by Pip Granger
The bohemian set that Dan Farson made famous in his book, Soho in the Fifties, were one such group. My father and his friends were another, while the birth of the teenager resulted from a new-found determination on the part of the young to reject the old values and certainties. A direct route may be traced from these post-war renegades through the West End of the fifties to the ‘anything goes’ attitudes of the swinging sixties.
Trust is one of the first casualties of war, and Soho’s multicultural nature, its great pride, was sorely tested by the conflict in Europe. All three members of Soho’s Italian community – John Carnera, Leo Zanelli and Alberto Camisa – that I talked to for this book had fathers who held an Italian passport. This was not a good thing to have after Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940, and there was trouble on the streets of Soho as the windows of Italian restaurants were smashed in by groups of people from other parts of London.
Within hours of Mussolini’s declaration, Churchill ordered a round-up of Italian nationals as so-called ‘enemy aliens’, and within four days 1,600 London-based Italians had been taken in to custody.* No matter how long they had lived in England, all the adult Italian males in the West End were detained and interned in camps for the duration of the war with Italy. For some, this was a very bitter pill to swallow, as restaurateur Peppino Leoni wrote in his memoir, I Shall Die on the Carpet: ‘I deeply resented the fact that after thirty-three years in England with no political or police blemish on my record, I’d be scooped up without proper consideration.’
Ennio Camisa, co-founder of the Fratelli Camisa delicatessen, recounted what happened in Judith Summers’s book: ‘War was declared on Monday. The police came for me and my brother on Thursday, and said, “Just come with us, we want to ask you some questions at the station.” We shut up our shop in Old Compton Street and we didn’t know what was going to happen to it.’
The Italian men were first taken to Lingfield racecourse, and then on to a disused cotton mill in Lancashire. From there, more than 1,200 detainees, mostly Italian but some German, and nearly 100 POWs, were shipped out to Canada on the Arandora Star, a luxury liner that had been commandeered by the navy. On 2 July 1940, less than a day out of Liverpool, the unescorted Arandora Star was torpedoed by U–47, and sank with the loss of more than 800 lives, 613 of whom were detainees.
The rest of the Italian detainees were interned on the Isle of Man until 1944, when the Italian Partisans toppled Mussolini and caused Italy to change sides, turning the ‘enemy aliens’ back into the friends they felt they had always been. In a way, they were the fortunate ones, in being able to come back at all. The loss of fathers, grandfathers, sons and brothers to four years of imprisonment or death on the Arandora Star resonated through all the families who had come from Italy to make their lives in the West End.
* * *
Another legacy of the war was rationing, which, in the case of sweets at least, lasted to 1953. Peter Jenkins, whose family moved to the Peabody Estate in Wild Street in 1947, remembers sweet rationing very well. ‘We took the coupons to a shop on Drury Lane, where we were registered. It was right opposite Clement Danes school, a grocery shop. Mum did a lot of her shopping there. My sweet ration was spent there on penny sherbets and liquorice dips.’ Peter also remembers ‘food parcels after the war – from your friend in Australia – tinned peaches, blackcurrant purée.’
I remember rationing, too, especially sweet things. In all the comics at the time – or at least the funny ones, such as the Beano – the most exciting thing that people could think of was unlimited grub, of golden piles of fish and chips, armfuls of sweets, huge pies with recognizable lumps of cow poking out, or bangers bristling from a massive mound of mash. That was what we kids wanted, more than anything: full bellies and sweet things with which to stop our gobs. The post-war restrictions only fuelled those feelings. So that was another effect of the war. It left post-war people hungry: for experience, family life, entertainment, normality, colour, beauty, all those good things; but also, importantly, for food.
Just as rationing was a hangover of the war, so was the black market that sought to subvert it. Whenever authority seeks to make something – anything – desirable difficult or illegal to get hold of, there are those prepared to supply it for a price. This was true of booze in America’s Prohibition days, it is true of pornography, illegal gambling, illicit sex and drugs, and, during the war, it was enshrined in the ‘black market’ that arrived hot on the heels of rationing and shortages. Thieves raided warehouses, looted lorries and pilfered wholesale from the docks to meet the demand for iffy goods. The phrase ‘it fell off the back of a lorry’ tripped off the tongue of the ‘spivs’ who were the merchants in that market.
I suppose there must have been the odd black market trader who didn’t favour loud clothing, a lounge-lizard moustache and leery behaviour, but I never saw him. No other individuals within society lived up, or down, to their stereotype the way spivs did. ‘They used to stand on street corners and sell all sorts of things, anything you could think of,’ Peter Jenkins told me. ‘They had those big kipper ties, brightly coloured, and very often hats pulled down over one eye. The police used to move them on, but they were an essential part of West End life then. They could get you anything. Or so I believe. I don’t know if my parents bought anything. I’ve got a feeling that my father was too morally upright.’
My father certainly wasn’t. He took a pride in being able to lay his hands on little treats for us all when he was feeling flush, especially if, in doing so, he ‘got one over’ on authority. I am certain that his spiv acquaintances helped a great deal in this cause.
When I think of the Old Compton Street of my childhood, I am struck by just how crowded the streets were. Every doorway seemed to shelter a working girl, a ‘man of the road’, or gossiping neighbours. Street corners had an endlessly shifting population of men and women, who came and went, returned and drifted in and out to talk, to exchange services and goods. Prince Monolulu would sail majestically to his pitch in Soho Square, Ironfoot Jack would strike sparks from the pavements, and busy spivs flogged anything and everything to anyone with cash and a heartbeat. In this, and in other, more legitimate ways, the war led some people to prosper.
The story of the Constantine family is a case in point. ‘In 1940,’ Ray Constantine remembered, ‘my father was working in an indifferent café in Cambridge Circus for £2 10s., 10 a.m. to midnight six days a week. We were bombed out of our house, very near the BBC, and had to go to the rest centre, which was in the Florence Nightingale Hospital for Gentlewomen, Lisson Grove. The LCC had taken over the basement as a British Restaurant and rest centre for people whose homes had been destroyed. The manager of the rest centre hadn’t been able to open the British Restaurant, as there was no staff, so he hired my father as chef and my mother as assistant. They felt like pools winners, with wages of £5 and £3 10s., and a large rent-free flat at the very top of the hospital in the matron’s quarters.
‘Very early in 1942, they were assigned to the same job for the American Red Cross. An American millionairess, Mrs Margaret Biddle, funded the whole show. The ARC (American Red Cross) occupied 10 and 11 Charles Street. I recall a lovely marble stairway leading up to the first floor, which was fully open and used as a ballroom. It was oak beamed, with suits of armour spaced along the walls, although the suits were removed and the oak beams were boarded up and wartime posters were stuck on the new walls. There was more affluence; a flat again, and £10 and £6, but both my parents worked more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week for that.’
One of the things that made me want to write about the West End’s residents, as opposed to its vast array of visitors, was the sheer resilience shown by its people and the dogged propensity to reach for their goals through persistent hard work. Perhaps it is because so many West End families arrived Up West from somewhere else that it was in their nature to try new things, to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. It takes courage and a pioneeri
ng spirit to begin again in a foreign country with strange customs and using an unfamiliar language.
The Camisa brothers exemplify this. ‘My father, Ennio, and his brother, my Uncle Isidoro, came over in about 1920,’ Alberto Camisa told me. ‘My father was thirteen and his brother sixteen. There was no work in Italy.’ Despite not knowing the language, the brothers worked hard enough for their aunt to start them up in their own shop in Old Compton Street. Things were ticking along nicely until the Camisa brothers were marched out of their shop to the internment camps in the Isle of Man. When they saw the shop again, four years later, it belonged to someone else.
Eventually, the brothers took on a building in Berwick Street that the bombs had left semi-derelict. Fratelli Camisa rose again and with an enormous input of hard work, determination and staying power, they built their business up until it was one of the premier West End delicatessens and importers of Italian food and wine.
Theirs is not a unique story: Peppino Leoni rebuilt his beloved Quo Vadis restaurant after returning from the Isle of Man, and locals of every creed, colour and origin picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and started all over again. So that was another effect of the war; it made people work hard, to try to get back what they had had before. It taught them to buckle down. No wonder that almost every story I heard as I was growing up was rooted in time by reference to it. ‘Before the war’, ‘During the war’ or ‘Just after the war’: these words resonate through absolutely everything.
*This picture forms the cover of ‘Blitz over Westminster’ by Roy Harrison. A caption notes that ‘Extra Police were called in to stop looting after this raid.’
*See Soho by Judith Summers.
3
How People Lived
People from outside London, and indeed from other parts of the capital, know the West End as a playground or tourist destination, somewhere you go for shops, sights, shows and nights on the razzle. The streets are thronged with office-workers by day and theatre, cinema, restaurant and club-goers by night. It rarely occurs to these visitors that anyone actually lives there, apart from the odd posh person: of course, the Queen has her place at the end of the Mall, and the Prime Minister is handily placed for a trip to the cinema, while presumably someone sometimes lurks behind the curtains and shutters of the genteel town houses in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, St James’s and the Adelphi.
Even today, though, ordinary people live in the West End, usually above the ground floor or tucked away in side streets, or down back alleys. In the post-war decades, there were far more of them. Tens of thousands of native West Enders lived their lives largely out of sight, often in cramped and poky flats above the shops, cafés and restaurants set in the Georgian terraces that lined the streets of Soho and the West End. Although most of these had been built as family homes, very few remained in single occupancy by the end of the Second World War. There were also some late Victorian tenement houses on the Charing Cross side, such as Newport Dwellings (also known as Newport Buildings) and Sandringham Buildings – but very few houses.
Some Covent Gardeners also lived ‘above the shop’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, or in houses that had long ago been converted into flats. The area contained a great deal of what we now call social housing. This was built following the slum clearances of the 1870s and 1880s, when the Metropolitan Board of Works used compulsory purchase orders to sweep away the worst of the slums defacing the West End. At the same time they created new streets, including Shaftesbury Avenue, Kingsway, Aldwych and the Charing Cross Road. There were several blocks of flats in private ownership, others run by the London County Council, and two Peabody estates. The last were built with funds provided by a London-based American banker and philanthropist, George Peabody, in the late nineteenth century to house London’s ‘respectable’ (or employed) poor.
One of the Peabody estates was in Wild Street, just to the east of Drury Lane, and the other was in Bedfordbury, which runs parallel to St Martin’s Lane. Wild Street was one of the largest of the Peabody estates, with 347 tenements in thirteen blocks, while in Bedfordbury, five blocks were squeezed in to a much smaller site. Both had a higher density of tenants than their equivalents in the East End, because the clearances of the Covent Garden ‘rookeries’ – a generic term for areas where tall, decrepit houses were crowded along dark access alleys no more than three or four feet wide – had displaced so many people.*
Despite the great size of many Victorian families, the tenement flats in both the Peabody and LCC blocks tended to be small. Some were just bedsits, and in most the kitchen – equipped with a coal-fired range (also known as a ‘black grate’) or gas cooker – also served as the living room and an auxiliary bedroom. Every flat shared a toilet, sink and wash-house with the other flats on their landing. There were no bathrooms. Graham Jackson ‘used to have friends in Sandringham Buildings in Charing Cross Road, by Cambridge Circus. They were little tiny flats, and my father used to say you could sit on the toilet, cook your breakfast and have a shave at the same time.’ The cramped flats and narrow corridors afforded young Graham and his pals the opportunity for mischief: ‘The doors used to face each other and we’d tie the knockers together, knock on one door, and of course the woman would open the door, and when she closed it, she’d knock on the door opposite, and so it went on.’
The converted flats in Soho were no bigger, and often no better appointed, than those in the tenements. Toilets were rarely put inside houses, while bathrooms were very much a luxury fitting in new houses until well in to the twentieth century: they were rarely plumbed into old houses and flats until after the Second World War. The age of the housing stock in Soho and Covent Garden meant that Victorian conditions persisted well into the fifties, and those interviewed for this book often remembered not only their first bathroom, but also the replacement of gas lighting with electricity in the fifties.
My father’s flat, at 61 Old Compton Street, was three floors above a delicatessen. The front door, set between the deli and what, in 1956, became the famous 2I’s coffee bar, gave on to a steep, dark staircase that wound up to a flat that had been intended as the servants’ quarters when the house was built a century and more earlier. There was a small living room and bedroom at the front, with sloping walls and ceilings following the roof line. At the back, a room had been converted into a tiny bathroom with an Ascot (a gas water heater that exploded into life at the turn of the hot tap), and there was a kitchen with a gas cooker. The kitchen also served as a dining room, although I remember the kitchen table more as Father’s desk, with his typewriter, untidy piles of paper and ashtrays overflowing with the oval stubs of the Passing Clouds he smoked when in funds. At the front, the windows looked out on the rooftops of Old Compton Street and Wardour Street beyond, and at the back they provided a view of St Anne’s churchyard.
I have many memories of the stream of visitors passing through this small flat, including Father’s drinking and gambling buddies, fellow writers, criminals and celebrities, but one of my most treasured is of feeding a pigeon that came every day to the kitchen windowsill for his breadcrumbs and crusts. I christened him ‘Crooky’, because of his distinctive bent beak. Perhaps the spookiest experience I had while researching this book came during the interview with Chas McDevitt, who briefly lived in the top floor of number 59, next door. He volunteered that he used to feed what was obviously the very same bird, although he dubbed him Ikey.
Jeff Sloneem spent the first eight years of his life just across the road from Father’s flat. ‘I lived in 62 Old Compton Street, above a greengrocery. We were on the second floor, and basically, you walked in, there was a living room with a kitchen, a little back room, then there was a bedroom, and that was it. It was part of a Georgian terrace that came to an end at my uncle’s tailor’s shop.’ The part of the terrace beyond Jeff’s uncle’s shop had been blitzed.
Some of the tall, narrow houses above shops or cafés were split between flats and businesses, legitimate and otherwis
e, which meant that Soho families shared their space with the workrooms of jobbing tailors, tiny offices or perhaps a working girl or two. Janet Vance’s situation was typical: ‘I grew up at 11 Frith Street on the corner of Bateman Street, diagonally opposite the Dog and Duck. It was a café with flats above, and my dad had a gambling club in the basement. There were two flats on the first floor, two on our floor, and one at the top. Girls, prostitutes, lived in the other flat on our floor, but they didn’t interfere with anybody, or work from there. Different girls worked from the two flats on the first floor.’
Ronnie Brace never lived in Soho, but used to visit his mother’s sister in Windmill Street. ‘My aunt lived about 30 yards past the Windmill on the right-hand side. She had a flat, one bedroom, small rooms, on the second floor; I remember walking up the rickety stairs. She worked for a Jewish tailor who had a workroom on another floor and she would work there, or bring stuff into the flat. She used to repair clothes, trousers.’
Chas McDevitt had several flats in the West End. ‘In ’58, I lived at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street above what became a dirty book shop, but was then just a closed-up shopfront, on the second floor. I looked there about fifteen, twenty years later and they still hadn’t changed the curtains! Filthy things, they were. I was on the road a lot, so it was just a place to crash. There was virtually a brothel next door, and when the girls knew I was leaving to get married, they wanted to know if they could have my flat.’
For John Carnera and his family, their Soho flat came with a job attached. ‘I landed in England on 1 March 1947 with my mother and brother, and we went to live in 45 Dean Street. My father worked at Gennaro’s restaurant, and we had the second and third floor above – well, 44 was actually the restaurant, 45 was a bar leading into it, and we were above that. We lived there for twelve years, above what became the Groucho Club.