Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1

by Ian St. James

  scrubbed the counter and the floor, and made sure everything was clean and tidy for the morning. I cashed up then. It was the best part of the day, so I left it until last - to give me something to look forward to while I was scrubbing the floor.

  Generally I got home to Battersea at about half past four. Mum would have cooked the roasts long before, so my first job was to slice the cold meat for the morning. Then I snoozed for an hour before going out again. I worked as a barman in the evening at The Jolly Friar in Buckley Street. It was a rough sort of pub - typical London backstreet place, but we sold a lot of beer and a few port and lemons to the local tarts before they went 'up West' for the night. Easy enough though, the occasional brawl on a Saturday night, but not much trouble apart from that. The wages paid my 'running costs', so that everything I made at Sam's Place was ploughed back into the business. And four years later I had nine of those little sandwich bars - all round the West End and into the City. I was twenty-four - and on my way.

  It was 1961 then. London was changing fast - or so it seemed to me. There was more money about, and people's expectations were rising, my own included. I had done well with the sandwich shops, but I couldn't see a future for them. People with money in their pockets would want more than a cheese sandwich for lunch - at least I thought so. Luckily not everyone agreed. There was a chap I knew - Norman Higgins - who had half a dozen sandwich bars, mainly in the Edgware Road and Paddington area. His sites were well placed and he was doing nearly as much business as I was. We bumped into each other occasionally, at the markets and places like that, and we became quite pally, after all we were in the same line of business but hardly competitors - people don't cross London for a sandwich. Anyway Norman was looking for more outlets and one day he asked if I was interested in selling him my Oxford Street bar. I had a soft spot for Oxford Street, that's where it all started as far as I was concerned, and it was still my second best earner, even then. I thought it over for a week, then I turned him down - but I softened the blow by saying I would sell him the lot - at a price.

  I suppose that deal got me started - on the road to the big time. It took Norman a month to raise the cash. I think every aunt and uncle in his family chipped in, so that what with their money and a loan from the bank he was able to come up with the hundred thousand I asked for. Then the accountants and lawyers took over and made a meal of it, but even so everything was finalised by the end of the year. I had saved a fair bit too, so at the beginning of' sixty-two I was worth the best part of a hundred and thirty thousand, and all in cash.

  I quit my job at The Jolly Friar then. I had kept it on more for the experience than the money; doing their ordering had taught me all about stock control and things like that - at least as far as the licensed trade was concerned. I could even read a balance sheet and write books up to trial balance, so all in all I was beginning to feel like a proper businessman.

  Jack and I went to Paris to celebrate. Neither of us had been abroad before and we couldn't speak a word of French. But what a time we had! We didn't behave like proper businessmen in Paris more like Proper Charlies looking back on it. The night life dazzled us. The Lido, the Crazy Horse, the Folies Bergere. We did the lot, night after night, club after club, and girl after girl. But hell, we were young, with money in our pockets; until, after ten days of it, our cash ran out and we just scraped together enough to get back home.

  Once in London I took a long hard look at the night life. I know it was changing, but compared with Paris it was as lively as a Sunday school. There were nude shows at the dear old Windmill of course, but none of the girls were allowed to move, so all you got for your money was a series of revolving tableaux of partly draped bodies. It suited the old colonels and the dirty mack brigade, but it never pretended to be a nightclub - not in the Parisian sense, nor even the American one. Hollywood was churning out all those tough guy movies then - Cagney and Bogart and Robert Taylor and invariably some of the action took place in a nightclub. I reckoned MGM had gone overboard on a lavish set and to get their money back were staging a nightclub scene in every film they made. But whatever the reason, there was no doubt that films were spreading the idea of nightclubs.

  It took me months to make my next move. My old Mum thought I would never work again, and worried herself sick about it. But I wanted to be sure. Something told me it was my big chance and I was afraid a mistake would ruin it. So I spread my risk in the end, and opened two places within six months of each other - and a third nine months after that.

  Winston's was a club for businessmen. Of course London has always had its clubs - Boodles and Whites, the Atheneum, places like that. But they were a different market from mine. I was aiming at the young businessmen, men like me in a way, who were making money and needed somewhere to take their clients for lunch. Most of the existing London clubs were too stuffy for my crowd, even if they could have obtained membership, and the food in some of them was pretty awful. So Winston's found a gap in the market.

  I was lucky with the premises. A long lease on an old house in Belgrave Square. I spent forty thousand doing it up, put a ticker tape in the lobby and financial magazines in the reading room, hired my chef from Simpson's and commissionaire from Sandhurst - and went into business. Membership was ten pounds a year, payable in advance, and within a month I had two thousand, members. And six weeks after that I had recovered my capital outlay and Winston's was a roaring success.

  Jennifer's was very different. It was a disco at the bottom end of Carnaby Street. The youngest member of Winston's was probably about twenty-eight, but he would have been middle-aged at Jennifer's. Discos spread like a patch of weeds in the sixties but Jennifer's was among the very first. We had strobe lighting and hairy two-hundred watt amplifiers, and a few dim corners for lovers. It's old hat now but it was as fresh as a daisy then. And being in Carnaby Street was just perfect.

  Winston's was a lunchtime place and Jennifer's only opened in the evenings, so running the two of them was no real problem. But I was still gearing myself up for the big one. Both of my ventures were generating cash flow and I still had a chunk of capital to invest but investing it was going to be the biggest decision of my life. Eventually I found what I was looking for. In Regent Street of all places. The location fell short of ideal. I would have preferred Soho or Shaftesbury Avenue, or even Piccadilly or Park Lane, but it was in Regent Street that I found a place big enough for what I wanted. It was a basement but the size was breathtaking - almost four thousand square feet and all on one level. I spent two days down there, watched over by a puzzled estate agent, pacing out what would be the kitchens and the restaurant, the dance floor and the bar, the lobby and the powder rooms - working my imagination overtime until I could see it. Until I could hear the band, smell the food, see the bare-shouldered women and the men in dinner jackets. It was just a dank and dirty basement then, but it came alive for me. I swear it was one of the most exciting moments of my life.

  Of course, that was just the beginning. Months of work followed. Architects, building contractors, air-conditioning men, lawyers, accountants - meeting after meeting, talking, arguing, persuading. I would start at eight, lunch at Winston's and be back at Regent Street by two o'clock. Then at about nine every evening I went over to Jennifer's for a quick bite to eat before returning to my temporary office in the basement. The building contractors worked twenty-four hours a day because of a penalty clause in my contract, but despite the noise they made, more often than not I stayed in Regent Street overnight instead of returning to Battersea. People would ask: "How do you sleep with that racket going on?" And I would grin, "Who's sleeping? I'm dreaming." And I was too.

  It cost much more than I thought it would. All of my capital went and I was into the bank for another fifty thousand. Jack came over one evening - about a month before I opened - and we toured the place together. He was bug-eyed, astonished at the transformation, but worried sick about the cash I was spending. "Sam, you'll over-reach yourself. Cut back for God's sake
! Go on like this and you'll go broke." But I just smiled and thanked him for his opinion. "That's your point of view," I said. Which is what I called the place.

  The Point of View opened on New Year's Eve 1963, and the swinging sixties really roared into town. I gave a party for just about every celebrity in London and flew the girls over from the Crazy Horse in Paris. It was champagne and caviar all the way that night. My old Mum came up from Battersea and had a lovely time. She wore a new frock and had her hair fixed, and I gave her a rope of pearls to commemorate the occasion - so she wandered around smiling at people, just like the Queen Mum. Jack came too, of course, with his new girlfriend, a slim, dark-haired Italian beauty by the name of Maria.

  We made the headlines in every gossip column bar one the next morning - even had pictures in a lot of them. Full of stories about Swinging Sam Harris and how the jet set was coming to London. I thought it was terrific. Mum started a scrap book of press cuttings and the future looked golden.

  Funny how life comes apart in your hands, just when you think you've got everything you want. It started to go wrong in February. Thanks to the grand opening and all the publicity, The Point of View did middling to fair during January. More than a few people were willing to give it a try. But trade fell right away in February. I thought it was a bad week at first, but then it was a bad fortnight which stretched to a bad month. I went frantic. My outgoings were colossal. Big name singers, entertainers, dancers, the band - all that lot to pay for before I bought as much as a bottle of gin for the bar. I did everything I could think of - hired publicity agents, paid cabbies for the business they brought in, gave members of Winston's special prices, advertised, promoted - spent and spent and spent! In the end the bank put a stop to my overdraft and that near crippled me. If Winston's and Jennifer's had stopped earning I would have gone under for sure.

  Then - half way through April - Mum died. She'd had this sniffling cold for weeks, and no matter how much I nagged she would never go to the doctor. "It's just a stupid cold," she said. "It'll go away." But it never did. I kept quiet about my worries but I think she guessed, because every day she told me how ill I looked. How ill I looked mind, not her - and me as strong as a horse, even if I was worried sick.

  I used to get home to Battersea at about half past four most mornings - later sometimes - after Saturday nights for instance. Mum would snooze during the afternoons and evenings - she never slept properly anyway - and she waited up for me with a cup of tea. It was crazy really. I had more than fifty waiters working for me then, but Mum had to make me a cup of tea. I was never able to persuade her out of it, and I gave up trying in the end. We used to chat for half an hour, and then I would go to bed for a few hours' sleep.

  Well, one morning in April, when I got home, she was dead. She was sitting in front of what was left of the fire, with my scrap book on her lap. Her head had dropped forward and I thought she had dozed off at first, but as soon as I touched her I knew she was dead. The shock hit me like a hammer. We had always been close - Mum and I. Dad was killed when we were bombed out in the war, and Mum brought me up single-handed - so life had never been easy.

  I pulled myself together eventually. Then I went round the corner to phone the Doctor. And Jack of course. He arrived ten minutes later, with a half bottle of brandy in his overcoat pocket. We sat drinking until the grey light of a Battersea morning crept into that tiny kitchen. The doctor came and went - and two days later I buried Mum at the little cemetery near Chelsea Football Ground.

  It's all so long ago now. Looking back I'm glad she died when she did, which sounds pretty sick when you say it like that. But I was on my way up then. She had lunched at Winston's and been to Jennifer's, and had a few dinners at The Point of View. And she was so proud of it. I can remember her now, sitting in the kitchens in Regent Street, looking about her at the gleaming ovens and the serving dishes - and just sighing and cooing with wonder at it all. Thank God she never lived to see me charged with murder - or sat through the trial at the Oxford Assizes - or listened to the judge pass sentence on me. Any of that would have killed her for sure.

  I saved The Point of View eventually, with Jack's help. He had bought a half share in his first pub by then - the Blue Posts - so he had his own problems, but nothing ever stopped him helping me. His pub closed at eleven and he was at my place by half past - all decked out in a dinner jacket and ready to lend a hand wherever he could. It was Jack who spotted the fiddles. Money lost to dishonest waiters and crooked barmen. Suppliers who padded their bills and paid a kick-back to the chef. Staff who stole the silver and others who walked out with the linen stuffed under their coats. Jack watched my back while bit by bit I got things under control. But it was touch and go for a time. The bank counted every penny and for weeks on end the profits from Winston's and Jennifer's were wiped out by the losses piled up by the nightclub. More than once suppliers were kept waiting for their money, and Fridays were a regular nightmare - waiting for enough cash to come in to meet the wages. But as the summer passed so did the crisis, and from early autumn business got steadily better, so that by the end of the year the battle was over. Even the bank relaxed - the overdraft had been halved and was moving down steadily - and The Point of View was established.

  Chapter Two

  I slept badly that first night back at Rex Place. Absurd really, the soft bed and crisp sheets should have made me sleep like a baby. But I tossed and turned all night, troubled by old memories and fresh worries, until I awoke with a splitting headache. A couple of minutes passed before I even realised where I was - then it all flooded back - the cold shoulder around town last night, and a visit from Davis to cap it all. But just the simple act of making coffee cheered me up. After all, Rex Place was a sight better than Brixton Prison. If I had problems at least I was free to do something about them. So within the next hour I had shaved and dressed, and was ready to face the day.

  The post surprised me. A letter from Maria. I recognised her handwriting on the envelope. But then it was a gesture typical of her. She would have posted it yesterday morning, to give me a surprise today. Except when I opened it, I found not so much a letter as the printed details of the place in Baker Street - and the keys to the premises. I grinned. Who could be down for long with friends like Maria? She and Jack were determined to help me start again. So I began to think seriously about the idea.

  A prison record does not automatically disbar a man from holding a gaming licence, or even one to sell spirits - but it doesn't help. In both cases licences are issued by magistrates and the applicant has to prove himself a 'fit and proper person' to hold such a licence. Even in Brixton I knew the future would be difficult, and that was before learning that Davis was gunning for me.

  My trial had left me disillusioned with lawyers. Courts are places for actors, not businessmen. Any justice resulting from the proceedings is quite accidental. It would be quicker and cheaper to spin a coin. At least I thought so then - and still do for that matter. But my application for licences would be heard by magistrates - so, like it or not, I was back in the business of hiring lawyers.

  Tomlinson saw me at eleven o'clock. A tall, thin man of about sixty, as white and brittle as a stick of chalk. He kept licking his lips, and when he spoke he chose his words carefully, like an old fashioned schoolmaster. Of course, he knew who I was. Every newspaper in the country had covered my trial, and lawyers follow court cases the way most men follow football. I told him my side of things and filled him in with the details. He listened attentively, his head half cocked as though he heard better through one ear than the other. Now and then he asked a question and noted my answers on a pad in front of him. His expression was neutral for most of the time, but there were enough flickers of doubt for me to wonder what kind of impression I was making. But eventually I had told him all there was to tell, and it was his turn to speak.

  "How old are you, Mr Harris?"

  "Forty-two."

  "You're still a young man. Full of energy. Experienced i
n life and in business. Why not try something else?"

  "Because I know the casino business inside out. It's what I know best."

  He raised his eyebrows and peered at me from above his spectacles. "Oh, come now. Business is business. A client of mine is a management consultant. He maintains the same rules apply whatever the business.

  "I'm not a management consultant."

  "But you follow my drift?"

  "Are you saying I'll never get back?"

  He hesitated at that, lawyers always do when you ask a direct question. "I'm saying it's exceedingly unlikely. If the police lodge a strenuous objection, the magistrates are bound to take note of it."

  "But it's not the police - it's Davis."

  "Who happens to be a policeman - and a fairly senior one."

  "A fairly bent one!"

  He steepled his fingers and looked at me severely, "I really must caution you not to say that. Of course what you say here is privileged, but were you to say that outside -"

  "I did. I said it to Davis - to his face last night." I laughed, but without amusement.

  That surprised him enough for him to want to know more, so I told him what had happened and he noted it down. Then he said, "Let me tell you how this appears to me. You have just finished a term of imprisonment and Chief Inspector Davis was largely responsible for bringing the prosecution -"

  "Not entirely responsible. But his manoeuvring had a lot to do -"

  "That's as may be," Tomlinson said with surprising forcefulness. "But the fact is that you pleaded guilty. It's all very well for you to condemn the practice of plea-bargaining now - but now is far too late."

  I glowered but said nothing. So he went on, "It seems to me that there is a good deal of personal animosity between you and Chief Inspector Davis -"

  "Bloody right."

  "As a consequence of which," he went on without pausing, "you see your return to the world of nightclubs as a way of getting back at him. After all, you will no doubt say, I can't be such a bad chap if the magistrates have restored my licences. In a way it supports your present contention of being innocent —"