A policeman’s been killed up there.’
It turned out that a man older than was usual in the gangs had been at the centre of the barney. Ronald Marwood, a twenty-five-year-old scaffolder from Islington, had gone to the Academy with a knife to settle some vengeful argument, though knuckledusters were as far as things went usually. He had probably thought only of intimidation, but when the gangs took sides and fought on the pavement outside, a policeman tried to wedge himself between the opposing sides and had been stabbed in the back. He died from loss of blood. Marwood fled, but his father persuaded him to give himself up.
Those of us who lived in Finsbury Park spoke of little else but the killing in the next few weeks. It also focused national thinking on the growing phenomenon of delinquent youth and gang violence. At Larkins I was pumped for what I knew. I told them that many in the gangs lived in the streets around me, and that I had gone to school with them. The Guv’nors hadn’t been directly involved in the murder, as it happened, but I took some photographs of them into the office, where I was told I should try and get them published. Someone suggested taking them to the Observer, a liberal, socially concerned quality Sunday newspaper which I had never read.
In those days there was none of the sophisticated security apparatus that now bars newspaper doors. In my hopsack suit and suedes, I was able to walk straight into the Observer offices in Tudor Street and be directed to the picture desk without prior appointment. The picture editor, a man called Cliff Hopkinson, looked carefully through my folder, then swung back in his chair and gave me a long inquisitive look.
‘Did you take these?’ he said at last.
‘Yes,’ was all I replied.
He said, ‘I like this picture, and I’m going to use it. Would you do some more for me?’
I left, full of excitement, with a formal commission for more pictures, and a writer by the name of Clancy Sigal was asked to produce the story. Yet Finsbury Park was still to have its say in the matter.
Even as I was leaving the cafe in Blackstock Road, at the end of a session photographing the boys, I saw the familiar Wolseley waiting. As I approached, the car door opened and I heard the friendly invitation from the law.
‘Get in.’
I said, ‘No.’
‘Get in if you know what’s good for you.’
I got in. Always resist the first time, but never take it too far. That was the game around here.
‘We’ve reason to believe that you have been in that cafe with a stolen camera.’
I told them it was not stolen. They asked to see the purchase receipt, which of course I didn’t have with me. They suggested a short drive to where I lived to find the receipt, otherwise I’d be heading straight for the police station.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but do me a favour—don’t park outside my house. If my mother sees you, you’ll be in terrible trouble.’
That broke them up: ‘So your mother is tough, eh?’ but they did as I asked. I went in the house, rummaged through my little chest of drawers and found the receipt. When the old lady asked what I was doing I just said that I was tidying up. When I nipped out to show the receipt to the police they went all oily.
‘Can we drop you back to where we first found you, sir?’
It was a wonderful moment, refusing a copper’s favour and seeing them off. And of course I really had been of assistance to the law. If my mother had come across them harassing me over the camera, there is no question, she would have brained them with the heaviest available ornament.
The pictures were published as a half page in the Observer on 15 February 1959. I was twenty-three years old. The big picture was one I had taken before the killing. It showed the lads in their best suits posed in a burned-out house in The Bunk, though it had been renamed Wadcote Street to improve its image. I had got them together as they were setting off for an afternoon at the Astoria cinema.
Now, much more than then, I can recognise that it was a strong picture. It shows an awareness of structure that must have been instinctive because I would not have known what the term meant at the time. It was also brilliantly exposed, which must have been a fluke, for I did not possess a light meter.
That one picture changed my life. People have told me that if I had not made a breakthrough with that photograph, then I would have done so with another. I don’t think that would necessarily have been the case. I had a low tolerance of rejection, and no burning desire to be a photographer. If I had been obliged to battle my way into Fleet Street, I would never have got there.
8. A FASTER SIDEWALK
It was not only the policeman who lost his life at Gray’s Dancing Academy; Marwood also died. After standing trial he was hanged, according to the ruthless law of capital punishment. For these two men, the events that night in Seven Sisters Road led to tragedy. For me, they led to the start of a new life.
When those pictures appeared in the Observer, I was described as a stills photographer in the film industry, which was pushing it a bit. My job only involved copying animation drawings, but suddenly everyone seemed to be offering me assignments. Life magazine phoned, so did the BBC. A West End theatre company wanted me to photograph their show. The News Chronicle and the Sunday Graphic came on the line. The Observer also asked for more work from me. At Larkins the phone kept ringing until they became mildly annoyed by it.
Although it was a most rewarding time, I had no experience of being in demand or of the kind of money that was being thrust my way. When £10 a week was a good wage, the Observer had paid me £50 for my pictures. It was the largest sum I had ever possessed, and it led to my next social leap—opening a bank account. Home life at Fonthill Road also underwent a transformation. My mother took to searching for the Observer on Sundays, not a big seller in those parts. A telephone was installed, so that my new career wouldn’t interfere with Larkins.
Christine was working in an office in Bond Street and we used to meet for lunch most days in Lyons Corner House, like Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. We started making plans to marry over an economy bowl of soup and a roll. I would then dart off to photograph down-and-outs in Whitechapel or outbreaks of teenage rebellion wherever they might occur. I even took a portrait of the young V.S. Naipaul for his first book jacket.
The sense of being at a disadvantage for lack of education was still strong in me. In a letter from Photography magazine, commenting on some of my pictures, the editor said among a lot of nice things that something in particular was ‘very mundane’. I thought this must be high praise, until I found the word in a dictionary. Even so, I did summon up the courage to leave Larkins and strike out on my own.
I worked freelance mainly for the News Chronicle, for a magazine called Town, and for the Observer. I felt more pride walking down Fleet Street to the old Observer building than I had ever done in my life. In truth it was a strange place, where everything seemed to be done on a shoestring. The pigeonholes and windows looked as if they hadn’t seen an office cleaner for years. The whole building looked as if Rembrandt had a hand in lighting it. Yet in the gloom I bumped into loveable but eccentric Observer characters, like the affable editor David Astor, and Jane Brown, who I swear was no taller than my elbow and who carried her Rolleiflex and her Leica in a shopping basket.
During that period I started travelling all over England for stories, staying at railway hotels, watching men in those gloomy breakfast parlours where everyone was afraid to clink knife and fork. I began to sense a certain dignity coming over me, that a national newspaper should be trusting me, Don McCullin, to go and take a picture of some significant event which would then appear with my name under it.
I was learning quickly. In Fleet Street you stepped on to a much faster sidewalk. You acquire a much quicker perception
because speed is important. You are always trying to go faster than the man next to you. It’s a tempo, not a training, and I always thought it amazing how Fleet Street could pick an ungroomed person like me and make me see and do things I wouldn’t have believed possible, simply by plugging me into a much higher voltage.
Our improved financial position at home meant that my mother was able to buy the house where we lived, and shortly afterwards to sell it again, taking Michael away to the cleaner air of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Before leaving she made arrangements for me to rent the top two floors, and Christine and I were married.
It was not the most stylish occasion. How uncomfortable and conspicuous we felt in our new clothes as we left Liverpool Street Station in a train taking a crowd of soldiers back to barracks in Colchester, and us to an unimaginative honeymoon on the East Coast. When we returned to our fifty-shillings-a-week flat I put up some wallpaper and magnolia gloss, which I thought took Fonthill Road upmarket a bit, and decked out one room to serve as dark room, kitchen and bathroom. The tin bath was kept by the stove, to be handy for transferring hot water. All we had besides were a few sticks of furniture and a dubious television; a visitor would get the chair while we sat on the bed. Christine’s parents thought that their daughter had gone down terribly in the world. The people living beneath us were too lazy to put out their empty milk bottles and we would hear them breaking them up with a hammer in the kitchen sink.