by Pip Granger
Voices from the Streets of Post-War London
PIP GRANGER
CORGI BOOKS
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UP WEST
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552153751
First publication in Great Britain
Corgi edition published 2009
Copyright © Pip Granger 2009
Map copyright © Encompass Graphics Ltd 2009
Pip Granger has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author and of others. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects, the contents of this book are true.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Also by Pip Granger
Acknowledgements
Map
Introduction
1 A Special Place
2 During the War
3 How People Lived
4 Playing Out
5 School Days
6 The Market
7 Trading Up West
8 Street People
9 ‘No Squeezing ’til it’s Yours, Missus!’
10 Different but Equal
11 The Entertainers
12 A Matter of Tastes
13 Making Music
14 Out on the Town
15 Working Girls
16 Glamour and Sleaze
17 Taking a Chance
18 The Criminal Element
Endpiece
The Interviewees
Sources
Picture Acknowledgement
Index
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of those who sadly did not live to see Up West completed. I was too late to interview Ray Constantine and Andrew Panayiotes and therefore their testimony is from their initial emails. Alberto Camisa gave a long and fascinating interview and I hope that the fact that his memories run all through the book proves to be of some comfort to his family and friends. Roy Walker, Barbara Jones’s husband, also died before I could interview him in depth, for which I am very sorry. Bryan Burrough of the Soho Society was already unwell when we met, but I think of him often when I feed my greedy blackbirds, a little ritual that we shared along with our love of Soho. I am only sorry that I was unable to glean more of Bryan’s great knowledge of our favourite bit of London before he left us. I hope that the families and friends of all these people will accept my sympathy for their loss and my gratitude for the help that their loved ones gave to this book.
Part of Pip Granger’s early childhood was spent in the back seat of a light aircraft as her father smuggled brandy, tobacco and books across the English Channel to be sold in fifties Soho, where she lived above the 2I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street.
She worked as a Special Needs teacher in Hackney in the eighties, before quitting teaching to pursue her long cherished ambition to write. She now lives in Somerset with her husband.
www.rbooks.co.uk
Also by Pip Granger
Novels
NOT ALL TARTS ARE APPLE
THE WIDOW GINGER
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED
Non-fiction
ALONE
and published by Corgi Books
Acknowledgements
I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the contributors without whose generous testimony there would be no book. It has been an honour to share your memories and thank you for trusting me with them.
There aren’t adequate words in the language to thank my husband, Ray, for his support, all the legwork and unstinting encouragement – he is my hero and a star.
Many thanks to Mike Janulewicz for the loan of some very useful books and thanks are also due to the Archivist of the Peabody Trust, Christine Wagg.
Last, but by no means least – here’s to those who do all the unsung schlep – work that gets books on to our shelves – in this case my editor, Selina Walker; cover designer, Diane Meacham; editorial production, Judith Welsh; pictures, Sheila Lee; copy-editor, Beth Humphries; map, Tom Coulson and Phil Lord.
Introduction
I’ll own up to two things straight away. First of all, this book is not a ‘proper’ history, with dates and hard facts and footnotes, although there is a bit of that sort of thing. Up West is more to do with people’s memories of how things looked, sounded, smelt and felt, about what it was like to work and live in the West End of London in the twenty years after the Second World War. Rather than telling a story in chronological order, I’ve therefore chosen to present a series of pictures, of impressions, from my life and those of others interviewed for this book, to make what might be called an emotional history.
Secondly, although this book is called Up West, it’s pretty obvious that my heart belongs to Soho. Covent Garden gets a fair crack, too, but poor old Mayfair, for instance, hardly gets a look in. Although people did live in Mayfair and its West End neighbours, St James’s and Knightsbridge, those areas do not seem to have had that mysterious something that made people love them in quite the same way as Sohoites and Covent Gardeners love their ‘manors’. They simply don’t appear to inspire the same sense of place as the other two.
There’s a reason for that, which emerged when I was researching this book. Literally everyone who was interviewed who had lived in Soho and Covent Garden in the post-war years remembered the life and bustle of the streets, the sense of being ‘all in it together’, and the fact that most of the people who lived there, worked there, too. Working men and women, artisans and traders, breathe life and soul into a place, and Soho and Covent Garden have always had them in abundance. Some had only to go downstairs to go to work, while others had just a few minutes’ walk to get to thei
r jobs in workshops, restaurants, markets or the many small businesses tucked away in backstreets. Of course, the people who lived and worked there brought up their kids there, too, and there were plenty of them. Between them, Soho and Covent Garden could boast more than half a dozen primary schools, their class sizes swelled by the post-war baby boom.
It was this living together, working together, going to school together, eating together in local cafés, even going to the public baths together, that brought people together, and gave them a wonderful sense of belonging that persists long after they have moved away. A really thriving community needs a population that stays put for most of the year, and one that includes the young, the elderly and the middle-aged from all walks of life.
People in the posher parts of the West End never experienced this. According to Judith Summers in her book Soho, when the architect John Nash (1752–1835) laid out his plans for the building of Regent Street, his express intention was to separate the streets occupied by the ‘Nobility and Gentry’ from ‘the narrower streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community’. It was the habit of the Georgian upper crust to reside in London only during the season, then to remove themselves en masse to Bath or the seaside at Brighton, or hightail it back to their country seats. As a result, the town houses in fashionable Mayfair were shrouded in dust sheets and closed up tight as the place went into hibernation for much of the year. It must have felt rather like a seaside town on a winter Sunday, only without the bracing, salt-laden gales and crashing seas.
As for Fitzrovia, Marylebone and Bloomsbury, the areas north of Oxford Street, Londoners tend not see these as part of the West End, because they lack the concentration of cinemas, clubs, theatres and shops that make a trip ‘Up West’ a treat for East Enders. Besides, I tend to feel that Fitzrovia is simply the wrong side of Oxford Street. Some Soho natives even refer to it darkly as ‘the other side’. There are those who have tried to claim that Fitzrovia is, in fact, North Soho, which would suggest that it has had a bit of an identity crisis for some time now.
By the time the chocolatey remnants of my very first birthday cake had been wiped from my hands, face and eyebrows, I was already a veteran visitor to London’s West End, and particularly to Soho’s bars, cafés, clubs, bookshops and the snooker halls. Having sent my mother out to work to keep the family, Father was in charge of my care, and as the West End drew him back to its narrow, sooty, fragrant streets like a drunkard to his stash of bottles, that’s where we spent most of our days.
This was the case for the first five years of my life. After that, I was a semi-resident of Old Compton Street until I was thirteen. Then, once I had gained some independence, I haunted the place day and night until my mid-twenties. My visits became less regular after that, but whenever I had the time to wander aimlessly, I always chose to do it in Soho. I was happy to be back, soaking up the atmosphere and dropping in on some of the old ‘faces’, shopping in Berwick Street market, eating and drinking in the area’s restaurants, cafés and coffee bars. I developed a deep love and an abiding gratitude for the place and its people, and this love has sustained me for my whole life. For me, Soho is, very simply, my spiritual home.
There are many books about London’s West End. Some are general histories of particular areas, while others concentrate on specific sections of the West End community – the Chinese, for example, the bohemians of fifties Soho, or the lesbian and gay scene. Then there is the ‘I drank with . . .’ genre of memoirs, books that focus on a selection of the author’s famous boozy chums. Here, anecdotes about the likes of Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas (my own father drank with him), Brendan and Dominic Behan (and them), the Bernard brothers – Bruce, Jeffrey and Oliver – and John Deakin (and, indeed, all of those), tend to feature large.
What appears to be missing is a book that looks at the lives and times of so-called ‘ordinary’ people who happened to live and work in this extraordinary area – the shopkeepers, the market traders and market porters, the playing children and the working girls, those who lived on the streets and those who entertained on them, and the very different populations of both Covent Garden and Soho by night and by day. It was these people that made the greatest impression on me when I was young, and it is their stories I wanted to tell.
I have chosen to focus on the years from 1945 to the early sixties, partly because I was there for most of them, but mostly because the two decades immediately following the Second World War, from VE Day to the emergence of ‘Swinging London’ – a scene that was nurtured in the shops in and around Carnaby Street, in Soho’s north-west corner – formed one of the most interesting periods in London’s long history. What’s more, it is all within living memory – just. That is why there’s been such a rash of vox pop television, radio programmes and books about the Second World War and its aftermath: the rush is on to record the testimony of those of us who were there, before our memories fail or we kick the bucket eternal.
Nowhere else that I have visited in my life has had such a generous ‘live and let live’ attitude. From the start, Soho has been a community of the dispossessed, a welcoming home for the marginalized and different, whether they were fleeing persecution or poverty abroad or petty prejudices and hidebound attitudes at home. Since the eighteenth century, it has opened its generous arms and heart to virtually all comers, and in the immediate post-war years there was a new influx of the displaced peoples of war-battered Europe, and those who simply sought an alternative to the drabness of Civvy Street.
The Lyceum dance hall in Covent Garden, the theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue, the cinemas of Leicester Square and the dazzling, colourful, newly re-lit neon lights of Piccadilly Circus, as well as Soho’s cafés, restaurants, pubs and nightclubs – not to mention its brothels and spielers – offered escape from the memory of the horrors of the war that they had somehow managed to survive, the gloom of rationing and restrictions, and the new post-war terrors symbolized by the spectre of the atom bomb. The West End, with its many delights, brought a splash of much-needed, vibrant colour and cheer to the grey drizzle of austerity-bound Britain.
My strange little broken bohemian family, shunned as weird and out of step in the mind-numbingly, narrow-minded housing estates of post-war Essex, was instantly accepted in Soho. Nobody cared tuppence what accent I had, where I had been born, who my parents were, or how they earned their living. In that exotic, fascinating, multicultural and tolerant place, I was seen simply as a child who deserved the protection and love of adults – and I found it. No wonder I loved the place. For me, Soho was, is and will remain, a place of refuge.
I am aware that this view is at odds with that of the majority of outsiders. Many feel that Soho is, and always has been, a very dangerous den of viciousness, violence and vice. However, you will see from the testimony of the people I have interviewed for this book that they never felt threatened, frightened or intimidated as they wandered its night-time streets as adults, or played in its sooty squares when they were children.
It isn’t just outsiders, either. The parents of some children brought up in Covent Garden, just next door, warned their offspring – or their daughters, at least – against crossing the Charing Cross Road, especially after dark, as they would be exposed to sin and danger. Of course, that only added to the attraction for some. Those that risked their parents’ anger say the same thing as Soho children: that they were in no danger. Personally, I felt – and indeed was – far safer wandering about Soho’s streets and alleys than I was in any of the playgrounds of the many Essex schools I attended.
Later, when I was a young woman, if ever I was approached and hustled by an outsider looking for action on Soho’s night-time streets, a local would magically appear from the gloom of a doorway and tell the man to ‘Piss off, she’s Cliff’s daughter’: if anyone tried to argue the toss, it would be explained in no uncertain terms what would happen to them if they laid a single, unwanted finger on me.
Nevertheless, menti
on Soho in particular and the West End in general to anyone who has never lived there, and they immediately think of the four Ss – sin, sex, sleaze and shysters. They are unaware of the place’s many other, less disreputable qualities. I can, for instance, shock the unwary by mentioning that I have been invited to eat with the Soho Senior Citizens’ Lunch Club. I love to see the look of bewilderment metamorphose into disbelief. ‘Senior citizens in Soho? Surely not!’ It never seems to occur to anyone that people actually live in Soho, or if it has, they have assumed that the population is entirely made up of prostitutes, ponces, pimps, gangsters, gamblers, druggies and drunks. Other, more informed, types throw the odd bohemian, actor, musician, artist and writer into the mix, recognizing that alongside the sleaze, Soho has an equally long history of artiness.
What few people seem to suspect is that, within the half square mile or so of streets crammed between Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Trafalgar Square and Regent Street, families go about their daily lives in pretty much the same way as they do in the rest of the country. Children go to school to wrestle with the three Rs, while their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and older siblings get on with their jobs, trades and professions in order to pay their rent, bills and council tax.
Today, Covent Garden is a tourist trap, and a Mecca for lovers of opera, ballet, theatre, cinema and fashionable shops. In the period covered by this book it was a commercial and industrial centre, with the fruit, flower and vegetable market at its heart giving it a fragrant – and, at times, distinctly pungent – flavour. In Odhams in Long Acre, printing presses thundered out copies of a national newspaper, the Daily Herald, while small and large businesses – cigarette factories, bakeries, barrow-makers, printers and so on – thrived in Dickensian premises tucked away in courts and up alleys.