Up West

by Pip Granger

  ‘On the first floor, above the restaurant in 44, there was another large dining room, which was used for functions, and in 45 the first floor was a changing room for the waiters and whatever. The second floor was our bedrooms, and then on the top floor we had our front room and kitchen.

  ‘In the early fifties, the Gennaros kindly built us a bathroom. Before that, we used to use the restaurant’s toilets, and wash there. We had to go down to the first floor, through the banqueting room – which was usually empty – to get to the cloakrooms. So that was not convenient. You had to time going to the toilet when the restaurant wasn’t open. You were looking at the morning, between three in the afternoon and six in the evening, and then after eleven at night. Imagine that!’

  Owen Gardner’s family home also came with his father’s job: ‘We moved from Somerset to live in Upper St Martin’s Lane in Christmas 1946, and were there for ten years. My father worked for Page’s, the caterers’ suppliers in Shaftesbury Avenue, and the family lived over Page’s main warehouse, which occupied a whole block.

  ‘Before the war, the buildings belonged to Aldridges’ Horse Repository.* During the war, the building was used as a garage for the NAAFI, and they had it completely altered. Page’s took it on after the war as a warehouse. Our flat on the first floor was all converted offices. Our toilet had “Ladies Toilet” painted in gold on the door. It was difficult to find anywhere to live in those days, just after the war; although these were just offices, we didn’t mind.’

  The lack of housing was a pressing problem in the years immediately following the Second World War. In the East End and the suburbs, prefabricated houses (‘prefabs’) were built on land cleared by the devastating Blitz years, but these were not provided for West End people whose homes had ‘copped it’. As a result of this, those West Enders who did have a place to live hung on to it. Peter Jenkins’s father was the Superintendent of the Wild Street Peabody Buildings in the late forties and the fifties. ‘In post-war London, if you got a flat you were in clover,’ he remembers. ‘And you didn’t do anything to jeopardize that tenancy. You didn’t do any deals on the side; that would get you evicted. You didn’t sublet – that was one of the strict rules. You couldn’t have a lodger. You couldn’t co-habit, you had to be married. In all those years I lived there, I can hardly remember a crime at all. You would have been out on your ear.’

  It was not just that people were worried about finding somewhere else to live. The tenement buildings themselves inspired a great deal of love, as Sonia Boulter testified. ‘Newport Buildings was a tenement building but I loved it. I sobbed my heart out when I left. I didn’t move out of there until I was thirty-one, when they pulled it down. I didn’t want to move. My parents were born there, my brothers were all born there, and so was I, in 1940. Actually in the Buildings.’

  Ann Lee, who lived in the Wild Street Peabody Buildings, also remembers how living close to one another fostered a feeling of togetherness. ‘The Buildings were a very close-knit community. There were eleven blocks all together – J and K block got bombed during the war – and about twenty-five flats in each. Some were one bedroom, some were two. Some were what they called a bedsit, just one room, set in the middle of the landing.’

  For some, the sense of community was not simply a matter of living cheek by jowl; it was a family affair. ‘Everybody in the Bedfordbury had big families,’ remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘I come from a family of five. My uncle who lived below us had seven kids. I had three other lots of aunts and uncles living in Bedfordbury. They all had more than three. Five or six wasn’t unusual. Another aunt lived in the other buildings, in Wild Street. When my brother got married, he got a flat in Wild Street. I was offered one, but didn’t take it, I stayed in Bedfordbury.’ All five of the Mann children slept in bunk beds in a single room when they were young; as they got older, the family was moved down from 12E on the second floor to 5E on the first floor, and a rare three-bedroom flat.

  The way the tenements were set up meant that people more or less had to get on with their neighbours. Sharing was a way of life. Ronnie Mann again: ‘There was five flats to a landing, you had toilets at the end. You literally just had your rooms: three rooms for the seven of us. There was the coal box as you come in on the right, in a little alcove, then the three rooms in a row, no corridor. In the living room was the gas cooker and a coal fire, and a fire in the other two rooms. No inside toilet. The man in the middle of the landing, the three living next door to me and us seven made eleven – we all used one toilet, and shared a cold water butler sink, where you could fill up your kettle or whatever. There was no running water in the flat. Laundry was done by hand in a wash house, where every flat had one day a week. That was all you had, it was as simple as that. You just got on with it.’

  Some of the local flats were particularly run-down. An LCC block on Macklin Street had a reputation for being a bit rough, and some of those in private ownership, such as the Bells at the bottom of Drury Lane, were positively decrepit. The Jackson family had been moved from Shorts Gardens in Covent Garden to rather more salubrious surroundings in Bloomsbury following intervention by the Luftwaffe, but Olga Jackson and her much younger brother Graham still remember visiting their gran in her flat in Crown Court, at the back of Bow Street police station. There were three tenement blocks there, named after theatrical types – Sheridan, Beaumont and Fletcher Buildings – ‘where the front door would come out on to the balcony, and you’d go in and you’d step straight in to the living area, like a bedroom-cum-everything. There was a little scullery out the back, with a toilet, where a policeman used to watch Gran undress. I thought they would have had better things to do than watch her undress.’

  Peter Jenkins’s father’s duties included the collection of rents and the management of a team of porters, who were all residents and worked for very little money, as they had their flats in lieu. They fetched and carried, looked after the general upkeep of the estate – painting and the like – and carried out small repairs. ‘Generally,’ his son remembers, ‘he had to keep an eye on what was going on. He didn’t actually do the letting, but his recommendation counted very much. There were a few bad eggs, but basically it was a pretty stable society. Anything illegal, they would have been given notice to quit. You never abused your flat; you kept it in good nick. You made sure your doors were clean, your step was clean.’

  For those tempted to let things slide, there were stark warnings of what could happen in the streets all around. ‘Drury Lane and Covent Garden was a big tramp area,’ Peter remembers. ‘At the top of Kemble Street, on the corner of Drury Lane, was Bruce House, a Salvation Army type hostel. Tons and tons of down-and-outs, particularly in the immediate post-war years, would spend their time sitting or shuffling around outside there, or spitting in the corners, things like that. Very sad cases, a lot of them, often ex-servicemen who’d been severely damaged in the world wars.’

  There were 700 beds in Bruce House, and a further 344 cubicles in nearby Parker House. Local residents tended to look upon these hostels as a necessary evil. Olga Jackson, who was born not far away before the war recalls, ‘You were told, keep away from those places, but at least there was a place for homeless people to go. They might have been infested, because they used to fumigate them every so often, but nobody needed to be without a bed.’

  Her brother, Graham, got to know both places pretty well in the sixties. ‘When I went in to the funeral trade, you had to go in there and get the bodies out – and in the morning they were rank. The worst place of all was down by the Italian hospital, in Old Gloucester Street in Bloomsbury. That was a women’s one. That was awful, believe me.’

  The hostels were intended for single working men, but naturally attracted the homeless, the damaged and the alcoholic, who would hang around the area during the day, no matter what the weather, cadging handouts from people in the market and passers-by. Graham Jackson remembered that, ‘Down Drury Lane there was an electric substation, and the heat used to come o
ut of a vent. The down-and-outs would sit in there: there was like a little alcove, and they used to huddle in there, I often used to see them.’

  Then, as now, London was a city of contrasts: just a few minutes’ walk away from where the homeless huddled for warmth, there was great wealth. On the other side of the Strand, a little along from the Savoy, is the area known as the Adelphi, where Barbara Jones’s parents moved in the late thirties, when she was a baby. Her father was a caretaker-cum-housekeeper in a business premises behind the Tivoli, and they lived in John Adam Street, in the basement.

  ‘As a family, we had no money and were, effectively, servants,’ she says; but their surroundings rubbed off on them. ‘I was discouraged from visiting the Peabody Buildings children I knew from school. My parents had to be very cautious because we lived in a business house and had to enter by the front door, along with the rich and influential clients, so we had to be above “comment” at all times! Because we were the housekeeper’s children, we always had to be dressed like “young ladies”.’

  Although she had a prestigious address, Barbara was always conscious of living in someone else’s property. It was hardly the lap of luxury. ‘There was never daylight in our flat. It was electric light all the time.’ There were some perks, though: ‘The Embankment Gardens were our garden, and the river was at the bottom of it – although we knew better than to have anything to do with the water.’

  Several other people I contacted told similar stories; instead of living ‘above the shop’, as in Soho, they lived ‘below the offices’. Angela Rashbrook told me how, before the war, her parents were jointly employed as house managers in an office building near the Central Hall in Westminster. After he was demobbed, her father was reallocated to be house manager at Norfolk House in St James’s Square, and Angela moved in to the flat there in December 1945, when she was three. When her father died in 1969, she and her mother had to leave, as the flat was tied accommodation and went with the job.

  Andy Pullinger had a similar experience. ‘We moved to St James’s Square when I was still a baby: my father was a caretaker for Distillers Company Ltd at 21 St James’s Square.’ Andy enjoyed living in the heart of clubland: ‘I had a paper round for a newsagent in Crown Passage. The round took me all over the area from Green Park to Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St James’s Palace for the guards and the higher-ups near the Burlington Arcade and Old Bond Street. It was great at Christmas, as the tips were so good.’

  Anne Payne grew up in Knightsbridge. Her parents had split up when she was just a baby, and early in the war she and her mother went to live at 41 Montpelier Square, now one of the most prestigious addresses in London. In 2004, number 41 was sold for £3.2million, but during the war it was run as a lodging house, with a colourful collection of long-term residents. Anne’s maternal grandmother managed it for the owners, who had found somewhere less likely to be bombed to live in for the duration. Anne and her mother had their own small flat at the back on the ground floor, complete with the luxury of a bathroom. When her mother died she moved in with her grandmother.

  ‘After the war,’ she told me, ‘my grandmother’s job ended when the house was either sold or reclaimed by the owner as a home – I’m not sure which. She got a job just two doors away, working as a housekeeper to Sir John Prestige – of Prestige Kitchens fame – in his London home.’ Anne and her grandmother lived at number 43, next to the King George IV public house, until 1957. Her grandmother’s job was not too onerous, as ‘Sir John only came up a couple of days a week.’ The dusting could be a chore, though. ‘One of his hobbies was collecting clocks; he had quite a few grandfather clocks. One, in his sitting room, was quite large, in a glass case. It had a sun and moon that moved around, and apparently there were only two or three like it in the whole world. It’s quite strange to be in a large house like that, on your own with all these clocks ticking and chiming away.

  ‘We had a small sitting room on the ground floor and two bedrooms out the back, with a private courtyard garden’ – Anne was the only West Ender I spoke to who grew up with a garden of her own – ‘and the run of the basement. There was a bathroom and toilet down there, and a huge kitchen, which had a double gas cooker, a fridge – the first one I’d ever seen – and one of those dumb waiters: you turned the handle to winch it up to Sir John’s sitting room. That was fun. There were several pantries off the kitchen, and a boiler room at the back.’ This luxurious house had been a draper’s shop until 1927, when Sir John ripped out the double shop-front and installed a front door with a fanlight above and a garage entrance.

  Large luxury flats could also be found in Bloomsbury. When the Jackson family was bombed out of their home in Shorts Gardens, by the Seven Dials, they were rehoused in Ridgmount Gardens, in an Edwardian mansion block: As Olga remembers, ‘They commandeered all these vacant accommodations to house people, and that’s how we got in. We stayed until 1966. The company wanted the flats back, so you either bought it, or they rehoused you. They were nice flats, quite selective.’

  Her brother Graham, who was born in Ridgmount Gardens, takes up the story. ‘They were all seven-room flats. As you went in, to the right, there was like servants’ quarters, a bedroom there, and a toilet and a sort of bathroom, and then there was a bedroom and the main scullery and kitchen up that end, and the rest of the rooms, and what they did was split them, so they’d become two- and three-bedroom flats.’ The flats that had not been commandeered housed the well-to-do, including celebrities such as Hylda Baker, Jimmy Jewel of Jewel and Warriss, the actress Brenda Bruce and the pneumatic actress and singer, Yana, who made such an impression on young Graham that he mentioned her four times. ‘And then,’ says Olga, ‘there was Koringa, who used to live down in the bottom. She used to keep snakes and things in the bathroom. She used to perform with snakes. I always remember running past her door, because I’d heard stories of these snakes.’

  A common stereotype of the posher areas of the West End was the ‘kept woman’ – a phrase I’ve never liked, as it smacks of pets in cages – in her Mayfair mews or bijou apartment. It wasn’t that far from the truth, as Owen Gardner remembers. ‘When we moved out of St Martin’s Lane, when it was redeveloped, we moved in to a flat in Cavendish Mews South, in Hallam Street, at the back of the BBC. The guy who owned Pages had had one of his girlfriends at this flat. When he died, about 1949, his sister and brother-in-law inherited the business, and along with it these various women. He had one in Cavendish Mews South, one down in Camberwell somewhere and another in Aldford Street in Mayfair – he had them spread all over London.

  ‘Anyway, she was on the payroll, this woman. I used to take her pay packet to her every week – which was quite embarrassing for me. I would hand over the money, she’d say thank you and close the door. Somehow, in ’56, they got her out, and my whole family moved in. It was a beautiful flat, and we lived there until my parents retired back to Somerset.’

  The clear and steady light of gas – much closer in colour to daylight than any electric lamp – was a defining feature of Victorian London, but its use extended well in to the New Elizabethan age. Most of the street lighting around Soho and Covent Garden was gas, with lamps mounted on short posts and lit by hand. The mysterious figure of the lamplighter, a dark-garbed middle-aged man, and his arcane skills with his ladder and the long wand that was the tool of his trade fascinated me as a child. I was not the only one. Peter Jenkins waxed quite lyrical about him: ‘The lamplighter, oh the lamplighter! Every night, towards dusk, he came round to light the gas lamps, with a long pole to flick open the casement and light it.’ He used to come round in the mornings, too, after sunrise, to turn off any lamps that had not gone off automatically, as they should. I remember seeing him on a winter’s morning, his breath hanging in a mist before him as he went from post to post.

  I was surprised to find how much lighting, domestic and workshop, relied on gas mantles. These were chemically treated gauze covers that enclosed gas jets and became incandescent when heat
ed by the flame. They gave the most wonderful soft, natural-looking light that was appreciated by the rag trade in particular – colours were easy to match – and by those with ageing skins. Harsh artificial light adversely alters both colours and skin tone. All my contacts at the Peabody Buildings remembered gas lamps being replaced by electric lights at around the time of the Coronation, while, most unusually, Janet Vance recalls that her family moved out of their electric one-bedroom flat in Frith Street in 1959 into a ‘two-bedroom place in Pulteney Chambers, an eighteen-flat block off Brewer Street, that used to have the little gas mantles’.

  While electricity had largely replaced gas for lighting by the mid fifties, coal remained the number one choice for heating in the post-war decade. Peter Jenkins remembered that ‘Charringtons was the coal merchant for the area. In those days, around Covent Garden, everything was delivered by horse and cart, and the coal wagons had big horses to pull the weight.’ One of his father’s jobs as Superintendent was to arrange the weekly coal delivery to the Buildings, and its distribution to the residents. ‘When the coal delivery men came, they would bring it to the bottom of the stairs in each block, and the porters had to carry these ruddy great hundredweight [50 kilo] sacks up the stairs. There were no lifts, and six floors.’

  The residents got through a lot of coal. They all used it for heating, with a hearth in every room, and some also used it for cooking. Ronnie Mann remembers that his flat in the Bedfordbury had a gas cooker, but that his gran’s ‘bedsit’ flat in the same buildings had a range that she cooked on and kept clean with black lead.

  Of course, all those coal fires had an effect on the atmosphere. If you weren’t there, it’s difficult to imagine the smell of the West End in the fifties. Today, nothing much assaults the nostrils apart from traffic exhausts, fast-food joints, pub fumes, the odd bit of decaying rubbish in the summer and an assortment of those sickly scents that bleed from gift and cosmetic shops. Peter Jenkins, however, remembers the particular pong of the Wild Street Peabody Buildings in the late forties: ‘The estate had a Lambert & Butler’s factory at the far end, which used to blow a lot of smoke out over the estate. The whole place was smelly: Lambert & Butlers, the market smell of green vegetables, earth, potatoes and horse dung, and the general smell of being in an enclosed, smoky place. Especially in the summer. Everyone had coal fires then, and lit them except on the hottest days. When I had an asthma attack, my mother used to take me out and down to the banks of the Thames, supposedly to breathe good air, although the state the Thames was in, in 1947, ’48, I do question what I was actually breathing in.’