by Suggs
Sadly, Alf passed away in 2007. I heard the news from a reporter at the Camden New Journal who’d done a piece on him. It was a big shock, because Alf always seemed indestructible to me, an ox of a man and a constant in an ever-changing world.
When I got home that evening from rehearsing with Madness for a gig at Ascot racecourse at the weekend I found a box of cigars and this note on my doorstep.
Hi Graham (aka Suggs),I am sorry that we have all lost Alf. I know you have a lot on. My dad had some dreams in his last weeks. He loved Ascot; this will be the first Ascot race meeting that he will not attend in 43 years. This year Ascot is on his birthday, 11 August, and there is a race meeting that day. One of his wishes was that his best friend and I go to the race meeting that day. My dad had a dream that he and myself called to see you. In the dream he said to you, ‘Hi, play me a song, I am not well.’ I had to tell him it was just a dream. He said I was to give you a box of cigars that he had kept for you, if he did not get a chance to call and see you. Could you please play him a song that night at Ascot? My dad would have loved that. One for the rag-and-bone man. Thanks so much.
Lots of love,
Damian, Alf’s son
I did sing him a song that night and even added a bit of ‘wooah ooah!’ for good measure. Before he died I had the chance to ask Alf what it was he had been shouting for 40-odd years as he came down the road ringing his bell. He thought for a moment and said, ‘D’you know what? I haven’t got a clue.’ Now that Alf has gone, there’s no one else left who could answer the question. He was greatly loved and is sorely missed. He did as much, if not more, for the community as anyone paid by the council. Alf, the last of that noble London breed, the rag-and-bone man.
So this book is also a celebration of the people like Alf who are just as much a part of the fabric of London as its streets and buildings.
You can’t stop the clock of progress, or travel back in time - and nor would I want to. I love this city as it is today, and I can’t wait to find out what it’ll be like tomorrow. But sometimes it’s good to stop for a breather and take the time to celebrate the best bits of the past before they head off over the hill like Alf and his cart, a last ring of the bell swallowed up by the sound of the traffic.
CHAPTER ONE
Soho-itis
I have a pad in Soho; well, it’s a helipad actually, located on the roof of the 24-storey tower block where I have an apartment. There are dozens of heli garages on the rooftop of my building, so the skies above the glass-canopied streets of Soho can get a little congested if all my neighbours decide to take their helicopters for a whirl at the same time, especially if the people in the five identical tower blocks nearby decide to take flight too. Still, if I’m venturing no further than the French House for a cold drink, I usually navigate my way by high-tech gondola along the network of rooftop canals and, if I’ve remembered to bring my Speedos along, I’ll take a dip in the vast, glass-bottomed swimming pool that looks like a tropical fish tank in the sky.
No, I haven’t been at one of Sherlock Holmes’s pipes, nor have I had one too many absinthe shandies: this fantastical plan for a ‘Brave New Soho’ was actually put forward by the Pilkington Glass Company in 1954. Back in post-war, bombsite-ridden Soho, Pilkington’s proposal to turn the district into something approaching a modern-day shopping mall with a touch of Thunderbirds thrown in was just one of many redevelopment schemes that were considered for the district. It might seem incredible to us that such a radical idea was ever conceived, but if you were to tell those Pilkington chaps that one day it would be illegal to smoke in pubs, they’d probably choke on their cigars.
If you fancy a glimpse of how Soho might’ve turned out, take a look at the only piece of the jigsaw to have slipped out of the box: Kemp House on Berwick Street. This incongruous, 17-storey block of flats was as close as plans for a futuristic Soho came to being realised. All I can say to that is phew. The building, which features on the cover of the Oasis album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, was once home to the infamous Soho-ite and bibulous journalist Jeffrey Bernard, who made a career out of writing about his alcoholic escapades in Soho and was a drinking buddy of many of the 1950s bohemian brigade, including the painter Francis Bacon. I don’t know what he thought of the place but I thank God Mr Pilkington and his glass company’s attention was diverted to the Westfield shopping centre, because a high-rise Soho would’ve been a no-go for me - an abomination of epic proportions. After all, what makes this tiny district of London so special is its village-in-the-city appeal. It’s one of the few areas of London that is not traversed by any bus route, never mind rooftop gondolas, so the pavements are full of pedestrians.
To outsiders, life in Soho might appear to be the world turned upside down, but to me it’s the world turned the right way up and that’s because my experience of this bastion of bohemia began at a very young age. In fact, Soho’s been a part of my life since I was knee-high to a barstool. It’s here that I got a lot of my education, and because the place is so full of surprises lurking around every corner, I don’t suppose I shall ever stop learning. And I owe it all to my mum, who beamed down to planet Soho in the mid-1960s.
Mum was a jazz singer when she arrived here from Liverpool, and she’s been singing and working in Soho’s clubs ever since. We didn’t actually live in the district, but moved first to Clerkenwell and later to a flat on Tottenham Court Road, which was no more than a long throw-in from Soho if launched by Chelsea legend Ian ‘The Windmill’ Hutchinson. One of my earliest memories of the place is being taken by Mum to the Colony Room Club on Dean Street in 1968, and to this day I clearly remember the legs of those old barstools, at eye-level to a youngster like me. This also meant that I was well below the thick fug of cigarette smoke that hung across the tiny bar, so that I couldn’t really see or hear what was going on at adult level. On reflection, that was probably all for the best. Occasionally a giant hand would reach down through the nicotine clouds and ruffle my hair, or better still proffer a two shilling coin. If the atmosphere was particularly convivial, that might even rise to a ten bob note. Now there’s a thing to conjure with, and conjure you could as ten shillings would buy a lad a lot of magic tricks.
The décor of the place didn’t bear too close scrutiny. Arguments still rage today on Dean Street, among those without more important things to do, as to who was the first person to find their feet physically stuck to the Colony carpet. I can say without fear of contradiction that my credentials, sir, are impeccable. Now whose round is it?
I shall be returning to the Colony later, but I mention it now because of its association with the so-called ‘golden age’ of Soho back in the 1950s. During this period, some of the most charismatic, dissolute and infamous characters in Soho’s already lively history were doing the rounds including, as I’ve said, Bacon and Bernard, along with Muriel Belcher, the redoubtable founder of the Colony Room Club, and George Melly, who were both still knocking about in my time. Another regular from that era was writer and broadcaster Daniel Farson, who wrote the definitive book on Soho in that decade entitled, funnily enough, Soho in the Fifties. Farson was a talented journalist, writer and photographer and wrote the authorised biography of his pal Francis (The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon). He could also be a nightmare when under the influence. I didn’t know Farson personally, but I often used to see him in Soho’s pubs and clubs before his death in 1997. His reputation as a hellraiser was of sufficient standing for his obituary in the Daily Telegraph to contain the following description: ‘Television interviewer, writer and photographer who turned into a monstrous drunk in his beloved Soho.’
Part of Farson’s book chronicles a Soho ‘Life in a Day’ kind of journey set in 1951, the year he first set foot in the district. Farson appears to have nicked this idea from James Joyce’s Ulysses, so in the same spirit of recycling I thought I’d attempt to follow in his footsteps to see which places remain from those far-off days and to mull over just how much the area has change
d in my lifetime. It’s the sort of journey that would come with a government health warning these days, but attitudes to alcohol were different back then and, as Farson said himself: ‘A Soho type of person would never contemplate going out “just for the one” unless it was the one day.’ So, having done a fair bit of training in my time, I’m ready to give it my best shot, but please don’t try this at home.
It came as a bit of a shock to read that Farson’s perfect 1951 Soho day began with a coffee at a cafe; I’d have bet good money that he would’ve been off in search of the hair of the dog. But, of course, back in the 50s, and for decades to come, you couldn’t get a drink in Soho until the pubs opened at 11 a.m., which is why serial hooch-hounds used to head to Covent Garden for an early morning livener, because prior to the fruit and veg market getting the heave-ho in 1974, the Garden’s pubs were permitted to open at 5 a.m. This quirk in the licensing laws applied to pubs adjacent to many London markets, like Smithfields meat market (and probably still does in some instances). There was, however, one major proviso during Farson’s day: landlords were only permitted to serve market workers.
This stumbling block didn’t prevent a number of Soho characters I knew in the early 70s from regularly chancing their drinking arms in the hope of hoisting a few before the milkman delivered and, for others, the pubs of Covent Garden were the last port of call after a night out. It didn’t work for everyone though: apparently the barman of the Coach and Horses on Wellington Street in Covent Garden was gunned down by a Canadian soldier during the Second World War after refusing to serve him an early-morning drink. Which seems a trifle harsh, even by Soho standards.
Daniel Farson took his coffee at Torino’s cafe on the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street. This was a popular rendezvous for poets and artists in the 50s and was run, as most Soho cafes were back then, by an Italian family. The attraction of this place was that the owners not only allowed credit, they also permitted customers to sit and talk for hours over a small cup of ‘real’ coffee. Unfortunately, Soho said arrivederci to Torino’s long ago, but not to worry, there’s an establishment of a similar vintage and cultural ancestry just around the corner that we can visit instead.
Bar Italia is a Soho institution which has been run by three generations of the Polledri family since it first opened for business on Frith Street in 1949. Over the centuries, Soho’s been home to a huge number of different cultures following the lead of the French Huguenots, who first arrived here in the seventeenth century having fled religious persecution in their homeland. Greek Cypriots, Chinese, Russians, Poles, Spaniards, Maltese and Bengalis have all prospered and made their mark in this oasis of toleration. However, if you were to pressure me into revealing who I think has made the biggest impact on Soho, I’d have to go with the Italians. This judgement is not governed by the fact that I have a penchant for all things Italian - no, it’s all down to the coffee bars the Italians introduced to Soho, which brought a welcome splash of colour and style to a dour post-war London and set the capital on its way to becoming the world’s hippest city. Soho’s coffee bars were a breeding ground for British rock’n’roll and hosted early gigs by the country’s pop pioneers. Without them there would’ve been no Tommy Steele or Billy Fury, no Cliff and the Shadows, no Johnny Kidd and, further on up pop’s long and winding road, no me. What a cultural vacuum there could’ve been.
I’ve been going to Bar Italia for aeons and, being the hardy individual I am, I like to take my coffee al fresco. Partly because of a pathological aversion to offices, I try to have all my meetings there, much to the consternation of my agent. It can be quite cramped as we huddle round tables and it can get a bit fresh in the winter, but I am sure it’s extremely efficient. But more important than efficiency, there are few finer places to sit and watch the kaleidoscopic street theatre of Soho unfold.
Because the concept of sitting at a pavement table was as remote as closing down a post office in 1951, Daniel Farson watched the Soho world go by from inside Torino’s Cafe, and what a different world it was. In the days before freezers and fridges were commonplace, ice used to be delivered in huge blocks by robust geezers who, in Soho, were usually of Italian descent. Farson mentions blocks of ice that were left outside shuttered restaurants and had ‘started to dribble across the pavements’. Rather as the modern out-of-town revellers do now on a Friday night.
He also talks about the large number of musicians who’d venture into Soho on Monday mornings armed with instruments in their cases, making their way to the Musicians’ Union offices on Archer Street in the hope of securing employment in a dance band, theatre orchestra, club band and so on.
Around this period, Bar Italia was set to take delivery of a new-fangled machine made by Gaggia, thus making it one of the first espresso bars in London and, to paraphrase the famous song that featured in the show written by the ex-jailbird and Soho drinking accomplice of Daniel Farson, Frank Norman, with lyrics and music provided by Lionel Bart, the arrival of frothy coffee meant that fings weren’t what they used to be.
Unfortunately, things nowadays aren’t what they used to be either when it comes to classic, family-run cafes. In the 1950s Soho had the greatest concentration of Formica-festooned Italian coffee bars in London, but over the past decade or so many of my old favourites have served their last fried slice. Perhaps the most shocking closure in recent times was the much-loved New Piccadilly Cafe on Denman Street, which first opened its doors coincidentally in 1951. Described by classic-cafe connoisseur Adrian Maddox as a ‘cathedral amongst caffs’, the New Piccadilly’s populuxe interior remained intact right up until 2007 when a rent hike of Land’s End to John O’Groats proportions forced its owner, Lorenzo Marioni - who’d put in over 50 years’ service at the cafe - to throw in the tea towel. This great cafe, with its iconic 50s décor, was like a set straight out of Expresso Bongo, a film that starred Cliff Richard in that famous, not-to-be-reprised role of Bongo Herbert. Cliff is still clinging to his youthful looks but the New Piccadilly has bitten the dust. Its closure sounds a bit of a warning. I feel I ought to remove my bowler as a sign of respect when I mention it. And, to be honest, every time its name does pass my lips or comes to my mind I feel sickened that I/we/they didn’t do more to save such an important cultural icon.
Fortunately for us another caff that belongs to old Soho and is still open for business is the Lorelei on Bateman Street. The wood-panelled exterior of this A-list anachronism is painted in the colours of the Italian flag, and its village-hall-like interior features a large, tobacco-stained mural of a mermaid that covers one wall. Also on the menu, décor or otherwise, are faux-leather banquettes, dodgy light fittings, a linoleum floor, creaky chairs, perfect pasta and pizzas, excellent espresso, great chips, an elderly owner and, just when you thought things couldn’t get more authentic, you have to take a walk in the open air to get to the lavs, which are located in an outside yard. There used to be tons of caffs like the Lorelei in Soho, but nearly all of them have done a vanishing act in recent times due to the inexorable march of the global coffee conglomerates.
It’s one of life’s great mysteries to me as to who wants to pay £6.90 for the privilege of having ‘coffee’ in a gallon of warm milk served in a bucket with a straw. It always amazes Italian friends of mine, when they’re over here on a visit, to see office workers in contortions on benches in Soho Square, balancing one of those super-sized mocha frappuccinos between their knees while trying to eat a sandwich and talk on a mobile phone at the same time. Mind you, talking of contortions, you should have seen their faces when they came out of one of the brighter Soho clubs later that evening.
The sterile, uniform surroundings of the coffee-chain cafes don’t pass muster either. Do you know what I want? I want to hear the dull chink of Pyrex crockery and the rattle of cutlery trays; I want wall-to-wall laminate surfaces and chrome and vitriolite espresso machines; I want steamed-up windows and the whiff of a fat fryer; I want tea urns and tomato-shaped sauce dispensers; I want a bit o
f banter with a familiar face behind the counter instead of being told to ‘have a nice day’ by remote. Above all, I want the charismatic caffs of yesteryear over the bland, branded coffee combines that have stripped our high streets, back streets, avenues and alleyways of their individuality. Give me a coffee outside Bar Italia underneath its big neon clock that directs lost latte lovers to its two-tone Formica charms and I’ll greet all passers-by with a contented smile.
Sitting on Frith Street with the froth blowing off cappuccinos all around me, it’s evident that catering is king in Soho these days, because just about every retail outlet opposite me is either a coffee concession, club, bar, takeaway or restaurant. Thirty years ago sex shops ruled the retail roost in Soho, with over 200 outlets dotted around the district selling a different variety of takeaway wrapped in a brown paper bag. A balance had to be found. Soho needed to be cleaned up a smidge, because its sleazy reputation was not only killing other businesses, it was also destroying the sense of community that had long existed among residents and tradespeople. The district was reborn in the 1980s, thanks to the concerted efforts of the Soho Society. However, Soho’s resurgence was accompanied by the rise of commercial rents, which had been artificially low during the period the district was in the grip of vice and, inevitably, there were some casualties.
Most of the small businesses that used to supply goods and provisions to the local community - butchers, fishmongers and ironmongers - are long gone. There used to be a fair number of back-street tailors and specialist instrument-makers too, of which only a few still survive. Recently I’ve noticed that the record shops of Berwick Street have all but vanished, which has special resonance for me. Berwick Street used to be a Mecca for vinyl and CD junkies, and in the 70s I used to buy obscure singles on the Bluebeat label here. Initially I bought a couple out of curiosity, because it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing that would’ve been played on the self-proclaimed ‘Nation’s Favourite’ pop music station, BBC Radio One. Of course, had I been around a few years earlier, I would’ve been able to walk into Soho’s mod clubs, like the Scene or the Flamingo, not more than a few yards away, and hear this kind of music every night. Anyway, by the time I was about 17, my collection of Bluebeat singles had grown to a couple of hundred and a fair proportion of these 45s were by Prince Buster, including one called ‘Madness’. I can even recall the number of the single: BB 170. Of course, this later became the name of a very successful and tremendously talented British pop group. I’m wondering now whatever did happen to BB 170!