by Pip Granger
There were cafés as well as pubs, of course, where a split sausage or fried egg, smothered in brown sauce and slapped between two slabs of lightly buttered (or, more likely, marged) bread, all washed down with sweet, thick, aromatic tea, made a satisfying meal. In these steamy rooms was a whole different world, one of flat caps, Woodbines and Brylcreem, where you could find small, whippety men with calloused hands, and large and formidable women bundled up in coats, exchanging greetings and gossip, or quietly reading the racing form and the early editions of the papers with the help of their brand new National Health glasses.
Unlike the market pubs, the local cafés would stay open for much of the day for the local trade. Barbara Jones remembers one just to the right of the entrance to St Clement Danes School: ‘One of those with a counter all down one side, dark, a workmen’s café for the market men and what have you. The kids at school went in there to buy a penny slice of bread and dripping, when they’d had no breakfast, and perhaps even no supper the night before.’
The market was at the centre of the community, the beating heart of Covent Garden, where to be known as a local was to be respected, whether you worked there or not. Graham Jackson’s father was a policeman at Bow Street, and knew the Garden area like the back of his hand, as only a beat copper could. ‘After he retired [in 1954], he used to go through the market, and many of the people who worked there would acknowledge him – some he had nicked on occasions. They always wanted to know who I was, and would always give me an apple or some fruit if we stopped to speak to them.’
Ann Lee had a similar experience. ‘I didn’t need pocket money. My mum took me through the market, and I’d come home with two bob, a shilling, ten bob note. They all thought the world of her – they went through the war together, I suppose.’
The strength of the sense of community among the market workers was matched by the strength of their language. Ann Lee again: ‘I learned all my swear words from Covent Garden Market porters. Our bedrooms backed out on to a street where the market porters used to wheel their barrows, and if they dropped something – oh, the language.
‘My dad used to say, “You’ve heard it, don’t repeat it, forget it.” Once they got the big lorries and stuff, you didn’t hear them so much, but when I was a kid, they’d be dragging their barrows about and shouting to one another across the street. They were on the go long before I got up and they stayed on the go until after lunch. They quietened down about two-ish, and that was a long day for them. My mum said I wasn’t allowed to swear until I was twenty-one, so I had to store it all up.’
The porters seemed a definite type, what my mother-in-law refers to approvingly as ‘Real London’. ‘My little brother,’ said Ann Lee, ‘at age thirteen, was Jack the Lad, all “fink”, “fought” and “Fursday”, and I used to say to my mum, “Oh, Covent Garden market porter that one” – and he was!’
Mike O’Rouke’s family were involved in the market for generations. ‘My grandfather was a porter for a firm called Bloom and Green in Floral Street, so that goes back a fair while,’ Mike told me. ‘I got the impression that his father worked in the market as well; that was the main form of making a living back then. My nan, Nanny O’Rouke, she had her own business in Mercer Street, right opposite the Cambridge Theatre. She also had a stall up in Earlham Street, on the Seven Dials; she was in greengrocery all her life. I had an uncle I was very close to, used to live with Nan and Grandad round in Mercer Street, and he worked for T J Poupart up in Long Acre, opposite James Street, a greengrocery firm. He was a porter there.’
Portering was a hard working life. The market was open 364 days a year, every day except Christmas Day, although there was much less business done on a Sunday. The hours could take a toll on family life. Mike O’Rouke’s father, who lost a leg in an accident with a lorry when he was just eleven years old, was brought up by maiden aunts. ‘Basically,’ Mike explains, ‘I think it came down to the fact that my grandad worked at the market, and his wife had her own business, and it was Grandad’s choice I think. He turned round and said, “I don’t think he’s going to get the right upbringing being at home.” He was saying that his wife couldn’t devote the time. They would both have to be up very early, and she’d be busy, whereas the aunts . . . in those days, women tended not to work. I suppose Nan was a bit of an exception, having her own business.’
Everyone I spoke to who grew up in Covent Garden had something to say about the market, but the only person who actually worked there that I interviewed was Ronnie Mann. His first job on leaving school in 1957 was at George Monroe’s in the flower market. ‘I left school on the Friday and started work on the Monday, and I was classified as Assistant Salesman, so you had to do six months in the office, eight o’clock in the morning until whenever it finished, sometimes at midday, sometimes at six in the evening.
‘After that, I started at three in the morning until midday. But although the job was called an Assistant Salesman, virtually you was an underpaid porter, because you had to unload the lorry. Monroe’s was a non-union firm – that’s how I got in it – and I had to lay out the boxes, take the delivery notes up to the offices, enter them in the ledger books, so you knew what you were getting, so the salesmen could see how much they were getting per bunch.’
What everybody seems to remember the most clearly, and the most fondly, were the sensations of the market, the colours, the vibrancy, the jostling busyness, the clatter of hooves and hobnails on cobbles, the hubbub of voices, but above all the smells, redolent with the peaty, vegetal dampness of the English countryside, the exotic whiffs of foreign fruits and the café scents of fried food, tea and roll-ups. And then, of course, there were the flowers. Anyone who ever strolled down Floral Street – or dodged through the crowds, more like – on a weekday morning remembers the vibrant colour of the dealers’ flashes, so welcome among the muted browns, greys and navy tones of a rationed nation, and the glorious fragrance rising from massed lilies, roses or pinks. Banks of violets from Cornwall or daffodils from the Scilly Isles could really perk up a grey March morning.
Part of the appeal was the timelessness of the place. ‘The market hadn’t changed in a hundred years,’ explains Ronnie Mann, talking about when he worked there in the fifties and early sixties. ‘It was basically the same. The porters still had the big boxes, they still pushed them on the trolley, they still dressed as they had pre-war, with the scarf round their necks, the flat caps – it was virtually a uniform. It hadn’t changed at all, in any shape or form. The market pubs used to do God-knows-what hours. A lot of them used to open nights, or at three or four in the morning, until midday, but were never open weekends, so that was strange as well. It was an upside-down life, really, but I reckon that way of life in Covent Garden market didn’t change, hadn’t changed, in a lifetime.’
Ann Lee agrees. ‘It was just a lovely atmosphere. You could walk down Long Acre and go in to Covent Garden market from that way, or from where I lived you could sort of walk around the corner and you were there.
‘When they turned Covent Garden market into what it is now, I bloody hated it, because it wasn’t what I knew. Now, I think they’ve really done well here, but it still isn’t my Covent Garden market. When I walked through it there was the stale smell of fruit and veg where it had rained and it was all cobbles, and it had just sat there, but it wasn’t offensive, it was what you knew. It was lovely, like bringing the countryside in to the town.’
I have to agree with Ann. Although I never lived there, I miss the old market. I’ve only been to the new Covent Garden once, and it was enough. What’s there now may be a treat for the tourists, but jugglers, bistros and chain stores cannot make up for the unique atmosphere of what was once the greatest market in England. Everyone I spoke to used phrases such as, ‘When the market came alive’ or ‘When the market was awake’ as if it were indeed a living thing, like a much-loved, elderly relative. And as with a relative or old friend, when the market was gone forever, everyone who had known it and l
oved it grieved.
*Many porters’ barrows were made by Ellen Keeley of Neal Street. Barrow-making was one of many local trades connected to Covent Garden market. Keeley’s was established in 1830.
*‘Flash’ is market-trader slang for the display on their stalls. Some traders quite rightly took (and still take) enormous pride in their ‘flash’, and produced displays of great artistry.
7
Trading Up West
A look through the Kelly’s Directories for the forties and fifties shows the extraordinary number and variety of businesses that existed throughout the West End. In 1946, a single yard off Archer Street contained fifteen separate businesses, including a drum manufacturer, three die-sinkers,* two working ladies’ tailors, three men’s working tailors, a mantle-maker,† a music engraver, a repairing jeweller and an export merchant. That same year, the short length of Windmill Street housed art metal workers, engravers, silversmiths, antique furniture dealers, cabinetmakers, boot repairers, sign writers, ironmongers, embroiderers, mantle-makers, ladies’ tailors, plate glass merchants, a laundry and coppersmiths, while a single address in Wardour Street housed a printer, a film agent, the offices of both a film distributor and a publishing house, an engraver, a diamond setter and a manufacturer of costume jewellery.
There were businesses specifically associated with the area: the theatre, publishing, the rag trade, film-making, catering, and so on. And there was a large pool of craftsmen, often from overseas, who had small businesses all over Soho, supplying and supporting these trades: providing wigs and costumes for the performers, bows for the violinists, shoes for the dancers, and pots, pans and pinnies for the restaurateurs. The theatres needed painted backdrops, publishers needed printers, and clothes designers needed haberdashers and specialist seamstresses. Even the street markets had their own support networks, as Alberto Camisa remembered: ‘Where the British Library is now, in the railway arches that were there, is where all the barrows and stalls for the markets used to be made. The guy there took great pride in his work. You could go there and buy or hire one. It was like going back to Dickens’s time. All his lathes were manual – he didn’t have electricity there, he had tilley lamps to work by. It was nice.’
And of course there were the luxury shops, the ones that distinguished the West End from the rest of London. There were tailors, shirtmakers and shoemakers in St James’s and Savile Row, jewellers in Bond Street and the Piccadilly Arcades, and the fashion houses and milliners of Mayfair. The bespoke tailors and couturiers were supported by networks of pieceworkers and freelance specialist craftsmen and women. Each had their own speciality, such as making mantles, cutting and sewing trousers, making buttonholes or closing shoes. They worked from their homes in Soho, Covent Garden or Clerkenwell, or from small workshops in single rooms in Soho terraces. ‘All the Savile Row stuff came from Soho,’ Albert Camisa told me. Both of Andrew Panayiotes’s parents worked in the rag trade: his father was a journeyman tailor supplying trousers to Anderson & Shepherd, Sackville Street. Mr Panayiotes was one of three freelance ‘working’ tailors – as opposed to retail tailors – who had rooms at 5 Old Compton Street, above the Star Café.
Jeff Sloneem’s uncle was in the business, too, but in retail. ‘My uncle’s shop was a few doors down from where we lived in Old Compton Street. He had quite a famous clientele. His was the only tailor’s shop in the street. Just round the entrance to Berwick Street market, a few doors up Peter Street, you had Sam the Presser, who had a big Hoffman press at the time. I used to be sent round there to take things for pressing. Then in Meard Street you had a guy called Stevens, who owned a haberdasher’s where everyone went for their cottons, zips, buttons and other bits and pieces. Everyone was in easy walking distance.’
Being surrounded by specialist craftsmen and women came in very useful for the locals. Quentin Crisp remembers in The Naked Civil Servant that he could accept gifts of clothing ‘indiscriminately’, as ‘I could at any time enlist the services of a certain Mrs Markham, known throughout Soho as the greatest trouser-taperer in the world.’
When the Huguenots fled persecution and massacre in France, they brought their skills as master embroiderers and silk weavers with them. Most settled in and around Spitalfields but Soho also benefited from their presence. French tapestries had long been the envy of Europe and many master weavers also came in that first wave of French immigrants. They headed for Soho, where they flourished by selling their wares to British royalty, the aristocracy and the just plain rich. When, in the late eighteenth century, some of France’s nobility fled ‘Madame La Guillotine’ for London, they brought their dressmakers, goldsmiths, lace-makers and so on with them, to ensure that the pretty necks they had saved remained well dressed and stylish.
Soho’s craft traditions were applied to its charitable institutions too. In the nineteenth century, orphans in the Parish of St Anne were offered apprenticeships in any trade they chose when they grew too old for the orphanage. Extraordinarily, and uniquely in Britain, this went for the girls as well. They could become cutlers, milliners, bakers, silversmiths, lace-makers and so on, while their sisters outside the parish would wind up in service, or slaving over a hot tub in a laundry, for a pittance. No other parish in the country offered orphan girls the opportunity to train for a trade that would, once their apprenticeship was done, give them an independent living.
The tradition of immigrant craftsmen coming to Soho carried on well in to the twentieth century, as John Carnera remembers: ‘I come from the Friuli-Veneto, in the north-east corner of Italy, a part of the world famous for mosaic and terrazzo. My father, my grandfather, for generations back, were all in the same trade. In the thirties, it became very fashionable in London to have terrazzo floors, to have mosaic, and my father was one of a number of workers who were contracted to come over to England to work on various projects and buildings in London. The terrazzo at the front on the ground floor of Gennaro’s was all done by Dad, he did it all through. My brother, Elvio, followed my father and grandfather into terrazzo mosaic. In the end, his business was mainly tiling, and he had a shop where he sold tiles, and he subcontracted work from other contractors.’
Although he did not go straight in to it after leaving school, Ronnie Mann had an established family trade and business to fall back on. ‘It was N. Mann & Sons, picture-frame makers, at 7 Monmouth Street. The business started in 1849, and we’ve got photographs of them ranging back: my dad, my uncle, my grandad, great grandfather and great-great-grandfather, all the way back. The shop was always in Monmouth Street, although it was called Great St Andrew’s Street when it started. The original N. Mann was a Noah. My cousin, who’s now dead, was also Noah, poor sod. He was in the navy when he was young, and he had so much stick, he used to call himself Billy.
‘Me and my two brothers took over in 1962, because Dad wanted to get out. We only rented the place, it was a repairing lease, and we carried it on for a few years. We done quite well out of it, but gave it up eventually because the whole area had changed – double parking, high rates. Funnily enough, when Covent Garden market moved away, they couldn’t sell places, they couldn’t give them away.’
In this way, the skills and traditions of craftsmen and women were proudly handed down through generations of French, Italian, Jewish, German, Greek and Swiss families, all of whom had sought and found sanctuary in the same sooty streets that had embraced all comers for centuries. This community established the West End in general, and Mayfair in particular, as the place to go for first-class, exclusive shopping.
This wasn’t all that the immigrant craftsmen brought to the area; the French, Italian and Chinese populations laid the foundations for good food and fine dining that has pulled so many people, anonymous, famous and infamous alike, in to the West End to eat. All those hotels and restaurants needed easy access not only to ingredients – which accounted for the many delicatessens, specialist food importers and so on – but also to catering equipment.
Owen Gardner’s
father came up from Somerset after the Second World War to work for William Page & Co., a large caterers’ supply store in Shaftesbury Avenue that sold everything from kitchen utensils, glasses, crockery, cutlery and pans to whole kitchens. When Owen left school, he went to work in the buyer’s department there, and in time, he became the buyer. ‘Page’s was such a big shop in those days that people came from all over,’ he remembers. ‘It was a department store for caterers, if you like. Its founder, Harry Bradbury-Pratt, was a tough taskmaster: he thought he paid the best wages in the West End, but if he saw you skiving, then you were fired, just like that. In those days there were no rules and regulations about employment – if he thought you were hard up, or you were unwell, then you got the best money could buy. He just wanted what he paid for, like most people.
‘I don’t know where his double-barrelled name came from: he started out as a Billingsgate fish porter, but set up Page’s in Great Portland Street between the wars, moved it to Brewer Street just before the war, then on to Shaftesbury Avenue in 1942. In those days there were several shops in Soho selling pots and pans and so on. There was Kitchen Supplies in Brewer Street, Leon Jaeggi and Sons in Dean Street, Page’s in Shaftesbury Avenue and Ferrari’s, a cutlers in Archer Street.
‘There also used to be an auction room in Greek Street and one in Dean Street. And as many restaurants as there were in Soho, an awful lot of them went broke, and all the chattels from these went in to the auction rooms, and they used to have auctions every week. Sometimes people would go there thinking they were getting a bargain and would pay more for the goods than they were in our place new. They would get carried away with auction fever.’