by Rick Stein
Running the club was an ever-increasing strain, but we didn’t help ourselves by staying on far into the night after it shut at 1 a.m. We’d sit and talk for hours with Richard Bate and his wife Maureen and their coterie of locals. Richard would hold court. He was about six foot five inches tall and heavily built, slightly running to fat but immensely powerful. He was also extremely intelligent, but dangerous. Like many locals, he had lived a life that was hard, and he made do as best he could – poached salmon a bit, went to sea occasionally, worked manual labour, had a few extra children here and there, drank copiously and entertained us wonderfully with highly embellished stories of old Padstow. He introduced me to a whole world of energetic local life and a deliciously coarse humour.
Richard was protective of us four – Jill, Johnny and Terri and me. I think he felt sorry for us, that we were so wet behind the ears. He really tried to sort out the increasing fights. It wasn’t just the fishermen but the occasional farmer who threw a punch or two, and then of course there were the resentful landlords or resentful friends of the landlords. The landlady of the Harbour Inn got into a fight near the bar on Saturday night. She hit my brother John by mistake; he was only staying for the weekend.
One Saturday in early June I was called to the door. Richard wasn’t on, and a mild-mannered school teacher called John Newling was trying to block half a dozen men who were trying to get in. (They were, I learned later, a jousting team who were taking part in a tournament on the Royal Cornwall Showground in Wadebridge.) I became very angry and walked aggressively up to the ringleader and started swearing at him, telling him to get off my terrace. The next thing I remember was being in Johnny’s car, asking if he could remind me what my name was. I had been knocked out with one punch. I spent a night in Treliske Hospital with concussion. Next time I met the sister at the A & E, I was concussed again, with a black eye and suspected broken nose. She said she was sure she’d seen me somewhere before.
I was getting regular visits from the local PC, Fred Hardy. He kept warning me that the trouble had to stop. He was friendly, but said there was a lot of notice being taken ‘from above’. The end was in sight. A group of men in their thirties, known collectively as the Watford Boys, had been drinking in the Customs House for most of the day. I couldn’t possibly comment on whether some conversation about the badly run club just down the road had taken place between them and the landlord. All I know is that at about 11.30 that night they arrived en masse. Richard Bate refused them entry and one of them hit him with a stool. They swarmed into the club and beat me up. I went back to casualty to be patched up and was kept in overnight.
The next day I got back to learn that revenge had been taken. A lot of the Watford Boys had been staying in a caravan outside Padstow and they had been blasted with both barrels of a shotgun late at night. The assailant had had the grace to shout to tell them to get down on the floor.
I rang Terry Johnson.
‘Hi, Terry. I suppose you’ve heard what happened?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I think that it might have been Richard Bate.’
‘Yeah, of course it was.’
‘Well, I’m a bit worried. He could have killed one of them. They’ll come after us now.’
‘They’re nothing. Nothing.’
‘I see. Well, thanks. That’s reassuring.’
It wasn’t reassuring, not at all. All that day I expected the Watford Boys to break in again, but this time with steel bars or knives or guns.
The police came round and took photos of me and I gave a statement. Gradually the fear receded. The police prepared a case and a date was fixed for a couple of Watford Boys to appear at Wadebridge Magistrates Court. The one who assaulted me was sent to prison for a year. For some reason – nod, wink – the local police never found out who had shot up the caravan.
Meanwhile there were more fights and, finally, frightening violence. I found myself with Johnny hosing blood off the terrace at the front of the club the morning after a glassing and a stabbing. The paving slabs were large cheap textured-concrete ones, and the blood was hard to shift because it had sunk in. It was a dark early morning, oppressive with black clouds, a mood of dark grey and red.
I said to Johnny, ‘This is like a film, I can’t believe it’s happening.’
A local from St Issey had attacked a fisherman from St Merryn, first with a broken glass cutting most of his nose away from his face. He had staggered out to the terrace bleeding profusely and his assailant had picked up a piece of angle-iron from a half-finished road sign in the quay car park across the road and run back and stabbed him in the chest. We were now absolutely four-square in the sights of the local police and it was only a matter of weeks before the end came.
A plain-clothes police couple signed in on the door as a member and a guest on two occasions. No one checked their names or consulted a membership list, they were just signed in and given instant access. No one offered them food with their drinks. Each time they came they purchased alcohol and they played poker on the fruit machines. Every drink and every pull of the handle was an offence.
III
I put on my best suit for the court case. This was on the advice of my solicitor, Eric Church. His firm, Cole and Cole, was based in Oxford. They were my mother’s solicitors, and had done the conveyancing on my original purchase of the club. It might have been a mistake employing them to defend me: a firm of poncy lawyers imported from an ancient university town was perceived locally with suspicion. But of course our real mistake lay in our childish disdain for the law, our naive lack of forethought and our ignorance of businesslike management. We were something of a laughing stock.
The police prosecutor had got hold of a leaflet for an Old Time Music Hall show that we had booked. The advertisement was a poster headed ‘A Night of Wild Abandon’, which he took as an example of the sort of thing that went on in the club. Wild Abandon! The old-time music hall was three very senior actors and an MC called Knox Crighton with handlebar moustaches and a dicky heart. Then there was ‘The Nation’s Heart-throb’ Jeanette ‘Bombshell’ du Barry who wore a black wig as she was bald after chemotherapy, and a small man in his early sixties who would appear as a black-and-white minstrel and sing ‘Mammie’ wearing a straw boater. He had a prosthetic hand which he would unstrap and leave on a table upstairs after his performance.
Eric Church had also advised me to seek respectability by making an honest woman of Jill and getting married. But nothing worked. I was declared not a fit and proper person to hold a licence, and so was Johnny.
My wedding, as it happened, was great. It took place in a marquee on the lawn at Redlands. Jill and I paid for it all but it didn’t cost much as we made all the food ourselves: poached salmon, rare roast beef and my mum’s ham with cloves, mustard and brown sugar. I bought a few barrels of Bass and we got the champagne at trade prices. All my friends came – Francis Bowerbank, John Thompson, Graham Walker, Martin Leeburn, Richard Bulmer and many, many more – and all my large family. My strongest memories are my love for my beautiful young wife, so lovely in her clinging wedding dress, and the perfume she was wearing – Guerlain’s Shalimar.
The service was in St Merryn Church opposite the pub. The stag night had been in The Hanging Tree, a rather jerry-built pub in a chalet estate next to the Second World War airfield behind St Merryn. There, the Wadebridge Camels, with whom I played rugby at the time, got me completely pissed on full-strength Navy rum. First, they threw me in the pool, which was filthy. To avoid drowning, I had to swim through water which was literally darkened with cigarette ends. After I finally got home and into bed, they manoeuvred me and the bed through the downstairs window and into the marquee, so that I woke next morning in the tent wondering how on earth I’d got there.
I suffered a lot from being declared not a fit and proper person. I pulled in for some petrol at the garage in St Merryn and the owner John Ball came out with a grin and said, ‘Ricky Stein, the man they couldn’t hang.’ I hated the s
tigma and felt very low.
The club limped on for another year after we lost our licences in February 1975. We took on an ex-pub landlord, who got a licence till 11 p.m. in his own name, but no one came and he helped himself at the whisky optic to any meagre profits we might have made. We struggled with entertainment on the second floor. We booked a lot of dance trios, including one with Jill’s dad Jack and his best friend, but they didn’t attract much of an audience. We occasionally put on Big Al Hodge which filled the venue but didn’t pay for itself. We often booked the Rod Mason Jazz Band; we had lots of fun drinking with them afterwards but we always lost money on the evenings.
There was only one glimmer of hope. Due, I suspect, to a processing error, though I like to think it was a spark of humanity with the police, a separate table licence for the restaurant on the top floor was never challenged in court.
Many years later I recalled those months after we lost the licences. And remembered that after my dad died I went to see The Sound of Music three times because it cheered me up. I remembered the words in ‘Climb Every Mountain’ which sound a bit like what Dame Edna Everage would say, ‘When the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window’. And there it was – the open window. We would plan a fish restaurant.
Not long ago, I received an invitation to tea in St Austell with a retired policeman called Inspector Hooper. He had been in charge of the case against the troublesome little club on the quay in Padstow.
By then my restaurant was very well known, but the invitation was to remember the past.
‘We felt sorry for you both,’ he said. ‘When we turned up that afternoon to check the register, we were amazed you hadn’t destroyed it.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t. The doorman kept saying throw away the register, but I couldn’t lie.’
‘The signatures in it were the evidence we needed.’
‘It was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ I said. ‘You left us with one restaurant licence. Did you do that on purpose?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
I’ll never know.
IV
My friend John Watt, who knew a lot about French food and smoked Gitanes, had a friend called Mark Righton who was running a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Falmouth called Mark’s Seafood Bar. This was in a narrow street, Quay Street, which ran down to the harbour. You went down some steps through a door with a porthole in it into a tiny little bar. As soon as you walked in, there was a smell of garlic butter and grilled shellfish. Downstairs, in two tiny rooms, old pine tables and chairs from household sales were crammed in. The walls were festooned with herring nets and the room was lit by old ship’s lamps and candles. In the tiny kitchen he had a six-burner stove and grill. Here Mark would grill lobsters with garlic butter, and serve moules marinière and classic French fish dishes – chowder, Dover sole and whole lemon sole with a prawn and cream sauce. He was attracting well-heeled customers – retired admirals, captains of industry at their holiday houses or off their yachts … After my diet of drunk fishermen and locals complaining about the price of Double Diamond (I think at the time we’d just put it up from 19 to 20p a pint), this was a glimpse of a civilised life.
There was a fish place in Padstow called The Blue Lobster above The Shipwrights, a pub on the other side of the harbour from the club. I had been there a few times with the composer, Malcolm Arnold.
Malcolm and his wife Isobel were friends of my parents who had moved from London in the late sixties to St Merryn. You couldn’t fail to get to know Malcolm if you ever went into any pub in Padstow, St Merryn, St Issey or Porthcuthan. Wherever he went, he’d buy everyone in the pub a drink. Not unnaturally, wherever he went the pub would fill up. Malcolm had received an Oscar for his score for Bridge Over The River Kwai and was riding high on this and other successful film scores including Whistle Down the Wind. He was very generous, and he’d invite Jill and me, Henrietta and Johnny and Terri over for lunch or dinner and give us exotic beers like Budweiser from Czechoslovakia and Russian cigarettes with long cardboard filters and Cohiba cigars. He also took us to The Blue Lobster for lobster Thermidors. It seemed like the height of luxury, and I began to realise that Puligny-Montrachet and lobster had enormous affinity for each other.
The memory of those great nights at The Blue Lobster stayed with me and I thought we could do the same sort of thing, but simpler. I decided not to set up in direct competition with them but to create a Mark’s Seafood lookalike. We went to household sales at Button Menhenit and Mutton, and bought tables, chairs and old pictures. We also bought a couple of large dining-room tables and some chapel pews from an army camp which was closing down on Dartmoor, and a second-hand chiller display cabinet to put the white wines in. We transformed what had been a room that looked like a Wimpy Bar into something that looked like a junk shop, so keen were we to model it on Mark’s hole-in-the-wall atmosphere. Downstairs was the club, while the top floor was earmarked for the fish restaurant. The middle floor would also be put to use.
I took on a secretary, an elderly lady named Helen Stevens whose job was to do the books and write letters for me and Johnny. I built an office for her on the top floor, bought the materials for stud walls and papered them myself with woodchip paper to avoid the cost of plasterers, and got a carpenter to hang the doors as it was beyond me. As ‘the man they couldn’t hang’, I was trying to build some sort of credibility with ordinary nice people rather trying to compensate for the den of iniquity that had been going on downstairs. Helen suggested a family restaurant, the sort of place where ordinary nice people would come to eat roasts and sponge puddings, on our middle floor.
I took on a cook – a girl called Tessa who lived with her husband in an old mill house in a remote village down a very narrow leafy lane. They smoked a lot of dope down there and lived the sort of good life which seemed idyllic to me at the time, growing their own vegetables, making home-made wine, their little children growing up knowing about flowers and herbs in a damp but pretty house by a stream. It was Tessa who decided she wanted to work for me. She had made friends with the sort of locals who used to come into the club with Richard Bate. She once described herself to me as witch and temptress. I wasn’t attracted to her physically but I found her conversation electrifying. She loved talking of the Padstow fishermen, and had spent plenty of time in some of the rougher Padstow pubs. She said that she would be able to cook the sort of food I wanted – roast lamb and roast beef, Irish stews, carrot soup, apple crumble – so I let her get on with it.
The afternoon we were due to open the family restaurant there was no sign of Tessa. She finally arrived, pissed, from the pub at about 6 p.m., incapable of doing anything. Fortunately, there were no customers.
The next morning Helen told her she’d have to go.
‘I can’t possibly go,’ she said. ‘I’m in love with Rick. I have to go on working for him.’
‘You’ve no business loving him,’ said Helen, ‘he’s already married.’
I was a bit flattered and a bit shocked – and agreed with Helen that Tessa should go. I had grown nervous about a family restaurant, anyway. It was definitely not me.
We decided to open a burger bar on the middle floor instead. The first McDonald’s had only just opened in the UK, but US hamburgers were becoming increasingly popular. The Hard Rock Cafe near Hyde Park Corner opened in 1971. The waitresses wore white cotton overalls and plimsolls; they looked like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Long queues formed down Piccadilly. The Hard Rock Cafe was modelled on the look of an American diner and sold drinks such as Dr Pepper and Schlitz beer as well as American Budweiser. There was loud rock music and the large, rare, burgers were served with relishes such as chilli or sweetcorn. I also loved the fact that the owners had named the place after the picture on the back cover of Morrison Hotel, an album by The Doors, whose ‘Roadhouse Blues’ was a favourite in my disco.
I actually found a supplier of American-style burgers in Cornwall
. It was in Bude and also did frozen buns and, most importantly, shoestring chips. We tracked down a company in London that did hamburger relish, and another which sold an Australian beer called Fosters Lager which I remembered from my trip. There was a charcoal grill left over in Terry Johnson’s steak bar, and we already had a chip fryer in the kitchen there. Thus begun The Great Western Hamburger Express. We produced a poster with stars and stripes all over it and a rather more wild western version of the train that was puffing along the paper of the club downstairs and the fish restaurant upstairs. The posters were printed on flimsy paper and we put them under car windscreens in all the car parks around Padstow and the beaches.
The hamburger restaurant took £4,500 in the only season it was open. Not a great deal of money, even in 1975 – but those who went there loved it. Rather more, I guess, than the two cooks, Richard Gibbs, aka Fuzz, and Dave Stout, aka Sprout. There was no extraction in the kitchen on the middle floor so I bought a plastic 12-inch fan and replaced all the window panes in one of the windows with a big piece of plywood with a 12-inch hole cut out of it. I put the chargrill under the window. Unfortunately there was no way of controlling the flare-up from the fat oozing out of the burgers on to the hot charcoal below, so that after a week the fan blades had melted. From then on Fuzz and Sprout had to cook with the window open. Whenever you went in there on a busy night, the two of them would appear out of the smoke wearing swimming goggles with wet tea towels tied round their faces. Heroes.