by Pip Granger
‘A bit later, there was a bunch of us, kids you go to school with and play with after school. We played around the streets. There weren’t many cars. We used to play football or cricket in Mercer Street, put an orange box up for a wicket. It wasn’t until it was getting quite dark that maybe one car would creep in to the top of Mercer Street, up by Long Acre, and park there. We used to play until it was dark.
‘There was always people about to look out for us. Everyone knew who we were. Of course, it meant we couldn’t get away with anything. You’d get a clip round the ear if you played Knock Down Ginger, anything like that.’
The games that Mike and hundreds of others played in the West End streets ranged from those for just two or three people through more or less formal team games to thoroughly informal adventure games or brawls that sometimes involved great swirling mobs of boys. Sonia Boulter and Peter Jenkins, for example, both recall ‘endless games of hopscotch’, which of course was so much easier to chalk out on a pavement laid with rectangular stones than it was on the tarmac surfaces in the grounds of the estate.
Others remembered ‘run-outs’. Mentioned by several Covent Gardeners, it is explained more fully by Tricia Bryan: ‘There were two teams. You both ran off, then would have to try to get back to base without them seeing you. You didn’t have to be tagged, you could just say “I spot Trish behind the telephone box”. It was how many from the team got back unseen. We used to play that in the playground behind St Giles-in-the-Fields. Although there was a park keeper, Mr Chivers – like the jelly – it was just a playground with swings and a slide, no flowers. You walked through the churchyard and you were in.’
The labyrinth of streets, alleyways and yards around Covent Garden made it just right for games of tag, hide-and-seek, and their many variants. Tricia also remembers Tin Tan Tommy, ‘another game of tag with a base, usually a dustbin. The base was guarded by Tin Tan Tommy, and he had to come and find you but at the same time guard his home. If he tagged you before you touched the dustbin lid, you would be out. We would all make a break for the lid. Whoever touched it first without being tagged was the next Tin Tan Tommy. I’m sure that name came from the home being a dustbin lid. We played that in Shorts Gardens, in the flats there next to the Medical Mission, where we all went to Sunday School.’
The Bedfordbury Estate had been jammed in to a much smaller space than its sister estate in Wild Street, but the ’Bury kids gleefully took over the roads outside. ‘We played Cowboys and Indians, mostly,’ remembers Ronnie Mann, ‘or whatever was on at the local pictures: Tarzan, pirates, general mucking about. And we used to play ’ares and ’ounds down there. There might have been twenty or thirty kids on each side, and the idea was that after a while you had to get back to the lamp post or whatever it was as home.’
My main playtime was spent in St Anne’s churchyard, because it was behind the flat where I lived and was enclosed by buildings and, on the street side, railings, which made it seem safe. It was overlooked on two sides by lots of windows. It made a good playground: there was a paved area in front of the tower and the table tombs could be made to be all kinds of things: a desert island, a ship, a house, a raft or simply ‘home’ in a game of Tin Tan Tommy and a place to park all those players who were ‘out’.
I learned to hula-hoop in St Anne’s, and there were skipping and two-balls to master as well. There were seasonal things such as five stones or jacks in summer, when sitting about on the ground, in the heat, had a certain appeal, and hopscotch, skipping and all that energetic stuff when the air was a bit sharper. Two-balls was another summer game. You could play it alone and hone your technique or you could play with others.
‘Everything used to close on a Saturday at about one o’clock,’ Ronnie Mann recalls, ‘so from then until the lorries started to open the market on Monday morning, there was no traffic in the West End. Local people didn’t have cars, and anyone coming up to the West End had no problem parking in the Strand or Piccadilly, so they didn’t park in Bedfordbury.
‘The garages of Harrisons, the printing works, had shutters. They were the goals. On Sunday morning, all the kids would be playing a game. Cricket was in Coliseum Court, between Charing Cross and Bedfordbury. You had the two telephone boxes; we used to play football and cricket down there.’
John Carnera also had the imagination to turn a back alley into a sports stadium. ‘We would play cricket or football in Bateman’s Buildings, on the way home from school. There was a lamp post at either end. The one nearest Soho Square – the Hospital for Venereal Diseases on one side, and a factory on the other – was the wicket when we played cricket, and in the winter we played football there.’
One of the advantages of street football was that it required a minimum of equipment. Discarded jackets or pullovers served for goalposts if there wasn’t a handy wall to be marked out. You did not even need a ball, as Leo Zanelli remembers: ‘The trick was to get a cigarette packet, stuff it full of paper and stick it together. It would slide quite nicely. It wouldn’t last very long, though . . .’
You hardly ever saw one of the big heavy footballs being used on the streets. Most street football involved filthy, dishevelled, bare-kneed boys tussling over a fraying tennis ball. Sometimes they didn’t bother with a ball, and just got on with the tussling. ‘The ’Bury kids always used to fight the Wild Street gang,’ remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘The irony of it is that a lot of them were my cousins: my aunts lived in Wild Street, my best friend that I sat next to in school lived in Wild Street, but we would all fight each other on the weekend.’
The ’Bury kids weren’t always spoiling for a fight, but they did have a habit of going mob-handed, as Ronnie remembers. ‘The main thing we used to do as kids was go down to St James’s Park and across in to Green Park and back. You’re talking about, not half a dozen, but in excess of thirty or forty kids across all ages from six to fifteen, when you left school. We’d walk up to Tottenham Court Road, to Euston Road. Don’t ask me why! We actually used to walk to Hampstead as kids. I remember getting my pennies to get home, because the little kids, they used to put us on a bus, and the big kids – ten years old – walked home from Hampstead. We didn’t think about it, it was just natural to walk everywhere.’
If walking palled, Ronnie and his pals could always improvise some transport. ‘We used to make our own scooters. You used to get blocks of wood, tyre blocks, two planks, then you’d screw it through, two screw eyes, you put a bolt in between the two and you had a scooter you could learn on. You used to have the scooter season, and kids would build scooters, and you’d go wherever you wanted on them.’
Life on the streets changed according to the seasons. ‘We used to do penny for the Guy at Tottenham Court Road tube station,’ Graham Jackson remembers. ‘We had two guys, to catch both entrances [laughter]. We used to earn quite a bit. We’d start early, about the middle of September. The only time we’d get chased off was when we went down in to the tube station. They let us sit up the top. As Dad was a PC, he used to tell me off, “You know, that’s begging. You could be done for that.” He never actually ran us in, though.’
Some people looked at the shifting mass of kids in the street and saw in them the stuff of recruitment. Ronnie Mann talked of the bonuses to be had if you could work the system. ‘There was Corpus Christi, the Catholic Church, in Maiden Lane, St Martin’s, and the Communist Party HQ on the corner of King Street and Garrick Street. At that time, we had nothing, but if you went to Sunday School, you had the chance to go to camp with the vicars, or on outings, so all the kids, Catholic or Protestant, went to St Martin’s Sunday School in the morning.
‘In the afternoon, the priests used to come out of Corpus Christi to round up all the Catholics to go to Mass, and they’d have half of us in it as well! Some of the kids from the Buildings used to sit there in rows, not a Catholic in the family, and I used to come away thinking, “This is strange.”
‘And then of course, the Communist Party mob got the hump. They used to s
weep you off the street, take you up in to their building and lock the door so you couldn’t get out, and show black and white propaganda films! [laughs] I should imagine there was about a million to one chance of any of them getting a sniff of interest from anybody. Oh dear.’
My dear old friend Terry Pizzey and his pals played the same trick in Marylebone, ‘We’d go to all the Sunday schools,’ he told me. ‘The denomination didn’t really matter, it was the teas that counted. Round our way the Church of England did the best teas, closely followed by the Methodists. The Catholics knew who belonged and who didn’t, so we all knew there was no point in turning up at the left-footers because they’d sling you out unless they’d seen you at Mass over several months.’
With her parents both working, Tricia Bryan learned how to get about London independently at a tender age. ‘I used to walk everywhere. I walked the length of Gower Street to go to school on my own when I was five or six years of age. You didn’t worry about it. I used to pick up another little boy when I was seven or eight, and he was probably five. I used to be paid for that every week, for taking him to school and bringing him home. We used to play out after school; didn’t get home until seven or eight. I don’t know what we did for food – probably went to the chip shop on the corner of Endell Street, six of chips and crackling*, or to Dolls, the sweet shop just up from the chip shop. You could take the penny-halfpenny you’d saved from your bus fare and get a bag of black jacks and fruit salads – a farthing each – or flying saucers.’
She felt perfectly safe walking the familiar streets. ‘We knew not to speak to strangers, but I suppose we weren’t so sure who was a stranger, because we were always on the streets. That’s the thing about communities. You knew faces, and you knew there was always somebody you could go to. You knew you could knock on a door and someone would know who you were.’
Jackie Trussler was in Tricia’s class at St Giles. From the age of three, she lived with her aunt in a council flat above a shop in Museum Street. ‘My aunt used to work the theatres,’ she remembers, ‘just the cloakrooms and whatever, so she was out in the afternoons and evenings. So, on high days and holidays her son, my cousin, who was eight or nine years older than me and still at school, basically looked after me. I used to tag along. That’s when I wasn’t off here, there and everywhere with Tricia and the girls.’
Tricia’s grandparents were in the greengrocery trade at Seven Dials, and although her parents had been bombed out, and had to move in to a flat in Bloomsbury, her heart was in Covent Garden. ‘I had a cousin who actually worked in the market. I remember in the summer holidays just running in and out of the stalls, playing, actually when they were working – because they were still there at lunchtime. That was our playground. Even when we weren’t at school, that was where we met up to play, at Covent Garden market, because we could all get there; walk, or bus, or whatever. We’d all meet down at Shorts Gardens, and from there we’d decide where we were going to play that day.
‘We used to take turns in going to each other’s houses for tea. We once went to Christine’s house. There were a lot of them, and – well, none of us were rich, but they were poor – and when I asked “What’s for tea?” her mother said “Shit and sugar sandwiches,” and I thought, I don’t think I can eat that. We only went to Christine’s once or twice.’
The menu improved when Jackie’s mother remarried and Jackie went to live with her above a pub in the Gray’s Inn Road. ‘It was huge,’ remembers Jackie, ‘and they had these kitchens where we would cook our own tea – eggs on toast, stuff like that. There was this dumb waiter we would ride on. I can remember her mum yelling at us to get out of the dumb waiter, to get out of the kitchen, get out of the pub. Wherever we were, we weren’t supposed to be there.’ The eternal problem of youth.
* * *
Several of the interviewees spoke about their memories of youth clubs. The fifties was when people began to see ‘youth’ as a problem, and organizations – churches, usually – started to set up clubs to get teenagers off the streets. There were several church-based youth clubs in the West End, including a club in the crypt of St Martin’s, where Ann Lee danced to ‘La Bamba’ by Ritchie Valens, and Graham Jackson played snooker. Another one, affiliated to the Catholic Church in Warwick Street off Golden Square, offered table tennis and snooker, while St Patrick’s in Soho Square opened up its crypt as a club. ‘We started a football team,’ remembers John Carnera, ‘as well as a cricket team. A fellow called Gino, who lived in Meard Street, used to run the teams for us, but it was initiated by Father Hollins, at the church.’
Olga Jackson remembers the clubs too. ‘The Mildmay Medical Mission in Shorts Gardens used to have a girls’ club, run by Miss Morton; everyone went, the Italians, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, you name it, they all came along.’
Leo Zanelli spoke of two youth clubs in Soho, ‘one in Kingly Street and one at St Anne’s. I played for Soho United, which came about from the youth club at the back of St Anne’s. They got us a set of green and black quartered jerseys.’ The team joined the legions of footballers playing on Hackney Marshes.
The club that everyone remembers is the Gainsford Boys’ Club in Drury Lane, a sports club affiliated to the Inns of Court. It ran football and cricket teams and had a fully equipped boxing gym, as well as facilities for other sports. It stood on the corner of Long Acre. ‘There’s a block of flats there now, posh ones,’ Ronnie Mann points out. ‘You had one of those concrete and tarmac football pitches where you could play, you had the boxing underneath it, billiard tables, table tennis.’ Next door to it was a playground with some swings to attract younger children.
Although it was officially a boys’ club, girls were tolerated. ‘My brother used to play football for them,’ Ann Lee remembers, ‘and you could go downstairs when the boys had finished training and have a Coke and a packet of crisps.’
Jackie Trussler was even more privileged: ‘My cousin who looked after me belonged to the Gainsford, and I was the only girl member. Because he played in the football team they used to let me in. I’d be sat on a stool in the corner – “You’re only allowed in if you’re quiet!” – and as I was an honorary girl member of this boy’s club, I just sat in a chair and kept quiet.’
Peter Jenkins and Mike O’Rouke played table tennis there ‘and a game of snooker – if you got a chance to get a table,’ added Mike, ruefully. He saw it as more of a social club, ‘mainly for the boys in the flats down Drury Lane, but more or less the only place you could meet up and play football together. I was well into boxing at the time. I remember going in there and doing a bit of boxing training, but just a couple of times and that was it.’
Ronnie Mann also went there for social reasons at first. ‘A lot of the guys from Wild Street loved the Gainsford. I went there because of mates, not because I particularly liked it. It had a predominantly boxing culture, not really my scene. Boxers thought they were a cut above the rest of you. You know, they were training.
‘I remember going in there, fourteen, big for my age, cocky. They decided they were going to knock the stuffing out of me, and put me in with a kid about two or three years older. It was a big difference at that age, between a boy and a man, and he was knocking the shit out of me. We were only supposed to be sparring: I knew the difference. It was elbows as well – wallop, fuck, where did that come from? I realized the geezer’s hitting me on the chin with his elbows.
‘So I kicked him right up the bollocks – which caused absolute chaos. I was nearly hung, drawn and quartered, I was the lowest of the low, but as I said then, you shouldn’t have put me in with him, you should have stopped him doing what he was doing.
‘The Gainsford had a good football team that I played for a few times, but again it was too good for me, in the sense that they were competing in really good leagues, and you had to be prepared to train a lot harder than I was. If you didn’t do the circuit training, you didn’t get on the team. It was as simple as that.’
One person
who did play football for the Gainsford was John Carnera, the only Sohoite I found who was a member. ‘In fact,’ he tells me, ‘I used to play cricket for them as well, and sometimes we used to go and have our training sessions for our cricket team at the Inns of Court in the Temple. They had greens there, just off the Embankment. We used to set up the nets and have our training there.’ Unlike many other patrons of the Gainsford, John – despite being the nephew of former world heavyweight champ Primo Carnera – was not tempted to take up boxing: ‘Much too dangerous. I thought my uncle was a bit mad, to be honest.’
If you wanted to play in green spaces, your choice depended largely on which side of the Charing Cross Road you were. Youthful Covent Gardeners tended to gravitate towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Coram’s Fields, while Sohoites headed north or west to the royal parks.
Ann Lee remembers Lincoln’s Inn Fields with great affection. ‘It had big open greens, a massive big circle in the middle with a bandstand right in the middle of that, tennis courts, netball, a little cafeteria. You’d go over there with your mum, maybe watch someone playing tennis, have a run round on the grass, and then we’d go to the cafeteria. It was just an old van that opened up, but I can still remember the smell of the tea, and the coffee, and the cakes. You could buy a sandwich, but normally it was cakes, and ice cream for the kids. There was all little tables and chairs dotted around.’
It was also a favourite haunt of Mike O’Rouke, although for different reasons. ‘I got a second-hand bike when I was about eleven. I used to go around Lincoln’s Inn, because you’ve got 400 metres around the outside, like a track, so you could do a bit of racing round there.’
Tricia Bryan was an habitué of ‘The Foundling – Coram’s Fields – in Guildford Street. My mother played in Coram’s Fields, I played there, and later I took my son there. You were always safe, because adults were not allowed in without children.’
Children were, of course, allowed in without adults to sample the delights of the Fields. ‘We used to use the paddling pool in the summer,’ remembers Margaret Connolly, ‘and maybe take a picnic. I was chief swings attendant for my younger sister and brother.’